Art amid tattoos and Tracey Emin’s end

Ex-heckler Ben Oakley’s thoughts took flight last night

Last night I went to the private viewing of a new art show by Ben Oakley, who has his own gallery in Greenwich Market – but this show was at The Circle tatoo studio/gallery in Noel Street, Soho.

I met Ben a couple of months ago by accident when I and my eternally-un-named friend wandered into his gallery to see DRB’s matchbox show. It then turned out that Ben had been a regular heckler at late comedy performer and promoter Malcolm Hardee’s legendary Tunnel club… had directed The Prodigy’s Firestarter rock video… and used to work for Ridley Scott’s TV/film commercials company. But, last night, he was Ben Oakley, artist, with his show of “Pinhead Paintings” described thus:

One of Ben Oakley’s pinhead paintings currently at The Circle

“Using original portrait photography and fashion/media prints, he hand tints then stencils over the flesh of the subject using everyday safety pins and spray paint with fascinating results. Though still instantly recognizable, each portrait takes on a peculiar almost Alien/tribal feel that transports them out of their original era and setting, into a more fitting modern day environment. All the paintings are presented in original worn frames to evoke the thought that they once sat on your grandparents’ kitchen wall and no-one batted an eye lid.” The prints included, I think, three of the Queen (Elizabeth II not Freddie Mercury) and one of Jesus. So it is good to see Ben retains a respect for past values.

This Saturday’s Pull The Other One bill…

Meanwhile – and, yes, there is a connection, dear reader – Vivienne and Martin Soan are in Leipzig, preparing for their Pull The Other One comedy club show on Saturday night. Martin was a long-time co-performer with Malcolm Hardee in The Greatest Show On Legs. Before they left for Leipzig, Martin & Vivienne were suggesting to me that an art gallery should be set up with a permanent room dedicated to work by Anonymous. “The people choosing what to include in the Anonymous Room,” suggested Vivienne, “would not know who had submitted the works. They would just choose what to exhibit on the merit of the art itself.”

“The stuff could be by a 4-year-old boy,” explained Martin, “or it could be by Tracey Emin, but no-one would know. The idea would be to get away from celebrity in the Art world.”

It will never happen.

Though it should.

How do street artists make money and who is this trendy DRB matchbox guy?

DRB (obscured left) & Ben Oakley at the exhibition yesterday

Yesterday, I went to the Ben Oakley Gallery in Greenwich, to see the last day of artist DRB’s exhibition Firestarter – basically matchboxes custom-made by DRB.

But we are not talking normal matchboxes here, we are talking Art.

Some of DRB’s matchboxes are now in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection in London. The boxes are being displayed at a gallery in Hong Kong in about a week and DRB has a duck with hands for ears which is in Boston in the US at a liquid arts venue.

“When I trained as a printmaker,” DRB told me, “there were no computers – well, there WERE but they weren’t on my radar – and then, just as I graduated, computers basically made me redundant. All of my printmaking skills were irrelevant and I had to learn how to use computers.”

“And you do now?” I asked.

“Yeah. All of my creative career has been computers, so I’ve done websites, videos and all that. I had a creative career but, twenty years later, I’m doing printmaking again.”

“Though the world is different…” I prompted.

Ceci n’est pas un Magritte de Belge… C’est un DRB de Sarf Eest Londres.

“I trained to be a gallery artist,” DRB said. “I expected to be represented by a gallery and paid by a gallery. Whereas now a lot of my friends are street artists. They essentially represent themselves – on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook – and they don’t even show in galleries because their work is selling before it even hits a wall. Whereas I’m still a gallery artist. I do put things on the streets but, essentially, I think of whole shows whereas those guys will do just one piece and it sells before it hits the wall.”

“How does that street art thing work?” I asked.

“They have maybe 20,000 followers online,” explained DRB. “They have huge followings. They’re like rock stars compared to traditional painters. What they’re doing is they record every stage of the journey – their ideas, their sketches, their preliminary, everything – and people engage them on their social media.”

“So,” I asked, “I say I’m going to paint a giraffe on a wall next week and someone buys it before it hits the wall?”

DRB looks at a wall of his boxes in Greenwich

“No,” explained DRB. “They call themselves street artists in the sense that they put something on the street first. So, if they make something, it has to go on the street first – that’s their own rule – and then they’ll make a print edition of it and sell it to people who liked it on the wall.”

“Do you do street art?” I asked.

“I put things on the street,” DRB replied, “but that’s just me being playful. I’m not really a street artist, I’m a gallery artist.

“I did study fine art, so I was a gallery artist for about four years, I had a residency in Norway for a year and there’s work of mine in Australia all up the west coast. I painted walls there when I was in my twenties in the 1990s and they’re still touching them up. Not graffiti. More like murals… They don’t know who I am.”

“So they maintain your artworks, but they don’t know you originated them?” I asked.

DRB’s publicity for the Ben Oakley exhibition

“There’s a town – Carnarvon in Western Australia,” said DRB, “where there’s a 20 foot wall with a mural. I was in the papers for that. I got run out of town by the police. I was about 20. I’ve had a creative career but, in terms of recognition it’s been this last year. I had my first solo show in Hoxton last summer and I’ve had about 20 shows since then.”

“Are DRB the initials of your real name?” I asked.

“No. It stands for Dirty Rotten Bleeder…It’s a play on words with the printing term ‘bleeding’ – printing that goes over the edge of another image or the edge of the displayed area. I call myself Dirty Rotten Bleeder like I could call myself a Messy Print Maker.”

DRB at the last day of his Firerstarter yesterday

“Have you got a website?” I asked.

“I’m making one,” said DRB. “I find it hard to write. I have a blog, but what I tend to do is get really wrapped up in paradoxes and all of that and it doesn’t read in a way I would want someone to read it. “

“But you said you know how to design websites,” I said.

“Well” replied DRB, “there’s a difference between designing the look of something and populating it with content – actually putting words in there. And it’s harder to write words about yourself; I could probably write something about somebody else.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

The night comedian Malcolm Hardee urinated on a member of his audience

Legends grow in the telling and re-telling of them.

When comedian and club owner Malcolm Hardee drowned in 2005, The Stage called him “a larger than life character whose ribald behaviour and risqué pranks were legendary”.

I told one definitive anecdote about him in yesterday’s blog.

But one of the most famous stories told about Malcolm was the night he pissed on a member of the audience at his legendarily rowdy comedy club The Tunnel.

Comedian Mark Lamarr was there that night. He says:

“Jerry Sadowitz was on stage, very loud and noisy and, while he was on, this bloke was fast asleep in the front row with his head down, just absolutely gone. And Jerry rants, There’s this fucking bloke fell asleep here!… but at no point did he wake up.

“After Jerry finished, Malcolm walked on and said, Oy Oy There’s a bloke asleep and the audience – who were a vicious Klan Rally of an audience – all started shouting Piss on him, Malcolm! Piss on him!

“And he said, Yeah, alright.

“But he didn’t do it immediately. He had the most perfect comedy timing. He just started telling jokes and drinking to fill up his bladder.”

Ben Burke, who was also there in the audience that night, says: “It was Stuart North… sadly demised now, though not from being pissed on.”

Mark Lamarr remembers well what happened: “The audience is yelling: Piss on him, Malcolm! and he’s saying, Yeah, alright, and for five minutes he’s saying this and the bloke is still fast asleep.”

Ben Oakley, who was also in the audience that night, says: “It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Malcolm looked down at the bloke and nudged his boots which were up on the stage. After no response, Malcolm casually whipped it out.”

Ben Burke says: “As I recall, Malcolm took Stuart North’s furry Russian hat off and pissed in that.”

“Then,” Ben Oakley says, “Malcolm continued to drink his beer whilst streaming full pelt onto the bloke’s head.”

“He pissed all over this bloke,” Mark Lamarr recalls, “But it wasn’t a dribbly piss. From where I was standing, no-one could have lit this better. There was a big arc of piss coming over and dribbling down this bloke’s face and the crowd, as a man – 300 people – stood up and yelled: Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!!!!! And the bloke still hadn’t woken up.

“For a minute or so, there’s this stream – like a waterfall of piss – just going down his designer clothes. He’s there asleep and it’s going on and on and on.

“Eventually, Malcolm zips himself up and says, Alright. That’s it. See you next week. Goodnight, and that’s the end of the night and everyone leaves and there’s this bloke who’s sat there, covered in piss, still fast asleep and eventually his mates nudge him and wake him up and, from across the room, I saw his mates were miming to him how Malcolm pissed on him and he looked down and looked up and opened his mouth in happy excitement. He was over the moon that he’d somehow been a big part of the show, just as a piss recipient.”

Ben Oakley remembers is differently. He says, when Malcolm pissed on Stuart North, “The bloke woke up slowly at first by licking his piss-covered lips and face, then wiped his hand across his cheek and looked at it, at which point the whole place erupted. He got up and ran/staggered out the place.”

When Malcolm told me the story of what had happened, he said that, the following week at The Tunnel, he saw the same guy in the bar. The guy walked up to him and Malcolm thought, Oy Oy He’s going to hit me but, in fact, he beamed at Malcolm, shook him by the hand and thanked him.

“I’ve been dining out on the story all week,” he told Malcolm.

I asked Ben Burke if he thought it would be OK to name Stuart North in this story.

“Please do,” he told me. “It would make Stuart’s family very proud!”

Legends grow in the telling and re-telling of them.