So much of my art practice seems to revolve around recurring 'meta' narratives that I've long since assumed that my subconscious sense of creativity really does have some sort of master plan for a seemingly disparate collection of works produced over a number of years (or else, I'm really just lacking in originality...)
Reworking and recording an old punk number written as part of a 'rock opera' which had been written some years ago (and then promptly forgotten about), and now given new visual life in the form of a music video, made me realise - though only after watching the video back a few times - that it seems to represent a stage in the 'further adventures' of Em and Jay, the main characters from my film 'Hardwired'.
The concept of bringing my interest in music-making (albeit of a crummy, lo-fi form) into the forefront of my practice is probably long overdue. Original scores did feature in all three of my 'major' (i.e., over 10 minutes' length) films of the last few years - 'The Wanderer and the Wish-maid', 'Solstice' and 'Hardwired'. But making music into a main focus, for all its roughness (which itself could be a personal methodology, and is indeed a deliberate aesthetic used in various genres) is something I will be exploring in more depth - featuring, as it does in this case, character and narrative, which have always been my main driving forces.
My enthusiasm for punk as a social, cultural and musical movement has already been documented in my 4-part performance poetry cycle, which can hardly be called nostalgia as I was barely a conscious entity when the first wave began to fizzle*, but I do have a long history of living and breathing various aspects of the ethos, especially the 'DIY' concept of making (comix, zines - including my forthcoming 'A/Object' zine, which includes a few punk-inspired images among the other X-rated material), production (especially music - I play all instruments, to varying standards), and distribution.
A few other tracks with narrative (or at least artistic potential) include pieces which exist, at present, only as titles, like 'Acne Empire', 'What a Load of Crap', 'So I'm Married to a Drag Queen' and 'I ****ing Swear'. How might this body of work develop? With my public exhibition of 'Hardwired' only a week away, I'm expecting to channel some feedback from that experience in this new direction. Perhaps Em and Jay will become a pair of recurring universal heroes in a whole series of works, popping up in multiple genres and/or places.
Keeping with the musical theme, I also had the following cartoon published in a recent zine by Coin Operated Press:
(Whilst writing this, I've just been reminded of another commission illustration - for a book by David Kerekes - which I made some years ago, entitled 'Gob' - featuring a spotty punk vocalist doing just that, the very antisocial activity (namely, spitting, in British slang) which became a trademark activity for the UK press to accuse all punks of being guilty of as yet another signifier that The End of Civilization was night. Except that, at that time, many people spat in public. To the extent that I can still remember as a tiny kid, on the old Dundee buses with my mother, seeing signs which read 'No Spitting'.)
*I usually refer to it as a 'celebration', covering as it does the 6 year period of British history from 1976 to the Falklands War of 1982.
