THE THING EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT LIV TYLER
She is Steven-Tyler-from-Aerosmith’s daughter.

It is the coldest day of the New York City winter so far. Liv Tyler is late for lunch, and I’m getting twitchy. Not because Liv Tyler is late. Not even because she is almost half an hour late. But because Sant Ambroeus – a West Village newcomer rammed with well-heeled thirty-somethings – is possibly the noisiest restaurant Liv Tyler could have chosen.

I have the second cheapest tape machine for sale on Tottenham Court Road: a machine guaranteed to pick up nothing but the Frank Sinatra medley thumping from eight wall-mounted speakers. Outside, the windchill factor dips to minus 18. I begin, quietly, to sweat.

THINGS YOU CAN READ ABOUT LIV TYLER ON THE INTERNET
She is 31. She is Cancerian. She married Royston Langdon, a musician from Leeds, in 2003. He used to front Spacehog. They separated in May 2008, are now divorced. They have a four-year-old son called Milo. She did a striptease for Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s Crazy video when she was still a schoolgirl. Her mother is Bebe Buell, rock chick, ex-Playboy Playmate and supergroupie (as well as Tyler and rocker Todd Rundgren – the man Liv thought was her dad til she was eleven – Buell’s conquests include David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger and Elvis Costello. Not a bad haul).

The table Tyler has selected is at the back of the restaurant, in a corner, three inches from a Spanish tour group loudly debating Sant Ambroeus’ charms. I count eleven voluble older women in fur-trimmed puffer jackets and expensive blow-drys before I raise my own voice, try ‘Testing, testing 1,2,3’ – the tape-machine pretty much in my mouth – and record nothing but the Spanish for ‘I’ve heard they’re famous for their cakes.’ Shit.

THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT LIV TYLER
She laughs all the time. She likes Marks & Spencer’s carrots. She hates public speaking of any kind, once blacking out at a press conference from nerves. She turns into a wanton nymph in front of a still camera. Her voice is childlike, soft, like Marilyn Monroe’s. She says the word ‘normal’ eight times, with reference to herself, during our two-hour conversation. She uses English words like bloody and brilliant and spazzed and wanker. She fancies Johnny Depp.

A sudden flurry of snow in the street conveniently heralds Tyler’s arrival. Black wool cape, black tights, black eyeliner and black pumps. Her hair, cut in a long bob with a fringe, is darker than I thought it would be. She’s tall, but not big. She looks tired. And she is grinning sweetly.

“Hello! I am really sorry I’m so late.”

Not at all, I say. Think nothing of it. It’s fine. I’m Louise, I offer.

“Oh,” she smiles, “I’m Liv.” We shake hands, embarrassed. Because of course she knows I know she knows I know her name and it’s all a bit awkward for a moment. There is a pause.

WHY LIV TYLER WAS LATE
“Bobby, my best friend who’s living in my house, said ‘If you are still sleeping late, do you want me to wake you up?’ and I was like, ‘Bobby – Milo wakes up at five-thirty. I’m going to be wide awake at five!’ Then I woke up at ten. And I kept dozing and I came down to have a cup of coffee with him and I looked at the clock and it was a quarter to twelve. And I ran upstairs and I was like ‘Wait! What am I going to wea-a-a-r?’ And I couldn’t find any stockings – all my Wolfords were in L.A. or had runs, and then I found a bag of some new ones and I was very excited.”

I love your cape, I say. She frowns: “I’d completely forgotten it was Sunday. It’s far too loud in here, isn’t it? What can we do?” I don’t know, I reply. Um. Go somewhere else?

Tyler looks at me strangely, makes a decision. “I’ve got it! Why don’t we get a take-out from here and sit round my kitchen table and I can make coffee?” She orders scrambled eggs and a salad to split.

We briskly walk the single block to her house, both a little nervous. It is ridiculously cold. Tyler’s cape is beautiful, but it doesn’t look remotely warm enough. She talks to fill in the gaps.

No questions about her divorce, I’ve been expressly told by her publicist. Yet by the time we arrive at her front door, Tyler has spoken of nothing but the fallout from the end of her five-year marriage: “It’s a little bit sad… because this is the house I’ve lived in forever with my husband, and this is the first time I’ve been home in four months, and I just got in last night from L.A. and, well, a lot of stuff has gone. Roy moved a lot of stuff out.”

Tyler’s candour about her break-up and the obvious pain behind it are instantly disarming. It feels perverse not to tell her that you’re sorry, that you understand. So I break the first rule of the celebrity interview, and confide back.

We arrive at her front door. Tyler touches my shoulder and smiles. A kind, generous smile that says she knows just how it feels and that it’s all going to be alright: “You know, Louise, what’s hard when you are going through the pain of a break-up is when everyone says, ‘It’ll get better one day’ and you’re like, ‘Fuck off! You don’t know how I feel.’ But the truth is that, it takes a long time, but you do kind of wake up one day and you just feel a little tiny bit better…”

LIV TYLER’S HOUSE IN MANHATTAN
Is a three-storey brownstone. She uses the basement door, which opens onto a sitting room. There is a single chair and a coatstand with “matching Alpaca wool hats for me and Milo”. A black-and-white photo of David Bowie sits on the sideboard. A white upholstered armchair faces the door. The stairs going up to the rest of the house are to the left. To the right, there’s an archway through to a little room with green wooden cupboards and a butler sink. Beyond that is the kitchen.

Liv Tyler: [Hanging our coats] I won’t take you upstairs to the sad parts. There are pictures off the walls, and furniture gone… It’s freaky, it’s really weird. Thank god the kitchen doesn’t look too bad… I’m crap at interviews. I get really nervous and stressed. And afterwards I always think, ‘Oh my god what did I say, what did I do?’ No one’s ever been in my kitchen before. Not that it’s that exciting… [Laughs]

LB: Oh I don’t know. Yours is the biggest fridge I’ve ever seen. It’s like a shed.

LT: Isn’t it ridiculous? Usually it’s very full, but it’s empty because we’ve been gone.

LIV TYLER’S FILMS
Tyler was sweet in an angora jumper in cult hit Empire Records but got her real break losing her virginity in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. Since then she has been in love with Ralph Fiennes in Onegin, Joaquin Pheonix in Inventing The Abbotts (he was her real-life beau for three years), Ben Affleck in Armageddon, Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, Ben Affleck again in Jersey Girl, Casey Affleck in Lonesome Jim and, most recently, Edward Norton’s Incredible Hulk. Last autumn, she was terrorized by mask-wearing ne’er-do-wells in The Strangers.

LB: So. I watched your films back-to-back on the plane and in the hotel last night.

LT: And you fell asleep!

LB: No, I didn’t. Well. Only in the big slug-out at the end of The Incredible Hulk!

LT: [Laughing] I never watch my movies. I was actually just thinking that Milo might be ready to watch Lord of The Rings, because he’s really into dragons and princesses. He always calls me his princess: he comes into my closet and there’s this one dress, which is like a long kind of tie-dye dress to the floor, and he asks me to put it on every day. And I was just like, ‘Wait! I am a princess in that movie!’ I can’t find the coffee. Bobby must’ve moved it. [She goes to stairwell and shouts] Where’s the coffee? [An inaudible response from the first floor] Thank you!

LIV TYLER’S KITCHEN
The room is dominated by a pine table and big black shiny units. There are three tiny stickers on the fridge. Two of them say Milo, in a child’s handwriting. On the worktop is a mock-fifties diner-style CD player, a small watercooler, two blue storage jars, one saying coffee, and a bottle of lemon juice.

There is a mark on the wall above the fireplace where a clock belonging to Langdon used to hang. On the floor is a child’s red chair, a fire engine, a white-board. There are white metal bars on the window. On the table is a bowl with a single apple, a bottle of stain remover, a jar of Himalayan pink salt and an ashtray with an empty packet of Marlboro Lights.

LB: You smoke?

LT: I do sometimes. And now that no-one’s here I can smoke here! [She sits down, her knees under her chin] So… the trauma! I thought, ‘I’m going to be cool: I have a house full of clothes so I’m just going to bring a carry-on bag with my essential toiletries, my computer, my books and my underwear.’

And then I get here and I realise that just before I left I did a huge closet clean-out. I gave away everything. So I was like, ‘Fuck.’ And then I remembered Stella – McCartney – had given me that cape for my birthday! I opened my coat closet and it was sitting there with a golden halo around it. So thanks for saying you love my cape.

I haven’t been shopping for five months. I stopped reading all fashion and trash magazines. I don’t want to be influenced any more by what’s in and what’s out and what makes somebody cool or not cool. In the middle of the night I’d go and take a pee, and on the bathroom floor would be a magazine, and I found myself memorising banal headlines like 500 Best Black Tops. So I read only books – A Farewell To Arms, it’s a heartbreaker, oh god – and decoration magazines.

LB: Where’ve you been decorating?

LT: I’ve been doing a house in L.A.

LB: But you’re a New Yorker!

LT: I am a total, no-doubts-about-it, one hundred per cent New Yorker. It’s been reallyhard. My boy says to me probably every two days, ‘Mommy when are we going home?’ Basically what happened is that ever since I had Milo, I was feeling a bit stressed being in this neighbourhood. It changed so much here; I felt like I was being watched all the time.

LB: And were you?

LT: Well there are a lot of people and a lot of tourists. There’s even like a Sex And The City tour where they walk past everyone’s houses. And I just, for my boy, I wanted him to have the things that I had growing up in Maine; and Roy had, growing up in Leeds. I was confused about what to do. And then when Roy and I broke up, it was very hard to be in this house without him. So we decided to move to L.A. for a little. I kind of thought, ‘Well I’ve been an actress since I was sixteen and I’ve never lived in L.A., so let me see what it’s like.’ [Liv goes to the phone and orders full fat milk, a New York Times and two packets of Marlboro Lights]

LB: So when do you think you’ll want to get back to work?

LT: When it was all happening, I went through six months where I didn’t read a single script. I just wasn’t ready to work in any way. I feel like now it’s the New Year I’m ready.

LIV TYLER’S NEW HOUSE IN L.A.
Is Spanish-style, 1920s. Terracotta tiles. Lots of grass and a single lime tree. Her dog Neal loves it. When she moved in there was nothing in the house: “Not a telephone, not a fork.” All the towels and glasses are from Calvin Klein: “I had this amazing gift certificate for going to an event for them, and I was like ‘Yes! I finally used one of those things. Swag is great!’” Tyler sleeps in pajamas with Milo’s blanket.

LT: I miss the seasons. I got back last night and it was snowing which was incredible. [She goes to the front door to get the delivery, shouting back] I grew up in New York and Maine so I love the cold. I’m a complete Eskimo. [She comes in with a brown paper bag and unpacks it] Ciggies. One for you, one for me… It’s strange. I have more privacy in L.A. because you can run around in your yard. But the paparazzi are very weird, because they actually stalk you. Like they have someone wait in the car all the time, so whenever you leave –

LB: What?

LT: Yeah. I’m really boring: I take my son to school; I go to the grocery store. So I don’t play their game. But it’s confusing because they kind of trick you. Some days they’re really obvious, and then some days you’re driving and you look back for them, and they’re not there, and you’ll feel like a weird narcissist. And then you’ll think: ‘Oh, I’m free.’ So you’ll have two weeks where you can be in your sweats with no makeup on. And then, suddenly, you realise they have been there all the time, just hiding out.

LIV TYLER’S ADVICE FOR MENDING A BROKEN HEART
“There’s nothing worse than heartache, being lovesick. It’s like there’s a physical sickness. You go through a couple of weeks where you think, ‘Oh, I’m okay, I feel better,’ and then suddenly, out of nowhere, it hits you again… You also realise who your friends are.

“When Roy and I broke up, Bobby literally moved in with me and helped me get through everything. And my other best friend, Victoria, she’s with me in L.A. right now. The hardest part is when they leave… It also brings up a lot of issues: you might feel like a failure, or like there is something wrong with you. I see a lot of people run away from it, or they act like they don’t care. But if you don’t let yourself mourn, it’s going to come back and bite you on the ass. You can’t run away from yourself: you kind of have to just deal with it.”

LT: Oh! You have to listen to Gram Parsons, he’s my favourite.

LB: Ah. ‘We’ll Sweep Out The Ashes In The Morning‘.

LT: Oh my god! You know him? ‘Hearts on fire…’ [Starts singing]

LB: ‘Love Hurts’ is my favourite.

LT: Ah, ‘Love Hurts’ is my favourite. It’s so true. Ah, how does it go?

BOTH SING: “Love hurts, love scars/Love wounds and mars/Any heart not tough nor strong enough/ To take a lot of pain…”

LT: I can’t believe you know that! I love that. [We dissolve into laughter] Music gets you right in your gut. He’s literally all I listen to at the moment…I must have it here. [Liv goes to the CD player, looks for his CD] Oh no! I can’t find anything. [The doorbell rings. It’s the food. She gets the intercom. “Oh yeah, Hi, can you come down to the basement?” She comes back in with two paper bags] Okay, this is so fun. Where are the plates? Oh they’re over there. Everything’s mo-o-oved!

LB: So you literally haven’t been here for four months?

LT: Not once… It has been really good for me because it’s a new place without memories. Without stuff, you know? Excuse me I’m just going to the bathroom. [I hear a little voice from the toilet singing ‘Hearts on Fire’. We both laugh. She comes back in, smiling] I can’t believe you know that song. I went to this little spa in the desert by myself two weekends ago because I had a cold and I needed to sleep for two days.

And on the whole journey, I was so nervous to drive: I only really learned how to pump gas on my own the past six months because Roy would pump gas! I’m always afraid it’s going to come out and spray! I listened to Gram Parsons the whole way and sang at the top of my lungs and I fucking loved it. [I take a piece of kitchen towel over to the two enormous silver bins. On one is a label saying ‘Crap’, on the other, ‘Recycle’. I laugh] Yeah, Roy did that.

LB: So what’s a kitchen towel?

LT: That’s crap.

LB: Let’s do some childhood questions. Was there a recurring theme on your school report?

LT: I used to get in trouble for speaking without raising my hand a lot. And even the year before I graduated, when I was a fully working woman, I would get sent out for speaking out of turn! And I remember standing in the hall going, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ And my headmaster, who was really sweet, would walk by and roll his eyes at me.

LB: Did you feel different to the other kids?

LT: I definitely knew that my family was eccentric. My mom was this wild woman who was in rock bands.

LB: All everyone goes on about in interviews is –

LT: My dad. Well, it’s because people always glorify it. No matter what I tell them, they invent their own version. I remember reading once that I was friends with Mick Jagger when I was a kid. All these weird things that never happened…

LB: So what did happen?

LT: When I was born my mother was very young and she was struggling, she needed help. So I lived in Maine with my aunt and my uncle and my cousins.

LB: She left you with them when you were born?

LT: When I was three months old. For three years. And she would come and visit a lot. She was trying to sort her life out and figure everything out.

LB: Okay. So was she working out of town?

LT: She was probably here. Modelling and stuff.

LB: But you won’t remember any of that…

LT: I do. I remember being with my aunt in Maine. And it really feels like home to me… Then I lived with my grandparents in Virginia. And then I kind of lived with my mom full time. And Todd Rundgren was my father. Todd basically decided when I was born that I needed a father so he signed my birth certificate. He knew that there was a chance that I might not be his but…

LB: Did you feel any sort of resentment towards your mother?

LT: It was hard for me as a kid, because I was definitely sad and angry that I didn’t have this Perfect Mommy thing. But now I have a lot of empathy for her. I mean going through everything that I’ve been going through the last couple of years, I really understand… so…Todd was my father. He completely supported me and put me through amazing private schools and I would go see him three times a year, he lived in Woodstock –

LB: And did you call him dad?

LT: Oh yeah. I still – I sort of stopped calling him dad but, you know, when he… He’s the most, I mean, I’m so grateful to him, I have so much love for him. You know, when he holds me it feels like Daddy. And he’s very protective and strong.

LIV TYLER’S FIRST MEETING WITH STEVEN TYLER
“I was like eight. I didn’t know who Aerosmith was. And my mom said, ‘Come here I want to introduce you to someone,’ and I was watching Todd play and I was like, ‘Ugh, I don’t wanna come!’ And she pointed to this guy standing at the bar and I was like, ‘Is that Mick Jagger’s son?’ And he bought me a Shirley Temple, which is grenadine and soda bubbly water with little fake plastic cherries. I was such a tomboy, I had an 80s skirt on and I was sitting with my legs open and I remember him saying, ‘You need to cross your legs, young lady.’ I fell madly in love with him. I had no idea who he was.”

LT: After we met, he, Steven, started calling and we’d go see him. He was just out of rehab, so part of going through those steps is making amends by reaching out to my mom after years of being a drug addict and not ever being there. He’d never met me before.

LB: But he knew?

LT: He knew. I mean he knew something… You know that relationship is still sort of hard. He’s very busy, my dad. He’s not around very much; it’s sort of hard being the daughter of a rockstar. There’s definitely, at times… it can be painful… especially for me, I can’t speak for all of his…[She trails off]

LB: Do you talk much?

LT: Honestly? In the past few years we haven’t been very close. He has been going through a lot of things on his own and he has not been the… he hasn’t been around that much for us. So that’s been hard. But I probably shouldn’t be talking about this… I wish, I wish, I really wish he was around more, to know Milo more, and… but he has to go through what he goes through.

LB: I read a piece where you interviewed Kate Hudson and you talked about the fact that people don’t understand that having famous parents can be difficult. I guess they just think about –

LT: The glamour of it. [Putting plates away] You look at people’s lives from the outside, and everything seems a certain way. But Kate and I are completely different: she grew up in the middle of California with movie star parents; and when my mom finally moved to Maine we lived in this tiny apartment and all my friends lived in fancy houses… In order to feel good about myself, I need to do normal things, whereas Kate probably grew up in a house with a lot of help and nannies and housekeepers, and that’s normal to her.

LB: How does that need to be normal sit with moviemaking?

LT: Well. That’s why often in my career I’ll go to work intensely and then I really won’t work for a year, because I need to come home and just be my version of whatever normal is.

LB: Is there ever a time when you think, ‘I would trade it all in, to be a regular Joe?’

LT: No, because if I want to do that I go to Maine, to New Hampshire, to Boston, to Upstate New York.

LB: Do you worry that if you got more famous, the celebrity thing would get worse?

LT: I don’t really think about it.

LB: Okay. But to be Angelina Jolie-level must be unbearable, right?

LT: I know, but that’s her. That’s why I stopped reading all those magazines. I just don’t even want to be thinking about it… I mean, so far, it’s okay. Maybe I’m living in the past in the sense that when I had my first big moments, there was no such thing as paparazzi in that kind of a way.

LB: Well it used to be that the general public wanted that distance between us and film stars. Now all everyone wants is to know –

LT: What toilet paper they use! [Laughs] I do interviews all the time where they say, ‘We’re not going to ask you any personal questions; we just want to know all about your skincare routine and what you eat.’ You don’t get more personal than raiding my medicine cabinet and knowing every ounce of vitamins in my body!

LB: Are you ever affected by what people write about you?

LT: I remember when Stealing Beauty came out and there was some review. The journalist said I looked like a horse eating out of a trough!

LB: Nice.

LT: And I’ve never forgotten that as long as I’ve lived. Although I’m okay with it now, because I am kind of horse-like!

LB: Have you seen Stealing Beauty lately?

LT: I was at home the other night in LA and I’d just put Milo to bed and I came into the TV room and the nanny was sitting watching it on TV. And it was the scene where I am lying in bed crying and I wipe a tear away and it’s a bit ambiguous as to what I do with my wet finger, and then Jeremy Irons walks in and he sniffs my finger. And I was like, ‘Oh my god. Linda, you can’t watch this.’ And I watched it for five or ten minutes… It’s weird because I am always looking back. All the images that I see, or all the interviews people ask me about, or all my films are me as a young child or a younger woman.

LB: Did you notice any differences between then and now?

LT: I remember thinking I seemed a little bit tougher and stronger; I’ve gotten a little bit softer in my old age… I often think I should watch these so I can remember who I am, or who I was at that time. And I never do. I kind of get scared to.

LB: Are you ever shy when you meet someone famous?

LT: I am, shockingly, a pretty shy person. With my friends I’m opinionated and talk a lot and am kind of an extrovert, but I would never just walk up and introduce myself to someone. You know whenever you meet people like Lauren Bacall or Jack Nicholson or Martin Scorsese, that’s always like ‘Huuuuhh!’ for anyone, no matter who you are.

LIV TYLER’S DINNER WITH MARLON BRANDO
“He was so naughty. He had this real child-like personality and he was doing all these funny magic tricks for us. Like he had this red scarf stuffed in his pocket of his jacket and he did a trick where he took it out and did this thing with his hands and then went [she waves her hands] and none of us could see where he’d put this scarf. It turned out he had a fake thumb on. And the scarf was stuffed in the fake thumb! That was pretty amazing.”

LB: What traits do you take from your parents?

LT: God that’s hard… I would say that both my mother and my father have this child-like joy and optimism that comes out of them. My mom has definitely been through some painful things in her life, and she has always taught me that everything happens for a reason. And that has really helped me a lot in the past couple of years. I’m a very grateful person: I see that there is a lot of beauty in the world. There’s a lot of sadness and pain too.

LB: But when you’re full of sorrow, it can intensify the world around you.

LT: Yeah. You feel everything. It smells different. You think when you’re younger that you have it all figured out, and you have all these plans and goals… And then certain things happen that stop you in your tracks.

LB: You mean you learn that if you love, there is the possibility that you lose, and that’s how it has to be.

LT: Yeah. And the scary thing about that is, that it might make someone not ever want to give fully or passionately again because they don’t want to feel loss. I am the opposite of that. There is an incredible sense of loss when you move on, but I just wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Because I want to feel that, I want to… It’s huge. So, that’s what I’ve been trying to live this year: stop trying to be the person everyone wants you to be, or the person you think you need to be to please everyone; just be yourself. [Bobby comes in] Hello. What’s the time?

LB: It’s 2.46.

LT: Wait – I have to be somewhere at three. Fuck!

The interview has overrun by fifty minutes. Tyler sprints to the loo, grabs her bag, shrugs on her cape, apologising all the while for chucking me out. On her doorstep, a hasty but warm embrace.

“Thank you!” she says. “See you at the shoot tomorrow. I can’t wait to see what they want me to wear.” I tell her that her cape is much too thin for this cold. “I know,” she laughs. “I’d normally be bundled up in about twenty coats and scarves. But I wanted to look glamorous for you! I’m fucking freezing.” And, with one last smile, she’s gone.

Photography: Miguel Reveriego
Fashion: Grace Cobb
Words: Louise Brealey

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009.

The post Liv Tyler Interview appeared first on Wonderland.

It’s only now, after forty years of neglect – and a desperate email from his wife Jackie that miraculously found its target – that the British Film Institute has finally acknowledged his position as one of the country’s seminal filmmakers with a season of his work on the South Bank and the release of Gazwrx: The Films of Jeff Keen on DVD. Better late than never, you might say. But the BFI’s art-gallery arm needs a hard slap. In a feat of spectacular short-sightedness, not one of his dazzling paintings, sketches, photo-novellas, posters or installations – many of which, as he puts it, “sprout out from” his extraordinary animations – will be on show. So, even as his cinematic endeavours are celebrated and saved for posterity, Keen’s art will be completely ignored. Again.

A Jeff Keen film is singularly difficult to describe. But it’s no exaggeration to say that he has melted, burned, blasted, torn, cut, scribbled and spray-painted his way to a new understanding of cinema’s potential. Almost forty movies since 1960, all made on a pittance by a man on a mission to rip up the medium and start again. The titles give you a sense of the gleeful spirit with which they were created: Marvo Movie, Meatdaze, Joy Thru Film, Mad Love, Omozap, Artwar. Together, they function as a series of barely controlled animated explosions, the celluloid embodiment of Picasso’s maxim that ‘every act of creation is first an act of destruction’. They’re what the projected contents of Topol’s mind – as he has his brain washed in Flash Gordon – ought to have looked like. Legendary New York filmmaker Jack Smith came closest to capturing the assault of wild colours, graffiti, plastic toys, home nudity, comic-book graphics, melodrama, carnival, and hardboiled men’s mags, when he wrote of Keen’s Autumn Feast that “it sends us spinning into the street, undone and toothless”.

Today though, Keen is drained of fervour. His memory is not what it was; his appetite for some sort of recognition as an artist, even as the BFI pumps thousands of pounds into his cause, is gone. It’s all too little, too late. He’s 85. He’s tired. And he has cancer. “They’ve left it too long,” he says, without bitterness, when I ask how he feels about all the attention. “If they’d done it even a couple of years ago, I could’ve been much more… flexible.” But Jackie – whose once striking beauty is captured in many of her husband’s films – still burns with the kind of rage that inflamed Dylan Thomas. The fuel is not the fact that Keen is growing weak. But the fact that it is happening here: in penury and in obscurity.

Jackie and Jeff have been married for 53 years, but before his illness, were in fact living apart. Keen’s own tiny rented flat is five minutes’ walk away. It’s a journey he has been strong enough to make only once in recent months. Today he’s too ill to come with me. Jackie gives me the key. It’s like walking into someone’s mind. Every available scrap of space is filled with evidence of his deep love of pop culture. Plastic guns form a collage on the wall; Sindy dolls are crammed into accidentally compromising positions with Action Men; melted plastic sculptures litter the surfaces. The effect is overwhelming; and somehow desperately sad. Fifty years of paintings and drawings – page after page of green-bound books with felt-tip squiggles, sketches or exquisitely rendered pen-and-wash creations – are stacked against the walls, piled in drawers, crammed in shoeboxes, wardrobes, or on the floor… “I’ll have to get someone in to get rid of it all,” says Keen, back at Jackie’s place. “I’m going to go round and just stand in there and decide what to do. The last time I was there I had ideas, you see. Now I have none at all.”

Incredibly – ridiculously, when you see the skill and wit obvious in even his crudest doodle – Keen has never sold a piece of his art. Last summer, an unscrupulous acquaintance from Jackie’s college days offered the Keens ten thousand pounds “for everything”. Mercifully, they felt uncomfortable with the offer and, although desperate for the cash, turned her down. But the strain is beginning to show. The council are threatening to stop paying the rent on Jeff’s flat because he is being cared for round the corner. “It’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads,” says Jackie, turning to her husband. Her voice cracks: “I just… I wish for the impossible, that someone could help us find somewhere warm with a bit of space where you could be comfortable and you could have your work with you and it would be safe. Instead you’re imprisoned here with me, sitting in that chair all day.” His reply is gentle: “Yeah. I’m okay. Don’t worry about me, love.”

WONDERLAND: Why are people finally taking notice of your films?

JACKIE KEEN: A year ago I wrote to the BFI saying that it was disgusting that my husband had been sidelined. I explained that I had seen him devoted to making movies for decades working on a shoestring, doing the whole thing by himself, and never stopping –

JEFF: Well, I’ve stopped now. [Laughs]

WONDERLAND: Why have you been ignored for so long?

JACKIE: Partly it’s his fault, because he’s not interested in chatting people up. He’s too shy. In fact, I said in the email to the BFI that if Jeff knew I was writing at all, he’d be cross with me.

JEFF: Oh well. It’s old stuff, that is, Jackie. I’ve given up film now.

JACKIE: Yes. But it hasn’t given you up.

JEFF: Well, it has in a way, I think.

WONDERLAND: How do you mean?

JEFF: I’ve kicked the film habit.

JACKIE: But you haven’t kicked the drawing habit.

JEFF: No. I can’t kick that. I fall back on that. I’m still drawing all the time.
[Jackie goes into the next room and comes back with her arms full of boxes, plastic wallets and folders. She hands over the sketchbooks]

WONDERLAND: These are incredible.

JEFF: These are just from the top of the pile… It’s all part of it. It’s all part of the story.

JACKIE: He was never //not// drawing, were you Jeff?

JEFF: No, love. [Little laugh] I used to sit in my flat; I have a chair that’s convenient, and I used to sit there until it got too dark, every night. So I’ve got quite a lot of books lying about.

WONDERLAND: These are the contents of your mind, Jeff!

JEFF: Pouring out. But they don’t want to see them, that’s the damn trouble. The BFI obviously are just thinking in terms of film and I understand that but… I have been bored by it. To be honest, I am exhausted by it. And I don’t want to talk about it.

JACKIE: Now, don’t say that.

JEFF: Anyway, a lot of my stuff was outdoors. It’s gone.

WONDERLAND: Did you used to go around Brighton graffiti-ing?

JEFF: I started doing graffiti in the 60s. I remember the first time, it was the other end of town, the road running underneath the railway bridge where the London trains go over.

JACKIE: I was keeping watch to see nobody came to arrest him. And you were spray-painting ‘Deep War Hurts Says Doctor Gaz’

WONDERLAND: Why did you first move here?

JEFF: I came on a chance a few years after the war. It was a very different place then, almost like life on another planet. I got a summer job working in parks and gardens and stayed on for 12 years. That job came to an end in ’63: we had a very bad winter, and I remember going along the seafront scraping up sludge and snow, throwing it into the road for cars to spin it back at me again as I walked along the road, and that was the end for me.

WONDERLAND: And how did you get into film?

JEFF: I wasn’t thinking about film at all when I was younger. I was an artist, really, from the start. It was only much later that filmmaking was thrust upon me, when Jackie was at the art college.

JACKIE: There was no film society, so Jeff did everything, behind the scenes. It was ostensibly me, but it was all Jeff: he was the backroom boy.

JEFF: I found I liked getting behind a camera. I was the only person with spare time, so I finished up making the films to show.

WONDERLAND: Did you teach yourself?

JEFF: Yeah. Nothing in it really. [Laughs] You can learn to use a camera in a few days, and the rest follows.

WONDERLAND: Do you think in pictures?

JEFF: I suppose I do.

JACKIE: That was one of your slogans, ‘Kill The Word’ –

JEFF: ‘Don’t Let It Kill You!’

WONDERLAND: How did you meet?

JEFF: In a coffee bar called Tinkie’s.

JACKIE: Jeff saw me in the street first.

JEFF: Oh yes, actually, when I first saw her, it was rather terrific. She was walking down from the Clocktower, all in green: green hat, green coat, green shoes. And I thought, ‘God, there’s someone with style.’ [Laughs] She was being chased by a loping man.

JACKIE: Oh Jeff you make it sound –

JEFF: No, it’s true. [Laughs]

WONDERLAND: Have you always felt like an outsider?

JEFF: Living here in Brighton I’d always been outside the mainstream. From the very outset I never really fitted in, even as a filmmaker. Not that it mattered much, you know, I didn’t mind. I just carried on filming.

WONDERLAND: Did you want to be accepted?

JEFF:No. Not really. I never really tried for it.

WONDERLAND: Let’s talk a bit about your childhood. Where were you born?

JEFF: Trowbridge, Wilts. I remember the road. I don’t remember the house. It was a bad birth. My mother was quite old, forty-something. And I was the first one. And it was November and from then on it has been a difficult road!

WONDERLAND: What did your parents do?

JEFF: My mother took on local nursing. And my father didn’t do anything really. He was out of the war, the First World War, where he’d been in a minesweeper off the coast of Ireland, rescuing bodies from the Lusitania, when it sank in 1915, all that sort of thing. Over a thousand people died, a hundred children. And he didn’t want anything more to do with that.

JACKIE: Jeff’s father was amazing. [Jackie goes to the shelf and brings down a photo album] He had the most fantastic sense of humour, and he used to love dressing up.

JEFF: Actually these photographs say far more than words. They need sticking back in again, Jackie.

JACKIE: [Takes one out, a headshot of Jeff in soldier’s uniform] I love this one of him as a soldier. His face radiates warmth, intelligence and his poetic nature.

WONDERLAND: Did you do a lot of destroying things when you were a kid?

JEFF: No I don’t think I did. I was very mild-mannered. [Laughs] I didn’t like the destruction of birds’ eggs, all that. The things I destroy in my films don’t answer back! I remember my cousin, who lived next door, he had this habit of shooting little birds, he got a Diana air pistol for Christmas. He had these starlings down from the nest, on a little table and he put them out on there and shot them and it was a bit of a shock. That night I felt this irritation in the throat, and that was the Scarlet Fever starting.

WONDERLAND: What did you want to be when you grew up?

JEFF: I think I always wanted to draw. I used to draw birds, natural history. My first job was at the local store in Trowbridge just before WW2. Sainsburys, actually, and I remember drawing aeroplanes there. Bombers and things like that. Everyone was talking about war. It was in the air.

WONDERLAND: Comics are obviously crucial to your art. Did you read them when you were a boy?

JEFF: I discovered comics when they started to become popular in this country in the late 50s. They were quite sensational: you could buy them in corner shops, you’d get a collection of comics down beside the door as you went in, mostly national comics, not Marvel then. But I don’t draw like comics. I love them, but I don’t set out to imitate them, you know?

WONDERLAND: Do you remember your first trip to the cinema?

JEFF: My mother took me. It was Chaplin’s film about the circus, I was less than five and I remember screaming out: I was upset when the horse goes on the loose, and everything started to fall about. I was frightened… It’s difficult to imagine really how important the cinema was to us. During the war, of course, it became even more important. People would just flock to them, it was the only entertainment… and the smoke from all the cigarettes used to rise.

WONDERLAND: What did you do in WW2?

JEFF: Nothing much! I was at a secret location about ten miles inland from Great Yarmouth, fitting reject flying fortress engines into Sherman tanks for D-Day.

WONDERLAND: You said earlier that you’ve given up film –

JEFF: I haven’t been making films for some time. And I feel now I’m too weak. [Laughs] You’ve got to be strong, I think, to make films. Unless you’ve got other people to help you. I work in that precarious place of being without money most of the time… It’s strange, you know. I was always happier making films than trying to explain them. Now it’s come to an end, I should be stopping and thinking, but I’m not really. I’m trying to forget.

Words: Louise Brealey

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Jeff Keen appeared first on Wonderland.

Two-fifths of Boston buzz band Passion Pit talk porn, stagefright and why they want to fuck up arch-rivals Vampire Weekend.

Does the world really need another lo-fi experimental pop sensation from America? Probably not. But the cyber-din generated over Massachusetts quintet Passion Pit is fast becoming real-world acclaim. Founder-frontman Michael Angelakos wrote the band’s debut EP Chunk of Change alone in his bedroom as a belated Valentine gift for a (now ex) girlfriend. Classmates at Emerson College clamoured for copies, inspiring Angelakos to flesh out the band with four like-minded souls to play live sets. Since then, they’ve set the US indie circuit on fire with their blissed-out tunes that combine hand-claps, gooey lyrics, synths and Angelakos’ bizarrely appealing falsetto. He now counts Columbia Records’ Rick Rubin, the most influential man in music, as a mate; and Columbia just signed them in the UK. Not bad for a group that are just a year old and have yet to finish their first album.

When I arrive at the allotted time at the Tribeca studio where Passion Pit are recording, there’s no sign of the band. There is however a ridiculously big black leather sofa and a producer, Chris Zane, beavering away at a computer. Zane saves the day by tracking down Angelakos to his bed – he has completely forgotten our meeting – and rousing him from a deep sleep. The 21-year-old prodigy finally arrives wearing an electric blue woolly hat that he has no intention of taking off and looking a bit confused.

Wonderland: You’ve got a much lower voice than I expected.

Michael Angelakos: Well I just woke up. [Laughs] I do have a pretty normal voice. I used to sing mid-range. I started singing high on Chunk of Change because it just sounded right.

W: Why do you need so many band members?

MA: We didn’t want to be an i-Pod band. We’re all musicians and we don’t consider ourselves DJs; so we were pretty adamant about arranging the music so that we could play it live. A lot of electronic-based bands tend to use backing tracks; they can go onstage and it’s almost like karaoke. And we really had no interest in that.

W: Who does what?

MA: I sing lead and play keyboards; Ian Hultquist plays keyboards and sings and plays guitar; Ayad Al Adhamy plays synthesizers, early 80s Moog synthezisers; Jeff Apruzzese plays bass and Nate Donmoyer plays drums and samples.

W: How does it all work out in terms of egos?

MA: I think the live shows help make it more collaborative. We all do the arrangements. That makes it’s easier for when we go into the studio. There’s just less of the banal minutiae that gets over-examined and over-analysed to the point where bands break up.

W: But you did Chunk of Change by yourself?

MA: Completely. It wasn’t mixed by anyone, it was mixed by me, which is why it sounds horrible. I did it in my bedroom. I did it on my laptop.

W: And it was a Valentine’s Day present for your girlfriend?

MA: Valentine’s Day 2007. I didn’t do much for Christmas and I didn’t really do much for her birthday. I was a bad boyfriend. So I was like, ‘Oh man, how funny would it be if I wrote her an album for Valentine’s Day?’ So I did.

W: How long did it take?

MA: Not long. It doesn’t take me very long to write songs. I can write a song in a couple of hours. I just know how it’s supposed to sound so it comes out pretty quickly.

W: How long after Valentine’s did you deliver it?

MA: In true fashion it was late. But she didn’t care, she was totally in love with it. Every time I finished a song, I’d go over to her house and we’d listen to it. She’s the only one that really got it. Because it was so ‘me’, it repeated the same kind of parts that I like, it had these childish vocals. I wrote it to capture that feeling when something feels //too// good.

W. So. Did you name the band after the John Holmes porn movie?

MA: No. I was taking this class in American fashion and in the 50s they used to call the drive-in movie theatres ‘passion pits’, because people would go there and just neck. And I thought it was kind of cute! I mean we’re not like a sexual band.

W: I’m glad to hear it.

MA: Ayad broke the news. He was like, ‘Traci Lords was in that film, she was underage…’ and he just went on and on, because he knows quite a bit about porn.

W. Have you now seen it?

MA: I haven’t seen it. Actually that’s not true, I’ve seen clips of it on Youtube. I’ve seen the non-sexual parts. It’s one of the most famous pornos ever made. When I found that out, I was like, ‘Really? That really //had// to happen to me?’

W: What’s been your best gig so far?

MA: I think we rose to the occasion and became very comfortable with ourselves at The Bowery show last year. It was when we were dealing with all the labels. I kind of started feeling comfortable in my own skin at that show. I started getting very active on stage. I used to just hide behind my keyboards. Because I was scared; I had a lot of stagefright. But that show, there were just so many important people there, we’re just like, ‘Holy shit we really need to make this happen.’ And we just did. And ever since then it’s just been like we know how to be Passion Pit.

W: Were there competing labels there that night?

MA: Yeah, there were a number of labels there. Like any other buzz band. I’m sure there are a hundred different bands right now that have like a hundred labels coming out to their shows.

W: Is it not exciting?

MA: It’s exciting, but it’s also nerve-racking.

W: You seem quite laidback about the buzz thing. Is that because it’s been happening for a while?

MA: Yeah, I’m not interested in the buzz thing. I just wanted to get signed to a label that I really liked, and put out a really awesome record. That’s about it. Now if we drop off the face of the earth, I could not care less. I’m just so sick of all these bands being so competitive and trying to dominate the world. You’re missing the point! Do you really love making music or are you just in it for the perks, to get your ego stroked? Most people just get really vain. They just love the adoration.

W: Speaking of which – your hat is cute. It’s because the top of it is folding over forwards, like a smurf’s. Just don’t grow a big white beard, that’s my advice. Because that might be a bridge too far, high-pitched singing voice and all.

MA: Yeah. I’m friends with Rick Rubin, and I should, next time I see him, put this on him. Because he’s a walking Garden Gnome and so I can just imagine in him in this hat.

W: Have you had any totally shambolic gigs?

MA: So many. When we signed with Frenchkiss Records we started getting better. But holy shit were we bad before that. I’m hard on myself, but I fucking hated the way we sounded. We used to have two different members, that we asked to leave. The worst gig was probably at a Vice Party at Le Royale. Both skins of Nate’s bass drum broke through. Ayad’s synthesizer just got zapped, gone. My keyboards were all out of tune. It was just a comedy of errors.

W: What do you argue about? [Nate comes in]

MA: What do we argue about Nate?

Nate Donmoyer: Covers you want to do.

MA: Wait, you //still// want to cover that Annie Lennox song?

W: Which one?

MA: The More I Love You. You don’t want to do Sweet Dreams?

W: Could you describe your music?

ND: It’s a lot of synthesizers, but we try to make them not sound like synthesizers, by making them sound like synthesizers.

W: That is brilliant. Thanks, Nate.

M: We like to think that we’re a pop band. We’re just looking at pop from different angles. You know that electro-pop style was something we did. But I think the new album is a little more organic, or is that a really lame word to use?

ND: We use real instruments, which is the same thing as organic. We use real drums, real piano instead of Reason samples.

MA: I never used Reason, dude.

ND: Abelton.

MA: Abelton… We think of this as a danceable record.

ND: But it’s like brisk walking.

MA: Brisk-ish. We want it to be a very groove record. But without being like, ‘Oh this is a dance-pop record by another MGMT or Friendly Fires.’

W: Who else have you been compared to?

MA: Hot Chip.

ND: Postal Service.

MA: Which are just the laziest comparisons in the fucking world. I like Hot Chip, but, I mean do you //know// how many bands use synthesizers?

ND: Since the 70s?

MA: Since sometime around then, Nate.

ND: I’d say it’s been thousands.

MA: Maybe more than that, right?

ND: Tens of thousands.

MA: I would say so. So it’s irresponsible for a music journalist to describe us as a crossover between MGMT and the Postal Service. It’s like, ‘Dudes, get the fuck over it.’ It’s literally some of the most amazing highly revered journalists…

W: Is there anyone you don’t mind being compared to? I think someone said Kate Bush.

MA: If you compare me to Kate Bush I’ll give you five dollars. Lets make it ten. I love Kate Bush. Peter Gabriel, any of those like bigger 80s, 90s power pop –

ND: We love Tears For Fears.

MA: Really? I didn’t know you were a Tears For Fears fan.

ND: For like a year when I was 17 all I used to listen to was Tears For Fears, every day on my way to school.

W: Which band is your nemesis?

ND: We’re not going to say that.

MA: Yeah we’re not going to fall into that trap.

W: Do I look like I’m trying to get you into trouble?

ND: We’re kinda looking to get into trouble.

MA: Vampire Weekend. We want to fuck them up.

ND: There’s a good reason for that –

MA: They took a cover from us…

ND: … without asking for permission.

MA: It came down to two labels: XL, the label that had Vampire Weekend, or Columbia: the label that had MGMT. We’re much happier being on the same label as MGMT because even though I’m not a fan of their music, I think they’re artistically more open-minded. Anyway the bottom line is that –

ND: Vampire Weekend suck.

MA: I don’t think anyone will be very happy with this!

ND: They suck. Fuck those motherfuckers.

MA: [Laughing] We don’t love everyone. We’re very selective.

W: Describe your fans.

ND: Nice. Thoughtful.

MA: Scenesters. The official answer is it’s a pretty wide range of people. For example, we’ll play to a frat party and there’ll be a lot of pretty hammered kids there that want to have fun with us, and those are sometimes the best people to play to.

W: How old are they?

MA: Young, but you see a lot of older people too. It goes up to I’d say 35.

W: Wow, that old?

MA: Yeah. Real old.

W: Which song do you wish you’d written?

MA: Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. What do you wish you’d written, Nate?

ND: Everything In Its Right Place, Radiohead.

MA: Oh, well Kid A. Everyone wishes they did Kid A. That’s like, ‘Let’s write an album that is going to piss off every single musician.’ There’s that point where you listen to that record and go, ‘Fuck! I’m useless.’

ND: I never thought to put myself on the same plane as them.

MA: Yeah, but you’re still playing music.

ND: Yeah, but they’re Radiohead.

MA: They’re still human.

W: How have you found recording in New York City?

MA: To be completely frank, doing a record here is really hard. It’s very stressful: I just want to be in the studio, and everyone’s talking saying, ‘Oh we’ve got to go out’. And I just want to be a hermit.

W: How would you describe the new album?

MA: It’s an antidote to misery. It’s a really pretty record. We’re just trying to make people feel better. This is my way of making myself happy. It’s euphoric stuff.

ND: And not cheap, like drugs.

MA: Not cheap like that, because that shit doesn’t last.

ND: Like Myspace relationships.

Photographer: Andreas Laszlo Konrath
Words: Louise Brealey

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Passion Pit appeared first on Wonderland.

If the gentlemen behind Jackass were German-speaking installation artists with giant brains, they would be Gelitin. A two hundred-foot pink wool rabbit on an Italian mountain-top; a fountain of a man pissing in his own mouth; and a 35-foot chute of naked bodies down which greased-up members of the public were encouraged to slide. These are just a few of the art anarchists recent exploits. Not challenging enough for you? Try constructing a cantilevered balcony out of a window on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center.

But their most controversial act to date, insists Urban, was a show in Paris called La Louvre. “The Louvre sold their name to a Dubai company for $700 million,” he begins. “So we said, ‘We can get the name for free, we’ll just call the show that. But the gallery said no. So we said ‘Okay, we’ll call it La Louvre’. And then they wrote a letter to the lawyer of the Louvre. Can you imagine? Any lawyer will say no. If Andy Warhol had written to the lawyer of Campbell’s Soup they would have said no!”

Urban is a very droll man. He is also a very thoughtful man. And he speaks in full sentences. This last may not sound like the greatest accolade of all time. But it’s a rare trait, and worth noting. It also means that the conversation printed below is verbatim. Our encounter took place on the telephone (all the Gelitin boys – Urban, Florian Reither, Wolfgang Gantner and Ali Janka – are holed up in their Vienna studio hard at work on their new Art Basel Miami show). Urban’s tone, even filtered down a long-distance line, is drily sweet. He often sounds as though he is just a word or two away from laughter.

WONDERLAND: Okay. So. Let’s begin. Why make art as a foursome?

TOBIAS URBAN: When we were students, we were 17 people. They became doctors and we ended up as four. We are basically the leftovers. It’s much more fun working together. You can tell each other how good you are.

WONDERLAND: You certainly look like you’re having a lot of fun in your Cleaning In The Nude video piece. Quite a few erect penises.

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah. Yeah we were. I saw this thing on YouTube about the last exhibition in New York and this guy said, ‘These guys have way too much fun to be taken seriously.’

WONDERLAND: Do you agree?

TOBIAS URBAN: I think humour is one of the most serious things in life. Also if you take life seriously you have to cry all the time and I’m not a person who likes to cry all the time.

WONDERLAND: So, you all knew each other when you were kids.

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah. We met at a summer camp in 78. I came from Germany and they came from Austria.

WONDERLAND: How old are you?

TOBIAS URBAN: I’m not sure when the others were born, but they were born in the 70s.

WONDERLAND: And when were you born?

TOBIAS URBAN: I am the oldest. But the story changes, you know?

WONDERLAND: I noticed. [Laughs]. Your age is different in every article…

TOBIAS URBAN: Yes. It depends who is in power. If the Nazis had won the Second World War, the Polish would have been the bad guys…

WONDERLAND: Does Gelitin avoid personality or encourage difference?

TOBIAS URBAN: We’re not like a political party; political parties avoid personality. We //are //personalities. We didn’t start an artistic career to become zombies.

WONDERLAND: So who plays what role in the group?

TOBIAS URBAN: I’m usually the artistic person. I’m counting tools and sorting nails. Ali is the creative director because he always likes to put the last bit on it. Wolfgang is the president because he’s a very natural president: he always screams, especially when he’s drunk. And Flo takes care of the food, where we go for food. And I am the German, which is important. We have a couple of galleries and there is always one German working there. Nobody likes him, but he’s there.

WONDERLAND: You don’t live together, like The Monkees, or anything like that?

TOBIAS URBAN: No. We also usually don’t have sex together. It happens sometimes but it’s not the usual.

WONDERLAND: What effect does your work have on the public?

TOBIAS URBAN: Very often they smile. It’s like a liberation. Like when somebody dances really embarrassingly at a party – you think, ‘If he dances like this, I can dance however I want to.’

WONDERLAND: Is there any sort of an ethos behind what you do?

TOBIAS URBAN: There are less and less possibilities to do things in the world. If somebody does things nobody thinks is possible, then everyone’s perspective broadens. So that’s what we do. If it’s art or not, I don’t really care. The good thing is, if you say it’s art, it’s art. Nobody can say it’s not.

WONDERLAND: What inspires you?

TOBIAS URBAN: I don’t know… anything that’s around me. From porn to music, anything that you see, comics, books that I read. Even sometimes art, but not very often. Sometimes we are told, ‘You cannot do this, this is not art.’ We made this fisting video to show in a gallery and they said, ‘You should show this in a private video booth.’

WONDERLAND: Sorry, I couldn’t quite hear you. Did you say fisting video?

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah.

WONDERLAND: Oh God.

TOBIAS URBAN: It was this video where Ali and I are double-fisting a guy.

WONDERLAND: Oh no!

TOBIAS URBAN: And this was my introduction to fisting. I’d never done it before and I’ll probably never do it again. But it was kind of interesting. We wanted this guy to be on stage in London in a box, with just his arse coming out, and if we don’t know what to talk about we just grab into his arse and take out something like a ball with a name or a theme written on it, so we made a test video.

WONDERLAND: And what happened?

TOBIAS URBAN: We filmed it. But he didn’t show up for the actual performance. We gave him what he wanted the day before.

WONDERLAND: [Laughs].

WONDERLAND: [Laughs]. So this video we shot, this guy said if we didn’t show it in his hometown, he doesn’t care, anywhere else. So we showed the video and then there were the arguments about pornography. But pornography is all around us. You just have to go onto the internet. If you read the statistics, a third of males watch porn every day. It’s part of our visual language. It’s not exceptional.

WONDERLAND: When was this?

TOBIAS URBAN: In 2006. They shut down the exhibition a week early. [Laughs]. Usually they do that with us.

WONDERLAND: Any other major scandals? What about the Arc de Triomphe sculpture?

TOBIAS URBAN: Yes. In Vienna in 2003. I was really angry that we gave a national platform to local politicians. Politicians usually like to create problems that they can solve, because they can’t solve the //real// problems, which are too difficult. So they stand in front of our sculpture and say, ‘We have to protect our children from erect penises.’ It’s total bullshit. They built a house around it. Did you read about it?

WONDERLAND: Yes. Wasn’t Prince Charles coming on a visit?

TOBIAS URBAN: The Guardian called us and asked us if we did this because Prince Charles was coming. And we said, ‘Somebody who wants to be a tampon should not be scared of a statue of a man peeing in his own mouth.’ Nobody talks about the innocence you create… The fact is that usually what you see in the public space is a huge commercial for BMW, or for the new Nokia blah blah i-Phone. And then you put this guy in a yoga position with a hard-on peeing in his own mouth with the socks down and with the tee-shirt round his neck. And you are giving an image of someone who doesn’t need anything. And he for sure doesn’t need the new i-Phone, because he’s happy peeing in his own mouth.

WONDERLAND: What about the balcony you made on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center? It’s all over the internet that it was a hoax. But you did do it, didn’t you…

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah we did it.

WONDERLAND: Why lie?

TOBIAS URBAN: In America they sued this guy who climbed it in the 70s. They sued him for $750,000.

WONDERLAND: Shit.

TOBIAS URBAN: So then you start to think that it’s not important that we prove that we did something just for them to fuck you up for the next fifty years. And then there was this collapse of the towers. And then before you know it you have something to do with //that//. And they can do whatever they want to you. You don’t fuck with these authorities.

WONDERLAND: You’ll be in Guantanamo before you know it…

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah. Seriously. For four or five years.

WONDERLAND: So what did it feel like standing outside, up there on the 91st floor?

TOBIAS URBAN: We try to do things that are very natural. You are in this glass prison breathing artificial air and the most natural move you want to do is to step out. So that is what we did. We built a little house around the window inside the room so no one saw what we were doing. It took us a month to find out how to take out the glass without breaking it. We trained how to take it out with suction cups. And then we had our balcony.

WONDERLAND: For how long was it in place?

TOBIAS URBAN: It was out two times for about twenty minutes. It’s like if you step out of an aeroplane. It’s too beautiful. You puncture this skin that is not allowed to be punctured.

WONDERLAND: What’s your favourite Gelitin piece?

TOBIAS URBAN: One really good one was in Australia where we dug a tunnel to the Chinese restaurant. A Hole To China. It was super-beautiful. The organisers of this festival gave us this left-over empty space in a shopping mall – one of those places where you want to shoot up heroin – and we didn’t know what to do. But we found out that there was a hole in the floor, so we opened the floor and there was just sand and we started digging. And then we had the choice between the jewellry store on the right side or the Chinese restaurant on the left side.

WONDERLAND: What did the festival make of it?

TOBIAS URBAN: We opened the tunnel at noon so there is a lot going on in the Chinese restaurant. The organiser had to pretend to the sponsor that he knew what was going on and he went down with the video camera and was saying, ‘How fantastic, how fantastic.’ And he never ever talked to us again.

WONDERLAND: Is Gelitin the inheritor of any artistic tradition?

TOBIAS URBAN: Feminism.

WONDERLAND: Right.

TOBIAS URBAN: Serious. Look at their work. I feel related to them. Because they changed the image of female bodies a lot: the idea that you are not passive as a female; you are not the brush of an artist, you take it in your own hands. Like Carolee Schneeman, who pulled the poem out of her pussy and VALIE EXPORT, who gave herself a new name that was not her father’s or her husband’s and spelt it with capital letters, like a brand.

WONDERLAND: Does your work have a message?

TOBIAS URBAN: Um. No. I don’t want to change the world. I think the people who want to change the world are dangerous. People like Bush want to change the world. If someone wants to improve the world, I’m worried.

WONDERLAND: What do you want to do to the world: make it laugh? Think? Neither?

TOBIAS URBAN: Hmmm. I am just watching it. For me the world is absurd. We are now in this financial crisis. In 2006 Goldman Sachs paid $60 billion to its employees. And you think, ‘What do they produce? Do they produce refridgerators? What do they do? Do they make art?’ They just make money out of money.

WONDERLAND: And you find that strange?

TOBIAS URBAN: Yes. I just watch it. And think about it. Not really criticising it. That’s how it is. I’m not a better person or anything. I’m a person who happens to be an artist. And art is a very free system.

WONDERLAND: How long before an exhibition do you decide what you are going to do? A long time?

TOBIAS URBAN: No. Well. You have the idea somewhere in your head.

WONDERLAND: So somewhere in your head you have a 200-foot pink rabbit?

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah, you have this 200-foot rabbit and you think, ‘How do I want it?’ And you think, ‘I want it that old ladies are knitting it, because it’s much nicer than a machine.’ So you feed the old ladies with sugar and tea and then there is a pink rabbit coming out. And then you have the rabbit skin lying in the studio for four years and you don’t know what to do with it. And then this person comes by from a gallery and they want to find a good spot for it.

WONDERLAND: I saw some pictures of the rabbit recently, he’s looking quite pale, isn’t he?

TOBIAS URBAN: He’s pale, yes. He’s getting quite grey. Now you can climb on from all sides.

WONDERLAND: Have you been back since he was first installed?

TOBIAS URBAN: I was there in September. We had a little third birthday party for him.

WONDERLAND: That’s nice.

TOBIAS URBAN: I always think, ‘Now it’s over with the rabbit’, but every year it’s getting more beautiful.

WONDERLAND: How long will he be there?

TOBIAS URBAN: Forever. I think you’ll still be able to see it in fifty years if you are lucky. Because even if it’s completely covered in grass, you’ll still see a form.

WONDERLAND: The archaeologists of the future will do an excavation and they’ll find your rabbit…

TOBIAS URBAN: Yes and can you imagine somebody coming from outer-space in the future and seeing the churches and people praying to somebody nailed to the cross. People are crazy. I always think when I go to church, ‘You are praying to a torture instrument. Take him down, please!’ I want Buddha, some old guy that sits down and is happy.

WONDERLAND: Okay, that’s it…

TOBIAS URBAN: That’s it?

WONDERLAND: Yes.

TOBIAS URBAN: Okay. My date of birth you can say what you want. I don’t care if I’m 36 or 45.

WONDERLAND: How old would you like to be today? I’ll just put that.

TOBIAS URBAN: Um. 37 would be good.

WONDERLAND: Nice.

TOBIAS URBAN: [Laughs].

WONDERLAND: Oh yeah, do you have a title yet for your new show in Miami?

TOBIAS URBAN: It’s a long one.

WONDERLAND: Okay… What is it?

TOBIAS URBAN: Hang on, I have to read it. It’s My Face Your Popo, Your Face My Popo, Restefick, Euroink, Pittosporum, The Freckled Show, **Our**Wonderful**Show**, I Say Goodbuy You Say Hello, I Say Hello You Say Goodbuy, Everland, More Is Less More Or Less, In 80 Tagen Um Die Welt, Dim Sum, New Chinese Art, Rubber Americard, Younger Bats Must Back To Bed, Old Farts, Culatello My Ass, Concord Is Here, Never Forget A Billion Has 9 Zeroz, Ass To Mouth, And Back Again.

WONDERLAND: Um. Thanks.

TOBIAS URBAN: You’re very welcome.

Words: Louise Brealey

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #16, Dec/Jan 2008/09

The post Gelitin appeared first on Wonderland.

When the dog bites, when the bee stings, etc. Seasick Steve can cheer himself up by remembering a few of these…

Food Oatmeal. I have it every morning. My favourite restaurant is Arnold’s in Nashville. Meat and three veg. It’s like greasy but for real Southern food.

Drink That’s easy. Jack Daniels. Straight. The best thing to come out of Tennessee.

Person in the world My wife Elisabeth. Oh yeah! Ain’t no question about that. She’s my best friend.

Place in the world The Big Sur coastline in California. One time me and my wife and my first boy, we didn’t have nowhere to live and we just driving in Big Sur and we all slept on the side of the road. It was just one of those magic nights, you know, where we didn’t get bothered and it was real beautiful. It was almost kinda like camping. Real special. But I don’t like holidays. I always seemed to be in jail on holidays. I don’t have no relationship to holidays.

Possession My pocket watch, which I have on me right now. But if I had to choose between that and one of my guitars, I’d keep my old beat-up brown acoustic guitar. Someone gave it to me a long time ago. It didn’t even have a name on it. It’s real old, I think from the 1800s.

Body part My hands because that’s what I use the most. Without the hands I couldn’t play the guitar and then I’d be very bored… My favourite tattoo is my rolling dice. That’s how life is for me. I never know what the day will roll.

Item of clothing My denim overalls. You English call them dungarees. I’ve worn them my whole life. I started wearing them when I was a little boy.

Animal Dog. My German Shepherd died last year. He was called Boss because he was the boss.

Proper job I never had many jobs that I liked. But I used to like working in the carnival when I was a kid. I set up the bumper cars.

Film I like that old cowboy film Shane.

Movie star Clint Eastwood.

TV show I used to like Wagon Train back in the 50s, with Clint Eastwood. Actually, you know what? I take that back. Rawhide was my favourite when I was a kid. I didn’t watch TV too much over my life though. Rawhide… that was it!

Work of art I ain’t so much into art. I don’t go look at art much but one time someone took me over to one of these museums in London where the Van Gogh pictures were. I was impressed with the light coming from them.

Book Jim Grim by Talbot Mundy. It’s kinda pulp adventure set back in the 1920s and 30s. Some of it takes place in the British time in India and Afghanistan. People keep asking me if I ever read On The Road. I never read a book about none of that stuff. It’s only in the last few years that I even heard of this Jack Kerouac character. I doubt he ever rode a freight train, anyway.

Sport I played baseball when I was a kid. I was a catcher. I also liked playing first base. I used to like watching baseball a little bit, too. But now I kinda like watching football, which y’all got over here in England. At least there’s lots of action going on so I’ll watch it if it’s on the TV. But I don’t know nothing about no teams.

Comedian My kid played me a little bit of that Bill Bailey. I like him. He was pretty funny.

Musician I’d have to say Mississippi Fred McDowell. Helluva nice guy. I never played with him but I could’ve and I blew it! He said, ‘If you wanna come down here and play you can’ and I was doing something else so I didn’t do it. And now he’s dead.

Song “You Only Hurt The One You Love” by The Inkspots.

Gig I’ve seen James Brown. 1963 or 64. Oakland, California. Ain’t no-one ever even come close to him.

Gig I’ve played This year at Glastonbury. 65,000 people is a lot of energy comin’ atcha. It was like getting hit with a wave.

Motto It’s all good. Cause These days it’s the stayin’ alive cause. That’s a good one for me.

Photography: Ben Rayner
Words: Lousie Brealey and Ben Cobb

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #15, October/November 2008

The post Seasick Steve’s Favourite Things appeared first on Wonderland.