I don’t seem to have any time to put word to the machine at the moment. The days are crowded with things to do. Artwork for the album is almost finished, thanks to Dubai Dave who, unfortunately, is not as dodgy as Mary’s monicker for him would otherwise suggest. I have a folder somewhere full of photographs that I took while making the record but they are lost to me at the moment so they won’t appear on the sleeve which, as I’m sure you will agree, is most unfortunate. If I find them I’ll stick them up here so fear not! You’ll be able to look at pictures of me sweating and singing out of tune to your hearts content.
A couple of weeks ago an illustration that I did for the Times received a number of complaints from Christian members of our community including this one from a Mr Brin Dunsire from Princes Risborough.
Please note this as a formal complaint about Martin Carr’s graphic associated with Caitlin Moran’s article about the 1970’s in the issue of 27th April.
He chose to insert a gorilla’s face over the face of the Virgin Mary, and George Bush’s face over that on the Infant Jesus.
I hope he genuinely did not realise that the icon he chose to use was more than simply a “stock” image of the Madonna and Child; it is in fact an icon known as Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, and is very precious to many Catholics across the world. My interest is that it is special in the Catholic Diocese of Northampton, for which I have the privilege to work ; we have two churches named after Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, and a rare copy of this icon is displayed in a shrine church in Northampton. Catholics do not, of course, venerate pictures and objects as such, but the content and concepts which they evoke, and these may be very intimately held in our spirituality.
Martin Carr may be the kind of person who thinks it is cool and amusing to mock the images associated with religious belief: I can see from his portfolio that this is not the first time he has chosen to incorporate a Madonna & Child image into his cartoons for satiric purposes. But this use was simply gratuitous and vacuous. It is difficult to reconstruct the thought processes involved in deciding to use a Madonna image in the context of illustrating Caitlin’s Moran’s opening paragraph, which itself was purely a whimsical diversion from the main point of her article. Surely, if his point was to imagine a gorilla “nurturing” a Baby Bush, this could have been done in a more clear and amusing way ?
It is also disappointing that the inappropriateness of this kind of material was not picked up by a sub-editor, though I suppose time is short.
You (and Mr Carr) may be tired of hearing this point being made by Christians, but it bears repeating nonetheless; can you genuinely state that you would have no hesitation in publishing a picture of the prophet Mohammed with a pig’s face inserted, if it suited the pure purpose of mocking religion, and the only thing that is stopping you is the fear of possible violence ? Because if your reply would be “ No, that’s not the only reason, it is not right for us to cause gratuitous and unnecessary offence to religious people” then you should not be using illustrations like this simply because they are “only Christian” and you can get away with it without being threatened. What do you say ?
I say nothing Mr Dunsire, if I can’t believe you have nothing better to do than write letters such as this then I would be foolish to become involved in a debate with you, theological, sociological or otherwise.
Actually, fuck it, while we’re here..
I found Caitlin’s column difficult to illustrate that week. I don’t why this is, some weeks the image jumps out at you as you read through but I couldn’t find anything suitable, no overreaching theme that needed illustrating. I decided to focus on a throwaway line she had written about a time traveling gorilla. Hang on, let me find it…
“Going back to the 1970s could help tackle global warming, researchers claim. Well, yes. We’ve all seen ‘Quantum Leap’. Of course Dr Sam Beckett leaping back to 1973, into the body of a climate-campaigning gorilla capable of sign-language, who touches the heart of the young George W Bush forever, could help. That’s not in doubt. We know that.”
Ok, that’s illustration gold right there and who cares whether it fits in with everything else she says. Like the May Fly the page lives for a day before returning to dust and looking at the wider picture, at the daily injustices meted out by uncaring, corrupt, inept politicians, the poverty, the violence, the greed, war, starvation etc It’s not that important. Not really.
The illustration, as you can see, is of a time traveling gorilla using sign language to teach the young George Bush about the benefits of protecting our beautiful planet. It was called ‘Greenilla’. It has nothing to do with religion. I have nothing to do with religion. I’m not an atheist either, I’m not involved. Nor do I think that it’s ‘cool and amusing to mock the images associated with religious belief’. I’m forty years old, I don’t think anything is ‘cool’ (except for maybe Stuart Hall). I love religious images, songs, buildings. I love people who deemed their immense talents to be a gift from a higher being, Diego Maradona, Christopher Wren, Mahalia Jackson etc but I don’t believe what they believe and I see nothing in the various icons that I’ve collected over the years but their manifest beauty. Even if I were willing to guide you through the minutiae of my thought processes, I couldn’t do it. Inspiration works at speeds many, many times faster than light. I threw some images together until it looked like I wanted it to, that’s all I did and if that offends you, I don’t care. Obviously the sub-editors at the Times feel the same way as I hand my illustration in three days before publication.
And you’re damn right I wouldn’t put a pigs head on Mohammed. I’m scared just to type it out. I think visually and as there is no visual representation of Mohammed permitted, the thought would never occur to me. I didn’t stick an apes head on Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, I pushed pixels around a screen until they were ordered in such a way that I liked.
It’s all in your mind, not mine.
Marylou and I spent thursday morning at Akira’s house singing and playing guitar on this big song he has called ‘The Answer to the Anti-life Equation’ a composition that veers from melancholic introspection to big beat hip hop and a strange bit that I haven’t got me head round yet. Sounds like something off ‘OK Computer’ which is not what you’d expect from Adam which is always what you can expect from Adam. Jeres came round to work on his Son of King Rebel album and we sang harmonies on ‘I Don’t Love Jesus No More’ which has an ace chorus, I can’t wait to hear the finished thing. Adam works hard, I think he had three or four sessions going on that day. Respect. I made everyone breakfast and Adam poured scalding coffee all over his hand and cooker. Sweet. 
Then Mary and I drove over to Clapton to see Stacey and he kids and show them the DVD we got from the 4D scan place which freaked the kids out and bored me to tears. When Penny told us she had seventeen minutes of footage what she meant was that she had three minutes of footage repeated six times. Poor. He’s a lovely wee orange blob though, I think we’re going to like him. I’ve known Stacey’s kids since the day they were born and I love them even though Betsi is always trying to get me involved in dollhouse games and Hank doesn’t appear to own any clothes.
Cait and Pete are away so a couple of her younger siblings threw a party which was still going when we got up the next morning. It was full of Cambridge nobs and the music was intensely bad. If you’re trying to sleep at four in the morning and the Stereophonics are grating away at punishing volumes then pray there is no shotgun in the house because if there is somebody is going down. Nobody died and the police didn’t come so it wasn’t really a party, more of a debate with booze. There was a serious amount of alcohol being consumed, they are that age where it doesn’t touch the sides. I get giddy on a couple of Kronies nowadays so hats off to ‘em. Apparently Jimmy, Cait’s teenage brother, got his fruity little leather satchel on at 7am, announced he was an important banker and set off down the hill towards Crouch End. Now that’s class. Jimmy is studying Theology at Cambridge and has spent his whole summer holidays studying the Bible so a breakdown was deffo on the cards. He calls me ‘lad’. When he’s speaking to me I can never work out if he thinks that I’m his Grandad or if he thinks that he’s my Grandad.
I was up until three doing this weeks illustration for the Times which involved a Tory MP seated at a kitchen table with his family with his head blown off in front of a depiction of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus (ahh) in her arms only I’d put Thatchers face on her and Cameron’s face on him. There is no way they’re going to accept it but I submitted it anyway because I’m a curly haired sleepy rebel.
So after not much sleep I had to climb into the back of a BBC cab which picked it’s way through the morning traffic before arriving at White City and the home of the British Broadcasting Company where I was to talk about Bandstocks on Radio 5’s Victoria Derbyshire’s show. I was there early and I had downed two huge coffees by the time I, Bandstocks founder, Andrew Lewis and fellow Bandstocks artist, Jersey Budd were ushered into the studio a good half an hour after we were due on. We then had to listen to the news, weather, sport and traffic before being introduced. With precious little time left to explain something relatively simple but new (new is hard to explain to most people it seems) we were interrupted almost immediately by Derbyshire reading out the breaking news story that was this year contestants on Strictly Come Dancing. After she had read it out she asked me why I had had my head in my hands throughout. What I wanted to say was that in doing what she had just done, interrupted a discussion on a new way of presenting music that benefits both the Artist and the music lover to read out a list of low rent ‘celebrities’ that are appearing on some reality tv show she had shone a light on what is so badly wrong with our culture, or lack therof, today. But I didn’t. I dunno, maybe I bottled it, maybe I didn’t want to waste precious time arguing but I mumbled something about not recognising most of the names (not true) and holding a torch for Cherie Lunghi (I’m afraid that is true).
So finally we were on, I don’t remember much about it. They played a couple of Boo Radleys songs which was absurd and some woman texted in to say that good music will always win through and why should she pay for our recording costs. I don’t know who she thinks pays for recording costs now but it sure ain’t the bands or the labels. That one question worried me, are people really that dumb? Are they happy to fund record company execs coke habits rather than be a part of the whole experience. She’s happy to pay a tenner for a record that won’t make money for her or the band but won’t countenance paying a tenner for a record where both she and the band could make money, where owning the record and having her name on the sleeve is the very least she could expect. i don’t want to get evangelical about this, that was never my attention but complacency and fear of the unknown are two things I cannot abide so I might have to start standing on mountaintops wrapped in a sheet, wielding a mighty shitty stick and chucking about lightening bolts of righteous fury. I’ll need to rethink my hair though, it’s not being taken seriously for the artistic statement that it immutably is.
Afterwards, still angry, which surprised me, I met up with Marylou. Her embrace chased my dark thoughts down Great Portland Street and kicked the shit out of them in some dark alley full of cardboard boxes and fire escapes. Then we met up with my old friend Keefo and his lovely wife Jen. We had lunch in the Clachan where Keefo and I have been going since the mid nineties. We talked about babies (they have a young boy named Hamish who, at the advanced age of two, is a sturdy and handsome wee chap) and Joy Division and Bandstocks and Queen and Fleet Foxes and the Creation book (not the Bible) and babies again. Once home I checked my mail and my illustration had been accepted without further comment which saved me some time which we used by passing out cold on the bed for a couple of hours.
Then to Hackney for dinner at a friend’s house. Nicki is an interior designer and a friend of Mary’s from Cardiff. She cooked a lovely meal and we met some ace people and I’m afraid I got drunk and had to be taken home and put to bed. Amen.
