Barney Bubbles artwork detail

Mark Hodkinson’s BBC Radio 4 documentary about Barney Bubbles now has a broadcast date: 2 January 2012 at 16:00 GMT. Or for us folks in California, 8:00 PST. Also available at other times in other locations around the world. Turn on, tune in, drop out. The visual accompaniment to this newsflash shows two antennaed daschunds, and are of course, a product of Barney’s tripped-out imagination.

(Thanks to R&M for the image.)

Barney Bubbles Chilli Willi sticker (courtesy R and M)

Here we see Barney Bubbles in cheap and cheerful mode, rapidographing up an image with references.

There’s Walt Disney’s Pluto’s bent ears – but with four fingers and thumb style hands, deliberately non-Ub Ewarks-like (Ub was the originator of the Disney three fingered hands).

The Harris Tweed jackets are amusing, each with their own weave. Improbably for a time of experiment in all things garment, we were still wearing such things back then, a tweedy jacket with elbow patches being useful for its pockets. In ’73 I was featured in the Times on the fashion page doing a layered clothing strip tease in Covent Garden by Ed Bell, in which I believe I was wearing two such jackets as well as an overcoat or two, and many underlayers.

Talking of layered clothing, it was Barney, back in his ‘Colin Fulcher’ days who preached the no-underpants style of dressing, with a view to avoid the presumably unseemly seam lines viewable through skin-tight denim trousers (OK, ‘Levi’s') that he shrank wearing them in the bath so he said (I don’t believe he did). This was a person at Conran Design inspired piece of fashion sense.

The border lines are drawn sharp (real sharp!), in contrast to his oft-used wiggly jagged line that was deliberate and not the product of a shaky hand. His ‘shaky hand’ drawn line was evident in the drawings he did for the Book of Egg Cookery in 1967, but which I in my innocence redrew, much to his annoyance.

Hand lettered, the type seems to vary in weight with ‘Chilli Willi’ perversely appearing lighter, I wonder if that was intentional? It was quite likely a product of not particularly caring if it was or wasn’t, just the way it came out of his fingers.

The line up of jolly chaps is a tip of the hat to Music Hall’s ounce of flash and wit, which influenced him in his BBC radio Light Programme Arthur Askey “Are y’ courtin’?” mode. He did enjoy that pounding the boards scene.

Mildly irrelevant aside
Funny this should come up now, I’m painting a thirty-two foot high mural of the view down the valley I was living in in ’74 when Mick Farren visited and memorably said on looking down the burnt sienna and Umber scene of buccolic perfection, “It needs some Vegas neon.”

I think of this as I paint, thinking to subvert the sylvan Vedic vistas before me with a crass blaze of Nickelodeon brash. The valley is one over from the Zen Buddhist monastery, and has its own connections with zen through the library of Allen Watts, which is one of two rain-barrel houses designed by Roger Sommers. Set in a one time ‘deliberate community’ of about six main buildings with various outhouses and built to fool the building inspectors who never discovered the full extent of the habitats grouped in the euk’ knoll on what is now state park. When I was there in ’74 it was a mature 1950′s hippie scene, called ‘Druid Heights’, with Watts, the beat generations’ favorite buddhist Church of England priest wandering around in a robe with a bottle; Roger Sommers, a jazz playing visionary builder, who has in retrospect has become the founder of the Tiny Homes Movement – he studied under Frank Lloyd Wright; Margo St. James the Whore organizer with whom I went on to found the Hookers Ball; The King of Carpenters, a stylish craftsman and his potter wife; and the poet Elsa Gidlow in whose goat house I stayed. In one of two wood shops, lived the landlords son, Tagore, a chippie who went on to be an engineer at Enron, and his girlfriend with whom I got very well, Julie, the classical flautist whom I married. Julie went on to the South Bronx in ’82 and was influential in early Rap.

When I read Mick’s book back then I told him that I had thought of a sequel and would write it. It was from that forgotten story that the Street Lightnin’ Gang (The Graffiti Artists Union, with President for Life, Molly Rodriguez Bode) evolved, leading to the glorious discoveries of World Teleport, that so changed the diesel emissions standards of the world, and leading to cleaner skies everywhere.

My cover art for Mick and Ed's book

Walls: Some of the book. Video: Yippie invasion of the David Frost show 1970, with Mick in full flight heckle.

Exhibition signing-in book

In a previous life, back in the ’80′s  I was retailing exotic West African masks in San Francisco. I read up on the subject, spoke to travelling salesmen from the Gabon and Chad. In the library  of the store owner, Lawrence Hultburg,  I had come across a reference to a tribe, the M’Fuka*, a people with a bad rep in the slave trade as being facilitators at the terminus of the piano-key ivory merchants in what is now Benin and Nigeria. They had a bad-tempered life-style. A self-named dance called the M’Fuka was reknown for its angry vigor. The name came to be used as an abusive putdown. 

I think that adds substantially to the lore of the African roots of the US slur, ‘mofo’ and related phrases.

*I’ll get better references to the monograph on West Africa which mentioned the M’Fuka when I do.

I done an ad for Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in 1964 in the back of Town magazine, and Ronnie gave me free entry for life. Johny Rotten’s mum was a waitress there when I used to go. One day she served me a half pint of bitter with a cheese sandwich. I didn’t tip her enough and she rebuffed my iddle chatter with a,”f’you.” threw the beer in my face as she lunged forward and wrestled me to the ground, rolling down the risers onto the stage as Sony Rollins was in full belt. Kicked myself free to a rolling trill from the laughing Rollins and dashed for the exit in my torn Harris Tweed. Johny was born a bit later. (Not all exactly true, but some is.)

OK, in fact that’s certified cowdung, While it is true I did the ad and had free entry through most of the sixties to Ronnie Scott’s, and Johny’s (or was it Sid’s?) mum worked at Ronnie Scott’s during that time, I had nout to do with either’s birth since they were both conceived in the fifties I am reliably informed. Live and learn. And no, I never had a dust-up with her iver, though ’tis true I didn’t tip her enough..

(There’s a photo in the Box of Tricks by me of Higson and a Tiger scull.)