Arctic Monkeys
This graffiti house is a circus
On a train via Birmingham to Liverpool tucking into a little spiced rum from a hip flask courtesy of Nipper. A few hours lie ahead before our rendezvous with Jae at the former. Our destination in Liverpool was a depressing little suburb; Garston, or Ghastly! This was going to be a grotty few days painting the nightshift in a semi-closed-off terraced housing estate surrounded by the same scallywags that had tied up the security guard to his own chair just a few nights before and wrenched up as much copper piping as they could bare weight. What added to the grit was a huge overlooming and rusty gas cylinder.
Juno Studios had contacted a friend from Squeeze 18, purveyors of fine events & decor, a couple of weeks beforehand in search for a merry crew of graffiti artists that could take on a high profile and demanding project. It was a lightly-guarded secret mission to completely abuse the whole interior of an innocent, copper-free, terraced house awaiting demolition. Juno Studios had the contract for the latest Arctic Monkeys album artwork and de5ign4 were going to be there to execute this phallic brief upon the walls for a few rotten nights while rocks were regularly thrown against the metal panelled-up windows. Hard to lock down a secret in such a close-nit neighbourhood.
The daytime hours were filled with design adjustments from Juno and drink related recovery from the previous night of painting. Well, what else was there to? It’s impossible to adjust to a nightshift overnight and hanging around a design studio like spare parts wasn’t appealing to us.
The whole job was a mixture of excitement and terror, from painting such a high profile project, to an over-protective covert neighbourhood watch scheme. A lot of sweating for the cold climate. Why had the Arctic Monkeys wanted so many cocks adorning the walls of this well beaten house for their album – Favourite Worse Nightmare? I could only relate it to the obsession most males have of scrawling images of their one-handed local friend on any surface available.
After the artwork was complete, a bricky had to dismantle first, the front of the house, whilst Juno took the snaps of the adjoining mural from ground floor to 1st hoping the measurements had added up and the artwork matched up, to bricking the whole bloody thing back up again only to repeat this daft behaviour at the back of the yard!
Sadly we couldn’t hang about to meet the band, we had to scoot to Heathrow and jettison to Qatar for the 2nd instalment of the Wheels & Heels Festival hosted by Reach Out To Asia!