D R A W I N G R O O M D I S P L AY S
Secondhand Daylight George Shaw
21 January 2019 – 3 May 2019 1
Fig. 1 Some Things Don’t Fit Anymore, 2002
Preface
Introduction
Secondhand Daylight has been designed to complement the exhibition George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, October– December 2018; Holburne Museum, Bath, February–May 2019). Shaw’s paintings focus upon the environment in which he grew up, the Tile Hill council estate near Coventry. They offer a subtle chronicle of his own childhood, and of the estate’s history over more than four decades. His drawings, in turn, explore the individuals, myths, fantasies, and horror stories that populated Shaw’s teenage imagination. Secondhand Daylight gathers together some of the cultural materials that shaped Shaw’s adolescence, and that have informed his later practice as an artist. Bursting with books, records, and badges, and featuring an iconic T-shirt, it is also intended to offer a vivid, highly personal glimpse into the workings of English popular culture between the 1960s and the 1980s. This accompanying booklet, written by the artist, offers a characteristically lively commentary on the objects in the display.
The title for this display comes from the 1979 album by the postpunk band Magazine. I would have come across its post-punk pretentiousness a good few years later, when I became pretentious myself. The album was Bowie on a budget. But, like a lot of the things I picked up on in record shops and bookshops, it was the title and the imagery that held me. What was this second-hand daylight? The album had no single track listed as such. And yet this seemingly familiar term described the very substance that enabled me to see the world.
Mark Hallett
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Books and Badges
Long before the world was internetshaped for nearly everyone, my world was shaped by the fairy stories handed out by Ladybird Books in the late 1960s. The series, titled 'Well-Loved Tales', retold fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, stories by Hans Christian Anderson, and the occasional English folk tale. It was the illustrations that seeped into my imagination. These lovingly painted images depicted a world that was familiar but strange: sunny and colourful places where horrible and cruel things happened. I remember having The Gingerbread Boy read to me by my mum (1 ). Perhaps it appealed to me because of my ginger hair. He has a freshly baked smiley face and in his happiness, he skips and dances
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into the mouth of a fox. There is no happy ending. The final painting, by the illustrator Robert Lumley, is of the fox chomping his way through the little boy: ‘Then he cried, “I am half gone!” Then he cried, “I am three quarters gone!” And after that the little gingerbread boy said nothing more at all.’ The author, Vera Southgate, did much of the retelling in this series, and many of the images that have haunted me over the last fifty years were made by the illustrator Eric Winter: pictures such as Snow White lying in her glass coffin in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (2); and a gorillafaced beast in dandy clothes in Beauty and the Beast (3). However, the true horror came in the shape of Rumpelstiltskin (4): his funny little
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red cap and stripy tights, his big old face and little body, his furious dancing and his pointy boots. The woods never felt so innocent or so harmless after seeing such figures, and neither did the stories of my childhood. Years later, when I saw the film of the thriller Don’t Look Now (1973), it was Rumpelstiltskin I saw creeping around Daphne du Maurier’s Venice. The non-fiction books Ladybird published were as beautifully illustrated as their fairy stories. From their natural history books, such as the one that helped me identify trees (5), I ended up at the lives of the Great Artists (6). It seemed that my journey from childhood would lead me from one mythology to another. As I grew up, I could reach my dad’s bookshelves. My dad’s portrait of himself was conjured up from the books and the films of the British kitchen sink realism tradition. Initially, I was fascinated by the titles and then by the romantic idea that a fiction had grown out of the truth of my dad’s upbringing in the north of England. The first of these works to weave their way into my mental make-up was Alan Sillitoe’s film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) (7). I would have come across it in the late 1970s — just as I turned
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into a teenager. The main character, Arthur Seaton, stuck two fingers up to the world around him twenty years before the kids I saw hanging around on the Tile Hill estate or loitering without intent at school. The actor Albert Finney, who played Arthur Seaton in the film, even looked a bit like my dad in some old black and white photos. The Pan paperback I have of the novel has a painted image of Finney in the film, as if it’s from a Ladybird kitchen sink series.
My penguin paperback of Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960) was published in 1970 (8). Despite London swinging away, I imagine life wouldn’t have changed that much for a Vic or an Ingrid Brown — two of the characters from the book — during the decade. The cover reminded me of a painting by Nevinson called The Towpath (1912), which I saw in an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1980. For me, it was the beginning of the period when the real became romantic.
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The Penguin paperback copy of David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960) has a rather sorrowful painting on its cover by the illustrator Allan Manham (9). It doesn’t reference the film at all and suggests an existential despair that a teenager like myself would have liked to associate with the arty and the foreign. The imitation of a Wild Woodbine cigarette box used on the book cover of Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959) is a piece of grubby graphics that a young Peter Blake could have found next to a beer mat (10). Another downbeat painting covers Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963); my copy of the novel is full of tender line drawings by Susan Benson (11). It all went up a beat
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when it was filmed with a Manfred Mann soundtrack some five years later. When the BBC repeated the screening of the television dramas The Nigel Barton Plays, it was just at the time that I was heading off to art school in the mid-1980s. Nigel attempts to reconcile his workingclass background with his academic and political aspirations. Ken Barlow finds himself in a similar fix in the first episode of the long-running television soap drama Coronation Street in 1960. This Penguin Modern Playwright edition avoids the familiar kitchen sink iconography in favour of typography that references a television screen (12). I first came across the writer Royston Ellis who was featured
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in the Daniel Farson television documentary Living for Kicks (1960), when it was repeated as part of Channel 4’s TV Heaven in the early 1990s. Farson went on to write the biographies of Gilbert and George and Francis Bacon. He also devised the wonderful Channel 4 Gallery quiz show about art in the mid1980s, hosted by George Melly. Living For Kicks looks seriously at teenage disaffection and an emerging housing crisis. Rave (1960) is a book of poetry by the twentyyear-old Royston that takes on many of the themes he discusses in the documentary (13).
The 1960s are bookended here by Keith Waterhouse’s There is a Happy Land (1957) and Barry Hines’s Kes (1968). The cover of Waterhouse’s childhood memoir is dull to say the least, which is a shame because this edition, intended for use in schools, has some wonderful photographs and snippets of text (14). These relate strongly to B. S. Johnson and Julia Trevelyan Oman’s Street Children (1964). The cover of Kes, meanwhile, shows a treated still from Ken Loach’s 1969 film of the young David Bradley giving the world the two-finger treatment (15). Oddly enough, we studied Kes at school.
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Literature wasn’t really part of the playground conversation. One of the few books that appeared in the pockets of kids at school
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was Richard Allen’s Skinhead series (16–24). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a revival of fashion and music associated with mods
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and skinheads. At the centre of this revival was the Coventry-based Two-Tone Records label, so all of us in Coventry were very excited. When I first saw the cover of one of these books, I was fascinated to see people who looked like the people I knew. I recall the novels being handed around school like cigarettes. Many of the copies opened by themselves at the sex scenes or the violent scenes. I don’t recall ever having finished one. The covers alone told a little play for today with each character cast outdoors as though they had been banished from any form of domesticity. Richard Allen was actually the pen name of James Moffatt, who wrote pulp novels under several names for the New
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English Library. Funnily enough, by the time his first Skinhead novel was published, he would have been nearly fifty. The characters tend to be violent and abusive and the pages are littered with racism, sexism, and sexual violence. It’s curious that Kubrick’s 1970 film A Clockwork Orange was released in the same year as the first of these books. Kubrick himself withdrew his film from British release three years later in response to allegations that it led to copycat violence. Richard Allen, however, went on to write a further eighteen novels exploring and exploiting a number of youth subcultures. These ranged from Suedehead and Bootboy to Glam Rocker and Teeny Bopper Idol; the series was crowned off with Punks
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and Mods Rule in 1980. In many ways, the covers of these books document an undercurrent of British culture. They led me from childhood to adolescence and to the point where I was teetering on the brink of a Nigel Barton-style exit from Tile Hill. The wearing of badges was a way of showing allegiances, a way of saying what you were and, more importantly, what you weren’t (25). The badges of mine that have survived include one that reads 'May the Force be with you', which I bought at the cinema when we
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saw Star Wars in 1977. In 1979/1980, nearly every youngster in Coventry wore a Two-Tone badge of some description. A Saturday didn’t go by without a trip to Poster Place in the city centre to buy a handful of badges. I found or stole The Who’s The Kids Are Alright badge and I think I bought The Jam badge at a concert. Joy Division was a story in the music press and a badge before I had heard one note of their music. By the time I’d saved up enough for the album Unknown Pleasures (1979), Ian Curtis had killed himself and the band was no more. My Joy Division
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badges set me apart from other kids at school. No one seemed to know who they were or what they meant, which was the whole point really. In summer 1981, my dad took a photo of me in the garden, casting his own shadow with mine which lay on the cut grass; he wrote on the back: 'Judd "Joy Division"
T-Shirt and suede boots' (Fig. 2 showing me wearing 26). The very last set of badges I wore before insincerity took over related to The Smiths: a couple of album covers, and a curious image featuring Joe Orton, who never figured as a cover star as far as I’m aware. Or is it Murray Head?
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Music
I was really too young for punk. Punks were the bigger boys at the end of the road or on the back seat of the bus. Needless to say, I had nothing to do with them and, fortunately, for most of the time, they wanted nothing to do with me. I learnt about records from listening to the radio — the charts, and later, John Peel. As time went on, I talked about records with other kids at school but not often. I heard about things like the Sex Pistols from the news but I don’t remember listening to them. The first punk song I remember hearing was Sham 69’s 'Hurry Up Harry'. I thought it was brilliant and hilarious. Someone told me that 'Sham' stood for 'Skinheads are magic' and I think I believed them. A few years later, I found the track on Sham 69’s second album That’s Life (1978). I was drawn to the collage cover, which was designed by Jimmy Pursey, the band’s singer and writer. It’s a mash up of newspaper headlines, photographs, and adverts that sum up mid-1970s discontent (27). I’ve heard it described as a concept album, but it’s simply a series of songs that are linked by snippets of conversation, so it runs like a play or a musical. If it has a story, it’s one of an average young man’s day: getting up, going to work
and the pub, meeting girls, and all his moaning and joking about the world. In the late 1970s, a television play called The Witches of Pendle brought my dad’s tales of the Lancashire witches to life in our living room. My enduring fascination with this story brought me to The Fall’s Live at the Witch Trials (1979). The cover summed up my blossoming bleak vision of the British landscape: eerie, anxious, and threatening; deep-rooted and dying (28). The songs themselves are the soundtrack to that landscape. I don’t know anything about the mysterious John Wriothesley, who is credited with the cover. Item 28
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The very basic black and white graphics of the Two-Tone Records label made it easy for us kids to replicate it using marker pens on schoolbooks and bags. Similarly, the black and white photography on the cover of The Specials (1979) kept it rooted in real experience (29). It also looked like a low-budget version of My Generation (1965) by The Who. The track listing on the front has always made me think of poetry titles and pushes the content right in your inquisitive face. Paul Weller described the music and cover of Setting Sons (1979) as 'an English story so we wanted an English sleeve' (30). The image shows the sculpture by Benjamin Clemens called The St John’s Ambulance Bearers (1919) in
the Imperial War Museum. I spent my primary school years obsessed with the First World War and I was gripped by this image when I saw it in the record section of the local library. I quickly handed over my ten pence to borrow it for a week. For their debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, Kevin Rowland, the lead singer of Dexys Midnight Runners, said he wanted 'an image of unrest'. This came courtesy of a newspaper photograph of a Catholic boy fleeing his Belfast family home, following the introduction of internment by the British Government in 1971 (31). Of course, when I saw this cover for the first time, I knew nothing about these details — it appealed as an image
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of a lost and melancholy youth. My own copy is a cut-price reissue, which I probably bought in the mid1980s. By the time Crocodiles (1980) by Echo and the Bunnymen arrived in my bedroom, I was beginning to have more other-worldly ambitions to do with art and ideas (32). I remember some mild abuse when the band’s name was found on my school rucksack. This image of the young men hanging around an eerily lit wood, together with the cover of Joy Division’s Atmosphere (1980), confirmed my self-image as a doomed romantic artist striding out into the landscape (33). Any contradiction between roots and ambition were, for a while,
reconciled by The Smiths. Morrissey mined the iconography of post-war working class culture to tell his own story of lost innocence, unrequited love, injustice, and alienation. Each of the singles released in the mid-1980s had their own 'cover star' and the star of Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (1984) is Viv Nicholson, who is shown returning to her childhood home after winning (and losing) the football pools (34). The B-side of the single is 'Suffer Little Children', which was written about the Moors murders. The physical similarity between Nicholson and Myra Hindley is a calculated one. Item 34
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Words and Pictures
I discovered Quadrophenia (1973) by The Who after seeing the film in 1980 (35). I didn’t care much for the music at the time but the booklet of photographs that came as part of the album rolled all my interests into one clear and complete work of art. What’s more, I could actually own it. Pete Meaden described Mod as 'an aphorism for clean living under difficult circumstances' and we see this tension being played out again and again in Ethan A. Russell’s and Peter Townshend’s photographic story. The image of Paul Weller’s post-Jam band The Style Council took this aphorism to heart. The cover of Our Favourite Shop (1985) shows Weller and
Mick Talbot, suited and loafered, browsing elegantly amid the bric-abrac of a bygone age (36). It would have been my favourite shop too. I discovered British Image 1 (1975) in a second-hand bookshop shortly before I went to art school (37). Together with a host of other distractions, it was images like these that encouraged me to abandon painting and take up a camera. I fell in love with the square format of the book, with its functional iconography and title, and, most of all, with Daniel Meadows’s beautiful photograph of three lads with their pigeon (a Kes sequel of sorts). The book could have been a record with a photo of the band members.
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I probably discovered Homer Sykes’ Once a Year (1977) when I was at art school (38). Sykes takes the discipline of documentary photography and makes something strange and unfamiliar out of it. I found Nick Knight’s Skinhead (1982) in a record shop (39). It begins with a history of the skinhead subculture and ends up with some disturbing photographs of London youth in the early 1980s. These images of a world I saw around me had none of the strange nostalgia and far away innocence I enjoyed from the 1960s and 1970s. They too, soon came to look like images of the past; sadly, as today’s news shows us, their politics did not end up being buried forever.
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Much of my early attempts at art school would fit neatly into the box labelled pretentious. Perhaps this was what drew me to the books of B. S. Johnson. Writing throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, his experimental projects seem at odds with the kitchen sink narratives of the period. His first published novel, Travelling People (1963), has black pages to indicate the subconscious. Albert Angelo (1964) has holes cut into it, so that the reader can see through to other pages. The Unfortunates (1969) is often referred to as the 'book in a box' because it contains unbound sections that the reader can shuffle into any order (40). Consequently,
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Knows Somebody Who’s Dead (1972), which in this pamphlet form looks like a 7-inch single from the early 1980s (42). Johnson summed up his literary ambitions in the preface to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, in which he suggested that traditional methods of storytelling were redundant and were in fact merely the telling of lies. I sympathise with his quest for a kind of truth. Ageing and death sit at the centre of much of his work, as does humour, and — despite his Hancockian pomposity — a humble Item 42
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the book turns into an object. However, in the middle of reading Johnson, I am always struck by how commonplace and ordinary and even sentimental his stories are. The Unfortunates begins when the narrator is sent to report on a football match, which triggers quite banal memories of a dead friend. Johnson does have a knack for great titles. Very few can beat Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973) (41) and Everyone
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and attractive self-awareness. The text of Street Children (1964), which should be the most sentimental of books, twists and turns its way into
a dark fairy tale set in London in the early 1960s (43). It comes as no surprise to find that Johnson took his own life in 1973.
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Film
Conclusion
Johnson believed that the arrival of cinema made it necessary for the novel to distance itself from the 'what happens next?' structure. He did make some intriguing films himself, though I doubt if I will be seeing them on television anytime soon. For most of my youth, I could only see old films when they came on television. I read about films more than I saw them; they tended to exist as descriptions, stills, and posters. Most of the posters I have hanging at home have been found in second-hand shops or car-boot sales. I had the poster for 10 Rillington Place long before I saw the film itself (which didn’t disappoint) (44). It is one of the grubbiest films you can come across and the exploitative publicity poster feeds that grubbiness as it markets the crimes of Christie as a Soho side-show. It is strange that, until very recently, publicity posters very rarely used stills from the actual films but rather made do with heavily manipulated photographs or paintings.
Each of the objects collected in the exhibition, and described in this booklet, illuminated the world around me during my youth. The landscapes I have found myself painting in my middle age still radiate with the light of these stories, pictures, films, and songs — a truly second-hand daylight.
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Object List
Books and Badges
19 Richard Allen, Sorts, 1974. New English Library Ltd
1 The Gingerbread Boy, Ladybird Well-Loved Tales, 1966
20 Richard Allen, Trouble for Skinhead, 1974. New English Library Ltd
2 Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs, Ladybird Well-Loved Tales, 1969
21 Richard Allen, Skinhead Farewell, 1974. New English Library Ltd
3 Beauty and the Beast, Ladybird WellLoved Tales, 1968
22 Richard Allen, Knuckle Girls, 1977. New English Library Ltd
4 Rumpelstiltskin, Ladybird Well-Loved Tales, 1968
23 Richard Allen, Punk Rock, 1977. New English Library Ltd
5 Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, The Ladybird Book of Trees, 1963
24 Richard Allen, Terrace Terrors, 1975. New English Library Ltd
6 Dorothy Aitchison, Great Artists: Book 1, 1970
25 Assorted badges 26 Joy Division t-shirt
7 Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1965. Pan Books 8 Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving, 1970. Penguin Books
Music
9 David Storey, This Sporting Life, 1977. Penguin Books
27 Sham 69, That’s Life, 1978. Polydor Ltd
10 Keith Waterhouse, Billy Liar, 1973. Penguin Books 11 Nell Dunn, Up the Junction, 1966. Pan Books 12 Dennis Potter, The Nigel Barton Plays, 1967. Penguin Books 13 Royston Ellis, Rave, 1960. Scorpion Press 14 Keith Waterhouse, There is a Happy Land, 1979. Longman Imprint Books
28 The Fall, Live at the Witch Trials, 1978. A Step-Forward Record 29 The Specials, The Specials, 1979. 2 Tone Records 30 The Jam, Setting Sons, 1979. Polydor Ltd 31 Dexys Midnight Runners, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, 1980. EMI 32 Echo and the Bunnymen, Crocodiles, 1980. Korova
15 Barry Hines, Kes, 1977. Penguin Books
33 Joy Division, Atmosphere, 1980. Factory Records
16 Richard Allen, Skinhead, 1972. New English Library Ltd
34 The Smiths, Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, 1984. Rough Trade Records
17 Richard Allen, Suedehead, 1971. New English Library Ltd
35 The Who, Quadrophenia, 1973. Polydor Ltd
18 Richard Allen, Boot Boys, 1972. New English Library Ltd
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Words and Pictures 36 The Style Council, Our Favourite Shop, 1985. Polydor Ltd 37 The Arts Council of Great Britain, British Image 1, 1975 38 Homer Sykes, Once a Year: Some Traditional British Customs, 1977. Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd
41 B. S. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, 1973. Hutchinson of London 42 B. S. Johnson, Everyone Knows Somebody Who’s Dead, 1973. Covent Garden Press 43 B. S. Johnson, Street Children, 1964. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
39 Nick Knight, Skinhead, 1982. Omnibus Press
Film
40 B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates, 1969. Panther Books Ltd
44 Poster for 10 Rillington Place, Columbia Pictures, 1971
Secondhand Daylight has been curated by Bryony Botwright-Rance and Mark Hallett. They and George Shaw would like to thank Emily Lees for producing this booklet.
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