What would it be like to have a conversation with William Blake? In his recent pamphlet entitled A Conversation with Wm. Blake (Uppingham: Goldmark, 2019), artist David Suff takes this question as his theme. Suff’s imagined dialogue with Blake unfurls in a series of visual and verbal evocations, beginning with the front-cover design (above), in which Suff places his own self-portrait directly opposite a portrait of William Blake. The two artists, centuries apart, are pictured in a single pictorial plane, conversing across a small coffee-table.

Suff is represented by Goldmark Gallery, an idiosyncratic cultural institution in Uppingham, founded by Mike Goldmark. Goldmark has also published literary works by Iain Sinclair (White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, 1987 and Objects of Obscure Desire, 2013). The artworks that Suff made for A Conversation with Wm. Blake were recently displayed at Goldmark Gallery (March 23 – April 13 2019) in the show Journeys Beyond Appearance, which also featured Suff’s 30-foot long autobiographical pen drawing called ‘River of Life.’

I recently interviewed Suff about his engagement with Blake over the course of his long artistic career (see the full interview below). What emerged was a sense that Suff’s ‘conversation’ with Blake has been a lifelong process. As a maker of verbal-visual books, an enthusiast of and participant in 20^th-century counterculture, and a lover of literal and figurative journeys, Suff has brought Blake to many aspects of his creative practice. His work offers one vista into Blake’s legacy among contemporary artistic practitioners and particularly among makers of small-press books. In our interview, Suff recalls the beginnings of his fascination for Blake:

I think it began with the imagery, and the fact that so many of his most well-known images were taken in the 1960s and were used as emblems of the counterculture, there are lots of little small presses that all use Blakean words for names of their printing houses, and some of the psychedelic music of the 1960s was heavily influenced by Blake. I think my beginnings would have started with all of that, and then fitting that to living in London, loving walking around, looking, thinking about people who would have walked there before: all of those things kind of get crystallised in Blake for me.

Suff is particularly interested in a kind of Blakean re-enchantment of London’s topography. In our interview, he describes a quasi-epiphanic moment of inspiration that he experienced at Bunhill Fields, the site of Blake and Catherine’s burial. In A Conversation with Wm. Blake, which was directly inspired by this experience at Bunhill, Suff offers what he calls ‘a partial portrait of a man who is always near.’ In the poetry he meditates repeatedly upon a sense of Blake’s continued presence within London:

Non-conformist, free-thinker

     the time will come for you to

blow through this city

 

[…]

 

a suitcase of visions         carved from the darkness

     following the golden string

listening for mermaids,

                                           reading faces and

… tracing feather paths through the air

                                                endlessly whispers through the centuries

In picking up the ‘golden string’ that Blake lays down in Jerusalem, Suff positions himself as actively thinking with Blake, both thematically and formally, in the space of his minutely detailed visual-verbal book. There are many differences between Blake’s illuminated books and the practices of self- and independent publishers today—not least owing to the advent of digital printing—but Suff’s A Conversation is one work that keeps resolutely alive Blake’s legacy as a maker of books and a maker of worlds.

Links:

David Suff’s website: https://www.davidsuff.com/

Goldmark Gallery: https://www.goldmarkart.com/

Documentary about Suff’s Journeys Beyond Appearances, produced by Goldmark gallery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1-JG4Z4ZD0

More information about the exhibition: https://www.goldmarkart.com/exhibitions-and-events/all/114-david-suff-journey-beyond-appearance-upcoming

The Interview

We began the conversation talking about Journeys Beyond Appearances, Goldmark’s documentary about Suff’s artwork River.

DS: Goldmark Gallery is a very, very strange institution. It’s a commercial gallery, but it behaves more like an arts centre: they publish books, they put on poetry readings and music events, they have a huge activity with ceramics, with pottery-makers from around the world, they deal in contemporary art and historical art, all sorts of things. When I first moved here to Rutland eighteen or so years back, it was a bookshop—a secondhand bookshop with the gallery on the side. Now it’s this huge building with lots of rooms and lots of things going on. They keep a resident film-maker. It’s common practice that if they’ve got an exhibition of pots or paintings or something, they tend to make a supporting film.

What I didn’t say in the finished version of that documentary, but probably said in one of the conversations that went towards it, was that I often don’t sleep very well, I’ll wake up a lot in the night. It got to be my habit, if I was staying in London overnight for some reason, I would probably stay somewhere near the Barbican or Old Street, and if I woke up in the middle of the night I’d go for a walk and I’d probably go and sit in Bunhill Fields. The grave marker that’s been there for quite a long time, apparently marking William Blake’s burial spot, says ‘nearby lie.’ That ‘nearby’ has always seemed such a powerful thing. It’s not a very twentieth-century kind of phrase, but it’s such a powerful kind of statement: here’s this person who’s so embedded into our culture in all sorts of ways—principally ‘Jerusalem,’ but also the imagery and the poetry and the idea of the Romantic radical and all of these things—and yet we don’t actually know exactly where he’s buried. And it’s a graveyard for Nonconformists—Daniel Defoe has a beautiful stone memorial there and the Wesleys, but Blake is somewhere here, he’s somewhere round about.

CR: It’s funny though that he has been given a sort of pride of place in its own way—it’s a humble sort of thing but it’s kind of hard to miss as well.

DS: Absolutely, and it turns out that the actual burial is around thirty feet away. Some people have researched the exact point and they know who’s buried in the shared grave and all of that. But it just seemed to me that over your shoulder is the City of London, this enormous capitalist powerhouse, with tentacles of influence and power all over the globe, and here’s Blake: someone who was not afraid to comment on that, to confront it, to talk about the inequalities within society, and he’s buried so close, just on the periphery of it, and nobody actually bothered to note precisely where he is. There’s something there that always fascinated me and intrigued me, I think.

CR: From living in London and living near Bunhill Fields—is that how you came to know Blake or came to know him in a particular way that was very closely related to place and geography?

DS: My father was a Cockney. He was born in London. He was orphaned and grew up in children’s homes and I kind of feel as though I’m a Londoner in my sinews, in my heart, and we lived in London for a long time. And there’s something about London that draws me back imaginatively, constantly. The River Thames is a huge thing in my thinking—the idea that Roman legionnaires crossed it on bridges, the idea that Joseph Conrad sat in a boat out in the estuary and wrote Heart of Darkness. And Blake’s one of those London figures. If you’ve got a Romantic notion of the city and its place in history and generation after generation walking the same streets, then he’s one of those figures that you would naturally be drawn to. But I don’t think that’s where it began. I think it began with the imagery, and the fact that so many of his most well-known images were taken in the 1960s and were used as emblems of the counterculture, there are lots of little small presses that all use Blakean words for names of their printing houses, and some of the psychedelic music of the 1960s was heavily influenced by Blake. I think my beginnings would have started with all of that, and then fitting that to living in London, loving walking around, looking, thinking about people who would have walked there before: all of those things kind of get crystallised in Blake for me.

CR: Did you have a sense at the time that there were other artists or hubs that were interested in Blake in London? For instance, you seem to have crossed paths with Iain Sinclair through Goldmark, is that right?

DS: Sinclair I knew from his self-published books in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, I suppose around the early ‘70s. I have copies of his Albion Village work, the things that he published himself, and I’ve followed his career through all of the publications since. And he very kindly agreed to speak a little bit in that documentary [Journeys Beyond Appearances]. So Iain was one thing, and I think that there was a kind of psychedelic folk music centred around the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention and some Irish musicians—Dr Strangely Strange—that were Iain’s friends and so we both had some similar interests in that kind of music. I was aware of the William Blake Society and went to a few of their exhibitions and talks. I spent a lot of time in the Tate looking around, when all the Blake pictures were in that strange rotunda room. I would go there quite often.

CR: It would be great to hear a bit more about what Blake’s work means to your work, especially in light of the metaphors you’re interested in—the river and the garden and so on. By the way, there is a Blake painting at Tate entitled The River of Life, and I was wondering as a side note whether you’d had that in mind as well?

DS: Yes—I think I thought about that after I’d pretty much finished the river thing. But I’ll just go back to amplifying the piece that’s in the documentary. On one of these early mornings, I was sitting in Bunhill fields with the fig tree behind me—there’s a little bench there—and there were goldfinches. There were goldfinches flittering around and chattering away, and I suddenly felt not the presence of Blake—not somebody speaking to me from the past or something—but I suddenly felt that that kind of commentary on the inequalities of society is a pretty continuous thread and it was almost like these tiny, tiny coloured birds twittering away, the sun breaking through at dawn, and these enormous tower blocks of power and authority and wealth behind—they seemed like some kind of almost Blakean metaphor, some kind of image of the natural world. The grass is going to pop up beneath all of the paving slabs—if we leave it long enough, the city disappears, the tended garden returns to the wild. And that’s something that’s probably always been in my work. And out of listening to those goldfinches, I made a few drawings, which became four largeish black-and-white drawings and that little pamphlet of some of the thoughts and words [A Conversation with William Blake].

There were feathers falling out of the sky because a couple of birds had had a dispute, or maybe there was a predatory bird attacking a smaller bird or something. But I’m sitting there, in the dawn light, listening to the goldfinches, and there are these feathers dropping down, and somehow it all seemed like I was kind of in the presence of at the very least a Blakean way of looking at the world. I’m not claiming that there was a ghost speaking to me from the past, it wasn’t that kind of experience, but it was something very powerful and it fed into a lot of work. I would have been working on that river drawing at that time and thinking more about my own life and the experiences of moving around and passions, and fundamentally thinking about ‘what is this thing that I’m drawn to do?’ One of the most common questions that I’ve ever been asked as an artist is ‘when did you decide to do that?’ And I don’t think I did. That’s what I was chosen to do, that was the thing that I was set up to do, really.

CR: I love the image of that unfolding notebook that you used for River and that seemed to me to resonate with the kind of journeys that we find in Blake as well, this idea of the golden string metaphor, that there might be some kind of goal in the future but that the way to get there is step by step, it unfolds along the way. Back in Bunhill Fields, John Bunyan is also buried nearby in that big tomb and I was wondering if there was a theme of pilgrimage in Bunyan’s sense informing your metaphor of the journey, or if Bunyan has been an interest of yours as he was for Blake as well?

DS: When I’m there, I’m aware that those other people are buried there, but it’s Blake that draws me there. My father didn’t know his grandparents. Probably the grandfather would’ve been a seaman from Northern Germany or Denmark or something, and so the East of London has always been very interesting to me. The idea that life is a journey, the idea that it’s not clearly mapped out, and that it’s not necessarily a straight line—all of those things make perfect sense to me. I always say to people that I think I’ve led a charmed life really, it just unfolded and it was interesting. It was scary, it was miserable at times, it was sometimes hard to pay the bills, and all of those things, but they’re just kind of common threads in any life, in a life. Most of us are sort of given over to wondering ‘what’s the point of all of this? What am I here for?’

CR: The River artwork isn’t annotated, is it? It’s pictorial, is that right?

DS: Absolutely right. I’ve shown it a few times to roomfulls of people and I usually say very little to introduce it other than ‘here’s sixty years of a life—my life—in fifteen minutes.’ That’s kind of all the clues I want to provide really because there are symbolic images embedded in it, some of which I’ve spoken about and spoken of in that documentary, but there are other things that I don’t want to talk about. There was a long period of miserable, depressive life—more than a decade really of not very pleasant times. I think if you look at the thing, it gets incredibly dark at one point and it’s not like other bits of it that are well-lit and everything. But that’s kind of all you need to know because it’s not intended to be a drawing of this life only. I want it to be a drawing of a life that you’ll find your own resonances in. I don’t think I’ve lived an unusual life, it’s been fairly ordinary in most respects, but obviously the sequence of things or how things affect your equilibrium will be different for different viewers or different interpreters.

CR: Different threads to be picked up… You’ve also written some beautiful words—poems—in this pamphlet [A Conversation with William Blake], and I was fascinated by this combination of words and images, it seemed very reminiscent of the illuminated books.

DS: It’s straight out of Blake! I think that I’ve been fascinated by the conjunction of word and image and always been drawn to illustrate children’s books and graphic novels (to some extent, but less so). In my drawings, in the exhibitable pieces, I would like to embed words into them more, but I’ve never found a satisfactory way of doing that, partly I think because our culture tends to give more weight to words than to images, and if you put words in it might solidify possible interpretations in ways that I don’t really want. Over the years there have been a few pieces of work where it’s fed into a little pamphlet or something which you’ve very kindly called poetry…I’m uncertain and don’t want to make any great claims for that. But all of those words which are in the sketchbooks and on scraps of paper, they somehow seem very important and part of the making—in this case—four largeish drawings and maybe twenty or so smaller pieces. I don’t know if the booklet really stands alone as a separate thing, but it felt important to do that and working with Goldmark gave me a very good opportunity to make that.

CR: Were your other pamphlets also published by Goldmark?

DS: No… At the end of 1982 or something at the Royal College of Art, I made a very large drawing about the Green Man and there’s a substantial booklet that went with that, which was published at the Royal College as part of the final degree piece of work. And some of them were just one-offs, just handmade little sewn chapbooks.

CR: Are you working on something in particular at the moment?

DS: At the beginning of 2020, about a year ago, I went for a walk locally from this house—a three- or four-mile circular walk. And in one of the hedgerows I found a huge Ash tree that had been blown over a long time ago, a hundred or more years ago, and it’s growing laterally to the ground, and it’s incorporated in the hedge, and it’s maybe eighteen feet long, with the roots at one end and all the saplings grow up as it goes along. I decided this thing was called ‘tree hedge,’ and I would begin making drawings of it. A few weeks later, we were all supposed to stay at home and only go out for an hour a day, so I began doing this walk every day, listening to the birds, taking some photographs on my phone maybe, and making drawings. Today was day 302 of making this same walk.

Once a week, on a Monday, I gather all of the things I’ve seen together into a little email and attach this week’s drawing, and I sent it originally to friends who I knew to be bird-watchers or interested in the natural world. And it now goes around the world—I send it to about fifty people. Some of them send it on to their mums and dads in their nineties who haven’t been able to go out of the house since last March. I get these extraordinary messages back from around the world. Somebody sends me a photograph of the Cherry Blossom in Osaka, somebody else tells me about the street demonstrations in Portland, outside the Capitol building… I’m right at the point now of turning the first six months of that walking into a book. I’m laying out the pages, and that’s forced me to make additional pictures, so I’ve made some landscape drawings where the weekly picture had been a couple of birds in the hedgerow or something. I call this thing ‘Walking on Skylark Ridge’—I made up the name ‘Skylark Ridge’ because there were invariably skylarks singing when I went out walking for 125 days continuously, there was a skylark singing for sure. And then there’s been a big gap, and yesterday and today there were skylarks singing again, so we’re nearly back to a full year. Now I’ll start to see the repetition of the natural world. I know what date I saw the first swallow last year, will I see one at the same time this year, or will I see one later, will the daffodils come up at the same time… It’s this strange kind of nature diary that’s grown by accident, really. It’s been an extraordinary, gentle way of connecting with the world around about and keeping contact with friends all over the globe.

CR: To come back to Blake, do you attach particular significance to specific Blakean places? I know you’ve mentioned Bunhill Fields and I wondered if you’re interested in the kind of obsessive cataloguing of the places that Blake mentions in his work, or where he lived in London, which is something many Blakean writers and artists have taken up? Is that something that you feel drawn to, or that you’ve brought to your own work?

DS: It’s something that I’m definitely aware of in Blake. I’m very aware of the specificity of places in his work. But I’m more generally aware of the biography of his life than the specific bits of London…that hasn’t been a major part of my work. In the past there have been drawings of Callanish up in the Scottish Isles and drawings of Venice and gardens in France and things. But I suppose there’ve been two strands in my work, one of which has been images of recognisable, known places—if I make a drawing of Stonehenge, you could go and compare it with Stonehenge—but the larger pieces have generally been an imaginative place, they’ve not been a real place. So I might take the form of a bush from here, a piece of pyramid topiary from there, and a bird from here, and invent a garden because I think the idea of the garden has run through most of my work for thirty or more years.

CR: Are you thinking of the garden in opposition to something like the city or built environments?

DS: No, I think I’m thinking of the garden more in that kind of Islamic tradition of heaven on earth, a place for contemplation, a place for quiet: the running water, the flowers. I’m not thinking of the garden in opposition to the built environment of the city as though they’re opposites. I’m thinking of the garden more as an imaginative space, a space where spiritual contemplation might be possible. I think I’m very interested in spirituality and thinking about why and how, but I don’t go to a church or follow a particular church or follow a particular belief system. But in a way the garden is a little bit like a sacred space, a place of worship. In a way—I wouldn’t want to make that point too strongly.

CR: I don’t know if there is an answer to this, but why do you think that Blake has this status in independent publishing specifically, but also some kind of special status as a guide-figure in art, poetry for a lot of people?

DS: I think you’re right when you say that you’re not sure if there could be an answer to the question. It’s very complicated, but there are bits of answers to it. I think that Blake does seem to be very, very singular. It’s very, very hard looking back through British culture to think of anybody who had such facility with words and with images. It’s very hard to think of any other kind of free-thinker or radical commentator who could make such powerful images. And yet, at the same time, he seems to be both didactic and not at the same time, so it’s possible for you to invest in Blake almost any kind of meaning that you want. I’m very comfortable in saying that Blake was unafraid to “speak truth to power”, or one of those modern phrases that we all think we understand and we quite like people who can do those things. He feeds in a way into that very kind of middle-class, European idea that the genius has thin soup, dried bread, lives in a garret, and yet is so extraordinarily creative and wonderful. That’s sort of true about Blake to a point, except he was quite well supported, and when he did earn money, he earned more money than an awful lot of ordinary working people in his community would have earned. He had some kind of way of being able to talk to more wealthy, more powerful, more socially distanced people. One of the things about the artist sometimes—not always—is that they can float free of the restraints of stratified society, so they can be in the working man’s pub in the East End playing darts and drinking beer, and they can also attend a soiree at lady somebody-or-other’s house the next day. They never quite belong in either place but they are sort of tolerated and don’t not belong in either place. I think Blake is kind of quintessentially that. He’s not afraid to criticise things, he’s got ideas on social order, he talks all the radical language, he’s sort of an outsider, and yet maybe he wasn’t. Certainly there was a community later in his life of younger artists who were very aware and held him in high esteem and tried to support him, he had patrons who found work for him—perhaps not the work he wanted, but something.

When you get to the publishing houses, well he was one of the first self-publishers. Financial necessity made sure that he had to invent techniques, and he had a lot that he wanted to say, he had a lot to do. It’s not hard to see how if you set up your own publishing operation in the twentieth century, or even perhaps in the nineteenth century, why you would have taken Blake as some kind of role model or exemplar, he’s perfect for it, but they miss the bit where he wasn’t actually very successful in disseminating the things he published.

In a way, of course, he told us so little about his reality, and people might have had their own reasons and their own agenda to over-romanticise him. This idea that somebody sings on their deathbed is a pretty powerful image—all of us would like to die gently and with a smile on our faces (if that could be arranged, please)—but we don’t know for sure that that’s what happened, we don’t know that he didn’t die in agony and discomfort.

And again, it’s the same point really, that he’s an extraordinarily colourful and interesting creative figure, but the biography and the detail and what he was exactly trying to say in particular pieces of work is vague enough, it’s almost blank, you can almost put what you want onto Blake and it’ll sort of fit.

CR: It’s posssibly something that could be said of many if not any text—that you can bring your own interpretation to it—but Blake seems to make this idea a theme.

Since I’ve been in London I’ve noticed quite a number of publications and exhibitions relating to Blake, and a series of small presses with this Blakean undercurrent, and I’m wondering if that is to your mind something that has had a bit of a resurgence again recently, or whether it’s been there throughout?

DS: I think it’s kind of cyclical. I think in the little book [A Conversation with William Blake], I say something about Blake always being there. But I think that fashion, or the zeitgiest or something…periodically it seems to come back. You only need Damon Albarn from Blur or someone to speak about Blake and there seems to be a new flurry of activity. He’s a bit like a kind of creative Che Guevara in a way—you can sort of put William Blake on your t-shirt and you’re telling the world something about who you think you are, and what your interests and passions are. I don’t think there’s very many British artists that you could do that with—you couldn’t do that with Turner. If you put Turner’s image on your t-shirt, or one of his paintings, a much smaller number of people would get the reference and know what you’re doing. Blake has always been, I think, bigged-up, especially in the literary community, but also by people who see themselves as radical, who see themselves as iconoclasts or outsiders in some way, and so he’s become this kind of poster boy. He fits so many other people’s views of what it is to be a poet or a painter.

As part of my research into Blake’s legacy in the realm of independent and self-publishing, I recently spoke to photographer, publisher, and activist Max Reeves. Reeves is the founder of a small press called Entropy Press, a not-for-profit collective which was initially set up in the basement of a faculty building at Auckland University in 1987.

The project was re-launched in London in 2009, when Reeves began printing a series of zines called Papakura Post Office: A Spazmodical Zine and Raven’s Revenge. The Papakura zines collate Reeves’ own psychogeographical photography with poetry and art by those in his entourage including Niall McDevitt, Stephen Micalef, and Aidan Dun, to name a few especially Blakean contributors. Based in London’s East End, Reeves continues to publish experimental work of many kinds. Entropy creations fuse poetry, photography, and other artworks in multimedia books and zines that flicker with wide-eyed visions of a sometimes menacing, sometimes miraculous metropolis.

Reeves is also involved in a group called the Blake Bloc, an activist collective who march under a Blakean banner. The banner was designed by Matthew Couper and features imagery drawn from Blake’s illuminations, a portrait of Blake, and the slogan ‘Opposition is true friendship,’ excerpted from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Adopting Blake as a poster-boy for radical protest in the spirit of ‘60s counterculture, the Blake Bloc have participated in anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstrations, and in recent demonstrations at Tate Britain over staff cuts.

The group also overlaps with the William Blake Congregation, recently joining in celebrations on Blake’s ‘death day’ on 12 August 2020 to commemorate the occasion. The gathering at Bunhill Fields, the site of Blake and Catherine’s burial, doubled as the first World Anti Fascism Poetry Day, marking the events of 12 August 1952 (The Night of the Murdered Poets), when thirteen Soviet Jewish poets were executed in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow under false charges of espionage and treason against the Soviet Union.

In the interview, which you can read in full below, Reeves took us on a jaunt through his fascinating experiences with independent and ‘underground’ publishing. From student agit prop in ‘80s Auckland to poetry and photography zines in digital-age London, Reeves’ stories are alive with the spirit of Blake and with the radical zeal of so many independent publishing ventures to this day.

Highlights from the interview include Reeves’ stories about running photocopiers to the ground to churn out copies of Situationist Times issues during his student days, and ironing out crumpled poems from the pockets of his friend, the prolific poet Stephen Micalef. Reeves also spoke of the ‘resonance’ of William Blake in a present-day context:

People really personalise Blake, and people tend to be very very passionate about Blake, and kind of overly protective. And he is like Mr Archetypal Counterculture, so you can trace him through all sorts of movements—obviously Allen Ginsberg, and I think he’s on Sargeant Pepper, and all sorts of things… So he’s a really resonant figure. He’s almost like an icon to latch onto, especially these days when neoliberalism has sort of flattened everything and monetised everything. To have this sort of beacon to reach out to, I think, is incredibly inspirational. I think it’s something that people can form around in all sorts of different ways.

In Reeves’ work, Blake is there as an ‘icon’ of many things—self-publishing, experimentalism, protest, anarchism—and his comments push out into the wider ways in which Blake has been fragmented and reworked throughout an afterlife far more illustrious than his actual life.

Links

More about Max: https://maxreeves.com/.

To find out more about Entropy Press, visit their website: https://www.entropypress.co.uk/.

Other things mentioned in the interview:

See Niall McDevitt’s blog: https://poetopography.wordpress.com/author/niallmcdevitt/. Niall’s work is frequently published by New River Press: http://www.thenewriverpress.com/.

For Stephen Micalef, Helen Elwes, and The William Blake Congregation, see https://williamblakecongregation.wordpress.com/the-william-blake-congregation/.

The Interview

Launching straight in, we started off talking about the 2019/20 Blake show at Tate, for which the tagline was ‘Rebel Radical Revolutionary.’

Max Reeves: I was sort of saying to the curator, you know, what’s so ‘radical,’ ‘revolutionary’ about it—it doesn’t bear any particular relation to the exhibition, it’s just branding. That’s the thing about Blake: why are the establishment so keen to colonise Blake? He is the archetypal countercultural figure, he’s the archetypal outsider. These are the kind of people who hated Blake, but there you go, therein lies the rub, I guess.

Caroline Ritchie: I came to Blake’s ‘birthday party’ celebration at Tate Britain in 2019—I think you were involved in that?

MR: Stephen Micalef and Helen Elwes, they run the William Blake Congregation, which is for living Blake people. They live the life, they don’t just quote the quote. They’ve been doing that for twenty odd years, every time, every Blake birthday, which again ties into psychogeography and all that. In the Blake room at Tate Britain, they’ll have a sort of live performance celebration, and it’s kind of been more or less tolerated by Tate. Actually at the last one, which happened during the exhibition, so we couldn’t actually go into the room—well, there wasn’t any Blake in the room—I managed to basically get the Tate to agree to have an after-hours walk-through for the Congregation or whoever wanted to come. It was a two-hour walk through the exhibition. It’s kind of become semi-official now, it’s part of the agenda of Tate now, which is quite nice, and interesting as well. We didn’t put it on Facebook, it was sort of word-of-mouth.

CR: I’d also like to know a bit more about Entropy Press. Could you tell me about how that came to be?

MR: Basically, I went to university in Auckland—Auckland University—where I became involved in this anarchist group called the Pleasure Party that used to put on gigs—there was a big underground music scene at the time. We used to put on gigs for all our friends who were all in bands at the university venue. The guy that ran it—this guy called Simon Coffey (aka Saint Simon) —he also made a magazine called Catalyst. I was doing a literary magazine thing called Catacomb with one of my friends called Joanna Larkin. In those days everything was xeroxed. So you’d cut and paste and glue things and then go back to the xerox machine and reduce it by 5% to fit it in and all that.

CR: Very old school.

MR: Yeah, so then through this network, and one of my friends who was in my little group—a guy called Ian Collins. Basically there was this guy who wasn’t a student, but you know back in the ‘80s, back in those days it was free to go to university, so university was like a place for people to hang out, you had these people who were ‘professional students,’ some guys that had been enrolling in the same courses for twenty years just to hang out and do stuff and join the clubs and all that, it was much more of a cultural thing. There was this guy who was about twenty years older than us called Bruce Grenville, and he ran a printing press—he had a Heidelberg electric pattern press, so we’re talking all linotype and type and ink… We kind of got to know him and he had this table-top press called an Adana, it’s about A4 sized, and you’d print each page individually. So me and this guy Ian, basically we bought one of those. He had a room in the basement of I think it was the Human Sciences building or something. We used to go there and do all sorts of stuff, you know, print stickers for all our friends who were in bands, sticker the city with bands. I remember there was this really annoying group called Youth for Christ who were just everywhere trying to convert people and pushing a very conservative social agenda, so we made a false Satanic group called Youth for Antichrist and printed these Satanic tracts and just plastered them all over town, which of course was just me and Ian, but they freaked out and spent lots of money on a counter campaign. So it was sort of a little bit agit prop, a little bit doing things for our mates—you know, printing letterhead. But also we used to make books and bootleg books. So the Situationist Times—I don’t know if you ever encountered that, by Larry Law—these little A6 books. We’d print covers and we’d xerox the insides.

In those days you had photocopier salespeople: they’d give you a photocopier on trial and you’d pretend you were interested, so Bruce would get a photocopier dropped off like on Friday afternoon at someone’s flat and then just run it to the ground—we’d have a solid 24-hour Friday to Monday morning kind of party where people would have shifts, and whatever anyone needed photocopying, they’d photocopy. So we’d buy tons and tons of paper and toner. And the poor salesman would show up on Monday morning and the thing would just be having a nervous breakdown and falling to pieces. So we’d photocopy the inside of the books and guillotine them to size, and then we’d print the covers. So we did all the Situationist books—bear in mind this was the ‘80s and New Zealand was way out alone in the middle of the Pacific and overseas books were not that easy to get.

CR: Did you then distribute them around the university mainly?

MR: Yeah, we’d give them to our friends or we’d put posters up. We had PO boxes. Also we were sort of illegally living in the inner city in office spaces and things like that, because in those days the inner city was kind of empty. So we’d set up sort of temporary galleries and all sorts of stuff. I remember Ian printed Principia Discordia as well, things like that, underground things that are sort of ten-a-penny now but were in those days actually quite difficult to get. Bruce Grenville, besides being an anarchist and a printer, was also an Egyptologist and philatelist, so he actually invented his own country and managed to get UN recognition by Belgium and some American company gave him thousands of dollars for exclusive rights to print the stamps, so he made a sort of strange empire. There was all sorts of weird stuff going on like that, so printing stamps and just whatever took our fancy. I remember making a book called ‘The Proverbs of Amenemope,’ who was an Egyptian prophet. There’s a book in the Bible—‘Proverbs’—kind of ripped off this Egyptian so we printed the original as another swipe at Youth for Christ. Challenging the hegemony so to speak. So we were sort of doing that, and we had our little hand press, which we could carry around easily, because we’d move from flat to flat or whatever. I ended up getting a Victorian treadle press which I gave to a friend of mine. So that was that—that was all in Auckland.

The other thing was that in New Zealand—you know ISBN numbers?—in Auckland you just wrote off to the central library and they just posted you, for free pages and pages and pages of ISBN numbers. So everything was ‘official’ because we could chuck an ISBN number on it and it would go to the archive and stuff. And it got logged in perpetuity in the National Library. We used to print badges as well, used to get a bit of money by printing badges. We were sort of existing on nothing—we were all really poor students eating Hari Krishna food and stuff. I remember Tuesdays were Art Openings Day and in those days most of the gallerys laid on food at openings so we’d had a nice art dinner. We had a sideline in homebrew as well, which we’d sell to all the underage punk rockers. So we’d print the beer labels and just stuff like that. So anyway, I left Auckland in 1990, and kind of left everything behind, and basically moved to London. I’ve stayed here ever since.

CR: What brought you to London?

MR: Oh, just Auckland—especially in those days—seemed super authoritarian. Very conservative and seemed tiny. I thought it was really boring. In hindsight, with our little counterculture movement going on, it was pretty exciting, but at the time it just seemed like the arse-end of the planet… which it kind of is—and authoritarian, which kind of ties in with Blake. It was a very different world back then. People who dressed diferently, thought differently, were not just expressing their individuality but seemed to be challenging society itself. Which I guess many of us were. Classic small town stuff. You’d almost risk getting beaten up for not wearing an All Blacks jersey, (well not really but you know what I mean) if you walked into a bank or somewhere like that some people would just look at you like you were just not welcome… not that there were any pubs, but you wouldn’t get let into any pubs because you were looking too scruffy and all this. It just seemed like a sort of authoritarian nightmare. And of course, you just want to see the world. And everything seemed to be happening in London.

Basically, then I just started doing other stuff, photography and dark room sort of stuff. Then everything was kind of on a hiatus, I guess. And then I went from black-and-white analog to digital, photography-wise. So then I found myself with digital photos. I still very much like printed matter, I don’t particularly like websites as a platform to present photography and that, they’re okay obviously, but there’s nothing quite like a thing in your hand, a book. Then I was in this housing co-op called Phoenix and we had the idea to make a little annual zine thing. Obviously I used to do a zine at university about literature and poetry and whatever. And then I thought yeah, let’s do a zine. And it just so happened that one of the guys in the co-op worked at a bank—a socialist guy. He basically did his own projects on the side. And then I thought, oh I’ve got these ISBNs, even though it’s a different country, chuck an ISBN on it I got enough of them why not? So we did this one-off zine for the housing co-op and I met the printer and to cut a long story short I thought, I’ll do another zine, why not. It was very cheap printing, I just used to chuck him twenty quid or so for beer. And so then I started the Papakura Post Office, which was supposed to be a collaboration of all my different friends, doing things, and ended up being mostly my photography, because it’s a pain to chase people all the time, and if you can just do it yourself, you just do it. The idea was to have this outlet for our London-based bunch of people.

CR: Where does that name come from—Papakura Post Office?

MR: The city where I’m from, which has now actually been swallowed up by greater Auckland, was called Papakura, in the south. And there was some graffiti we saw when we were teenagers during the punk era. There was one band called Papakura Post Office and I don’t even know if they existed as a band but they just spray painted—they had a graffiti campaign which I really enjoyed. And of course when you’re sort of isolated in a cultural outpost, post office—tying into this philately thing and fictitious states, there’s a network of fictitious states. So for example I used to correspond with this Native American guy who has his own state on a houseboat in Seattle. His name was Dogfish and his girlfriend was Dragonfly—we used to send them stamps, and they used to send us stamps, and so the post office was a way of reaching out and communicating and keeping a sort of underground network. It just seemed like a funny name and it sort of alliterated, so…

CR: So some of the work was contributed by other people who you were friends with?

MR: I had all these networks from various places. There was a network of poets from this pub—there’s an old bank turned into a pub venue—called the Foundry in Shoreditch, and there was this open microphone poetry evening called Wormworld, which is where I met Niall McDevitt. And then Phoenix, and there was this magazine called Mute, which had this cultural milieu and scene around it. And just the squatting scene and Tony’s Café and Broadway Market when that was a squatted concern and all those things. And New Zealand connections—lots of New Zealanders came over and squatted in Peckham in the 90s and, some I knew from Uni and Ilam (Auckland’s Art School) you know, just people that you pick up, I guess a sort of underground network or something, sort of non-mainstream.

CR: I noticed that there are a few of those pamphlets—the Papakura Post Office ones—that have Blake stuff in them. Was that when you started getting into Blake, or had that been there earlier?

MR: I grew up in the suburbs. I used to go to the local library and peruse the Encyclopaedia Britannica and later my parents bought an old set of World Books Encyclopaedia, I think it was called. I wanted to educate myself, so I think probably I knew of Van Gogh or something, so you’d go to Van Gogh and then read that, and then in the footnotes would be ‘see Byron’ or something, so you’d go to Byron, and eventually everything seemed to lead to Blake. So it was in my consciousness. Also, I lived in the East End and my kids went to a school just off the Barbican, so basically I’d end up going through Bunhill Fields to drop them off and pick them up. For the best part of twenty years I’d be walking past Blake’s grave, strangely. So Blake’s always been there even if he seemed difficult and strange, and meeting people that I got on with, people like Micalef and Niall… Most of what I know about Blake I get filtered through these proper experts who live and breathe Blake. Niall’s walks, endless nights in the pub… Me and Niall and Anthony from Mute started this thing called the Wetherspoons Underground Sykogeosophy club. We’d do a series of walks.

CR: Did you say psychogeosophy? Or psychogeography? What do you mean by this term?

MR: Sykogeosophy. My son Marlowe, when he was about three or four, invented this thing called SykoGeosofy, and then forgot what it was. I like to keep it as a vague, slightly brainy sounding thing. So we’d follow the underground rivers and Niall would come on the walks and different people would come on the walks, like my friend Glen, who was in Class War, for example, he’d know a lot of political stuff, and he’s also a gardener, so he’s bring a lot of facts about the flora on the way, following the underground rivers. Niall, likewise, was a poetry expert, so that the walks took on a very poetic aspect. And Niall’s actually got his own thing going on called ‘Poetopography’.

CR: Are Niall McDevitt and Steve Micalef your main Blakean comrades?

MR: Yeah, I guess so. They’re both poets who live and breathe the spirit of Blake. There’s another friend of mine, Robin, who is peripheral to the Blake Society as well, I think he’s still a member, but kind of an outside member. He used to be the caretaker, I think, of Bunhill Fields. He’s very much a Blakean and he was looking after that, and he used to run events at Shoreditch Church—a lot of theatre, but I remember they’ve done things like a reading from beginning to end of Jerusalem, which I think was like nine hours long. There were about twenty people there all taking different parts and reading it out loud.

CR: Have you had much to do with the Blake Society? Have you joined in their events and such, or not so much?

MR: No, I’m not particularly interested. You know about Blake’s birthday at Tate Britain; every Deathday the Congregation have done an event on his grave—have a picnic—and poetry readings and stuff. And last year—or whenever it was, the year before—it coincided with the unveiling of this plaque, so it was this weird truce between the Blake Society and the Congregation and we had started this thing called Blake Bloc, which is supposed to be like a pretend paramilitary wing of the Congregation. So we had our banner up and the Society were there, and it was a perfect example of what Blake’s about—you had this awful public school choir doing the worst version of Jerusalem I ever heard, and then you had this sort of right-wing nationalist ‘comic’ doing some spiel, on the other hand you had Micalef talking about punk and Blake… and then you had Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden, who’s a complete Blakean as well. He did a fantastic story about when he was a rockstar in some hotel crawling about on his hands and knees with his hair all down, naked, and then looking in the mirror and having a vision of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar. So that kind of illuminated the contradictions that Blake is. I guess what I’m about, and sort of what we’re all about, is sort of claiming Blake—although I mean who knows what Blake would’ve thought, we can’t speak for him—but claiming him for the counterculture, for what he was, which was a political radical, a religious visionary, a proto-anarchist actually. In fact, I’ve got a book in front of me by Peter Marshall [Max showed Marshall’s William Blake: Visionary Anarchist]. I think the nadir for me was Tracy Emin coupling herself with Blake at Tate Liverpool… Who the hell allowed that! That’s very un-okay.

CR: Are you still making books at the moment?

MR: Yeah, so I did the Papakura Post Office books—I think there’s about eight of them—the last two just ended up being showcases for my photography, so I thought it was getting boring. I was still using the New Zealand ISBN. This is kind of personal, but for me, for my photography, I’ve always wanted to make books, to make kind of coherent statements. But it’s always been impossible to get published unless, you know, whatever—I’ve always found it difficult. So basically, the price of online printing used to be very astronomical through things like Blurb, and then it kind of came down into a vaguely affordable realm. So then I thought, okay, I’ve got this press, I may as well start making my own photo books, which is what I’ve always wanted to do. So then I thought, okay, I’d better get some UK ISBNs, only to find out that instead of being like millions for free, they’re like 80 quid each, or 150 quid for ten. So I bit the bullet and bought ten of them, and started slowly experimenting and trying to figure out how to make photo books.

And then Steve Micalef, he’s really really interesting. He’s very much from a punk rock background—DIY—in fact, if you ever meet him, he’s got pockets full of poems. Which is a nightmare—me and Helen are kind of ironing out his poems so we can scan them. So yeah, apart from my photo books, I thought, god, Micalef’s never been published, this is insane. So with this online thing that’s super cheap, you can print it. Because he’s always essentially broke himself—he’s never had a job other than being a poet—i.e. he’s never been monetised as such. So we found a really cheap way of printing his poetry, so we’ve done two now. He was the editor of this really seminal punk zine called Sniffin’ Glue—he was one of the editors for a while. So we did a book on his punk years. He interviewed all the punk bands—was probably the first person to interview tons of these people. We did a book of his poems on that, and then we did a book of his poems on Felpham. We’re currently supposed to be doing one on Soho. I’d like to publish tons and tons of his books, because he’s really worthwhile. So that’s how it is now. I think we’ve made five or six of my photography books, then two of Micalef’s. I’m using the lockdown to try to make more…

People really personalise Blake, and people tend to be very very passionate about Blake, and kind of overly protective. And he is like Mr Archetypal Counterculture, so you can trace him through all sorts of movements—obviously Allen Ginsberg, and I think he’s on Sargeant Pepper, and all sorts of things… So he’s a really resonant figure. He’s almost like an icon to latch onto, especially these days when neoliberalism has sort of flattened everything and monetised everything. To have this sort of beacon to reach out to I think is incredibly inspirational, I think it’s something that people can form around in all sorts of different ways.

CR: Do you get the feeling that that’s been sort of reawakened more recently, or has it always been there while you’ve been working?

MR: I think it’s always been there. It’s just maybe harder to see. I don’t know how old you are, but obviously we’ve gone from a very dichotomised world where there’s been the establishment, the mainstream, and the underground, whereas now everything’s been so… This is kind of irrelevant, but South of Auckland, somewhere near Huntley, there was this Dutch guy that made a little cheese home factory thing, next to the Waikato River. It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive from Papakura, so I used to go on these drives down to buy some Gouda. The last time I went, which was ten years ago, I couldn’t find the place. They’d built this entire motorway system. It’s actually funny, they wanted to steamroll through things but the local Maori claimed that there was a Taniwha in the water that needed protecting—I think it’s the first time that a river’s been protected from a mythological creature. It’s a fantastic story. Anyway, I was driving ‘round, thinking, god, it’s gone, after all these years. I think I went online and phoned them up and they said, no no, we’re here. So I found them eventually and I said, I’m sure you guys were over there—have you just moved? And they said, no no, we’ve always been here, everything else has been landscaped around us. So they’ve always been here doing their thing, making cheese, it’s just the entire environment has changed. And I think that’s kind of the same: it’s easy to overlook, and you have to look for it, but it’s never left.

As the tumultuous year that was 2020 comes finally to an end, this is an opportunity to return to a pleasurable task that I had meant to undertake just as the first COVID-related lockdown was taking hold. In April, the art-rock group, Phaze Theory, had released an album and concert video, Live at Balabam, which brought together their love of esoterica, W. B. Yeats and William Blake.

Based in London, the group was founded in 2014 by Christopher Barrett (on tuba), Tal Janes (guitar) and Marco Quarantotto (drums), and released their first album, Phaze Theory, in 2017. While that album owed more to Yeats (with tracks that included “Song of the Wandering Aengus” and “Dialogue of Self and Soul”) it also included an astonishing burst of Blakeana in the form of “The Angel”, in which Barrett’s ominous blasts create a disturbing vortex from which bursts Janes’ jazz guitar and Ray Jones wonderful vocals. It was exciting, dynamic and truly beautiful.

A year later, the group – now joined by singer Irini Arabatzi – had gathered at the Balabam music venue in Tottenham, an event which would be recorded as their new album. Again comprising a mixture of occultural-inspired songs, some of which Phaze Theory had already played at other clubs such as the Vortex and Bird’s Nest, this album brings together a wider selection of Blake’s songs, most notably The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found, as well as How Sweet I Roam’d from the Poetical Sketches (and for the inclusion of which I might have been partially responsible…)

The live album begins with a somewhat more laid-back, slightly melancholy feel on “Into the Twilight” which perfectly matches the mournful sense of Yeats’s poem from The Wind Among the Reeds, with Arabatzi’s vocals perfectly complementing the mellow harmonies of the three musicians. By contrast, “The Little Girl Lost” marks a significant transition towards the art-occult forms that the band like to explore, using free jazz forms to break away from tonal chord progressions and instead evoke Blake’s Song of Experience as a mysterious search of the soul among caverns deep and beasts of prey. Its companion piece, “The Little Girl Found”, focusses on Janes’s guitar and Arabatzi’s voice to create a harmonious resolution – Lyra returned to her parents as the soul returns to its home.

“The Little Girl Found” is beautiful, but my personal soft spot remains “How Sweet I Roam’d”. Published in Blake’s first collection, Poetical Sketches, in 1784, it is one of his most perfectly lyrical songs and has been frequently been set to music, beginning with Henry Balfour Gardner in 1895 and most famously by The Fugs on the 1970 album, Golden Filth. Although it has been a popular poem for different musicians and groups, Phaze Theory make the song entirely their own – a mystical, dreamy vision of a lost Spring in which melodious voice and instruments hover within harmonies while lilting away into slight dissonances that match perfectly the underlying discord of Blake’s original poem (and, it must be said, which segue perfectly into the next track, Mohini Chatterjee).

Phaze Theory have been described as a combination of Miles Davies, Led Zeppelin and William Blake (which very much underestimates the importance of Yeats at least). Live at Balabam certainly shows them as inheritors of Blake’s musical mantle – and is a reminder of happier times for live performances and a hope that it will not be too much longer before we can see them again.

You can hear Live at Balabam on Spotify and support them by downloading from their web site. Some of the live recordings from the concert can be seen on YouTube.