Anything But Dull

James Charnley

Description

Anything But Dull: the Life and Art of Jeff Nuttall reveals the life lived and the art created by a visionary polymath whose generosity of spirit defined his character. From childhood traumas to revolutionary acts, through triumphs, defeats and resurrections Jeff Nuttall’s story is told here for the first time in all its richness and singularity. Based on over eighty interviews and meticulous archive research Anything But Dull shows just what made Jeff Nuttall such pivotal, provocative and important figure in twentieth century life and culture.

Performer, poet, artist, writer, musician, teacher, film actor, bon vivant and hell raiser. Throughout his life Jeff Nuttall was always getting into scrapes, provoking outrage, drinking, fighting, falling in and out of love. Those intense experiences became the inspiration for his art. Almost no form of creative expression was foreign to him and within these nothing was forbidden – except, of course, to be dull.

Sujets

• Performing Arts
• Biography
• Art of the United Kingdom
• General officer
• Counterculture
• Entertainment
• General
• Autobiography
• History
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 12 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680536751
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Photo © David Trace

ANY THING BUT DULL
The Life & Art of Jeff Nuttall
JAMES CHARNLEY
ACADEMICA PRESS WASHINGTON-LONDON
PUBLISHER: Academica Press, Washington DC and London
Publication Date 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
NAMES: Charnley, James (author)
TITLE: Anything but dull: the life and art of jeff nuttall Charnley, James.
DESCRIPTION : Washington: Academica Press, 2022. Includes references.
IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2022944888
ISBN 9781680536744 (hardcover)
9781680536768 (paperback)
9781680536751 (e-book)
COPYRIGHT © James Charnley 2022
DESIGN: PETER J THOMPSON
COVER PHOTOGRAPH: © Hanna Holborn Special Collections, University of Chicago
“.… there is required a certain generous and sane intoxication, a certain large and equable friendliness in dealing with people and things and ideas. It is a sign that the earth calls aloud for the passionate dreamer.”
Andrew Lang (1844–1912) on Rabelais
For David Stephens
CONTENTS FOREWORD BY ADAM HOROVITZ INTRODUCTION Endnotes CHAPTER 1 A SNAKE IN THE GRASS Endnotes CHAPTER 2 MID-CENTURY MODERN Endnotes CHAPTER 3 TOMB BOMB BOOGIE Endnotes CHAPTER 4 TAKING THE UNDERGROUND Endnotes CHAPTER 5 FILLING THE ALBERT HALL Endnotes CHAPTER 6 REVOLUTION IN THE AIR Endnotes CHAPTER 7 QUIET DAYS IN NORWICH Endnotes CHAPTER 8 MAGNETIC NORTH Endnotes CHAPTER 9 SOFT SOAP AND POETRY WARS Endnotes CHAPTER 10 OLD SCHOOL/NEW ORDER Endnotes CHAPTER 11 AMONGST THE WOMEN Endnotes CHAPTER 12 WEIMAR DAYS Endnotes CHAPTER 13 PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS Endnotes CHAPTER 14 SHANGRI LA Endnotes CHAPTER 15 A DISSENTING VOICE Endnotes CHAPTER 16 ACTING UP Endnotes CHAPTER 17 NOT GOING GENTLY Endnotes AFTERWORD Endnotes JEFF NUTTALL PUBLICATIONS RECORDINGS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
FOREWORD
J EFF N UTTALL WAS THE SORT OF ANARCHIST that everyone needs; someone who came in swinging and aimed to shake up every aspect of life that got in his way. He was the sort of bohemian reprobate you wanted to see goad himself and others into action as often as possible. He arrived in every room with an unavoidable bounce. He grinned explosively. He flirted with everything, up to and including disaster. He upset apple carts just to see which apple might seed right there on the floorboards, purely out of shock.
Jeff wanted to wake the world to new ideas. To new ways of working together, and of falling apart. He wasn’t the sort of man to simply get up and wave some big new flag around in the hope that people followed. He wanted to persuade, and each new phase of his mission started with YOU, whomsoever you may be.
Jeff could be caustic, but never forbidding. He was dismissive when needful, but rarely cruel. He peppered his impressive intellect with the ripest language, the saltiest of jokes; ones which would not have been out of place on the dockyard, spoken by sailors just returned from war. He was fierce in his kindness, expansive in his interest, as comfortable with challenging children as he was with shocking adults.
It was all to a purpose, the terror and joy Jeff inspired. Every encounter with him, whether from a meeting in the flesh or through one’s discovery of his art, his words, or his music, brought something new wriggling out of one’s subconscious. As I write this, I am looking at one of his paintings, given to my father and left to me. Meaty wads of oil seem to drip from the canvas. Its greens and umbers and oranges look like a landscape seen from above, one that is built out of corrupting flesh. It is at once unsettling and comforting, this painting, and these two opposing feelings are entirely entwined. It is very Jeff.
It hardly seems fathomable that 18 years have passed since Jeff died. I still find myself daydreaming of getting up of a weekend and travelling to the Hen and Chicks in Abergavenny to see him play jazz, through a fog of ale fumes, in the tiny back room where he died mid-session one Sunday afternoon. He held his cornet, every time, as lovingly as he describes the soldiers in his National Service squad holding their cocks as they slept: they woke ‘…with a hand on the gear lever’, just as he did when he played jazz.
So much of Jeff’s art was intermarried with the body. Physical things permeated it through and through. There was the joyous gutbucket traditional jazz he played, and the intestinal tubular art he exhibited (which looked to me a little like the sort of thing Jeff Koons might have made after a year living in a cave alone, on a raw meat and LSD diet). There was the performance art he helped pioneer with The People Show, which, according to director of the 2004 People Show, Christine Entwhistle, in her tribute to Jeff, made “…people anxious. The people in it. The people who watch it.” * He made meaty paintings which looked ready to swallow you whole, and often rather animalian cartoons that warped their subject as much as Steadman or Scarfe might, though usually a little more kindly. His poetry and prose encouraged wildness and orgiastic celebration of human form and function, yet that was married with a profound intellectual vigour and a deep seam of tenderness.
Whatever Jeff did, it had to have rhythm. It had to swing. Jeff had stalked bear-like, celebratory, scary and amusing through my childhood, at gigs he appeared in with my father, the poet Michael Horovitz, but my earliest clear and precise memory of Jeff is of him seeing me at a New Departures gig holding a trumpet I was attempting to learn to play. He swooped down on me and challenged me to play him something.
“Are you any good, Adam?” he asked. I blanched, and struggled through a few notes of some half-remembered tune. “Something else?” said Jeff. I played something else, even more cautiously. Jeff’s mouth set into a kind-but-pitying smile. “Do you like jazz?” he asked. I nodded. “Well, you’ll never play jazz like that. It’s got to swing, Adam. It’s just got to swing. It don’t mean a fucking thing if it ain’t got that swing.” I turned away, mortified, the horror of being 14 and shamed by my father’s best friend rising in me like bile. Then I felt a hand soft on my shoulder.
“Thing is, your writing’s got the beginnings of swing,” Jeff said. “I heard you on stage earlier. If you want to swing, swing into words.”
This is the sort of guidance one should take gladly, the sort of advice that many people took from Jeff over the years: a hard truth with a challenge; an encouragement to let art move the way the body wants it to move, and the body move the way art demands. A kindness dressed up in highwayman’s clothes. As James Charnley says, in chapter five of this book: “[His] essential message was that love and honesty should prevail even to the point of hurting.”
The history of the counterculture in the 20th Century is, at its heart, a history of difficult (or, at the least, seriously awkward) but loving people. They stepped up, and into the foreground, to deal with the monstrous aftermath of fifty years of war, horror, and both potential and actual annihilation. The counterculture is bound in to the mass migration of people and ideas, the metaphysical melting pot of Europe and America; all those battle-weary nations trying to re-establish austere Edwardian norms, despite the fact that everything had changed.
And when everything has changed, the counterculture reasoned, what is there to do but explore ideas that are anathema to the old mind-set? To delve into the thingsw that hurt, the wild frontiers of inner space? The places where newly embodied ways of thought explode upwards, arms spread in Blakean welcome, through the all-consuming viscera, shit and blood of war. What can one do, when one hurts, but challenge the reductive norms in collective, loving fury and try not to let the old, established patterns settle too hard, or ossify into restrictive order once again?
Jeff was inescapably in at the forefront of this collective urge to shock and titillate involvement into new ways of thinking and being, from his time at the radical Corsham Art School in the 1950s all the way through to the early 1980s. Certainly, the pinnacle of his countercultural and influence centred on the era that he documented in Bomb Culture, the 1960s. Unlike some of his compatriots, however, he remained open to new cycles of revolution, new patterns of thought. Teaching in Leeds in the 1970s, he inspired artists and musicians who would later run counter to the 60s counterculture, at the forefront of the punk and new wave movements.
As you will see when you read this book, Jeff’s obsessions formed long before he took to the wider stage of countercultural Britain in his early 30s. He was a Lancashire lad raised hard by the Welsh border in the rural west of England, and you can see the influence of city and country, North and South, writhing together and competing in his work. He was a young artist trained to draw what he could see, and angry enough to abstract the horror from it to make something challenging and new. He was a sexually precocious boy raised near Kilpeck Church, whose Sheela Na Gig carving, of a fertility goddess opening her cunt to the world with her hands, survived the Victorian purges and formed the basis of one of Jeff’s earliest intellectual studies combining art and sex. A boy raised in the shadow of the bomb.
He had an uneasy relationship with his childhood, and with the patterns of thought he was raised in; yet without that unease he would, of course, have found it harder to rail against them. Indeed, when he wrote about his re-visitation of the border country he grew up in, heading there with Dylan Thomas-ish intent, he found it too changed to hang on to. As my father put it in the foreword of his tribute to Jeff, Jeff Nuttall’s Wake on Paper*: “In Jeff’s haunted return the exaltation of ‘Fern Hill’ is replaced by a mood of wry submission to the dispassionate turning of the planet.”
Jeff was often awkward: exasperatingly, exhilaratingly, wryly and necessarily so, fro