Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl by Wendy Jones & Grayson Perry

Author:Wendy Jones & Grayson Perry [Jones, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448155255
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-05-30T23:00:00+00:00

Collage, 1983. Early work containing several examples of my personal iconography, crashed car, shed, pill box, pylon and girl with doll in Essex landscape

12

CHELMSFORD WAS QUITE A HOT-BED OF PUNK

ONE SUNDAY MORNING I was delivering the newspapers when I saw the front cover of a supplement with a photograph of punks at a Sex Pistols concert. I was amazed by it, I thought, ‘Fucking Hell! This is good!’ I decided then and there I wanted to be a punk rocker. There were a lot of other boys at school who wanted to be punk rockers as well, one of whom became our hero because he was on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine in a ripped school blazer. The headmaster was infuriated – a boy from King Edward the Sixth, in the school uniform, with safety pins!

The glorious amateurishness of punk meant that I could make my own outfit. I ripped the sleeves off a grey school shirt, then stencilled ‘HATE’ all over it with a home-made stencil. I bought plastic sandals, wore the school blazer covered in badges and put Vaseline in my hair. My pièce de résistance was from a bag of horse tack my brothers found in the loft that had been used to hobble carthorses to stop them running away. It was a huge horse collar with whopping great brass studs, very brutal-looking, that I wore round my neck, extremely proudly. It was massive. The downside was that it had three great big metal chain links attached to it so when I pogoed they used to smack me in the teeth.

Chelmsford was quite a hot-bed of punk. It had a lot of gigs to which my mum gave me a lift. I never drank or took drugs at gigs, I didn’t have enough money. Instead, I put my heart and soul into being a pogoer, I used to go bonkers, getting extremely sweaty and adrenalised leaping up and down. When the Boomtown Rats played in Chelmsford, I was the best pogoer, so Bob Geldof hauled me on to the stage to dance, which was a proud moment for me. The Vibrators dragged me on stage because I was so mental it looked like I was having a seizure. That summer, a three-chord-wonder band called Crispy Ambulance played the Social Club at Chelmsford Football Ground and when the mosh pit became a sweat box, I pushed through the fire exit, sprinted out on to Chelmsford football pitch, in the centre of which was a colossal lawn sprayer, and raced round and round and round following the sprayer until I cooled off.

Chelmsford had a very healthy punk scene so, in the summer of 1977, a misguided person organised an all-day festival of punk at Chelmsford Football Club. I was excited, especially as The Damned were headlining and I put on my home-made punk outfit and the horse collar. I can remember the name of two bands that played and they were both atrocious. Bethnal were Prog-Rock but

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