Newtasty

Seeing the riots in Birmingham has made me think a lot about my time growing up there.

It pretty much mirrored today. The economy was in dire straits, massive unemployment, no sense of community or structure for the youth, racial tension, and the police were smashing skulls if you were wearing the wrong outfit or had been in the sun for too long.

But the thing that stands out for me, is that me and my friends never let any of it stop us. I don’t remember ever having this sense of entitlement. There was no air of “society has failed us, so why bother?” We didn’t have privileged upbringings, we all came from pretty much working class families and we were never going to have opportunities handed to us on a plate. But nothing seemed impossible. We were all going to go ahead and do whatever we put our minds to, regardless.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we were angels or we skipped thru the streets with our shoeshine boxes. Of course we were bored, naturally we got up to a lot of mischief, and if we were ever caught (and we were, a lot) we owned up to it and accepted the rap on the knuckles, smack on the arse or punch in the face depending on the judge and the crime.

But this whole thing that’s happening right now in Birmingham just smacks of defeat. It’s depressing. And the reasons given for destroying our own homes is baffling.

So I want to think about Birmingham in a good way. Me and my buddies in our Nike cagoules and Puma States, on our BMXs steaming past the ChipShop Mob and hoping they don’t catch us, going up to the green hill with Wilbo’s ghettoblaster and listening to UK Fresh or our shared collection of Electro cassettes as the sun goes down.

Man, I feel like an old fart… I can almost hear the Hovis theme tune while I’m writing this.

Warm up sketch for today… I tried to find some Walter White in his eyes but all that’s left is Heisenberg. For Dan and Smyth.

Last year me and my ColdRice friends were asked to host a monthly party at a nice little cocktail bar in Birmingham. As our usual events lean more towards garage rock n’ roll we decided to make this party strictly soul music.

To promote the events I decided on a series of posters depicting some R&B giants in a pulp comic book style, to create an almost unreal image of characters that we are only used to seeing in TV footage or photographs, introducing these 2 things that (to the best of my knowledge) hadn’t met before.
I love the idea of these characters who I consider being larger than life having their tales exaggerated and immortalised in this format. My other reason for this approach was much more simple: Soul music and comic books, me and David Lee Roth both grew up on them!

Wednesday is the waiting bird, much better than that dickhead the surfing bird.

I have a couple of little tiny sketchbooks, I like to have them with me while I am hanging around waiting. A lot of waiting time is spent in bars so I’m usually a little tipsy and using a borrowed biro and half my vision when I scribble in them.
I’m going to put up a sketch a day from the books for this week, first one, Arthur Lee.

A quick Anton Chigurh sketch. My wife’s dad has a little Javier Bardem thing going on. No, not scary at all.

Today’s warmup sketch is Birmingham’s very own loveable inner city serial killer, the Digbeth Strangler. You only need to be scared if you’re a nob…

I’m having a recurring dream about the end of the world, very vivid. Anyone who knows me knows that I am always rooting for the end of days, but these dreams have made me completely rethink my apocalypse jonesing. It’s not as exciting as I always dreamed. Anyway, this whole thing has got me thinking about a short story I wrote about a cowardly boxer, which prompted today’s warmup sketch. Too much information? OK, forget all of that, here’s a drawing of a boxer.

Today’s warm up sketch is for my buddy Gary Wood, because I know he’ll be sad. Peter Falk, drawn with heavy shadows in honor of Gene Colan. R.I.P.