How Thatcher created one of London's best buskers (part 2)

Hi everyone,
Last week Mat told us how Thatcher’s closing of the mines and resultant strikes upended industrial towns and stripped them of their identity, and then how he used clowning around as a social crutch at school.

This week: the army won’t take him, work sucks and the art world feels pointless, which is how he came to busk.

[Trigger warning: more swearing, more drug use and some surprising talk about body hair.]

With just a thirty five percent attendance rate I got good enough GCSEs to do four A levels: psychology, chemistry, physics and biology. But, I spent most of my time in Rugeley getting pissed with a friend.

After 9/11 my mates decided to join the army. So, after doing just three months of A-levels I said I’d quit and join with them, or at least just go to the recruitment centre (I wasn’t really intending to join, and later I actually protested the Iraq war by lying down the middle high street in Birmingham).

I did the BARB test—which is the army recruitment intelligence test—and I got seventy nine out of eighty. They offered me any job I wanted, paid jobs, so I chose to go into REME, the Royal Engineers. I thought I can get a pretty good paid education there.

I was a very good hurdler as a kid, one of the fastest in the country, I even represented England against Scotland. I got my run right down close to the army’s record speed for their induction. I was incredibly fit considering I was getting pissed all the time, smoking dope and twenty fags a day. But, I had to go do a medical.

It's the only time in my life where I had to cough and they cup your balls. No fucking idea why your testicles have anything to do with your military prowess. The doctor said, “Do you have any conditions?” I said, “Well, I used to have asthma, but I’m one of the fastest runners in the country,” and he just struck me off. Bang, go, I got kicked out there and then. I was in the Army for a total of one day.

Then I got a job in telesales for a double glazing company. I was a specialist, one of the best they had. We had a psychological system that was basically designed to wear people out, calling people back and forth for four or five hours, changing deals, constantly giving a slightly less bad option, until they agreed to allow a salesman through their door, because throughout the entire pitch they were told they could cancel after two weeks if they were unhappy.

One time I was sat on the phone with this old lady. She mustn’t have had a lot of friends, because she talked to me for forty minutes. I learned that our company had been in, was rude, overcharged, left rubble there and installed windows that had gaps in the mortar so that it was breezy. We basically ruined this lady's life and gave no compensation.

In the end it was tough, but I got her to agree to have another salesperson come through her door—who I knew would just try to sell her something else. I felt a sense of achievement as I took the phone receiver away from my head, but then immediately felt remorse for what I’d done. It’s like the Prison Experiment; human beings will compromise their morals if it's accepted as necessary to do a task. So, I walked out of the job after just six months.

I wasn’t thinking, “How am I going to get a stable job,” I was thinking “Why are people working? What's the purpose?” All the jobs laid out in front of me were fucking menial. If you're selling shoes and a shop two streets down is selling shoes as well, your position in life is fucking pointless. What could I do? I didn't want to settle down in Armitage and work a nine to five, consumed with paying for a house and all of life’s entrapments.

So, I told my parents I’m going to live with some friends and we fucked off to Birmingham to live in a squat, guys I knew from a club called XLs, a kind of emo/metal club for teenagers.

We were the epitome of the worst people you'd ever want to live next to. We used to burn rubbish fires all day long, plastic bags, recycling, paper...everything, just any household rubbish we had, because they didn't collect our bins. We'd have a hundred people over every weekend, every room would be full, there’d be music playing...we were just the worst. But the neighbours liked us because we were nice people and the landlord couldn’t kick us out or take us to court because he was doing a lot of dodgy stuff.

There’s very few photos of my time in Birmingham, for obvious reasons, but I had amazing hair then. I’d change my hair colour every two weeks: bright blue hair; a pink streak from the back to the front with a white slash in it; black hair with a white and red slash: all fucking green…. I almost bleached it to death one time and decided to stop abusing it.

I don't feel ashamed of my baldness now, but I know buskers—and I won't mention who they are—who go to South America and get hair plucked from their ass, then get the follicles put into their head. I've got friends who spray the top of their head. They literally have black paint they spray on the top of their head. For me, I think you should wear the things that you feel ashamed of with pride. If you feel uncomfortable about it, let everybody see.

Anyway, when I was a young guy in clubland, being high four or five days a week and not sleeping from Friday to Monday, I thought the world was irredeemable, that there was nothing good about it. Human beings are lying, petty, nasty creatures, our existence is brutal and horrible, and I'd rather not be part of it. I literally thought that you take as many drugs as you can until you die, and the sooner the better.

I’d taken quite a lot of acid by this time and I think I was hanging on the precipice of psychosis. I thought that our existence was a veil, that there was this great deceit. How can you use that productively in your life? You can't, it’s an unanswerable question. I wasn't prepared for suicide, but I was prepared to blitz myself into oblivion, running from a monster that couldn’t be seen but could always be felt.

I was funding my life through lots of different means, hanging out at the exits of clubs. I don't want to talk too explicitly about all the things that happened there, but in that culture drug dealing wasn't strange, it was pervasive, it didn’t even seem illicit. I wouldn't choose to do it now because you need to worry about people paying you, robbing you and being arrested all the time. But at eighteen, nineteen, I thought I could do it until I died.

I just narrowly escaped prison for possession. I got stopped with quite a large amount of ecstasy. It made me think, Either I can carry on living with other people who are getting high all the time, or I can try and change my life. If I don't change it now, I never will. So I went back home, I talked to my folks, I said “Look, can you put me up, I’m fucked, I fucked everything up.” And they put me up for nine months.

I'd always been good at drawing as a kid. I'd copy posters and covers, and did reasonably good in my double GCSE in art. So I went to Hornsey College of Art in London to do a fine art degree, kind of as a way of escaping, but expecting it to be a journey of discovery, almost spiritual, reading about the classic artists, learning about life and existence.

But it wasn't. The degree wasn't about questioning, it wasn't about trying to find truth, it was just about making conceptual products to sell. It wasn't for me, it just wasn't my thing, I didn't want to make products. I didn't want to make something to sell, I wanted to change the world.

Before I left I read a book on guerrilla art. It looked at Greenpeace and load of other artists who created effective work in the public space. I also studied the mural movement in the 1980s, art that was designed to make neighbourhoods better and instil a sense of community. Art in galleries doesn't do fuck all. We all have a responsibility to affect the world around us. I believe I have purpose.

I did a year and a half there. I made a lot of friends. We found a local offie that would sell booze twenty four hours a day, and sat around drinking all night, talking shit, chatting about the world, playing music, singing, that kind of thing. It was a very hedonistic time, which may have led to me not getting a degree.

My girlfriend and I very nicely invited a guy to live with us. She left me for him, so I had to move out. Not great, not great, but then I'm a dickhead as well so I'm not gonna be too harsh. Another friend and I knew of an empty house in Wood Green. The people in it had died and it had been left empty for many years. We went and saw a window was open, so we lived there for two years. Once again, very much a party house.

Then I got a job at Cyberdog, a dance fashion shop in Camden that’s all glitter and big smiles and funky appearances, but absolute brutal capitalism behind closed doors. They really are. If I wanted to take a break during an eight-to-ten hour shift I’d have to turn up to work early to cover it. They hire you to be a weirdo, to look interesting and shock the tourists who come around, who’ll then buy a little trinket to remind themselves of the place.

All the other staff were wearing PVC, ultraviolet costumes with plastic in their hair, and I'm just there in jeans and a t-shirt with dreadlocks down to my shoulders. So I got this glass ball from a shop called Oddballs. I thought I’d do that David Bowie glass ball thing. That's a cool fucking thing, why not? You wouldn’t be seen juggling around the estate, you’d get bricks thrown at you, but I could do it in the shop to fill time while moving coat hangers around and whatnot.

Through doing lots and lots of drugs for a long time I’d become quite nervous and introverted, so contact juggling was the perfect thing for me; I could sit around people in a room and do it, both being part of the group but at the same time being quite insular. I did it all the time, I’d do it six hours a day, every day near enough. I bought a DVD called In Isolation, and mastered all the different techniques in it. I tend to become good at what I focus on.

Cyberdog fired a friend in a really bad way so I quit and walked out. I felt really good about myself until I had fuck all money. My partner at the time suggested we go down to the South Bank to see the performers.

I'd seen a guy when I was a kid called Demetrio contact juggling in the street, so I thought maybe I could perform there too, see if I could make anything. I must have been about twenty one. I thought I'll just go out and give it a go, found my own little spot outside the National Theatre, and people started giving me money.

– Mat Boden, from his houseboat on a canal in London, November 2019.

News, stories and gig opportunities from around the world that I’m not writing about elsewhere. In this newsletter: a great interview from Birmingham, taking the shine off of Golden Colorado, I was interviewed by NBC, buskers prevent a Glaswegian hating the Edinburgh Fringe, the history of sidewalk chalk painting, celebs who started their careers busking, and a pianist is cycling(!) her piano all over the UK…

First up, busking campaigner (and fantastic writer) David Fischer just gave a great interview railing against the total ban on busking in Birmingham’s City Centre. I’ve uploaded the audio here for you, because I really recommend having a listen. It’s the best interview I’ve ever heard discussing busking policy, and I’ve heard a lot!

My favourite quotes from the interview:

The city of Golden, Colorado, has just banned amplification. According to an article in the Denver Gazette, the effect was immediate, as the main shopping thoroughfare was entirely quiet just three days later. The article is good (it includes nice videos of buskers in Denver) but a little confusing: sound levels are capped at 65 decibels — more or less the level of ambient noise in a city.