Christopher Stead interviewed by Lee Rourke.
Christopher Stead is the author of Ghosts in the Machine: The Hauntology of Graffiti and Rave Culture 1990–2010. It is an incredible book that weaves together the impact of both subcultures within an oppressive, damning, and hostile socio-political climate that aimed to erase anything that dared resist its imposed hegemonic agenda. Steering his critique through the lens of Derridean hauntology via Mark Fisher, Christopher serves to present the important impact these two subcultures still hold in our collective psyche. The following interview took place over a series of emails in which we both agreed to unearth the socio-political upheaval that fostered the modes of resistance expressed in the book. We cover the unwavering impact of Thatcherism, mass unemployment, boredom, working-class culture, the corrosive influence of neoliberalism, race, gender, urban spaces, decay, displacement, and the unifying need to express, resist, and rebuild. Having been a graffiti artist since my early teens in ‘80s Manchester (big up FWA crew!), and lucky enough to witness the birth of Acid House and rave culture in clubs like the Hacienda, Thunderdome, and the infamous Blackburn illegal Warehouse Parties (they weren’t called ‘raves’ in my day), it was an absolute honour to interact with Christopher, and I was struck by his brilliance and depth. His essential book, as the blurb says on his website captures ‘the spirit of intervention amid the oppressive political climates of the ‘90s and ‘00s questioning if the mass acceleration of communication has led to a freezing of time, leaving [us] seemingly stuck in a state of hauntological retrospection.’ Even if you’ve never broken into a train yard to paint steel in the dead of night or danced yourself stupid to repetitive beats in a sweat-drenched warehouse/field/dingy club on the wrong side of town, this timely, beautifully curated/produced book is essential reading.
PART 1
‘…an escapist withdrawal from existence’
3:AM: First, what an achievement this book is — it’s timely and essential reading. There’s so much to discuss, so it’s best I just dive right in and begin with some general questions: how do you feel the socio-political landscape of the UK during the late 20th Century informs our understanding of graffiti and acid house culture as forms of resistance against the prevailing establishment?
Christopher Stead: As Thatcher declared, ’there is no such thing as society,’ amid mass civil unrest, and as the UK picked up the pieces from the miners’ strike, Acid House and graffiti culture arrived hand in hand, offering a new model of individualism that eluded the paradigms of the old order as well as a voice to a muted generation who felt silenced by a lack of social mobility. Rave’s sonic and visual language was built around themes and motifs that painted a futuristic utopia. The music, created on computers, and the sci-fi-influenced flyers, promising lasers, intelligent lighting, and luxurious settings, offered an escape from the pitfalls of cheap labour and the dull dross of the ’80s. This fast escape route catapulted a generation into the ’90s with unbridled optimism and anticipation. As a subcultural music movement, rave continuously moved forward, never looking back.
Meanwhile, graffiti provided an escapist withdrawal from existence within a land that only promised a minimum wage, long hours, fuck all job security, along with an early marriage and a set of kids who would inherit your poverty. The act of writing your name as a form of contemporary deviance became a way out of the hegemonic maze of unevenly distributed socio-economic power, education, and culture of the ’80s. The public space of the city’s decaying walls and moving trains provided a transitory gallery that carried their work out of the city, offering a state of catharsis not readily available to the working class. Intrinsically linked by rave culture’s escapism, a mobilised youth danced their way through the Tory sociopolitical cul-de-sac and the polarising policies of the Blair years.
3:AM: It seems to me that these ‘escape routes’ as you call them seem lost to us these days, they have become mere ghosts of another time. In what ways are these ‘spectres’ of lost/past movements embodied, and how do they influence the aesthetics, and themes present within these subcultures?
CS: If Thatcher’s tenacious grip on society would inspire any art movement, it would always be graffiti. Quarantined as low culture and positioned as a motif of crime, graffiti provided a response to the pitfalls of the working-class condition through the spectral occupation of capitalised spaces within the city, an act almost conservative by nature. Should we consider that hip hop and graffiti reflected the moment’s social and political conditions, then the all-inclusive bacchanalian revelry of Acid House followed, offering a hedonistic way out of a dead-end decade. Much of the music that forges culture is born out of poverty, and when you lose your money, liberty, and love, all you have left is the music. The all-night raves that emerged from this era brought harmony to a generation.
Graffiti, by its definition and long history, has always been positioned as a visual motif of resistance and protest. If we consider graffiti’s role within a Tory ecosystem as a motif of this spectral resistance, then Acid House and Jungle were the theme music to this protest, spicing up the grey soup that was pop music. Much like its subversive predecessor, hip hop, acid house offered social cohesion and identity to a youth who yearned for change and collective unity, which was sorely lacking in the country. True, hip hop had arrived some years earlier, but it was primarily dominated by the boys. Rave culture defied these codes of masculinity and the hedonistic mobilisation of a generation, attempting to dissolve decades of race, class, and gender barriers.
3:AM: Do you think we’re nostalgic for the boredom we experienced? How can the interplay between nostalgia and boredom be analysed through the lens of hauntology, particularly regarding their critique of contemporary society?
CS: The generational melancholy of the ’80s led to a collective sense of boredom. The people were bored with Thatcherism and the ‘special relationship’ with America. Bored with the blandness of the ’80s. Bored of the pop bands, the razzmatazz clubs full of beered-up boys in shirts and shoes chatting up girls. Whilst the aesthetics of boredom may be considered as one of the key mediums that fuelled the fire that was rave and graffiti culture, as we arrived at the 21st Century, the subculture’s ability to offer a new way out transitioned into a nostalgic sensation, as the post-digital age of social media slowed down time, cancelling the promised future, leading to a state of hauntological retrospection that yearned for the subversive feelings of yesteryear, today. By the mid-noughties, rave music appeared to be running out of new ways to reimagine itself, seemingly stuck in a hauntological loop, remixing its past. Gone was all the magic, mystique, and wonder that the underground brings.
The future-searching, digital utopias of drum and bass were beginning to dissolve into a gentrified digital soup, domesticated for mass chart consumption, even becoming the background noise on the BBC. Drum and Bass’s capacity to sound like the future was no longer, and as we entered the 21st Century, it felt like we were living in an echo chamber. The UK has always been at the forefront of new music, and as the rave bubble began to burst, new sounds emerged from the woodwork. However, with Brexit considered the miners’ strike of our times along with the post-trauma of Covid, it is no wonder raving remains one of our most quintessentially British, ‘perfect-imperfect’ cultural exports, and the spectres of graffiti continue to reimagine the sleeping trains into a civic tapestry of collective melancholy and counter-hegemonic resistance that mirror our broken society.
3:AM: Can the idea of a ghostly return via our ‘collective melancholy and counter-hegemonic resistance’ inform our understanding and expressions of resistance against cultural amnesia and the monotony of neoliberalism?
CS: As we toasted to the end of the ’00s and entered a new nameless decade, there was a feeling of change in the air, defined by the seeming lack of any. The Tories were back at the wheel, rave was in a state of drift, and graffiti entered its post-digital future. With New Labour remitting power to a coalition built on betrayal, we, as a generation, were beginning to realise that the affordable housing promised to us in the 20th Century would never materialise, and we’d be renting until the grave. Both ‘Thatcher’s children’ and ‘Blair’s babies’ were living in cities too expensive to get a mortgage in, trapped by the demons of neoliberal domination and precarious 0-hour contracts. As London prepared for the 2012 Olympics, a distinct marketing suite feel seeped into the city as the rapidly changing skyline made it look like a hybrid Dubai. East London’s dystopian romanticism gave way to the gentrified soup of transient financial tourism. The graffiti, which had occupied the vacant no-man’s land of the railways for decades, was reduced to blank walls of grey paint, portraying a clean, crime-free Britain, while street art was ushered in as part of the fiscal facelift. The 21st Century had arrived, but with little in the way of political or economic change, the spectre of Thatcherism and Tory politics had returned to haunt a city which no longer had the ‘future shock’ of rave utopianism or graffiti escapism as a new way out of the bleakness for the youth this time round. Just more of the same old, same old, and as such, graffiti had a moment of decline.
However, this departure from past modes of escape didn’t last long, as the saturation of far-right post-truth politics became the new normal. With toxic regression becoming the dominant discourse, moral minimalism seeped into the fabric of society, and the spectral path of a failed future led us into a hauntological cul-de-sac. With this new pessimistic sentiment, the events of COVID, the BLM Movement, Extinction Rebellion, the Ukraine invasion and the ongoing occupation of Gaza led to a generational lack of trust in authority. As such, graffiti made a new, ghostly return, occupying public space in a way not seen since the ’80s. Suppose the dominant culture uses graffiti as a motif of disorder. In that case, it is by no mere coincidence that the current rise of graffiti merely reflects the public’s perception of contemporary society. Labour’s ability to deny the genocide in Palestine has created a Forage-sized political vacuum that will inevitably create even more ideological displacement, leading to a more unstable terrain.
3:AM: How do we re-place/position ourselves within this displacement? How do we create a sense of presence amidst urban decay and disillusionment?
CS: The subcultural ritual of reclaiming space within neighbourhoods and institutions thrives in the liminal spaces that exist between and parallel to normative society’s notions of utopia and dystopia. Labelled by Foucault as heterotopias, these worlds within worlds can only be entered through a rite of passage, whether it involves insider knowledge, a set of master keys, security codes, passwords, or simply being in the right place at the right time. From the relics of post-industrial ruin that were the graffiti-covered warehouses where the illegal raves were held to the ritual of ghosting around the Victorian railway network, painting the trains which travel within this central nervous system, right down to the vacant ‘no man’s land’ which separates these private and public borders; all three combine as fluid heterotopic spaces of deviance which act as the hauntological ruins of a decaying British Empire. Social disaffiliation, dislocation, and exclusion are all critical components that create sociological and cultural phenomena, which the dominant culture views as a counterculture.
3:AM: Does hauntology inform this exploration of identity and marginality, particularly in relation to voices often overlooked by the dominant culture?
CS: It’s no coincidence that rave, hip hop, and the YBAs flourished in the aftermath of Thatcherism. Music, art, and poetry flourish within the darkest corners of society, and the arrival of hip hop, graffiti, and acid house signalled a turning point in British youth culture, which was tired of the monotony of the dominant culture. As New Labour and the noughties drew to an anti-climactic end, the Tories regained power, and there was a feeling that the future we yearned for in the 20th Century had failed to emerge. The Lib Dems made a deal with the devil, whilst Labour fell into a state of drift, creating a political vacuum that allowed the regressive post-war politics of the far right to sweep through the country, igniting the start of the Brexit civil war. Both the political landscape and rave culture became stuck in a hauntological cul-de-sac with no way out. Counterculture can always reflect contemporary sociopolitical urgencies, but what happens when the ghosts of its past continue to haunt these conditions?
Graffiti provided identity and a way out of the working-class subordination that was bestowed upon youth growing up in poor single-parent families within a hegemonic Tory wonderland. We didn’t know or understand the world at the time, as class disparity and marginality seemed a quintessentially ordinary British affair. Still, it wasn’t until we grew older and a little wiser, after years of witnessing the uneven distribution of power and the structural ruination of England caused by a political party governed by constant inconsistencies, cancelled futures, and cancelled leaders, that we realised maybe we weren’t the criminals and problem-causers after all. In the wake of the EU Referendum, COVID-19, financial collapse, and cost-of-living crises, the sociopolitical landscape shifted multiple times, evoking a ghostly feeling that time was in a circular loop.
3:AM: I feel this ‘circular loop’ is so important throughout all art, from Byzantine repetitions of the icon, Vico’s ‘corsi e recorsi’ in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Mark E Smith’s obsession with repetition, and its hypnotic prevalence in the art of sampling in acid house music and intertextual references in graffiti (the repetition of the form, the letter, etc) illustrate hauntological ideas, particularly in their engagement with cultural texts and historical narratives of resistance?
CS: Raves in the late ’90s were the perfect settings for a dark sound of discontent to grow. After years of despair, we were ready for a change. True, acid house and hardcore offered an escapist pathway to better days. Still, Goldie’s seminal track, ‘Terminator’, gave us futuristic riffs and samples that reflected a state of paranoid dystopia, wrapping a cloak of darkness over hardcore’s sun-damaged utopian dream. The trip had gone bad, and the ghost of hardcore had to come to haunt the rave. Fights inside and robberies outside became more common, but to be honest, after the euphoria of hardcore, jungle was always meant to be the soundtrack that played as we came to the end of 18 years of Tory rule, leaving the country in a socioeconomically deprived position. With Happy Hardcore seen as a broadly vanilla, bumpkin affair, the kids in the cities who had grown up in rough estates surrounded by poverty, exclusion, and violence couldn’t relate to that shit anymore and welcomed a post-human sampledelic sound that reflected the dark side of city life. Meanwhile, graffiti’s escapist nature allowed its participants to adopt their roles within the dominant culture by occupying space in society under the cloak of anonymity through the use of pseudonyms, which borrow intertextual cultural references from contemporary archives of information.
3:AM: Spaces are always recreated in this way, through socio-political entanglement. I know I keep returning to the ideas of space outlined in your book, I find them fascinating, so I’d just like to know how you think urban environments serve as spaces in the context of graffiti and acid house culture, and how can these spaces be analysed to reveal critiques of the socio-political climate?
CS: The physical roots of contemporary graffiti and raves can be traced back to the origins of urban exploration, which emerged as a response to boredom. Whether urban or suburban, the ghosts of post-industrialisation have left a myriad of abandoned warehouses, squats, and vacant spaces. Growing up, my friends and I had no access to museums or galleries. That just wasn’t part of our culture. We found our catharsis within the post-industrial playgrounds that stood as monuments to failed futures. These places of other were treasure troves of pieces from the early graffiti pioneers. By day, the decaying and ruined spaces would act as makeshift galleries for the city’s curious teenagers. Then, at night, the same spots would transform into pop-up clubs for illegal parties, something we had yet to learn about and were about to discover. These playgrounds allowed the city’s delinquents to unyoke themselves from their home lives, and the secret, concealed nature of these sanctuaries made us feel like it was our secret. The train lines, however, were no secret; they were just forbidden.
While the post-industrial network of graffiti spots offered an explosion of excitement and inspiration, the real sense of mystique dwelled in the liminal spaces of the train tracks, where the graffiti remained out of public reach. Faded tags seemed like the haunting spectres of faceless youths trapped in dangerous, heterotopic spaces of deviance with no escape. On top of roofs, in the dark tunnels, next to the live third rails. The ghostly names were everywhere, on every surface, repeating in a fecund motion again and again. Here, there was no colour, just silver names, which were the ghosts in the machine that was British Rail – an ever-expansive, never-ending network of electrified tracks, Victorian tunnels, and bridges, where tags were physically embedded into the fabric of society as part of the urban clamour and newfound individualism.
3:AM: Does all this challenge contemporary artistic and political expressions?
CS: Graffiti’s systematic assailment on power structures and cultural hierarchies stems from its genealogy of uprising and protest. At the CIA headquarters in the USA, stand three slabs of the graffiti-drenched Berlin Wall. Captured, deported, and displayed as trophies, these ghostly relics were reimagined as motifs of freedom and hope within the West. This same recalcitrant energy was used during the BLM riots to graffiti the buildings and statues of the former enslavers and pinnacles of power worldwide. Graffiti, positioned as a motif of moral ambiguity and resistance, finds itself simultaneously illegal and venerated by society. The linguistic polarities of graffiti, operating as both vandalism and art, are played out by various agencies of law, information, and culture. Graffiti, as a medium applied in its traditional illicit sense, renounces its inclusion in the commodity system. By resisting the ‘art object for sale’ paradigm, it remains a guerrilla channel of expression, isolated from the gallery framework. This rejection of the financial pyramid means the medium finds itself marginalised as a low culture by the dominant discourse of cultural hegemony. Graffiti presented within an institutional context immediately inverts its definition, reducing itself to the role of street art, as graffiti can only truly exist in an illegal context. Everything else acts as a pastiche. From the aesthetics of poverty to the agency of resistance, graffiti bleeds into the streets of society as a vehicle for a hauntological discourse of public protest.
Jeremy Deller’s recent documentary Everybody in the Place contained scenes filmed in 1992 at the iconic Shelley’s nightclub in Stoke on Trent. Shot through the eyes of the promoter’s handy cam, as they wander through the club, everybody in the place dances with a celebratory energy that would not have looked out of place from the bacchanalian scenes of revelry rendered in Titian’s Renaissance paintings. With no phone or beer in sight, the spectacle has a prevailing sense of innocence, with the whole club dancing in unison as one big family, on it and on one. Such scenarios invoke a sense of yearning for an idealised past and of a lost era, as these were Thatcher’s children, dancing without a care in the world, just for one night. These archived images now roam the internet like the ghosts in the rave machine, haunting its unknown future, dancing on the grave of ‘Thatcherism’. In 2025, this free spirit continues to live on in gender-fluid clubs such as Berghain and FOLD as a continuum to rave cultures’ primal principles of political disassociation and cultural collectivism.
3:AM: What struck me when watching that incredible documentary is just how much the world has changed. How do we now understand the subversive psyche that existed back then?
CS: John Major’s Conservative Party passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in 1994, which criminalised unlicensed raves. The act gave the police the discretionary power to arrest people in groups as small as ten if they believed they were organising or travelling to a rave. This allowed them the right to stop and search anybody within a mile of a rave. Defined as a mass of people playing amplified music, ‘characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. Techno, Jungle, Trance – call it what you want, but the ‘crime’ was punishable by a three-month prison sentence or a fine of up to £2,500. The ‘Iron Lady’ may have left Downing Street, but the spectral presence of her acid reign was felt nationwide that day.
Hate it or love it, graffiti was and is emblematic as a motif of resistance against the old hegemonic order, as old as the Romans, and after spending the following years exorcising these demons in an art world as corrupt as the Tories themselves, I’m finally at peace with it, because in this tsunami of fiscal and moral minimalism, if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. As we recover from the collapse of two Tory-induced periods of political malaise, graffiti and rave culture celebrate the recalcitrant spirit of countercultural collectivism amid the divisions of an ever-changing Britain, which survives the effects of Thatcherism and the future-present feeling of collective melancholy of an island nation in mourning over Brexit. Graffiti remains a subcultural intervention of creativity that turns life’s lemons into lemonade, a reaction and response to an ageing British monarchical system. We, the ghosts who haunt this broken political machine, have a story to tell.
***
PART 2
‘…something to get our teeth stuck into’
3:AM: How did you get into graff?
CS: Many people enter graffiti through Hip Hop, but for us, our entry point was delivered through the aesthetics of boredom, growing up in post-Thatcher rural Britain. Compounded with the unaddressed learning difficulties and the inherent behavioural problems that go hand in hand with these conditions, you could say we were patiently waiting for something to get our teeth sunk into. Of course Hip Hop played a key part in it, as there were around 20 – 30 graffiti writers in my school around the golden-age of ’88 – ’90, but for some graffiti was just a clip on component of the five elements of Hip Hop that you had to be seen to do, and for others it was an escape route from the banality of the ‘80s.
As with many postwar subcultural scenes, graffiti positioned as a punk movement of rebellion was a predominantly heterosexual male affair with little female participation. The gender politics of graffiti can be unpacked through the socio-economics of its practitioners, as some of the most prolific and fearless graffiti writers often shared the same low-income background and single-parent upbringing. Looking back from a distance, I believe the thread that connected many of us, was the felt absence of a male role model in our childhood homes and the impact this can have on developing selfhood, which may lead to a sense of virility and a fearless disregard of authority, as most of the participants in both sides of the game of graffiti, (writers, getaway drivers, train drivers, rail workers, detectives, vigilantes) remained primarily male. We didn’t know it at the time, but the act of graffiti helped foster a sense of camaraderie through the construction of identity and purpose offered from inclusion within a DIY scene, set amongst dichotomous settings.
3:AM: In my experience (in Manchester), so many 80s writers gave up when Acid House arrived on the scene – how did the later rave scene affect the productivity of the writers you knew?
CS: The same thing happened in many cities, as many graffiti writers were young men who had never danced in their lives, and rave culture offered a different type of freedom and fun that graffiti could never. Black and white boys were dancing together for the first time. Straight and gay revellers threw shapes at each other. ‘Mad for it’ Northerners climbed speakers whilst the MCs told off posh Southerners for trying to join in. Yuppies and chippies shared cups of tea in chill-out tents. Hip-Hop-hardened graffiti writers dropped the B-Boy pose postering and started voguing on dance platforms. Even the football hooligans were getting in on it, rubbing Vicks into each other’s faces to make each other rush. It was only inevitable that this new form of expression of self would lead to an exodus.
However, for many, rave just became part of the ritualised lifestyle of painting trains. My graffiti co-dees and I would put our raving shoes on and bunk the trains all over the country to these parties. For us, raves were the same as the faraway train yards, as we loved the long journeys into the unknown. And, just like the yards, you never knew what you were walking into, which added to the allure. Whether it was Fantazia, Metalheadz, AWOL, Fabric, or Plastic People, the same crews you would find in the train depots were the same ones who were reaching the raves every week. The two subcultures merged into one lifestyle, epitomising modern metropolitan working-class culture. Even after I stopped writing, I would still bump into crews of graffiti writers at the front left of the rave, meaning even beyond the act, you were still part of that same family. These raves were the last dance of the 20th Century for a disenfranchised generation, becoming places where graffiti writers, dealers, and robbers raved together in peace, most of the time, but not all of the time, and even in 2025, not much has changed. It’s impossible to attend a rave without bumping into these familiar faces.
CS: Despite graffiti’s transition into the post-digital realm where a new speed of communication enabled its participants to overshare their endeavours in a click of a button and identities and personalities could be reimagined online for better or worse, London, like many metropolitan cities, didn’t operate within the algorithmic anxieties of social media. Many crews come and go, but the DDS crew has remained unchanged in their codes of conduct and continues to operate a model of graffiti that upholds the essence and spirit of what it really is, and what it is and always will be, is played out in the subway yards and streets of the city. Graffiti’s popularity, lives and dies a death every few years in the face of direct police action and a set of economic conditions which inform this, but regardless of the subcultures current popularity, it remains a collective pursuit of expression in the face of political moral malaise and this continuation of the spirit of graffiti’s recalcitrant nature is exemplified within this group who remain active participants in every era.
3:AM: Do you think graffiti is accepted now? Has graff died a postmodern, neoliberal death?
CS: Graffiti, just like contemporary painting, is often declared dead by the dominant culture, only to have its validation reapproved once again. I think the proliferation of street art in the East End of London, along with the Daily Mail’s obsession with trying to reveal Banksy’s real identity, led to a desensitisation of graffiti as a crime, as they added a romanticisation of the act of individual anonymity by trying to make it tabloid news. This inadvertently created a sense of mystique around street artists, which, of course, trickled down to graffiti writers, as the medium and methods were indeed similar when carried out illicitly. For example, every graffiti writer’s friend, mother, or uncle will have asked them at some point if they know Banksy. Why? Because the British media reimagined a public-facing artist as a vigilante, with a ‘who is Batman?’ rhetoric that appealed to the British audience. But the lifestyle of a graffiti artist isn’t that romantic, as the dominant culture celebrates street art, whilst vilifying graffiti through jail sentences.
Is graffiti accepted now? Not really. We’re just in a different era of austerity, where the investigative tools of the post-9/11 era are not as readily available, which has led to a visual increase in graffiti in this country, because graffiti reflects the conditions of the time. Both in its spirit of rebellion and in it being a signifier of moral minimalism that seeps from the powers above. Graffiti alone doesn’t have the power to position itself as a motif of society gone wrong. That stems from a shared sense of governmental collapse and civic unrest.
3:AM: Saying that, the recent ‘state’ of the Bakerloo Line has ruffled a lot of feathers – that line has been bombed – this can only be a good thing, right?
CS: The rise of graffiti running in service for weeks at a time on both the Bakerloo and Central lines of the London Underground was somewhat of a surprise to see for both the authorities and its participants, as it felt like we were in an ‘80s and ‘90s time warp. Some critics labelled the Bakerloo Line something akin to Gotham City, which led to some right-leaning TikTok vigilantes donning high-vis vests with anti-Sadiq Khan messages, filming themselves illicitly cleaning the trains while in service, and becoming part of the sociopolitical spectacle unfolding before our eyes.
Writers who hadn’t painted trains for a decade or two were reappearing on the system, leading to a sense of nostalgia for many. But this was more than a return to the old. What is happening now is a haunting of the previous conditions of a generation caught in the middle of a societal breakdown. You only have to look at the state of current political structures to understand why there is so much graffiti today. Labour has inherently been the party of the working class; yet, in 2025, it leans so far to the centre-left/right that many of its supporters have simply left. Meanwhile, the Tories have dissolved, creating a Farage-sized political vacuum. When a moral black hole exists in parliament, graffiti as a form of protest will always make itself known, reflecting generational angst.
3:AM: You’ve turned your experiences into a book – a work of art in itself – does it serve the same purpose for you: getting up (albeit in a different medium) and disseminating your art/words/message?
CS: There are many parallels in the act of writing graffiti and writing books, as both mediums require the same obsessive attention to detail. Despite the competitiveness and masculinity of graffiti, it never felt like a competition for me, as the biggest challenge was one of self-improvement, to make the next piece better than the last, and when I say better; I mean you’re always trying to resolve internal problems, in the same way a contemporary painter is trying to find a solution in communicating a message. That said, graffiti was for me a journey of personal problem-solving, whereas writing a book like Ghosts in the Machine was more a journey of trying to create a vessel that could communicate the conditions of not just my experience, but the collective understanding of the working-class condition, which comes with its own burdens.
The beauty of writing a book is that it remains a fluid medium until the point of the deadline, and you are always striving to find that moment of clarity where you can press save and have a moment of peace with the work in front of you. Now that the book is printed, that frozen moment has fled into the wilderness, I now have a hunger to continue with more books, which isn’t what I really signed up for. I managed to escape my life as an unhappy chef, who painted graffiti in between stressful shifts in an industry that rarely has a happy ending, by getting into art school. When I started art evening classes to build a portfolio, my head chef would call me gay for having a sketch book in my tote bag, and you could feel the resentment when your peers knew you were trying to escape from what is often an inescapable rat race. So, when I managed to secure a scholarship, it did feel like a new escape route.
3:AM: What has the experience of putting this book together been like?
CS: For years, it remained an unattainable pipe dream. I made the first draft in my head chef’s office in 2012, after he buggered off home every night, using his photocopier, Pritt Stick, and a pair of scissors. This handwritten, phonebook-sized ‘promo copy’ was then sent by post to various European publishers as a time capsule of archival photographs. A precarious verbal ‘carrot and stick’ deal was offered to me (‘show me 1000 words, and I’ll give you an advance’), followed by a hollow (‘show 5000 more and so on’) sort of affair. This ‘deal’ was ended via a text message at 9 pm on a Friday night, stating that there was no market for this type of book at the moment. Other deals came and went, but tbh, in the meantime, I ended up being accepted for a Master’s in Painting at the RCA, so for the betterment of my studies, production was put on ice, but deep down, I knew it was what I really wanted to do.
After several years of operating in an art world that felt even more corrupt than graffiti itself, I felt an urge to revisit the idea of producing the book, making it my bucket list project, as painting didn’t really feel like the medium that could expand these ideas and experiences. Initially, it felt slightly retrospective to return to the archive and revisit past feelings, but the deeper I dug into the soil of discontent, the more it felt like I had no choice. Every day, from morning to night, was consumed by archival mining and rewriting page after page; meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I had an unshakable feeling of doom, that it would never see the light of day and that this would be a waste of time. Today, it doesn’t feel that way, but there is a sense of irony that it took taking on £70,000 of student debt to write a book about having no education or future prospects. I suppose this is just the process of turning yourself inside out for public consumption.
3:AM: What are you currently working on?
CS: I had no idea how time-consuming the process would be, and my studio practice as a visual artist died a momentary death, as it seemed impossible to concentrate on anything else but tweaking every element of the production. In the meantime, I had been applying for Arts Council England funding and was caught off guard to receive it this Spring. It’s difficult to make future plans based around public funding, as the odds of success are so low, so to get it in the midst of finishing the book was a bit of a shock to the system, but now the book is out, the plan is use this opportunity to connect the dots between the personal histories and lived experiences of the written work, with my studio practice, whilst been able to live without compromising the message. There is some confusion in the art world about the distinction between graffiti and street art, and from a distance, they can appear to be the same. Graffiti can never be placed within the gallery context without losing its edge, as graffiti can truly only exist within its unwanted context as an uninvited ghost. It is the poltergeist of the art world that never asked to be let in.
Whether low or high, art, just like that of music and poetry, rave, rap or opera, doesn’t always come from a place of light, and if the flower that was Acid House grew from within the dark concrete of Thatcherism, then the generational rejection of the binaries of social inequality created amid today’s increasingly oppressive political climate, mark a continuation of these rituals of resistance through communality, collaboration and above all, creativity. Graffiti is how we reimagine public space, and if it teaches you anything in life, it’s that nothing lasts forever, and today’s paint is tomorrow’s puddle. Raving is how we reimagine private time, and in times of restrictions, cutbacks, and uncertainty, it remains to this day, one of life’s simplest modes of youthful rebellion. I am currently considering ways to integrate all of the above into a cohesive, unified body of work and look forward to this new challenge.
3:AM: Finally, are you ever tempted to paint some steel – just for old time’s sake?
CS: As a recovering graffiti artist, I am constantly at odds with the past. Between having nightmares of being a chef again, I often have dreams of painting graffiti again. I miss the non-stop pursuit of trying to ‘get over’. It was such an important part of my life, but you also can’t live in the past, trying to recreate a pastiche of the old. Everything has an expiry date, and as much as I would love to be up a ladder painting a whole car on a train tonight, I have set new challenges in my life, which, to be honest, are more unattainable, therefore more rewarding. Graffiti lives by the 10,000-hour rule. If you put in the work, you will be rewarded, but the art world isn’t always so easy. There are many artists huddled over a Tupperware of reheated spag bol in a lonely studio somewhere, nowhere, putting in a 10,000-hour shift, but life isn’t that simple. Paint more steel? Who knows, maybe I’ll know the answer in 10,000 more hours of this.
3:AM: Any shoutouts?
CS: Tip of the hat to the whole team who worked tirelessly on the Ghosts on the Machine book. Jonny Banger for the heartfelt foreword. Alias Tim for running extra mile and extracting forgotten parts of the archive. Aurèle Sack for the acute attention to graphic detail. Simon Armstrong for proof reading clarity. Sean Summerfield at Doughty Street Chambers for the legal surgery. Saskia Colwell my partner in crime.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Christopher Stead is a London-based artist and documentarian of British counterculture. His painting and installation works have been exhibited internationally and he has contributed to numerous subcultural publications over the past 20 years. His latest book, Ghosts in the Machine: the Hauntology of Graffiti and Rave Culture 1990-2010, is available now from Alias Press.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Born and bred in Manchester, Lee Rourke is the author of the short story collection Everyday, the novels The Canal (winner of the Guardian‘s Not The Booker Prize), Vulgar Things (‘poignant and unsettling’ – Eimear McBride), and most recently Glitch (‘a wise and tender novel’ – The Guardian), as well as the poetry collections Vantablack and Varroa Destructor. He also contributed to the acclaimed Know Your Place essay anthology – a ground-breaking collection of essays about being working-class. He is a contributing editor at 3:AM Magazine, and has written regularly for the Guardian, New Humanist, TLS, Bookforum, Independent, and New Statesman. Between 2012-2014 he was Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University, where he lectured on the MFA Programme in Creative Writing and Critical Theory. He has also taught Creative Writing at Middlesex University and the University of East London. He lives by the sea.
