Seven Years with Banksy

By Robert Clarke

Michael O’Mara Books Limited

Copyright © 2012 Robert Clarke
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84317-865-1
CHAPTER 1

NEW YORK

In 1994 I found myself back in New York. I had been travelling around the Middle East with my brother after my father had passed on, and had stopped in Bristol for the summer. I had this unquenchable lust to be back in New York and even though I only had a small amount of money left, I got myself on a plane and headed over the Atlantic.

By now I felt I had developed a relationship with the place, having first visited New York in the harsh winter after John Lennon was shot down in 1980. Those were the days when you would see a subway train screeching into a station that had been bombed (covered in graffiti) massively inside and out. They were like living, breathing works of art coming at you non-stop. When the doors sprang open, every square inch was tagged. It was another world and it exhilarated me. I would sit and watch the trains coming over from Brooklyn on the bridges and trip.

I loved the graffiti and back then there were no glossy coffee table books fetishizing the subject. It was just hyper-real. As a kid just out of his teens this was like being in a Kojak thriller all of my own. When I was back again around 1984 most of the trains were clean but you saw Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat works on the subway walls instead.

By 1994 the city had changed its nature again; it seemed a tamer place but it still retained a raw edge. Since 9/11 New York has become so sanitized it barely resembles its heyday and I, like many others, have fallen out of love with it. But I’m glad I’m no longer addicted to the place.

To set the scene: in 1994 I came rolling out of JFK and on to the A train heading into Manhattan. I got out at St Marks Place and strolled down 8th Avenue to Tompkins Square Park in the East Village where my mate Max lived. He was only going to let me stay with him a couple of nights so I had to act sharp to get sorted. A place to crash was obviously a priority: the nights were drawing in and the big freeze of winter was on its way.

I struck lucky and hooked up with Max’s ex-girlfriend, Phlipp, an English girl who I knew from London, and she threw some good fortune my way. Within those two days she found me a place to stay – a warehouse space over in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was just one stop on the grey L train from lower Manhattan, and back then it was only just starting to be populated by artists converting old warehouses and industrial spaces into living quarters. Spaces could be huge and rent minimal, just how artists like it. Now the place is expensive and full of young trendies living the high life. Back then we were sandwiched between Poles, Hispanics and Hassidic Jews, and there was only one or two places to eat. The City changes and money moves the underprivileged out. In ’94 it was a decidedly righteous place to live.

My room was basic, with access to an adjacent roof from where you could take in a view of the city. There was a nest of rats down my stairwell but as long as they didn’t come into my room they never bothered me. About twelve of us shared a bathroom but it was all good and functional. I was established in living quarters in the Borough of Brooklyn.

It wasn’t too long before I needed to find work. I had an old Social Security number that a friend had procured for me when I had lived in San Francisco. It was dodgy but I could use it for a while before the wheels of bureaucracy would catch up. Meanwhile Phlipp had just quit a job working at a low-rent hotel in midtown. She had had enough of the place but offered to introd