We know what we are to expect of Mr Noisy when we are greeted on its opening pages by the central character reading aloud the very work of which he is part. For indeed, this is no simple parable about a person who makes too much noise – the racket Hargreaves rails against here is that of the piece itself. And so begins this cautionary tale on what he sees as the excesses and frivolity of metafiction. 

Of course, in order to tackle the supposed indiscipline he wishes to decry, Hargreaves must likewise make the text itself the object of our contemplation. The voice of Mr Noisy therefore booms across its landscape, just as did playful postmodernism across the literarylandscape of the time.

For the people of nearby Wobbletown, it is a voice both deafening and oppressive – a wearingly unrelenting bombardment which makes it nigh on impossible for them to experience day-to-day life as a stable and consistent unproblematised reality. Grown tired of this constant bellowed reference to the ultimate status of their world as fiction – and, we might add,compelled by the genre of the piece to act - the townsfolk agree that something must be done.

Hargreaves obliges with a fitting resolution, and in a deft appropriation of Pirandello’s Six Characters, he employs this supporting cast of locals to march the author out of the text and restore the reliable narrator. Or, as the story puts it, to make Mr Noisy more quiet.

Hargreaves’ aim here is, of course, to turn the tools and­ techniques of metafiction upon itself, hoping that in doing so he will banish forever from storytelling what he regards as its smug and artless horseplay. However, such is his mastery of the very antics he so despises that they never seem more at home in fiction than when it is he who employs them. 

Despite his own hankering for a return to a more simple, more refined moral and literary universe, Hargreaves cannot silence his gift. 

When you go out in the woods today...

It was a pleasure last summer to exhibit The Taping Of Quincy in Siena - at the top of Via Lucherini, next to the junction with Via Sallustio Bandini, to be precise. The 'Leeds' version seen here doesn't quite scale the same heights as the 'Liverpool' version that I exhibited a few years back at the Venice Biennale, but it still has a certain charm. Wonder if it's still there or if it's found its way into the hands of a private collector. 

Mr Tall is a man beset with incurable ennui. Able to take neither his own life nor a leap of faith with any intellectual honesty, he has no option but to face the absurdity of existence without the slightest hope of any relief.  Hargreaves cleverly captures the various aspects of this predicament by giving his character inordinately long legs. At their very least they form a most effective metaphor for his fundamental discomfort with the world. 

This is demonstrated particularly well when Mr Tall is bent awkwardly into his bed at night, irreconcilably at odds with what is simultaneously the essential condition of his being. These legs allow him insights, however, denied the common man or woman. They afford him a view above and beyond the rooftops of the town that might otherwise have bound his horizon and buried him in comforting falsehoods.  

Even in this latter respect they remain a dubious gift. And when his torment finally drives him to the cliff edge, they deny him the option of drastic action. It is now that we see Hargreaves the master at work, reaping the rewards of his choice of metaphor. For what is Mr Tall to do there? He is a man who can step off a cliff just as a doorstep, whose tread on the seabed is but a paddle by the shore. It is not as if he can hurl himself to his death or drown himself. It is equally hard for him to leap ecstatically into the void, beyond the bounds of reason - the abyss somewhat loses any promise or threat when one’s feet rest with ease at its base. There is no escape for Mr Tall. He is condemned to the ridiculous.

Failed by reason, faith and death, Mr Tall sits on the cliff edge staring out to sea. He is visited by a procession of those who live the absurd life, with no higher moral purpose to curb them. Mr Tickle, Mr Nosey, and Mr Greedy arrive in turn – a fool, a voyeur and a glutton. They each present to Mr Tall a life without apology, embodying in their different ways the maxim that what is important in the face of the absurd is not the best living but the most living. Hargreaves would normally punish such excess, but here he knows this is futile – it would bring about no change, no remorse.

The words of these visitors do the trick, though the resolution they bring feels a little too easily won given the weight of the quandary Mr Tall has been grappling. He sees his lack of hope was liberation all along, freedom from the need for a purpose.  He strides home briskly, revitalised, any imperative to find or create meaning decisively cast in his wake. But his jollity seems a simplistic response - has he found just another evasion?

Portrait crop of an oldish work. An A1 print on some fancy paper would work on your living room wall, I think.

The Village Satanists

Dream account, rendered here in biro on the back of a pizza box.

The ultimate triumph of photobombing.

Edmonton, 2009.

Pollarded branches in Aulnay, Charente Maritime, adorned with the faces of statues from nearby Dampierre-sur-Boutonne. 

During lockdown, I noticed that the food and fat residue at the bases of takeaway pizza boxes invariably generates beautiful abstract expressionist works. I framed and titled several, which I then of course sold for vast amounts of money on the international art market. Here is a small selection:

Manilow Synesthesia

Vitruvian 12 Inch Meat Feast

A Hunger Artist

We are left to wonder in the story of Mr Greedy if he ever truly awakens from his slumbers of its opening pages, for beneath the veneer of the moral fable we remain very much situated in the realm of the unconscious throughout. In terms of subject matter, we might also ponder if the message of this work may be somewhat lost on its readership, being perhaps more relevant to a slightly older audience.

In Mr Greedy we meet the adolescent male libido, whose drives his voracious appetite can be taken to represent. He avidly guzzles whatever pleasures come before him, his gluttony implying frequent and fervid self-gratification. It is no surprise that his wanderings through the Freudian wilderness of dream quickly lead him to a cave - the sex. He cannot but venture within, licking his lips as he enters at the delicacies doubtless in store.

And what sights it has to show him - enormous culinary delights beyond all imagination. He bites on a giant apple of temptation, gorges on a colossal plate of bangers. The symbolism of neither is lost. But of course, in the domain of dream we find not only wish fulfilment. We also come face to face with our neuroses, the inner life we repress. The adolescent psyche is a difficult place, with much to process and overcome. Perhaps a little guilt is there at the autoerotic explorations of youth. 

Sure enough, a giant appears. The overbearing father figure is once more present with the son in the womb - the battleground, the arena, for this particular complex. There is a telling picture in which we see only Mr Greedy’s head protruding from the vice-like grasp of the giant. With this, Hargreaves confirms that we are witness here essentially to a character wrestling himself, struggling against the pull of powerful internal forces.

And what storms we find have been raging in that bottomless pit of his! Mr Greedy is confronted with the Oedipal hatred and fear that has stalled him thus far at the oral stage of his psychosexual development, his insatiable appetite a regressive rebellion against the internalised paternal archetype. But when faced with the Father now, his guilt commands him to meekly accept the punishment decreed. The giant forces him to gorge on the unthinkable banquet of the mother’s flesh, where the mutual presence of the two locates us.

Mr Greedy emerges from his youthful excesses ostensibly a man of moderation, with increased regulation of his drives. But can we truly say he is cured? Some of the most disturbed criminal minds have found their genesis in less than what has passed here, and we shudder at the thought of what psychopathological maelstroms lie in wait for Mr Greedy. Better let him sleep?

Tupelo Shroud

The Elvis equivalent of the Turin Shroud? A miracle caused by sunlight falling on fabric at Graceland? Or a highly convincing forgery created one night in a bedsit in Pimlico with some hair bleach & a projector? Hmmm - where's Fiona Bruce when you need her? Some fun from 2009…

Open Plan

Recounting dreams in biro on the back of takeaway pizza boxes definitely seems the way forward.

It remains a great honour and source of pride to have been represented at the 2017 Venice Biennale - the 'Liverpool' version of my masterpiece 'The Taping of Quincy', blu-tacked for posterity at the junction of Ramo Primo de la Pegola with Calle de la Pegolathe.

‘A reverent exploration of the monuments & sculptures of our housing estates as sacred sites of shared experience - intoxication, sexual becoming... Even micturition upon such works is read by Knill as a sanctifying act.’

Whilst throughout his work Hargreaves retains a certain fascination with the individual as a tool of resistance and agent of social change, he generally prefers to frame his exploration of this with characters who enact it inadvertently – often through clumsiness, silliness or being particularly accident-prone. It is these characters who triumph most emphatically when we consider his output as a whole.

Clearly written with Debord in mind, the confused and confusing Mr Topsy-Turvy falls very much into this category. If Situationism needed a literary hero, Mr Topsy-Turvy would fit the bill - if only he knew it himself. Moving through a metropolitan environment rather than the semi-rural suburbs more commonly found in Hargreaves, his act after act of unintentional détournement leaves the city in a state of considerable malfunction. Taxis crash, streets come to a standstill, and consumers tumble down the escalator in a department store - all due to seemingly innocuous, innocent behaviours such as speaking in jumbled up sentences, or wearing one’s socks on one’s hands.

But why this narrative insistence that our hero should appear so oblivious to his impact? Is it that Hargreaves views the rebellion of the unconscious as somehow more authentic than organized collective action?  Or, more likely, does he wish to side-step his own misplaced need for moral equilibrium? One suspects that Hargreaves prefers to see capitalist power relations crumble through the benign acts of a Chaplinesque fool, rather than through an open revolt whose perpetrators he would then feel he must punish.

This is all most disingenuous of course, and Hargreaves betrays Mr Topsy-Turvy’s total grasp of the situation when the character insists on hanging the pictures in an art gallery upside-down. We note, furthermore, in the disarranged utterances of a newsreader at the end of the story, that Mr Topsy-Turvy has decisively infiltrated media culture and turned it upon itself. For a man so unaware of the chaos he will cause, he certainly seems to know how to target his efforts. His sudden and mysterious disappearance owes only to the sheer magnitude of his impact. It is not that he is gone – he is everywhere. His ascension complete to the realm of signs, he occupies now the very structure of thought. That is, he is language itself. 

And it is with this radical transformation that Hargreaves declares Mr Topsy-Turvy the most genuinely subversive of all the Mr Men. Whilst Mr Tickle, for instance, might well bring temporary disruption to the accepted order of things, Mr Topsy-Turvy far surpasses this. Like a countercultural virus, he infects and fundamentally alters the system he traverses to bring about enduring change.

Amidst the neatly mown lawns and manicured hedgerows of the commuter belt, in Mr Fussy we meet a well-known creature of this habitat - the anal retentive personality type. With his excessive need for order and meticulous precision, Mr Fussy’s drive to retain control even goes as far as straightening the blades of grass in his garden.

Students of psychoanalysis will immediately recognise the fundamental unsustainability of this level of repression. And sure enough, it is not long before Mr Fussy is visited by Mr Clumsy, apparently a cousin from down under - clearly an allusion to the anus. Mr Clumsy is of course nothing more than our hero’s own deeply buried desire to rebel against the toilet training of his infancy. As this process, though clearly traumatic, was at the same time integral to the formation of his adult identity, it is only logical that his subconscious must project an alter ego through whom he can stage his regressive revolt.

It comes as no surprise to see that Mr Clumsy is in appearance simply a fatter, more bedraggled version of Mr Fussy himself, dutifully giving the latter licence to relinquish control of his bowels and at the same time look disapprovingly on. Make no mistake, Mr Fussy is loving every minute as the symbols of the self in his house and garden are processed and expelled as waste. And because the conscious self is allowed to remain a mere bystander in proceedings, this return to the Eden of untrammelled excretion evades any crisis of guilt.

For now at least, that is. Hargreaves hints that there may be a future price to pay for his scatological rampage. Things cannot simply go back to how they were. Soon after Mr Clumsy leaves, Mr Bump arrives. Do we take this to mean that Mr Fussy’s still unresolved internal conflict will see him at some point escalate to bouts of accidental self-injury? We are left to muse on what earthquakes await with the shifting tectonic plates of the psyche.

'Tony Blackburn reads Derrida' audiobook

Would you believe me if I told you I found this in a charity shop in Bacup?

Urine guy - really should do a series of these..

Despite the visual witticisms of his resemblance to a purple heart, what we have in Mr Rush of course is the One-Dimensional Man of Marcuse. If any stimulant drives his actions, it is the ideological apparatus of advanced industrial society. Lacking a critical dimension with which to question and transcend such circumstances, he speeds around in blind conformity to the ethos of his age.

The inherent irrationality at the heart of all this is displayed in the fact that despite having internalised the core technological values of productivity and efficiency, the perpetual haste with which he is driven as a result makes him thoroughly unproductive and extremely inefficient. The perfect worker for the one-dimensional society is therefore unable to hold down any job.

We notice too that the leisure goals of his activity come retrospectively, heightening further our sense of the absurd. He must search for his soul in catalogues and brochures, finding it in products and services – in this case, a holiday abroad. This is aspiration as repressive tool, as he is further bound into the social order by his own conditioned needs.

And indeed, when Mr Rush finally gets to go on his break, we discover that he cannot relax. So deeply introjected are the conditions of his labour that he is subject to them even in his leisure, which he races about as if a work task. Production and consumption come to mirror one another, and in consequence are equally frenetic. Of course, Mr Rush does not stop to reflect, and hurtles at pace towards Thanatos.

The archangel Michael, patron saint of waste management.

Bringing businesses and customers together, Mile End Road, circa 2013

The Taping of Quincy (Headingley, 2015)

Still ruing the missed digit.

Never say again that nothing ever happens in Halifax.

The new fragrance from GWF Hegel

A look back at some of the great releases (and re-releases) of 2016:

First up, there's nothing like an established performer seeking to extend her range, at the same time as bringing some great music to a new audience - exactly what Shirley Bassey has done with this, her interpretation of the legendary Captain Beefheart.

In a similar vein, Vespas of 1610 specialise in choral reworkings of mod anthems. Their 2016 offering, 'Hoc est, in mundo' (This is the Modern World) was dedicated to Jam covers - highlights included 'Sub Occasum' (Going Underground), 'In Civitatem quae dicitur Malita' (A Town Called Malice) & 'Haec sunt jucunda' (That's Entertainment). Best of the rest in terms of covers was an eclectic selection by the Brighouse and Rastrick Band, my personal favourite being their rendering of the Man 2 Man Meets Man Parrish Hi-NRG classic 'Male Stripper'. 

Meanwhile, the year also saw a welcome re-release for the back catalogue of 80s New Romantics, Rural Vest Scenario, famous for their smash hit 'Tea is a diuretic'.

One artist stretching himself with new material in 2016 was James Blunt, with a taster for his forthcoming concept album based on the film Videodrome.

Seminal House legends Action Man versus Rubber Skeikh deserve a mention for producing yet another hot and heavy dance classic with 'ChemSexx Supermarket'. Fans of ITV idents might notice the incorporation of the Granada TV symbol into the logo of their label Mantrax.

Here's hoping 2017 can anywhere near match any of this.

#alloftheabovejustkiddingofcourse

the place where words are made

2016

Modernist souvenir mug, against the backdrop of Number One Riverside, Rochdale

Exhibition (detail)

Wanstead Park, 2013

"When I were a lad, we used to make our own entertainment - constructing Situations to subvert the hegemony of the ruling class."

#rebrandingyorkshire