Saatchi Art & Music Magazine
interview, Autumn 2008

An exhibition of new work by John Squire opens on 10th October at Westminster’s SW1 Gallery. Lois Wilson hooked up with the artist/guitarist in his Macclesfield studio for a sneak preview of Noise, and a little light rumination on the crossover between art and music.

Like most people, I first discovered John Squire’s art through his Jackson Pollockindebted sleeve designs for his band, the Stone Roses. Formed in 1984, the Roses revolved around the songwriting nucleus of singer Ian Brown, guitarist Squire, bassist Gary "Mani" Mounfield and drummer Alan "Reni" Wren. They captured the turn-of-the decade’s zeitgeist in their eponymous 1989 debut album. The record marked Squire as a dizzying talent, who re-appropriated the guitar hero from machismo rock cliché, drawing on the US folk rock tradition epitomized by the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn. The innovation continued with the single 'Fool’s Gold', which melded dance and funk with rock; by their second album, 1994’s long-gestating Second Coming, they were probing heavier, Led Zeppelin-style sounds.

While today John says playing the guitar was, “a struggle, I never understood the process like I do the art process” – he is being coy. His guitar playing was often awe-inspiring, as his recording legacy is testament. His art initially took a back seat when the Roses took off. With no formal art training – “I never had that privilege” – he was self-taught, studying techniques from library books and experimenting in his bedroom whenever he had a spare moment.

Music also played an important role in John’s art education. He first became aware of Jackson Pollock through The Clash, who customised their stage gear with Pollockesque paint splashes (although the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock was actually the first to do it). “I came across the name Jackson Pollock in The Clash photo book by Pennie Smith, there was a picture of Paul Simonon [The Clash’s bassist] in a dressing room”, Squire recalls. “The caption read, ‘Paul surveys a Pollock-style action painting on the floor’ and being an obsessive fan I went to [Manchester’s] Central library to look for books on this Pollock person and I liked what I saw. There was so much information in there on the process it was easy to replicate. I was trying to visually represent the music in the best way I knew how [on the sleeves]. I think I was trying to make the music more like the Jesus And Mary Chain, and to me the Jackson Pollock artwork represented their [signature guitar] feedback; I was trying to incorporate that into our band, I was trying to deface the band. But the motivation behind doing it was quite simple: I was petrified that some designer guy from the record label would knock up a sleeve in an afternoon and that would [forever] be a visual association with the band. I made a sculpture for our first single [1985’s ‘So Young’] that had been given to an ex-factory designer who messed it up recreating it, so I was determined to do it all myself. The sculpture was of two beer bottles and a radio smashed up and reassembled and painted.”

John also made outfits for the group, “shirts based on the Beach Boys’ stripy ones; I also made leather pants, I painted our instruments and in one photo-shoot [famously captured by lensman Kevin Cummins] I used the band as a canvas – covering them in paint.”

After leaving the Stone Roses in 1996, Squire formed The Seahorses, releasing just one album, 1997’s Do It Yourself, before going it alone as a solo artist, recording 2002’s Time Changes Everything and 2004’s Marshall’s House. The latter contained 12 songs, each one inspired by an Edward Hopper painting.

As well as designing the artwork for his own releases – ranging from a photo of a sculpture made from sunglasses and concrete for a quite literal interpretation of The Seahorses’ single ‘Blinded By The Sun’, to the Pollock- splattered cow skull adorning his first solo LP – Squire also provided covers for the series of War Child charity albums.

John doesn’t remember the exact moment he decided to swap the guitar for the paint brush. “I know I should,” he says, “but I really don’t.” But it seems to have coincided with the recording of his un-issued third solo album. “There was a big overlap; I was working on this album, I was doing it on my own without any session musicians. I was using vocal samples, but my [visual] art was gradually becoming more and more important. The volume of work I was creating was more of a reward. And I found the ability to experiment more in painting. It felt more liberating, there was more freedom in this pursuit and less convention, less mathematics – and I was less reliant on other people. But in some ways the two approaches [to writing songs and painting] are identical. This is all just a continuation; because as far back as I can remember I’ve made things: from Plasticene people and Airfix model kits to songs and clothes, and now I make paintings, to the exclusion of most other things.”

He could also add puppets, props and theatrical sets to his list. “My first proper job, after working at Tesco’s, was at [animation studio] Cosgrove Hall making things for [TV programmes] Cockleshell Bay and Wind In The Willows,” he recalls. “I liked it initially when I was freelance – I’d ride on my scooter to Chorlton [where Cosgrove was based] and deliver my models made of potatoes that I’d spent the previous week in my bedroom making from modelling clay. When I got a full time position there I was told I had a reputation for making really beautiful objects that quickly fell to pieces. My best work was used on the pilot of Fungus The Bogeyman, based on the Raymond Briggs story, but they never got the funding to make the show. It was a good place to work, I could burn the candle at both ends – and music at the same time.”

John’s studio is filled with everything you’d expect an artist to have on hand, and some things you maybe wouldn’t. There’s a Marvel action figure of The Thing from the Fantastic Four, a toy plastic skeleton hanging from the ceiling and a children’s desk next to his easel. “It used to have plastic nails and a plastic vice attached,” he says. “Things just seem to get dumped in here but you achieve so much more when you don’t have to tidy up after yourself.”

John converted the former barn with friends’ help and it stands next to the farmhouse where he lives with his wife Sophie and their three children. It’s just a ten-minute drive from Macclesfield train station but the surrounding area is nothing like that terrace house-lined town, voted fifth happiest borough in a survey this year. Instead, in all directions are rolling green hills, expansive blue sky and fields of grazing sheep.

It’s against this background that Squire has recently completed paintings for his upcoming show Noise. Partly homage to J.M.W. Turner’s sea and landscapes, they are bold and dynamic and saturated with emotion. Salute, a large canvas, is inspired by Turner’s Venice paintings, especially Seascape on Rough Sea With Wreckage. Through their incorporation of text and language, however, the paintings challenge notions of the conventional. Squire recorded conversations on buses, in cafes, on the street, from TV and the radio which were then transcribed and scrawled over the canvases to impart both information and to create their own expressive form. Through this layering, Squire plays with the notion of a unified image; highlighting the role that destruction – “vandalism” – can play in art.

This is a motif that defines much of Squire’s work. Past exhibitions have seen the artist experiment in the layering of plaster, sand, wax and oil paint – “destroying what’s underneath”, and making collages from the cutting up of secondhand clothes.

John is particularly excited about the as-yet untitled piece he put the finishing touches to the night before our meeting. It is formed around two blocks of impasto colour [stormy grey sky/textured brown earth] divided by an ominous black line. Above the line the words "Have Faith" are scraped in pastel, below "In their forever unprovable omniscient creator." “It’s a quote from [British ethnologist and science writer] Richard Dawkins,” Squire explains. “The paint was so thick I really had to gouge the words out. If I saw this in a gallery, I’d wish I had made it. I’d want to grope it, I’d want to know what was going through the artist’s mind as he or she did it.”

And what was?

“Well,” he pauses. “I do think there is a destructive streak in regards to my art. If you look at the pictures my mum kept from primary school, everything I drew was dilapidated; if it was a house it was a broken down house, if it was a car it was rusted. But you can be over-analytical. I’ve created something here. These weren’t landscape masterpieces I found and then defaced with blocks of colour. This was the intention from the start.”

For all that, it’s hard not to see John’s paintings as some kind of reflection of his emotional self. As an interviewee he verges on the shy, although he’s never awkward or obstructive; instead he considers every question carefully, pausing to reflect before replying, taking time to craft every sentence into a comprehensive answer. “I’m trying to be as transparent as I can; I’ve not spoken this much for a long time,” he admits. “I’m rarely demonstrative,” he reveals, but he’s funny, charming and generous too. Yet his paintings are, in many ways, a complete contrast; captured in the rush of stream-of-consciousness – a raw, jumbled moment.

“It is an outlet,” he says. “In a similar way to playing music; it’s a way of saying something without having to go through the tortuous social procedures that most people have to go through. Chit-chat fills me with dread. When I get frustrated and concerned about the things going on around me, I address what is inside [me] on canvas. The process itself is emotional. I’m really excited by it and the possibilities arising from the blank canvas.”

So how was the concept behind Noise conceived?

“I have this problem of forcing myself to listen to a conversation when a lot of people are gathered together; when the children are talking and friends are talking and my dad, who’s partially deaf, he’ll have a lot to tell me and I’ll find it difficult to block out all the other voices in the room and concentrate on what he’s saying. I found I could draw on that experience and I contrived a way of exploiting it, using it as fuel for my art. I’d tape conversations people were having on buses and trains, strangers in cafes, snippets from the radio and from flicking through the TV channels, interesting bits here and there and then when applying them to the work I’d see which were the most relevant but also which fitted in due to their shape. It was as much about the aesthetic form as the meaning. I use the lettering as points of light as well as language. I make it hover above the work and then let it sink back in.”

One of the earliest pieces completed for Noise was the aforementioned Salute and it was pivotal in how John came to see his work.

“I’d come into the studio each day and it would surprise me. I’d be drawn into it, reading the phrases, but as I started to live with it day by day I’d start to see it as colour and form, I was aware there was information there in a form of language but I was no longer drawn into it, the image had become whole.”

One particularly impressive piece, The Dinner Party appears to be inspired by the barn that houses the studio. Painted in red are the words, “No support”.

“When I first invited people into my studio to interview me about my art,” he says, “I’d always get asked if the landscape played a part. I thought that was a really trite thing to say but I think I was probably in denial. I’m aware now of the fact I’m inspired by it and am in some way recording the times through the paintings themselves – in a way you can’t avoid doing that.”

By adding text to his work, John says he feels more connected to it. It was something he felt able to explore more fully after the discovery of Cy Twombly’s child-like abstract expressionism.

“I actually started to write on my work before I became aware of Twombly. It was after my second show at the Dazed and Confused Gallery in 2007. I decided to write a stream of thoughts on a piece of paper and cut out shapes from the other side and see what was left. Then three months later the Tate Modern asked me to pick a painter from the collection currently on show and talk about it for the camera. I picked Twombly’s Quatro Stagioni: Primavera. (A painting in four parts). I recognised in his work a certain freedom and experimentation that really appealed and I wanted to extend that to my own work. I try to be as confident and carefree as the children in my work, and it starts to come more naturally with the volume of work I produce. I’m much less careful than I used to be, especially when I was making music, the painting would be sporadic, I’d be a little uptight, I’d want to get it perfect. Now I know I can make as much art as I like, so long as the sun shines.”

John may not make music for public consumption at the moment but he is still buoyed by it. After the interview we sit in his kitchen; he talks about The Byrds and Hendrix, The Kinks and Ray Davies, enthuses about the recent Led Zeppelin reunion – “it was frightening, it was so good” – can’t find the song by the Beach Boys called ‘Little Bird’ on their Friends album he wants to play but can locate ‘Hell Will Take Care Of Her’ by [‘60s band] Brass Buttons on the compilation My Mind Goes High, which he is currently raving about.

As we’re sipping our respective teas and coffees, a red Lambretta GP splurts and splutters into view. It’s Mani, the Primal Scream bassist and John’s former Stone Roses cohort, who’s dropped by on an impromptu visit. Talk turns to Man United, the football team both support, the Olympics and general reminiscing, but it’s clear John’s happiest in the here and now.

“I don’t wake up with a throbbing neon sign saying ‘artist’ every morning in my head,” he says. I define myself by the book I’m reading, the children, my relationship with my wife, the things I’m surrounded with... In some ways I never stop thinking of myself as a child. I’m still the aspiring songwriter, the aspiring painter, never the finished article. But I do wake up and think 'what am I going to do today?’ I get a real rush of adrenalin when I think I’ll be in my studio, making something on the canvas. And one day I can come into the studio and see my art and be immediately elated and really proud of my work, then the next day I can come in and just think this really isn’t any good and get really depressed about it. I figure if it elicits such extreme emotions within me it must be the right thing for me to be doing.”

Lois Wilson

John Squire’s Noise is at the SW1 Gallery.