Peter Blake

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures choose the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the artist Sir Peter Blake, the grandfather of British pop art. Peter is one of the most influential artists of his generation, and his work is among the most recognisable. A Royal Academician with work in the National Collection, including Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, he's renowned for paintings and collages that borrow imagery from advertising, cinema and music. Having created the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band sleeve in 1967, he became the go-to album designer for other artists, including The Who, Paul Weller, Madness and Oasis.

1:00He was knighted for services to art in 2002.

1:10Peter Blake, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much. You were born in Dartford, in Kent, in 1932. What did your parents do? My mum is a Geordie and came down from Newcastle to be a nurse. She thought nursing was kind of holding somebody's hand and she didn't realise it was quite a tough thing. So she stopped being a nurse and she became a dressmaker, really. And my dad was in the building trade and was an electrician. So a working class household then? Oh, absolutely, yeah. And you were evacuated, from what I understand, at the outbreak of the war in 1939. Looking back at that time, what effect did it have on your creative imagination, do you think?

2:00I was seven. The day war was declared, the siren went, and there was one shelter in our road. So all the children were rushed into this tiny Anderson shelter, and we sat waiting for the Germans to come. And the very next day, my parents evacuated my sister and I because my brother was about to be born and was born on the 13th of September. So you were sent away without parents then? Oh, absolutely, yeah. And to what, to a farm in Essex? No, to a house, but a very strange household. I mean, it was a married couple, but the man had been in the Navy and was now a Batman. Is it called Batman? Yeah.

2:51Somebody in service to looking after. In Greenwich. The woman was about 40 and she'd let parts of the house out so there was a man who lived in solitude. He'd been in the Boer War and had lost a leg in the Boer War on the battlefield. so he was in the front room upstairs and then there was a farm worker who lodged as well. That seems extraordinary that you had contact with somebody who was in the Boer War at the start of the Second World War. I mean, what would he have thought of this little boy and girl suddenly arriving? I mean, he'd gone into hiding, really. He never went out. Did you already have an interest in making things, in creating art?

3:40Not really. No, I didn't. But you studied graphic design at Gravesend Technical College. Well, I got into the Technical College and at the interview for that, I had no idea of going into art. And they said that the art school is part of the technical school, is literally around the corner. If you want to walk around and do a drawing test, you can try for the art school. So really my interest in art and my time in art started then at the age of 13, never having anticipated being an artist. And they introduced you to the work of, what, old masters or the work that you were studying? Then you had a fantastic education then.

4:29I mean, you got a grant, which was one thing. and you I learnt well you learnt drawing and painting obviously but you learnt woodwork silversmithing architecture anatomy it was a fantastic art education I did that for a year and then somebody one of the teachers thought I should try for the Royal College and then went into national service it was the RAF you served in what were your experiences like that At that time, of course, you had to do national service. Most of my contemporaries got away with it. They either acted mad or gay, and one or two shot a toe off. What, seriously? Yeah, a few shot a toe off.

5:19Not people you knew? No, nobody on you directly. Oh, sorry, I think they meant friends of yours. No, people, young men in the art world who were due to do their national service avoided it, shall we say. I thought it's easier just to do it. Did you enjoy it? Looking back, I did. At the time, not. I mean, at the time, it was a terrible... I have rather sort of sensitive skin and to wear that uniform, tickly uniform. No, it was pretty awful, really, and it was two years out of my life. One of your earliest pop artworks from 1961 is called The First Real Target. it's in the National Collection, it's in Tate Britain, I think.

6:00Was that inspired by the RAF roundels that you saw on the wings of the planes? It probably was. I mean, looking back, there was a big gap between being in the RAF and using it as a motive. But it came from that time, I'm sure, yeah. So you enrolled in the Royal College of Art to study painting in 1953. If this was all relatively new to you, who were the major artistic influencers when you arrived at college? Well, my contemporaries as students in the year before were Bridget Riley, Frank Arbuck, John Bratby. But you were being influenced then by your peers or by those people? I had very good teaching staff.

6:43I mean, Ruskin Spear, Johnny Minton, Carol Waite. I mean, superb teachers, all of them. And they actually taught you. I mean, if you were the first year, you had to only be in the life room and they would come round and ask you to stand and they would then demonstrate and sometimes kind of rub your drawing out. I mean, now they'd be sued, wouldn't they? You couldn't possibly do it. But they would do a demonstration drawing. So you really were taught. Did you take to it straight away, given that you had expected to become a graphic artist and then made this detour into fine art. Oh, I loved it.

7:27I loved going to the college. I mean, I remember wonderful kind of November mornings, walking through the fog and going in, and you had to book in at 9 o 'clock. It was quite strict. Just going to art school was wonderful, and we were grateful. You know, we appreciated being there. You know, it was fantastic.

7:54On this show, Peter Blake, I ask my guests to choose the most significant influences and experiences that inspired their own work. And your first choice for this programme is Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, which was premiered on stage in New York in 1953 and then on BBC Radio the following year. So that was when you were at the Royal College of Art, I guess. Is that when you first knew of it? How did you come across it? That's when I first heard it on radio. This is the BBC Third Programme, Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas. To begin at the beginning. It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and Bible black.

8:41The cobbled streets silent and the hunched quarters and rabbits wood limping invisible down to the slow black. slow, black, crow-black, fishing-boat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as... The Welsh kids at the college from Cardiff and Swansea were fascinated by it, and quite a group of them did work about it, did paintings about it. And so I was kind of immersed in it from the other students. Blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the welfare hall in widow's weeds. And only many years later decided to illustrate it and then it took me 28 years to illustrate and it's now a book.

9:32Well, this was an epic project that you undertook and culminated in 2013 at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff and it was a series of 170 artworks, mixed media, I think, wasn't it? watercolours and collage and drawings, all inspired by Under Milk Wood. So why did it take so long, 28 years? It's a lot of work. I mean, there were 27 watercolours. The opening of Under Milk Wood is that everybody in the little town dreams, and Dylan Thomas describes their dream. So there were 27 dreams. And then I took on the task of doing a portrait of everyone that's mentioned, even if they don't have a speaking part, as it were.

10:20So, I mean, you would think, if you've read Under Milk Wood, that there are two men of God. In fact, there are four, but they're only mentioned... In passing. Yeah, in passing. But I made a portrait... So there are 60 portraits, and then there are something like 80-something, done in various mediums. So some are pencil drawings, some are rather old-fashioned, kind of crosshatch pen and ink drawings, actually using a pen. Some are photographs, and they're all mixed medium. And so as you were creating these characters and this imagery over the course of nearly three decades, were you listening? Did you go back to that original Richard Burton recording or some of the other recordings?

11:05I listened to the recordings, the Richard Burton one. I couldn't quote you any of it, oddly enough. My mind doesn't work like that, but I just listened and played it pretty much all the time. You can hear the dew falling and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast and slow asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest before dawn minutely dew-gray stir of the black, dab-filled sea, where the Arethusa, the Curlew, the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride. Did you visit Larne in Carmarthenshire, where Dylan Thomas lived and worked and was inspired to write under Bob Wood?

11:58Absolutely. We planned a trip to Larne to take photographs for me to work from. We went into Browns, the pub, and there was a film crew there, and I thought well there probably is most of the time and I said what's going on and his wife Caitlin of course had gone back to Larn for the first time since his death so she hadn't been back for 30 years and she happened to be there she happened to be there that day which is extraordinary She was doing a book signing in the little bookshop in Larn. So I got some wonderful photographs of her and Dylan's daughter. So it was just an extraordinary coincidence.

12:47So you chatted to Caitlin as well? Yeah. About the process? She was quite old then. Yeah. Old, like me now, I mean. That really is amazing. Yeah, it is.

13:05Your next big influence is the music hall artist Max Miller. There are precious few of you who can't call up a picture of Max Miller's gorgeously coloured plus fours, his white hat and that saucy twinkle in the roving eye of the cheeky chappy. So why have you chosen him? I just loved him. I've got a pocket full of sunshine And a heart that's full of song And when I see you, all I want to do I was very interested in the musical anyway. And once I was at the Royal College, of course, Chelsea Palace was a walk away from the college and there were many musicals in London. And eventually I wrote my thesis on Paul Raymond introducing nudity into musicals to keep them going, to revive them.

14:02In fact, it killed them eventually. So I was going to all these new shows to do the thesis. And, of course, they were combined with all the other artists. And Paul Raymond was running these theatres in Soho. He owned them, yeah. He owned them. He owned the theatres. He was known as the king of Soho at one point, I think, wasn't he? Putting on these shows, but they were... Well, he put on new shows. I mean, in the theatre it was very funny because they weren't allowed to move. They could do tableau vivant where they posed with a piece of cloth across the important bits and didn't move. But there was a stripper called Peach's Page who got around that once by pretending a mouse had come onto the stage.

14:50And there wasn't a mouse, but she ran off the stage away from this fictitious mouse. and the next thing they invented was they'd put her onto a bicycle at one side of the stage, push the bicycle and she'd sit still on the bicycle. So she was moving because she was on the bicycle. But immobile. But immobile, absolutely. But you were writing this thesis about this nudist aspect, nude aspect of the musical pioneered by Paul Raymond. But this was the end of the Max Miller era then? It was coming to an end. Because it was 1956, he called shows things like, hurrah, it's 1956, and things like that. And I called my thesis, don't point, it's nude, after one of the shows.

15:42As they closed the theatres, Max Miller always worked the last week, which was poignant. Just before the theatre itself shut down? The last week, yeah. The only one that didn't do it like that was Chelsea Palace, where Liberace played the last week. So you went to see Max Miller? You saw somebody? Oh, a lot of times, yeah. 20 times. And what was the appeal then? Just give us a Max Miller show for those who don't even know the sort of variety that he was performing. Well, his reputation was that he was naughty. He was the Cheeky Chappy, wasn't he? The Cheeky Chappy was his title, yeah. I said to my father, I said, Dad, I said, I want to get married.

16:23I said, all right, son. Who do you want to marry? I said, I'd like to marry Miss Green. He said, you can't. I said, why not? He said, she's your half-sister. He said, when I was a lad, I had a bike and I got around a bit.

16:37I said,

16:43all right, I'll marry Miss White. He said, you can't. She's your half-sister. Forget about it. Well, I was a bit despondent and I walked around. My mum said to me, she said, what's wrong with you? I said, well, I said to Dad, I wanted to marry Miss Green. And he said, I couldn't because she was her half-sister. I said, all right, well, I'll marry Miss White. He said, you can't. She's her half-sister. She said, look, you go and marry which one you like. He's not your father anyway. And he had two books of jokes, a red one and a blue one. And he'd read, the red ones were kind of innocent and the blue ones were the naughty ones.

17:18Blue humour, literally. And he was actually banned from radio for a pretty naughty joke, but it's just too naughty to say on radio. Really? Even today? Give it a try, it must be. Well, you can cut it out. Yeah. He was on a narrow path going round a mountain and he ran into a lady coming the other way and said, I didn't know whether to... I can't have forgotten it. I didn't know whether to toss myself off or... Block her passage. Block her passage, yeah. It's gone down the ages, that one. Block her passage comes first. How could I have forgotten that? Yeah, it's a joke that possibly doesn't land so well in 2024, is it?

18:08But probably was hilarious in 1956. Oh, it was, yeah. And by then, the theatres were dying, so there were very few people there. I mean, even a crowd would have been eight up in the gallery. I always went up in the gallery. And 20 in the theatre, it'd say, come forward, come forward. And they'd all sit in a little bunch at the front, and he'd work straight to them. But it wasn't just about gags with Max Miller. He was sort of a song and dance man as well, wasn't he? Or he was singing, comic. Well, most comics, if you remember, closed the act with a sentimental song, didn't they? I don't know. Before my son.

18:48Oh, do you know? Do I remember? He had a song called My Old Mum. Right. I ain't half proud of my old mum, and she ain't half proud of me. Oh, I ain't half proud of my old mum The finest fellow a fellow ever had She looked after me when I was just a kid She put me right when I was wrong No matter what I did Oh, I ain't all proud... As an artist, you are so associated with popular culture, of course, but especially the music of the 1960s. But Music Hall is pop culture from an earlier era. How did it influence the work that you started to make, do you think? Well, I think my interest is general in popular culture.

19:40I mean, it's musical and cinema and... Folk art. And circus, particularly, and definitely folk art and outsider art. Was that something when you first started making your art, you know, and you had your own voice, that was something instinctively that you looked to to incorporate? Well, I was very lucky while I was at Gravesend still that Enid Marks, who was a great expert on folk art, stood in for somebody for a year and took a great interest. I mean, she would have been really young then, ten years older than I was probably, and she encouraged us. When did you first come across the term pop art and did you feel that you were at the forefront of a new movement in the late 50s and early 60s?

20:32I think why I was was that suddenly there were people like me in art school. There wouldn't have been before the war. Well, you mean sort of young working-class people who suddenly had access to art schools. Exactly. So the gap between the end of national service and coming out of art school meant that a person like me would be different, and so I was interested in different things and I think pop art came out of that. And was associated right from the start with music and of course this is the dawning of rock and roll as well in the 50s and you were listening to music from America. What about the artists who were emerging at the same time?

21:14Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, the people who are regarded as pioneers of American pop art. How aware were you of what was going on over there? I mean, a pocket history of what was happening was that in the very early 50s, you got Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg in America pioneering and pre-pop art. And then you got pop art itself, which was Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol. Then the actual core of pop art happened in America. And at the same time, in London, you had the independent group at the ICA, which I wasn't a member of, but I went to their meetings. And that spawned Richard Hamilton, Palazzi, architects, musicians, Danny Cordell was part of it.

22:09But did that feel like an essentially British artistic group? Exactly. Rather than something that was responding. At the same time, I was at the Royal College exploring and pioneering what I was doing. So you've got the three movements, really. You've got New York, Independent Group and me. Good evening. Our programme tonight consists of one single film that we've made about four young artists. They're four painters who turn, for their subject matter, to the world of pop art, the world of the popular imagination, the world of film stars, the twist, science fiction, pop singers. A world which you can dismiss, if you feel so inclined, of course, as being tawdry and second-rate, but a world all the same, in which everybody, to some degree anyway, lives, whether we like it or not.

23:05The first, and I suppose in some sense is the leader of the group, is Peter Blake. Blake is 29. He comes from Dartford in Kent, where his father is an electrician. Of the four, he's much the most established. His cheerful, uncompromising comments on the modern world have been exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and so on. And he's sold pictures to all sorts of organisations in America as well as in this country. It was 1962, wasn't it, that Ken Russell made that film Pop Goes the Easel for the BBC's Monitor series and it was about you and your fellow artists Paul Mbote, Derek Bosher and Peter Phillips.

23:46And there's a scene in which David Hockney appears as well where you're all dancing. It was a wonderful film because it was Ken's first feature-length film.

23:59But how were you regarded by the art establishment at that time, do you think? Not seriously, shall we say. And still not, in a way. I mean, now it's done. My career is kind of complete in a way. You are Sir Peter Blake as well. I am Sir Peter Blake. And I've pretty much shown everything I want to show. But at the time you felt that it was sort of derided because it wasn't proper art. It was light. It was light. I didn't actually turn down painting the Queen, but when Anna Goni did the second portrait, Roy Strong who was then head of the National Portrait Gallery suggested that I ought to do this sort of official portrait of the Queen and she actually chose Anna Goni to do it quite rightly I mean she must have, if she looked at my pictures then she must have been nervous that she'd come out with badges on or something new and so it was a wise decision I mean I got very serious at one point and kind of slightly doom laden I mean, for instance, as a fine artist, to actually paint a pin-up girl in the same spirit as a professional artist was unknown.

25:18I mean, no-one would have done... Hundreds of nudes, but life poses. And to paint a pin-up... So it was OK for Velasquez... A nudity... To paint a nude figure, but it was derided when you were using everyday contemporary imagery then. Yeah, pretty much. This picture's called the girly door. I've also done the door of the young Frank Sinatra. This is a Kim Novak wall. I've done other walls, the Everly Brothers, Superman and Shirley Temple, Laverne Baker. They're usually entertainers. And it was about the materials, you know, the use of collage techniques and those images from the pop and film worlds and whether it's Marilyn Monroe that you were depicting or advertising logos, Coca-Cola.

26:06What did those materials and that imagery offer you as an artist, do you think? I suppose a whole new field of imagery. I think my language was different to the other pop artists. This is the love wall. It's like a love shop, really. All the postcards are in the windows. When I did this picture, people said, why do you stick the things on, why don't you paint them? And when I do paint them, they say, why did you bother to paint them? Why didn't you just stick them on? You just can't win.

26:49Your next choice for this cultural life, Peter Blake, is, of course, the Beatles' 1967 album, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was 20 years ago today Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play The sleeve of which you designed and made with your then-wife Jan Howarth. How did it come about? What was the first call that you had about making the sleeve? Well, the Beatles were making the record. They were friends with Robert Fraser, the gallerist who was the gallery I was with. He then got the contract, which was, I think,£1 ,000. There was a lot of money at the time to make a seat. So he subcontracted me for£200 to do my work.

27:38I then, Jan helped a lot doing it, so I decided she deserved to be credited. Yeah, and got half the fee, I presume. Well, you shared it. Yeah, we were married by then, so we shared it. But it's not a collage, is it? It's a photograph of the Beatles themselves, the real Beatles, standing in front of life-size figures on a set, some cutouts and some waxworks. So can you remember how you put it together, how it was made? Yeah, I mean, it is a kind of collage, but it's a life-size collage. What we did was I asked all the Beatles and Robert and myself and Jan to make a list of people because they decided to be Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band and they'd had the uniforms made and Paul had some kind of idea of them being in some kind of group.