Beyond Adland is an interview project with brilliant people who’ve moved beyond the advertising industry to do something different.
Dave Buonaguidi worked in advertising for 35 years, starting at Howell Henry before going on to co-found two of the most influential creative agencies of their time, St Luke’s and Karmarama. Today, Dave is an artist, also known as Real Hackney Dave.
There were lots of moments where I thought, what am I doing? Is this my life now? The main thing was when I hit fifty. I was at Karmarama. I had a house, a car, kids in good schools. I was married. I had my own business. On paper, it looked great, but I was miserable, and I just couldn't work out why … I saw I was doing a job where I was having to act the whole time. I was no longer being creative because I just sat in meetings all the time, shovelling shit, cleaning up other people's messes, and because it was my agency, I took it really personally. I just got to the end.
Listen to the interview here 👇 or read the transcript below.
When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch. He had the nicest clothes, he drove nice cars, and he always knew how to make money. I loved watching him because he was on the verge of illegality, but was one of the most interesting characters.
You co-founded two of the most influential creative agencies of their time, St Luke's and Karmarama. What set you apart from other creatives of your generation?
The bloke I did them both with, Naresh Ramchandani, is like me. He's from an immigrant family, born over here, so we didn't have any British DNA. When you've got a country in your DNA, it makes it easier to engage with it, whereas we were outsiders — or felt like outsiders — and that's why I enjoyed working with him, when we first started working together. I was employee number six at Howell Henry, and he was employee number ten. So we had known each other for a long time, and we just got on.
There was a little group of us at Howell Henry that we used to call Immi Club, which were all the immigrants. It was like when you’re at school, you find yourself hanging around with the people a bit like you, because it makes it safe.
The thing that made me feel different was the same thing that Naresh felt different about: we were always looking for different, better ways of working. The thing that always frustrated me in advertising was it's very old fashioned. It's run by the same systems that they've been running for thirty or forty years. So when we had an opportunity to run our own place, we immediately thought, this is a great opportunity to try and do something different, and maybe it's a competitive edge.
We did stuff like, don't enter awards. Personally, I think awards are the cancer that has completely humiliated advertising. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's navel gazing. Ad agencies seem to think it’s the most important part of the business. Most important part of the business is somebody pays you to help them sell a product or provide a service, and that's your fucking job, and you do it and hope that you did a good enough job that they'll come back the following year.
When we set up, we always said, we do certain things, but we don't do certain things. That made it exciting. It gave us an opportunity to try and do something different and provide a better place to work for people who felt like us. And it worked for a period of time. It was that weird thing with both of those agencies: they were really good right at the beginning, when everyone was mad. All those people you attract when you set up, they love the late nights, love the drama, love the lack of paddings. It’s just 100% the whole time. It’s fascinating.
When did you start thinking about leaving advertising?
I had lots of little moments. When I was working at Howell Henry, I met some really nice people on holiday, who happened to live around the corner from me in South London. And they’d say, we're having a barbecue, do you want to come over this weekend? I’d say, No, I'm working. I just lost all friendships. I had lots of colleagues. But I don't drink, I don't do coke, I don't do any of that fun stuff, and I don't go sleeping with people I work with. I ended up being really isolated. And I quite enjoyed that. Because as a creative I really understand now, the importance of depressurising. When I've had a really long day, sometimes I just like going home and sitting in the dark. No TV, nothing.
There were lots of moments where I thought, what am I doing? Is this my life now? The main thing was when I hit fifty. I was at Karmarama. I had a house, a car, kids in good schools. I was married. I had my own business. On paper, it looked great, but I was miserable, and I just couldn't work out why. Living in London in the 21st century is about as good as it's ever been for middle-class white boys like me. I had everything, and I was still miserable, and I saw I was doing a job where I was having to act the whole time. I was no longer being creative because I just sat in meetings all the time, shovelling shit, cleaning up other people's messes, and because it was my agency, I took it really personally. I just got to the end.
Karmarama had taken over another company that had more people than us. Our culture, that was very rich and tangible, suddenly got diluted by a bunch of people that I personally would never have hired, but we'd had backing from an investment company that was an interesting way of us growing. I remember looking around thinking fucking hell, if I was an employee, would I want to work here? Absolutely not. My marriage was breaking down because I was always at work. I just felt really pathetic. I felt quite ashamed, actually, that I allowed it to happen. But when you're part of the service industry, you can't be a wanker. You've got to be nice if you want to hold on to business and attract people. So you you let it eat you up internally.
When I hit fifty, I suddenly realised, shit, man, I might have eighty summers, if I'm lucky, and I've done fifty already, so I've got fewer ahead of me than I’ve got behind me. And I know it sounds quite dark, but I had an incident when I was fourteen where I died — I was found hanging on the stairs by my sister — and it never really affected me. But when I hit fifty, I suddenly thought, shit, I could have … I'm lucky. I've been respawned. I've had a second chance, and I've experienced some incredible things. But I've just spent my whole time working for other people and trying to satisfy them and make them happy. I've never done anything for myself.
For me, the cultural part that was the bit that I enjoyed. I liked having weird things in the office. We had a sweet shop in Karmarama — a little room that had sweets and cigarettes and things in it, and we'd ring the bell at three o'clock and people would come and buy a bag of sweets off me. I love the fact that we had that: it was stupid, but it made me feel we were different. That culture drove it. Once I realised that the culture didn’t know what it was there to do, I felt I was running out of time, I needed to do something that made me feel good. So, for once, I thought I'm going to be really selfish, and I just pulled the plug, I walked out of Karmarama, and then I left my wife a year later.
It was the most horrific period of my life. Horrendous, because you lose everything. Twice. I gave the business away. They sold it. I didn't make any money out of it. Then I lost whatever else I had saved up, and the house, in the divorce. But I look back on it and think, fuck, as bad as it was, it's great, because now I taste the freedom that I have, the fresh air. I've got my motorbike, my van and my studio.
Everybody has to go through turmoil. It’s painful at the time, but it's working out what do you want to do afterwards? Fifty to fifty-five was really awful. I'm trying to write a book about it, for people in their fifties to be clear about what they want to do and what their role is in life, above and beyond being a dad or a mum or whatever. That thing of just being happy, finding something that makes you feel happy.
We're very good in the modern world at thinking, I'm going to get a good job, and I'm going to build myself up to get an even better job, and the money will make me happy, and it doesn't. It just creates a thing that you're part of, and ultimately finding that thing that you love that makes you feel fucking amazing, is essential for your happiness.
We don’t think about that enough, because we're stupid. We make decisions in our teens that are going to affect us until our fifties. When I've lost jobs, when we set up St Luke's, when I split up with Naresh, they were all formative moments in my life. And I thought: this is your chance to do something really good. Shit or bust. You're in a burning building, you got to jump out the window, otherwise you die. It's about how you react.
I do want to read that book. I hope you write it, because I think the truth about ageing is none of us think it's going to happen to us, until it does. This question of feeling safe and valued. I think that means something so different when you're in your twenties. What does that mean when you're over fifty?
You have different commitments. You're in relationships, you've got mortgages, you've got rent … I was having a conversation my daughter, who's nineteen. She's just started renting a house up in Loughborough, and her car failed its MOT, and she had to find money. I employ her to work here during the summer. She becomes studio manager. And she said, I hate being an adult. And I said, tell me about it. It's fucking hard. Because you'll have some days where nothing will happen, and then you'll have another day where the whole world falls in on you.
If you sit there and worry about all the bad stuff, you get crippled. I said, all you’ve got to do is try and earn enough money to make it okay, to pay for stuff. So that's a focus. And then just go, how do I deal with it? If a dog poos on your carpet, you pick the poo up, you clean it, you throw the poo out, you bleach it, whatever, you deal with it. Just deal with the shit as quickly as possible, so you've got clarity in front of you.
When you get older, you're more experienced, more able to deal with that stuff. But a lot of it is also that drive to try and find something that you love doing. It’s like I said: eighty summers. I'm sixty now. I might only have ten or fifteen good ones left. Fuck it. That's why I've got to be in here 9.30 every day. I make stuff until eight o'clock at night, then I go home and I sleep and I come back and do it again, because it's the only thing that I love doing at the minute, I'm going to give it everything.
Definitely brings focus, doesn't it, that idea of how many summers have we got left.
Today, you're an artist. Dave Buonaguidi, known on Instagram to your followers as Real Hackney Dave.
When I left Karmarama, they put me on gardening leave for a year. I was going to set up another agency and I was thinking about what I was going to do. I just couldn't stand it anymore, and I went and did a screen-printing workshop, four days after I'd walked out. It changed my life. I know it sounds dramatic, but I did it, and I suddenly realised that I'm studio, not boardroom. It's like those videos on TikTok where people are putting clothes on cats, and they just walk around like they can't. It was like that with me. Wearing nice clothes is not what I do. I like wearing shit, covered in ink.
When I walked into the studio at Print Club, it was an epiphany. I've suddenly felt I was surrounded by people who were like me, which I'd never had, never in advertising, never at school, maybe at art school when I was eighteen. People who thought like me, who were vulnerable, like a lot of creative people are, but people who are very supportive, and I've never experienced that in the corporate world, because nobody supports anybody in the corporate world. You show any sign of weakness, you're fucking dead. I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with that studio thing. For me, the studio is the safest place. Even if I'm not working, I'll still leave home at nine o'clock to get in here for 9.30 and I'll just sit here, because it's my place.
You describe turning up at the Print Club and feeling you'd almost arrived home and you were suddenly among people that were like you. How have your relationships or connections shifted since you've become an artist?
I'm a lot more open. When you work in an environment where you're having to act the whole time, and pretend you're something else … I was going off a script when I was in meetings with clients. I didn't feel I could say what I wanted to say, and I didn't feel I could be my own personality. An ad agency is the personality of all the clients it's got, and so you have to be very wary about who you are and what you say.
I like being stupid, and self-deprecating, and honest. And it was something I was never allowed to do, whereas now, through my work, I can be very honest. This is what I do, and hopefully you will like it. But also having that awareness thing of self-editing. I know I need to make money, but not only for logistical reasons. I've got to pay for my rent here. I've got to pay for my kids. I've got money going out, but also because I see money as a sign of validation that you're doing something right, but more importantly, the money I earn goes into being able to buy more shit that I can make. Because when you've got fifteen years left, that's a finite amount of time, and that means you've got a finite amount of projects that you can do. I never want to be in a position where I can't afford it in the budget, which is something that we always used to get in advertising.
As a creative, if you get too many ideas sitting in your head, you just spin around in circles. That was the thing advertising was really bad at: you’d have to produce hundreds of ideas to get to make one. What happens to the other ninety-nine ideas that might be really good? Whereas here you come up with one idea, and you creative direct yourself in order to go, yes, that's right, that's on brand, I'll make it look good. That leads to hundreds of other ideas.
I've got a whiteboard here with hundreds of words that I've written on it, which are the next project I can start to think about and play with, and not try and attribute it to a client. In advertising, you're in destructive mode the whole time, you're always breaking things up. Whereas in the world I'm in now, everything adds up. Everything is cumulative. You come up with an idea and it leads to something else, and you go to interesting places all the time.
Money is such an interesting topic. You've made artworks about it. You talk about it: this strange vibe that artists shouldn't make money. You're clearly a highly commercial creative person, from your advertising time and now. I think your art is beautiful, I'd also say it's highly commercial. Are there other projects that none of us ever see and you'll never sell, or is this artwork — which happens to be very sellable and beautiful — is that your most authentic expression?
A lot of it is driven by the world I was in. I love the medium of posters: three words and a picture. I like instantaneous propaganda. That's influenced me a lot.
You seem to have a really healthy, realistic attitude to money, but then also this sense of being completely free as a creative person. Because there are some artists that don't make any money, but they are also working their arses off every day.
There are lots of different types of artists. If you went to the right art school and were picked up by the right collector or the right benefactor, you could carry on doing those things that you love doing. That's not the world I'm in. I went to Frieze once, and I just walked out. I thought, fuck, I'm not an artist. I'm a printer. These people are artists. When somebody's hanging a kettle off the ceiling and it's got three broken biscuits underneath it, I just don't know what it's about.
I come from a world where: what's the fucking idea? That's how you judge it. When you work in any corporate business, you're looking for a reaction. What's the point you're trying to make? Who are you talking to, and why are you saying it? I think it should be the same with art. Art is very, very passive. It's like: I do pictures of the sea. There's no idea, I just do pictures of the sea. You're going to spend the rest of your life just painting the same fucking coast? I don't get it. I don't understand it, and because I'm functional and very linear, my thing was always, what's the reaction I want to get out of people? I want to make people feel something.
When we do ads, that's how you cut through. That's how you connect with people. You make them feel something. You make them laugh, make them cry. You make them think about their world or their life, or what they're doing that might be right or wrong. You create an emotional connection. All of those great brands, like Apple or Nike, have spent billions of dollars creating that connection. When you pick up an Apple phone, or queue up overnight to get a new phone, you're doing it not because it's a phone. It's because you feel creative, or because you feel sporty. You feel superior. I don't think there's any difference with art.
My ambition is not to be one of those artists that sells sprints for ten thousand pounds. I hate that kind of stuff. I want everybody in the world to be able to have one of my pieces. Now, whether that piece cost them 50p or a quid or a grand, is irrelevant. There are lots of different price points in the world, but I want to sell a lot of stuff to lots and lots of people. I'm a mass manufacturer with the work that I do, because I’ve got fifteen good years left.
Money is vital to me, but it’s also from when I worked in advertising. This is the brief. This is my work. If they're not the same, I'll get fired. I've had thirty-five years of having a threat of being fired and losing face and getting God upset with me and having the Italian family turn against me. So my job was to go, this is the brief. That's my work, and you get them as close as possible in order to 1) do the right thing for the client, and 2) keep your job.
I don't understand artists who’ve got no intention of bringing those things closer together: what they do and what people like. It’s part of the education problem. At art school, you're not taught how to become a professional artist. You're taught how to develop your technique. It's flaccid. That’s only half of the problem. The main problem is being successful enough to continue your craft.
I absolutely relish being commercial. I love the idea that I do something that lots of people like. I love the commerciality of: this is what people are doing, this is what people are thinking about, this is what people like.
I hadn't thought about that before, but yeah, you're absolutely right. For some artists, there's a certain privilege that lets them carry on working in a certain way. And perhaps if you're actually trying to earn your living from it, you just have to be more pragmatic.
You do seem intent on changing behavior. You have these messages for people. What's the big message you're trying to tell the world?
It's that journey that I've been on: the self-discovery of understanding who I am and what I love. I was in the dark for so long. I wasn't doing what I loved, I had no idea who I was as a result of it. When I walked into Print Club that day to do that workshop, it was like somebody took my hand and walked me through a walled garden into a new pasture. It makes the hair on my arm stand up thinking about it, because it was such a massive moment for me. I've become obsessed by that.
I talk to a lot of people who are in the same position I was in. They're in a job they hate and they don't know where they're going. We sit down and have a cup of tea, and we talk about it. There are some functional steps that I've taken. Nothing I've done is miraculous or wasn't solved by doing a bit of research, understanding, listening, reacting, and working: all those things you’d do in any other job, if you wanted to keep your job. That's how you succeed. That's how you progress in your career.
That process is the thing that sometimes scares people. Absolutely terrified me, because being fifty-five and starting a new career is not good. You're dead man walking. You’ve just got to knuckle down and get on with it. You can't bail, because if you bail, you're out.
Print Club have a studio, which is a big open space with lots of machines in it that you can rent by the hour. But they also have desk space. My marriage wasn't in a good place and I thought, if I've got to spend a year at home, I'm dead. So I rented desk space from Print Club, because I needed to be in the environment that would allow me to be right next door to the studio, come up with ideas in my little space, then run next door and make it.
It was really useful, because they had a gallery upstairs, and I’d talk to them. I didn't have any work, but I went up to them and said, can you just show me your top ten selling artists? And they said, what do you want to know that for? And I said, I just want to know who I'm competing with. The gallery said, what work have you got? I said, I've got nothing, I’m starting from scratch, but I need to know that if I want to do this, which is, instinctively, what I want to do, I want to know who I'm competing with.
I looked at the top ten, and could see that I was nowhere near the top. I was eight or nine. Probably a little bit better ideas-wise. When you've worked at the hard end of advertising — we had some pretty good agencies — I was good at coming up with ideas, so I thought, I've got no problem with the ideas, but it's the technical stuff I need to start again with.
But I also had a relationship with a guy, Dario, at Jealous Gallery. I'd done a piece when I was still working in advertising. I messaged him out of the blue. I’d built a statue of Charles Saatchi when he strangled Nigella Lawson. I wanted to do something that took the piss out of him, but turn it into a piece of art. So I built a massive, full-size model of Charles Saatchi with an interactive arm that you could get a selfie with, being strangled by him. He had a red head and horns because he’d published a book called ‘Be the worst you can be’. And I just thought he was such an arrogant tosser. I did it, and I messaged Dario, just said, Do you want to do something naughty? No pictures, no hi there, I'm Dave. It was just: do you want to do something naughty. And he responded straight away. Since then, I've had this amazing relationship with him, where he mentors me. We're friends, we share lots of stuff.
That reply to the email was huge for me, because I ended up in The Sun. It was amusing to see how sometimes those little moments in life, those connections, can suddenly become something, and I've been become very aware of those moments, and then absolutely rinsing them when they do arrive, to try and maximise the end point, which is momentum.
When I did the research, Anthony Burrell was doing really well with his particular style of work. I'm not the first person that's ever done words on paper, but I looked at all the other people doing words on paper, and thought how can I make my stuff different? It might just look different or it might have a different tone. It was exploring language and personality: all the stuff you do on an hourly basis in an ad agency, when you're working on a pitch or a new brief for a client, you have the guard book with all the information. It was just a question of finding those things gradually and building it. Once I found what I liked and what I was good at, then I could just play a lot more.
What makes the difference between staying stuck and moving on?
A lot of it is driven by fear and familiarity. When you've been walking around in circles, you create a groove, and at some stage that groove becomes problematic to step out of. It depends how desperate you are. I use the analogy of standing in a burning building, when I look back at my life when I was fifty. It absolutely felt like that. I was going nowhere. In this era where I have so many luxuries and I was still ashamed to be doing what I was doing, it was a total slap in the face. And I thought, you know what? This is not fucking good enough, and I've allowed it to become like that.
You've got to do something about it. Stop whining, bat your face, have a cold shower and get out and fucking make it. That sort of pressure is something I've experienced millions of times. Anybody that's worked in advertising for any stretch of time will know that, because that's what you're expected to do.
It's never easy. Anything that any of us do, we'll never get three good days in a row. Just keep fucking going. This is what I said to my daughter: deal with it. As you get older, you understand how to do it, and you worry less.
Now I'm at that fuck it stage in my life where I don't worry about anything. I mean, I worry about lots of things, but I really don't worry about anything — there's enough shit going on in the world that makes it the most petrifying and horrific place to be. But when I unlock my door, open the door here, come down and do what I've got to do, it's simple.
That's such a deep truth, that it's never easy. I think a lot of us are searching for certainty and this kind of ultimate safety, but actually, it's never easy. And I think that's maybe the truth.
You have to create it. It gets back to when we did St Luke's. I’d worked in environments that were really cut-throat for years. And I was just an employee, just a piece of meat on a wagon. If I left or got fired, they'd have somebody else replace me. Whereas the thing I loved when we when we did St Luke's, was finding young talent and mentoring it.
I went to Channel Four after St Luke's; I tried to treat it like an art school. They had a weird thing at Channel Four where you weren't hired permanently, you'd be on two year contracts. I sat down with all of the people that worked for me and said, What do you want to do? And they said, no one's ever asked me that. And I said, yes, because we just get you in to cut edits or shoot things. But what do you want to do? And they’d say, I really want to make pop promos. And I said, then I'll sit down with our Head of Production and we'll give you the jobs that will enable you to become a promo director, so that in two years’ time, or whenever your contract is up, you can leave and go and do what the fuck you want to do. What a brilliant place to be! You're basically paid pretty well to go to college and learn, and have a vision for a stretch goal.
Whereas in advertising, you're hired permanently, and you carry on going and hopefully you do better work every year, and you get more responsibility and more money and more power or whatever it is you're after. And it carries on like that. But what's your stretch goal? What is it that you want to do? And when you focus on that, and when you have that vision, it materialises, because you can see it and feel it and smell it, and then you want to be doing it.
I've had that on various occasions in my career, and especially now. As long as you're always going forward, that's good. I think sometimes we take ourselves too seriously, or we think we've cracked it, or we just fall apart. We fall in, fall in line, and just carry on to the beat of somebody else's drum. There are some of us who just don't want to do that, and the biggest thing is going, no, I don't want to fucking do that. And then pointing yourself in some general direction that will allow you to stop doing that and go somewhere that you really want to go.
For me, the biggest moment is understanding this isn't right, this isn't good enough, and doing something.
It's like in a relationship: we've all been in awful relationships. My daughter split up with her boyfriend at the beginning of the summer, and we were having a conversation about it, and I said, you'll look back on it now and think, I should have done that a year ago. Just like whenever we leave jobs, when we leave, we realise we should have left a year ago.
It takes a lot to get you out of that little rut you've created. Because it's hugely disruptive. Divorce, losing a job, it's fucking horrific, you sweat. But once you get used to that, and once you've done it a few times, you actually quite enjoy the fact that if your hand's in a fire, you take your fucking hand out of the fire.
The thing I love is guiding people, or giving people a little bit of information that might unlock that door into the next corridor that could be the thing that you really want to do.
What would you say to someone thinking of making a step away from advertising?
Do it, as quickly as possible. It was very good to me, and I was very good to it — I did a lot of things for a lot of people, that made that business tolerable. Not only clients, but staff and colleagues. But I think people get into advertising thinking it's a creative business, and it's not at all. It's just a checklist. It becomes like solving a crossword puzzle, where you've got a certain amount of words, a certain amount of time, and you've got to solve the problem. I do enjoy that. I love solving problems with really smart people, but it's not creative in any way at all. You're having to talk in a different language. You can't be yourself. You work with people that are disruptive and Machiavellian and there are too many hidden agendas. If you're into that kind of shit, good luck to you. But if you're not, and from experience, all the creative people, with one or two exceptions, we're all very similar. They're looking for opportunities to flex and have some fun and create something that is exciting. It's not that business anymore. It's a colouring-in exercise. You're told what you've got to do, when you've got to do it, and you've got no money.
They want too much information going into stuff, and as a result, you end up with vanilla ice cream, and it's just the most soul destroying. But there still seems to be this weird attraction to the business. I don't get it. I think it's because the industry side of the business is the most exciting part of it: going to Cannes every year, doing coke with strangers, getting off with people at parties. It's just all of that “fun stuff”. But I never did any of that stuff. I never wanted to. My job was to be of service to my clients, and they’d want me to do something really good for them, that would work. And that's the buzz I got. When I got the phone call saying ‘we have to take the ad off air because we've run out of product’. Brilliant. That's what I'm there to do, not all the other bullshit around the edges.
The advertising industry has a very specific relationship with time. We're always working to certain time lengths, and time pressure is a defining characteristic. How has your relationship with time changed?
Because I came to my new world and I don't have much time, I need to use my time in the most beneficial way. I do a lot of work, but I don't work a lot. I like sitting around watching Netflix for a bit, and then I'll jump up and do something. But I like being in control of my time.
The thing I hated about advertising, certainly when I was at Karmarama, was being in meetings from 7.30 till eight o'clock at night. My diary was like Tetris. They’d say, there's a seven minute slug between that meeting and the other one; can you have a meeting in the cab on the way back? It was exhausting. It was soul destroying. Whereas now, I like to get in early, because I like the discipline of getting on my bike and going to my place of work; it's my job, it's my career.
But then, as my daughter sees when she's doing work experience, we sit around watching TV a lot and talking about stuff, and waiting for screens to dry, or waiting for screens to expose, and then washing them out and drying them, and then suddenly you have this very intense bit of printing. And you get that excitement of looking at something. I like being in control of my own time, and I was never allowed to be.
I also like the idea of being able to do stuff really quickly, and then some stuff really slowly. When you work in a factory where you've got all the machines waiting, I can have an idea on my motorbike, and know I can turn it around very quickly. And then other times — I've just been doing this series of icon prints — I've been working on that for a year and a half, trying to work out how to do it properly. I'll print a bit, and it will not look good, and then I'll try it again. And now I've worked it out, and I've done them all. So I've got Kate Moss, David Bowie, Nick Cave, Grace Jones and Debbie Harry. They're all waiting to happen. I've just got to drop the layer of glitter on them.
So some things, I'll spend a huge amount of time on. Other things, it's just one layer. I can do it really quickly. I love having the ability to do that, whereas in the corporate world, it was all so process-led. You couldn’t ever react quickly, because you'd have to wait: the planner is in Norfolk, he's had a long weekend. So you'd have to wait for him or her to come back, and then you'd have to have a meeting. And then we could only have a meeting on Thursday, because everyone's really busy, and it's just like fucking hell: the amount of time you waste.
You’re pretty independently minded, I think it's fair to say, but you don't appear to work in the solitude that many writers and artists seem to, or seem to feel they need. Your Instagram is full of collaborations and group visits, and the print studio sounds really lively. What's your preferred way of working? What do you get from being with others?
Bit of everything, really. I live on my own. I don't have many friends. I've got lots of people that I hang around with occasionally, but I don't socialise. I don't do dinner parties, I don't get drunk, I don't go to the pub. My personal time and space is really important to me, because I also find it quite exhausting. When you're doing work, it's like the pressure on a bottle of champagne — when the cork comes out and it all comes out. Again, if you’ve worked in advertising, you recognise that when you're doing a pitch, the amount of effort, the amount of time and self doubt all builds up. Then when you do the pitch, you're physically shattered afterwards. You need two or three days where you can build back up.
I was feeling devastated last week when Ricky, who I share a studio with, left for Stockholm. My daughter has gone back to uni, my girlfriend's away for a week, and I'm on my own. It feels really weird and very exposing: where's my little gang gone? I like to have people there —if he’s doing his thing, I can sit there and talk about what he's doing, or we can have lunch together. And my daughter's down here and we've got work to do. I love that, but also I really like the solitude.
When we're done, I'm going to turn the lights off and watch a bit of Dexter. I like Dexter. And I like the fact that I wouldn't have been able to do that if either of those two had been in. It’s just being in control of your time. If I don't want to do it, I'm not going to do it. If I want to do it, I'm going to do it. That's a very luxurious and selfish situation to be in. But that's the situation I've carved myself, and I want to make sure I enjoy it while I have the opportunity to.
You’ve spoken quite honestly, today and also at other times, about your disillusionment with the advertising industry. But when I was reading your book, Blah! Blah! Blah! I was quite moved by the zest and focus of you in your early days. When you look back over the 35 years you spent in advertising, what remains?
I did it. I look back on that with some sense of achievement. It feels like climbing a mountain. You're doing it for no other reason but climbing a mountain. We did some amazing things. I had some amazing colleagues, and we had moments that were just incredible. Alongside that, there were some moments that were horrific, but I'm glad I did it. Anybody that's been in the Army for thirty years, or done anything — been married for thirty years — it's an achievement.
I don't look back at any of the work that I did, as much as I enjoyed it. I've always had a weird relationship with work, and I have the same relationship with my art. Formulating and production is really exciting for me, but once it's done, it's gone. It's more the next things that I'm thinking about. It used to drive me mad in advertising, when it was like making Fabergé eggs. The crafting and the amount of money and time to make this wonderful thing, and then we put it on an award and it would be revered. I'm just like, fucking move on, man. Just do it. Get it out of your system. Get onto the next thing. That's the thing that I've always been excited about.
The thing I'm most proud about in advertising is that we created some amazing places, notably St Luke's and Karmarama. There was a lot of happiness and a lot of joy, and a lot of the things that I wanted, which was to feel safe and to feel valued and to feel that I was part of something that just had real momentum. And that was all done by St Luke's being a co-operative; Karmarama being based on the concept of karma. So when you joined, it was like joining a bit of a cult. There were certain things that you did and certain things you didn't do. And if you wanted to do things that we didn't do, then you wouldn't get a job there. It required you being all in. When I was at Howell Henry, when it was six people, I was all in. I gave them everything, and I loved the fact that I was a little bit selfless. And I loved the fact that when I employed some people, they were selfless as well to me. I never tried to behave like that asshole boss that would squeeze all the juice out of the orange and then spit it out.
I loved being there with them. I loved being part of something that made people feel valued and important, made them feel like they were part of something bigger. That's the thing I'm most proud about, is that we made a lot of people feel really good about what they did. The interesting thing about both Karmarama and St Luke's is they were positioned as the sort of agency that was the last place you worked before you went off and did what you wanted to do. That makes me feel really good. Because if we can be the key in the door that opens to something else, fantastic.
Wonderful. Final question. What matters most to you today?
The functional things, like health, and petrol in my motorbike. It’s that kind of daily energy, combined with ambition. I don't really know what my ambition is, because COVID threw everything out the window. In 2020 when I started as an artist full-time, I thought, I'd like to have two shows in London with different galleries, and I want to do fairs around the world. And of course, for the next three years, all of that went to pop.
Suddenly, all of my long-term thinking got shrunk into what's the next thing I'm doing? That's all I focus on now. Looking at my whiteboard and thinking, what are the next three things that I'm going to get on with, and having the excitement and the energy and the ambition to fulfill on those and to make them as good as they can be. And at the same time, building relationships and continuing relationships with the people that either like my stuff, or that I can talk to about selling my stuff — independent people, Instagram, but also galleries.
I've got no ambition to be a thousand pound print artist like Damien Hirst. My stuff isn't investment art. My stuff is emotional, feeling art. That's why you can buy it for fifty quid, or I've got a big, eight foot, one tonne bomb that you can pay fifty grand for, but the way I price things is based on how much it cost me to make it. I like thinking well, if it cost me ten pence to make, then sell it for a quid. Playing with it.
What means more to me than anything, is having that ambition combined with the energy to want to still be excited about it. There's nothing to be fucked off about in my world. It's really, really simple. The people I work with are really nice. The galleries that I work with are very nice and very functional for me, and I have a good relationship with them, but I've worked with them in the same way that they work with me, and that requires being professional and delivering work on time and to a certain quality. It's very one-dimensional.
It sounds amazing.
It's amazing. Best thing that I've ever done, and the best job I've ever had, and I've had some pretty good jobs. It's just exactly right for who I am and what I'm about.
That's the thing that I really love to share. Everybody is different, and everybody has different goals and ambitions and techniques and styles, but I think a lot of it is being aware of doing that thing that makes you feel good. And you know, it's out there.
So this is Real Hackney Dave, isn't it? That name that you cobbled together for Instagram, it sounds like it's actually quite good.
You know what? That's what I mean about sometimes there are these little moments that whoever is playing the simulation, or whatever it is, they hand you these little bits of paper, and you either use it or you don't use it. I love taking advantage of those little moments and seeing what happens. Sometimes they're constructed, and sometimes it's something that you have to think about and manufacture, and other times they're just gifted to you.
When you get to the stage I'm at, where you just say yes to everything, because you know that eight out of ten times something interesting will happen. Two times will be disastrous. But if you just say yes to everything and go with it, and then don't worry about the two, just have fun with the eight; the odds are in your favour.
It becomes so much easier and so much more fun. Because when you close off stuff, or you're suspicious with it, it becomes a little bit toxic and it seeps into you. That's why I love doing collabs with people and just trying stuff all the time. I’m sixty, and I'm just very happy. So why wouldn't I do that?
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