UKNOWN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID KING, DEC 15, 2011

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S: You had gone to Art School in England with Gee Vaucher and Penny Rimbaud back in the 1960's.

DK: That's right.

S: My understanding as a Yank is that back in the 1960's a lot of British invasion bands, as we called them, came out of the English art schools and in the 70's a lot of punk bands like Wire and the Jam, and indirectly, Crass, came out of the art schools. I always thought that the art schools were created by the Labor Government after the war to try and generate cultural exports in order to stimulate a new economic currency to replace the British Empire. You saw this all over Europe where these war weary countries had to figure out new ways of making money. The Italians focused on making suits, ladies' hats and cinema, the French started exporting films and philosophical dissertations and Britian started exporting popular music. The art schools were a resource that was available to all social classes.

DK: Yeah there was an interesting structure to education at that time. There was this notorious exam called the Eleven Plus that you took after Junior School, as we called it. This was right on the cusp of getting into what in the States would be called high school. There were basically two routes of education you could take. One route was towards being middle class and the other was toward remaining working class. The exam was the crossroads: if you did well you went to a school that was based on a liberal arts education. If you didn't do well you went to a school that would prepare you for the trades with a job in the factory or a job in the trades. It was strange how naked the situation was. Everyone knew your life could change drastically at age eleven based on how well you did academically. If you did well you could go to what we called public school and then to college after that. If you went to a trade school you learned a trade and that was it. That was your trade for life. There wasn't much cross over between the trade schools and the liberal arts schools. If you made it into the later you were elevated from the start. If you came from a working class family you would probably do what your parents did. The classes didn't mix unless something strange happened. In the Sixties this started breaking down. For the first time people from the working class had a chance to go to art school which was new then. The whole Swinging Sixties in London consisted of photographers and artists coming from the East End and other working class areas mixing with more upper class people. For a brief period there was talk of a classless society but it never panned out. The Sixties, brief as they were, were a very hopeful period. Up till then everything was sort of set in stone. You couldn't hope to transcend your past. Class was mediated by your accent. Everyone sort of knew where everyone belonged just by the sound of their voice, which is a weird thing. It amazes me to this day. There were some advances in the Sixties in taking this system apart but then it all fell into a pit during the Seventies because things got so economically bad. Then you had Margaret Thatcher and punk in response to her.

S: Of course punk started happening before Thatcher.

DK: Right but I'm going sort of shorthand from my experience. Crass focused a lot of their justifiable hatred on her. Art school was really for people who didn't know what to do with their lives to some extent. I'm not sure exactly how many people who went to art school managed to make careers out it. The art world was much smaller then than it is now. There weren't that many graphic designers whereas now, with the technology, anyone can do it. Graphic design was a mysterious guild where people had to apprentice to learn how to do these arcane things. If you were lucky you might have been able to make a living doing it. I think anyone who went to art school felt very fortunate to be there. There was a sense of freedom and possibility existing in that environment. You felt like you had been given a privilege. The alternative was rather grim. When you went to the Careers Office in high school, for instance, the career officer didn't have much to offer you. A job as a bank clerk was considered a great position since you got a pension at the end of your working life and that was as far as they could see ahead.

S: So you get a pension after fifty years of doing the same thing over and over again?

DK: Exactly. Art school was Nirvana compared to that. I think all sorts of artistic expression came out of that sense of freedom. Bands were included in that. Some very big bands would come to the art school and play. Cream played one of their first gigs at our art school. I met Eric Clapton in the school hall. I was kind of excited because I was a big fan of his and John Mayall's Blues Breakers. My friend John organized this gig and I was at the door collecting admission fees and Eric Clapton comes in and sort of beckons me over - and this was at the time when people were spray painting "Clapton is God" on walls - so "God" is calling me over and I think I'm going to have this great conversation with him and he says: "I'm going to have some friends coming over would you let them in please?" I was, of course, anything you want. This was before everything got huge, that's sort of what it felt like to be in art school in the mid-Sixties. It was all kind of homemade. I loved it. I was there for three years. You got a sort of graduate degree out of it though nobody ever asked me for it. I got a job as a designer right out of college, then art director, so for ten years I did that work. Then that was enough. I wanted to do my own work so I quit my job and moved to the Dial House.

S: How did you meet Penny and Gee?

DK: Well it was a very small school and they were actually a year or two ahead of me. I just met them in the school cafe. Half of the school was the art school and the other half was the trade school. Photography was considered to be a technical trade and not an "art" so if you wanted to study photography that wasn't part of the art school, that was part of the trade school. The photography guys were just these people in white coats with really bad dermatitis from rinsing their hands in developer all day long. The school was H-shaped and the art school was one upright of the "H" and the trade school was the other and the bridge was where the cafe was. This was where both sides met. Those of us from the art school side would go to the other side to learn photography then we could come back to our side for drawing. So I met them both in the cafeteria where both schools could mingle.

S: Now the school was in London?

DK: On the outskirts of London.

S: What I understand is Penny Rimbaud had written a manifesto and you illustrated the cover for what was essentially a hand made self- published book and that illustration became the Crass logo.

DK: Yeah the manifesto was Christ Reality Asylum.

S: And that was a broadside against Christianity?

DK: Yeah it was directed pretty much at whatever you have that's oppressive: the family, the class system, the church, teachers, priests. It was a heartfelt rant. Penny just put it into this sort of zine and made 50 copies. This was before Crass but it was sort of a blueprint for the band. There was all this passion and anger in the document. Where he and I were living at the time there was an old copy machine and we printed Christ Reality Asylum on that. We basically typed the thing onto carbon and then printed it. Then there was a whole stack of gray cardboard to make the covers. Penny said he wanted some sort of logo for it so I made a logo specifically for the cover. It had to be a stencil because that's the only way we could reproduce it. We spray stenciled the logo on the 50 copies and eventually that became the symbol of the band.

S: How did you come up with the logo?

DK: Well the most obvious thing to me was the rant against organized religion in the book. In my mind I thought we needed a cross and someway to symbolize the evil influence so I took the Biblical reference of the snake and just put them together with the snake sort of diagonally negating the cross. It was a simple as that really. I had this book of Japanese family crests, there was one at Dial House as well so both Penny and I had seen this book independently. The first version of the logo was just a Christian cross with a long lower arm and a snake that was just a line crossing it. After looking at the Japanese crest we noticed most of the designs were constrained in a circle that made everything inherently symmetrical. What else can you do with a snake? Do you just have a head and a tail? Another way to do a snake is to have two heads on the snake and everything just built from there. Again it had to be something you could stencil. Each part of the design had to be like a jig saw that you could separate. I was living at Dial House when I made the logo. Penny found the house and rented it in 1967. It was a farmhouse northeast of London in Essex. It was where the farm workers would have lived and was derelict when he found it. He fixed it up with help from other people. Much more recently Penny and the people that live there were able to buy the house. For ten years there was an eviction campaign to try and get them out which was resisted vigorously.

S: The owners didn't like their politics?

DK: No it was just a real estate thing. They wanted to turn the place into a country theme park, like a Disneyland about the English countryside, instead of having a real farm. It would be like Dollywood, or something, with a lot of housing around it. It was a way they tried to sell it to the Council responsible for zoning. Have a theme park about the countryside in the countryside then we can all build however many houses on the land around it as we can. I don't know how aware anyone outside was of the collective's politics. The end result was that Penny and everyone else were successful in buying the house and the land. I started going out there when I was still in art school. I had a friend in my year in school he knew Penny a little better than I did, so he and I, and my friend John, went out to the house and I liked it so much I started staying there on the weekend. I was still living at home at the time. I was just fascinated by the place sensing the possibilities. Eventually I moved in. I only lived there about a year in '76. The band started in '77. There had been some other adventures associated with the house before Crass. There had been some Avant-garde bands, other sorts of large art projects. The Dial House didn't start out being specifically political, it was more about alternative living.

S: Was that your first experience in the country?

DK: Well the house wasn't far from where I lived so I could cycle there from my house and I loved the countryside around there. This was the first time I lived on a farm though I spent a lot of time in the country as a child. I lived on the outskirts of London and was born in Ilford - where the photographic paper comes from. The suburbs of London aren't like the suburbs of American cities, except maybe Los Angeles. London is a vast sprawling place. You could live very far out and still say you lived in London.

S: Penny Rimbaud is interviewed in a documentary that's on-line called No Authority but Yourself and he said that he has a commune that's not based on any kind of hierarchical belief system, religion or political ideology and he thought that the Dial House was unique, or near unique, in that respect. What did you observe there?

DK: Well it's changed over time and I sort of divide things between the Crass years and the pre-Crass years. Earlier it was much more a continuation of art school. People were sort of bohemian and not exactly hippy. They were trying to figure out how you could disengage from the dominant social paradigm and still survive, thrive and enjoy life. Could you grow your own food? Could you support yourself minimally and not have to work all the time just to live? Could you help yourself by pooling all the different sorts of skills that you had among your group? At that time it wasn't so engaged in a dialectic against society as much as it was about questioning how to get away from society and have your own type of community. I think things got more politicized because of the various things that happened to people. Early on it was a very open and fertile environment.

S: When you say various things happened to people like what for instance?

DK: Well if you read any accounts of The Stonehenge Festival Penny's friend Wally Hope was sort of persecuted and basically died from this persecution by, I guess you would have to say, society or the law. Wally was involved with the Windsor Free Festival and the Stonehenge Festival which was held at Stonehenge. Penny's written a whole lot about this. Wally's death really changed Penny. He realized that there were forces out there that didn't really want you to make your own way even if you really weren't bothering anybody. You weren't allowed to go off the grid at that point. I think that changed Penny although I can't speak for him.

S: Well I'm not familiar with this history. Did Wally get beaten up by the cops?

DK: No, no. He was arrested and put in a psychiatric facility and overdosed with psychiatric drugs. He had organized the Stonehenge Festival and that had come to be seen as a cultural threat to the Establishment, if you will, and he became a target I think.

S: I know Gee Vaucher did a lot of the Crass album covers but were you involved in any of the band's graphics aside from the logo?

DK: No. I left just when Steve Ignorant moved into the house. For a brief period it had just been Penny and myself then Steve moved in and the other band members moved in and not too much longer after that I left, so I didn't go to their early gigs. I'd visit every year so I kept connections with everyone but I didn't really have a hand in any of their graphics. Periodically I'd send the band versions of the symbol but that was the extent of it.

S: One thing I noticed about Crass is that there wasn't a lot of racial diversity in Crass but there was definitely gender, age and class diversity. Penny Rimbaud described himself as coming from an upper middle class background and was in his thirties when the band started while Steve Ignorant seemed to be of the same age and background as people like Steve Jones and Jah Wobble, working class tough kid punk rockers. Was the Dial House really accessible to get into?

DK: Yeah it was designed from the beginning to be an open house so people could just come there and stay or just visit or have a meal or volunteer to work in the vegetable patch. Racially at that time England wasn't very diverse and people didn't tend to know people of other races, outside of major metropolitan areas it was pretty white.

S: Why did you come to San Francisco?

DK: I came in '81. I moved to New York in '78 where there was a big music scene and I was in a couple of bands and then one of the bands I was in moved to San Francisco.

S: Which bands?

DK: Well the band I moved out here with was called Arsenal and then the name was changed to Sleeping Dogs. Crass put out a single of ours. I played drums standing up with very little prior experience. Our band changed its name again to Brainrust and Michael Millet of Broken Rekids put out our album.

S: So when you were in New York that must have been when No Wave was going on.

DK: Yeah it was a great time. I got to see Richard Hell and Television. I said there was a big music scene in New York in that there were a lot of active bands but the scene actually occupied a small downtown geography and there was a lot of cross pollination between artists, musicians and film makers. It was a really great period. Scot B., Rick Mitchell... a really great period. I sort of consider myself really fortunate to have experienced what, in hindsight, were the heights of eras defined by their decades like the Swinging Sixties in London then the emergence of punk in the '70's and New York punk in the late '70's then finally San Francisco punk in the early '80's. I went to all the famous San Francisco clubs: The Tool and Die, The Deaf Club, the On Broadway, Club Foot....

S: The Farm?

DK: Yes the Farm.

S: Was the Farm at all like Dial House?

DK: No. The Farm was located down off of Army Street and had the 101 Freeway running right over it. At Dial House you had the sense of being really detached. It was out in the country in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't that far out but to get there you had to walk a mile from the village near there. It used to be that the London Underground train went all the way past the house and in the early days the driver of the train would let you off right by the house and you could just run down the embankment into the garden. That was in the Sixties but then they closed down that branch. If you were driving from the center of London it would be about an hour's drive. It's in this area called the Green Belt that was established all the way around the city so London wouldn't just sprawl forever into the farmland. There was a barrier established. Forested areas were part of that green belt and beyond that were farms.

S: Was it a bit of a leap to move to the United States?

DK: It was a really random decision. I was feeling kind of down and isolated so Penny suggested I visit Gee who was living in New York at the time. I was only going for two weeks but I was so amazed by New York. I couldn't believe the level of excitement and energy and the stuff that was happening there. I just decided to move without thinking far ahead at all. I lived in a loft in Tribeca before it became Tribeca. It was a really large loft and I shared it with two other people and my rent was $80 a month. I think a lot of these renaissance periods happen because the economics are conducive to creativity. People have the time and the energy to make stuff. Whatever it is you do: music, art - you need time. In the Sixties there was finally money coming into British society after the long struggle following the war. I was born in '48 and there was still rationing and our playgrounds were the bomb sights. That was great because there would be this row of normal houses that were all the same and then two or three of them would just be ruins with wildly overgrown weeds and as a boy you could re-fight any war in them you wanted to.

S: There was a lot of interface in the Sixties between the greater culture and the arts - not just art for it's own sake but there was a lot of artistry in the fashion industry and popular culture. Mary Quant had invented the mini skirt, crazy, almost surreal, mod fashion was the rage, you had weird psychedelic TV shows on like The Prisoner, Antonini filmed Blow Up in London. You get that sense of all this stuff going on, that there were a lot of young people with energy and money in the country where there hadn't been before.

DK: That's right.

S: If you look at the difference between British films from the '50's and British films from the '60's in the case of the former you have these angry, bitter black & white films but in the '60's the films still had anger and bitterness but they were in color and colorful and kind of sexy. Where did that money come from? I thought it had to be a mixture of the Beatles and the Marshall Plan.

DK: I don't know. Maybe we got a handout or it comes from the selling off of the last of our colonies. I have no idea. It did seem like it happened almost overnight. For me the magic year was '64 when I went to art school. The world seemed pretty bleak right up to that time. Things had been uniformly gray before that. It's an illusion but it does seem like the Sixties invented color. There had been protests in the '50's against the way things were going. What became the peace symbol started as an anti-nuclear bomb symbol for the nuclear disarmament movement. That started in the '50's and was protesting nuclear bombs being placed on British soil by America. After the Second World War there were American military bases all across Britain and the bombs were brought in. This resulted in a popular upswell amongst the British people against that all across class lines. Many intellectuals were involved.

S: Wasn't it Bertrand Russell who incorporated what became the peace symbol?

DK: Yeah Bertrand Russell. The symbol communicated the letters N and D. The downward fork of the peace symbol was based on semaphore with the flags pointed down. That was the logo of the CND.

S: It's the semaphore signage for "Don't deploy" I think right?

DK: That's what it came to mean.

S: Are you politically active now?

DK: No except in the case of being somewhat left of center and living in San Francisco and being an artist and a gardener. Other than that I don't make any claims.

S: Well I was thinking the Occupy Wall Street movement could use some kind of striking symbol.

DK: Well I might do some work with someone who is involved with printing up the posters and something might come of that.

S: Have you been able to earn a living as a graphic artist?

DK: Barely. In New York I lived doing editorial illustration but it was a lot cheaper to live in New York back then so that was doable. When I moved here there weren't so many publishing opportunities as New York so I started doing gardening work out here. My income came mostly from gardening with draft and design work parallel to that. I've done logos for different bands and record companies. I did a logo for Mordam Records and Broken Rekids and for bands that don't exist anymore like Raining House. It's not something I could really live on. I think when you're English they give you a little trowel and put you out in the garden and see what happens. It's sort of like riding the whale.

S: Riding the whale?

DK: Well there's a film called Whale Rider about this rite of passage for Pacific Islanders where they have to ride a whale as an entry into adulthood. I don't know what they call this movie in the States.