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A CONVERSATION WITH
SCOTT KING
SCOTT KING
interview Martin Hossbach
archival photography Scott King
portrait Ben McMahon
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A CONVERSATION WITH
SCOTT KING
What was your favorite mode of transport
when you were a kid?
looking bloke outside Leeds train station, which I think he’d stolen and cut
down to remove the frame number. That
was only £80 but it was great really, the
first scooter I had ‘on the road,’ when
I was 16. It was a wreck as well, but it
was quite fast … I home-painted that
one too. I painted the word ‘Disillusion’
down the side in white Hammerite.
Well, my mum always tells me that I
was permanently glued to my red plastic
racing car, not literally, but I used to
spend all my time racing round on that,
apparently. I don’t ever remember being
excited about going on trains … I wasn’t
one of those kids. My dad bought me my
first motorbike when I was eight, and although I never went any further than the
back field on it, I’d have to say that my
bike, a Yamaha TY50, was my favorite
mode of transport.
What was next?
Next was a Vespa P200E, I bought it
from a well-known criminal in Goole,
he needed money in a hurry so I got it
for £100. It had a wheelbarrow tire on
the back, totally deadly. I soon got rid of
that one, but not before I’d customized it
and made it worse. Then in August 1986
I bought a beautiful scooter, one I wish
I’d kept all my life. It was called ‘Reflections’ and was famous in the Goole area.
It had been built and painted by a bloke
called Ozzy, an engineer who actually
knew what he was doing—very rare in
those days. It was a Lambretta GP200,
Stage 4 tuned with a 30 mm Dell’Orto
carb and DJ pipe, so it was very fast
for its time. It was painted in candy
apple purple and silver, with a lot of
chrome. By the time I got it, it had seen
better days; the paint was fading and
the chrome was peeling but I loved it.
I used to spend my whole life polishing it, which only adding to my dad’s
suspicions, especially as I got my hair
streaked around this time. I had to wait
until my 17th birthday to ride it legally,
so I had three long months of just cleaning it and admiring it in the garage at
When did you get your first scooter?
Since the 1990s, Goole-born artist, graphic designer and author Scott King has been investigating
image production, the imagistic and emblematic in popular culture—first as art director for i-D
magazine and later as influential creative director for Sleazenation as well as designer of album
covers for Pet Shop Boys, Suicide and Morrissey. He has exhibited his art works in museums and
galleries all over the world and has published several books including ‘Anxiety & Depression,’ ‘Anish
& Antony Take Afghanistan’ as well as the monograph ‘Art Works.’ He loves Dr. Feelgood, The Jam
and Sleaford Mods, and is Professor of Visual Communication at University of the Arts, London. For
The Travel Almanac he takes us to Northwest England to revisit the motorbikes and scooterboys of
his youth, and to marvel at the decaying monument to British industrialism that is Blackpool Tower.
When I was 14. I pestered my dad to buy
it for me. He loves motorbikes and was
openly worried that I might be turning
into ‘one of them,’ as he put it, because I
wanted a Lambretta. My dad has always
equated scooters with homosexuality;
he calls them ‘hairdryers.’ Anyway the
first one I got was a J125 which cost
£145, quite a lot in 1984. It was rubbish. The J Range Lambrettas are a
complete no-no for anyone who knows
about scooters, but of course I didn’t,
I only knew I wanted a Lambretta. I
used to paint it once a month, always
trying to make it look better, but it just
got worse and worse … by the time I’d
finished it looked like a meltdown at
the aerosol factory. I eventually managed to flog it to a lad in my class, Daz
Hobson, for £150. I felt sorry for him
as he rode it away. After that I bought
a cut-down Vespa 90 from a dubious
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SCOTT KING
fashion or music. It was the northern
tradition to make these scooters faster,
strip them down and make them loud.
So the first scooterboys I remember,
around 1979, were the Goole Gladiators Scooter Club. A lot of them were
Leeds United fans, so they were really more akin to what everyone now
knows as ‘casuals’ than Mods. As the
’80s progressed the scooterboy attitude
or approach spread across the UK (and
further) and began to incorporate all
sorts of sub-sub-cultures. So by 1985,
scooterboys might also be rockabillys
or psychobillys … there was no definitive look other than wearing what was
practical for riding a scooter over long
distances. But the scooterboys I always
looked up to as a kid were the ones that
were more ‘townie’ or just ‘lads’ really …
scooter and football and Jam fans. Ian
Brown and Mani from The Stone Roses
were big scooterboys, you can see that in
them and hear it in their first LP, I think.
home. On 23 November 1986, a freezing
cold Sunday morning, I got up at 6 am
and rode the scooter into Goole, and as
I rode across the bumpy level-crossing
in town, both side panels fell off and
skidded backwards down the road. I was
nearly in tears as I picked them up. They
were ruined. It was a valuable lesson
though, one I’ve never forgotten: owning
a Lambretta is a heartbreaking business.
Did you manipulate the scooters to make
them go faster?
We all did. I’m a useless mechanic, so
my skills never really extended beyond
polishing the paintwork, but there were
loads of kids in Goole who believed
themselves to be ace Lambretta tuners—self-appointed shed-based geniuses—who were of course, not. I didn’t
know anybody who had a Lambretta
that would go for more than eight miles
without exploding, usually because
they’d tried to tune it themselves with
an angle grinder, some rare parts from
a vintage lawnmower and three rolls of
gaffer tape.
What made you buy a racing bike?
I was brought up to love fast bikes.
When I was very young, from about six
to 12, my dad used to take us to Oliver’s
Mount, the famous road racing circuit in
Scarborough. I saw Barry Sheene, Mick
Grant, Wayne Gardner and other stars
of the day racing and I loved it … just
the smell, the noise and the speed of the
bikes was incredible. For years I’d always
wanted a sports bike, but either couldn’t
afford one or was too scared to get one.
The one I’d coveted since my teens was
a Suzuki GSX-R 750. These were really
What makes a boy a ‘scooterboy?’
Scooterboys, as they emerged when I
was a kid, were really a northern English
thing, often coming from backwater
towns like Scunthorpe, Barnsley, Bury,
Wakefield and all that. Scooterboys were
not Mods, like they had down south.
In the North there had always been
scooterboys, and they were really bound
together by a love of scooters, over
managed to almost crash, then get lost,
but I was definitively having it. The next
day I took it for a ride out to Southend,
and once it hit 9000 revs it just screamed
and took off. On that first day I just
couldn’t resist, I had to see how fast it
would go, I was terrified but I had to do
it. It was one of the best things I’ve ever
done; getting on that bike on a sunny
day and hitting top speed along an empty dual-carriageway. A prison offence I
think, but it was worth it. With bikes,
people either love them or are scared of
them. As a kid I have a clear memory of
being in the car with my mum and dad,
the first and still arguably the best ‘street
sports’ bikes. Ash L’Ange, one of the
directors of my gallery Herald St, told
me in 2006 that he planned to sell his
bike. It was a Suzuki GSX-R 600 … I just
had to buy it. I knew I’d never get a better chance to own one and so I pestered
Ash about it and got it at a bargain price.
When I went to collect it from his house
in Fulham, it was stuck in a dilapidated
garage and was covered with a sheet,
sort of left to rot, but it was so beautiful. I fell in love with it straight away.
He suggested I take it for a test drive so
I rode it around the block and somehow
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“I have a clear memory of going to the coast with my parents, and lines of bikes
roaring past us ... and where most parents would tut or shout ‘bloody idiots!’
my dad would cheer and punch the air.”
Scotland, so I decided to go to see them
in Blackpool, spend some time with the
band in a place that wasn’t a trendy part
of London, and where I thought they’d
make more sense.
maybe going to the coast, and lines of
bikes roaring past us as we traveled at
maybe 60 mph, they’d come past at 100,
120 … and where most parents would
tut or shout ‘bloody idiots!’ my dad
would cheer and punch the air, until my
mum told him to put both hands on the
steering wheel and look where he was
going. So my love of fast bikes is genetic,
it seems.
What was your first impression of Blackpool?
It’s a very strange place, the second
poorest town in Britain after Hull, with
this odd mix of rundown alcoholic misery and neon seaside fun. I was so excited about going there I went two days
early, which in retrospect was perhaps a
mistake. What do you do in Blackpool
for two days alone? I set myself the task
of wandering the streets and photographing its misery; the problem was,
all my photographs were predictable
sub-Morrissey clichés of sad northern
poverty. They were terrible. Then on
the third day I started to think about
Blackpool Tower. I’ve made a lot of work
about public art and how governments,
in the hope of ‘regenerating’ rundown or
post-industrial areas, deploy it. It struck
me that this half-sized copy of the Eiffel
Tower, built by local industrialists in the
1890s, was perhaps a similar example of
utilizing a monument in order to create
‘place’—that is, in the same way that
Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’
created a sense of place for Gateshead,
so the tower created as sense of destination or place for Blackpool. It became a
For your work ‘Study of Blackpool
Tower’ which I recently saw at Wolfgang Tillmans’ Berlin gallery Between
Bridges, you took photos of the Blackpool Tower from different angles with
your phone. Do you often make site- or
city-specific work?
I think I’ve done quite a lot of work
about particular places, about incidents
or memories of a place. But ‘Study of
Blackpool Tower’ was different. I sometimes think ‘creativity’ is a bi-product
of boredom, and that was certainly the
case with this work. I first heard the
then little-known band Sleaford Mods
in late August 2013 and I fell in love
with them, so I forced Arena Homme+
magazine to let me write an article
about the band. I interviewed them
after a gig in Shoreditch and tried to
write my article, but it was crap, so I
needed another plan. In December 2013
they did a short tour of the North and
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“Blackpool was essentially invented by Victorian factory owners as the ‘go-to’ resort for their workers to spend one week each year and, well, go mad."
lucky enough to find yourself in Berlin,
New York or Paris, where you always
know someone, where you’re never alone
for long … or you might find yourself
alone in remote and strange places … so
you become an expert on places that you
would probably never dream of visiting. I know every bar in Dunkirk, for
example, and not by choice.
beacon of positivity for the town. Blackpool was essentially invented by Victorian factory owners as the ‘go-to’ resort
for their workers to spend one week each
year and, well, go mad. It’s a ‘fun town’
that the working classes have visited for
almost 150 years in order to get drunk,
have fights, have casual sex and enjoy
themselves. So by night it’s a magical
place, but by day it’s pretty miserable. I
wanted to both document the tower, its
complete dominance of the landscape
and also the daylight misery that surrounds it. I wanted to photograph the
surrounding chip shop terraces, just as
I had with my Morrissey snaps, but this
time with the central motif always being
the tower at the same size and in the
same position, thus dictating the composition of the photograph and forcing
me to objectively document the streets
that surround the tower. Making this
work took me about four hours. I loved
doing it, and I would never have made it
if I hadn’t been alone with a lot of time
on my hands. Once I’d finished it I then
went to the pub to celebrate. It was a
great day, though the band arrived very
late and my interview with them largely
consisted of me slurring.
You visit Berlin quite often. There you
recently worked on your ‘Festival of
Stuff ’ show for Berliner Festspiele’s
‘Foreign Affairs’ theatre festival, and
the visual identities for an internet
music show called ‘The One-Hit Parade’
and the music festival ‘Pop-Kultur’ at
Berghain. You said that you’d hate it
becoming ‘normal’ for you. What do you
like about Berlin?
Well, I love Berlin. I miss it as soon as I
leave. I’ve got into this strange ritual every time I take the train back to Schönefeld airport. I always turn the wrong way
in the tunnel between the train station
and the airport – there’s a dirt track at
the ‘wrong’ side and I go there to think
for five minutes and take a photograph
of the track. I really don’t like leaving
Berlin at all. It’s a sort of special place
for me and my girlfriend, and I’m lucky
to have a lot of friends there. Also I
almost always stay in this amazing
apartment … so my version of Berlin is
Do you like traveling alone?
Yes, I think it’s one of the great privileges of having exhibitions. You might be
SCOTT KING
how much I’ve drank. You know, after
a certain amount of booze getting on
a bus or a tube just isn’t an option, is
it? In fact, moving at all becomes very
unattractive. But I’ve not been drinking
recently so I’ve been using the bus a lot.
Not only that, last week I even bought a
bicycle … Ich bin ein Berliner. w
very privileged. What I like about it is
very obvious I think, it doesn’t have the
draining intensity of London, people
seem much happier in Berlin, I don’t
know, I can only talk about it in clichés.
With London, for a long time I didn’t
like it. I just felt I had to be here to do
the kind of work I wanted to do. I used
to dream of moving to Kent and having
an easier, cheaper, quieter life … but
it was just a fantasy. I’d be lost without
London. The only other place I’d really
like to live is New York, though I suspect
I never will.
Your girlfriend's family has a house at
the seaside, which you often travel to.
Would you call that a holiday?
Well it’s in Whitstable, which is one of
the ‘go-to’ places now for middle-class
types from London, a sort of low-rent
Hamptons. But it’s great there. The
house that my mother-in-law owns is
right on the beach so yes, it’s definitely
a holiday. I hate leaving there too, I drag
my feet all the way to the train station.
Sometimes I burst into tears and lie on
the floor in a star shape crying hysterically, refusing to move, like toddlers do
in supermarkets.
You like taking cabs but your knowledge
of the London public transport system is
quite thorough. Are there certain times
during the day where you prefer the cab?
When’s ‘cab time’?
Well, I’ve been good recently. My excessive use of cabs is a direct reflection of
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