Derek Jarman: A Biography

14. Swinging Decayed

14 Swinging Decayed Across London from Sloane Square, in then unfashionable Islington (‘Drizzlington’, Jarman once termed it), stood 60 Liverpool Road, a decaying early Victorian house that dominated the corner with Bromfield Street, just north of Chapel Street Market. Newly acquired by Michael Harth, the house had been purchased on the understanding that it was to be modernised by the friends to whom he offered rooms. Brenda Lukey and Roger Ford were to move with Harth from Gloucester Crescent and take the middle floor. Harth himself would occupy the ground floor. Richard Rowson would share the basement with the clutter of Harth’s current hobbies : foul-smelling tanks of tropical fish interspersed with racks of equally pungent home-made wine. The top floor would go to Jarman, for whom the large front room would make an ideal studio, the smaller back one a more than adequate bedroom. Thus it was that in early 1967, at the same time as he was helping to create the Lisson Gallery, Jarman was spending weekends at Liverpool Road mixing more Polyfilla and paint. As the gallery neared completion, so did number 60, and in March or April Jarman terminated his lease on the studio he had been sharing with Michael Ginsborg, said goodbye to Priory Road and took up residence. The house had the air of a commune. The bathroom – rather splendid and on the ground floor – also provided access to Harth’s living quarters and therefore doubled as a passageway where, if the bath was not full of home-made wine, you might encounter the domestically maddening Jarman at his extended ablutions. On the middle floor, Lukey and Ford had knocked their rooms together and installed a mammoth table that seated over a dozen, making that the venue for any house party. The parties were innumerable, as were the visitors, a couple of whom even became semi-tenants. Keith Milow, who had a studio nearby, took to sharing Jarman’s or Rowson’s bed when he was in the area, which is why his pants feature in Jarman’s own encapsulation of life in the house: Michael’s tropical fish bubble away in the gloom of the basement. Stacked between the tanks are a thousand bottles of home-made wine. In the room above Michael plays piano selections from his musicals, which you never quite remember. Then he stops, and begins to type out one of his manuscripts. Brenda comes in from Chapel Market with volumes of the Arden Shakespeare sandwiched between cauliflowers, and trips over Keith Milow’s pair of elephantgrey velvet pants, that lie in a hopeful and permanent heap of laundry outside her door. Roger is patiently stripping the wooden casements of the windows in their room. Upstairs on the top floor the record-player plays the Who, while the sun streams in through the window over my green landscape paintings and the rolls of used masking tape which cling to the floor.1 Given Jarman’s flair for imparting information and generating enthusiasm, it would have been fitting if, on graduating, he had applied for a teaching post to fund his purchase of paint, canvas and all the masking tape needed for the straight lines that criss-crossed his landscapes. Instead, perhaps because his earlier forays into the world of education had not been altogether happy, he opted for the dole and spending every day in his eyrie of a studio, painting Swinging Decayed 127 feverishly, pausing only to snatch lunch in a nearby café. ‘I was impatient , wanted quick immaculate results, hated “the struggle”, the time that it took physically to complete an idea – I envied Keith Milow’s concentration.’2 His envy and the ‘struggle’ notwithstanding, within six months of graduating, Jarman saw his work selected for inclusion in no fewer than four exhibitions. He exhibited as both Derek and Michael – in one case as Michael-Derek: the transition was not yet complete. First came the Edinburgh Open Hundred, organised by the recently opened Demarco Gallery in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and held as part of the Edinburgh Festival in the university’s David Hume Tower in George Square. Amid a flurry of controversy as to why, from 1,500 entries, the judges had chosen the hundred paintings they had as representative of the best in contemporary British art, Michael Jarman’s Landscape with Marble Mountain failed to win a prize, though it...