There was panic in the video shop. I’d not been at art college very long when I’d made a horrible spoof film poster using my embryonic Photoshop skills and stuck it up on the wall where my colleagues and customers would see it. It was black and white with a big slab sans serif font, probably ‘Impact ’. BORN: One Man’s Fall From Grace read the title. I’d added spoof rave reviews along the bottom. And there, smack in the middle, was a grainy photograph of a half man. This fell drunken creature, like a stricken curiosity from a 1950s horror film, lurched over, bright white arse bouncing the Max Spielmann disposable camera flash back at the mortified viewer. It wore only socks and loafers and had been expelled from a taxi while the innocent slept.
This abomination was my poor manager. His misfortune had handed me a story.
I was a reckless young idiot back then. I cared about people, but if the story was there to be had, I sunk my fangs in greedily without fear of consequence. In this case, the consequence was a near job loss because the area manager paid an unannounced visit to our Blockbuster branch, and nobody could remove the shameful poster from the wall in time. I’d known the risk and pulled the stunt anyway. I asked the question a lot around that time: ‘How much are you willing to give to get the story?’ Anyone would have thought I was a journalist, not an art student trying to work out what it all meant and where I belonged.
I’m not so kamikaze these days – probably down to the sheer overload and fatigue of parenthood and modern life – but I’ll still surrender any amount of time and dignity if it means I get to tell a tale on the other side. One close friend routinely tells me I lead a ‘cartoon life’, reminding me of my catalogue of unlikely experiences. I smile. He loves my stories and I love to share them. It was my biggest attraction when I set foot in the street on those turn-of-the-century nights out; the possibility that anything could happen. Where would we end up? Who would do what? Would there be bush jumping tonight and what shit nightclub would beckon us in, only to turn us away for the wrong shoes or wayward eyes? I made a crumby Geocities website to share the posters I made for each outing to Bradford, Halifax or Bingley. Nobody would see them other than those who were already coming, but I was a pro wrestling fan and loved to assign alter-egos to friends, weave narratives that were far more dramatic than the truth.
It would be around 20 years before I recognised that storytelling was what I lived for and underpins everything I love to do.
Why was this?
Well, first of all, I was in it, living it, so I never saw the wood for the trees. This is a constant for all of us. My ability to zoom out was limited when I was the lead character in my own play. Education was about learning to see, but I wasn’t consciously aware of that at the time; I was hitting the next deadline, doubting whether the work was any good. Then I was listening to visiting lecturers share industry stories and wondering whether I’d ever make it in. Then I was working full time and scraping together a dubious maiden portfolio. And so rarely did I stop to breathe. Once I was in, my chimp brain ran riot, so deadlines, income and the rest of life tied me to the back of the car and put a brick on the pedal. There were moments, of course. I always had half-decent self-awareness. I didn’t put crap in my portfolio that might attract work I didn’t love. I knew storytelling played a part in what I did, but I also didn’t see how my visual language might tally up with the way I spoke into a microphone or wrote a short story. Each such side quest would happen by chance, a response to opportunity. I’d gallop through the mud, after the new squeaky ball with my tongue out and worry about the bath when I got home.
As I hit my late 30s, I started to see the broader pattern and join more dots. That’s why coaching made sense, and the book writing for and with other artists, designers, founders and the like. It helped that I’d written eight of my own. But these new ventures always happened at pace and with a full schedule comprised of work with words, pictures and sound.
Last year I did some coaching training with the Paradiso Institute. I’d written co-founder Héctor Ayuso’s biography as a raw, dramatic short story, as if it were fiction to reflect the at times unbelievable nature of his life and begun working with Pablo Honey on In Between, his memoir. And that was it; I was now also working as a story coach. Part of the training, led by co-founder Marko Pfann, was about establishing frameworks and processes to help people understand our offer. I took my time after we finished up, sort of liking what I’d landed on, but something about it wasn’t me. It felt a little banal. I needed an overarching philosophy. So, I carved out some time to sit and introspect. I kept returning to something an old school friend had told me. He said he’d heard a local pisshead say that our hometown, Keighley, in West Yorkshire, was one giant Star Wars bar.
Since an early age, I’ve struggled to remember three items I needed from the supermarket, but will remember, word for word, something funny or silly someone said ages ago. My brain covets humour and absurdity, the unlikely and the magnificent and captures moments of this nature photographically. It’s why I remain obsessed with pro wrestling, still read Viz and see pure cinema in small-town hi-jinx that others will sigh and shake their heads at.
Hearing the stories of others in the creative industry is hedonistic to me. My lecturers would share offbeat tales from other illustrators and artists in the pub at lunchtime on lecture days and I’d go along with them and sit there, grinning and nodding and taking mental notes to make sure I pursued such misadventures of my own. I remember Steve Wilkin, our course leader, being on the verge of tears as he recounted another lecturer calling in to say he wouldn’t make it into work in Preston from the Lake District because badgers had eaten away the foundations of his driveway and it had collapsed. And truly, it was this, in the atmosphere of the studio environment, that drove me. I found the culture magnetic and mesmeric.
So it should be no surprise to me that I’ve found myself coaching people in revealing and shaping their stories. It took time, but of course I would move this way eventually. With almost two decades of interviewing experience under my belt, I’m well equipped, but honestly, that only goes so far. I’m still sticking that poster up on the wall despite the risk, cackling like a hyperactive chimp. It was always there. If it hadn’t been, I’d have settled for a less-demanding career path. That giant Star Wars bar, Keighley, churns out storytellers like few other places. Eccentrics and oddballs of all kinds. I heard of local myths and legends from my parents and other family members from the moment I could understand stories and the local pubs were swimming in them as I neared adulthood. It’s stamped onto my soul. So this part of my work might just be the most natural and well-suited of all.
I’ve called it The Cantina. The drunk man’s comment became my philosophy.
It can take an eternity to see what was always there. I’m thankful it was just 43-years for me. I’m curious about what might be staring you in the face. Can you see it yet?