Artist and poet Jeff Nuttall (1933-2004) rode, and drove, the wave of the counterculture in England in the twentieth century. Nuttall led the Aldermaston March against the atom bomb while playing jazz cornet, published the otherwise unpublishable William S. Burroughs’s surrealistic stories in his My Own Mag zine, organized happenings with John Latham, Alexander Trocchi and others in London, wrote and championed modernist poetry as chairman of the Poetry Society from 1975, and was a poetry editor for the Guardian. He taught at Leeds School of Art (1971-1980), and was Head of Fine Art at Liverpool Polytechnic (1981-84). He wrote the Zeitgeist 1968 book Bomb Culture, that connected the threat of nuclear war to social liberation, and then ten years later King Twist, a glorious recovery of the forgotten northern comedian Frank Randle, along with scores of poems, short stories and memoirs. His work in performance art led later to a rumbustious act as Friar Tuck in the Patrick Bergin/Uma Thurman Robin Hood (1991), and many more over-the-top cameos.
James Charnley’s superb recreation of Nuttall’s life, Anything but Dull: The Life and Art of Jeff Nuttall (Academia Press, 2022), is a labour of love, tracking down the most obscure publications, anecdotes, and events. Charnley’s previous book was Creative License, about the innovative leadership at Leeds College of Art from 1963 to 1973, and how it made for a revolutionary challenge in the North of England to the artistic establishment. Nuttall’s mad years at Leeds and Liverpool take Charnley back to that rebellious northern art world where Head of Art at Leeds, Harry Thubron, recreated the Bauhaus collaboration across disciplines, and Senior Lecturer Robin Page championed the anti-art ‘Fluxus’ movement.
Nuttall’s extraordinary career lurched from Dionysian inventiveness to Bacchanalian orgy.
“An artist starts from excitement”, Nuttall wrote. “Hugo, writing of Baudelaire called it a ‘frisson’, and jazz musicians called it ‘cooking’”. Nuttall knew how to get things cooking. Like the pied piper, he put himself at the head of the Aldermaston march with his trad jazz cornet playing, though he had done none of the organizing. Cheering and jeering people on, he stirred a great hornet’s nest of inventiveness, crossing boundaries and encouraging others to do the same. The self-published My Own Mag mixed cut-up technique, modern poetry, and Nuttall’s own pastiche comic strips. Publishing Burroughs—whose work then was scandalous to almost everyone—connected him to the beat poets in America. With Michael Horovitz, Nuttall helped to arrange a huge event at the Albert Hall, where Allen Ginsberg headlined.
Nuttall was recruited by the very radical Albert Hunt, who was teaching performance at Bradford College of Art, before the move to teach art at Leeds. “When I arrived at Leeds as a Fine Art student in 1970”, writes Charnley, “Nuttall was impossible to ignore”. He continues: “His teaching style included impromptu speeches directed at everyone within earshot … He was loudly extolling the virtues of the soixante-huitards in Paris. You should have been there hurling rocks … the government was running scared. We could have done it. That was our chance”.
Student Mark Almond, who would go on to found 80s synthpop band Soft Cell, was drawn to what Charnley calls Nuttall’s “aesthetic of beauty in ugliness”. “It was Jeff Nuttall who was the biggest influence on me”, Almond remembered, “he revelled in being a slob—large, overweight, unkempt and slovenly”.
Student Mark Almond, who would go on to found 80s synthpop band Soft Cell, was drawn to what Charnley calls Nuttall’s “aesthetic of beauty in ugliness”.
Nuttall’s revolution was anarchistic, not communist. He was, in time, set upon by the dogmatic and holier-than-thou Marxist art historian, T. J. Clark (Clark had been a subscriber to the Situationist International, but recoiled from “formalistic” experimentation in favor of social realism), and Clark’s fellow thinker, artist Terry Atkinson. Between them, they disdained Nuttall for his “raucously expounded, yet flimsy clichéd fifties/sixties notions and legends of the artist subject”. This liberal individualism, according to Atkinson, belied an “authoritarian hubris” and, most damningly, “in the view of T. J. Clark and myself Nuttall was at best, very sparse on what we called theory”. Nuttall was, as Charnley tells it, outmanoeuvred as his cries of “‘Don’t talk painter, paint!’ were treated with intellectual disdain”.
Atkinson and Clark goaded their students, who included Jon Langford, a founding member of The Mekons, and Simon Gartside, the later singer of 80s alternative pop darlings Scritti Politti, into rebellion. “Terry was in Militant”, Langford remembered, and “Tim Clark berated students for not making any art related to the winter of discontent”, the strike wave of 1978. For his degree show, Gartside pinned up typed pages of a manifesto denouncing the school’s bourgeois individualism and repressive hegemony. Nuttall answered Gartside’s criticisms: “What do you believe in? We’ve heard your doubts—where are your certainties? What do you bring with you? … Where is your uniqueness? Show us your uniqueness!”
For his degree show, Scritti Politti singer-to-be Gartside denounced the school’s bourgeois individualism and repressive hegemony. Nuttall answered Gartside’s criticisms: “What do you believe in? We’ve heard your doubts—where are your certainties? What do you bring with you? … Where is your uniqueness? Show us your uniqueness!”
Afterwards, Langford and Gartside wrote a pamphlet titled ‘Show us Your Uniqueness’, denouncing the school’s—and Nuttall’s—belief in artistic creativity: “A desert of laissez-faire and crass ‘performance’ art which by the mid-70s had made the Department of Creative(!) Arts an intolerable place for anyone with a glimmer of skepticism about their highly touted status as figureheads of creativity”.
Simon Gartside changed his first name to Green and to found Scritti Politti (who, after early years of angry agitprop punk, settled into a pleasantly melodic mid-Atlantic pop). Though it seemed at the time as if the post-modernists’ deconstruction of the emancipatory subject was the revolutionary position, with hindsight, Nuttall’s defence of the “individual human imagination”, in his 1974 Artist’s Statement appears more hopeful: “the only truly free thing in existence”.
Having already clashed with the Leeds Marxists, Nuttall went on to outrage the Women’s Society. At the farewell do for Yorkshire Arts officer Gillian Clark, Nuttall is introduced to Jan: “‘Hello luv’, I say and throw an avuncular arm around her, anxious to show that I, at least, am happy to be in the company of the general public. She throws my arm off her shoulder as if it had been immersed in rat vomit”. (Jan was a radical feminist working with the theatre company General Will.)
Having already clashed with the Leeds Marxists, Nuttall went on to outrage the Women’s Society.
Nuttall continues: “In minutes I am surrounded by aggressive women who pin me to the wall by my shoulders and accused me of everything but the then unsolved Ripper murders”.
The feminists, unimpressed by his offer to go home “to his wife” then knock him to the floor and beat him up.
Having clashed with all the radical factions in Leeds, Nuttall fell upward to his last appointment, as Head of Fine Art at Liverpool Polytechnic. He tried to recreate the creative openness of the Leeds School of Art, but by the 1980s, the cold grip of budgetary rigor and external regulation was closing in. He had by that time developed a fine knack for the comic aside, using his status as Head of Art to give whole course lectures that would slowly reveal themselves as performances, parodying the seriousness of fashionable artistic theories. The Council for National Academic Awards, the degree-validating body, investigated the Liverpool course and closed it down. Nuttall was a charismatic leader, but bad on detail. Like Al Capone up on tax evasion charges, he was finally laid low not because he had overturned the apple cart but because he had bankrupted the department.
Nuttall’s private life was as anarchic as his public one. As a student he fell in love with, and then married, his art teacher, the long-suffering Jane Louch, who bore him four children. He had many affairs. He fell in love with Priscilla Beacham, with whom he wrote and performed in Leeds. Late in life he lived with Amanda Porter. He sometimes supported and sometimes abandoned his children, quarrelled with them, and is remembered unfondly at least by his son Daniel (who thinks Charnley is far too soft on him).
In later years, Nuttall carried on working, painting, and sculpting, writing and playing jazz, though his cachet was not great. To contribute to its poetry evening, he had to climb the steep stairs up the Hen and Chicks pub in Abergavenny: “He managed by crawling upstairs, grunting loudly as he progressed and finally bursting through the door at the top, still on all fours like some large burrowing creature”.
Ric Hool, who told this story, adds that “the stairs became known as ‘The Nuttall Ascent’”. Although Nuttall himself made little of it, he probably reached the widest audience with his bit-part character acting, and comically surreal ads for the orange soda drink Tango. His last judgement on the state of the arts was in a slim and under-appreciated volume called Art and the Degradation of Awareness, that pillories the ideologically exhausted age, post-modern philosophy, and the Young British Artists’ lazy worship of the market. Charnley has done a fine job to re-tell this wonderful, flawed, and creative life.
