James McBarron of Hoxton
James McBarron
When I published Bob Mazzer’s Underground photographs from the seventies and eighties, I was astonished by how many readers got in touch to name people in the pictures, but I never expected it to happen when I published Horace Warner’s photographs of the Spitalfields Nippers from around 1900. Yet Lynne Ellis wrote to say her father James McBarron recognised Celia Compton whom Horace Warner photographed at the age of fifteen in 1901. By the time James knew Celia, as a child in the thirties, she was Mrs Hayday and he encountered her as a money-lender when he was sent to make the weekly repayments on his mother’s loans.
Intrigued by this unexpected connection to a photograph of more than a century ago, I took the train from Fenchurch St down to Stanford Le Hope recently to meet James McBarron and learn more of his story. This is what he told me.
“I am from Hoxton, Shoreditch, I was born in George Sq at the back of Hoxton Sq – it’s not there anymore. There were seven tenements and another building where Mrs Hayday lived, all around a yard with a lamppost in the middle. We attached a rope onto the lamppost and swung on it. We used to have a bonfire there in November and all the families came along. It was like a village and a lot of people were related, and everyone knew each other. We were clannish and there were quite a few families with members in different flats – my grandmother and grandfather lived there in one flat and I had two aunts in another.
Eighty years later I can still remember Mrs Hayday, even though I was only seven, eight or nine at the time. It was in 1936 or thereabouts. She was a money-lender and I was sent by my mother every Sunday to pay sixpence to her, but it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. To my eyes, as young boy, she was overwhelming. I was shown into the bedroom by her daughter and she was always lying there in bed. She took out a book from the bedside and made a note of the money. I recall an impression of crisp white sheets and she had dyed blonde hair. She was a buxom woman, a little blowsy. She smelled of scent – Phul Nana by Grossmith – the only scent I knew as a young boy, the factory was in Newgate St. I was awestruck because she was so unlike any of the other people I knew. There was a never a man there or a Mr Hayday. She was a very nice lady, she said, ‘Hello’ and ‘Say ‘Hello’ to your mum and dad.’ And that was Mrs Hayday.
My father, George, was a carpenter from Sunderland and he served in the Great War. My mother worked at Tom Smith’s Cracker Factory in Old St. My parents met in London and my mother’s family already lived in George Sq. My grandfather, he was an inventor and I admired him very much. He made a little working steam engine, and he tapped the gas main and had a tube with a little flame, so he could light his roll-ups. He played the violin and read music, and he never went to work. My gran used to go round to the pub for a jug of beer and they’d all go upstairs to my grandparents’ flat and play darts, and he’d play the violin.
We kids used to chop firewood to make money. The boys and girls used to go around collecting tea-chests and packing-boxes from the back of all the furniture factories, and say ‘Can we take it away, Mister?’ We chopped it up into sticks and made bundles, and we’d sell them for a penny or a ha-penny. We used to go to Spitalfields Market and ask for ‘Any spunks?’ or ‘Spunky oranges and apples?’ and they’d chuck the fruit that was going bad to us.
We didn’t think we were poor, except there was a family called Laban who were better off than us. He was a bookmaker and had touts. I remember their son had a jacket with pleats in the back and I wanted one like it, but when my mum eventually got me one it wasn’t so good. My father had a blue serge suit and it was pawned each Monday to pay the rent and bought back each Friday when he got paid. On Sundays, we went down to Stephenson’s Bakery in Curtain Rd to get a penny loaf.
When you came out of George Sq, there was a little alleyway leading through to Hoxton Market. There was Marcus the Newsagent, and next to it was Pollock’s and they had toy theatres in the window and these glass bottles with coloured liquid – it was a tiny shop. Next to that was Neville’s where my father bought our boots and shoes. I can remember every shop in the Market. Hoxton St was different then, bustling with stalls and there were barrows selling roasted chestnuts and boiled sheep’s heads.
William was the eldest child in our family, then I was born, then Peter, then Johnny and last of all Margaret. There was twenty-one years between us and she was born while I was away in the army, so she didn’t know me when I came back. I knocked them up at seven in the morning and called, ‘Here’s your boy, back again!’ We had three rooms – two bedrooms and a living room, and that’s why we had to move.
After the war, they moved us up to Haggerston to a new building in Stean St and George Sq was demolished because it was a slum. Everything broke up when people moved out. They took out all our furniture – including a table and chest of drawers my father made – and put it in a closed van and fumigated it because of the bugs. I’ve still got his tool box. It was a ragtag and bobtail existence, but I think we were a little better off than some. “
Celia Compton photographed at age fifteen by Horace Warner in 1901. Years later in 1936, a year after her husband died and when James McBarron was a child, she lived at 5e George Sq and he knew her by her married name of Celia Hayday.
James McBarron with his father’s carpentry box
Margaret & George McBarron in Haggerston
James and his brother Peter
As a boy, James visited Benjamin Pollock’s Toy Theatre shop at 208 Hoxton Old Town
James’ younger brother Johnny in the new flat when the family were rehoused in Stean St, Haggerston, in 1946
James’ elder brother William at the piano
James & June McBarron
James & June McBarron got married in St Leonard’s Shoreditch on 5th June 1954 and celebrated their diamond wedding this summer
James McBarron, 1965
James catches mackerel on holiday in Devon
James & June McBarron’s children, Lynne & Ian, in the sixties
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Roy Reed At Billingsgate Market 1975
Roy Reed took these pictures of Billingsgate Market when he was a twenty-three-year-old documentary photography student at the London College of Printing in 1975 and they are seeing the light of day for the first time now.
Roy’s enthusiasm for the subject was greater than the interest of the student-journalist who asked him to take the pictures for a project on London’s dying markets. “When I suggested we get there early, she said, ‘See you there at eight,'” Roy recalled, rolling his eyes significantly. In the event, Roy got there at seven-thirty on a February morning and took his pictures just here as business was winding up at the nocturnal market. Forty years later, any disappointment Roy might harbour that the project was never written up and published is outweighed by his satisfaction in having taken these rare photographs of a lost world.
“It was nice chatting with the porters,” Roy remembered fondly, “No-one seemed to mind having their photograph taken – except maybe the guy in the tweed hat, you can see him looking at me suspiciously in the picture.” Taken at the time the market was already due to leave its ancient location next to London Bridge, Roy’s lively photographs comprise a fascinating record of a seemingly recent era in market life that grows increasingly remote.
Photographs copyright © Roy Reed
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Music Hall Artistes Of Abney Park Cemetery
When the summer heat hits the city and the streets get dusty and dry, I like to seek refuge in the green shade of a cemetery. Commonly, I visit Bow Cemetery – but last week I went along to explore Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington to find the graves of the Music Hall Artistes resting there.
John Baldock, Cemetery Keeper, led me through the undergrowth to show me the memorials newly restored by the Music Hall Guild and then left me to my own devices. Alone in the secluded leafy glades of the overgrown cemetery with the Music Hall Artistes, I swore I could hear distant singing accompanied by the tinkling of heavenly ivories.
George Leybourne, Songwriter, Vocalist and Comedian, also known as Champagne Charlie (1842 – 1884) & Albert Chevalier (1861- 1923), Coster Comedian and Actor. Chevalier married Leybourne’s daughter Florrie and they all rest together.
George Leybourne – “Champagne Charlie is my name, Champagne Charlie is my name ,There’s no drink as good as fizz, fizz, fizz, I’ll drink every drop there is, is, is!”
Albert Chevalier – “We’ve been together now for forty years, An’ it don’t seem a day too much, There ain’t a lady livin’ in the land, As I’d swop for my dear old Dutch.”
G W Hunt (1838 – 1904) Composer and Songwriter, his most famous works were “MacDermott’s War Song” (The Jingo Song), “Dear Old Pals” and “Up In A Balloon” for George Leybourne and Nelly Power.
G W Hunt
Fred Albert George Richard Howell (1843 – 1886) Songwriter and Extempore Vocalist
Fred Albert
Dan Crawley (1871 – 1912) Comedian, Vocalist, Dancer and Pantomime Dame rests with his wife Lilian Bishop, Actress and Male Impersonator. He made his London debut at nineteen at Royal Victor Theatre, Victoria Park, and for many years performed three shows a day on the sands at Yarmouth, where he met his wife.They married in Hackney in 1893 and had four children, and toured together as a family, including visiting Australia, before they both died at forty-one years old.
Dan Crawley
Herbert Campbell (1844 – 1904) Comedian and Pantomime Star. The memorial behind the tombstone was erected by a few of his friends. Herbert Campbell played the Dame in Pantomime at Drury Lane for forty years alongside Dan Leno, until his death at at sixty-one.
Herbert Campbell, famous comedian and dame of Drury Lane
Walter Laburnum George Walter Davis (1847 – 1902) Singer, Patter Vocalist and Songwriter
Walter Laburnum
Nelly Power Ellen Maria Lingham (1854 – 1887) started her theatrical career at the age of eight, and was a gifted songstress and exponent of the art of male impersonation. Her most famous song was ‘The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery.” She died from pleurisy on 19th January 1887, aged just thirty-two.
Nelly Power – Vesta Tilley was once her understudy
The Music Hall Guild will be hosting a free guided walk through Abney Park Cemetery to visit the Music Hall Artistes next Sunday 27th July – meet at the cemetery gates at 2pm
In Old Rotherhithe
St Mary Rotherhithe Free School founded 1613
To be candid, there is not a lot left of old Rotherhithe – yet what remains is still powerfully evocative of the centuries of thriving maritime industry that once defined the identity of this place. Most visitors today arrive by train – as I did – through the Brunel tunnel built between 1825 and 1843, constructed when the growth of the docks brought thousands of tall ships to the Thames and the traffic made river crossing by water almost impossible.
Just fifty yards from Rotherhithe Station is a narrow door through which you can descend into the 1825 shaft via a makeshift staircase. You find yourself inside a huge round cavern, smoke-blackened as if the former lair of a fiery dragon. Incredibly, Marc Brunel built this cylinder of brick at ground level – fifty feet high and twenty-five feet in diameter – and waited while it sank into the damp earth, digging out the mud from the core as it descended, to create the shaft which then became the access point for excavating the tunnel beneath the river.
It was the world’s first underwater tunnel. At a moment of optimism in 1826, a banquet for a thousand investors was held at the bottom of the shaft and then, at a moment of cataclysm in 1828, the Thames surged up from beneath filling it with water – and Marc’s twenty-two-year-old son Isambard was fished out, unconscious, from the swirling torrent. Envisaging this diabolic calamity, I was happy to leave the subterranean depths of the Brunels’ fierce imaginative ambition – still murky with soot from the steam trains that once ran through – and return to the sunlight of the riverside.
Leaning out precariously upon the Thames’ bank is an ancient tavern known as The Spread Eagle until 1957, when it was rechristened The Mayflower – in reference to the Pilgrims who sailed from Rotherhithe to Southampton in 1620, on the first leg of their journey to New England. Facing it across the other side of Rotherhithe St towers John James’ St Mary’s Rotherhithe of 1716 where an attractive monument of 1625 to Captain Anthony Wood, retrieved from the previous church, sports a fine galleon in full sail that some would like to believe is The Mayflower itself – whose skipper, Captain Christopher Jones, is buried in the churchyard.
Also in the churchyard, sits the handsome tomb of Prince Lee Boo. A native of the Pacific Islands, he befriended Captain Wilson of Rotherhithe and his two sons who were shipwrecked upon the shores of Ulong in 1783. Abba Thule, the ruler of the Islands, was so delighted when the Europeans used their firearms to subdue his enemies and impressed with their joinery skills in constructing a new vessel, that he asked them to take his second son, Lee Boo, with them to London to become an Englishman.
Arriving in Portsmouth in July 1784, Lee Boo travelled with Captain Wilson to Rotherhithe where he lived as one of the family, until December when it was discovered he had smallpox – the disease which claimed the lives of more Londoners than any other at that time. At just twenty years old, Lee Boo was buried inside the Wilson family vault in Rotherhithe churchyard, but – before he died – he sent a plaintive message home to tell his father “that the Captain and Mother very kind.”
Across the churchyard from The Mayflower is Rotherhithe Free School, founded by two Peter Hills and Robert Bell in 1613 to educate the sons of seafarers. Still displaying a pair of weathered figures of schoolchildren, the attractive schoolhouse of 1797 was vacated in 1939 yet the school may still be found close by in Salter Rd. Thus, the pub, the church and the schoolhouse define the centre of the former village of Rotherhithe with a line of converted old warehouses extending upon the river frontage for a just couple of hundred yards in either direction beyond this enclave.
Take a short walk to the west and you will discover The Angel overlooking the ruins of King Edward III’s manor house but – if you are a hardy walker and choose to set out eastward along the river – you will need to exercise the full extent of your imagination to envisage the vast vanished complex of wharfs, quays and stores that once filled this entire peninsular.
At the entrance to the Rotherhithe road tunnel stands the Norwegian Church with its ship weather vane
Chimney of the Brunel Engine House seen from the garden on top of the tunnel’s access shaft
Isambard Kingdom Brunel presides upon his audacious work
Visitors gawp in the diabolic cavern of Brunel’s smoke-blackened shaft descending to the Thames tunnel
John James’ St Mary’s Rotherhithe of 1716
The tomb of Prince Lee Boo, a native of the Pelew or Pallas Islands ( the Republic of Belau), who died in Rotherhithe of smallpox in 1784 aged twenty
Graffiti upon the church tower
Monument in St Mary’s, retrieved from the earlier church
Charles Hay & Sons Ltd, Barge Builders since 1789
Peeking through the window into the costume store of Sands Films
Inside The Mayflower
A lone survivor of the warehouses that once lined the river bank
Looking east towards Rotherhithe from The Angel
The Angel
The ruins of King Edward III’s manor house
Bascule bridge
Nelson House
Metropolitan Asylum Board china from the Smallpox Hospital Ships once moored here
Looking across towards the Isle of Dogs from Surrey Docks Farm
Take a look at
Adam Dant’s Map of Stories from the History of Rotherhithe
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Boys’ Club Summer Camp Banquet 1942, Max is on the far left
My pal Maxie Lea rang to convey the sad news that this year’s Cambridge & Bethnal Green Old Boys’ Club Dinner, celebrating ninety years since the founding of the Club in 1924, will also be the last. Numbers have been dwindling in recent years but – understandably – Maxie wants the final dinner to be a bumper.
So please spread the word. If you were once a member of the Club and you would like to attend the Sixty-Eighth Annual Reunion to be held on Monday 1st September at the Imperial Hotel, Russell Sq, please give Maxie a call on 020 8954 0708.Monty Meth, who joined the club in 1938, will be the Speaker.
There has been an unbroken run of these reunions since the first, held in 1946 by Cecil Bright & Sydney Tabor with over three hundred and fifty Old Boys in attendance. It was my pleasure to attend one of these dinners for the first time in 2010 and I have joined the Old Boys each year since then, and you may look forward look to my report on this poignant final dinner in early September.
Operating from its headquarters in Chance St, the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club succeeded in raising the aspirations for generations of boys from the Boundary Estate and surrounding streets. As Ron Goldstein, who joined in the Club 1933, put it to me famously, “Half of the boys would have ended up as the next generation of gangsters and criminals if it had not been for the Club.” Originally founded as an exclusively Jewish boys club, they opened their doors to all in response to the rise of Oswald Mosley and his black shirts in the East End in 1936. It is a measure of the significance that the Old Boys place upon their experience at the Club that they still choose to meet all these years later and rekindle the friendships of long ago.
Maxie’s phone call inspired me to look back over the stories I have written about members of the Club and collect together these joyous evocative photographs by Harry Titchener – known to the boys as “T” – who, as well as being Club manager, was a professional photographer and member of the Royal Photographic Society.
Tea in the orchard 1942, Max sits on the right drinking a mug of tea
On Herne Bay Sands, Max stands in profile on the right
Boat trip, Max raises his fingers to his chin in the centre left of the picture
Maxie Lea (second from left) does the dishes at summer camp
Looking down on Dover, Max is on the left of the group
High jinks at the Greatstones Camp Tuck Shop 1939
The cook makes dough in a field at Greatstones – note the makeshift stoves in the background
Treasure hunt, Max is centre left beneath the tree
The treasure hunt continues, Max is on the right
Mealtime at Greatstones Summer Camp 1939
Max & Stanley go boating
France 1959, Max is seen in profile, waving at the centre left of this picture
Harold goes for breakfast while Paul & Max look on
Max peels the spuds at the centre of this picture
On a Sunday ramble through the outskirts of London
Max is in the centre right, paddling with his pals, Stanley, Manny, Butch & Ken
Photographs by Harry Titchener MRPS
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Eliza Begum, Bridal Florist
The seventh of seven stories by Writer & Anthropologist Delwar Hussain, author of Boundaries Undermined, who grew up in Spitalfields
Eliza Begum looks like she is buried under flowers. There are large bundles of roses, gerberas, pink lilies, gypsophila, hydrangeas and chrysanthemums everywhere. This is nothing new. For the last eight years she has been making wedding bouquets from the dining room of her house just off Brick Lane.
This time, however, the order is slightly different. A secondary school in Plaistow is organising a prom night for its final year students and they want flowers – a lot of them. Eliza explains that the theme of the prom is “summer” so everything has to be colourful and bright. They have ordered one hundred and thirty-seven buttonholes, wrapped and pinned with foliage – one hundred and five single red roses, wrapped and ribboned – ten large bouquets and three massive table arrangements.
“I usually make bouquets, corsages, buttonholes, garlands, large displays with fresh flowers, bedroom decorations and headdresses. Holidays and weekends are mental and the main wedding season is obviously spring and summer. It is particularly buzzing then because everyone wants to have their weddings at the same time. I have bookings three months in advance, but then there is always a surge and I often have to refer clients to other bridal florists. Someone will always call me up and say that they need something ASAP. Or two days before an event, I will receive a message saying that they want to add ten more buttonholes to their list. They don’t understand that I have to pre-order the flowers, so then I have to find them somehow. When things get really chaotic, I enrol my husband into it as well. He has become quite nifty at putting the flowers together for buttonholes.
I like working with a client to create the overall look. I work from pictures, ideas or themes that they bring to me. Mostly people tend to want red and white colours. Carnations are durable, so I use them if someone has a particular sort of colour theme. I use celosia, which look a little like velvety brains. At the moment, I am using a lot of peonies and gerberas. The latter come in bright colours, but they don’t last very long. Orchids are my favourite. Each plant is different, unique. They come in all shapes, colours and sizes. They take a lot of skill to grow. I had a white orchid shower bouquet for my own wedding some years ago.
I do an in-house service which involves making fresh flower canopies, draping them around the matrimonial bed. Someone recently wanted me to decorate their horse-drawn carriage. The vehicle itself was like the glass one Cinderella had in the fairy tale. The bride had an image of herself being totally immersed in flowers and emerging out of the carriage with the flowers tumbling out with her. But I couldn’t do it because she called me only a week before the event. I told her that I needed to pre-order the flowers which would take some time and that the carriage hire company may not even give permission for such a thing. In the end, she settled for strings of flowers instead, which I think looked much better.
Since the recession, the price of flowers has gone up and they are much more expensive than what they were. I think it has become harder for people to weigh up the costs and benefits of them. Having said that, people tend to spend quite a lot of money on their weddings anyway and the recession hasn’t changed that. I’ve noticed that people want their flowers to look standard and uniform. They don’t want them to look natural. They don’t want their flowers to smell either. They say it may clash with their perfume, or that they suffer from hay fever.
I got started in it when I was eighteen years old and my older sister was getting married. She wanted a particular design for her bouquet and we went to a florist for a quote. They were asking for eighty pounds. I was shocked and thought I could make it myself. So I did and continued to do so.
I was working as a youth worker at the time and started teaching the young people how to do flower arranging. I was then hired to do various different youth projects related to flowers. From that, people began asking me to do their weddings. It was around then that I also did a professional training course as I wanted to know what I was actually doing.
Afterwards, I would get my flowers delivered directly from Holland. I was young and new to the business and got a little nervous by the large amounts of flowers coming in. I didn’t know how to store them all. I decided to change my flower dealer and to go to the New Spitalfields Market in Leyton and Columbia Rd Flower Market instead. It is much more expensive buying in such a way, but it is less wasteful and I can get the precise numbers that I need.
I have built up a great rapport and relationship with the sellers at Columbia Rd. I have been going there for years now. I can call them before hand and ask them to get me something, or some of them even save me flowers that they think I would like. The advice they give me is really useful too – information on storage, cutting, dying roses blue for example, how to make them last longer, that sort of thing…”
Buying flowers at Columbia Rd Market
To commission flowers from Eliza Begum email eliza25@hotmail.co.uk
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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ENVOI FROM DELWAR HUSSAIN
“I would like to thank you, readers, for allowing me to bring to you some amazing stories from East Enders. I really look forward to the next installment.”
Portrait of Delwar Hussain copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Sina Sparrow, Graphic Illustrator
The sixth of seven stories by Writer & Anthropologist Delwar Hussain, author of Boundaries Undermined, who grew up in Spitalfields
The first time I saw Sina Sparrow’s graphic illustrations was on the staircase of the Hackney Picture House last year. It was a dark, winter’s evening and I had been to see a film on my own. I was walking down the stairs when a series of black and white images leapt out at me.
The illustrations were striking and they were attached to the wall using bulldog clips. All were of men in various states of nudity. Some of them were embracing intimately and others kissed. A few of the drawings had captions with wry comments and observations. They looked like graffiti from toilet walls, but they seemed more thoughtful, considerate, melancholic even. One was of a topless man captioned “He sleeps with everyone but me,” with a heart coloured-in beside the figure.
I tell Sina this when I meet him in Limehouse where he lives and works from his bedroom. He runs Debbie, a monthly club in Bethnal Green, and is tired and sleep deprived. He laughs, which he does easily, often and with volume, telling me he remembers that exhibition vividly – he had split up with a boyfriend and was feeling heartbroken while hanging those pictures on the staircase. “I stood back and looked at my work and thought ‘all of this is so sad. I really hope people connect to it and think it’s fun,’” he recollects, again laughing.
Much of Sina’s work is autobiographical, excavating his own store of experiences, desires and fantasies. It concerns a range of observations on relationships, break-ups, sexuality, pop-culture and loneliness, and also upon the ordinariness of life, the enigma of coincidences, the nature of attraction, the inherent difficulties of living in London and our relationship with technology.
Growing up in Surbiton, Sina was writing and reading comics from an early age. “I love words and pictures and found comics exciting. I was into superheroes such as the X-men, Wonder Woman, Thor, Superman and Batman, Cloak and Dagger and the Justice League. I found the characters all really attractive because they were really powerful and beautiful, and they were fighting for social justice at the same time.”
Sina initially drew his own comics based upon what he was reading and he gave them away to people he knew. Then, around the age of sixteen, he discovered that there were others who were making and photocopying their own zines, and this led him to take his own material more seriously. In his work, he began to address what was happening in his own life, exploring matters to do with identity and bullying – the latter, he says, was especially pivotal.
“I went to an all-boys school and there was a lot of homophobia in the air. I didn’t have very many friends and was bullied quite a lot. Much of it centred upon my sexuality. At the time I didn’t even know what I was, but this did not matter to the bullies. What this period allowed me was a lot of time to work on my art and creative writing. Reading comics such as X-Men helped – this story about mutants is essentially a metaphor for race, sexuality and other forms of difference, and the ways in which people react to that.”
“Boy Crazy Boy” was the first of these zines, taking a sardonic look at everyday incidents which Sina experienced. One of his stories was about a boy Sina had crush on. One day, the boy invites Sina to his house, which he is over the moon about until he discovers that the crush’s boyfriend is there as well, when he didn’t even know he had one.
Sina’s parents are both academics who initially encouraged their son’s enthusiasm for comics but, when it seemed like he wasn’t growing out of them, they became anxious about it. “Comics were thought to be slightly regressive, in relation to ‘real’ art and literature.” They also grew uncomfortable by some of the content when, at thirteen, Sina’s biggest influence was a series called “Love & Rockets” by Mexican-American brothers Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez about two punk girls in a lesbian relationship.
Sina went to art school and did a degree in illustration, but he says it made him feel lost and disillusioned with his work. It took a long time to get back to making comics again. He did a series called “Art Fag – Tales of Love and Loneliness that could be yours,” and a zine called “Pretty Boys Ignore You” which is a series of illustrations that he did in the bars and cafes of Shoreditch and Soho, imagining the stories of strangers he sat next to.
Sina’s work is honest and frank. “It’s about feelings, ambiguous and sometimes negative feelings – I think it is important to talk about the darker side of life,” he admits – but he also hopes his illustrations make people laugh and connect emotionally through humour. “The more specifically I speak about my own life and experiences – ironically – the more universal my work becomes,” he suggests, “Straight people can look at it and say, ‘Oh that’s really romantic’ or ‘I feel like that too.’”
“I don’t want to be hot or cool or – or fabulous,” he said, “I just wanna be me.”
But there was something inside him that burned gently and bright and strong
Drawing for The Melting Ice Caps album cover
Portrait of musician Owen Duff
Sina Sparrow
Illustrations copyright © Sina Sparrow
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
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