In 1983, several things influenced me to getting in to Hip Hop.
First Toni Basil had a TV show aired on the BBC in which she had a feature on The Rock Steady Crew, and that got me hooked on breakin'. My brother started listening to electro and I regularly heard Rockers Revenge coming from his room.
Then Channel 4 showed the documentary 'Style Wars' in the Another America season and that blew my mind.
My friend Andrew Cakebread came to school after the holidays wearing a padded Nike Cagoule saying he was a breaker and had a walkman playing Streetsounds Crucial Electro and I had a listen and loved it.
Tony and I started learning how to break at school and we met up and practiced in an alley behind the local shops with some other mates from school.
We decided to give graffiti a go too. Probably because we had seen a copy of Subway Art - I remember I had bought a copy very early on around this time. We formed a crew with Tony, myself and Cakebread and called ourselves 'The Dynamic Sprayers'. We got some paint from the local hardware shop and designed a piece. We found a good 'safe' wall next to the railway in Aylesford and started spraying straight on to a damp wall. The colours were not too bright as the paint soaked in, and we had a grid in the design that added perspective intended to be neon in style (very 80's).
I had got a pot of white emulsion from my dads garage and only had enough for these lines! So that's all we painted - the lines were bright and the rest a bit dull.
Our piece was soon 'gone over' by a neighbouring crew from Snodland (Subway Service) and being incensed that our area had been invaded, we spent the next 6 months or so locked in battle with them. We were outclassed as we'd just begun but we made good progress in our style and can control during this time.
The first decent piece we really did was 'Kings of Kent'. Although a bit wobbly in translating the design to large scale, the drips had stopped and the blending was pretty good - especially as we were using car paint.
We were very proud of this piece and kept coming back to look at it. It wasn't long however before it was written over by our rivals.
Our piece was soon 'gone over' by a neighbouring crew from Snodland (Subway Service) and being incensed that our area had been invaded, we spent the next 6 months or so locked in battle with them. We were outclassed as we'd just begun but we made good progress in our style and can control during this time.
The first decent piece we really did was 'Kings of Kent'. Although a bit wobbly in translating the design to large scale, the drips had stopped and the blending was pretty good - especially as we were using car paint.
We were very proud of this piece and kept coming back to look at it. It wasn't long however before it was written over by our rivals.
1 comment:
Hope to see more of your graffiti.
Hey show me your wedding pics and some of your pictures there with Nadia... :-)
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