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KAY ONE INTERVIEWS MODE 2

 

Mode 2 would like to dedicate this article to the memory of James “DJ” Leacy 10/05/1971-10/14/2004 R.I.P.

 

Kay One: When and how did you start writing?

Mode 2: I first picked up a can of spray paint during the early summer of ‘84, having been trying my hand at drawing letters on paper a bit earlier than that. I remember even doing wild-style-esque letters with enamel paint on a couple of grey and navy-blue Nike windbreakers for this crew called “Street Rockers” in Covent Garden. The scene was on such a buzz during that early summer, even before Subway Art, Breakin’ (Breakdance in the UK), and Beat Street. We had Tim Westwood on LWR every wednesday night, Spats on Saturday from midday until three, then of course Covent Garden itself, Leicester Square at night, and the underground walkways around Charing Cross station, especially the bit by a restaurant called The Tappit Hen, as it had the dark glass in the reflection of which guys were practicing their dance-steps.

Scribla was a dancer then with a guy later known as Mc Duke, and my brother and I had seen their crew dancing since the previous autumn. I only discovered he was a writer when he caught onto my drawings and told me how he had got busted for doing a piece under the Coliseum, and was on a year’s probation. He’s the one that got me to use spray paint.

Kay One: You moved to Paris in the mid eighties, how did you link with your crew?

Mode 2: I moved to Paris at the end of March ‘87 to work at a computer graphics company partly. I had been coming to Paris since two years before though, to meet, then paint, with Bando and Step h in May ‘85, then back with Pride in June, then with all The Chrome Angelz in July of that same year. Bando had been a rival that Scribla and I met in Covent Garden in April ‘85, and we were so impressed by each others’ work, that we got down with his crew while he did the same with ours. That’s how the London-Paris connection got set up. We did most of our painting together until ‘87, when Bando and Steph had a falling out, Pride and Scribla had gone back to Art College, and I was out in Paris painting mostly with Steph. I didn’t last long in computer graphics, as the technology was so primitive then, while we were going out tagging or doing tracksides and pieces.

 

 

 

Kay One: Tell us about this European connection around CTK with writers from Sweden (Disey, Ziggy) and the Netherlands (Shoe, Angel, Delta, Gasp).

Mode 2: I first met up with Scribla in summer ‘84, and then we hooked up with Zaki, Eskimo, and Zerox (Kev One) in the autumn of that year. They were known as “The Trailblazers”. I remember seeing Pride, this big, intimidating dude, painting at this jam on the South Bank, 3D from Bristol was also painting that day. Danny Francis, the dancer was painting a “Glidemaster” memorial piece with Scribla and me, as he had just passed away around that time after a motorbike crash. We really wanted Pride to be down with us though, as he was the most talented writer from London that we knew. When he finally joined, we founded The Chrome Angelz, our goal being to unite the writers with the most skills in one crew.

 

When we met Bando, we became down with his crew Bomb Squad 2, which he subsequently change to Crime Time Kingz, as he incorporated TCA, and cleared out some other dudes who were in Bomb Squad 2. He was a bit ruthless that way, but that was the thing then, who had the crew with the most skilled writers. The illegal side was almost secondary to the talent. The competition in Paris then came from the Bad Boys Crew, with Jayone, Saho (Ash), and Skki, as well as another crew called the Buccaneers. Not taking anything away from those in London who were beginning to hit steel hard, and were just up a lot, Haze 115 (Karst) springing to mind. Style wise we were a bit bored, as we fed off of each other in TCA, and progressed really quickly, each developing his own style that got subsequently bit by other crews.

That same summer of ‘85 we saw the pieces from Shoe, Jan, and Jaz along the Paris riverbank and, sure enough, when we hung out to see if they would come to look at their pieces in the daytime, we hooked up; total chance meetings, but we really sought each other out back in the days, looking for competition to burn. Shoe had been given photos and pointers from Dondi, and was consequently really advanced, and he and Bando clicked. Bando started on regular trips to Amsterdam from the end of ‘85 or beginning of ‘86, and there was a strong CTK connection set up there.

Delta came to Paris in the late spring of ‘86 with Jezis, and Angel was more or less holding it down for the characters while I was in London, back at school, but trying to keep busy. Steph came over and did the graffiti with me on the Smiley Culture tour that October.

 

When there was UK Fresh ‘86, loads of Hip Hop heads came to London from all over Europe, and important connections were made there, especially with Scandinavia. I went to Copenhagen in August ‘86, and spent a day or two in Stockholm, where I ran into the most unlikely duo; a half Swedish, half Japanese guy going by the name of Disey, and with him this blond Swede called Ziggy, both with hair down to their waists, the Stockholm style of back then.

When I went back to Stockholm at the end of November ‘86, I had to hook up with them, and they really had skills too, Disey having incredible outline control. They were burning then, but we together were also partying too, like crazy, getting up to all types of mischief.

Bando was making regular trips to Amsterdam and New York; CTK becoming THE crew with all the connections. We’ve been thinking on how to write a book about the flow and spread of style from one guy and one place to another during that era, as so much was laid down in such a short space of time.

 

Kay One: How would you describe the style of your crew and why has it been so ripped off by a lot of writers, especially in France?

Mode 2: I was the youngest between Zaki, Scribla, into CTK, Danny, Pride, and myself. Even though someone like Danny was more of a dancer, he could draw, and most of our inspiration came from people like him, from the Mighty Zulu Rockers, from DJs like Cosmic Jamm, and the other guys hanging around Covent Garden. We had all developed styles and personalities as individuals, and shared everything style wise, as we knew that the other crew members would turn that into something of their own and new. We had not so much documentation and only really had each other, but we were really motivated by this brotherhood in style. This gave us each a unique direction that other crews had a hard time competing with, as they had perhaps each only one “stylemaster” and pace-setter in their midst, names like Juice or State of Art. So people would come and shop for style at TCA, picking whose style fit best with their own taste and personality; that’s why we went to Paris.

 

 

 

 

Our arrival in Paris brought new directions to the game, as we shared ideas and letters with Bando, and I pushed my characters further still, since I was basically employed as “the character dude”. Still, there were quite a few of the simple letter pieces of Bando’s that had my original pencil outlines on paper; but he was the man as far as how many drawings you could pump out per day. Anything he put his mind too, he’d take it all the way, and further still. The impact of Spraycan Art is what really set it off, even though many had been trying to get close to Bando’s style, save for the crews that I was talking about earlier. Guys like Darco FBI were also heavily influenced I think, and the Stalingrad Hall of Fame became THE place to paint in Europe, and Bando’s distinctive letter-science was exported eastwards and southwards. So much seemed derived from what he was setting down as being “European” style.

 

As for me, I got more into letters as I painted less with Bando, but was aware of what went on with the younger crews, and the tag styles evolving in Paris then. By the end of the ‘80s I was doing styles developed by thickening tags which a lot of other writers picked up on. Even if I was inspired by others, I would make it my own interpretation, and would rather lead than follow.

 

Kay One: A lot of writers got inspired by the way you work to the point that we get confused sometimes, do you think that they don’t know the rules of biting, compared to way back?

 

Mode 2: There was a time when you would show up to Covent Garden on a Saturday, show your blackbook, and get so dissed and laughed at if you had stuff that looked like someone else’s, that you would have to go back and find your own. Biting was such a humiliating thing to do then, and nobody wanted to get pulled up on that. Since the fanzines in the early 90s, and the websites and jams and all that, people started to get into biting to such a degree that no one seems to care that so much looks the same, and that we don’t have the richness and diversity of the mid ‘80s.

 

If you’re not in that crew, you can’t use that style, that’s it, period. That’s what made things evolve so incredibly on the New York scene, where people were always fighting to be more original and come with something new. Things would get sorted out physically or violently back then anyway, if heads started to break the rules.People were getting hurt for more trivial stuff anyway, so imagine if you were biting style from a bigger crew than yours!

I see the same thing in graphics, in the b-boying, and on wax also; people are incessantly using other people’s stuff, and not even acknowledging where they bit something from; check out how Delta’s style got ripped by people like Daim for instance! Find your OWN shit, dude; but once you feel like you’ve moved on, don’t act like it never happened, as there are a lot of people alive who do not forget, OR forgive for that matter.

 

Kay One: Tell us about the good old days in Paris around ‘87, with the hall of fame in Stalingrad, the other crews like BBC and then the second generation of writers coming around the late 80’s, early 90’s, no regrets?

Mode 2: My main regret was the coming of Boxer because he had a truck that allowed us to go and rob paint further and further out, as the Paris stores got hotter. Stalingrad was THE place, as I said before, and I STILL get on with the BBC guys, even though we were bitter rivals before. You just have respect for guys who have constantly evolved and adapted, and remain somehow at the forefront.

 

 

 

Many guys came along in our wake, biting any of those first pioneers a bit like with TCA back in London before. I know that, after doing workshops with younger writers towards the end of 1990, many people did pick up on what I was showing them then. I don’t think there had been up to that point, open talk and advice being given to younger writers on how to grasp style quickly until then.

Looking back on it, they were pretty lucky to get one of those who had to learn the long way to teach them all these shortcuts. I think that our long way is what has also contributed to the longevity of many of those from my generation.

 

Kay One: You got involved in a lot of jams all over the world like B-Boy summit and many others, what keeps you so motivated?

Mode 2: I went to the B-Boy Summit in ‘96 and ‘97, but I’m still heavily involved with Battle of the Year, being part of the committee that makes decisions on which way it should be going, as well as doing the posters continuously since 2000. I have great faith in Thomas, the guy who started it all out, as well as Storm and Crazy, who devised our Excel-based judging system. Though not a b-boy myself, the best of them have always inspired me, as I see a parallel in our struggle to be original and stay ahead of the game, while keeping that sense of duty to the history and those that came before us. I feel that b-boying should find its own way to stand alone, and not be relying on rap videos for the best dancers to earn anything near decent, when you consider just how much they put into their art.

 

The idea of trying to pass on the blueprint of Hip Hop in as open and freeform a way as possible, while remaining linked to its roots, is what keeps me motivated for certain jams. The chance of being able to make a novice discover this whole universe, away from all that is preformatted for economic or other reasons, feels almost like a duty. It just landed on us in the early 80’s, and was so open to interpretation. There were no magazines, music videos, DVDs, websites, or graffiti stores; you just made it all up in as close a way to what little idea you had of New York then. This allowed for such a diversity that seems to be sadly lacking today.

I did the jams throughout the 90’s, as it was a chance to travel, meet new people, but also get to see friends such as Sharp or Delta (Amsterdam) in different circumstances every time. We would talk about hip hop and life in general, and share our views on the goings on of the day.

When I realized that most of those organizing jams were more into it for themselves, or having their heart really into it, but being grossly incompetent or misled by what they thought Hip Hop was; I decided to chill on the whole thing. What used to be new and exciting and fresh became repetitive; the whole sense of merit for performing on a jam was gone with the advent of these massive jams where everyone was painting. It all just seemed chaotic and pointless. We’re supposed to pick out a handful of our best ambassadors and let them perform, in all disciplines; not just make it this free for all where there’s no sense of hierarchy with regards to actual skills.

This is why I’m super-picky about the whole thing now, rather than falling into a routine where you show up to what seems either like an old people’s home with dudes repeating the same old tired moves, or else these jams where the motivations behind them are as naive as the look on the young crowd’s faces.

 

Kay One: There is a big gap between Hip Hop culture and the rap industry. Is the culture going back to the underground?

Mode 2: I personally don’t think that underground can truly exist anymore. Everybody and their mum and dogs got a website now, so things get blown up way before they’re ready. With the years of the rap industry’s involvement, as well as the fall-out from all these “Pop Stars”-type TV talent shows, so many of the weaker minded just cannot resist telling their neighbor or taking some kind of shortcut that would just give the game away.We have to find today’s definition of the position of opposition that we had towards society and accepted culture back in the early 80’s. That does not mean wearing all the clothes and attitudes of then. We were constantly evolving then, so why do some heads hold onto the cosmetic side of all that like some kind of security blanket?

I think that those who wish for something more wholesome will go and seek it for themselves, rather than relying on the different forms of media to bring it to them on a platter...

When it comes down to it, Hip Hop is the ethos by which you can rap about how fucked up your neighborhood is, but rise above that in your lyrics and propose some path to a solution or at least a debate. ©rap just feeds off of what is fucked up, covering shit with icing and serving it to you like dirty drugs; just creaming anything and everything you can out of what’s around you, at their expense and to your profit. I’m not saying that everything should be serious. Indeed, it requires great skill to drop wisdom about the serious shit, but with humor. If you’re not bringing me some kind of enlightenment, upliftment, or inspiration, no matter who you are and what’s your trade; you’re not hip hop, period.

 

Kay One: After the “RATP” in Paris approaching Futura to hijack posters from “Le Printemps” almost 20 years ago, a lot of people from the industry used graffiti art like they always believed in it, how did it come out?

Mode 2: The industry only uses (graffiti) writing when it will bring them some plus to whatever product that they have to push. They realize the impact potential of the art form as far as certain products go, and all they need to do is find the chimp or the chump to do it. I personally only get involved with products that I use myself, and I have never helped used my art to push something I wouldn’t touch myself, such as cigarette companies, the petrol-chemical industry and so on.

Our full potential has rarely ever been used by the clients; the rare occasions being the CK1 bottles by Delta, Espo, and Futura for instance. This is why it’s great to have the connections we have with companies who’ve collaborated with us on numerous projects over the years; the foremost of course being Sartoria, in Modena (Italy). What the clients don’t have the balls to do is where we actually start devising new projects, ideas, or directions with partners like Slam Jam.

I have no faith in “the industry” and live by word of mouth or chance meetings as far as my work goes. Even buying two pages in LeBook, with exposure on their website, has brought me no work whatsoever.

 

 

 

Kay One: After watching writers doing their own personalized jacket or very demanded limited edition t-shirts, streetwear clothing companies started to come from everywhere, have you been working for anybody or do you still do your own tees?

Mode 2: I used to do my own t-shirts (limited edition and destroying the screens as soon as the last shirt was finished!), taking them on the jams and selling them hand to hand, just so as to have money while I was in whichever country. I’m not very business-minded, so I didn’t go about setting up a clothing label, like so many have done so in the recent years, whether they be rappers, sportsmen, or drug-dealers trying to launder their profits.

I remember how buyers (meaning hip hop heads at the jams coming up to me, or guys from the neighborhood) would haggle and try to price me down, the thing they would not think of doing at the supermarket; so why me? Fair trade had better start right here!

 

I’ve wanted to make myself a jacket with the painted back-panel, like we had back in the days, for at least five or six years. I even talked to Shoe about it, and we both said, yeah, we’d have one each for that coming summer; as if!

 

I’m still thinking of getting something happening by myself, perhaps with two really close friends on board, but there’s so much to do right at this minute anyway. I’ve had this series of t-shirts called “I hate London”, emphasizing the love-hate relationship I have with this city, with it’s over-hypeness, it’s me-me-me attitude, and its inefficient yet expensive infrastructures such as public transport. This series has been ready since 2001, but the samples are sitting in boxes since the Santa’s Ghetto thing we did with Pictures On Walls, when I want to see someone on a train platform sporting it at one of those oh-so-common transport chaos moments we go through on the trains and the tube. We try to do what we can with all the designs at P.O.W., but we can’t afford to have everything out there, and the t-shirt situation’s been the same for everyone here.

 

Kay One: How is the graffiti scene in Europe now, I see a lot of writers using those Delta 3-D’s in their letters or doing too many backgrounds but no letters, s’up with that?

Mode 2: I guess things move on and people wish to push the envelope and explore new directions, experimenting with letter-free and character-free compositions in the same way that heads bit Jonone in Paris in ‘87, calling it freestyle, when we knew that dudes who couldn’t rock letters went to hide in there. Jon himself got this from Futura and murdered it on the NY transit system, but at least he has the humility and respect to state who his sources of inspiration have been.

 

What I don’t like is this unhealthy situation, that’s been around since fanzines like On The Run, Underground Productions, Fatcap, or Bomber Magazine in the mid-nineties, where heads are just biting style straight up, and not giving the credit where it is due. Delta from Amsterdam is of course THE individual that opened the door to direct application of 3-D into letters, on which other writers like Daim, and all those who follow that train (bandwagon?) of thought, built their careers and credibility; what’s UP with that?

Back in the Covent Garden days, you’d get slated, dissed, cussed, generally humiliated by a bunch of heads laughing in your face over biting someone’s stuff! Back in New York, you’d be lucky not to suffer some bodily harm! The internet and the general distance to have to cover to kick someone’s arse makes it easier for all these biters! I remember Delta 2 from New York, who was painting with Sharp, wanting a plane ticket to Amsterdam to kick my mate Delta’s arse!

I admire originality, before technique, as the latter comes so much quicker these days than when we first started out. I personally don’t look at people’s pieces that long, as your subconscious will record what’s in front of you, and the next time you’re drawing something or painting, your brain will tap into that “virtual memory” and make you do shit you’ve seen elsewhere. So sometimes it’s not blatant conscious biting; you just find yourself reproducing what you’ve seen before.

 

 

 

Kay One: What is your definition of a “king”?

Mode 2: Somebody who’s original and has always strived to be, whose name is up wherever you go, even worldwide, someone who has style from a simple well-executed tag, as well as its placement, right up through throw-ups, simple pieces, wildstyle; whatever. Someone who, when branching out into the commercial world outside of the culture, can somehow keep this from tarnishing his writer identity by flipping some new game and adapting to “gallery-culture” with equal skill and cunning as the street or the yards.

 

There are very few kings left in my eyes anyway, not to say that they all belong to the old school; it’s just that it’s hard to take what was part of a New York underground scene of thirty years ago, and balance that with all of today’s bullshit...

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http://destroyalltoys.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/kay-one-interviews-mode-2-frank-151.html

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  • 4 months later...

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Through the TCA facebook group I was linked to an old post from Terror161 on 12oz. I put here below the intersting Mode2 answer/explanation, he write in Sept. 2012 about some common words like ”hip-hop”, ”graffiti”and “street art”. “Our” culture (as I consider myself to be an extension of what pioneers like yourself had been doing over so many years in NYC) really needs that writers such as yourself set your side of the story down somewhere, even if only on-line; as we are otherwise drowned out by what the journalists and book authors wrote. We were very lucky to get this whole package handed to us on a silver platter, in the early eighties, and we did what we could with it, though of course my efforts cannot be in any way compared with the years of bombing and innovating of style that your generation set down; as well as those who came before and after you. With regards to “Street Art” though, my point is as follows; The term “graffiti” was what a journalist used to define writing to the wider public, even though this word doesn’t begin to describe the whole spectrum of imaginative expression and quasi-scientific research applied to perfecting letter dynamics, which is more the direction and the vast horizon that writing was about. It made the public look in a very narrow-minded and pre-formatted way at something which was way richer than what that journalist had tried to describe, in his own subjective and reductive approach. Still; “graffiti” is the term that stuck, and as such probably influenced indirectly how things evolved from that point on. Of course I try as much as I can to avoid using that term, and I put it inside quotation marks and so on; mindful of what Phase 2 had repeatedly explained to me about this term. The term “Hip Hop” is also a label that another journalist (doing an interview of Bambaata, if I remember rightly) used as a blanket category to pigeon-hole the different disciplines of expression which co-existed for many years, and, for some heads who were into that, were interdependent; meaning that whether it was B-boying or MC-ing, rocking the turntables or rocking with marker and spraycan, you would be inspired and influenced by one or the other, or you would actively participate in more than one of them. This of course did not apply to many writers, as the writing culture itself was around before what a journalist called Hip Hop, and those writers were influenced and would get off on different music altogether.The term “Street Art” is again something “invented” by journalists or book authors from outside of the culture, needing to find an umbrella term for what is done in the streets, but has nothing mush to do with the science of letters per say. I’m not taking anything away from Banksy, or Shepard Fairey, or Invader, Zeus etc… I was already exposed to what Invader and Zeus were doing in Paris, from the mid to late nineties, when I was still living there. I also remember seeing work from Banksy in Bristol before he switched to exploiting the usefulness of the stencil as a propaganda tool. As with writing itself, especially in a “post-NYC” context, where biting is the norm, and props and dues are not given to the innovators and originators of style; it seems that the likes of Banksy set free a whole bunch of heads who were either too lazy or too wack at lettering, and didn’t wish to strive to make their originality stand out, in what had become a very crowded and competitive arena. So a LOT of people thought, “Oh that’s easy! I’ll do just like him!”, which is what set off this whole wave of pseudo-Banksys, pseudo Invaders, Zeus and Os Gemeos (even though the twins have MAD tag-skills) across the planet. The same audience who had assimilated the “graffiti” term, and could not see the richness in the diversity of letter styles, or even understand the difference between a good or bad tag, throw-up, piece and so on; this same audience automatically referred the culture of writing as being a bit “passé” and “done” and they welcomed “Street Art” like it was the new gospel or something. Speaking with many a few older writer friends that I know across Europe, it seems as if “Street Art” is seen as the “intelligent” cousin of writing or “graffiti”, as it is seen from their narrow-minded perspective. For me, if there’s ONE culture that brought art out ONTO the street, it HAS to be WRITING; whereby ANYBODY could rack a marker or can (if they couldn’t afford to buy), and go out there and record their OWN PERSONAL and INDIVIDUAL identity, by making letters link one into another. If they’re good, and if they get up a lot, they WILL get noticed. Obviously someone doesn’t HAVE to do letters specifically, and can instead draw a character real quick or some kind of stylised logo or whatever, but this would mean that this is somebody who already has figurative or graphic drawing skills. The writing culture, on the other hand, is a form of expression which gave ANY individual with a grasp of A-B-C-D the chance to explore shape and style and rhythm; which is what made the culture more “democratic” and accessible to youngsters from ANY background; REGARDLESS of whether or not they could draw anything looking remotely like a character. Through this, certain of these individuals became incredibly gifted writers, while others who could draw characters couldn’t get anywhere NEAR them. THAT, in my eyes, is what is specific to writing and the incredible reach that it had to youngsters across the planet eventually… I guess that wraps up the point I was trying to make, as a complement to what you have stated in your post. I actually came across this particular post while doing a Google (who else?) image search on “phase 2 graffiti”; what an irony that I have to use that term to trawl through Google. I’m having to write a really brief overview of the culture for youngsters who participated in a writing workshop I did in Northern Ireland towards the end of August; in the small village of Ederny, County Fermanagh. Yes, it is indeed incredible where something that you guys were building so many years ago has now gone THIS far… On a completely different but all too important note, I would also like to mention that I still have some photos of tags you left in London, around Charing Cross Station, on a blue flower seller’s stall, as well as on a yellow newspaper seller’s stall; along with a tag which looks like “SPACE” and also “SIN DB”. These tags were an inspiration to our generation, in ‘84-‘85, when we were first exposed to them; hence the importance and relevance of style and rhythm in writing, and why it sets “our” culture apart from “Street Art”. Thank you for your time, dedication, and the inspiration that you have been… Mode 2 Mode2 picture by Joel Fox - See more at: http://www.lectrics.fr/blog/web-mode2-words/#sthash.uXAZcwxK.dpuf

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