It Was Never About Graffiti

Sometimes I find myself gazing up at Dougie, the piece of street art strewn across a wall in AAA, the coffee house and bar I seem to have built around ideas like this. It’s named after my chum Dougie who came up from London to unleash hell with a spray can on an entirely unassuming public. This tends to occur at precisely the moment I should be doing something more important, but instead I find myself lingering, procrastinating quite deliberately, and feeling an entirely unjustified sense of pride.

When it first went up, it felt slightly out of place, which was, I suspect, part of the appeal. Not polished, not polite, slightly risky, and just there, as if it had decided for itself that the wall would do.

A couple of days after the mural went up, we were still building, so it was only visible through the window. Someone decided to graffiti that very window.

Which felt, in a way, like progress.

Graffiti breeds graffiti. One mark invites another, whether you asked for it or not. The only difference is that in Harrogate, it feels less like the start of a movement and more like a misunderstanding.

It is, after all, a place that prefers things to remain picturesque. And picturesque places don’t tend to develop street art cultures. They admire them from a safe distance, or at least like the idea of them, provided they are happening somewhere else.

Although, if we are being honest, I am not entirely sure it is admiration.

There is a sense that it sits slightly beneath things. Something for other cities. Other problems. After all, what would there be to complain about here.

Which, given the current state of things, is clearly not true.

The street art in Berlin had a romance with the cobbled streets and when the rain fell you’d have to jump over the puddles and avoid turtlenecked locals. The rain-filled potholes of Harrogate, on the other hand, seem to have developed from adolescence with a certain ambition. They have grown wider and deeper over the years, settling into the public’s mindset as just another grumble. Years of underinvestment in public services, quietly revealing themselves one broken axle at a time.

It does make you wonder whether a bit more graffiti might help get the message through. It seemed to work reasonably well in New York.

Some things travel. Some things stay exactly where they are.

Which makes the whole thing slightly odd.

Because standing there, looking at that wall, I am reminded of those places where coffee, music, and art come together and accidentally build something that feels like it might matter.

Which, unsurprisingly, sent me reminiscing back to an article I wrote about ten years ago…

The Story of Graffiti

At the time, I thought I was writing about walls, about tags, about the idea that graffiti and hope for a better future are closer cousin than you may think. I even flexed my philosophy muscles and gave Plato an outing. 

Reading it back after all these years made me ponder. I’d missed something.

Berlin is city that covers its walls in messages, it’s also a city filling abandoned spaces with music.

No permission, no gatekeepers, no official channel. Well, maybe not entirely true anymore, but was when my old apartment over looked the shell of a disused abattoir became the spontaneous site for an Easter rave. There’s irony there somewhere I’m sure.

Berlin is the only city I know where you could go out on a Monday evening and come back on a Monday morning. Having lost all sense of time, direction, and in some cases, dignity, the spaces didn’t open and close in some boring obvious way like they do in boring countries. They just… carried on. Or at least made you guess when you could use them.

Which, thinking about it now, probably explains quite a lot.

Post-Wall Berlin, particularly in the East, was full of buildings and areas that hadn’t yet been claimed by anyone sensible. Empty blocks, half-finished districts, places that existed in a sort of administrative shrug.

And into those spaces came everyone else.

Artists, musicians, DJs, people who weren’t waiting for anything in particular, largely because there was no one left to ask. And the lines between those groups weren’t especially clear.

The same people painting walls were going to the same nights. The same buildings hosting both. Clubs behaving like galleries, galleries behaving like clubs, and DJs being treated less like entertainers and more like people taking things apart and putting them back together again in a slightly different order.

No one had really named it yet.

It was just happening.

Berlin and New York, Still Not Coordinating

In the original piece, I linked Berlin and New York. That part still holds, although I now realise it is even stranger than I gave it credit for.

You have two cities, dealing with entirely different problems.

Berlin, physically divided, then suddenly not, left with a collection of spaces that no one had quite decided what to do with.

New York, shaped by neglect, policy decisions, and the sort of urban planning that looks much better on paper than it does when people actually have to live in it.

And in both places, people arrive at roughly the same conclusion.

If the usual routes don’t work, you find another one.

In New York, that looks like hip-hop. Sound systems, parties, records being looped and reworked in ways they were never intended to be.

In Berlin, that looks like techno. Rooms being filled with sound that simply turned up and carried on.

No shared meeting, no grand plan, no one popping over for a quick chat to align strategy.

Just the same idea, arriving twice.

Like the intelligence of an octopus, something complex appearing more than once, independently, which is either reassuring or slightly alarming depending on your outlook.

The Bit That Travels

The thing about that instinct is that it doesn’t stay put.

That graffiti tag style, the quick, functional mark, the thing that looks like it was written in a hurry because it almost certainly was, you see it everywhere.

Argentina. Melbourne. Naples. Places that have very little in common on the surface, but still end up with the same marks appearing on walls.

It doesn’t really belong to anyone.

It just turns up, wherever the conditions allow it, like a slightly rebellious houseguest.

The Bit I Seem To Have Built

The slightly awkward part of all this is that, without really intending to, I appear to have built something around that idea.

The AAA logo was never designed in the traditional sense. It came from that same instinct, the way people write on cassette tapes, on access all areas passes, quickly, without overthinking it, which is ironic given how much overthinking tends to follow.

It is not particularly polished. It is not trying to be clever. It is, for want of a better word, a tag.

The Graffiti Tag range I developed for Audio Architect Apparel is much the same. Not a grand strategy, more a continuation of a feeling that seemed worth keeping. I just thought it was cool. 

And then our humble coffee house and bar itself. The logo, stands more subtle above the door than most people thought it should be. ‘Why not bigger?’ They’d say. The design felt like the right place to be creatively. Maybe not for Harrogate but definitely felt like the right version of me that I wanted to portray. 

AAA, Cold Bath Road

People come in, they choose records, they shape the room, they leave something behind, even if it is just a moment, or a memory, or a slightly questionable decision involving Phil Collins at the wrong point in the evening.

It is not graffiti or street art, but it is not entirely different either.

Harrogate, which, it’s fair to say, is not Berlin. It is also not New York, although I suspect it would be quite flattered by the comparison.

It’s tidy. It works. Things generally happen when they are supposed to happen. There is a level of polish to it that Berlin, particularly at that time, would have regarded with mild suspicion.

And I do sometimes wonder whether AAA fits into that, or whether it sits slightly to one side of it, like a guest who has turned up to the wrong party but decided to stay anyway.

Maybe it is too much. Too rough around the edges.

Or maybe the opposite is true.

Maybe I am the one trying too hard to tidy it up, to make it behave, to make it fit into something that was never really the point.

I am not entirely sure.

If I went back and rewrote that original article, I would probably make it cleaner. More structured. Less likely to wander off into Plato without warning.

But I would also lose something.

Because at the time, I was not trying to prove a point. I was just noticing something that did not quite fit the story I had been told.

And I think that is still the interesting bit.

Not whether graffiti is art, or whether hip-hop started it or adopted it, or whether Berlin influenced New York or the other way round.

But the idea that, given the right conditions, people will always find a way to speak.

Even if no one asked them to.

Especially if no one asked them to.