In November 2021, over four dazzlingly bright, bitterly cold autumn days, a seven foot high mural was created by Brighton street artist, FEK, to announce the forthcoming comic book series, Trombone Man: Ska's Fallen Genius. Here's the story of how it came about.
By Adam Reeves, September 2024.
First, check out the time lapse film of its creation:
(Special thanks to FEK for creating the mural, Adrian 'Ujuchin' Storey for editing the film, and Lucas Petter & Grippa Laybourne for the music).
Striding along Hove seafront with my partner Peta, one fine spring morning in 2021, a small dog playing by the shoreline caught her attention. She stepped down onto the pebble beach to ask the owner what breed mix it was, while I waited on the promenade. Their conversation went on for longer than a simple chat and after about half an hour I went over to join them. Peta was engaged deep in conversation with an intense-looking young man with piercing blue-grey eyes. They'd long moved on from dog breeds and were now deep into some heavy duty philosophy.... God, religion, the usual stuff. As the conversation drew to a natural conclusion, he causally mentioned that he was a graffiti artist and that he'd recently spray-painted a mural of Bob Marley at Black Rock, the run down area down by Brighton Marina where once an open air swimming pool stood. I remembered the monochrome painting, which seemed to jump right off the wall at you.
I told him about my plans for a comic book about Don Drummond and asked if he'd be interested in doing a piece of street art to publicise the imminent launch of the project. I didn't need to explain who Don Drummond was, he knew of him and was familiar the music of the Skatalites. It turned out his Dad was a comics illustrator, as well as a collector of old reggae and ska records. He liked the idea of doing something together and we made some kind of a pact right there to make it happen. Graffiti artists prefer to remain in the shadows. For convenience sake, I'll refer to FEK by his graffiti name for the rest of this piece We parted company and I walked off, buzzing with excitement about what had just transpired. I checked out FEK's Instagram page and was blown away by the sheer diversity and ambitiousness of his work. Here's a selection - click on the right image to scroll through:
Later that spring I met up with FEK in central Brighton to discuss a possible location. He made it clear to me that our mural would need to be a wall with permission. Brighton and Hove council had been cracking down on street artists, resulting in many getting hefty fines. Not that it seemed to have curtailed the sheer amount of spray painted art around the place. Brighton is renowned for its street art, with a couple of books dedicated to it. I set of with FEK on a fascinating meander through the back alleys of Brighton's North Laine area, my own personal guided tour of the street art underworld. He seemed to know who was behind every creation and held an opinion on each one. He pointed out their flaws and failings as well as masterful strokes of technical and artistic wizardry that I would have been otherwise oblivious to. I learned about the etiquette of the street art world. You have to earn respect in the scene by adhering to certain codes of conduct and those that don't soon get a bad name. For example, you don't cover a new piece of of work. 'Tagging' (writing your graffiti name) on other's work is a no-no, although plenty do it. One piece he showed me was by a feared London gang. Paint over their work and you're asking for trouble, apparently.
At the end of a back alley, on a street corner, we stopped at a freshly painted piece that FEK had completed a couple of days previously. It was of Sebastian Eubanks, son of local boxing legend Chris Eubanks. Sebastian had died earlier in the week, aged just 29, while watching a sunset in the sea off the coast of Dubai. He had a previously undetected heart condition and had suffered a massive heart attack. He had been due to become a father in a few weeks. At the foot of the painting were some scattered sunflowers and a few burning candles. A young man of about 18 was gazing at it in silence. 'Did you know him?' asked FEK. 'He was my cousin,' the man replied. 'Did you do this?'. FEK nodded. 'Thank you,' the young man said. 'On behalf of my family, thank you.' We stood for a few moments in silence and left him in peace. It was a powerful moment.
We looked at more wall spaces and FEK explained why this or that one wouldn't be possible.
He remembered a wall alongside Richer Sounds hi-fi store on the corner of the busy London Road, a seedy shopping area that has been undergoing rapid rejuvenation, for better of for worse. There was a gaudy purple painting of T-Rex singer Marc Bolan on the wall as well as some fairly scrappy art. The store manager was happy for us cover the wall but not the Bolan image. That wouldn't work. We needed the whole space. FEK tracked down the artist and cut some kind of a deal with him, offering some wall space in exchange for forfeiting his Marc Bolan. Now I do love a bit of T-Rex but I thought the image was second rate and wasn't sad to see it go.
Spray paints were purchased and work began on a bitterly cold Wednesday morning. I filmed the entire thing on time lapse, using a Panasonic Lumix FZ-70 point-and-shoot compact camera, grabbing a shot every 30 seconds. The painting was going to be in three sections, a portrait of Don Drummond, a portrait of his lover Margarita Mahfood, and a recreation of the main project motif by Trombone Man comic illustrator Costantinos Pissourios. FEK set about rapidly covering the first section of the wall to be worked on with an alphabetical (A-Z) and numerical (0-9) grid, which you can see him doing in the video. The purpose of this is to act as an accurate, to-scale guideline. He photographs the grid, then creates a composite transparent image overlaying the grid with the image he will be copying onto that part of the wall. This provides an exact map of the wall scaled right down to the size of his phone screen, detailing what needs go where.
