jeremy deller, welcome to this cultural life. thank you. you were brought up in dulwich in south london. what are your earliest cultural memories of home? home. well, church, actually. there s culture in church. yeah. there s a human culture, there s people, and then there s music and there s visuals and smells and so on. so, the church, maybe early on as a child, is something i remember. i remember seeing help, the beatles film, very early on. i remember telling my mother i d just discovered these four men who live in the same house as each other, which was very much like the house we lived in. and i was amazed. then she told me, oh, actually, i know those people. that s the beatles and they re not around any more. that was your introduction to the beatles? yeah, and i was very sad. i remember being very sad about it, thinking that they didn t live together properly and it was actually. they weren t around. so help was a big influence on me, and television in general, i t
in that play, which is based around sort of folk, pagan culture. there s even morris dancing in it. then it begins with a rave. so it s all the things i m interested in, basically. and that performance as well, by mark rylance, was incredible. and itjust, totally just blew me away. i was just amazed. i wouldn t say he d read my mind, but it s like, this is all the things i ve been thinking about for years and years. this tension between city and country, housing, the police, folk culture, rave. itjust had it all, basically. in 2001, you d already made a piece about community, about conflict, which was the battle of orgreave, in which you used historical re enactment societies to restage that infamous confrontation between the police and the striking miners in yorkshire. archive: by mid-morning, the picketing had turned i to rioting. eventually, senior officers ordered in the mounted police to disperse the miners. a gap opened and the horses galloped in.
time travelling aspect to it. # goddamn europeans # take me back to beautiful england # and the grey, damp filthiness # of a-es and battered books and. every song on it is just so catchy. so that s a very seductive thing as well. so that album ijust played to death, but it really helped me thinking about, later on, how i would work around commemorating the battle of the somme. and withjerusalem, another artwork, really, that crystallised my view of britain. roosterjohnny byron ain t going nowhere! so a happy st george s day! now kiss my beggar arse, you puritans! klaxon blares all the things i d been thinking about were in that play. like what? well, just folk culture. at the end of the play i won t go into details but the most amazing end