i. Twin Towns

It was maybe 2003 or 2004, I can’t remember exactly, I’ll have to dig out the flyers. Anyway whatever the exact year I had successfully applied for an artist residency with Sunderland City Council. I would spend 6 or 7 weeks in Saint-Nazaire, Sunderland’s French twin town. The residency was part of an artist exchange thing. A French artist would spend a month or so in Sunderland and one would go over to the North West coast of France, make things and have an exhibition.

I graduated from a photography degree at Sunderland Uni in 2002, I was 26 and this residency was my first gig as a freelancer since graduating. I lived in Newcastle not far up the road, geographically close but, as many people who live in the North East know, spiritually and culturally a chasm between them. I loved Sunderland though, I just didn’t want to live there.

My proposal for the residency was pretty simple. Before I left for Saint Nazaire I would find people in Sunderland who would be prepared to twin their homes and objects they owned with the homes and things of people who lived in the former Atlantic pocket. Through friends of friends and the family of friends and aquantices I found maybe half a dozen people who lived in Sunderland willing to get involved. A former student and young mother who I studied with and who would later call me a wanker on a popular social media platform. A German lecturer at the university called Lothar who had a hardback first edition of JG Ballard’s Crash. My mate’s Mam and Dad who lived in Barmston in Washington and had a weird chair lift that would come through the ceiling of their living room like a suburban Bond villan. A widower and former school teacher who had a violin that I would subsequently lose 3 months later and a retired Geologist who lived in Ryhope.

At the interview for the residency I outlined how I would make ceremonial plaques that would be installed in peoples’ homes and get them to select things that could be twinned with objects of Saint-Nazarian residents who didn’t know they would be taking part yet. I would photograph these Sunderland homes and objects and take the photos with me to France, spending the six weeks finding a French cohort to do the same, the photographs and objects would then be displayed in two exhibitions in each city.

I would receive a fee from Sunderland City Council and in Saint Nazaire I would get to stay rent free in a house in a small park on the sea front and suffer from regular nightmares, like American Werewolf in London, of Nazi’s bursting through the front doors. Saint-Nazaire is littered with the detritus of WWII, concrete pillboxes are everywhere and there’s a huge former German submarine base where they may have filmed scenes from Das Boot.

I’d also receive a weekly subsistence payment for food and maintenance, given to me in a brown envelope of euros by a woman called Chantelle. Chantelle was the director of the Ecole d’arts de la ville de Saint-Nazaire managing the exchange from the French side. She smoked incessantly at her desk, at every meeting and throughout the school. She had a full head of short dark grey hair, wore neck scarfs, breton hoops, had a raspy voice and the ashen complexion of a life long smoker. It wasn’t like an arts school like we have in the UK. It was more a small provincial community college with a student body from primary up to post-sixth form age. Chantelle hated me and I drove her up the wall.

At the school they had a technician called Hervé who also smoked all the time. He had the maddest face; a cartoon-like visage, caterpillar eyebrows, Hills Have Eyes eyes, a languorous gait, cowboy boots and long receding, disheveled black hair. He didn’t speak much English and was a misanthrope. From what I remember he was a lot of fun, once you broke through his superficial moody exterior, he made me laugh a lot. He hated the Big State of French municipal life. He enjoyed helping people though, was good at his job but despised the college and the directors, with fag in mouth he’d say things like ‘Everyone is making their own soup’.

There was also a tutor and artist at the college called Pascale, who could not have been more French. He had a pomade black curly mop and was clean shaven with a very fine pencil moustache. He was softly spoken, tall gentle bloke, very calm, generous and friendly. Pascale was a massive Factory Records and Durutti Colomn fan and loved that I was from Salford and half Irish. On nights out he would say to people ‘Non! Irlandais!’ and the folks around the table would look at me and nod and go ‘Aaaahhhh!’ in a French way. Having said all that he was a mad driver and I recall one trip to Nantes, Saint-Nazaire’s imposing big city neighbour, for a night out to meet his friends for beers, a break neck Death Race 2000 style jaunt down the linking Autoroute, over the limit and tailgating at 70mph, his toy town Euro car beeping in that French way,

The residency began in March, it was 2003, I remember now because the residency coincided with the invasion of Iraq. A week or so before leaving I’d watched over a million people on Channel 4 news march to Stop The War . I remember seeing bits of Tariq Ali’s speech and thinking that I should have been down there. Before the residency had finished Sadaam’s statue was being toppled.

I’d visited Saint-Nazaire the previous October, I think I must have had the interview September? I persuaded the Sunderland City Council Arts team to pay for a weekend recce to meet people and see what the place was like. The singular outcome of the visit was that it ingrained in me an overwhelming fear of flying that I have been unable to shake since. Severe turbulance over the channel on the return flight rocked our small plane so badly it had the american woman seated next to me in tears screaming. I remember too that I left my copy of Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices on the flight.

I was in a relationship at this time, she had moved in with me the year before not two weeks after meeting. The Autumn visit to Saint-Nazaire was the first time in over a year since we first met that we’d been apart for more than a single day. When I returned from this weekender I was overcome with emotion on seeing her at the airport and asked her to marry me. She said yes but by the end of the residency, the following Spring, she’d left me. In fact she left the day after I left for France. Not that it was without warning, from the moment she agreed to get hitched right up until leaving for Saint-Nazaire I was consumed with work and distracted, I had switched off from the relationship and it broke her heart. In simple terms I became a complacent and detached twat.

The realisation came way too late and she took the opportunity of my absence to leave. I found out she’d gone in a phone booth at a service station in the middle of the night on one of the Northern French Autoroutes between Caen and Rennes on route to the residency. I had a sense something was wrong and when she answered she informed me that she was leaving. I was in a service station because I didn’t want to get on a plane again after the October flight and my friend Pauly proposed, or maybe I did?, that we use the travel budget to drive the 800 mile route and have that the road trip we’d always dreamt of, he would drive, drop me off and then come back in April when the residency finished. The journey was wrought even before the late night phone call on the outskirts of Caen.

I had met Pauly on the Photography degree at Sunderland maybe 5 years previous, he’d grown up in Washington New Town just outside of Sunderland and was into large format photography. He would make beautiful landscape images of the New Town he grew up in — new topographics they’d call it back then. It was always an adventure hanging out with Pauly, always laced with drama and exciting. We met in 1998 through a mutual friend and I asked him if he’d like to be part of a collective that was going to Groninegen in Holland, another twin town exchange but this time with DJs, VJs, musicians, artists and dancers from Newcastle. This was the late 90s when everything was about collective action, forming groups and heavy youthful utopian idealism. Pauly documented this Dutch exchange and subsquently lost all the rolls of film on the return. We became firm friends, were both rather shambolic and through various mishaps, failures and repeated academic years found ourselves studying Photography within the same year group. We first started doing things together under a photography tutor and artist called Charlie Holmes and his Time, Light, Narrative module — a module based around surrealism, making things strange and the cut-up techniques of William Burroughs and the like. It was a revelation and through our shared love of Philip K Dick and previous misspent years on psychedelics we were in our element.

After this we would always have a project on the go and drift walk around Washington New Town, follow the trainlines of Newcastle and Sunderland and cruise around the hinterlands, industrial estates and derelict sites of 90s Tyneside and Wearside, thumbing Iain Sinclair books and enacting magickal operations with maps and divination in whatever clapped-out auto Pauly had at the time. As a partnership I was very bossy, irritating, loud and impulsive. Pauly thankfully a more stoic, well-liked and calmer presence. Pauly was a great raconteur who told tales of his tour around the US with a circus and being shot at in New York. We would always make plans over egg & chips and a pot of tea in Haversham’s on Fawcett Street. We would have a laugh burning wooden sculptures on the beaches of Hendon and set up chains of fluorescent lights with green gels and mini generators in the car parks of Gateshead and South Tyneside, every other intervention would involve a run in with the police. Our French road trip though would be a severe test of our friendship.

In March 2003 Pauly had an old white Ford Fiesta and it was in this that he would drive the 1600 mile round trip to drop me off in Saint Nazaire. We left Newcastle early morning on Ash Wednesday. The residency would begin officially on Monday 10 March and end Easter week, as a lapsed Irish Catholic the synchronicity of the length of the residency aligning with duration of Lent was not lost on me. The morning we were due to leave I had overslept, unprepared I had to pack in a hurry, a bag of carrots and half a loaf of Morrsion’s bread was thrown into a carrier bag for the journey.

Our ferry would depart Dover the same day and we made it as far as the M20 just outside of Ashford before Pauly’s Fiesta engine exploded, steam and smoke bellowing from underneath the bonnet. Thankfully Pauly had a mobile phone. He was not a member of the AA or RAC and from his wallet he produced a card for a breakdown company called International Rescue. It was a 3 hour wait sat on the M20’s grassy verge, in late winter wind and rain, with a bag of unpeeled carrots, dry bread and Pauly describing episodes of 999 with Michael Buerke before Ron from International Rescue turned up. The aging Ron, with a wooden leg and green lumescent overcoat, informed us the car was a right off and asked if we wanted to be driven back to the North East or somewhere else. We made the snap decision that we would go on to Ashford, we would offer Ron the car for scrap and find a B&B, a copy of Autotrader and buy another car to keep the dream alive.