I remember once as a small child, seeing a drunk throw a three-foot ice stalactite at my mother when she refused to serve him. I also saw a black belt karate guy take my old man out with one punch for the same reason. As I grew up, it was compulsory to be in a gang. Luckily for me, I was a popular kid and didn’t really have to fight much but I saw guys’ heads being smashed with crow-bars. We regularly went gang-banging armed with machetes, knives and hammers. However, once I got into clothes, girls and dancing that was it for me. I turned to the guys and said, “I’m fed up of going home in cop cars and ambulances. I just want to get laid”. I was fourteen years old and I never looked back.

Over the years, however, I’ve still run into a lot of trouble. When I was in this performance art outfit, knuckleheads would always try to take us out, onstage or off. They thought we were students or something. What a shock they got! I had a drum cymbal thrown at my head, a glass smashed in my face (22 stitches); I was beaten up by another band for wrecking their equipment (14 stitches, broken arm) and almost shot by a gun-toting pimp in Cannes. My partner in BRUTE! at the time, Malcolm Bennett, was arrested on firearm charges. Working in TV and advertising paid so well in the 80’s, we could afford to go mental and we did.

Also, I lived in Amsterdam in the early 80’s where I hung out with pimps and their girls that I met in the bars and clubs my girlfriend and I used to go to in the red light district. I’ve always been able to hang out in seedy places without being bothered. The first job I had after leaving school was in this clothes shop in Liverpool. The owner was gay and he used to take me to the bars and clubs he frequented. In those days (the mid-70’s), the gay scene was more underground and the characters you met in those places were amazing. Hardcore gangsters with the pinky rings and a little boy perched on their knee. I can remember those sweaty, lurching faces, the spangled cleavages of the fag hags and the threat of easy money in those after hours dives.

But on top of all this, the real reason I can conjure up all this stuff is that I am still the same angry bastard I was all those years ago when I was a teenager. I have my demons and if I let them go or worked through them then I would probably lose that edge. I’m probably insecure with deep feelings of resentment and low self-esteem and in dire need of some radical anger management but so what if the dog is scared of me? Compared to some of these artists I read about, I’m a pussycat.

Liberation: The men and women in your work definitely play up to their stereotypes of the chiseled masculine man and the bombshell femme-fatale but I find both sexes to possess a gay (or at least bisexual) undertone. Is this intentional or, as a gay man, am I reading too much into their sexual identities? I think this sexually ambiguous tone worked brilliantly with KMFDM because most of the people I knew who listened to them, at least here in the US, were gay industrial metal guys.

Aidan Hughes: I was asked once at one of my erotic art exhibitions, “Would you consider drawing any gay porn?” I was shocked. That’s like asking an actor if he would object to playing a gay character. Art is like acting. You must portray what you feel without prejudice. The answer to this guy’s question? “No problem. But the guys will all have square jaws.” If someone wants it and is willing to pay, I’ll draw a man wearing his own ass as a hat. OFFICIAL!

Seriously though, you’d need a microscope to see what it is that I am concentrating on when I am drawing. I am constantly measuring dynamics. Burst areas, flare perspectives and the like. Sometimes the piece will require a circular shape so I may use a breast or a wheel. In another area of the work I may need a totem shape and so I will include a building or a penis. Why limit your imagination by branding your work in any way? When I draw a naked woman, I may as well be drawing a sports car or some other object that requires flowing curved lines. It’s not like I get a hard-on when I draw a sexy babe (I get that when I get paid!). It’s the underlying image that I am more interested in, the way the forms interact and collide in the subconscious eye of the viewer.

I do like a more masculine female. I go with what John Lennon said in the song Polythene Pam: “She was so good-looking she looked like a man.” I fucking hate those Japanese manga with the cutesy little schoolgirls! I like women to look like they could pull a man a pint. I was brought up with those ruddy-faced, big-bosomed barmaids with their dirty laughs and ways of knowing about men that their skinny-arsed wives would never learn. I loathe all these airbrushed skeletons that are paraded across our screens every day as though I am supposed to want one. My ideal woman would be able to hold a broadsword while dancing in heels! I had huge arguments with the animators who made ‘Rocky’ for MTV in the 80’s. They wanted the girl in the animation to have this tiny wasp waist like the Tex Avery cartoon babes and I refused, demanding that the stomach be more realistic. I lost.

Liberation: Considering your work already has a distinctly political feel to it, how have events such as 9/11 or the mess the U.S. is making in Iraq affected you as and artist and how does it play into your new work? Your WTC illustration is haunting me in a way I have yet to find words for.

Aidan Hughes: The WTC disaster was tragic. But it was also epic and spectacular. When you think of the stink he caused with just a few true believers and a handful of sharp instruments and the fact that he must have known that hundreds of cameras would capture the event, there’s no denying that Bin Laden is a genius. Who knows what ways we are playing straight into his hands, even as we speak?

As soon as the second tower came down, I started to work. The information was thin on the ground about what exactly had happened so I had to work in a non-political way and very quickly. I used the fireman as an icon as no-one could later say that they had been working for the CIA or whatever. The poster remains true to those heroes, before all the bullshit that came later. The other stuff, “ Kandahar” and “ Liberty Will Prevail” were thinly-disguised digs at the Bush administration or anyone who thinks they can curtail anyone’s freedom, whether it’s for their own good or not. When I did the show in San Francisco, even the gallery owners couldn’t see the satire in the work. Needless to say, I didn’t sell a thing.

The problem with doing propaganda art is that, especially today, the power and meaning of your work is either diluted within hours or blown out of all proportion by the ignorant. The amount of people who tried to tell me that one of my posters, “Your Fix, Their Ammo!” was incorrect because it implied that the Taliban were selling heroin. I had to tell them that in the UK we get pretty in-depth documentaries such as Panorama (an episode on which I based my research) whereas, in the U.S., you have CNN. I rest my case. Despite this, I am not a political person, as such. I prefer the politics of citizenship, like promoting good manners and general thought for others. I love those old “Don’t Spit on the Floor!” posters from the late 40’s. I think the power of a message should come from its humanity or sense of humor, not its political bent. As an artist, I realize that no matter what political party wins in my country, art will still be the same and the lives of most of the artists will never change. If anything, I would vote for a party that oppresses creative people because they thrive under repression. I know I do.

Liberation: I am a huge fan of Shepard Fairey’s work, do you feel that his Obey Giant campaign or his style in general has been inspired by your work?

Aidan Hughes: I could tell you who inspired me by but to find out who inspired him you should ask him. It looks like he is more likely to have been inspired by the posters of the Russian Constructivists. I’m known as a Constructivist artist but I feel as though I come out of a more American tradition than that solely aligned with revolutionary art. Of course, now I have been doing it for so long, many people assume that I am the granddaddy of this style but, in the beginning, all I was doing was distilling two or three art styles for this one book, “The Claim,” which required a woodcut look. Later when I started to illustrate BRUTE!, I used my knowledge of American comic art and my collections of pulp covers to add to that European woodcut tradition. This hybrid eventually became the style that you saw on the early KMFDM covers.

I’ve been getting people writing to me over the years, advising that someone is copying my work and people have been crediting me with Frank Miller’s Sin City for decades now, especially now the movie looks like the short films BRUTE! made in the mid-80’s, “Love Me Gangster” and “Mallet!”. But my agent is in poor health and my representation sucks so I can’t chase firms for ripping me like I used to. I successfully sued a large sportswear manufacturer a couple of years ago but the stress wasn’t worth the eventual pay-out.

I remember the stories of the guy who wrote Superman who was too poor to afford the entrance fee to see the movie when it came out. I also remember when I went to a comic convention to meet the Hernandez Bros. (who created Love and Rockets’) and their agent told me that they couldn’t make it because they couldn’t get time off work. ‘What work?’ I asked him, thinking they were working on a new project. ‘They’re janitors,’ he answered.

There’s no point in going on too much about how much something looks like your work unless you are prepared to take it to the courts.

Liberation: Good point. You have said that you are inspired by the works of Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. What is it about their work that drew you to them and what inspiration or impact have they left on you?

Steve Ditko is the master of graphic melodrama, better than Will Eisner is at noir lighting. He also does the best clothing creases of them all - he makes them look so easy! Even better creases than Wally Wood! I look at the inner elbows of his suits and sigh: ‘I’ll never be that good…’

Jack Kirby: the man who took the funny papers into the cinema. Everything looked like Archie before Kirby! Captain America’s giant hands with those square fingers! Those sprawling battles across panoramic backgrounds! The tiny fragments he used in fight scenes to suggest actual bits of flesh! The exploding galaxies of the Silver Surfer and New Gods! Fuckin’ A-mazing! He should be honored by the USA. It is horrendous that rip-off wankers like Lichtenstein be remembered and not Kirby.

Liberation: As far as mediums go, you have illustrated, animated and have now moved on to these enormous outdoor projects. Is working out in public a new direction in which you are taking your work? I would imagine that working outdoors on pre-existing canvases would pose a challenge logistically not to mention legally. Do you welcome the large scale projects or do prefer more conventional methods of working? Are any of these pieces commissioned?

Aidan Hughes: The Creation Project follows a discussion I had with a couple of graffiti artists from our area. I’d caught them at their work and tried to talk to them about why they were doing what they were doing. I have to say, I was not impressed by either their artwork or their reasons for doing it which I felt betrayed any sort of moral code that may exist among artists.

I explained to them about how long an architect must train before he builds so much as a model. I told them how, even when his building is accepted, he must compromise with health and safety legislation, tenants and environmental associations and, after all that, some little twat comes along and inscribes his pathetic little scribble on the base of it. Architecture is the finest creative calling of all time. Art changes nothing. Buildings can help create new thinking and new ways to make civilization work. Walking beneath a new building gives us hope for the future, a blazing reminder that not all is bleak, untalented sludge. When these oiks splatter their paint on these buildings, they are reminding us that it is.

The Creation Project was formed to try to bring the warring factions together. Publicly-funded art spaces instead of graffitied no-go zones, working with architects and artists to present a cohesive vision of a graphic/building concept by using the dynamic forms of the building to inspire the art. To use art to complement the motion of transport by positioning graphics along the sides of tunnels or motorways. A purely futurist concept mixed with the compromise of post-modernity.

We began by painting a few walls locally and the neighbors loved it, especially as they covered up the old tags. In the following weeks, they became the talk of the town until the council came and removed them. They didn’t prosecute us because we’d used this weak mixture that came off easily.

We got a lot of press for the Barga wall, which was a good laugh but a lot of hard work. For that one, we used the scaffolding from the building site, some of which was already up. I took my usual squad from the UK plus twenty or so locals from the village, gave them all a section of the wall to work from and then splashed paint up for two days and nights. I think it was a bank holiday or something but we managed to get it finished for the next working day. Then we did a tunnel entrance in Prague. It was all arranged with these cleaning guys who left up the harnesses and platforms over the weekend, as long as we kept their name out of it. That was a beautiful job. One of the guys who came over with us had just been made redundant and he paid for the whole trip. His wife went ballistic!

My next step is to liaise with local community, council and police forces to help them to implement an educational strategy, where I would come and talk to the kids as part of their rehabilitation and maybe get them to help with some of the new projects. I live in a beautiful part of England and I feel it is my duty to try to repair some of the damage that tagging has done to my community and to inspire the kids to be creative and not simply destructive.

Liberation: What are you currently working on and what can we expect to see in the future?

Aidan Hughes: I’ve just completed another couple of designs for KMFDM which should be out soon. I should be in San Francisco later in the year as I’ve been asked to do a mural in the Hotel Des Arts. I’ve just had a show of mobile phone art and I am doing an exhibition of the Creation Project stuff once I can get the necessary funding in place. There’s also talk of me doing another propaganda show in SF where I may show some War Art.

As I get older, it gets harder and harder to get the work in. It’s either fan boys who won’t pay or corporate assholes who think they can get my work cheaper by getting some art student to copy my style. Either way, sometimes I question whether it’s all worth it. The life of the artist is hard and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. My kids have gone without simply because of my job. I’ve told them that if I ever catch them drawing, I’ll break their hands.

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