East End artist Casper Grey has arrived.
Debut album ‘JUNGIAN JUNGLIST’ is out today, an anti-algorithmic antidote that abounds in a caustic, chaotic intensity. Inspired by the pioneering forefather of analytical psychology, Grey explores and disentangles modern-day archetypes in a lurid tribute to the dark corners of the underworld – surveying themes of guilt, repentance, virtue and sin. His artful, referential rap is on elastic display in songs that careen between abyssal electronics, synthetic Sinogrime and negative space punk.
Coinciding with his debut, CLASH caught up with the interdisciplinary artist for Their Library, probing the tomes that have inspired his early life, his outré tendencies and whiplash-inducing debut full-length.
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What is your favourite book and why?
I moved school a lot, and when I was in a new school and didn’t know anyone at break I would go and sit in the IT rooms and watch YouTube. I’d recently moved schools from Maidstone to Portsmouth and was on my break searching YouTube with autoplay on … I’d got distracted texting someone, and so the next video just started playing. It was a video of a big northern bloke with a moustache in his back garden talking about how he survived swimming across the Straits of Johor to avoid the police by punching sharks in the earhole.
The way he spoke was so terribly sublime, so I searched his name and discovered that he was the failed Wakefield boxer and convict Paul Sykes, but that he had also written a book. His first and only book Sweet Agony had won the Koestler Literary Award and original prints were extremely expensive. I ordered a cheap reissue off of my mum’s Amazon account and read what I can only describe as a story from the most unbound imagination with ferociously lean detail and ridiculous poetic, exaggerative descriptions of this particularly unique perspective of life from the mind of a man who in any other time, or context, might have been Alexander the Great or Hemingway, instead of a brilliant disaster, whose talent to success ratio was too few and far between, and who instead channelled those gifts into a pitiful legacy.
What other authors do you like?
I don’t know if I like authors in their totality. I often like one or two things they’ve done and not much else. If I had to say one maybe Alan Sillitoe … but really, the authors I like the most are the authors of the top-rated YouTube comments and first-draft scripts of cult classic movies.
What draws you to certain books?
Cool covers? I guess being different by being vehemently idiosyncratic. If I can hear the influences and it’s one or two very obvious sources I’ll close the book and go read them instead. But if there is a broad array of them, so much so that I can’t place a single one, paired with the writer being at their most sincere through a style they have discovered within themselves where they can express themselves limitlessly through a story that only they could tell, then I’m in. Change my life. Otherwise, don’t waste my time.
I also get drawn to writing, music and film through each other. They’re always cross-pollinating as mediums. For example, when I was young I had a really broad iTunes library of hundreds of CDs I used to burn alongside Limewire and Soulseek downloads. But my favourite thing to do was to sit down and draw with this library on shuffle, and I would get thrown around emotionally as if my mind was loosely tied to the back of a rollercoaster carriage by a bungee cord. Its highest point was somewhere in the stars and its lowest was at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
But one day I remember drawing and listening to my library on shuffle when a recording of Tom Waits reciting a poem about a diner came on and I started to draw a contemplative ugly old man who I imagined might be telling this melancholic story. Then, the next song that came on after was MF DOOM ‘CELLZ’ which begins with the sample of an apocalyptic poem being recited, and in my mind, it was as if the ugly old man I had just drawn had jumped off the page and started speaking at me in this demonic, tortured way through the voice on the song.
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After it finished, I felt really tingly so I paused shuffle and went on Google to search the two recordings, which had just happened to shuffle next to each other serendipitously. These tunes had no real metadata to even register algorithmically, because even how they were ripped and labelled was such a chaotic mess.
Regardless, to my extreme and feverish amazement, I found that the poem Tom Waits was reciting ‘Nirvana’ and the sample at the start of the following MF DOOM song ‘Born Like This’ were both pieces by an ugly old man called Charles Bukowski (and were both stellar representations of the broad spectrum of his writing in contrast). I searched online for his classics and the writer himself and was sold. I found out he was dead and somewhat of a low life like me, so in his spirit, I went to Waterstones and robbed about four of his books.
Ham on Rye is a gut punch which, by two sandpaper-skin fingers, drags you across those formative years by your nostrils. His collection The Last Night of the Earth Poems although not maybe the best, completely shifted how I saw writing and how aligned I felt to writing with no pretence. I think when you’re into a lot of experimental and envelope-pushing stuff, when you then read writers from the literary canon, you’re able to see clearly who really has “it”. You have a new respect for the simple stuff and how hard it is to write like that and tell the truth creatively without being an insufferable ego masseuse or gimmick.
Bukowski also put me on to a lot of great writers because he would reference them by name in a lot of his own work and how they inspired him as well as the ones he hated. I read John Fante’s Ask the Dust because of this. His writing and style alongside the writing in a lot of the music I was exposed to made me also question why any style or way of writing or speaking is considered good or bad. This was revelatory for the development of my own style and the confidence I needed to have with it.
Have you ever discovered a real lost classic? What is it and why?
I think Sweet Agony is sort of a lost classic and I’m sure like many others I felt like I discovered it.
Do your literary influences have a direct impact on your songwriting?
Of course. I hope one day what I make can impact a writer. It’s like we’re all trading blows across the contracting lungs of time.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’m kind of in a philosophy hole. I watched a video recently of a science and religion talk which, in our information age, kind of feels like the big Tyson fight every time two old-school heads clash. But this video talked about how historically, philosophy had to be written down in order to be recorded, but that the truest way to practice or experience philosophy is within a discussion, and that writing, which was often edited to suit the author’s argument after it was transcribed, is a secondary substitute.
This is now what we’re doing culturally with podcasts and long-form discussions. So, strangely, I have moved away from reading writing as the medium by which I consume, especially since a lot of newer writing that I get recommended or try doesn’t really do it for me.
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What is the first book you remember reading as a child?
I used to listen to Rik Mayall’s Grim Tales on tape all the time. They’re probably still some of the best kids stories ever recorded, particularly because of his performance and delivery, not to mention the fact that the stories themselves are certifiably insane. I also remember “reading” a special edition of Animal Farm by George Orwell with illustrations by Ralph Steadman, but I reckon that was a much more visual stimulation than a literary one at that age.
Have you ever found a book that you simply couldn’t finish?
My own? It’s nearly done, I promise. But no, not really. I don’t give up if I’ve started. I often have a hunch about books though, and just don’t ever start them. A couple of times I’ll test my senses and give one a chance (reading them front to back) only to get proven right in the end. I couldn’t finish the majority of the great War novels to be honest, but I think that’s because we got forced to read them in school and at the time I probably just couldn’t wait to get home and watch cartoons.
Actually, I did pick up a Rupi Kaur book of poems in a shop once and had to remove myself after a few pages. It’s amazing what great marketing can do for a truly vacuous collection of what is essentially fridge magnet aesthetic sentences set in lowercase next to an irrelevant amateur pencil drawing of a bug.
Would you ever re-read the same book?
Probably one day, when I have kids, I’ll re-read a book to them to bore them to sleep. If they’re anything like me, they’ll have a favourite story that they will want to hear every single night forever. Maybe I’ll be able to re-read them some of my own writing and stories.
Have you ever identified with a character in a book? Which one and why?
Dennis the Menace. Probably Billy Casper from A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines. It’s a story about a kid protecting the one thing of beauty, inspiration, love and hope from a world literally trying to tear it from his grip. The same world he miraculously has found this thing hidden within. I think the flippant misunderstandings, assumptions and consequential mistreatment of the character by almost everyone around him – except a luckily considerate teacher, and a bloody hawk – is quite a definitively British tragedy, at least symbolically. It breeds a solitary, introspective and disillusioned sort of social demeanour we all recognise.
I can’t think of a more appropriate metaphor, or a more relatable expression, of that quintessentially British inner child than that character and his love for the thing that provides some semblance of agency and control of his own ability, potential and future. Like the hawk, maybe one day he too could fly freely away from the hopeless, desolate world that surrounds him and looms ever closer; a not-too-distant future down the the pits of north England. His inevitable grave.
Is there an author or poet you would like to collaborate with?
Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods. Although I think maybe we’d both just end up arguing or something. That’s a good idea, actually. We could record a tune of us going back and forth (better than the standard feature format). I don’t know, though. It’s probably a better idea for me to collaborate with someone outside my immediate disciplines, like a dancer or something. Even though I like to think I can dance a bit, too.
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‘JUNGIAN JUNGLIST’ is out today.
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Photo Credit: Somitude
