Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.
It feels fucking weird being back here anyway.
You know what I mean?
Looking at all the crows flying over it reminds me of just watching out my cell window just
thinking here we've got another day and then I remember telling my brother about it.
One thing that he used to just keep us interested was all the seagulls would come and all the
birds would come and eat all the shit from another window and eventually when that food
would run out and the birds were really hungry the seagulls would start diving the pigeons
and ripping them to pieces.
At the first time that my house had been raided my brother had not been charged with the crime.
Wagons, 24 police, you know you've got a dog in the house which shouts mouth off to try
and keep the dog from running out of the house.
The police sort of swagger in you know like the police when they enter into a house they
don't know what they're going to go into.
There was a bit of a pattern though he tended to go out and not come back until very late
or early in the morning and I suppose I should have realised.
These police officers are fucking seen like all my personal shit from my phone, my laptop,
the messages to girlfriends, to my mum, everything they know more about me than some of my closest friends.
I kind of feel my mum and dad's relationship broke down because of it.
Obviously all the neighbours that see us getting raided all the time that affects my mum and dad
and that and granddad got raided like I've said before, my girlfriend got raided.
It affects everything, affects all your relationships.
If you're going to do it you've got to think of the consequences, like is it all worth it?
For me it was 100%.
It's something that's kind of been ingrained in my life, in my heart.
Because I think for me it's so personal.
For me it's an escape from reality because my real life as you want to call it
kind of has its ups and downs and when it has its downs I kind of tend to do more graph
and it kind of, I do it because it's a release.
Once you've been woken up at 6am to four policemen around your bed
you kind of start to realise that yeah this is not about me, it's not about what I've really done,
it's about money.
I'm not robbing a bank, I'm not killing anyone, do you know what I mean?
I'm not committing serious GBH, so to me it just seemed unmadness.
I'd be in the same kind of educational courses as people that had murdered their wives
and they'd done 28 years in jail, they were 55 and they had no life
because by the time they'd gone in jail and come out all their friends had died
and it made me think like fuck this, I've nothing to do with these people,
that was a category B jail, like one of the scrubs is a category B,
it's for quite high-risk people and being on the most high-risk wing, B-wing in jail
is just a bit of a mind fuck, it's surreal because you're coming in for putting graffiti on a wall
and I know I keep saying that, you're putting paint on a surface
but that's literally all it is when you break it down.
I've got something back, I've never got my computer back,
didn't get a book bag, didn't get a paint bag, didn't get a paint bag,
I can understand the paint, I can understand the pens, things like my computer,
I do paint, I try to make a computer, I don't do any tag to a computer, nothing like that.
And I wrote a letter to the judge and I said to him, you've got a young man here,
that you can positively change, you've got a young man here that you can give a chance to,
that you can bring back into society, you know,
that fundamentally what he's been doing is the fault of a society
which has turned its back on a whole generation of young people.
But a lot of writers probably would say to you that they're just as addicted as graph as anything
or they've been able to kick a lot of drugs and smoking but this is the one thing they can't kick.
I don't want to get drunk tonight, I rather go out painting,
I don't want to get into a fight with idiots,
I don't want to kind of like, just do other shit that's probably worse for you in the long run than painting graph.
In general our government and I guess as a society as a whole just values money
of human life in a respect.
If a graffiti writer can get more time for painting walls or painting trains
just doing criminal damage in general then someone that's raped or abused someone sexually,
especially a minor or anyone for that matter, then that's like,
I don't really need to say that's fucked up because if you've got a brain you know that
and you should know that's wrong.
I've got a two year sentence, so I did British transport police,
my sight's wrong there ain't it basically.
Our judicial system does sometimes have a predilection for guarding property as opposed to the person.
Before I got arrested, I thought everything was all strict,
all laid out and there was like a scale for what you would get from what you did,
but I've come to realise that there's nothing out there to really justify what people get.
There's no way of saying, oh this guy did this so we know he's going to get this sentence.
He just puts everything in perspective, like I've cost the government a lot of money so they want to fuck me over.
I haven't really hurt that many people, most of my graffiti was on Network Rail's property
and I think a lot of people, if they didn't like it or whatever,
I still think they'd say okay that's graffiti on the wall, okay it's punishable but I wouldn't say you should go to jail.
On a Saturday for instance, if you're a normal standard prisoner, you're being locked up for 23 hours easily.
And on Sunday, 23 and a half hours, you only have half an hour out yourself for the whole day on that Sunday.
And that's literally just enough time to like call your family, have a shower,
get some cleaning supplies, get some toilet roll, that's it, you know what I mean, your time's gone.
So as soon as I step on the track, I just feel at home.
I feel like I'm in a completely different place on the earth.
As soon as you jump over that fence, through the gate, whatever,
you kind of relax, you kind of feel at home.
As soon as you jump over that fence, through the gate, whatever, you kind of relax.
I think the main reason it's illegal is because loss of control.
They don't like that, they don't like the fact that they can't control it.
That's my view of it.
It's obviously an art form if McDonald's want to use it on their walls.
They've actually used people like people's tags, like real people's tags, they haven't made their own tags,
they haven't hired a graphic designer.
My feelings on graffiti were that it's a violent act.
And I feel that my brother had, you know, very little going on at a time of his graffiti.
He was working jobs, which, you know, do make you want to fucking crawl your eyes out, you know.
But then again, I learnt more life skills through painting graphs than I did through education.
Kind of didn't leave school with a lot of grades or anything like that,
but I've kind of left school with the knowledge of London that's probably more than anyone.
To my mind, you can't have people like Banksy making millions of pounds out of their artworks
and people like Harry being demonised in the centre prison.
The reason my brother was in that courtroom, the reason that he's been made an example of
the pay of seven of the evening standard, and that's a fucking joke.
There are hugely mixed messages out there on virtually every news bulletin or current affairs programme.
You'll see journalists talking to camera with a graffiti background.
You'll see pop musicians with graffiti in the background because it's cool.
For me, if I see, like, I see graph, you know, on track size or whatever,
even a tag, if it's got a nice hand style, I think that's art to me because it's typography.
Well, what is art?
Is art a pile of bricks on the floor, an unmade bed, a shark in a tank of formaldehyde?
Who knows what art is? Art is in the eye of the beholder.
But art's subjective and I can consider that art and my neighbour can consider that vandalism.
What upset me about what he was doing was that he was in a unique place.
He had an opportunity, you know, to spray paint things on the wall,
which could make people think a bit more.
I think that's what's missing from graffiti today.
You can use graffiti in a loving way, you know?
Spray painting the statistics for youth unemployment on every fucking wall.
You know, tell people to wake up and see the fact that we're heading towards a really dark future.
They said I was the million pound vandal, but if I did...
I know I didn't cause a million pounds worth of damage.
That's just bullshit that all those figures are just made up.
If I did cause a million pounds worth of damage, you're never going to get that money back off me.
I don't have that money.
And in fact, I'm taking more of your money because I've gone to jail
and you're having to pay as a tax bill for me to go to jail.
So the whole thing is just ridiculous from a capitalist perspective.
You know, there's real, real, real problems in our society
and you're dedicating time for TV, radio and newspapers on, you know, some kid running out of his tree house
and spray painting on him.
That's ridiculous.
So Wakeman's are going to get away from that whole madness of London and city life and escape.
I don't know.
Kind of just keeps you fit, keeps you active.
You end up developing a certain mind state and a certain set of rules that you live by
that not a lot of people really go by.
They kind of just live their normal nine to five city life and commute on tube and do fuck all with their life, really.
But Graf's going to talk me how to live a bit more free rather than confined to all these other rules and regulations
that people get put into place.
I still love Graf. I still paint and still paint walls.
I'm still interested in Graf. I'm still with the tax.
I watch a train every time it goes by just to check if there's panels on the under sides or anything.
So that part of me, that right part of me is still there.
I've been sketching graffiti since I was about six, seven years old.
So it's not something I could just throw away.
It's something that's like there within me.
Going to prison is a very unpleasant thing and should be a sanction of last resort.
Sending people to prison for creating an artwork is, to my mind, just ridiculous.
The tax payer knew how much they were paying to put certain criminals in prison, like feet rising in prison.
I think they'd be shocked.
If you continue to paint Graf throughout your life and you've still got that young kid at heart, which is, for me, I think that's just one of the most amazing things.
They don't care about the victims of pedophilia.
They don't give a shit. They just give a shit about their money and what we're costing them.
They don't give a fuck. And that pisses me off even more.
It just makes me want to do it. It makes me want to piss them off a lot.
So that's what I'm going to do.
He's still here. I'm still up. Who's really winning?
You're not practicing, are you?
Yeah.
You're not practicing, are you?
No, I'm not.
