For Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey, the British seaside is a symbol of contrasts: joy and pain, future and past, reality and dream, the bright lights of the promenade and the deep, dark ocean abyss. As an artist fascinated by notions of youth, subculture, music and class, Britain’s coastal towns act as liminal, distorted spaces – linked to his own childhood growing up on the Wirral, near Blackpool where Leckey would visit regularly with his grandparents, escaping to its bright lights and arcades. 

In his latest exhibition, In The Offing at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, Leckey is looking out to sea. Taking its name from the 18th-century maritime phrase for when a ship appears on the horizon as it approaches land, the showcase sees Leckey curate diverse and distinctive artists; commissioned with navigating memories tied to British coastal towns and exploring what the future holds for pockets of the country stereotypically overlooked. 

Acting as both artist and editor, Leckey approached the show similarly to his role as an NTS Radio host, curating a mixtape of sorts that exhibits his own newly commissioned work DAZZLEDDARK alongside a group of artists and musicians invited to showcase their personal observations of Britain’s coastline. Among the line-up is multidisciplinary artist Charlie Osborne whose six-minute video takes us – in true British style – from foam night to oyster bar. While musician Ashley Holmes collages field recordings and found audio in collaboration with Seekersinternational, and experimental producer ANGUSRAZE creates a layered soundscape portraying the darker side of Britain’s seaside towns. Hosted by Leckey, here all four artists engage in a roundtable discussion. 

Mark Leckey: About a year or two ago, Clarrie Wallis [Director, Turner Contemporary] had just started down in Margate and she came to me and said, “Would you be interested in doing a show at the gallery? It would involve commissioning artists you like, you can decide on the theme of the show.” I started thinking about artists I really wanted to be involved, and then I thought about having musicians instead of artists. I do a show on NTS Radio and it occupies most of my time now – what I think about more than anything is music. I was thinking about musicians who might have been able to translate what they do musically into visuals or the other way around, people who make images that I felt could make music. I wanted people who had some kind of connection to Margate too. ANGUSRAZE lives down in Ramsgate which is about as close as I could get. Charlie, you approached me, didn’t you?
Charlie Osborne: Yes, I basically gave my films to you on a USB stick in a little baggy and was like, “Please can you watch this?” Then we opened up a conversation based on that one handover. You invited me to make a new film for this show and it’s been great because it’s merging both the music and video sides of my stuff in the hope it bridges a gap. 

ML: Someone had told me at the Arts Education Exchange in Margate about ANGUSRAZE, so Ben Broome and I went to see him in a club called Elsewhere. I knew about Ashley [Holmes] because he worked in Liverpool. Ashley and I ended up being on the same bill for this strange music festival called Horst in Belgium. Ashley – I heard your stuff on NTS so that was enough of a connection for me. I was looking for people who had some connection to each other, to what I do and to the theme of the show. The theme at that time was: “All art aspires to the condition of music,” which is a quote from the Victorian critic, Walter Pater. I’ve always wanted to make a show based on that idea of putting music first and then the art catching up because I think that’s the way it is anyway – music is always future-facing. 
ANGUSRAZE: I have a question, in one word what would each of you say the intention is of your piece? Or maybe three words, you can cheat. [laughs]
Ashley Holmes: That’s hard, I’d say “trying to revisit.”
A: I like that. As a musician, the one question I get asked constantly when I say I make music is, “What type of music do you make?” And it’s the most annoying question ever, asking what the intention is behind it is almost the opposite. It’s more of a manifesto than a stylistic categorisation, which I think is interesting.
CO: If I were to pick three words they’d be, “functional liminal space,” because a lot of my research leading up to making the film was looking at how spaces operate in places by the sea. They always double up as these slightly desolate, haunted-looking, disused spaces but actually, if you know about them you can go behind the door and there is a whole world of people operating the space. It’s always changing and moving, sometimes it’s hidden or sometimes it’s in plain daylight. Old Town [Charlie’s film in the exhibition] is kind of looking at liminal spaces that are completely in use and function, and then at the people who come and go out of the space.

A: That makes sense, it feels like that’s a common thing. The seaside towns in the North and the South often do seem to be stuck in time, or stuck in the middle of an intention. The most objective example I can think of is probably something like Jaywick in Essex. It was made to be a seaside resort but became very run-down because it existed so much within the vision of a small seaside resort in the 1970s or 80s and it just never progressed past it. I think the UN visited Jaywick as an example of one of the most impoverished places in Europe. It’s incredibly liminal as it exists between places physically, on one side you have all these little villages in Essex, and then you’ve got Clacton-on-Sea, but also in terms of its existence. It’s just a place you walk past, but nobody knows the history and how much of it is an amalgamation of political and economic decisions, it has a wealth of substance. That intention you speak of has seemingly appeared in some form in everyone’s work, we’ve all overlapped in some way and I think that’s really cool. Half of my curiosity is seeing everyone’s finished pieces and seeing where those overlaps appear.
CO: I don’t know about you guys, but for me, the end result has literally travelled, as if it’s on some sort of weird ship travelling across different seas. My starting point was all about Club Oceana, it was going to be one big foam party scene and now it’s gone on a journey.
A: I definitely hit a storm or two. [all laugh] I feel that exact same way, I started off with an idea that was more filmic and traditional then, as I continued making it, I came to the realisation I wanted to make something which was similar to my methodology when I make music videos. When I’m making a song for an album, the green or red light in terms of whether I want to put a song on the album or discard it is if, when I’m making it, I instantly see the music video in my head. It’s something that isn’t down to me, it just comes to me and I see the angles, the costumes, and the editing decisions. With this film, it got to the point where I hit a wall and I was like, “I need to just do what I know.” It’s a cerebral sort of thing, it’s less so an ideology and more so getting out of my own way. It became an attempt to make something that was emotional but at the same inexplicable. To me, the medium of film and music videos are a way to extend or exemplify the music so it can add an emotional nuance that might not be as easy to put down in more objective terms in lyrics. I think film and visual movement is an opportunity to make things that are very inexplicable, more so than a book or a painting. With film you almost don’t need a description for it, when it’s in a gallery, if it’s a film that succeeds in what it wants to do, it doesn’t have to give you permission to feel a certain way, the film carries it.

This film became ideologically about being cerebral and emotional. As a working-class person growing up in the North, having an idea and executing it in an emotional and direct way was something I almost didn’t have a choice to do, because where I grew up in Dewsbury in West Yorkshire is an ex-mining town, so there is no creative infrastructure. It’s ultimate self-sufficiency because you can’t really sit there and be like, “Who in the area makes music videos?” There is nobody, you have to do it yourself, and you don’t have the luxury of being able to sit and conceptualise it. If you have an idea you have to go out and execute it directly because either you have no money, no time or no connections. By the end of what I did, it felt like the truest version of it, which is nice because I think that was probably a lesson in and of itself.

“I’ve always wanted to make a show based on that idea of putting music first and then the art catching up because I think that’s the way it is anyway – music is always future-facing.”

ML: Earlier, Ashley, you said ‘revisit.’ What did you mean by that?
AH: It’s something I’ve been thinking about, a lot of the stuff I’m interested in is Jamaican music, particularly Reggae and Dub, the idea of diversion and how the music circulates, or how there are multiple iterations of the same instrumental with different voices or different performances. Also, the idea of buying a record and having a B-side to it, that being a form of collaboration and things changing hands in an interesting way. That informs my interest in music and how I like to work with sound or collaborate, which is what has happened in this piece of work with Seekersinternational. They’re a collective that has been playing quite a lot of radio shows and I noticed some similarities in the way that they’re making music and working with sound.

ML: Are they a band?
AH: They’re a DJ and producer collective from the Philippines and are now based in British Columbia in Canada. I thought I’d reach out and see if there was any common ground in terms of our interest in working with these fragments of sound, working with field recordings and existing materials as something to explore further. Revisiting histories and the times that these things had been produced, what they’re telling stories of and the places they might have originated from. So, when I was thinking about revisiting it was in terms of music, genre and sound, how that circulates and how it’s disseminated. But, also on a more conceptual level of what the actual sounds are and ways we’re working with what that delves into. It’s interesting what you were saying ANGUSRAZE about intuition, listening to and feeling that, letting something just move and breathe in a way that feels natural. That happened in a collaborative sense as well, the way we worked was just sending stuff back and forth, so it becomes less of “That’s my bit, that’s your bit.” It’s interesting learning to embrace that. It’s sort of how the show has come together as well, it’s a bit like a mixtape and we’re all going, “Here’s a thing.” [all laugh] It’s a really interesting way to be working.

ML: It’s all a gift, I’ve received many gifts. The thing that really gladdens me to hear is all of you saying it’s been more intuitive than conceptual. Conceptual is fine but if you can evade that then it produces a different kind of work. That makes me happy.
CO: One day I was down in Hastings and I could hear these two buskers in Old Town, they were like magnets for me so I sat with them and the tone and magic behind the way they were playing these violins was the anchor for the whole work. I’ve never used music that becomes such a soundtrack driving force, it always becomes a 50/50 relationship, whereas Old Town is completely driven by those buskers I found and the lyrics I’ve been writing. The lyrics have become a very romanticised poem that feels like a letter written down by the sea. It became all about these magpie moments I was collecting, and they became the anchor for the whole work. If anyone was to ask me what it was about I actually wouldn’t know, but I kind of like that.
A: I think that’s great. Mine is about the cerebral nature of the work as opposed to any categorised meaning. If I did have a manifesto it would be to present something that was the most cerebral thing I could do visually and emotionally. As a musician, I’m not familiar with the art world, I’ve heard of The Turner Prize but it’s not something I’ve ever interacted with as a working-class person. A lot of the time, the general consensus is when people step into a contemporary art gallery they see a piece of work and they won’t necessarily know how to feel about it or even get much from it. Often they’ll read the description on the wall and it will present the emotions of the piece through the description and it almost gives them permission to feel a particular way and that validates the work. As a musician, it’s most common that the music will speak for itself. When you release a piece of music into the world it’s no longer yours in terms of what it means to people and how it operates – it extends past me.

In terms of traditional contemporary art, quite often if the artist feels the work is being misinterpreted, they will stand on a box and defend it, but with music, there is more of a tendency to release it from your intentions. It’s cool because I’ve picked that up from everybody else in this chat, this is equally the viewer’s work as much as it is ours. I think that is something Mark can identify with because I joke all the time that he’s almost like a musician trapped in the body of a contemporary artist. It’s like Freaky Friday. [all laugh] Everybody in this exhibition feels the need to present something new or at least something different to what a seasoned visual artist might see at any established institutional space.

ML: I went to Margate last week and I saw the audience going into the painting show which is on at the moment. We’ve already put together everyone’s work and it’s loud. It’s such a loud show and it’s quite dense. I saw all the people coming in from the retirement towns along the coast and just thought, “I wonder how this is going to be received.”
A: When I’ve been to art galleries before, sound has seemed to be an accompaniment, but with this exhibition even if they’re not ‘into’ art or they’re all from the retirement towns, they might get something from it. They might not ‘get it’ or they might not feel invigorated by it, but I think they’ll take it as an experience because it isn’t just a plain white wall where they’re just looking at a painting, it feels immersive on an artistic level. If they hate it and they think it’s the worst thing in the world, at least I’ve emotionally affected them.
CO: As I’ve recently graduated, I’m constantly hustling for artist opportunities and funding, it takes up 80 percent of my time and this has been such a blessing because I haven’t had to put forward an idea ten months in advance when I don’t know what it’s actually going to be. There is no emphasis on checking it’s going to be aligned with everything else, there has been such an amazing level of trust. It does have a DIY spirit while still being very institutional and I think that pairing is what a lot of exhibitions or galleries are lacking. As artists, we always have to predict what a project is going to be and lay it out on a piece of paper, whereas we’ve literally handed this over to Mark and that’s it. It’s a weirdly unique thing.
AH: It’s a really good reminder of what having that space, level of trust and confidence can produce without having to justify anything or have a really linear path. It’s been really refreshing to work in this kind of way.

ML: How did you all get on with the one limit we gave you, which was time? You all had six minutes, was that useful or frustrating?
A: My music videos are usually about three-and-a-half long so I was a bit worried. [laughs]

ML: Six minutes?! [all laugh]
A: When I made the film I just shot it guerilla-style in Harrogate. I put it into a three chapter set-up where each section was two minutes long so that was a bit easier. I didn’t feel completely overwhelmed.

“It’s such a loud show and it’s quite dense. I saw all the people coming in from the retirement towns along the coast and just thought, “I wonder how this is going to be received.””

ML: How did you feel about it, Ashley?
AH: It was an interesting one. It felt quite straightforward in the end but similarly, a lot of my time goes into putting radio shows together, working with music, extended mixes or collections of lots of different tracks and recordings. Working with Seekersinternational we had this back-and-forth exchange but somewhere in the back of our minds we were like, “OK, it needs to be this.”

ML: How do you think it would have naturally fallen if you’d have made it without a time frame?
AH: I quite like to stretch things and work with loops and repetition or play with time and tempo. It would’ve been a similar process, but it would have just taken a little bit longer to get to that point, being aware that it was going to someone else changed things ever so slightly. In a different scenario, I think it would’ve been stretched out even further and I’d have taken a little longer to sit with it and listen to things. How about you, Charlie?
CO: I was glad it was a six-minute cap but I’ve now got a whole desktop full of extra stuff and I’ve not really been sure how that will be seen or revealed. There were some really nice stages that just wouldn’t have made it into the final edit but there is room for it to come after the show. I was working with Bianca Scout [experimental musician and dancer] a lot in terms of movement and we were doing really late night workshops at her place, filming stuff all the time, which has become a whole behind-the-scenes work in itself. The film is like a ramped-up element of entertainment, so why not have a behind-the-scenes thing come after? I liked the six minutes, otherwise, I think it could’ve just kept going and going, restriction is sometimes good.

ML: The videos you gave me were all quite short, to be honest, that’s one of the reasons I thought you’d be able to do this. A lot of other videos I looked at were 40 minutes long and you just think, “I don’t know how they’re going to deal with six minutes.”
CO: A lot of my work is a combination of found footage and shot footage and it always seems to fit itself into a three-and-a-half- minute timeline. But the nature of the project has kept expanding and now it just lives on this laptop.
A: I love that, it’s similar to what I was saying about the musician philosophy. You release the work, then it expands past the initial release, it becomes something different to people and also yourself. I’ll make an album and it’ll have a particular intention when I make it, but then about two or three years later after I’ve released it, I then realise what I was trying to do or what the real reason I made it was. When I look at it retrospectively it’s like a little bubble of nostalgia. That happened with this work because I shot it quite energetically, it was almost childlike because I could basically do anything I wanted. I’ve been able to categorise it within myself as a music video but instead of matching the rhythm, intention and heights of the music, instead, it’s to a narration I wrote a day before I shot the film in an Airbnb. It was like a liminal space, there were no pictures on the walls, the walls were white, there was one desk, no kettle – it was like a prison. I deliberately wanted a place like that because if I was in somebody’s house, I don’t think I would’ve worked quite so regimented, I wanted to be somewhere that felt like an office cubicle. [laughs] Does anyone else get that thing where they look back on a piece of work after a period of time and it means something completely different, or do you realise that the intention you originally proposed was different?
AH: When I’ve made something I just need space away from it, I don’t know if that has to do with being really in it and giving a lot. A lot of the work I’ve made in the past has been quite personal focusing on my family history, so I’m working through a lot of stuff I need to decompress from. I’m not sure it changes so much but more so that I’m looking at it from a different place after, but usually I try and keep it at arm’s length for a little bit and see how it feels after a month or two.
CO: I feel the same. I love every bit of it and then once it’s done, I have to have space from it. The ways I revisit things are usually when it’s back in the context of the space it was made and it starts all over again, that’s usually the way I go with things.
A: What about you Mark?

ML: I have to get unstuck from it. The measure of a work for me is how much I can’t release it afterwards.
A: Have you always had that problem? Or do you think it’s got worse or better as you’ve made more work?

ML: No, I don’t. Charlie was talking earlier about the flow and a big part of the flow for me is that there is a point where the thing has completely depressed me or hollowed me out, or I’ve been thrilled, and then looked the next day and thought, “Why was I thrilled yesterday?” There’s a point in the edit, at the end, that I get totally lost in it, and if it’s really working I don’t want [that point] to come, so after it’s made and shown, I still faff with it. The thing also about making digital videos is that it’s so plastic you can keep making changes. There are always about eight different versions of something I’ve made, and I find it quite hard to let things go, especially if it’s worked. If it hasn’t worked then it’s very easy to give up, I just want to put it under the bed and forget about it, but if I feel that it’s doing what I wanted it to do then I can’t forget about it. After that, at some point whatever energy I had for it just dissipates and then I’m bereft, I’m lost – I’ve got nothing in my life. [laughs]
A: Every time I finish an album I’m just like, “I have nothing to give, it’s over!” [laughs] That’s a musician’s mentality as well, constant tweaking and fiddling.

ML: Charlie, I wanted to ask you about how you made Old Town. Where is the venue? There are so many people involved, whenever I watch something like Godspell [a 1973 musical by David Greene] or Jesus Christ Superstar [a 1971 rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber] I always think, “That must have been so exciting just to be on that set.” It feels the same watching that video.
CO: It was amazing. A load of my mates and I just basically rented a community centre for two days, the big stage and curtains live there anyway but we set up a row of club lights rigged on the ceiling. I invited friends to come on this insane schedule, every hour a different group of people needed to come in and then leave. We weren’t using diegetic sound so I had a huge megaphone and I was literally just shouting out directions for a group of people who had no clue what the film was about. [all laugh] Then in walks this amazing guy called Louis Pearl the Amazing Bubble Man who I found on YouTube. He’s a YouTuber from California who busks with bubbles and he just so happened to be working Brighton Fringe Festival, so came down on the train. He’s really amazing, he’s the type of guy Harmony Korine would make friends with and he just gets on stage and does all these bubble tricks. I had the camera right next
to my head basically all day, but I couldn’t stop watching what was physically there and that’s the first time shooting where I’ve had that feeling of “Shit, there should be a whole audience of people witnessing this, this is amazing live.” Then I’d have to remember we were filming and turn to the camera, but everyone that came by to help that day was in the spirit of it as well, I had long lists of writings and poems, and we wheeled in a sound system to play music throughout the whole day.

These amazing old church ladies were like, “We’re not looking, we’re turning a blind eye,” because there was even a foam machine technician who wheeled in a cannon. I basically just lived in a fantasy for the day, I was completely hyper from it for weeks after and was like, “Shit there actually is a film at the end of this, this wasn’t just a few days of complete overstimulation to last me a year.” [laughs] I shot something else afterwards, just completely by myself, as I wanted to wind down from shooting that, I enjoy both processes. Mark, to answer it simply it was just a load of people under 25 with loads of kit. [all laugh]

ML: I keep meeting people who were in it too, I’ve met three people who said, “Oh yeah, I’m in that.”
AH: I can’t wait to see it.
A: I can’t either, you’ve really sold me on it.

“There are always about eight different versions of something I’ve made, and I find it quite hard to let things go, especially if it’s worked.”

ML: My little daughter and I are watching a lot of The Smurfs at the moment and you’ve got Smurfs in your film, why are the Smurfs there, Charlie? [laughs]
CO: In Club Oceana, which for anyone who doesn’t know, is a club that is always on the outskirts or on the fringes of places, it’s a completely extinct club… I grew up in Cardiff and Bristol so that chain of clubs was always around me, I even went to under sixteen foam parties there and one of their main dress-up foam party club nights was a Smurf-themed one. [all laugh]
A: That’s incredible.
AH: Amazing.

ML: ANGUSRAZE I also wanted to ask you how you made [your piece]. Who’s the actor in your video?
A: She’s my friend Elwy [Malin]. When we shot the film it was the first time we’d met each other in real life, we’d been friends on Twitter since about 2017. She disappeared off Twitter for a few years and randomly messaged me a year ago. It was just one of those really cosmic things, when I went to go and shoot it up North I had to organise it in about a week, so I just reached out to her and she wanted to be a part of it. It wasn’t very regimented, it was really emotive and instant. We’d talked about films and music through Twitter messages for years so we were sort of on the same page. After I explained the concept of the film and some initial references, she sent me a big YouTube playlist of scenes from films and little things from music videos. I don’t think we ever felt like we were working, she just got my vision and trusted how I felt. I think I’m similar to you Mark in that a lot of the micro-intention comes through in the editing, so that’s where I felt most of the work became apparent. It was quite a simple story, it wasn’t as action-packed and amazing as Charlie’s – I’m still thinking about that! [laughs] It was just me and a camcorder from the 90s, that was it.

Interview originally published in The HERO Winter Annual. 

In The Offing runs at the Turner Contemporary until January 14th 2024, more info here.