In 1989, six visionary graffiti artists (Rough, Part2, Stormboy, System, Tee Roc and Solo1) were invited to join a groundbreaking new collective spearheaded by Juice 126. Now, over 35 years later, the group’s ground-breaking work has been chronicled in Future Language of The Ikonoklast: A Visual History of the Ikonoklast movement. Toby Stanford spoke to author and artist Remi Rough to get the lowdown on his new book.

In your own terms, how would you describe the Ikonoklast movement?

The Ikonoklast movement was a group of renegade artists who were against the grain, to the point that we made enemies with people who didn’t like what we were doing. I think it just became a family that had a lot of faith and trust in each other and what they wanted to do. It was something, apart from my family and my parents, and friends at school, that I never had. Not as a 20-year-old. So, it was an amazing thing to have.

Would you say the actual manifesto or set aims of the movement were almost secondary to the relationships and friendships that emerged?

I mean, primarily it was the thing that brought us together, but I think it very quickly became about the friendships. We just wanted to work together and hang out. I mean, Juice 126, who was the guy who created it and brought us all together, for two or three years, he was just coming down to London from Birmingham, like every other month, and we were painting… it was a really enjoyable time.

It was 1990 that it started, officially. Juice was doing all the groundwork at the end of 1989. He kind of had a view on artists he wanted to approach. This was pre-Internet, obviously, so he was travelling and meeting people, and he managed to find all these different artists in different cities, somehow managing to do so in a pre-digital age.

In a similar vein, acid house had exploded by then, and people were travelling around the country for raves. How did you guys relate to the music, and how did that inform, or not inform, your work?

It’s quite interesting, really. There is an alignment there, but it’s probably not how you’d think. Rave culture had killed off graffiti in many ways. A lot of kids who had been doing graffiti had gotten into rave culture and drugs, and some went down bizarre rabbit holes, never to resurface. That music scene did horrendous damage to our scene, which aided us in some ways because it levelled the playing field.

Suddenly, there was less competition. I did go to Astoria, but in my heart, I was more into my hip-hop music, and there was some really experimental music coming out of it at that time, which was keeping us all sane. So, it ran parallel basically. But it killed their libido, their want, their need to create things. Although our work was a young people’s game, we saw a long tail in it; we saw longevity.

Within that prime period, what was the moment you were proudest of?

It’s a complicated question. There are lots of things. There was a piece we did in 1998, Myself, Juice 126 and Part2, which is on the cover of the book, and it is called Welcome to a World of Genetic Modernisation. That’s in Hull and that’s really the pinnacle of our career. It was a real statement piece in terms of our creative process, in that three people came from three different parts of the country. Part2 from York, Juice from Birmingham and I was from London.

We all kind of arrived separately in Hull and none of us really had a plan of what we were going to paint, but we knew we wanted to do something together and created this piece, kind of out of nothing. We realised that was possibly one of the best things we had done. We had reached a point where the comfort had set in for what we were doing. We could just turn up anywhere and do something. It was quite a liberating feeling.

What was the meaning behind the name of the piece?

Well, the piece is comprised of a face with three different aspects. One side of the face is John Peel, on the left is the singer Tyrese, and then you have the bottom of a skull. And I had these hexagons, and Keith remarked that it was like a DNA structure. So, we just toyed with the idea, and we always liked to title things as we treated the paintings like they were people. It’s kind of like a mix of the genetic makeup of the face and hexagon shape, which informed the title, I guess.

With the Modernisation aspect of the title, it touches on something I’ve wanted to ask. How has architecture, or Modernism, informed your work? I’ve noticed in previous interviews that you’ve mentioned the Bauhaus and the Constructivist movement. I’m also conscious that you were doing art at a time when Britain was still within or just leaving that post-war Modernist world. How has all of that shaped the Ikonoklast movement or your work more broadly?

The good thing about the Ikonoklast movement was that we all shared a lot of information. So, if someone got a catalogue or a cool book on art or architecture, they would recommend it to you on the phone, and we’d go check it out.

For me, personally, I’m sort of the only one who was from London. I was born and grew up here, so I think I’ve got architecture ingrained in my DNA. I know London so well. I was born in Guy’s Hospital, which is a crazy Brutalist tower by London Bridge. I went to school in the Barbican briefly. You can’t escape architecture in London.

Growing up in an urban environment like that, it can really inform your taste, your palette. Your ideologies, your tolerances as well. I think people who grow up or live in cities are far more tolerant and understanding of everything and everyone. You’re all in this concrete jungle, and you all have to survive this together.

With that, a lot of ’80s and ’90s culture, whether it be hip-hop, rave, or graffiti, talks about the alienation of existing in an urban environment. Did you feel that, or were you expressing that urban alienation? Or, was it something else?

I think I did when I first started doing graffiti because it was Thatcherite Britain. It was a shit place to live. It was rough. The only people you knew who wouldn’t beat you up were Rastas. If you saw skinheads, you’d cross the road; if you saw the Police, you’d cross the road. Everyone was kind of out to get you because you were young. There was no money to do anything. There’s no money now, but the boredom of being a young person in 1985/1986 was just very stark. So, I was like that then, but by about 1989, it didn’t really affect me. I was travelling around the country, and I was painting. I had something I loved.

You mentioned today that there is no money. Do you feel as if there is the capacity to create radical new ideas, the way there was in the 1980s and 1990s? Although it was a shit time for a lot of people, it seemed as if there was a lot of new possibilities, art and creativity wise. Do you feel that’s the same today?

In the 70s and 80s, the creative outlets were incredible. You had people making amazing music, bands like Kraftwerk, the beginnings of electro. All those genres of music were dependent on activism. Being into that kind of music was activism, because it wasn’t the establishment. If you align yourself with cultural hard left turns, then you are aligning yourself with activism. And it allowed people to find creativity in themselves.

The difference now is that, because of the little computers in our pockets, our access to things has become so flippant and throwaway. I’m not sure those moments of genius rise to the surface the way they used to. There are still so many snippets of genius now, but the problem is that unless you have a behemoth of money and marketing behind you, or you’re very lucky, it doesn’t get out to the masses. But everything is in snippets now. And I just have a sharp appreciation for physical culture. That’s the reason I made this book, that tangibility aspect.

With the book, how have your past experimentations with type, language and form shaped the creative process?

I’m a huge collector of books, and I used to design record sleeves for a living. I was the art director for a label called Jazz Fudge. I would buy endless books on graphic design and soak it up, the layouts, how amazing designers like The Designers Republic or Tomato had put a piece of text on the left-hand side. Or, how they’ve added a squiggle. I used to be obsessed with that stuff, and I think I picked up so many aesthetics that I created my own aesthetic.

Designing a book isn’t the hardest thing in the world, but you’ve got to put lots of information in it, make it accessible, beautiful and make it work. For me, I really like the beginning of the book, it starts with Juice trying to kill the Ikonoklast movement because he didn’t feel it was achieving everything, which was ’92. That was Stormie’s idea. And I love the way you then go on to all the manifesto letters.

Are there any books you’re reading now that have been particularly inspiring?

There are two. The first is called Natives by Akala. Then I’ve got a book on an artist called Phase 2, the graffiti artist who died a few years ago. He kind of created Wild Style. He was the first graffiti academic. And I wrote to him a few times in the ’90s, but I never met him. He wrote back to me a couple of times, but the letters are almost illegible, you almost have to decipher them. It’s like a codex. But his book is incredible because he became a megastar in Italy after the trains. It’s a beautiful book, but it’s massive, and it kind of helped me inform what I wanted from mine and what I didn’t want to do, particularly with the size of the book.