Richard Foster interview - www.rcommendr.com

Richard Foster is an artist and writer who has just published a book of short stories, The Punk Rock Bird Watching Club. It is a follow-up to his 2022 novel Flower Factory, both are published by the great independent publisher Ortac Press.

Does the community you write about, seasonal workers roaming Europe, still exist?

All gone, or as near as damn it in the iteration I knew it. There are some pockets of free living, such as Ruigoord, near Amsterdam, but they are much more sedate and ordered than previously. Certainly, I know of no communities like the one that set up camp for years at a place called Cruquius near Hillegom – that was almost an independent fiefdom. This may also have something to do with the differing nationalities involved. In my experience, the 90s and 00s ‘tribes’ came mainly from the Basque and Catalonia regions of Spain, Ireland and the UK. The Poles did initially seem to be carrying that on (in individual instances) around 2000, but quickly after Shengen, they soon coalesced around agencies who brought gangs of workers in for a season and put them up in hotels, so it was never the same in terms of how they saw themselves or their time working in the bulb sector. A fair number of the Poles settled down, too.The more ostentatious workers were obviously alive to a kind of ideal of living which also meant that certain tropes openly being played out. Visually, it was all about being hairy, having dreadlocks or top knots, tie-dye clothing, beads, tattoos, para boots, some worn leather. Nothing you wouldn’t see at Glastonbury, in that way the look was pretty conventional, and widespread even outside of these groups. Another code was music: rave, dub and reggae were staples, heavier bands that could veer from Sabbath, or Ministry, to Goth bands like Sisters of Mercy to post rave rock bands like Primal Scream. Vegan food and vedic medicine was openly promoted or at least boasted about…Another strand of male worker you’d run into – especially those who’d find a place to live in a city like Den Haag – was really captured by Robert Carlyle’s character in The Beach: a sort of over-loved up Scally or Ned. They’d promote this kind of Jack the Lad hardness with a cavalier spirit. Each city had differing variations on the squatting theme, some nicer, some not. They were just a wild collection of personalities, with some really living on the edge. It could be intensely irritating to be around some of them; I certainly remember a lot of conspiracy theories from that time – David Icke and his lizards being a particularly popular one… but you couldn’t forget them!

What brought you to Holland?

Just being fed up with life as it was panning out in the UK in 2000, nothing more. A nineties comedown? Possibly. Like many, I believed in the “the Dutch are friendly and speak English so why not go for three months?” story. I ended up staying. I mean, the Dutch are friendly on the whole, I’m glad to say my partner, now wife, is – but living in another country can be a shock. You have to invent yourself anew and build up from the bottom. And you are very aware, on a number of levels, that you will never fully fit in.

Which is your favourite story from your latest collection and why?

Probably the birthday party one, Gezellig: that’s accurate of the sometimes awkward and boring family gathering where everyone is being dutiful: the Dutch do dutiful stuff very well. It’s also a very nice thing to be involved after a while, once you realise you will be sitting around for about three hours with a coffee talking about nothing much. I wanted to show how (white) Dutch society is also an amalgamation of many social shifts and tensions playing out underneath the surface. Like a swan on the water, you only see half the story… This particular story, set around 2002, captures the end of an era really, the wartime and postwar generations are going fast.

Can you explain about the Museum of Photocopies and the game PINS?

I’ll explain some of both of them, as I love the idea that these two things I do aren’t really fully explainable… The Museum is an attempt to photocopy all the things that amuse me in my life, or note why I feel they have a significance I can’t fully explain. I always made art and also saved bills, tickets, brochures, I don’t know why, as regards the latter. But I used to get my old concert ticket stubs out and think about what they meant to me. I have always possessed a marked loner/lonely streak. In that way I am like my late father, who saved hundreds of OS maps and made notes and drawings of lots of things. My maternal grandmother saved all her receipts though that may be down to the times… I suppose the Museum is trying to subvert nostalgia into something weirder, through describing a process. I always say what the image is and how many reproductive iterations it’s passed through before it ends up in the Museum. Somehow that cataloguing makes things more mysterious and moreish. I just like it that life at its best is a luxurious jumble of things that ultimately are there for you to breathe meaning into.
PINS came to me in a waking dream walking down the Barrack Road in Newcastle upon Tyne: I had all these notes from my father – PINS was initially a wargame created by my dad, using pins as an indicator. A unit’s effectiveness was based around how many pins it possessed, and so on. Of course my dad never tried it out but I have dozens of notes about it from him… He was a true autodidact who, as I noted earlier, loved learning things but hoarded stuff for a rainy day only to forget, or grow bored or impatient with something. As far as I know he never finished his more creative projects. He dabbled, brilliantly, but all too briefly, like John Aubrey really, I feel. Somehow – and probably processing the cumulative shlep of losing both my parents, some close friends, COVID, fallout from Brexit (essentially my legal status in NL), selling the family home, and some other miserable health issues – I used the format of his unfinished game to address something I’d had locked inside me, something I’d never been able to give true form to. In PINS, I use everything that anyone close to me had said that I could remember as guides, or rules for a game: these would form the basis of a wider, as yet unexplained story. A friend once said that I was full of anecdotes from the dead: I think we all remember sayings or situations or family legends we tell to others. And I thought, rather than think this a sombre thing, I’d make it into something I could share. Have a giggle, too. It’s a bit Powellian, Dance to the Music of Time always has me in its spell. Someone told me it was like WG Sebald, what a compliment – and that meant I started to read Sebald! The point is, anyone can play PINS – my version is just a template and like the best things in life, it means nothing.

What is Worm and what takes place there?

WORM is… argh, it’s so hard to encapsulate in one go. Suffice to say it’s an avant-garde cultural centre in the centre of Rotterdam. We used to be a more underground music-based venue but that has shifted over time to being more of a production centre – we have a growing community radio, analogue film studios, music studios, performance spaces. We have toilets made from waste tanks that look like the pod Derek Smalls got stuck in, in Spinal Tap. WORM is one of the last spaces in the centre of Rotterdam that is still rough, changing, restless and there to form a counterpoint with an increasingly sedate and self-satisfied city. We put on hundreds of events and activities a year, from the inspirational to the puzzling. And that knackers us physically and emotionally, haha! But we love it and we openly champion and work with the margins: the vulnerable and threatened or misfits, and the overlooked, the underfunded; whether that is art or people. An old statement, we would use a decade ago, was avantgardistic recreation”, which I still think we hold onto as a way to live and work. Currently we are working on creating a lot of multidisciplinary artforms and hybrid artforms – based initially on communicating with each other – are possibly the future and a salve in this fractious world.

What current projects are you working on?

Three things to do with books and the book world. PINS may become a physical thing, a game – I’m about to “talk to people” about it. There’s also a story written by my friend Christopher Dawson, about some rum characters in Accrington, I will be illustrating that and adding to the narrative where needed. That’s going to take some time but the bloody thing has lain dormant for too long! Then there’s the new book that is growing in my notebooks and in my belly… about my wild and often surreal experiences in the Dutch music industry 2002-20. I think that will be the last in my Dutch trilogy and will probably be the most surreal and experimental of the books so far. The foreword is written by Sir Thomas Browne…

What are you currently reading?

Aside from my usual pile of books on World Wars One and Two (especially the remembrance cultures aspects of both), I’m currently reading David Keenan’s Volcanic Tongue, which is such a heroic and humane take on music writing. His chapter on Peter Brötzmann is a tonic! I’ve just finished Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars on recommendation of another fave author and good friend of mine, Ali Millar, and I’m busy trying to read Helen Czerski’s Blue Machine – about the world’s oceans. I’m really trying to read things I don’t understand: geography and the sciences are not my strong point, so fair do’s, let’s give it a go. I’m also really enjoying flicking through lavishly made art books and catalogues: one on Sebald’s postcards, some on my artist hero, Max Beckmann, the latest Linder Sterling catalogue, some ancient bound editions of Punch, books on British woodcutters. It makes for a nice change!