Branded!

How Sue Webster has turned her life into art

One day back in 2000, that is to say 26 years ago, as part of my research into the phenomenon of the YBA explosion in British contemporary art, I went to a cool event in a cool place called the SoSho club, where the then head of Channel 4, Michael Jackson, was speaking.

It was a prophetic moment. “You need a brand,” he announced. “And if you haven’t got a brand, get one.”

And so they did. All the artists under the YBA banner did, anyway. Plus the galleries connected with them; White Cube, Sadie Coles HQ, Saatchi, Tate.

Damien Hirst was death. Tracey Emin; sex. The Chapman Brothers; violence (with a queasy side-order of sexualised children). Sarah Lucas; aggression. Gavin Turk; fun. Grayson Perry; frills and clever irony. And so on. Sue Webster, (then one part of the duo Noble and Webster), also had her own carefully curated brand; Punk Rebel. It was one she started working on when she was a teenager. Spiky hair, Siouxie Sioux makeup, bad attitude.

With her customised leather jackets @Dave Bennett/Getty

The Noble and Webster sculptures, notably consisting of hand-written phrases in neon (eg the Groucho club’s “Fucking Beautiful”), or portraits made via shadows cast by piles of rubbish were outward manifestations of this, with a bit of gloss laid on, courtesy of Larry Gagosian, or whoever the gallerist was at the time.

Neon by Noble & Webster

She’s still on brand. Appearing at a preview party for her brilliant, first ever solo show Sue Webster: Birth of an Icon, which opens next week at Firstsite in Colchester (disclaimer: I’m Chair of the Board), she was quite the part; leather jacket, pointy studded boots, loads of black eye makeup, artful hair. She looked cool, and quite scary.

Her friends at the do (in Kensington’s Roof Garden bar), all attested to how truthful the look is, and how scary she was growing up in Leicester and then at Nottingham Art School. As a teenager, she painted her bedroom black and decorated it with pictures of Siouxie Sioux and pages ripped out of Smash Hits. She had a record player and begged her older sister to give her one of her own David Bowie albums every year for Christmas. Astonishingly, this ruse worked. At least it did, until her sister threw the rest of her Bowie collection away. Sue however, has thrown nothing away.

Her life changed when her art teacher persuaded her to stay on at school and do Art A Level. Her parents had both left school at 16 and saw no reason why their daughter shouldn’t, too. But the teacher thought differently, and even encouraged Sue to apply to Art School. She did so, and got in, although arriving a day late because she had got held up at a gig in Holland the weekend before.

The show, her first solo exhibition, will be is a collection of her life; it is dominated by a giant wall which she affectionately calls The Crime Scene, and is decorated with everything she has kept from that teenage black bedroom, including ticket stubs to key concerts, to album covers and even letters such as one from Channel 4’s The Tube, inviting her to a screen test for presenter.

Sue Webster with an early iteration of The Crime Scene

There are painted leather jackets, adorned with the face of Siouxie, big paintings showing her pregnant with her son Spider-Ray (yes that is his real name, chosen to go with his surname) and a specially made neon for the show, reading ICON in her trademark spiky handwriting.

There is a book, a visual autobiography I Was a Teenage Banshee which recounts a tumultuous childhood and adolescence in which she considers Siouxie her ‘adoptive mother’. Of writing this, she has said; “It’s my voice and I don’t mind if it doesn't make sense, as its my sense I’m trying to make sense of”.

Pregnant with Spider Ray

As she explained to BBC Six Music DJ Mary Anne Hobbs, who drew out a very insightful interview during the evening, the invention of “Sue Webster” clearly seems to have been a way for Sue to escape a possible future as presented by her mother and older sister. Permed hair, kitten heels, early motherhood. Not for her then, or now.

The Sue Webster brand represents artistic freedom. Why not? She invented it.

For others, who have had brands thrust upon them, it’s not so easy. Compare, if you can, the imprisonment of Brooklyn Beckham, 26, whose parents have even taken his name, and monetised it. Yes, he is a privileged young man who will probably never have to worry about travelling Economy. But being trapped within a brand? According to the news this week, Brooklyn says his family values “public promotion and endorsements above all else”.

Michael Jackson, who went on to run Channel 4 and is now an independent TV producer with a company in London and New York, is a clever man. But I doubt that even he could have predicted that brands would become so colossal, so curated and so valuable that they might actually stifle living human beings. Mercifully, Sue Webster seems too single minded and in charge of her own destiny for this. She’s also not 26. But go and see the show. It’s free, bracing, and cool. And quite scary.