"If Scarfe was in the newspaper when it arrived on the breakfast table it would be just as if the family dog had shat on the table. It was an outrage within their little world." There is more than geography that separates Gerald Scarfe's rooftop studio from the "homes around the Shires" that he is referring to. The difference is in the mindset, an almost pathological mistrust of authority and those who wield it.

“A lot of people ask whether the Editor suggests the idea. No they don’t. The idea of a cartoonist is like an opinion writer on a paper, you’re there for your opinion, even if it is opposite. The great thing about this country, I guess, is that one can do that. It’s very healthy. There are different points of view in the same newspaper. When ‘Drawing Blood’ was printed in China, I went over there to check that the colour prints were correct, and they wouldn’t print the pictures of Chairman Mao in China. I had to go to Hong Kong, which is still China but it’s kind of capitalist China, to print. So there is censorship. They even censored - there are some very large willies in here, some erect penises, and they said they wouldn’t print them, I said ‘Why not?’, and they said ‘Oh…too big’, so I said, ‘That’s the way we are in Britain.’”

He laughs at the idea that he has an obsession with big willies. “I don’t know why that is, but I’ve always prided myself as an artist on being able to draw everything. Sex is a very big part of life, big willies are a very big part of life if you’re lucky. So I think that’s to do with that. But there is a lot of censorship around the world, and I do appreciate, it sounds rather pat to say it, we do have a huge ability to print freely – they were talking the other day about a Police state, but we’re nowhere near that really, however much nanny state we are we aren’t anywhere near the point where you can’t print things in a newspaper. I mean, Chairman Mao is dead, and he still holds sway, and hold fear, over the printers, and if they print it they might get their business taken away. But in newspapers, I can honestly say I’ve never had anyone tell me no. The other advantage to being an artist is that you cannot be edited like a writer. Writers are edited all the time as a matter of course, but no one says to me, ‘That nose is too long, take an eighth off that’."

Totalitarian control was one of the central themes of The Wall, which Scarfe worked on with Roger Waters. “I loved it, the whole time was terrific I must say, and you’re quite right – when I was working for Disney I went to the Far East to promote a Disney film, and promoting Disney films is weird, you just sit in a hotel room and every ten minutes a new journalist comes in and you tell them the same thing you just told the last journalist. But of course in Japan people didn’t have a clue who I was but as soon as I said Pink Floyd they knew immediately, it’s world wide. So is Disney I suppose. But it was a good experience, but of course at the time I had no idea that it was going to be what it’s now become, a cult film. I did an animated film for BBC2 called ‘A Long Drawn Out Trip’, and Roger Waters and Nick Mason saw it independently on television that night, and then the next day apparently they said ‘Did you see that guy last night? We should really have him work for us’, and that’s how it started. I just started doing some drawings for ‘Wish You Were Here’ and then, years later, Roger came here with his Wall tapes which he’d done with a synthesiser himself, and he played them here, and he said at that time, ‘We’re going to make a film, we’re going to make a record, we’re going to make a show out of it. Which, to his credit, all three happened. The show part was fun. That was travelling around from LA, the rock’n’roll stuff with black limos and helicopters and all the stuff backstage that you can imagine. But then when it got to the film, it got more difficult, because the director Alan Parker was brought in, and Roger and I had worked for say three or four years before Parker even appeared on the scene, but being a director naturally he wanted complete control, and Roger and I were not about to relinquish control, so there was a lot of pulling and tugging and angst there. I always tell the story of how I found myself at the very end, when we were doing post-production at Pinewood Studios, driving there at nine o’clock in the morning with a bottle of Jack Daniels on the passenger seat, and I had to have a kind of slug to go in and meet what I knew was going to be an onslaught of misery, at that point in the production. But I mean, a lot of films are like that, and since then of course, as it drifts into the past it doesn’t matter at all. But it’s very good because it keeps me in touch with a younger audience. My sons are 23 and 25 now, so they know about the Floyd, their friends know about the Floyd, so I know it has applied to your generation as well as my generation at the time. God knows what it was in it that somehow struck a chord, but I remember when I was in Los Angeles this guy was interviewing me about it, and he said ‘Wow! You worked with the Floyd. That’s fantastic! How did it feel?’ I said ‘Well, it’s like another job, a job comes along, I try and think of ideas and do them.’ He said ‘But…did it change your life?’ I said, ‘Well, not really’ and he said ‘Well, it sure changed mine!’ It kind of hit a chord, about something that was happening at the time, I don’t know what that chord was cause we all hit it, and it is true, I get commissions all the time, and some remain remembered and others don’t. I don’t know what that magic ingredient is.”

At the time, Scarfe expressed a fear that certain aspects of the film might strike too much of a chord with far-right groups, and indeed a now defunct American neo-Nazi group, calling themselves the Hammerskins, adopted his crossed hammer design as a logo. I was worried, yes, because when you’re railing against something, it means that you have to depict it, and there might be those that enjoy that depiction. They might enjoy the violence in the drawing. What I’m really saying is I am against violence, and I think some people misstate that and think I’m advocating violence, which is the last thing I’m advocating. The same thing in the film. The idea is that these fascist creatures with the crossed hammers symbol are laudable in some way, so I was just sort of slightly worried at the time. When we filmed the sequence a lot of young guys came along and they had shaved their heads, and shaved the crossed hammers mark into their haircut, and had false tattoos on, so I thought ‘Shit, this is a bit worrying’ because the last thing I wanted to do was start some kind of pseudo-fascist movement. It was the complete opposite of what we were saying really. What we were saying was that these are bastards. These are horrid people, not how wonderful they are. So I was worried about it, yeah.”

Irreverence is a key theme of Scarfe's work, something that he traces to his bedridden childhood and his early career. “I said ‘Advertising is Lies’ because I started in advertising and I hated it. When I left school at 16, I didn’t have the opportunity, like one of my sons who is at the Royal Academy. He’s doing it the proper way, but I didn’t have that advantage when I left school. My father was in banking and he wanted me to go into banking, which was kind of the opposite end of what I could imagine, and of where I am. Although I’d been known as a ‘good artist’ ever since I was a child, it didn’t seem to strike them, because art was not within the family’s knowledge it was not a viable way of life. And as my father thought quite rightly, it’s a dodgy way of life, Artists, like actors, are mostly waiting on tables at McDonalds. It’s very difficult to make your way in the creative world. So I was forced to go into this advertising studio, which I loathed. I sort of was aware that I was privileged to actually have a talent, if it can be said as such, and then I was kind of prostituting it drawing this crap, to make things look good. If they were selling that [picks up shabby box of paints] I’d have to draw this box with sort of glistening high lights and all these little paints inside would be beautifully arranged, or perhaps spraying out of the box. I was selling lies. But I do think, when I finally found my path, it helped me, because I overbalanced the other way. I began to tell what I thought was the ‘ultra-truth’. That’s what made me hit so hard, I think. I’m sick of telling these glossy lies, let’s tell the fucking truth. Then of course, it’s my truth, and what is the truth, and all those usual arguments you know.” “I was an asthmatic, from a child, and drugs weren’t that great in those days, they were pretty primitive. My parents were frightened that I was going to die, I think. It’s very, very stressful to watch someone with severe asthma, especially a young child. You just can’t breath. It’s like the worst nightmare where you’ve got a wet flannel over your face or something. You’re fighting for every breath. So there was that, but also it was wartime, my father was away in the RAF most of the time, and my mother and I followed him around the country as best we could, to the various places he was posted. So it was a nomadic lifestyle, and a stressful lifestyle. Although my parents hid the war from me, I do remember of course the kind of stress of being in London when the bombs were falling, so that was sort of the first ten years of my life. I think that fear, and anxiety, is still with me to a certain extent today. It’s very difficult. They say, give me the child before the age of seven and I’ll give you the man, and I think in my case, I’m a very anxious person and I still suffer a lot from anxiety, but I’m able to put it out into the drawings and sometimes I come up here, and therapeutically, when I work, it kind of disappears. It’s going into the drawings. But I think it shows in the drawings as well, that edginess and anxiety, can, when its working well, actually come out in the drawings. Also, I’m a very hard worker. I think that’s something to do with that period of my life, too, because I always feel late. I always feel that I’ve missed something. My education was very scattered, because of the asthma. I went to a number of different schools, and I had a couple of tutors at home, but I was always behind, always late, and always felt at a disadvantage educationally. Then when I left school, as I told you I went into the studio, I didn’t go to university and I didn’t go to art school, until later. I think it’s given me a feeling all my life of being late. I’ve got to work like hell to catch up. But there’s also the feeling, that I think a lot of people have – I’ve worked with Peter Hall and people like that – and there’s this feeling that goes amongst creative people, and I suppose it’s the feeling that you might dry up any minute. Peter Hall used to say to me that he’s always worried that he’s going to be ‘found out’, someone’s going to say “Oi, come on sunshine, you’re nicked, you’ve been sussed”. So I think I’ve got all that running through me. God knows what makes an artist. I don’t know. Or what makes an artist of my particular type. I don’t really know, but I can only put together all the facts and do some penguin psychology, and say that, possibly, may have something to do with it.” “Well, people often say, “You wouldn’t be who you are if that hadn’t happened to you.” It’s impossible to know why you are who you are, you can look back to you parents, I suppose, like we all do. Sometimes we almost feel like our parents, you can almost hear your dad saying what you’ve said. Especially as you get older and you have children yourself, you find yourself saying things that your parents said. I don’t know, but certainly all those early influences I think are very important.” “I think I very much mistrust authority, and I think that comes from relying on doctors. I’ve had some dodgy treatment in my days. My father, bless him, tried everything he could to get me cured, and that included all types of therapy. There was one guy who thought I wasn’t swallowing properly, I had to wear a plate and swallow. There was an osteopath who used to rabbit punch me on the back of the neck because he thought my vertebrae were out of line, until my father came in one day and said “Stop it, stop that” because I’d passed out when he rabbit punched me. I also remember once being given adrenalin at home. I was very severely asthmatic, lying in the bed, and the doctor gave me this adrenalin. And then they obviously became worried, I remember the doctor and my mother and father’s faces, and me kind of going in and out. I remember them saying “His fingernails are blue, we better send him to hospital.” The ambulance came, they put me in the ambulance and for some reason or another my mother and father couldn’t go in the ambulance, but the doctor gave a note to the ambulance driver saying, “On no account give this boy any more adrenalin. He’s reacting badly to it.” Well I got to the hospital, and I was lying there and they were asking me all these irrelevant questions about my father’s age and date of birth, and I could hardly breath. Anyway, she said, “Alright, I’ll give you something first.” She came forward with this needle, and I said “It’s not adrenalin, is it?” and she said “Yes”. So I said, “Didn’t the ambulance driver tell you? There’s a note saying I shouldn’t have it.” So that’s a small story which makes me very afraid of handing over control to anyone. So I think I mistrust people. I mistrust politicians, obviously, and I think we’re all fallible. I mean, I’m part of it. I’m often talking about myself in my drawings when I talk about fallibility. We’re all here not quite knowing why we’re here, what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. Really, its all very mysterious, the whole question.”

I tell Scarfe that this issue of PartB will be entirely hand drawn, and ask him about the impact technology has had on his work. “I’m an artist and I think you can’t beat hand drawn. When I was working on Hercules with Disney they did a whole sequence with the Hydra, which was perfect to computerise because as you remember, with the Hydra when you cut off one head, two heads grow, and you cut those off and four heads grow. So it was perfect computer stuff, you just regenerate. I did one Hydra drawing and then they made a model from that and computerised it. I think it took about six or seven months to do this whole sequence, which was probably only about half a minute, and it just looked computerised when you’d done it. It’s like computer games, they are brilliant but they look computerised. My sons play football games, and there’s the atmosphere and so on, but they’re still slightly inhuman, as this sequence was. They then had to spend a whole stash of money to redo it graphically. To make it look graphic like my work, and I said to them at the end, “Wouldn’t it have been quicker to do it in the old Walt Disney way?” and they said, “Yeah, probably, and cheaper too.” I’m not against computers. I’m not computer literate but I’m not against computers. I send my drawings electronically all over the world, so I understand the use of them. But I was a fan of Disney as a child, so when they came to me: it was actually two guys who were students in Chicago, and I used to work for Time magazine and had a lot of shows in Chicago and New York, and they came and saw my work and they were kind enough to say they were fans of my work, and years later when they did ‘The Little Mermaid’, and had a huge success with that, so they were kind of Kings of Disney at the time. And they just rang me up, or wrote to me, and said, “How do fancy being Production Designer?” “Wow, yeah” I really did try to do my drawing. I spent a year designing all the characters, and then I went over to Santa Barbara, met all the animators, and showed them my designs of all the people they’d be drawing. And some animators adapted to my work and some didn’t. There is a Disney house style, and it invades everything. There were some who really did try to get my style. Then afterwards, when they were animating I used to go there and, a bit like a schoolteacher, look over their shoulders and say “That legs too long” or “The ears are too big”. Some of them, there again, responded, and others didn’t. Just straight down the Disney road. I could only do what I could, really, and it’s a multi-million dollar movie and you can’t stop it and say “Do that again”, it just thunders on down the road. The ultimate result of the film, I thought there was some of me in it. There were 900 of them, and one of me, so I didn’t do too badly, considering the odds. But it was a great experience, and I would say it’s the nearest I’ll ever get to being Tom Cruise. It’s interesting with the animators themselves, each animator takes a character, one animator will work with Hercules all the way through, another will work with Hades all the way through, and they just stay with that character, so they are almost like actors on paper. The other thing I’d like to say about animation is that I think it’s still untried as an art. In the seventies or eighties there was a great deal of middle European, Czechoslovakian-type animation, a lot of which has to do with freedom, because of the oppressive Russian regime at the time, butterflies flying away with chains round them. But I can always imagine what Matisse or Picasso would have done with animation. It doesn’t have to be little bunny rabbits jumping about it can be anything. It’s living art. I did try in the Floyd film to push it, but it takes such a lot of work. There are twelve drawings every second in true, Disney animation. That’s a lot of work, and animators, by the nature of the job, work at a certain pace. You can’t whip them up and get them going faster. They don’t do faster. They do their own pace. I have tried to whip them up and I just end up buggering them up and they get confused and I might as well have left them as they were in the first place. But I’m still fascinated by animation, because it’s a moving art form and it hasn’t really been fully explored.” 

He also explained some of the other ways technology has impacted on his work “I used to have to send my New Yorker drawings on Concorde. It used to arrive before it left, so I could work all night. If they rang me on a Wednesday I could work until five in the morning if I wanted to, then a courier would come and take it to Heathrow, and put it on Concorde, which left at nine and arrived in New York at eight, so it was there at the start of day. But now of course it goes electronically, it’s brilliant. But also I can alter things electronically. If I do a drawing of Bush and Blair, and Bush is ok but Blair I didn’t like, then I can do another Blair on a separate piece of paper and marry them on a computer. Certainly some of the drawings don’t exist, as an entity, now.” “I thought Toy Story was incredibly successful, because it was dealing with unreal creatures, as was Shrek. But I think when they come to do human beings that’s where they fall down, the human beings don’t look right, but fantasy figures look fabulous.” Another aspect of Scarfe's work is his theatrical designs. He has designed stages for productions of The Magic Flute and Fantastic Mr Fox, and is currently working with Jim Steinman on a theatrical version of Bat Out Of Hell. “That’s great. It’s collaboration and being an artist is a lonely life, I’m working here alone, day after day, I’ve got the family, of course, I can ask them questions. But when you’re working in the theatre you’re working with a director and all sorts of other people who make things for you, it’s really nice and I’m very, very fond of doing that. But it’s a long term project. I don’t have to stop doing all the other things I do, I can carry on drawing and then go into the theatre at five o’clock in the afternoon. But it’s a collaboration so you do have to listen to what other people say, whereas I as an artist, whatever I want to put on paper, appears on paper.” “I think the people who employ me know the kind of stuff I do, they don’t expect me to do normal theatre. Directors like Peter Hall, who I’ve worked with three of four times, he just gives me my head, and says “You do what you want to do.” He’ll tell me how he sees ‘The Magic Flute’, what he thinks it’s about, and then he leaves it up to me to depict that visually. The other thing, in ‘The Magic Flute’, in Act One, I had a huge pyramid, which sort of split and developed into various bits of scenery, and then in Act Two I had something different, and he as the director then came in and said, “The pyramid’s so good, do you want to use it all the way through?” which, if I’d been on my own, I might not have had the confidence to do. So people giving you their opinion, of course someone as experienced as Peter Hall, who’s spent his life in the theatre, can help. In general, apart from the Alan Parker thing – Alan Parker and I got on very well, at the beginning, it was just towards the end when the knives came out, and as I say, that doesn’t matter at all today. It’s like water under the bridge. I upset a lot of people at the ballet, I did ‘The Nutcracker’ three or four years ago, and the ballet critics really didn’t like what I’d done to their darling Tchaikovsky. So I did a drawing of all the critics up one another’s arse, Critic’s circle, I called it. They’re a very small bunch of people, and it’s a very insular world, more so than the opera or theatre worlds, both of which are slightly bigger. But, as I say, most people when they employ me, I think assume that I’m going to do something a bit weird. That’s my job. I wouldn’t do an orthodox production.” 

And as for Bat Out Of Hell? “I’m working with Jim Steinman. What he wants me to do is design ‘Bat out of Hell’ as a theatre project, and to do animated sequences as well. Jim’s a very nice, intelligent guy. He has split with Meat Loaf, they had some difference, but on New Year’s Day I flew to Connecticut and spent ten days with Jim going through the script. It’s a theatre production that’s going to come on next year, they say. What one has to learn in the theatre world is that it’s all optimism. You never know until someone actually puts the millions of dollars necessary down. I’m told that money is there, but I haven’t got any way of knowing myself whether it is or not. But it would be very nice to work with him. I sort of vaguely remember ‘Bat out of Hell’, but on replaying it I was surprised how theatrical it is, and grandiose. He’s a great Wagner nut. He loves Wagner, and his house is a sort of tribute to Wagner, there’s this circular room he’s had built, with little Wagner statuettes sort of spot lit all round the room. The first thing he did, when we got there, was to play ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ at incredible volume, he’s got this amazing sound system in his house. Jane wore ear plugs the entire time we were there, it’s just killing, the volume. I remember with the Floyd, if you went in front of the speakers…it’s no wonder some of them go deaf. So that would be nice if that happened, but there are a number of things like that that are always on the back burner, and being in theatre you learn to not raise your hopes too much, but you always secretly hope it’s going to work, but a lot of them don’t."

Finally, I ask about his remaining ambitions, but he replies contentedly that it is "Only to go on". Fittingly for someone whose work has spanned artistic mediums and insinuated itself into popular culture, he says he has no more burning ambitions. "I've been very, very lucky, considering where I started, as a timorous, asthmatic, anxious child in the war; I've done what I wanted to do for years, and still feel incredibly privileged to be able to walk up here in the mornings and draw."