London Tube exhibition celebrates ghosts of the Underground and screeching sound of tracks
The ominous presence of a ghost at Bethnal Green Tube station, a melange of colour left behind from torn off posters at Bank and burly rain clouds cloaking Three Colts Lane.
These are sights featured in the paintings in Jock McFadyen with Jem Finer’s Underground (and Surface) Exhibition now showing at the Guildhall Art Gallery.
It’s a chance to take in the sights and sounds of the Tube without rushing through it on the way to somewhere – a celebration of one of the city’s most transient and taken-for-granted spaces.
As well as their truthful, unvarnished quality, paintings by McFadyen document the grit and surprising beauty of the Underground. As well as the stations themselves, paintings take in the above-ground locations near the Tube, or places that have been affected by the network’s growth.
“I’m trying to make people look at things in a new way,” the artist tells City AM.
London Tube ‘like a pleasure boat’
The exhibition was created by the Glasgow-born artist Jock McFadyen, who has had over 40 solo exhibitions. He has had his work displayed at the Tate, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, National Gallery and the V & A, and curated the RA Summer Exhibition in 2019.
The pieces, which are oil on canvas, are displayed alongside an electronic soundtrack of Tube tracks mixed by former Pogues star Jem Finer, a longtime friend of McFadyens.
“It’s like a pleasure boat or something,” is how McFadyen describes the Tube. “Maybe people would prefer to go on a cruise or go to Venice or something, but I’m quite happy on the Central Line.”
“It is the blackness of it, and the fact that you’re looking out the window at 70 miles an hour, and you can see all the spaghetti of wires,” he continues. “The machinery of it is like a mechanical worm or caterpillar. We’re all being transported sideways, sitting, reading the Metro. If you’ve got a half-empty Tube you can contemplate the people you’re sitting alongside and imagine things about them, or you can look at the blackness and hear the sounds.”
Inspired by industrial Glasgow
McFadyen’s work takes in architectural and nature themes. Growing up in Glasgow in the 1950s amid the demise of the working shipyards, the breakdown of industry inspires this exhibition, and has followed him throughout his life in London, where he moved in the 1970s.
McFadyen began his Underground series in the 1990s. His idea to pair his paintings with sound began two years ago when he was showing these works at his London Fields gallery.
He recruited Jem Finer to collaborate on the project, a multi-disciplinary artist who works in music, photography, film and sculpture, and was a founding member of Irish folk-punk group The Pogues.
“I started off being in love with the texture and the feel of the Tube, then I fell in love with the sound,” says McFadyen. “I thought I want to own it. So I asked Jem if he’d record it for me. He went AWOL, got really involved, he’s a serious guy.
Pre-Olympic London Tube sites
“He went off on the Northern Line and recorded this, recorded that, and called them field recordings. He mixed it and stretched it and made this haunting thing. He’s harvested sounds, mixed and stretched them, been up all night with these slidey things… I don’t know, these musicians… he got obsessed with it, which is good because I’m obsessed with my paintings.
“I get lost agonising over whether that green should have a bit more red in it. It’s pathetic really.”
For one painting of the wilds of Stratford, McFadyen trespassed during the pre-Olympic build to get a feeling for how the space was changing. “You could go in by water, and so we went in to take photographs and saw the you know demolition and excavation of the site,” the artist tells City AM.
Another depicts smokers standing outside an office block near the Liverpool Street Central Line station. “We’ve got this guy who looks like a caretaker or something from an anonymous block, and then these two. She obviously is maybe an office worker, or maybe something slightly more sinister, and he’s definitely weird.”
The ghost at Bethnal Green
But it’s the ghost at Bethnal Green that stirs the most. “I think that the idea of spooky things is more frightening to us as humans than real danger,” says McFadyen. “This idea of going into the dark tunnel and not knowing where you’re going to go. Sometimes the Tube stops in the middle… I do think it’s true that these are actually more scary and spooky things to the human imagination than the real fear of Angel Tube Station or Clapham North…”
Like the best painters, he is drawn to making “a picture that is arresting” a painting that draws people “to look again. That’s all painters can do, really.”
Just don’t go calling him a Tube obsessive. Rush hour, when you’re crammed into someone’s armpit, is no time for being inspired – like the rest of us, it’s the bane of McFadyen’s life. “I wouldn’t mind adding up all that time and erasing it from my life,” he says.
Jock McFadyen with Jem Finer’s Underground (and Surface) is on until 27 September at the Guildhall Art Gallery