Dan Richards and his 15 interviewees – from Bill Drummond to Judi Dench – collectively celebrate the maverick visionary
A book about its own making is always interesting. It unfolds before our eyes, shows its inner workings and the whirr of its thoughts. And as we read the sentences that describe its subject and themes, another tale is also being told – the story of our own reading. So it is with The Beechwood Airship Interviews, by Dan Richards, who co-authored Holloway with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood. Based on 15 interviews, whose subjects range from artist and musician Bill Drummond to Judi Dench, the book is part memoir, part polemic, part reportage and part poetry. And from the beginning we are right inside – putting the story together for ourselves, piece by piece, discovering what bit is important for us here, what bit there. Richards’s writing unravels and puts itself back together – in footnotes, asides, time switches and interventions.
Unwieldy and memorable as the model Zeppelin Richards creates for his old art school, to hang massively and uncompromisingly from the rafters of the student union at Norwich, The Beechwood Airship Interviews is a representation of something put together by instinct and craft, the scale of which we can’t quite see until it’s complete. “Time and again, the artists and craftspeople in this book tried out ideas aloud and ventured theories, as if for the first time; their process having crept up on them,” Richards writes. It’s a good summary of his own practice.
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