Outsiders welcome
by Steve Xoh

At 18 I was working in a factory, something I can romanticise in my memory but which, on reflection, I actually found really hard. I didn’t particularly mind the manual labour or the shift work. In fact, working with big, expensive, high-tech machines felt like an upgrade from the run-down salad-packing factory I’d worked in previously.

What I struggled with was trying to fit into the factory culture. The people I worked with were almost exclusively men who were older than me, some by only a few years, others by a much larger margin. I was quite happy interacting with the machines and drawing cartoons during breaks, whereas my colleagues would chat, read the newspaper, or do crosswords. (Most of the machines only needed human intervention if something went wrong, or once they reached a certain point in their process.)

But often I’d find myself thrown into a conversation that I not only didn’t want to be part of, but didn’t know how to participate in. I felt awkward and embarrassed when my colleagues launched into noisy banter, boasting about the exploits of their weekends, while I stood on the sidelines smiling every now and then and hoping nobody would ask me a question. Even though I liked playing football, I had absolutely zero interest in talking about it. And as a much younger, skinny, tall lad with long hair and an interest in weird alternative music, I was often the subject of a gentle ribbing - something I could never quite work out as being playful and good-natured or more aggressive, closer to bullying. But I survived by keeping my head down and getting really good at running all the machines so that at least the supervisors would give me an easier time.

I had few friends at the factory, which didn’t bother me too much, as escaping human interaction felt much more desirable. But one summer a young Irish lad called Brendan came to work in our department during his break from university in Dublin. Brendan and I immediately hit it off. He was also a bit weird, had long hair and, as I was soon to discover, a brilliantly alternative taste in music. We would talk about The Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, and Spacemen 3, all to the backdrop of bemusement or the occasional bit of piss-taking from our older colleagues.

On the day Brendan left to go back to uni, he presented me with a mixtape he’d titled “Various Savouries”. I thanked him and, at the end of my shift, excitedly put it into the tape player of my battered old VW Polo. From that point on, everything changed. That little C90 cassette blew my mind. It introduced me to songs, bands, and musicians that I still listen to and would list among my favourite artists. (Including Pavement, who would end up getting me unstuck enough to write this blog many years later).

But there was one song on the tape that stopped me in my tracks. It started with a weird recording of a kid’s toy saying “This is a pig. Do you hear the frog?”, followed by a strange, ghostly, childlike voice asking, “Hi, how are you?” What followed was three and a half minutes of music that I couldn’t work out was either the best thing I’d ever heard or the worst. What made it even more of a mystery was that I’d already lost the inlay card for the cassette, and with no emails or social media in the early 90s, the only way to contact Brendan was by letter. Later that week I wrote to him, begging him to tell me who the track was by. While I waited for a reply I became obsessed with the song, playing it over and over again. I played it to some of my music-loving friends to see if they recognised it, but they unhelpfully suggested that it was so weird that maybe Brendan had recorded it in his bedroom as a joke.

Eventually I received a letter with a Dublin postmark and excitedly opened it to discover that the mystery song was “Walking the cow” by Daniel Johnston, a singer-songwriter from Texas. Brendan went on to tell me that Daniel had somewhat of a cult following due to his unusual low-fi style. In fact, when he created his early albums he had no means of reproducing them so used to play them over and over again for each recording. Brendan also told me about Daniel’s shadow side. His demons. That he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, plagued by paranoid thoughts and an obsession with the devil. That he had been arrested a number of times, caused his father’s plane to crash, and spent time in a psychiatric institution. And it was on hearing this that I fell in love with Daniel. A beautiful misfit of a creature who seemed unconventional and unpredictable, but who made such incredibly raw and uncompromising music that it hit deep in my heart.

My interest in outsiders began with Daniel but went on to include other musicians.

Lucia Pamela — a woman born in 1904 who lived a seemingly unremarkable working life but built her own instruments to create soundscape worlds she sang over in a bright, enthusiastic, child-like voice. (Including an album about living on the moon.)

Wesley Willis - a Chicago street musician born in 1963 who lived much of his life on the margins of society but created hundreds of surreal songs over simple keyboard rhythms, delivered in a gruff, monotone voice and punctuated by random bits of product placement. (He was also known for greeting people with a headbutt, leaving him with a distinctive permanent mark on his forehead.)

And The Shaggs - a teenage sister band from New Hampshire, formed in the late 1960s, who recorded raw, naïve songs with strange rhythms and wonky timing that later earned them cult status as outsider musicians. (The band was formed following a prophecy from a mysterious fortune teller, made to their grandfather, predicting they would become a famous musical group.)

(I must also give honourable mentions to The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Connie Converse and Shooby Taylor.)

The world of visual outsider artists also opened up to me, introducing me to a host of singular, self-taught artists such as Bill Traylor, Aloïse Corbaz and Howard Finster, whose imperfect, unpolished and raw work moved me to make more of my own weird and wonky art. I began to realise that my practice would develop in a way that was more aligned with who I am and what is important to me by turning to the outsider for inspiration, not the expert. This became a philosophy that has since shaped all of my work whether visual art, music, talks, or writing.

I’ve often wondered what it is that attracts me to the brilliant and often tortured weirdo. (I use this term with great love and affection.) Part of it is maybe that I see something of myself in them in a way that I’m not totally conscious of. I’ve never really felt that I fitted in anywhere, and I just make art for me because it helps me make sense of myself, the world, and my place in it. I also actively avoid being part of a “thing”, or a club, or a movement, and I have an allergic reaction to labels. (See issue 4.)

But I think there is more to it than that. When I encounter work that comes from the raw self-expression of an outsider artist, in whatever medium they work in, I feel it in my body. I will often see a piece of work and experience a visceral attraction and I’m not entirely sure why. Like hearing Daniel’s music for the first time: I loved it and I had absolutely no idea why. It is as if the rawness, naivety and uncensored, spontaneous self-expression of the artist seeps into me, stimulating awe and wonder.

I feel I must emphasise something at this point that is very important to me whenever I talk about outsider artists. I am always keen to make very clear that I’m not engaging with their work as some sort of weird spectacle or freaky side-show. I genuinely adore it, am moved by it, am fascinated by it and I want to fight a corner for these artists in whatever way I can. I also appreciate that their marginalisation is often their day-to-day life experience and not some romantic artistic ideal. They exist on the edges due to circumstance, not choice, and that reality inevitably shapes the texture, tone and rawness of their work.

I feel sad, frustrated, and angry when I see the work of an outsider squashed or rejected by experts, or by society in general, simply because it is different or challenging. Videos of The Legendary Stardust Cowboy getting mocked on a US variety show or of Shooby Taylor being booed off stage at The Apollo in New York, show how big budgets and huge audiences can be used to mock and humiliate those who are doing something brilliantly different from the mainstream. The same dynamic exists today in programmes like The X Factor, which often include a “token outsider” in each episode who is there less to be heard than to be humiliated for comedy effect. I cannot help but wonder if all of this arises from a fear of the unknown and of anything that might challenge our fixed beliefs about who we are and what it means to be a creative human.

(It is worth adding that Shooby Taylor later said about the Apollo incident: “I was hurt, very hurt because I got booed off…I figured, ‘Oh, I did it wrong.’ But after months and months of thinking about it, I said, ‘I did it the way how I wanted to do it!’)

There are many ways the outsider influences and inspires me, but I think the most vivid is witnessing what becomes possible when someone gives themself unbridled permission to be uncompromising in their artistic expression. To make, or perform, or sing, or write, or move simply because this thing needs to get outside of you. You don’t have time to wait, or to train, or to refine and perfect. The process is more important than the performance, so at a deep level it really doesn’t matter what others think of it.

I strive to make art in this way. It is just for me. I simply need to get it out of me in a way that might bring catharsis or meaning or help me truly understand what is going on in my inner world. And this isn’t always easy. I occasionally watch Daniel Johnston’s first-ever TV performance before I play an open mic, to remind myself of all of this. But mainly it reminds me how hard I can find it and makes me admire and appreciate the outsiders who seemingly find unconventional ways of doing this so naturally.