Billboard vandal and drinker of tea Dr D plies his trade in a West London warehouse nestled in a landscape of railway lines, telephone poles and refrigerator graveyards. 
When we meet, he is ankle deep in cut-out letters, spraymount and a scattering of UK election campaign propaganda. He’s recently finished a two-storey high paste up outside Shoreditch’s Cordy House in support of the Robin Hood Tax – a simple suggestion whereby .05% of profits made by big business gets allocated to social services and charities. To erect the behemoth on brick, it took one scissor-lift, twelve hours and a sea of paper and paste.
“So this is where the magic happens?” I ask.
“Hardly. I don’t really work like that.”
Known for altering a billboard of Amy Winehouse with the words “I hear Duffy’s selling coke” and likening Tony Blair to Darth Vader this most unlikely graffito is unconvinced of his status as a street artist.
“Artists lock themselves up in studios and create something from nothing. I drive past a billboard and think up gag lines. I have a quiet chuckle and I come here and knock something up”.
It doesn’t take long.
“I drove past a nice low billboard advertising the UK Independence Party on the M4. I got some paint and parked up a lay-by. Walked – in the rain – and painted ‘Kilroy Silk Woz Ere’ then fucked off.”
You can probably see it as you land at Heathrow.
“I work on my own. So I’m carting along ladders, buckets, paper, everything. And a camera. It’s not that I don’t have any friends – though that’s true too. Just that nobody I know fancies heading out at three in the morning in the London piss to put posters up.”
My first encounter with Dr D was thru an East End billboard reading “HMP London / Open Prison / I.D. must be carried at all times”. At the top right third was “dr.d”. Being an anorak of the vandal variety, seeing someone new sparks the curiosity. Seeing someone good sparks inspiration.
There were rumours. Questions over Dr.D’s identity, gender, even whether Dr.D was a group or an individual. The same sort of buzz that surrounds any really successful vandal who hides under a pseudonym. But Dr. D was no Banksy. There wasn’t a constructed mystery wrapped up in a commercial venture. You had billboards, and you had the occasional poster knocked up for sale for a tenner at a group show. Whoever Dr. D was, they or he weren’t in it for fame or money.
I found more and more billboards doctored with a laconic back-of-the-class-with-a-peashooter wit. Evening Standard street displays that weren’t all they seemed. The Olympic rings with blood spattered on them reading “Made in China”. Police adverts changed from “Make a Visible Difference” to “Make a Risible Difference”. Dr.D was tipping the axis of how I viewed the streets of London by a few degrees. His humour was no different to me scrawling on toilet doors but D was scrawling on the walls of a bigger bog.
This glue-stained scarlet pimpernel is, in my eyes, delivering overtly political messages with the aim of encouraging people who see his work to rethink their socio-political spaces. He’s less convinced.
“You say it’s political, but I’d rather let the paper do the talking. I’m more of a piss-taker and a chancer. Politics and politicians are asking for it. They spend thousands on campaign posters begging for votes to get a job in Parliament. But they way they put themselves forward is totally laughable.”
The last time he was caught by the long arm of the law, he was customising a then-new David Cameron “Year for Change” poster.
“Must’ve been a pretty sharp copper because I was there in full hi-vis, all the kit and all the gear to make it look as if I’d been working. But he obviously spotted something that wasn’t right – the fact that that poster had been up for a few days. He came over, had a word and well… most of what I was trying to put up is in that pile over there.” He indicates towards a smattering of letters on a counter.
When he’s not covered in paper and glue, slipping under police radar he’s “a rat catcher. And if you bought any burgers out of a burger van in the East End in the mid-90s, you probably bought them off me. Not that the rats or burgers are connected.”
I tell him that he doesn’t make life easy for himself. Is there a Mrs. D? “Who’s to say I’m not Mrs. D?” And where did the name come from? “It’s an old DJ name. Works nicely these days because Dr. D can also scan as ‘doctored’.”
I’m taken to an alleyway behind his surgery. Stencils litter the earth floor and he picks up one of a cut-out man like the ones you see indicating the men’s loos. Beneath are the letters WC.
“It’s World Corruption. I put a few of these up in the Foundry toilets in Old Street on copies of the Financial Times. I’m experimenting a bit more with stencil and lettering. My dad was a typesetter so I suppose that’s where my obsession with letters comes from. Oh…and an old art teacher knocked my grade down when I made a piece that spelled “magic” with a “k”. The national curriculum in this country seems to say that you can’t make good art unless it’s spelled right.”
He’s reluctant to push himself as ‘the next big thing’ but walks about his studio with a quiet confidence. He makes good work that makes people laugh…and then think. As unassumingly humble as he is, he says the best feeling is when artists say he’s done something that’s influenced them.
“I find it weird when I’m asked where I think my art will go because I don’t see myself as an artist. I wish I was. I wish I could paint and draw freehand but I can’t – the closest I’ve been to being an artist is living in a squat with artists.
I got into paste-ups after reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo and was shown the work that Ron English does with pop culture and billboards. Those two ideas came together and Dr. D was born – it’s a low skill way of expressing myself. Nobody else does it like me because it’s stupidly complicated, hugely inconvenient and a ball-ache. It’s a long way to go for a bit of a chuckle.
What I do is a problem-solving exercise that comes out of pragmatic laziness. How can I adapt a board to say something in the easiest possible way? The logistics is what influences how the final piece looks.
What makes me different is not just the scale of what I do but the fact that it’s not my job. We all know artists who are under personal pressure to create, to come up with something new. They spend hours crafting, devising et cetera. I don’t. I see a billboard and think of ways of making it funny. Or I pick up on funny things my friends say.”
Dr. D’s stock in the street art world seems to have risen. In reputation at least. One of the outfits he works with recently told me that D is their “golden boy…does the best stuff around.” Asked about this, the doctor hesitates.
“Sometimes I wish the guys who could paint, the ones I’m secretly jealous of, had more of a message that comes out in their work. Arty people are so…arty. I’ve hung shows where guys would turn up and not even have a screwdriver.
And a lot of street art people don’t really get what I do. I know I’ll never sell huge amounts and most of my work is off the streets within weeks. And it’s big so you can’t nick it. That makes me a non-commodity. I don’t push to sell limited edition canvases or prints because that’s not really what I’m about.
I think like an ad-man but I’m not promoting a product, I’m working for my own ends. And often times it’s just so I can drive past a board I’ve done and smile to myself.”
Most of what I have written is true. But I have changed some details to ensure the good doctor’s work can continue. The messages, the jokes, the subversion – all of that will stop if I let my lips loose. The need to keep D as anonymous as possible is greater than any truth I can offer you. As of now, the doctor is in.
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This article was originally published in Who’s Jack Magazine, June 2010.
