John Major’s Y-fronts, George Bush as a chimpanzee and, now, David Cameron with a condom for skin. Steve Bell’s cartoons are as visceral, angry and memorable as ever
FOR ALMOST 30 years the savage brilliance of Steve Bell's If. . . strip has illuminated the pages of the Guardianlike a blast of satirical napalm. The recipient of numerous cartooning awards, and the publisher of 27 books, Bell has become that rarest of creatures: a subversive institution. His caricatures have become iconic: John Major with underpants worn outside his trousers, George W Bush as a perma-pouting chimpanzee and Tony Blair with Margaret Thatcher's rogue eyeball and a rictus grin.
Yet for all his longevity and success he is, or was, haunted by a persistent fear that the wrong people would like his work.
“Back when I was younger and angrier, I remember almost fainting when I found out Michael Heseltine, or someone in Heseltine’s office, had rung up and wanted to buy the art,” Bell says, ahead of his appearance next month in the Big Comics Chat at the Electric Picnic festival. “I thought, No! F**k!, and went into a fit of depression. It wouldn’t worry me at all now.”
While there is nothing new in establishment figures rather enjoying satirical jabs thrown in their direction, it’s difficult to imagine anyone taking pleasure in being the subject of a Bell caricature. We’re not, after all, talking about work that contents itself merely with droll and witty potshots at power. We’re talking about work dominated by a gleefully grotesque and vicious tone. Bell’s cartoons are born of an explosive and undimmed anger that doesn’t so much skim the surface of politics as aim absurdist bombs at its foundations. They eschew jolly fun-poking in favour of total evisceration of their targets. Surely no target could really enjoy this.
“You’d be surprised,” Bell says. “Even though you’re ripping the shit out of them, they quite like it. It’s a kind of masochism, but it’s also that you’re devoting so much attention to them. They need that. I think it’s a truism of politics that it’s terrible being caricatured, but it’s even worse not being caricatured.”
To critics, his work is almost irredeemably crass and vulgar, driven by crude bias and an unhealthy preoccupation with toilet humour. To fans, however, the scatological and absurd aspects of Bell's work are the qualities that mark it out as thrilling and refreshing. Unlike some of his more polished contemporaries, Bell's caricatures are hideous, wretched and occasionally quasi-demonic grotesqueries who shuffle and lumber through the hyper-real landscapes of If. . . like figures freed from a Bosch nightmare.
Bell’s latest prime target is, unsurprisingly, David Cameron. So how does Bell attempt to capture the new British PM’s elusive essence? By depicting him as a man with a condom for a head.“Cameron just got more and more rubbery as time went on,” Bell says. “It started out as a perception of him being very smooth. You go to press conferences and get within about a foot of him. You look at his skin and it’s like a baby’s bum. And he is all about surface. That’s the thing about Cameron.”
While there’s nothing particularly controversial or surprising about portrayals of politicians as superficial and surface-fixated, the condom remains an idiosyncratic choice. So why a condom?
“These things are entirely instinctive,” Bell says. “I don’t know how it works or why I went bloody all out for the condom, and I had to fight against the ‘condom ban’ because the editor took against it. He didn’t like it. I’d been doing him as a jellyfish and then there was a stupid poster that seemed to have been airbrushed to make him look even smoother. And, of course, with Cameron you don’t need to make him look smoother, because he is so impossibly smooth to start off with. So then I just drew him with a huge condom rolled over his head and it seemed to work. It was instinctive. But the editor said, ‘I hope I’m not going to see too many more condoms’.”
Happily, supposedly after the editor was grilled at a dinner party for coming down too heavily on Bell, Cameron was restored to his full rubbery glory.
Bell’s point about the primacy of instinct is a key one. His work is visceral stuff, springing from the gut and aimed squarely at the guts. So after all these years speaking twisted truths to power, what aspects of the political scene can still generate the ire?
"Well, the press. Which is predominantly Tory, and always has been. Even the Guardianis now a f**king coalition rag, with its nose up the arse of the liberal coalition. The thing that bugs me most is the consensus within the political-reporting establishment. That goes across the board, in all the papers. They're all in Westminster. They're all cosy. They're all locked into each other.
“In the run-up to this year’s election the Tories had such a soft ride. I actually stumbled across an exclusive press conference for the political editors, the higher echelons, which I wasn’t supposed to be at. It was George Osborne briefing the assembled editors, and it was the most nauseating display of sycophancy I can remember. Nobody gave him a stiff question, yet this was behind closed doors, where you think they’d be free and frank. And what he said that was particularly striking was: ‘Now, I think the way you can help us here is . . .’ – and he listed what he wanted them to say. In other words, you’re here to help me say what I want to say. I don’t see that as a function of political journalism, helping these f**kers to say what they want to say . . .
“I think cartoons can say things that are perhaps less easy to say in a more straightforward journalistic context. One of the things it’s uniquely good at it is manipulating the images that are manipulating us. That’s one thing you can do, take those images apart and utterly rubbish them.”
Bell is still gleefully diving in with both feet after three decades. “I’ve never got on with the gentle rib-tickling side of it, or the detached Olympian view that you’re above it all,” he says. “F**k that. You have to mix in with it. It doesn’t hurt to have opinions. And you have to be quite resilient, because you’re always going to put someone’s nose out of joint. It’s an offensive medium, out of necessity.”
Steve Bell is at the Electric Picnic on September 4th. You can see more of his work at belltoons.co.uk
