EPISODE 2 - The Signature
JAKE WARREN: In 2003, a year before the infamous heist took place, Andy was beginning to dip his toes into a new world for him - art. He was chatting to one of his mates he knew from the illegal rave community, a world that he had elbowed his way into, and became a big part of in the 1990’s. And this mate happened to have just stumbled upon one of the 21st century’s biggest new underground artists - which he believed was their next genuine golden goose.
ANDY LINK: He says, “But I have just bought a print by this guy.” He says “I think he's going to be somewhat big.” A guy called Banksy. “Ooh, what's that all about?” Funny enough, my rave community, we were involved in that as well. It was almost same family.
JAKE WARREN: So you knew people from the rave community that you were very much your people.
ANDY LINK: Yeah.
JAKE WARREN: That knew Banksy?
ANDY LINK: Well, they knew Banksy or they were into Banksy. They'd be going to Banksy shows because he was on that underground culture.
JAKE WARREN: But that's also, I guess, the beginning of the feud.
ANDY LINK: Well, yeah.
JAKE WARREN: When Banksy became your nemesis, right, or you became Banksy’s nemesis.
ANDY LINK: I'm more Banksy’s nemesis than he's mine, I’d like to think.
JAKE WARREN: What happened?
ANDY LINK: I went to the ghetto sale in Covent Garden, I think it was 2003, and bought the print “Flying Copper.”
“Flying Copper” features an image of an armed policeman with a cartoon smiley face and angel wings. It’s typical of Banksy’s known style - the dominating figure of authority, with a submachine gun in hand which is offset by a childish cartoon face. It was both a nod to acid house and the rave scenes Andy had also been a part of.
At the time, Andy had the choice of buying 2 different versions of the print. A signed one, for 150 quid or an unsigned one at half the price for 75. One thing we know about Andy by now is he’s nothing if not well connected. And it turned out, he only had a few degrees of separation from the artist Banksy himself. In fact, he knew one of Banksy’s crew. So, he bought an unsigned print, and asked his contact if he could give it to Banksy to sign for him. An innocent enough request on the surface, but what happened next would alter the course of Andy’s life for the next two decades.
ANDY LINK: I said, “have you asked him?” I kept pestering him. He says, “yeah.” He says, “you can fuck off your tight ass Northern. You should have bought a signed print.”
JAKE WARREN: Ooh.
ANDY LINK: That’s it?
JAKE WARREN: I’m Jake Warren and from Podimo and Message Heard, this is Who Robs A Banksy?
Andy is adamant it had nothing to do with money.
ANDY LINK: If I were doing it for financial reasons, fine, but so what? I didn't give a fuck because nobody knew these 75 print were going to be worth what they are today. Nobody. And so, 75 quid or 150 quid for fucking sake of a signature, yeah. And I thought, well, because he's a mate of a mate, he'll be able to sign “nice one Linky.” That's all I wanted. Sign it “nice one Linky -Banksy”. But he took offense. He thought I was doing it for the finances. And that's when I went, you know what, this ain't right. Something wrong with this. If you're a fucking artist and one of your mates’s mates goes and buys a piece, gosh, you'll sign it for him. Why wouldn't you?
JAKE WARREN: But the truth is, what was a £75 price difference between the two prints back in 2003, has got just slightly wider. According to myartbroker.com, an unsigned version of Flying Copper now has an estimated value of £24,000 - £34,000. Meanwhile, a signed version can go for anything between £30,000 to £90,000. With the beauty of hindsight what was a mere 75 quid saving has become a near 60 grand mistake. Yep, I reckon you'd be fuming too.
But Andy insists that all he was after was a personalised message, which, in the art world, might actually devalue the print rather than add to it. In Andy’s mind this was bigger than money. It was a favour denied and a personal shunning. And in the end, Andy ended up with nothing but a bruised ego.
ROSALIA FERRARA: He's got a big heart has Andy. He'd do anything for you. Yeah, he's crazy. He's mad in a good way. But if you crossed him, he'd be like, cut you off.
JAKE WARREN: Rosalia has known Andy for over 20 years, so knows all too well how this might’ve affected him.
ROSALIA FERRARA: And he probably just thought, “fuck you.” And yeah, kind of took any opportunity to start this feud. But I mean, Banksy could have signed it, but he chose not.
JAKE WARREN: So this was the start of the feud that Andy has spent the last 2 decades waging. You may well be thinking - “that’s it? Banksy didn’t sign your print and you think a measured response is to kidnap one of his statues in broad daylight?” It feels like, maybe, just a teeny tiny bit of an overreaction. But as I got to know him, I did really believe Andy when he said it wasn’t about the money for him.
ROSALIA FERRARA: I mean, he was offended. He was offended. He was put out, you know, it doesn't cost anybody to ever to, to sign something. But, you know, like I say, he'd do anything for you, but yeah, if, I think if you double crossed him, he'd, he'd have something to say about it or do about it.
JAKE WARREN: Each time I’ve spoken to Andy, the story of what Banksy allegedly said to him changes a little.
JAKE WARREN: Obviously, we talked a little bit about before, kind of the motivation of Banksy basically calling you a cheap northern bastard when you you know-
ANDY LINK: I think it was a C word.
JAKE WARREN: But the core essence is always the same. Really, it all comes down to one thing - respect.
What matters is that, when you break it down, Banksy personally insulted Andy’s character, and brought up negative stereotypes that he’s has thrown in his face his whole life.
MATILDA BATTERSBY: If the rumours that Banksy is THIS sort of well to do, well-educated, middle class character. And most of the people who were making a splash at the time in Street art weren't like that. They were working class, you know, it was a very different kind of hand style graffiti kind of story that they'd struggled with, then there might be a bit of class warfare as much as anything else.
JAKE WARREN: This is an interesting point to bring into this story. We don’t know much about Banksy - the whole being anonymous thing makes that tricky. But as Matilda says, there are still rumours about his upbringing. And so, Banksy bringing up Andy’s proud Northern roots in such a disparaging way, would certainly have stirred something in him.
Andy’s hustling, his childhood, his involvement in all these iconic subcultures, and really, his motivation can be boiled down to something that I’m sure lots of us will relate to. Sometimes, someone just really pisses you off. And how many times have you wished you could get your own back? Well, Andy is the kind of person who doesn't just fantasise about it, he gets off his arse and does it.
His childhood and upbringing were potentially, if we believe the rumours, pretty contrasting to that of Banksy. And so to understand this relationship between Andy and Banksy, we need to go back to 1961, the year Andy was born.
ANDY LINK: I’m son of a lock-keeper. My father worked for British Waterways and here’s the thing with me, I'm on the cusp of everything. I'm never one nor the other. Where we lived was classed as Dewsbury, but I went to schools in Ossett, which is part of Wakefield. So, I could only have a doctor in Dewsbury, which were uphills. It was just very difficult and odd. But we lived in the middle of what was the biggest goods yard, railway yard in Europe, a place called Healey Mills, which was colossal railway yard. And we moved there when I was three-years-old. I used to go to school, like to walk a mile and a half up a hill and I'd get halfway up the hill and come out of the smog. So, I lived in soot for a lot of time in my childhood. It was literally, you could stand at the top of my school and look down the big hill and you could see this big fog as it followed the river. But it would also full of, you know, God knows what comes out them factories. But yeah, it was definitely a scene from a Lowry.
JAKE WARREN: By the time Andy was a young kid, England was in the midst of political and social upheaval. The North of England in particular had been the birthplace of the industrial revolution - it’s where most of the factories, coal mines and thick smog, was so well captured on canvas by the artist L.S. Lowry who Andy just mentioned.
But by the late 60’s, a different energy culture based on cheap imports from abroad saw coal production in the UK go into freefall. The mines in the north of England were starting to close, tearing apart communities and leaving thousands upon thousands of Northerners out of a job and on the scrap heap themselves.
The 70s up north were even even worse. By 1972, the miners were on an official strike for the first time since 1926. In 1974 a 3-day working week was in effect. Inflation was huge and for normal working class families it was an extraordinarily tough existence to just get by.
ANDY LINK: My parents weren't good parents, we'll put it that way. My sister was seven years older than me and she used to bully me rotten. So, I never felt part of anything. I also, where we lived, the nearest friend was over a mile away.
JAKE WARREN: Isolating for a kid.
ANDY LINK: Yeah. It was like nobody could hear me scream. That was my thing. When I got a kicking, nobody could hear it. No matter how much I cried.
JAKE WARREN: Hearing about Andy’s childhood made me see him in a new light. I’d met him a few times by this point, and he’d always come across as strong, positive and resourceful. He wasn’t keen to dig toO deep into his family life, but from what he told me, I felt he was holding back. Even this small glimpse was tough to hear.
So Andy grew up perhaps feeling inadequate, unwanted even, and living in an area with very few opportunities to really make something of himself. And then in 1979, Margaret Thatcher, one of the most polarising figures in British politics was elected prime minister of the United Kingdom. She’d be elected a further two times, and it's impossible to understate the huge effect 'Thatcherism' would have over this country for the next 11 years. But Andy, by now 17, has other things to worry about. He’s about to get thrown out of home by his parents.
JAKE WARREN: Why did they throw you out?
ANDY LINK: I was at court for criminal damage, graffiti in a police cell. We used to have this, we’d call it a mushroom. It was like a shelter in the middle of the little Ossett town, since it’s a small village. And I graffiti-ed it. I put “Linky was here,” right. As you do, my early graff years.
JAKE WARREN: Classic.
ANDY LINK: They arrested me and I denied knowledge of it. Anyway, they held me in the cells. Well, and it was a proper Victorian police station. The whole plaster and the bars on the window. It was disgrace. And so, I decided, “Fuck you, if you're nicking me for it.” So, I did the whole, down to the plaster, took the plaster back to the brickwork.
JAKE WARREN: Wow.
ANDY LINK: So, I caused that. Couldn't really plead not guilty to all. So, that made the calendar, our local north or whatever, the local news at six o'clock. And it came over as Eric Link. My name’s Eric Andrew and my parent’s never used the Eric because it was my father’s name, and cost me, that went fucking mental…So yeah, that’s why I got thrown out at the 17, 18 – 17, I think.
JAKE WARREN: So Andy left home and decided to strike out on his own. But as the old saying goes, “you can take the man out of Yorkshire, but you can't take the Yorkshire out the man,” and despite a difficult upbringing, he still always remained proud of where he's from, Wakefield - affectionately known as 'Shakey Wakey.’
GILLY: Everyone from Wakefield's mental, so it's on a ley line with Reykjavik, and somewhere in sort of South America. It's like the the maddest place in the world. And everybody, everybody in, everybody from Wakefield is mental. Um, they're so proud of their city, their town or whatever even it is.
JAKE WARREN: Gilly is a long term friend of Andy’s. Or Linky, as Gilly mostly calls him.
GILLY: Can you describe Linky in a sentence? He's a force of nature, really and that's a bit of a cliche description of anyone, but when you meet him, you don't forget him. You can see the horror on people's faces when, when they first encounter him and then slowly that melts and there's something quite charismatic about him, but not in a charming way. There's something that kind of like people can't resist.
JAKE WARREN: When we asked Gilly what he did, as well as mentioning his journalism and photography, he summed himself up as:
GILLY: General Operational’s coordinator for Linky and his art thievery.
JAKE WARREN: But Gilly and Andy met long before the world of art heists. They got to know each other over 30 years ago, as fans of the same football team.
GILLY: I was a Bradford White. He was a Wakefield White. We used to kind of run together or stand together depending on who we were fighting.
JAKE WARREN: Leeds United, a football team based in, rather unsurprisingly, the major northern city of Leeds, are colloquially known as ‘the whites’ because they play in an all-white kit. And they’re renowned for having some of the most passionate, devoted fans in the UK. In the 70s they were living through a golden era. They won countless trophies under manager Don Revie, as their famously rough style of play reflected their hard as nails supporters on the pitch. You can see why someone like Andy would be enamoured.
Throughout the VHS tapes that Andy gave us, Leeds United comes up again and again. In the documentary “Swingers,” for instance, about Andy’s open relationship with his ex wife Fiona, the cameras catch a fight between the two.
ANDY LINK: Bastards. Monday night and won 3 nil. Bastards.
FIONA: You care so much about our relationship.
ANDY LINK: Oh, our relationship is equally important
FIONA: Football always comes first
ANDY LINK: I always told you that when we first got together. I told you that you know, no matter what, no matter what we go through, don’t ever try to come between me and Leeds because at the end of the day, I’ve loved Leeds since the day I was born and I’ll love Leeds to the day I die. There’s no matter. They will always come first. If you ever ask me to make a decision - you or Leeds, I would always choose Leeds. Deliberately on the fact that, you know, because you’re asking for that choice.
FIONA: Yes love. You can get down off your soapbox.
ANDY LINK: I’m not on me soap box.
FIONA: You are. You are. Pontificating about football, aren’t you?
ANDY LINK: It’s more important than our relationship. Yes.
JAKE WARREN: In another clip, Andy and Fiona are being interviewed in a fetish club. He’s in a short-sleeved top which, upon closer inspection, can be seen to be a rubber version of a football shirt. But not just any old football shirt, this is sadly not something found in the club shop but a custom made homage to his beloved Leeds United.
JOBSON: “You two look absolutely incredible tonight. You have got the outfits of the
evening for me. This has got to be a kind of Leeds United suit?”
ANDY LINK: “Absolutely. I had it done especially for the opening night of me club. And all me friends were really dubious because I’m on this thing, they’re really nervous about well, they all knew I was opening the club and I told them I was having a rubber outfit made. Being a Leeds fan, coming from Leeds, it was the only choice I could make. It’s total perversion.”
JAKE WARREN: I respect it [laughs] but I’m not sure how good I’d look in a rubber version of my football team Crystal Palace’s kit…
But at this time, supporting Leeds United, or any football team for that matter, didn’t just mean a nice day out to the stadium to cheer on your team.
GILLY: It was so anti-establishment, being a football fan that when I got my, when I first had a job, I didn't tell people what I did at the weekend. I did not say I was a Leeds fan. I'd worked at this advertising agency and were like, what'd you do at the weekend? I wouldn’t say. “I went and smashed up Sheffield or something like that.” Because that’s what everyone - It was a very working class male dominated violent…but you know, it's kind of, well it isn't now, basically. It wasn't something you could boast about in, in, in sort of middle-class circles until football was gentrified in Sky TV came in and sort of made it something that, you know, the masses, uh, the middle-class masses would talk about. Nobody would admit to being a Chelsea fan or admit to being a Leeds fan.
JAKE WARREN: Leeds United was and still is like a religion for so many young Yorkshiremen - they even have a salute - Make a fist with your right arm. Place the thumb edge of the fist on your heart. Extend your arm fully outwards and slightly upwards. They do this when they come across each other. But back then, this passion often spilled over into violence. Really horrible violence actually. And this type of organised violence between football fans was something that in the UK is usually called football hooliganism.
The different groups of hooligans are known as firms, and around this time there was a different firm for pretty much every major football club in existence throughout the UK. The Leeds United firm was called the Leeds Service Crew, named after the public service trains that the firm would travel on to get to away matches. The alternative were the specially organised match trains that were always heavily policed. Hooliganism was part and parcel of football. And that slightly tainted legacy is still felt throughout modern football today . For instance, If you’re after a flat cheap larger in a plastic cup whilst watching a game, you’ll be disappointed - because in England and Wales in 1985, the consumption of alcohol in the stands or even any stadium areas with views of the pitch was banned, specifically to curb hooliganism and violence. In fact, in Scotland you haven’t been able to drink anywhere in football grounds since 1980.
But the popularity of football hooliganism wasn’t just about the violence.
GILLY: I was probably more into the clothes and the trainers and the kind of like, you know, the kind of
JAKE WARREN: the beating people up
GILLY: being in the gang. Yeah, it's absolutely, it was kind of like more like I'd been a punk, I'd been into, you know, into, into scar music. I'd been into all sorts of stuff, you know, and that was another sort of place to belong. Probably, I needed a family.
ANDY LINK: It's tribal. It wasn't necessarily inflicting pain and damage on people. It was about territory. It's about standing on their patch and go, “Where are you? We've took you. If you want to check us out, we'll have a go.” But it wasn't so much about hurting people.
JAKE WARREN: That sense of belonging to something greater than yourself can’t be denied, especially at a time when so many young working class people were feeling disenfranchised and excluded from society and left on the scrap heap. But we can’t sugar coat this. Football hooliganism in the 70s and 80s in the UK was notoriously brutal, prejudiced and violent, and the Leeds Service Crew were famed as one of the hardest of the lot. Gilly told us a story that really highlights the mood at the time. It concerns someone called Peter Sutcliffe, who you may know better as his moniker - the Yorkshire Ripper. He was a serial killer who targeted women in the mid to late 70’s, with many of his victims being sex workers. It took the police 5 years to put Sutcliffe behind bars.
GILLY: When the Ripper was, um, at large, Leeds fans, they played a tape of the ripper, fake ripper voice. I dunno if you've ever heard it. Somebody sent a tape in saying, “I'm the ripper.” And played it at the stadium. and the leeds Fans hated the police so much, they started chanting, “you'll never catch the Ripper.”
JAKE WARREN: Bloody hell.
GILLY: I know. It's insane. I tell people that story and they just don't believe it. And they were like, they're going like, um, Ripper 12. Coppers nil. It's just unbelievable to sort of think we were in that kind of like, um, that there was, that hatred for the police was so much they didn't want 'em to catch the serial killer. And I can see your, your jaw dropping there because it, it was very them and us. They treated you like animals. Everyone acted like animals. That was what Jack Charlton said once, if you treat people like animals, they act like animals. So it was kind of a, you know. It's unrecognisable. You would not, you couldn't even go back and look at it. Even the footage just doesn't do it justice.
JAKE WARREN: This is a completely shocking story to hear. The anger towards police was so extreme at the time, that football fans were supporting a serial killer - one who was targeting women in a truly horrific way. It really shows the attitude towards police, which at this time was reaching boiling point. And while he claimed it wasn’t so much about inflicting pain, in one of his VHS’s we found a special report on the violence from Leeds United fans abroad, which of course features Andy himself.
ANDY LINK: “They fight differently to us. We’d fight with bottles and boots and fists. They were pulling out machetes and clubs. You know different, different time. Different time for fighting to what we’re used to. We’ll be prepared for it next time though.”
JAKE WARREN: Andy’s morality is something I’m constantly battling with. The Andy I was meeting in the present day was a carefully curated personality that I liked and warmed too. I respected his grit, his determination, and his sense of respect. But those traits clearly have also been utilised to do some pretty bad things, things I'm not sure I entirely agree with. Andy is also amazing at putting the things he’s done, the perhaps less savoury things, into context. He explained that there was an important side to football hooliganism that exists beyond the violence and the fighting. Even beyond the football.
ANDY LINK: You've got to remember, you cannot put all this into perspective without realising the political climate of the time. These were the dark satanic days of Thatcher. The days of Torism were fucking disgusting. We had nothing. You were treated like shit, no matter what you did. It was hard to climb out of the gutter. They were happy to kick you back in continuously. So, it was our way of fighting against the system. We didn't realise it then, we thought we were just being what we were, we were the hardest firm in England, or so we thought. I'm not saying it's true, but I'm not saying it's not true. You bring it fucking on, if you want West Ham. So, yeah, it was that kind of — and you had a camaraderie and a loyalty that … and then, you'd go out around town. If anybody said it, you'd give them a fucking slap. But that's what it was like.
JAKE WARREN: Back then Andy was finding it hard to climb out of the gutter. In Wakefield, he was working in a beer can factory. The system was bad. And he became even more deeply disillusioned by it.
ANDY LINK: My first wage was 19 pound 95p. And the Giro was 17 pound 50.
JAKE WARREN: When Andy says “Giro”, he’s referring to the unemployment cheques that would be given by the government. And for Andy, he didn’t quite understand why it made sense to work all those hours just for £2.50 more than he would get on benefits.
ANDY LINK: And it was like, “You've got to have a job. You can't go anywhere. If you don't work hard, you'll never go anywhere.” Well, me father had worked hard all his life and he had never had a pot to piss in. And I always looked at that as if, “I ain't going to grow up like you.”
JAKE WARREN: So he started looking for other opportunities. And it turned out, it was probably a wise move for him to start looking for those opportunities outside of Yorkshire. As the same personality that had attracted him to football hooliganism was clearly causing him some problems.
ANDY LINK: I left Wakefield because there was a price on my head by coppers and some local thugs and stuff. So it was time to leave.
JAKE WARREN: Oh dear, what did you do?
ANDY LINK: Ah, I used to fight a lot. I used to go out and I were a bit of a thug. I'm not going to deny it. I wasn't nasty, but I had a short temper. 99% of the time I never slapped somebody unless they fucking deserved it. That's how I always look at it.
JAKE WARREN: His logic doesn’t really excuse what he was doing, but it’s interesting that it seems Andy too finds himself grappling with his disreputable past. So Andy made his way to London in 1987, pretty much in the dead of night.
JAKE WARREN: You kind of skipped town almost?
ANDY LINK: Yeah. Just did a moonlight. Just packed me bag and fucked off. Emptied the flat, just never let him know. Just went, just vanished from Wakefield.
JAKE WARREN: Wow. So, Hackney, it's where you turned up at.
ANDY LINK: Yeah. What a place.
JAKE WARREN: Which is ironically where we are at now.
ANDY LINK: Yeah.
JAKE WARREN: But it's changed.
ANDY LINK: It ain't the same. Where we are now you wouldn’t dare go down at nighttime. When I moved to Hackney, I used to say, it was dogs on a string and mohican haircuts. Because it were punky and scotty. And now, it's labradoodles and wax moustaches. It's gone from that to this.
JAKE WARREN: Blokes that look like me.
ANDY LINK: You really have an issue with yourself with me, don’t you? No need for that. Not at all.
JAKE WARREN: In the year Andy found himself in Hackney, the name Banksy hadn’t entered the mainstream yet. Just as Hackney would change between 1987 and now, so would Andy’s life. He had no idea what was coming for him over the next few decades - from throwing an illegal rave that caused the biggest mass arrest in UK history, to over a year spent in prison, to the feud with Banksy himself.
We need to start thinking about the other side of the coin to the feud, the other major player in our story. The man, the myth, the legend...Banksy himself. This villain's origin story of the signature all started with Banksy - and what he may or may not have said to Andy to set off this almost farfetched chain of wacky events. I mean does he even remember this interaction from decades ago? It could have meant absolutely nothing to him and faded from memory entirely.
It also feels fairly ridiculous just how much of my working day I’m now spending trying to get in touch with probably the most famous anonymous person in the world, I mean not being traceable is kind of his entire shtick…but we couldn’t give up just yet. And the cold email we sent to Pest Control, Banksy’s official office, seemingly got us nowhere. But thankfully, there was someone else I could speak to…
JAKE WARREN: Have you ever met Andy Link?
ROBIN BARTON: Of course I've met Andy Link , who hasn't met Andy Link in the Banksy world and the street art world?
JAKE WARREN: Robin Barton is an art dealer specialising in Banksys. Throughout our chat, I started to get the unnerving sense that he could be closer to Banksy than he was letting on.
ROBIN BARTON: The only way you would ever get a comment out Banksy on something like this, if, if you had something, you held an ace card that he needed to react to, and Andy Link isn't that.
JAKE WARREN: So I basically, I, I don't, I'm lacking an ace up my sleeve.
ROBIN BARTON: Well, you get on a flight over to Hollywood. You can go to his house and you can knock on the door and you might be pleasantly surprised.
JAKE WARREN: Doorstep Banksy in Hollywood.
ROBIN BARTON: Doorstep Banksy in Hollywood. Why not?
JAKE WARREN: Have you got the address?
ROBIN BARTON: Yeah.
JAKE WARREN: Okay. Maybe that's what I have to do. I'm willing to do that.
ROBIN BARTON: Well, you know Moby?
JAKE WARREN: Yeah.
ROBIN BARTON: Yeah. Well Banksy bought Moby’s castle from him.
JAKE WARREN: So you think I, if I actually went up and rang the doorbell and said, “hello, my name's Jake and would like a comment from Banksy.” That's, you might respect the fact that I've come all the way from England to do it?
ROBIN BARTON: Yeah, I think. I think that's your best shot.
JAKE WARREN: So going through PR, going through pest control, going through people that know
ROBIN BARTON: Going through pest control is like into the void.
JAKE WARREN: Now sure, I wouldn’t mind a little all expenses paid trip to Hollywood just to knock on what is allegedly Banksy’s front door, who wouldn't? But…we’ll call that our Plan B. Because right now, we did have an ace up our sleeve…through a little detective work and sweet talking, me and my producer Bea had managed to find another route in. We wanted to update the rest of the team.
BEA DUNCAN: Yes. So obviously we emailed pest control.
SANDRA FERRARI: Mm-hmm. How'd that go?
BEA DUNCAN: Um, no response. Well, we got a bounce back email, um, saying that we would hear something soon if there was a response that needed to happen.
SANDRA FERRARI: Mm-hmm.
BEA DUNCAN: Um, chased up on that and there's still been nothing.
JAKE WARREN: How many people would you reckon email that email address?
BEA DUNCAN: Well, yeah, I know.
JAKE WARREN: It's like all the weirdos, isn't it? I mean, maybe we count as the weirdos as well.
BEA DUNCAN: I think potentially. Yeah, um, but we do have another lead, which is good.
SANDRA FERRARI: Oh.
JAKE WARREN: Yeah. We managed to get, uh, through underhanded and begging. We have managed to get, uh, email address and phone numbers of his official PR representation, or at least at some point his official PR representation. Don’t know if they still are, but it's definitely a step closer than like, here is a blank email address that anyone can Google on the internet.
SANDRA FERRARI: So, what's the next step?
BEA DUNCAN: So, I have emailed the email contact that we were given. That was a couple of days ago. I still haven't heard anything back, but we were told by our source that
JAKE WARREN: Super secret source.
BEA DUNCAN: That um, if you contact them, they will put it in front of Banksy. That is what we’ve been told. Whether that's true or not, I guess we'll find out, but we, we were assured that there would be an answer. But I think, potentially, the next step is to give the number a call.
JAKE WARREN: What the fuck do I say? “Hi.”
BEA DUNCAN: Can you imagine if it's just Banksy?
JAKE WARREN: Yeah. It’s just Banksy. “Hi. Banksy here.”
BEA DUNCAN: And I also feel, I mean, any comment really at this point is good. I just want to know. I wanna know what he’s thinking. Um, but our source also did tell us that when they mentioned this to the PR people, they kind of did a bit of a eye roll and said, “oh, not another feud.” So, this seems like it's a, a staple in Banksy’s life. Um, artists.
JAKE WARREN: But, but the only difference I would say to that is this is the first feud. It’s like a kind of, you know, one of those terrible Marvel films. You know, everyone has an origin story and everyone has a nemesis in those films, you know, when they're nobody, and this kind of feels like it's that. But is that true or not?
BEA DUNCAN: Guess we'll find out. Over to you, Banksy.
JAKE WARREN: Oh Christ.
JAKE WARREN: From Podimo and Message Heard this has been Who Robs A Banksy? It was hosted by me, Jake Warren, and written and produced by Bea Duncan. The music was composed by Tom Biddle, with production support from Harry Stott, and sound engineered by Ivan Eastley. The Story Editor and Executive Producer for Message Heard is Sandra Ferrari. The Executive Producers for Podimo are Jake Chudnow and Matt White.