Rob Filth interview from November 2010

Rob has been continuing to colourise the old FILTH comics, go to facebook and search filth comic to have a look.....

I first saw Rob’s work in the centre pages of old UK punk zine ‘Problem child’ in about 1987, I got to know him through writing for the FILTH comic and catching him at gigs and so forth, the cunt’s been making jokes about shagging my mum ever since. Anyhoo, Filth has been appearing in Facebook in coloured format and I thought 3 questions would shed light on wether the yuppie cunt is back in the publishing game….....

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Okay Fraser here's the answers to your "three questions" except they ain't three questions, it's actually more questions than your mum gives me if I neglect to phone her for more than a few nights......

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1: So back in the 90's you drew and published your own alternative comic, Filth, how many issues/copies did you do? Was most of your punters comic fans or punks? punks are notoriously devoid of humour, did any of the stuff in FILTH upset the PC brigade? there was a glut of more mainstream comics of that ilk at the time, Smut, Pulp, Viz etc, didnt you work for them too? you must have made a fucking killing you yuppie cunt?....

1. Filth was actually published regularly in the late 80's and not the 90's, the first issue was printed up on 24 Aug 1987and had 500 copies. Filth 2 had 1,000 copies, Filth 3 had 1,000 copies but had to be re-printed another 2 times because they were selling faster than I could collate them at that point and so ended up having about 3,500 done in the end, Filth 4 had 5,000 printed and the final Filth 5 which DID come out in the 90's several years later after the initial run in 1996 had 1,000 printed up. Originally the comics readership WERE punks and crusties because Filth 1 and 2 were mainly sold exclusively via gigs and the zine network, however by Filth 3 when I started to get the comic in to various comic shops the readership widened beyond just this audience. I don't think punks ARE devoid of humour, only perhaps the fashion "sceney" conscious ones who take themselves too seriously maybe. Don't forget there are a lot of jokey punk bands around not just the political ones and even Crass had a very situationalist/surreal and satirical sense of humour despite the fact that most people seem to think anarchopunk equates as having to be a miserable depressive cunt carrying the weight of the worlds ills on your shoulders. Also Chris Donald of Viz drew the first Toy Dolls album cover too I believe and toilet humour had always been rife in Punk ever since the fucking 70's.

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Yes, Filth did on occasion upset a few of the politically correct brigade, most memorably the feminist lot who branded it "sexist shit", disappointingly it never got a reaction from the vegan nazis however which is strange considering that myself and Steve(one of the other artists in the comic) were often on occasion depicting animal cruelty. I say disappointing because someone getting irate over the fates of fictional cartoon animals would have amused me cos everyone knows that cartoon animals don't feel pain like real ones do.
The more mainstream comics such as Smut and Pulp etc all came out after Filth, Viz itself was not mainstream when Filth was first launched and it was only Filth, Doodlebug and Poot which were the first Viz-cloned comics. Once Richard Branson hyped up Viz and gave them a national distribution getting them in all the large newsagent chains like WHSmith and Menzies and when Viz broke the mainstream and national consciousness, other larger properly distributed clones cropped up in competition such as Brain Damage, Gas, Smut, Ziggy, Pulp, Zit, Spit and Top Banana. There were quite a few others such as UT, The Trout, Gutted, The Gutter etc, but these ones were the most notable titles in my mind. 
I jacked in Filth to work for several of these comics because it afforded me not only to concentrate on drawing cartoons(Filth comic had become 90% distribution and 10% creativity work wise by that point), but it also allowed me a bigger audience and the chance to actually for the first time make a bit of money from my cartoons. Beforehand I was struggling just to claw back the print money with Filth comic and never made a penny from it.
I worked as a regular on Ziggy, Pulp, Zit, Spit and Top Banana and did a few very brief stints on Smut and Elephant Parts(formerly Brain Damage). As for "making a killing", I think the woman at the checkout in Sainsburys got more by the hour than I was making, I would say about 30% of the comics I contributed to and got published in, I didn't receive any payment for, but I did manage to make enough to get off the dole for about a year and was paying myself an average wage of £60 a week(which was £20 more than a giro at the time which was around £40 a week), in today's terms with JSA being around £65 a week I suppose that works out at about £100 a week - hardly a huge wage for what was basically a full time job.

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 2: Your also known for your involvement with punk band Throw Bricks At Coppers, and some other noisy outfit i cant remember the name of... what happened to those bands? and your very critical of the punk scene in general, despite looking like your stereotypical punk yobbo, why? now your into the goth scene it seems, surely you must agree that 99%, no, 100%, of that music is SHITE... havent  you even been doing some goth modeling, looking morose in churchyards n' that? pay well does it you fucking yuppie cunt?....

2. Basically Throw Bricks At Coppers are no more, they were gigging on the punk scene for 7 years between 1997 and 2004 and notched up close on 100 gigs and it's highly unlikely that the band will reform. I do often get people still asking me to reform TBAC, but I'm simply not interested. It was an interesting experience but being in a band is basically living the life of a fucking travelling alcoholic tramp, unless you have extremely rich parents, and that just doesn't appeal to me. I don't think I do look a stereotypical punk, I consider myself alternative as I hate the punk label applied to me. The dictionary definition of "punk" is "cheap, nasty and worthless", well I don't consider individualistic artistic and creative self-expression of appearance and free thinking to be any of those things, and so I reject the label. Also for something which is supposed to be anarchistic it's kind of laughable that the punk scene seems to have the biggest fucking rule book in existence on how people should and shouldn't look and what consists of being a "poser" and "fake" etc
Yes I do hang around mainly "goth" clubs nowadays and that's basically because the punk scene is just an alcoholics scene with people crashing cider bottles around each others heads because they're a poser or a nazi scumbag.....

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people generally just seem a bit more mature on the Goth scene and basically, I got sick of the retarded double-standards which are rife in the Punk Scene. The Goth scene I consider to be more progressive musically than Punk at the moment too, because most punk bands nowadays seem to be obsessed with wanting to sound and look like they're from 1982(which I personally think was an incredibly shit year for punk incidentally) and are completely introverted musically and politically. The best years of punk in my mind were the late 80's and the late 90's. I agree with you that Goth was utter dire shite when it was mainstream in the late 80's, especially when compared to the intelligence and political significance of Anarcho-punk during that same time period, however the later fusion of the Gothic aesthetic  with things like Grindcore/Death metal which created Black Metal and the later Gothic Metal and Gothic Doom genres have a far harder edge than the campy lightweight mainstream wimpy goth stuff in the 80's, much of which was like a piss-poor watered down punk anyway.
Personally I'd just rather listen to a Cookie Monster Serenading a Soprano Opera Singer to a blast beat string orchestra and find it more amusing to hear and progressive than a barely literate pissed up twat chanting out "Oi! Oi! We're Punks and Proud" to a shit tinny distorted guitar in front of a load of identical looking twats all doing their drunken damnedest to find a TARDIS to transport them back to 1982 again. Call me a traitor if you like, I don't care - I was in 1982 and punk and I have no desire to return back there again.
Ha ha, and no, I don't do "goth modelling", for a start I'm too fucking ugly. However, at most social functions there will always be cameras, just like there always was on Kings Road or in Camden. As for whether such things pay well or not, well I have to be able to afford to the red carpet upholstery cleaning for my fleet of Rolls Royces hidden around the back of my house somehow! I could be wrong, but I don't think you can make benefit claims for that one.  ....

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3: You've taken a step into the 'proper' art world recently, even hosting your own exhibit?, hows that panning out? is it still cartoonish stuff you do or what? sold much? bet your making a fucking killing you yuppie cunt? i notice on facebook you've been posting all the old FILTH stuff, there still much interest in that? and why no FB page full of your newer art? is it shite or something?
cheers!....

3. By a step in to the "proper" art world I assume you mean me getting Filth comic in to The Tate Britain for the "Rude Britannia" exhibition? Basically, I saw on the "Rude Britannia" website that they were asking for underground humorous magazines for the Reading Room part of the exhibition, and seeing as they were displaying a giant Viz comic there, I sent in some copies of Filth which they accepted. I have recently hosted a Filth Exhibition too, however because of Buffoon Boris who hasn't a fucking clue on how to run Public Transport since he became Londons Mayor the tubes weren't working on the stretch of line where the exhibition was hosted and so the turn out was extremely piss poor which was frustrating given the work I put in to the exhibition. Amazingly, however I did manage sell a few pieces never the less which was enough to break even and pay off the set up costs of the exhibition - hardly "making a fucking killing" but then I'm forgetting, unless you are in a punk band paying through the nose and losing money by flushing wads of it down the toilet by performing to one man and his fucking dog in some shithole toilet of a pub pissed out of your head every single night then you simply haven't any punk kudos. I really should roll in dog shit a few times and sleep in a hedge for a year or two whilst I'm at it eh? I mean unless you are wearing the same fucked up falling apart clothes with your bollocks hanging out for at least 10 years and have pissed and shat your trousers and neglected to follow any kind of hygiene regime then you are simply not a punk and just one big fat fucking rip-off millionaire capitalist poser instead.   ....

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I have made a Filth comic page on Facebook, it's basically because I decided to colour in all of my cartoons now that I finally have a full understanding of Adobe Photoshop and I have been publishing the results there because many people never got to see Filth Issues 1 and 2 which sold out donkeys years ago and which were never reprinted. I have always wanted my work to be in colour too, but when it was originally drawn up, the very idea of it ever being seen or printed in full colour was a completely inaccessible and unaffordable dream. In that manner, it IS "newer art" as each page often takes as long to colour as it did to originally draw up. As for my other "newer art", most of it is either my Art Diploma stuff which I did a few years ago or Photoshop stuff which doesn't really relate to the Filth comic stuff and which most people would find boring anyway. I am contemplating maybe one day either reprinting all of the Filth stuff in colour(when it's all completed and IF it ever gets all completed as we are talking about a huge body of work there) or reprinting it in a big book. Bands re-release their albums from decades ago all of the time to a new audience, so why the fuck shouldn't I do the same for my cartoons? Considering most people want everything for free nowadays I could be just wasting my time and money however. As for new cartoons? Well considering I have over 100 pages of Black and White art to colour in and that I am also presently trying to hold down a full time job at the same time too, that could be some time away yet unless some fucker wants to commission me to draw shit up because I'm not about to give up the day job to arse around drawing cartoons for jack shit at the moment. Then again, perhaps I shouldn't worry about that and just go out in the fields and graze grass and live off that like a fucking cow instead? Oh, I forgot, I'm supposed to hold a big sign telling idiotic tourists to ask me where to buy Doctor fucking Martins from instead aren't I? Good, I'm glad we've finally worked out my true vocation in life purely from personal appearance alone, it's so incredibly gratifying for me. Thank you. Would you also like me to roll in that dog shit now or later perhaps