‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?” says a mechanic, nodding towards the graffiti-daubed shipping container parked in the road outside the Styx theatre. It’s clocking-off time on a muggy summer’s evening and passersby are milling about, peering through peepholes scattered like bulletholes along the container’s sides. Up close, the crackle of police radios can be heard, but the voices sound like they’re on helium, because they’ve been speeded up to make them fit in with the model-railway scale (1/87) of the scene inside.
The apocalyptic, post-riot townscape filling the 40ft-long container is part of an even bigger work, called Aftermath Dislocation Principle (ADP), by James Cauty. It’s hard to mention Cauty without raising the spectre of his former life as half of the KLF, who in 1992 deleted their back catalogue before burning a million quid they’d earned from it. However, there is no performance element to this. Dwarfed by his shipping container, Cauty cuts a quiet, humble figure in a raver’s bucket hat.
The ADP has been scaled down for this appearance in Tottenham Hale, London. When it was full-size, it was inhabited by some 5,000 tiny police figures (no civilians) and spent much of last year as the “model village” attraction at Dismaland, Banksy’s anti-theme-park in Weston-super-Mare. The container idea arose partly to overcome the gruelling reassembly required each time it was moved – and so the ADP Riot Tour was born. Since April, it has been travelling the UK, on a trip that will take in 36 sites of historic riots, culminating at Christmas in Bedford, which is seen as very like the middle England ADP portrays.
Surprisingly, however, Cauty insists that the scene is not necessarily the aftermath of a riot. “It’s not really about what’s inside the container,” he says. “It’s about how people react to it. They just love to look at it, you know, and often they make up their own story, because I’m not really saying anything.”
I accompany the passing mechanic as he works his way around the peepholes, taking in the broken windows, overturned cars, bilious police outside Burger King and the DHL truck rammed into a drive-thru McDonald’s. Is this really not a post-riot scene? No echo with the Tottenham disturbances of five summers ago? “I think,” he says firmly, “a nuclear bomb has been dropped.”
Later, Cauty is in more reflective mood. “There’s a new narrative emerging,” he says. “The whole world is becoming high-vis. Different factions of high-vis people ordering other factions around.” Summer solstice at Stonehenge was like that, he says, the ADP having stopped there to commemorate the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, when police clashed with travellers who were wanting to set up a free festival at the site.
“Thousands of people in high-vis, bollards everywhere and everything’s all regimented,” he says, recalling the ADP stop there last month. “It’s ridiculous, the level of security, it stretched about five miles. “ The nearest the container could get was the Dinky Diner truckstop, off the A338. Cauty sums up the 1985 clash: “There was a group of travellers. Stonehenge was their spiritual epicentre and they didn’t know why – they were just drawn there. The police and authorities didn’t know why either, but they had to stop them.”
Veterans of the battle gathered around Cauty’s container to tell their stories. “They were saying it was a really horrific thing. They got beaten up badly. But then the right-wing local people came and said they’d asked for it, because they were travellers. So you hear all sides.”
We are joined for a beer in the sun by Steve Lowe, of L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, which helps turn Cauty’s ideas into reality. “People have started describing the container as a piece of folk art in its own right,” he says, but Cauty wishes some of the graffiti was more interesting. He points to one message – “Damien Hirst is an Egg” – and says: “That’s quite nice, isn’t it?” But another scrawl – “Don’t worry be happy” has got him rather annoyed. “I was going to write to complain about that, saying, ‘Look, don’t write that shit on my container.’ But Steve says I can’t.”
Cauty’s chuffed, however, with the graphic novelist Alan Moore’s scribble: “Jimmy, I love this.” Moore lives in Northampton and nearly didn’t get to see the Riot Tour after officials pulled out of hosting it in Market Square. In 1874, a huge riot there started over a disputed election and flagging this up was deemed to flout referendum rules, since Cauty and Lowe produce pamphlets about local riot history for each site. Instead, they had to stage “a guerrilla stop-off” outside Northampton’s Super Sausage cafe. Liverpool and Leeds, meanwhile, embraced the project, with local knitting groups fashioning woollen riot shields.
Two smaller ADP shipping containers are also now in circulation. One has just been to Glastonbury festival and will visit the migrant camps in Calais in August. “I like to think of myself as an outsider artist,” says Cauty, “not involved in the gallery system, not involved in anybody ever buying anything.” That said, the other ADP container is in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. “It doesn’t really make any sense,” he says, “but I’m happy to be in there.”
Cauty is making a film of the tour, and posting trailers on Vimeo along the way. But, says the man who co-founded the Orb, he won’t be doing the film’s soundtrack. Has he no wish to rekindle his musical side? “I woke up one morning in 1992 and it had gone, flown out the window. I don’t care about it. I know how to do it, I’m actually quite good at it, but I’ve expressed myself fully. I do other things instead.”
Cauty does have one final thing to say about his new thing, though: if only model-making weren’t so fiddly. “I’d be holding something and say, ‘Can you just take this?’ And people would say, ‘You’re not holding anything.’ You think you’re holding something, but it’s actually gone.” Although he had helpers, he’s the only one who could break the windows correctly and position people the right way. “It’s because of my sense of cartoon-ness. I study the way people stand in groups: usually either bored or excited.” These days, he says, if he sees a group of real police officers, he wants to go up and reposition them.
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