Elton John joins Wreckless Eric on stage during the 1977 Stiff Tour
One of the greatest songwriters ever to come out of Great Britain
ERIC GOULDEN (AKA Wreckless Eric) is an "antique English pop musician" and artist, best known for his 1977 single Whole Wide World on Stiff Records. More than two decades after its release, the song was included in Mojo magazine's list of the best punk rock singles of all time. It was also acclaimed as one of the "Top 40 singles of the alternative era 1975-2000". Before he exploded onto the London music scene, Eric studied Painting at Hull School of Art. When he's not touring or recording, or cruising the Hudson River with his wife Amy Rigby near their New York home, he might be found painting pictures of guitar chords, typewriters, musicians, signs and other bits of pop culture that strike his fancy.
artist statement:
plastic play-in-a-day typewriter kodak road sign trip
I started out as a painter but moved into music because it was a more immediate form of expression. After thirty something years in the music business I started painting again and was thrilled by the immediacy of it. You start painting, wait for some magic to happen. I manipulate paint the same as I manipulate sound. Pull it and push it around until it appears to make some sort of sense. Turn it up and tone it down. Or up.
There's really no difference, except for the physicality of it. I painted with noise, I make music with paint. I use acrylic paint - it dries quickly and I like plastic. I come from the plastic generation. When I was a kid people in England didn't know how to pronounce the word plastic. It was a fairly new word, particularly for old people. They called it 'plarstic' and everyone knew it was cheap and nasty.
I grew up with pop. Pop was invented before my eyes and ears. When I was born (in 1954) it didn't exist. When I was eight, The Beatles came along. The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Yardbirds and The Small Faces followed. The world started to move faster - photography, automation, mass production. Here today, gone tomorrow.
I tore the back page out of my sisters folk guitar tutor book and and learned to play every chord on it. Then, in 1972, armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of rudimentary chords, I left home and went to art college - Bristol Polytechnic, Faculty of Art & Design, Foundation / Pre-Diploma course. 'Arts alright' the school headmaster said, 'as long as it's not charlatans welding bicycle frames together.' I learned to weld and went off in search of bicycles.
I studied Fine Art at Kingston Upon Hull Regional College of Art - 1973-76. Conceptual art was the big thing so everyone was toting a camera, documenting things. Photography was in our blood, we were born to it - millions of dads, mine included, Brownie box cameras slung round their necks, capturing the holiday highlights. Brownies, Instamatics, point and shoot, Kodak moments. Family photo albums... People take pictures of each other just to prove that they love one another... don't show me no more please (Ray Davies) Now photography as we knew it is more or less extinct. Kodak, once such a modern word is the stuff of antiquity.
I love the word KODAK. I love the packaging, the signs. Kodak, Kodachrome, Kodak Ektachrome, Kodak Sold Here. A modern word for a modern world that we were never going to forget.
I make paintings of signs. We see signs everywhere, all the time. I hardly notice them in real life, especially speed limit signs (but that's another story). There's a Dead End sign on the corner of our street. I see it every day, every time I come home: Dead End. I try not to dwell on it.
And I remember my first typewriter. I threw it at the wall in a drunken rage because it couldn't express the things that I wanted to say. I could never type anyway - I produced grubby reams of crooked hieroglyphics studded with tiny holes where the Os should have been. Typewriters - they hold such promise - solid, dependable and at the same time so impossible, improbable, ungainly, unreliable and unrealistic.
I started out as a painter but moved into music because it was a more immediate form of expression. After thirty something years in the music business I started painting again and was thrilled by the immediacy of it. You start painting, wait for some magic to happen. I manipulate paint the same as I manipulate sound. Pull it and push it around until it appears to make some sort of sense. Turn it up and tone it down. Or up.
There's really no difference, except for the physicality of it. I painted with noise, I make music with paint. I use acrylic paint - it dries quickly and I like plastic. I come from the plastic generation. When I was a kid people in England didn't know how to pronounce the word plastic. It was a fairly new word, particularly for old people. They called it 'plarstic' and everyone knew it was cheap and nasty.
I grew up with pop. Pop was invented before my eyes and ears. When I was born (in 1954) it didn't exist. When I was eight, The Beatles came along. The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Yardbirds and The Small Faces followed. The world started to move faster - photography, automation, mass production. Here today, gone tomorrow.
I tore the back page out of my sisters folk guitar tutor book and and learned to play every chord on it. Then, in 1972, armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of rudimentary chords, I left home and went to art college - Bristol Polytechnic, Faculty of Art & Design, Foundation / Pre-Diploma course. 'Arts alright' the school headmaster said, 'as long as it's not charlatans welding bicycle frames together.' I learned to weld and went off in search of bicycles.
I studied Fine Art at Kingston Upon Hull Regional College of Art - 1973-76. Conceptual art was the big thing so everyone was toting a camera, documenting things. Photography was in our blood, we were born to it - millions of dads, mine included, Brownie box cameras slung round their necks, capturing the holiday highlights. Brownies, Instamatics, point and shoot, Kodak moments. Family photo albums... People take pictures of each other just to prove that they love one another... don't show me no more please (Ray Davies) Now photography as we knew it is more or less extinct. Kodak, once such a modern word is the stuff of antiquity.
I love the word KODAK. I love the packaging, the signs. Kodak, Kodachrome, Kodak Ektachrome, Kodak Sold Here. A modern word for a modern world that we were never going to forget.
I make paintings of signs. We see signs everywhere, all the time. I hardly notice them in real life, especially speed limit signs (but that's another story). There's a Dead End sign on the corner of our street. I see it every day, every time I come home: Dead End. I try not to dwell on it.
And I remember my first typewriter. I threw it at the wall in a drunken rage because it couldn't express the things that I wanted to say. I could never type anyway - I produced grubby reams of crooked hieroglyphics studded with tiny holes where the Os should have been. Typewriters - they hold such promise - solid, dependable and at the same time so impossible, improbable, ungainly, unreliable and unrealistic.
I was supposed to say something about myself.
I've been a pop artist for thirty seven years. Made a lot of records, toured the world, wrote a book about it. Now I'm an antique.