Douglas Statement

The Ben Moon Story
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-906148-99-7
Verlag: Vertebrate Digital
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

On 14 June 1990, at Raven Tor in the Derbyshire Peak District, twenty-four-year-old Ben Moon squeezed his feet into a pair of rock shoes, tied in to his rope, chalked his fingers and pulled on to the wickedly overhanging, zebra-striped wall of limestone. Two minutes later he had made rock-climbing history with the first ascent of Hubble, now widely recognised as the world's first F9a. Born in the suburbs of London in 1966, Moon started rock climbing on the sandstone outcrops of Kent and Sussex. A pioneer in the sport-climbing revolution of the 1980s and a bouldering legend in the 1990s, he is one of the most iconic rock climbers in the sport's history, In Statement, Moon's official biography, award-winning writer Ed Douglas paints a portrait of a climbing visionary and dispels the myth of Moon as an anti-traditional climbing renegade. Interviews with Moon are complemented with insights from family and friends and extracts from magazines and personal diaries and letters. 'Ever since I first set foot on rock at the tender age of seven years, climbing has been the most important thing in my life. In fact I would go so far as to say it is my reason for living and as long as I am able to climb I hope I will. It is from climbing I draw my inspiration for life.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Douglas, Ed

Leseproben

– Hoop-La –

Ben in Jeremy’s studio on Latchmere Road.

‘The real art isn’t in the revolution, it’s in the evolution, that’s what Jeremy would say.’

David Moon is sitting in the living room of the semi-detached house his older brother Jeremy bought half a century ago to raise his family and in which to paint. Outside, the grid of suburban streets expands around the house, ending abruptly to the north and east where Kingston upon Thames meets the expanse of Richmond Park. To the west is the Thames itself and to the south, Kingston’s town centre and the railway station. It’s here, in suburbia, where Ben Moon was born in 1966.

The town has been commuter belt for almost as long as such a thing has existed – almost, but not quite. When the railway boom got underway, landowners in Kingston were reluctant to make room for such a noisy and dangerous experiment, not when the coaching industry was so important to the local economy. So the London and Southampton Railway was diverted a mile to the south and the first local station was called New Kingston, or Kingston-upon-Railway. When Kingston finally got its own station, New Kingston reverted to the name of the nearby hamlet of Surbiton.

London’s suburbs are human life demarcated by the working day, by train timetables and bus routes, and the muted whine of jets sinking towards Heathrow. They are a place just off-stage, somewhere to change your costume and return to the spotlight, somewhere to wash your car at the weekend, where the state schools are good enough to send your kids, where the parks are large enough to qualify as a facsimile of countryside – a notion geographers term subtopia.

We like to characterise the geometric acres of near-identical houses and predictable behaviour we associate with suburbia as being toxic for creative minds. It breeds a kind of idiosyncratic resistance. On television, in its most benign form, it’s the self-sufficiency of 1970s show . A little more darkly, it’s the secrets and sex of . In the late 1970s the bored resentment of punk was, quite literally, in the case of Camberley band The Members, the sound of the suburbs.

The antidote to that trope, novelist J. G. Ballard, lived until his death a few miles to the west of Kingston, down the branch line in Shepperton. Ballard spent most of his working life anatomising modernity and the dehumanising impacts of technology and a compromised environment.

Ballard used to tell newspaper interviewers who arrived from the metropolis marvelling at the somnolent world this most contemporary of novelists inhabited that he came because of the space and quiet – and to monitor the flickering pulse of the middle classes. When his wife died unexpectedly, leaving him a widower with three young children, he stayed put to raise his family and focus on his work.

He also understood that his sight of the world, which he articulated in his books, was a thin flame easily extinguished. Being in the middle of everything and competing with others can be a terrible distraction from the process of observing. The myriad versions of human experience can crowd in, muscling what you were trying to say to one side. Most of us are simply copying machines, and not even very good ones. Imagining something new, and being able to realise it, takes confidence and absolute concentration.

Focus is necessarily a constant theme in this book, albeit in the context of rock climbing and not art. Although it is perhaps less certain than many suppose where the boundaries between these two activities lie. We associate sport with hard work and practice; habits that make movement routine, hardwired in our brains, bodies that are trained to perform to their maximum potential.

The nature of creative genius is more of a mystery. It’s perceived as a divine spark that changes base metal to gold. It adds glamour and excitement. Architecture seems creative in a way that engineering does not. Poets draw attention in a way copywriters don’t. Yet the boundaries between what is creative and what is not are less obvious than we often assume.

For the Greeks, there was only one truly creative process, albeit not in the romantic sense we understand: poiesis, from which we derive the word poetry. Art and music were merely , the physical making of things by the application of rules, and consequently best left to artisans from the lower social orders.

We don’t see it this way. Our culture venerates artists and musicians as much as or even more so than poets. Yet, like the Greeks, we limit ourselves with our own set of arbitrary boundaries. The idea there might be something creative in an activity like rock climbing would seem alien to many rock climbers, let alone the public. But, for the purposes of this book, and the telling of the life of Ben Moon, allow for the possibility that the states of mind in which great art is produced may be similar to that of a rock climber finally solving a sequence of moves on rock of the utmost difficulty.

Johnny Dawes is a friend and contemporary of Ben Moon, part of a generation that transformed climbing arguably more than any other. Dawes is a climber of a different mettle – fluid, mercurial, instinctive – but when asked whether climbing holds any resemblance to dance, he offered an answer touching on self-expression that could apply equally to Ben Moon or any other climber as it does to himself:

‘Any time you move, your emotional state is shown in your movement. So when you move on rock it makes you remember who you are. Climbing, like dancing, reminds me of who I am and gives me hope and affection for the world. Mozart’s music sounds like some form of astronomical maths transposed into sound. If you climb well, or if you dance well, it reconnects you with the person you really are.’

Ben’s father Jeremy Moon was a young abstract artist who came to prominence in the Young Contemporaries exhibition at the RBA[1] Galleries in 1962, just a year after enrolling at the Central School of Art in Holborn. By the time he moved to Kingston in the early summer of 1966, he’d got married, to Beth, and she had given birth to their first son, Robert. Their second son, Benedick, was born two weeks after they moved in, at home in their bedroom.

Artistically, Jeremy’s life was also on the upswing. During 1966 his work was shown in galleries around the world – Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington, Vancouver, Ottawa, Milan – and he was preparing a new solo show in London. He needed space for a growing family and also somewhere he could build a studio large enough to cope with the scale of his ambitious work.

Jeremy does not fit the popular image of a tortured artist. ‘Jeremy was good fun,’ his brother David says. ‘I never think of him as being moody or depressed. Our father Jack was. Jeremy was more like our mother Ruth.’

Yet if Jeremy was more level headed and calmly focused than his father, it took him a while to find his path. This was largely to do with expectations of class and what he perceived as the wishes of his parents. He was born in the affluent Cheshire market town of Altrincham in the summer of 1934. His father, Jack, was a lawyer in Manchester – ‘a good old-fashioned family solicitor’ as David puts it. After Jeremy came Penny, then David, eight years younger than his brother, followed finally by Diana, twelve years Jeremy’s junior. Both boys were entered for Shrewsbury School where their father had gone, and their grandfather before him.

‘Father was a frustrated engineer,’ David says. ‘He would like to have been in manufacturing and was actually director of a small horticultural engineering company. He loved all that. Liked cars as well.’ A love of cars and motorbikes is something that links all three generations: grandfather, father, uncle and son. Jack’s ‘pride and joy’ was an Allard roadster but Jeremy arguably carried his passion further than all of them. He had a Morgan for a while in the late 1950s, and a one-cylinder Isetta, a bubble car, which he drove around Europe. And there is a blend of joy and envy on David’s face when he describes the 1932 2-litre Lagonda Continental Jeremy owned: ‘That was a beautiful car. It had mudguards connected to the front wheels so when you turned them, the mudguards turned too.’

Jeremy also loved motorbikes and took David on track days at Oulton Park in Cheshire and Brands Hatch. ‘I remember he borrowed my one-piece suit,’ David says. ‘He had a heavy crash and it came back scratched. He said: “What are you complaining about? Now it looks like the genuine article.”’

Parenthood curtailed Jeremy’s passion for bikes, albeit temporarily. Not long before Rob was born in 1964, he went out for a final blast around London before selling his beloved Norton only for the police to pull him over for speeding. He explained the situation and the police waved him on with the suggestion that a prospective father might go more carefully. After the move to Kingston, from Swiss Cottage in north-west London where he and Beth had been living with Rob, Jeremy had bikes again to commute into central London where he was teaching at Saint Martins and then at the Chelsea School of Art.

He bought a new Honda 125 in 1972, ‘a fabulous little bike’, according to David, but graduated soon after to a 350cc two-stroke Kawasaki triple with the characteristic double exhaust, notorious for being the fastest bike for its engine size, and equally notorious for being difficult to handle. ‘Nothing happened until you got the revs up,’ David recalled, ‘but after that it just took off. That was...