The Boy with the Leg named Brian: cartoonist Pete McKee's new show coming to Notts

Hi Pete. First of all, what made you decide to bring it on tour?
Well, the show was static for a year in Sheffield and I started off by wanting to make it more biographical. It is about childhood essentially, and all the things that surround it from the toys, the mates, the music, the culture all the way through to my teenage years. It’s a childhood that I think that’s shared by a lot of people from my era, so I wanted to take advantage of that and take it to other places and to people from different communities to have the chance to see it. That was the starting point really; I didn’t want the original Sheffield run to be the end of it.

You’ve done a few pop-ups in Nottingham before, and you’ve said previously you have a lot of love for the city. Do you think that there is a lot of shared heritage between the two cities?
Well, for starters, it’s a city with two football teams, so they share that part of an intercity rivalry. But I think they both have strong working class cultural aspects with heavy industry and council estates which gives both cities a strong DNA.  Music plays a part too. It’s quite weird with Sheffield as you have Nottingham nearby as well as Manchester and Leeds. A lot of bands don’t come to Sheffield as much as they once did so you’ve got to choose where you want to go gig-wise. I really like Nottingham though, it is a great city. 

There is a sort of ‘Pennine Triangle’ when it comes to music: Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds… Keeping on the music theme, Sheffield has had a very lively and rich scene over the decades. How has that influenced your work over the years?
Oh it has, definitely! I was part of it in a small way. I was in a few bands as a teenager and was doing all the gig circuits that the Sheffield bands did at the time too. Music has always been a massive part of Sheffield’s industry along with the steel works. The steelworks created the cultural landscape that allowed our music scene to thrive. There was a rejection in terms of not wanting to follow your parents into the steel industry and having music and art be a form of escapism from all that.

Do you think that creating routes for artists is at risk as opportunities seem few and far between?
Yeah, that seems to be the consensus of opinion at the moment that it’s no longer the past time of the working class being in bands, football is the same too as people have to pay subs to attend sessions that are run by schools themselves to learn how to play football. I think in a sense, it is more democratic a process for working class people to be involved in culture, football etc. On the flipside of that you see a lot of bands now when they get interviewed, they speak with a posher “Middle England” accent. Nobody sings with an accent nowadays. 

Working class creativity often has a lot to do with politics. Has politics had a direct influence on your work?
I don’t set my work out to be political more than telling stories of the working classes with nods to culture. I have done two political exhibitions before in the past, more a story of how politics relates to class This Class Works, which was all about the empowerment of the working class and how it works as a community. The other exhibition, Don’t Adjust Your Mindset, was about Covid and how we all lived our lives on social media and how it affected us physically and mentally. Those I would say were the two which had a political message for sure. I generally just have these narratives in my work that create certain stories.

Storytelling has been the biggest feature in this exhibition and the major themes are, as you say, memory and childhood. Would you say this has been your most honest work to date?
Yeah, definitely. This was very much an introspective show compared to others. It came very much down to what I wanted to do and how I felt telling this story. 

Was it difficult for you as to what to include and what to leave out of the exhibition? 
Not necessarily. I don’t think much got left out to be honest. Unless I found bits which didn’t have a strong message. I didn’t think I censored myself too much, especially in the first section which goes into the relationship I had with my mum who passed away when I was seven. It gave me the chance to relive that time and all the emotions that arrived through telling the story of her passing. The wake and funeral are all part of the show too. I didn’t go to the funeral as the family decided I was too young. It was quite raw at points and I felt I had to tell my story honestly. It was quite therapeutic to not only write about it, but also paint it. 

I wasn’t aware what grief was as a child, in a sense. The time after that was strained; it was a tough period to grow up without fully knowing how to grieve and process these things. 

You’ll be performing with the Everly Pregnant Brothers as well. Humour plays a massive part in that with the parodying of famous songs. Has that been an antidote to some of the personal grief in a sense?
There’s this thing in our family called “the luck of the McKees” - there's always something going off and we try to have a laugh and a joke about it. It’s not just us. Everyone who’s grown up skint has had a bit of bad luck somewhere along the line, but it’s about how you deal with it. 

It is quite a northern attitude to have.
Yeah, if you ain’t gonna laugh, you’re going to cry. We grew up with laughter in our house. My dad loved Laurel and Hardy and the Two Ronnies; humour just rubbed off on me as it did with the rest of the family. Being a part of the Everly Pregnant Brothers just seemed like a natural fit for me really.

I suppose it’s an extension of who you are as a person…
It is. My art itself has a lot of humour there’s pathos as well. There’s a sprinkling of humour which means when you come to one of my art shows, you're either going to have a tear in your eye or a bit of a chuckle. With the Brothers, it's just a case of bread and circus entertainment really. People can come and forget about everything for an hour and and a half and have a singalong and a good laugh with us. We’ve always had this ethos that as long as we’re enjoying it, it doesn’t matter. If we have a good time, we’ll all have a good time...

Your songs are all parodies of well known tunes. I really liked Chip Pan’s on Fire, the Sex on Fire parody. I remember it so well. There’s also Electric Gravyland, which is another personal favourite.  Have you had any famous musicians join on stage?
We have quite a tight-knit music community in Sheffield and all of us know one another. We’ve had Reverend and the Makers join us which was really nice and the likes of Richard Hawley and Self-Esteem. We’ve had Steve Bracknell (Chris McClure) sing a few times, which was a right laugh. 

I think it’s good that you’re having the exhibition in a music venue such as the Metronome compared to a traditional gallery. It definitely brings your two loves together. Going forward then, once the tour is finished with the exhibition and the Brothers, have you got anything else in the pipeline?
There’s a couple of things. There’s a showing coming up in two years time, which is going to be at Wentworth Woodhouse. That’s going to be all about dogs and owners and our relationship with them as humans.

Do you have a dog yourself?
I’ve got a chihuahua called Eric. I didn’t have one growing up, but on our estate I used to go round saying I trained stray dogs and pretend they were mine.

Thank you for your time, Pete. All the best with the tour.

The Boy with a Leg Named Brian exhibition comes to Nottingham between 12-5pm on Saturday 23rd May, while the The Everly Pregnant Brothers play later at 7.30pm, both at Metronome. 

metronome.co.uk