A tribute to Pete Loveday - 1944 to 2024
Pete passed away week ago today on 16th April 2024
I’d been thinking I should give Pete a call. I’ve had phone calls with him that lasted hours. We’d chew the fat about all sorts of things. But I don’t think we spoke in 2023. It was usually Pete who’d call me but that’s a poor excuse for not getting in touch. Call your friends.
We spoke a lot in 2022. Pete had been in hospital with Covid and nearly died. It was a few months before covid that he’d taken a long walk to the top of a local hill and he told me that he felt like the last time he’d be do something so strenuous. He’d suffered with his chest. Covid had been a close call.
I knew nothing of Pete’s work prior to purchasing a copy of
XXIII (issue 23 of their journal) in 2018. I say ‘nothing’. I don’t doubt I’d have had plenty of exposure to Pete’s work. But I didn’t know Pete’s name, nor of his most well known creation ‘Russell - The Saga of a Peaceful Man’.
The Psychedelic Press book arrived while I was putting together the Super Deluxe edition of Burning Issue Magazine with Jonathan Greet. This was a vast and insane project to create a 164 page, glossy magazine for money burners and other destroyers of currency. It’s not the sort of magazine you’d produce on the basis of market research. Of course, it’s different now. There are money burners everywhere! But back in 2018 there was certainly no community of cash immolators desperate for a publication dedicated to their interests.
I’d already produced Burning Issue Volume One and Burning Issue Volume One Special Edition in 2016. These were much slimmer volumes totalling 30 and 46 pages respectively. But I’d got it in my mind that if I created something that looked like it had a massive readership, then a massive readership would follow. Or, at least it’d cause people to stop and think that a well-produced, doorstop of a magazine must have significant reach. Else why would it be published?
had given me permission to use an interview he’d conducted with Youth (aka Martin Glover). It details Youth’s acid induced money burning adventures on the Fulham Road in 1980. Prior to his world-shifting The KLF - Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Quid, John had started to write a book about the band Killing Joke. It hadn’t worked out and so the interview with Youth (which was done for the abandoned Killing Joke book) was without a home.There are a whole set quite frankly unbelievable but nevertheless true synchronicities swirling around the Youth/Higgs/KLF/Killing Joke nexus. Even this very post would likely not exist were it not for that strange agglomeration of forces. I’ve been squarely caught in the vortex. One example. I drove Killing Joke just prior to Paul Raven’s death and for some more gigs when Youth resumed duties on bass guitar.
Eventually, I would recount many magical stories to Pete in our phone conversations - when I could get a word in.
Meantime, I had an amazing and magical interview with Messrs Higgs and Glover but nothing to illustrate it. So when Psychedelic Press XXIII popped through my letterbox I thought “the guy who did the cover of this would be perfect!” So I found Pete’s number and gave him a ring.
Now speaking to strangers (which Pete was at the time) about money burning and magic can be a perilous thing. I’m often guilty of letting my enthusiasm run away with me. And guilty of assuming that once I offer some explanation of why burning a few quid is a really good thing, people will be on board. I’ve had many many knock backs.
But Pete accepted the idea of publishing a magazine dedicated to money burning like it was a no-brainer. And, he loved that I was self-publishing a magazine as a magical act of invocation. Just simply because the world needed Burning Issue to exist.
I sent him copies of Burning Issue Volume One and Burning Issue Volume One Special Edition so he could get a feel for what I was trying to do. Next time we spoke we arranged a price for his work and that was that. A couple of weeks after my ‘nominal’ deadline - but in good time for the actual hard to press deadline - a package arrived in the post with a piece of Pete Loveday original artwork.
I don’t mean to imply that Pete didn’t worry about deadlines. He did very much with both my projects and he spoke often about the stress other deadlines were causing him. But he always wanted to create good work. And he told me that he’d done a couple of weeks work on an earlier version of the Burning Issue illustration before abandoning it to create what you can see above.
The brief I’d given Pete was pretty basic. I found a bunch of photos from the 1980s which were broadly related to the Fulham Road and someone getting arrested. We talked about including the Michelin Building. And I do remember our lengthiest conversation was about whether Lady Diana would be featured. Well, actually it was about the impact of the iconic but somewhat salacious/voyeuristic see-through dress photograph that launched her into the public mind when she was just 19 year old. That was taken around the same time and not far from where Youth ran down the street burning money.
In the end Pete chose to reference Di via the covers of Chas and Di’s Bumper Fun Book (which you can see in the foreground of the painting). My view with Pete (and with other Artists) is there’s no point in commissioning someone brilliant and imaginative then telling them precisely what to create. Joan Collins, Boy George, Alfred Hitchcock and Dame Barbara Cartland (whom Pete disliked intensely) all made an appearance too. There was no particular reason for any of them being there, Pete told me. They just sort of appeared as he painted.
It amused Pete when I asked him who the figure was in the window half way up on the right hand side of his painting. It is of course his most famous creation - Russell. He liked the fact that I’d commissioned him with no idea about Russell. To bring me up to speed he sent me The Saga of Peaceful Man I & II and Big Strip Stupormarket. I absolutely loved them. Pete’s humour, curiosity and kindness shone through the dishevelled and unlucky antihero.
In 2021, Fayann Smith and I were organising an Art Exhibition in conjunction with Church of Burn’s Festival of Money. I asked Pete if he fancied contributing a piece and suggested that I would love to see a Russell banknote. I’d included one of my own £23 notes in Burning Issue Super Deluxe. The note was dedicated to and featured the Sex Worker and Campaigner Laura Lee. Pete had liked that and keenly accepted the challenge.
Again, stretching the deadline to its maximum he produced a super piece. I intended to buy it myself but paying for the event pretty much wiped me out and it got snapped up at the auction for a few hundred quid. A real bargain. I was so pleased he included his own version of our Goddess Melusine. He managed to make her desirable in spite of her fishy features.
When I phoned Pete to let him know that we’d sold his piece he was delighted. He couldn’t believe that someone would pay a few hundred quid to hang a piece of his work on their wall. I sent him several copies of the Burning Issue Supplement which served as the de facto Art Catalogue for the auction. And I think (and hope) that it worked to persuade him that what he’d created was art in and of itself. Pete was a humble and gracious man and my impression was that he tended to see what he did as contributing to something else. He illustrated a comic book or drew to promote some event. He wasn’t pretentious or precious about what he did but at the same time he exhibited absolute commitment and care to the work. It was a joy and privilege to work with him and I wish we could have done more.
Pete was always enthusiastic about Church of Burn and the ideas of money burning generally. He was excited to tell me that he’d set light to a fiver to see what it felt like. He had an enthusiasm which belied his age. He loved that there was a connection between Church of Burn and Ken Campbell through Ken’s daughter Daisy. She’s been instrumental in the creation and success of Church of Burn.
While he was recounting a few tales of doing illustrations for Ken and Neil Oram’s famous 24 hour play The Warp - which Daisy had directed aged just 18 - Pete remembered that he had a few flyers somewhere. Eventually he dug them out and sent them to me.
As some of you may know Pete created illustrations for - among others - The Secret Garden Party and Beautiful Days festivals. And it was through his festival connections that Pete would give me and Church of Burn a gift we can never repay. Pete was so enthused to hear and read about our Church of Burn events that he convinced Freddie Fellowes of the Secret Garden Party to book us for their 2022 event.
I’d love to claim that it was connections from my tour management days that led to a major festival booking for something so controversial it would ‘blow people’s hair back’ as Freddie put it - but it was all down to a 78 year old Pete Loveday.
We always talked about the possibility of meeting up. Pete had wanted to come to see us at SGP in 2022. But the risk from Covid was just to severe to his health. So sadly I never got to meet him in the flesh.
In 2022 I placed one of Pete’s Warp flyers on our Altar to acknowledge his role in getting us there. I’ll make sure that Pete is always remembered this way in the Rituals I officiate.
I hope I get to create a Pete Loveday £23 note one day too. Pete will be missed by his wife Kate, his son Mark and so many people who knew and loved both the man and his work.
Jon
Xx
A Facebook post announced Pete’s death and is accepting messages.
The Secret Garden Party posted a tribute on twitter which includes a snippets of Pete working and being interviewed about SGP for their film That Was A Serious Party.
This was wonderful to read! I had no idea that you'd worked so closely with Pete. I sold my Russell comics a few years ago, and am now regretting it.
From 1998-2001 I worked around the corner from the scene in Pete's Burning Issue illustration. On the corner where Russell is shown in a window there used to be a restaurant which was our go-to lunch place when we couldn't be arsed seeking out a new fancy restaurant (lunch back in those days was always on expenses, and Chelsea was our oyster). Had a wonderful young Scottish waiter who mumbled everything like he didn't give a fuck, and taught me how to rip the seal off a wine bottle. Happy days.
I also recently realised that I was at that Warp party that you have the flyers for - didn't see the play, but our friend Greg (who I reconnected with years later) was organising the after-party, and we came down from Sheffield for it. Seeing the dates on the flyers reconfirms my suspicion that our daughter was conceived that night 😁
This is a fantastic read and I'm sure you have done Pete Loveday proud with all of this. Pete designed the album artwork for P.A.I.N - Our Universe Commences Here and he also designed the Last Under The Sun band logo and he did a T-shirt design for the band too. I'll try and find some images to send to you. At one point I had all the Saga of Russell comic books and numerous posters and postcards for sale in the Iron Man Records shop. Pete said he had a load of old stock in boxes he didn't know what to do with...so I bought the lot and sold it on at cost price just to be sure his work went to a good home, rather than sit in a storage box. Pete was such a kind and pleasant human being, with a fantastic sense of humour too. Alway working to have the last laugh if you look carefully in amongst the detail of his paintings. He was a brilliant artist.