the moss garden

‘when some thing flows in one direction, some thing else sneaks in the other direction’ John Hyatt.

 ‘There is no past, there is no future, there is only the Now‘ The Pilot of Bee Patrol. 

John Hyatt left his body and left a heartbroken world and a book full of songs. 

My first encounter with John Hyatt was a simultaneous blast of sound and image. I was round at my mate Tim’s house, in his bedroom at his Mum’s house in Heaton Norris. Tim was a fascinating figure, a glamorous, dandyish young man with a big record collection of all the best new ‘alternative’ music. Tim had cool hairstyles, piercings, tattoos, fly clothes, sharp toed and shiny buckled boots like a clean Keith Richards, and he was always dapper, and tidy, never a hair out of place, often to be found at the pool tables at the Old Garrett of a weekend during the latter part of the 1980s.

Tim had just been over to Leeds to see an exhibition of paintings by John Hyatt, then the singer of the Three Johns and also a visual artist. Tim had a catalog of the paintings and he played me some Three Johns songs. I was blown away by the paintings, as a budding artist myself, just discovering painting and paint. The music was great too, bombastic and painterly. I knew of the band but hadn’t heard much. I was particularly intrigued by the Three Johns use of drum machines with bouncy, diverse rhythms and the poetically charged vocals. Drum machines appealed to me as drummers always come with a lot of baggage. 

This was organic and warm music, sarcastic and satirical, close to the KLF in spirit, the songs brimming with ideas delivered with John’s altered Elvis flourish, with an emphasis on the prolific. John was an incredibly prolific creator, as I was to find out. 

The next encounter was at Tim’s again, in 1989/90 it was sometime just after Fool’s Gold was released. Tim played Go Ahead Bikini off the Three Johns album The Death of Everything. I was knocked back by the sample, and Tim stated that this song came first, and that the Fool’s Gold vibe was clearly inspired by the Can-like Three Johns track. The album reminded me somewhat of the Manchester bands, the chaotic funk of the Mondays and the slick use of appropriated rhythms like the Roses and Charlatans. 

This always stuck with me, this meeting of the music and art worlds. I wasn’t an art world person, but I was an art person. I’d attempted to go to art school many times, it was my dream but a difficult one to achieve when you have no resources and are not in one of the traditional education streams.

A few years down the line, between 93/95, I did a part time art foundation course at Arden in Manchester, with a view to getting on to a degree course. I had offers and ideas to go places, I was being encouraged to apply for colleges in London, but I had this feeling about Manchester Poly. I’d heard the news that John Hyatt had become head of department of Fine Arts there, via an article in the Manchester Evening News by Andy Spinoza. I had seen John’s exhibition at the Cornerhouse which was a big influence on my work in ways.

As the time to choose a college loomed closer I’d learned about the European funding which was pouring into the new Metropolitan University and into the Fine Art department, which driven by John Hyatt , was building studios for multimedia art, design, music and video production, and creating the interactive arts B.A. course and other post graduate courses. This activism, of joining the dots and filling the gaps, widening the possibilities of the existing disciplines and diversifying possibilities of practice while seeding ground for new fields to open, seemed so much a part of the destiny of the city itself, which to me was a tremulous, seismic reality at this time in the mid 90s. There seemed to be a message from beyond for me, a calling to this place from this punk professor.

I chose the open offer at Manchester, starting there in September 1995. It was a wise choice as time told although almost everyone told me it was the wrong choice at the time .

One of the first things I did in my first weeks at the university was to find John Hyatt and grab him for a chat, which I did by first noticing his routine. I’d seen him going to Scruffy Murphy’s Irish pub at around 11:45 a couple of times, obviously heading for a fresh pint. Being of an Irish heritage this felt relatable and the pub did a reasonable breakfast, I scouted it out with my friend the Manchester foodie Josephine, who was then a student of embroidery at MMU. Jo’s family owned the Beaujolais restaurant which my dad was a big fan of and which eventually took over the basement at 70 Portland street, the old Crazy Face building where my Dad had his factory.

Jo and I had a couple of breakfasts and pints in there while John was there too but I eventually cornered him with a friend in tow from the Fine Art Painting course, someone I’d met and befriended instantly, Lee Chong from Liverpool, a painter, punk singer, and a Three Johns and John Hyatt admirer. 

We doorstepped him in the pub, barstooled him is a better term, and we told him how much we loved his music and paintings. I told him about the exhibition my mate Tim had been to which had sparked my interest in John and his Johns. We talked about the course and how there were some obvious tensions around due to the change in location, as tradition and custom clashed with this pop art post punk energy in the shuffle for space amid a newly hatched and bustling crowd. The course had moved from it’s original site in Chorlton on Medlock to a central site at the old Art School building at All Saints which was both a painful upheaval and a new adventure.

I was an adult, 27, a mature student and I had worked, I knew a little bit about people and life so was straight to the point on the matter of tensions in the department. John said that 

‘you put your head above the parapet, someone will take a shot’

He looked tired but he gave off great energy and encouraged us to do what we wanted to do, to be serious about what we feel and not be bound to the rules of the discipline. If we wanted to paint with a video camera, or a washing machine, it was our call. This was important as there was some scepticism towards mixed media practice within the disciplines, so a thumbs up from John was empowering. His message then was to be bold and get out of our comfort zones, which to me translated as a green light to do all the things I wanted to do there. 

I didn’t speak to him much over the time of my degree, just a few hellos, but I chose to stay at M.M.U. and study on the M.A. Art as Environment course, led by Ian Rawlinson, which brought me closer to John’s world as he was mentoring post graduate students. 

One reason why I’d been drawn to John was that he had music business experience, he knew the world I knew best and that language of those types of people and experiences. At the time I had faced a snobbish reaction from some people to my own journey into higher education, there was a feeling around some people I knew that ‘students’ were to be sneered at and blagged. This was a provincial snobbery, that life was something to be hard earned not studied. These voices did dominate for a time, until the speakers all grew wiser themselves, but back then I felt very much on my own, apart from my background, yet John was all the things I believed in beyond, a painter, a poet, a rock and roll professor, a polymath creator, a magician, a wordsmith, and a very soulful human being.

‘It’s only when people become adults they bring cultural baggage and prejudices with them. They’re frightened by the beauty of an idea’ John Hyatt to Andy Spinoza, M.E.N.1992. 

I speak to many people now who were Art and Design faculty and Fine Art department students then, at around the same time as me at MMU. I was there between 95 and 2000, and we all feel we were there in rare times, that there was incredible energy and creativity around as the John Hyatt defined art school emerged at All Saints, at the same time as Manchester was growing, regenerating and in some places gentrifying. We all look back to that time as vital, and still nourishing us now. This is an aspect of John’s legacy.

By the end of the course I’d been to a lecture of his about Navigating the Terror, an incredible, prophetic sci-fi novel he wrote. I was so moved by the themes, it helped push me towards a digital dimension which I set off into when I finished the MA in 2000.

I encountered John again, online in 2010. I joined an online community of digital art creators during a period when I was working with some then new technologies and I noticed that John was a member, so I messaged him and we started a rapport which soon became a collaboration.

He had been using the Second Life virtual world platform to create multiple avatars of himself. I was very interested in this multiplied persona idea too. We talked around some concepts and our rapport became a continuum of back and forth emailed conversation. We came up with many ideas using John’s alter ego the Pilot of Bee Patrol alongside the alter ego project M4SK 22 created by fellow 90s MMU Fine Art graduate, the Wythenshawe wizard Simon Woolham and I. We had a prolific spell of music and video creation, some of which was shown in exhibitions and festivals in different locations globally. At this time I was living in the Far North of Scotland and all our communication was done remotely, online, which was a radical way of working in 2010/11.

The Pilot of Bee Patrol, with Bees and Owls. Hyatt/M4sk22.2011

This relationship evolved into a song creation process With John. He was a demanding collaborator, not settling for easy solutions as he was able to foresee further outcomes for ideas, whereas my nature is to leave things in flux. In this way he was enacting the tutor role, pushing me beyond my comfort zone, which was something clear in his direction and ethos in that first real time encounter in 1995. This sort of mentoring allowed me to see structures amid my fluctuations and oscillations, he helped me find the patience necessary to see and hear the processes and structures in the chaos of my improvisations.

 Underlying all of this was a sense of understanding that we shared. For me it was rare to meet someone who had similar experience and language, and who had a sense of what this is, this life, the undertows, the parallel paths, the shadows and the glisters, the dream that dreams us, and the how of what we should be doing with it all . The enlightenment, which for John was a necessary process, the Triduum Sacrum, a holy, wholly, holey process of rebirth, and this enlightenment is not knowing, it is an understanding of what has to be done every day, and how to train.

When John was first diagnosed with Cancer we made songs about it, it was one way he was able to confront it. I had been a cancer patient so was already experienced in the process and was able to share some of that wisdom gained. 

This year we picked up some work that had been left off in 2020 when covid scuppered everyone’s plans, a series of songs in a garage rock style under the guise of Gods and Aliens. We also worked with his AI voice, processor Hyatt on another band, Wonderbar! John kept working and his last word to me was ‘wow’ about some video ideas that we were working on using AI generated imagery to work alongside the AI voiced songs.

John suffered and struggled greatly with the illness and the treatments yet he found a way to transmit love in the form of artworks and was persistent, a continuous process of becoming in his remote connections, he became mantra and karma, and our last communications were so often affirmations of this miracle of life. 

That John is a magical, angelic being of pure light and love is not in doubt. John’s message was both urgent and calming, to share that light and to impress upon us all that we are it, and that love is unquestionable. The material passing of John’s body is no end of his spirit. There are reasons, flowing out and sneaking in, the reasons why we are all here and now and why you’re reading this here and now.

‘I have fought dragons wearing lightweight armour made of mirrors. I have drunk from the chalice of eternal life in lands where marvelous and strange creatures rule. I have followed mesmeric melodies across the valley where clouds hang in the tails of wild blue horses. I have seen colours that I did not know existed and been rewarded with a new voice that speaks only Truth. I reached the silent place where creation roars‘ John Hyatt. My Brush with Angels.

John is Fintan Mac Bochra in 5000 years of Ireland’s dreamtime, singing his story to the Hawk of Achill, scattering the seeds of the three fruits of Trefuilngidh, seeds of rejuvenation, and ‘Gathering the shards of the shattered mirror of being’ as the Pilot of Bee Patrol sang.

’It being Dreamtime then, the land and everything in it was dreaming. Well might a person in those days say, there is a Dream that dreams us.’  John Moriarty. Dreamtime.

Be Kind, be collaborative, be creative, enjoy everything.