ISSUE 26. ARCHIVE. MYSPACE. CONTACT. LINKS

He’s good at coming up with puns, then he makes them into funny pictures; he can build awesome cakes…and he has some hilarious tattoo stories. It’s about time I interviewed Andy Murphy for the Tattooed Heart.

When Andy Murphy was in grade four, he won a drawing contest. ‘I won two highlighters,’ he tells me. ‘This was in like 1984, when highlighters were the new thing. I was probably the only kid that had them.’ Andy won the contest with a picture of Asterix. ‘I was pretty into Asterix,’ he says.

I was into Asterix when I was a kid too, but I never got all the puns. ‘I did,’ says Andy. A lot of Andy’s illustration now is pretty much based on puns. ‘Maybe that’s where I got it from…’ he wonders.

It’s a certain kind of mind that thinks up word play all the time. Like, who would decide to turn ‘Van Halen’ into ‘Ban Whalin’? ‘I thought of that at the Labour (local pub)’ he laughs, ‘I write notes to myself on my phone- usually I’m drunk. A few days later I look at them going ‘that doesn’t even make sense!’

Andy’s brother Mavie gives him heaps of shit about it. ‘He’s like, everyone who would come up with a shit joke like that would let it go – but you have to flog it!’

Making ‘shit jokes’ into art isn’t the only thing Andy does in his spare time. He recently completed a set of four t shirt designs for Stussy. He also designs album covers for bands, he’s designed and painted shop interiors and he creates other art including paintings and skateboard grip tape art.

Andy finds that even with commissioned work he pretty much gets free reign to design whatever he wants, although his style obviously varies a bit. ‘The metally hardcore bands I did covers for recently, those dudes have seen the stuff I did for Mindsnare so they ask for something like that. I reckon the funny stuff’s way better though,’ he laughs.

The other thing that Andy does is make amazing cakes. Cakes like you’ve never seen before. The only cake I’ve ever seen that comes close is this wizard cake I made last year which was pretty awesome, although Andy told me that the icing was too yellow and that I shouldn’t have used butter. Andy knows such things because he actually did a cake decorating course.

‘If you ask any of my friends it’s probably because I’m a raving homosexual,’ he explains. In actual fact Andy discovered a love of cake decorating when he met a guy called Brian that was really good at it. Seeing Brian’s cake pictures ‘melted my brain – I thought that it would be the best job in the world’ Andy tells me.

Inspired by Brian, who was also ‘a real good skater and an incredible art dude’, Andy took up the calling himself, although these days he is in semi-retirement after a stressful experience spending four days baking a gluten-free wedding cake and turning it into a love boat. ‘I hate baking,’ he says, ‘it turned out pretty good though; I was pretty stoked.’

 

To prepare for this interview, Andy told me that I had to go on youtube and listen to a song by someone called Shane Skillz, called ‘I reprazent, cunts’. Despite initial reservations about a song in which the word represent was clearly misspelt, I gave it a listen. It was retarded. I think it’s Andy’s favourite song.

Anyway, as I never get tired of reminding people, the Tattooed Heart is a tattoo magazine. Aside from the fact that Andy’s art is obviously influenced by tattoo imagery, he also has some tattoos! I ask him to tell me about them and he launches into a tattoo story. The story is pretty long and takes ages to actually mention anything about tattoos, but it’s pretty good.

It all started when Andy went to visit his brother Mavie in Canada. They had planned a road trip from Vancouver down to Mexico in ‘this piece of shit car that Mavie had,’ as Andy explains it.

‘I wanted to go in a ‘woody’ – one of those American station wagons,’ Andy says, ‘but he couldn’t afford one so he got wood-grain contact and put racing stripes along his car. ‘

The day before the boys left Vancouver, they were out the front of a hairdresser’s that was offering a $25 special on perms – so they dared Mavie to get one. ‘There were five of us there, we all handed him $5 each and he went in and got it.’

After Mavie got his perm, they headed out of town. ‘We drove through Portland and San Francisco and ended up in Las Vegas. ‘ The first place they saw with a vacancy sign out the front turned out to be a gay wedding chapel run by a gay Elvis impersonator.

‘Mavie had a perm and a fucken handlebar moustache – he actually looked pretty gay,’ Andy recalls. They tried to hire the ‘Hawaii Room’, but that was booked, so they settled for the ‘Space Room’ instead. ‘The chick behind the counter gave me a wink, she was like, “have fun!” After deciding to spend the night in, the pair ended the night having a massive screaming match, ‘like a full gay couple,’ says Andy.

‘In the morning I was like, I can’t handle you with that haircut any more. You look like dad. My dad’s got dark curly hair that he’s had in this weird mullet for my entire life…Mavie just looked exactly like him, with this weird beard and shitty mullet. I forgot to mention, the day after he got the perm, he went and lopped the sides off it.‘

Andy insisted on driving Mavie to get a cheap haircut – and they managed to find a place that did them for $6. Then, Andy says, ‘he went in there, she said “how do you want it?” and he was like “oh, can you straighten it?” I was like, “no, no, no, shave it off”.

(And now we’re finally getting to the tattoo bit!)

While Mavie was getting his haircut – he ended up grabbing the clippers off the lady and doing it himself – Andy went for a walk and found a tattoo shop next door. By the time Mavie found him, Andy was lying down getting, in his words, ‘the most awesome tattoo you’ve ever seen in your life.’ At this he rolls up his jeans to reveal…well it’s actually hard to see.

‘What does it say?’

‘VivaLasVegas’. All one word though; no spacing required. It’s the worst tattoo I’ve ever seen!’ Andy laughs.

But readers, that’s the thing about tattoos. It’s not just about the art; it’s also about the stories.

‘And then,’ says Andy,  ‘we walk out and Mavie’s locked the keys in the car. I’m just like, “you’re a fucken idiot”. I was so off him. All I wanted to do is go and buy a big pair of cow horns and screw them onto the bonnet and he wasn’t into it. I made him go back into the tattoo shop and he asks, “Have you guys got anything we can break into our car with?” And they go, “We’ve got a Mexican”. Then this massive Mexican dude walks out and within thirty seconds he was into our car.’

The end.

If you would like to see more of Andy Murphy’s art, check out www.salvadorgnarly.com