Joel Levack, on the left, and Phil Tidy. On the table between them: Joel’s thermos, my coffee cup, someone’s coat hanger, a box of Lemsip, a tin of chocolates, a water bottle and glass, a laptop, a roll of loo paper, and a small tech box with a G on it.
Two green Bromptons folded and parked nearby with different handlebars. Through the window, a red ladder Joel painted to match the tomatoes he was growing in a rooftop planter for Soho Bloody Marys.
Most pictures in this show catch a person in a room that belongs to them, and the room does half the characterisation. This one is different by design – Joel and Phil are sharing a table that isn’t really either of theirs. If it looks blanker than the others, or less personal, that is the point.
The building is enormous. Warner Brothers used to record voiceovers here – George Clooney and Tom Cruise among them. It now contains a radio station, bar, event spaces, sound studios, cinema, and offices let out on this floor. Phil uses this room most days; Joel was visiting from elsewhere in the building.
Under normal circumstances the rent would run to about two million a year. Their landlord let these two have it on a peppercorn plus profit share, because the building is in poor condition. Recently they had to service every aircon unit to prevent Legionnaires. The pop-up takeover was meant to last a year and was going into its third. Both of them were obviously knackered.
I was not actually there to draw them. I was there because they were putting together a book about running the building, and had asked me to help.
Joel I already knew – he had been one of the sitters in a set of Zoom portraits I made during the pandemic, when a Soho private members’ club raised money for its neighbourhood’s homeless.
That was five years before, and through a small screen. That is what the Zoom drawing looked like:
His was one of maybe thirty portraits I made for the Union that year, in exchange for donations. Everyone was on the other side of a screen. I did not meet Joel in person for a long time afterwards.
Before we met, we often zoomed to make collaborative art online. One day Joel told me he’d got hold of the old bar at the Union, which was being changed, and had cut it into twenty-eight numbered pieces, each made into an artwork.
I have that near me now, on a bookshelf.
We finally met in person in June 2021:
Later I helped at one of Joel’s art shows at a Soho gallery. This time he’d cut up an unwanted grand piano to make works about a mountain in Antarctica that shares his name, Mount Levack. He intends to visit one day.
I wrote the show notes – and interviewed Joel – back in my former role as journalist.
***
Joel co-runs All Is Joy, the name given to the former Warner Brothers building where I drew the picture at the top of this page, plus several other buildings around Soho. He does a show on Soho Radio. He knows a very high proportion of the people in that square mile. It is fair to say he is Mr Soho.
Immediately before All Is Joy opened, he asked me to run a couple of public speaking events there. Having access to the whole of the still-vacant building, I used one of the sound-proofed recording studios, and the bar, and the giant screening room. This picture shows Joel on the first morning, at the front door, looking out for my guests:
He also let me use a small gallery space at All Is Joy to show, for the first time in public, some of the drawings that would go into A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown. I was deeply ambivalent about letting anybody see them, and basically did not tell anybody they were there on display.
Great gallerist!
***
Joel isn’t a man you can keep at a desk for long. Here he is in the workshop at All Is Joy – safety goggles pushed up, a wall of saws, a ceiling of Soho events:
Knowing Joel to be a man of action, I was instantly grabbed – in the room with Phil – by the opportunity to picture him sitting down. With every minute, his expression showed an increasingly restless desire to get out of there.
The book idea we were talking about was to be picture-led – neither of them wanted to spend ages writing. I suggested they gather their best images of the building and of themselves inside it, print them into a single copy of a plain book, write over the pictures with any thoughts and memories, and reproduce the whole thing as it was.
What the picture ends up characterising is not Joel or Phil singly but the ad hoc tabletop between them – and a certain provisional, running-on-fumes look that felt honest to the whole enterprise.
It is the portrait in this show that is most transparently the picture of a working situation rather than a working self.
This is one of the portraits in Contain Multitudes, my show at Burgh House, Hampstead, 18-23 August 2026.