Susan Hillier: The artist who inspired The Maccabees song ‘Spit It Out’
When The Maccabees wrote Marks To Prove It, they did so with Elephant in Castle in mind. Firstly, their studio was there, so it became the spiritual home of the record regardless, but much of the album’s material acted as a love letter to London.
The video to ‘Spit it Out’ was filmed there, showing flashes of the 53 bus and local street art as the band played a track from their fourth and final album, and frontman Orlando Weeks insisted it was more than “just a roundabout”. As much as it was a homage to south London, ‘Spit it Out’ also nodded to the poignant work of Susan Hillier.
Though the lyrics “And we get to guessing games / Where no one knows their names” speak to the inner city feeling and the lack of belonging, it was also directly inspired by Monument by Hillier, which charts similar ideas. The piece features 41 photographs of memorial plaques Hillier had come across in Postman’s Park. “It was her discovery in a London park of a neglected Victorian monument,” Weeks explained. “All these plaques were a celebration of people who had died trying to save a loved one or a stranger in a heroic [way].”
The conceptual use of long-forgotten objects is a consistent theme in Hillier’s work, and she dubbed them “cultural artefacts”. Before she really took note of the significance of the plaques, she was struck by how easy it was for people to ignore the small feats that triggered their creation, which is a nice parallel to The Macabees’ argument that Elephant and Castle is equally overlooked.
When she committed to cataloguing them for a piece, she was struck that only her camera made people notice them. “There were people sitting on park benches in front of them eating their lunches, who turned round over their shoulders to look, as if for the first time, at what I was photographing,” she recalled.
Adding: “And when they had seen the plaques, they said things like ‘Oh! Isn’t it sad? Isn’t it dreadful?’ But what struck me was that they had sat in front of these perfectly visible objects for years and years, and the objects had been, literally, invisible.”
Weeks was deeply moved by it, calling her work “an extraordinary thing”. In the video for ‘Spit it Out’, those kernels of local individuality are highlighted by director Joseph Connor, who focused on the footpaths under the roundabout. He said they were covered in “the most stunning, colourful and odd mural paintings”, which gave commuters something with character to look at each day. As regeneration plans were made, similar artworks were disregarded because there was no space left for them.
“Replacing them will no doubt be more functional, but will it be as fun, as unique, as characterful?” Connor asked. That question seems to shape the video and the song, both a celebration of the local artwork and mourning a time when it was considered an important community feature.
