I first tried my hand at political collage in a London bed-sit in early eighties London, using pictures from discarded magazines I’d collected from bins and skips. First efforts were vaguely about poverty and ecology, but as my political awareness increased I began to include the figures of Power at that time, mainly Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

I molded their well known faces onto alien bodies and put them in strange situations and backgrounds, getting cheekier as I discovered I could get away with it, and even have the pictures shown at places where people enjoyed seeing their masters ridiculed in such a manner. Thatcher’s jaws yawned dangerously as Ridley Scott’s Alien; a grinning Ronald Reagan swept down to tear the suspended body of Christ in eagle talons.

Here's a review of my first exhibition -

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THE TITLED TAKE A PASTING AT THE HANDS OF NAMELESS ONE

(HAM &HIGH June 11, 1982)

Nothing falls flatter than ill-conceived satire. And the self-styled anarchist, intent solely on disruption, may fall flattest of all. Luckily the anonymous artist’s exhibition at the London Film Co-operative in Primrose Hill is an exception and with an ingenious use of collage, debunks the royals, the politicians and the police, writes LINDA TALBOT.

In the hands of some, collage emerges as an unruly hotchpotch, but the artist avoids this with works that are uncompromisingly audacious yet, with familiar heads moulded smoothly onto alien bodies, are assembled with imagination and skill. But who is the artist, one wonders? No one at the London Film Co-operative has a clue, although from another source, rumour has it his name is Michael Dickinson. But why the reticence? Surely no self-respecting anarchist fears retribution from those he exposes?

Predictably, Margaret Thatcher comes in for a merciless amount of flak, especially in her handling of the Falklands crisis. She sits in an insubstantial boat, tin hat on head, while Ronald Reagan shrinks with embarrassment from her face-saving exercise and Michael Foot inexplicably turns into a mermaid.

The anarchist’s works are assembled under headings, from Theft and Entertainment to Holidays and Cops. Under entertainment there is the Theatre of War, with Thatcher performing a high kick, Brezhnev attempting the splits on a pair of roller skates, while Reagan bears Nancy aloft while uttering: “Come on, let’s hear it for our team.”

Under Theft, there is Pay Now, Live Later, with the “Government Church” and Thatcher depicted as a saint while the sanctity of other Church leaders appear to be in doubt. The Prime Minister’s relationship with the police is commented on, too, as she indulges in militaristic tendencies by marshalling recruits rigidly into line.

In Victory, wearing her earnest expression with a glint of dementia, she dons the feathers and beads of a dancer and is surrounded by appropriate had signs and in Wild Life, she alarms the animals while swinging Tarzan-like through the trees with Reagan.

One of the most effective collages comes under Blue Blood, with the royals taking part in The Breed, a big budget movie. They are kitted out as bike boys, with the Duke of Edinburgh urging: “Let’s have some action out there!” while the Princess of Wales, in this case still an outsider, eyes them surreptitiously.

All this may sound prone to exaggeration and there are occasions when the imagery threatens to dispense with the humour that humanizes anger. But most pieces are wickedly adept at exposing the two-faced tendencies and follies of our leaders.

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By the mid eighties I’d moved out of the bedsit into a Brixton squat and the pictures were still making themselves. Shuffling through the cut out pictures, images would suggest themselves and I’d either reject or agree and glue them down.

A front cover of the ‘Sunday Times’ supplement of the Queen gingerly sipping from the coconut in her white gloved hand during a South Seas visit, and an ‘Observer’ one of the Pope slumped on his throne, plus a hard-on cut out of a gay porno mag, merged into the image of Her Majesty giving His Holiness a blow job in the depths of Hell! (That was a popular one – black and white photocopies were seen as far as Germany.)

In a rut in 86, tired of being arrested at demos and evicted from squats, I left the country to teach English in Turkey,vowing never to return until Thatcher was out of power. And I didn’t either. Cowardly of me, maybe.

I made these two collages of Thatcher today, quickly in a kind of trance, the one of Cameron in 2011. Thatcher may be dead, but her spirit still haunts the Houses of Parliament. It must be exorcised.