PING

London-based William Skeaping would be thrilled to kill the mood at your next dinner party. As the specter of our future climate dystopia, Will has turned his considerable marketing and communications talent to full-time activism, working as a strategist with Extinction Rebellion and co-editor of This is Not a Drill, their best-selling handbook urging humanity to do something about the climate crisis before it sleepwalks off a cliff. An erstwhile advertising and music exec who worked closely with everyone from Alan Moore to the late MF DOOM, our call with Will ahead of COP 26 ran the gamut from anecdotes about Oasis impresario Alan McGee to Japanese robot theater. Turns out the grim reaper is a great conversationalist...

Interview by Samantha Bloom

SAMANTHA BLOOM

What is the most important advice you’ve ever received?

WILLIAM SKEAPING

In the last few years the most useful advice has been to listen to the science. Pandemic aside, we are all way deep in a climate and ecological crisis and have just a few years to cut our emissions globally and radically transform our relationship with nature, and each other. It’s real and it’s terrifying. I took this advice to heart and have spent the last three years as a full-time activist, encouraging politicians to do the same.

This is your crisis too. If you’re not sure where to start, give me a call. As our cycles of consumption, news, and noise spin further out of control, most practical work or relationship advice from even a few years back feels antiquated and irrelevant. That said, I’ve received three timeless pieces of advice, each of which has proved widely applicable:

I’d just quit a very safe but dull job at Google, to join hip hop label Lex Records, and found myself on a plane to Coachella Music Festival in Palm Springs where some of our artists were performing. Despite flying coach, I had music-video fantasies and decided to misinform a flight attendant that it was my colleague’s birthday. The flight crew unwisely donated a couple of full size bottles of champagne to us without checking their supply, which must have led to a booze shortage in first class. Out of nowhere, music

“RIGHT NOW, THE ONLY ADVICE THAT MATTERS IS LISTEN TO THE SCIENCE.

MOST OTHER PRACTICAL ADVICE FROM EVEN A FEW YEARS BACK FEELS ANTIQUATED AND IRRELEVANT AS OUR CYCLES OF CONSUMPTION, NEWS, AND NOISE SPIN FURTHER OUT OF CONTROL.” impresario Alan McGee, who famously signed Oasis, stumbled out from behind a curtain scoping for a top-up from the hoi polloi and doing a great impression of a man trying to overcome heavy turbulence.

Young, plucky, and inebriated, I promptly stood up and introduced myself. He took an immediate shine to our free booze and was happy to sing for his drinks, though I think he was just relieved to hear a non-American accent and find a seat headrest to brace himself against. The soundbites started flowing, snatches of band names mumbled in a very strong Scottish accent… “(mumble mumble) Primal Scream, (mumble mumble) Pete Doherty…” until eventually, someone from his team arrived to beckon him back to a much more comfy, fully-reclining seat.

Little he said was fully intelligible, but he leaned in, frothing slightly at the corners of his mouth and in one final gasp, whispered a mantra as if it were the vital clue to locate buried treasure:

“Don’t believe the hype... believe the checks... Dont believe the hype, believe the checks.“

I like to remember he encouraged us to join in with him and repeat it back, and I may well have embellished this memory over the years, but the take-away is probably more valid than ever.

Advice I received in my formative years has also really stuck. My parents are musicians and I remember as an eight year-old in a pre-internet world, helping my mother to copy edit the brochures she was mailing out to booking agents across the country. I was practically learning how to think ‚audiencefirst’, and probably laying the groundwork for a comms-adjacent career.

The most practical piece of advice I’ve ever received? “Bend with your knees, not your back”. I learned this from a summer job moving boxes at Harrod’s department store as a teenager, where I was forced to watch a half-hour video on the importance of lifting boxes properly. I’ve stayed injury-free, but still hear that stern video voiceover in my head, even if I’m just bending down to pick up after my dog.

SB Describe the person who gave you that advice and your relationship to them?

WS Feeling a connection to the person advising you is more important than whether or not you meet them. My high school art dissertation was on modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth and I got a rare opportunity to explore an archive of her original corres pondence that hadn’t been seen for decades. She was writing to artists, critics and friends –but the letters read as if she was addressing me directly, so I took her comments to heart. Her consideration for truth to materials should be taught in school: paying deep attention to understand our creative mediums, their origins, space and temporality so we can work with them effectively. Platform agnosticism is often a race to the bottom. At the other end of the frivolity scale, there’s a strange intimacy in Andy Warhol’s memoir, Popism , that feels like a hauntingly prescient cheat-sheet for our disturbed times.

SB Who do you typically call when you need advice?

WS My friend, Jen Stilwell (@Monte.Vision), who deals highly-coveted Post Modern furniture in Palm Springs. We met in LA and immediately bonded over a shared love for early ‚80s Italian disco. I’ve stopped flying for climate-related reasons so we haven’t seen each other in five years, but we speak several times a week. It’s like having an extremely funny and judgemental oracle I can legitimately call in the middle of the night, supported by an eight hour time difference. We’re still trying to work out which of us is the other’s spirit animal.

SB Who is your unlikeliest mentor?

WS Deep sleep is an extremely underrated mentor, as is spending time in nature, water, and green spaces in general. The unconscious can do a lot of advising behind the scenes. Cheese before bedtime can help turbo-charge the all-night movie experience. I recommend a strong comté or a mature cheddar. I also worked closely with rapper MF DOOM, who gave me a handmade ‚Orgone Energy Pyramid’ to aid our psychic communication. Though he has ascended to another plane of existence, I’m certain he’s still sending useful signals.

SB If you could call anyone in the world and ask them for advice, who would you call and what would you ask?

WS I’ve become obsessed with a choreographed robot theater that briefly existed in Japan in 1985. I’m planning a fact-finding trip that means travelling from London to Tsukuba, by bicycle, train and sea. I need to speak to someone with international non-flight travel experience, ideally a japanese design expert and probably a psychologist to check that I’m not going mad.

ANYO.NE/WILLSKEAPING