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Painter Printmaker Musician Poet
The Mike Absalom story begins with music. That means rollicking live
music and outrageous head shop performances for audiences as far apart
as London and Athens, Belfast and Teheran, Gothenburg and the Costa
Brava. The list goes on for forty years: Germany, Holland, Belgium,
Vancouver, the Yukon Territory, Tierra Del Fuego, Paraguay, France,
Montana, Nova Scotia, Chile, Newfoundland, California – up and down,
back and forth, the gig list of half a lifetime. It has to be only half,
because I am a painter now.
I am a country boy, but Arabic at Oxford put me for a while among the
mighty and gave me the handful of languages that allowed me to live by
my wits in those far off places from the pages of the National
Geographic Magazine which had fascinated me since I was a young
immigrant growing up a parson’s son in rural Quebec. After University,
life in the 1960s was a delicious Niagara with no bottom. I tumbled
along down, happily enough, living (and the living was easy) from hand
to mouth. There were things to do and places to go. I was a bottle
washer, a babysitter, a bodyguard, a busker, a bum and I lived and loved
and was young. As a last resort, rather than stealing milk from
doorsteps, I sometimes even taught. I had had the accidental foresight
to buy a guitar in 1960, a little before everyone else did the same, and
this became my passport to vagrancy. From it came song writing and music
and, in the end, wild performance art. I moved upwards from the street
to bars that had chairs; from bars to folk clubs; from folk clubs to
colleges. I played the Royal Albert Hall, appeared on The Old Grey
Whistle Test and made
LPs. The 1970s were an all night party that
spilled over into the days. Afterwards I spent a lot of time on
mountaintops ironing out the hangover.
I passed the next quarter of a century in Canada. In tune with the solid
decorum of that country, I calmed down and became a pillar of the local
community. During those years, I made my living as broadcaster,
children’s entertainer,
puppeteer,
harpist, fiddler and Celtic
bandleader. I also wrote newspaper articles, did performance poetry and
toured North and South America as the male member of an all girl harp
group. For a while, I resided in Paraguay where I studied harp and got
up to no good, which, after Canada, was certainly worth it. I was
dysfunctional and quite happy with the world and myself. Still, the life
I had been living suddenly ended: World History gave North America a
violent shaking in September 2001 and at the same time dislodged me.
With my Welsh and Irish roots flapping loose, I decided it was time to
replant them in my native soil and I crossed back home over the
Atlantic. I craved old stones. It was a blind jump into the void and I
had no idea what would become of me. As it was, I landed on soft ground,
which in my Clare grandmother’s language they call Bog.
Now I paint, and though I live in the lap of what looks like a ruined
countryside, the old stones are beginning to stir. After forty years of
sound and fury, I am drawing up plans for the next forty. I have
exchanged my guitar for a painter’s easel and a printing press, and I
think that they will make a very good vagrant’s passport too.
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