Birkenhead-born Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey talks to Laura Davis about his year in the spotlight

SURELY the waiter who threw away the pile of debris on the cafe table did not realise it had been placed there by a Turner Prize winner.

If he had known the empty water bottle, chewed apple core and plate had been fashioned into position by the current holder of the world’s most famous art award, would it have ended up on eBay?

It’s a few hours earlier and Birkenhead-born Mark Leckey, the 2008 winner, is using his breakfast to explain what makes good art.

“I could arrange something here on the desk and it looks like a still life,” he explains in Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery cafe.

“In the context of a gallery, it is art. Then someone has to talk or write about it and it gets taken seriously.”

But, despite his own involvement, the rudimentary still life is not art, he insists.

“Art for me is like alchemy, the transition of one material into something else and it’s magic when it’s good.

“That magic gets produced about once every 10 years, and I wouldn’t claim any of my pieces to be magical.”

This modesty seems out of character for Leckey, left, who still has plenty of Scouse cockiness intermingled with his London cool.

When asked why his body of work was chosen for the 2009 Turner Prize, he states confidently: “’cause it was the best.” But he continues: “I didn’t expect to win, though, because I was up against three women and there have been hardly any female winners.

“I didn’t think it would be entirely political, I just thought it would be difficult for them to give it to me.”

After the announcement, Leckey did what most of us would – phoned his mum and got drunk.

First, though, he gave what was probably the least pretentious acceptance speech in Turner history: “I’m chuffed to bits. I’m reverting to my roots and getting Scouser as I talk.

“It’s a big thrill.

“It’s great to do something that has some kind of effect on British culture.

“And, you know, this is good, it’s a good thing.”

Drunk on his success and free drinks, the rest of the evening passed in a blur.

“To be honest, I kind of loved its glamour – it was a great party,” says the 45-year-old.

“The best thing was going down my street the next day and all the shopkeepers coming out and saying well done.

“It did wear off after about two days – yesterday’s fish and chip wrapper.”

With works that draw heavily on popular culture, including a video montage of clips of nightclub dancing called Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Leckey is very much the people’s artist.

Yet, while the art industry had bestowed him with praise, not all reaction from the outside world was so positive.

“You can do things in the art world, it’s fine, it works there and people appreciate what we’re doing,” he explains.

“You can have a rational debate about things.

“But when you try to go outside that, there’s a knee-jerk reaction to art.

“People think it’s pretentious.”

While he concedes that some conceptual art deserves this criticism, he is hurt that many of those who leapt to attack his work had not seen any of it.

“My mum and my sister can understand what I do, it’s not that complicated,” he insists.

“You don’t have to know about art to get what I’m getting at.”

Leckey cuts an unusual figure in the Walker, which he visited often as an art student.

A single pearl drop dangles from one ear and his blue T-shirt, pinky-red trousers and white scarf with pink and yellow stripes have a just a hint of 80s sportswear.

Not destined for greatness from an early age, Leckey left Whitby Comprehensive School, in Ellesmere Port, at the age of 15, and was on a YTS scheme when his stepfather intervened.

“I used to draw and I was always good at it,” recalls Leckey, who now lives in London’s West End with his girlfriend, Lizzie, a Tate curator.

“Then, when I was 19, my step-dad had this conversation with me about how everything in the world had been designed by someone, drawn out at first, and that I could do that because I had that ability to draw and I shouldn’t waste it.”

It struck a chord and Leckey took O and A Levels at college before completing a two-year foundation course at Liverpool Art School.

In 1984, he began an art degree at Newcastle Polytechnic, which he found a mixed experience – enjoying the people (he is still friends with some fellow students), but not the critical theory.

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, made of footage of British discos and raves from the 70s, 80s and 90s, intended to “chronicle the rites of passage experienced by successive generations of British urban youth”, brought him success in 1999.

Drunken Bakers, a film of the Viz comic strip dubbed with the dialogue bubbles voiced over the top, followed in 2006, while two solo exhibitions won him the Turner Prize nomination – Industrial Light & Magic at Le Consortium, Dijon, and Resident at Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne.

Inspiration for his work comes from books and music. Hours spent reading in Ellesmere Port Library as a teenager continue to provide him with material, he reveals.

“What I want out of art is ideas – I want ideas and sensations.

“I want art to be sensual and imaginative, and the problem is if you try and make work too populist it stops being that. It becomes something more formulaic like TV.”

The solution is to try and create pieces that transcend the traditional idea of contemporary art, he says. But he is not above wanting to make a TV show – not a programme about art, but one that is a piece of art in itself.

“The reason I make art is because I have obsessions that are near pathological and I’m trying to work them out,” he says.

“I think there’s something in the work that I do that’s uncomfortable.

“Basically, I’m always thinking about the same things – I’m always gathering information and then it’s like a kind of release to make something.”

These obsessions are too personal to share, Leckey says, but viewers of his work can guess at them.

With the Turner Prize under his belt, the challenge is to prove himself to the public, he says. And, given his local connections, he is angling for an exhibition at Tate Liverpool. He is content with relative anonymity, relishing that he can munch unrecognised on an apple in the Walker cafe, and has no plans to chase the limelight like Damian Hirst and the other Young British Artists.

“I haven’t got a lot of time for them,” says Leckey. “ The thing with all the YBAs is they became better at going to parties than at making art.

“I like the glamour of the Turner Prize, but that was just that week. It’s nice to have the moment in the spotlight, but no more than that.”

When he is not creating art, Leckey is treating students in Germany to zany lecture-performances. But when he is, he is searching for the feeling of pleasure that signals he has produced something of quality.

“The best feeling you can get making a piece of work is when it seems like it has made itself, it becomes separate from you,” he explains.

“With this comes a distance and a marvel at what you have made. It’s a beautiful feeling.”

WATCH Mark Leckey’s video art work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/video

lauradavis