Kim Janssen spends a night on the tiles with graffiti artist ‘Panik’ – and learns that what some call vandalism is for others art – and a route to self-esteem

TO an untrained eye, Panik looks like any other streetwise 17-year-old.
Slim, of average height and dressed like tens of thousands of other teenage Londoners in a hooded-top, jeans and white trainers with a scarf turned up against the cold, you wouldn’t bat an eyelid if you passed him in the street.
But look to the rooftops in Camden Town, Kentish Town, West Hampstead, Angel, Oxford Street – almost anywhere in London, in fact – and you’ll see his name sprayed in bold colours, five feet high.
Ask members of the secretive graffiti sub-culture and they will tell you he is one of the most respected artists in Britain, part of one of the best crews, Ahead of The Game (ATG).
Ask the police, or the owners of the property he illegally paints, and you’ll get a different answer. To them, Panik is responsible for hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of criminal damage and is one of the most wanted vandals in London.
He only agreed to talk exclusively to the New Journal with a guarantee his identity would not be revealed.
Speaking in a Camden Town kitchen over a cup of tea, he said: “I consider what I do art and I’d like to go to art school. To be honest, I don’t worry too much about what the police think of me – they’re a part of the game, that’s all.
“I write graffiti for myself. You want to get that respect for yourself, that fame, but you get to a certain point where people are amazed when they meet you and find out what you write and it doesn’t matter anymore.
“But if I feel I’m not organised in life or appreciated like I should be, or I’m just stressed out, then going out and doing something big gives me self-security and a sense of power.
“Everyone wants to be known for something, don’t they?”
Panik started writing graffiti when he was 12 and at a Camden secondary school.
He liked that it brought him peer respect quickly, and had a creative element.
In the beginning, he just practised his ‘tag’, his stylised signature, scrawled with a pen on the school walls. Within the heavily coded and hierarchical world of graffiti, he was what is known as a ‘Toy’ – a naïve, aspiring artist, without a real style of his own.
Older boys at his school – serious graffiti is practised almost uniformly by males – belonged to the hugely respected DDS (Diabolical Dubstars) crew, who had by then already passed into London’s underground ‘bombing’ legend.
Panik, who speaks in a deadpan voice but has a cunning smile, said: “They were all heroes to me – everyone in the school wanted to be in DDS, and it was a big crew of around 30, but I was just a little kid, and their reputation was as much for being rowdy and robbing people as it was for their graff.”
Over the years Panik learned the basics of graffiti: first perfecting his tag, then learning to ‘throw up’ – to outline his name in giant, stylised bubble letters with a single can of spray paint. Next came the ‘dub’ – his name in two colours, usually chrome with a black outline – and finally, the ‘piece’, a large, full colour work, also known as a ‘burner’.
At his style progressed, so did his audacity – the more prominent the spots he painted, the more ‘up’ he became, the more respect he earned.
Venturing beyond the school walls, he went first into a nearby ‘graffiti park’, a spot already so heavily covered in graffiti that painting there had become borderline legal; then there was an abandoned office building used by junkies opposite the MTV studios in Hawley Crescent, Camden Town, then the train tracks and the streets, until finally, he concentrated on rooftops, travelling as far afield as Prague, Amsterdam and Barcelona to paint.
With his friends Rest, Snor, Rayds, Aset and Harm, he formed ATG in 2001. And there was a clear agenda.
He said: “There was a joint mentality of wanting to systematically take over as many areas in London as we could with more style than you would normally get from a bombing crew, of trying to do something for the scene here.
“The type of graffiti you have says a lot about a city. There’s a lot of ugly graffiti in London, but then there’s a lot of ugly attitudes, too.
“There’s a lot of messy, shitty walls where people have overlaid each other’s work. If you go to Barcelona that doesn’t happen – people have more respect and they are more open minded.”
When ATG formed, painting chrome and black dubs on train tracks and fighting were enough to win respect, but they brought colour and painting in the streets back into the equation.
Panik explains: “One thing we did that drew a bit of attention was that we would emulsion the Victorian walls by the tracks with rollers before we painted them.
“With emulsion on first you could paint crisp colour pieces that really stood out like a sticker or an advert. We hoped other people might start doing stuff like that but they didn’t.
“Sometimes you wonder if London will ever take it to the next level.”
Jealousy has made him a few enemies, particularly amongst the old guard, and there are plenty of writers he looks down on for “just doing, messy, stupid stuff where the building would look better how it was built”.
So far he has escaped the worst of the violence that can go with the machismo and rivalry endemic to graffiti.
His response to the nasty side of graffiti, that can see writers steal from each other, paint deliberately over each other’s work, fight and even – on very rare occasions – kill, is straightforward: “They do it because they can’t beat you any other way.”
Even those who avoid the violence seem to be in danger – the number of graffiti writers who die young is documented in dozens of tribute pieces across the city, a testament to their willingness to take risks.
Writers like Evil, Vizo, Pause, Raze and Got 2 are amongst those who died before they hit 25; some were electrocuted on the train tracks, drugs are to blame in other cases. Still more have ended up in prison – Rainman and Sub are recent examples who have appeared in the courts.
But Panik insists risk taking is part of the appeal. He said: “You have to go out on your own and take risks – that’s part of the buzz. A year ago I fell off a ladder on a rooftop in Camden Town. I was lying there for five minutes in the middle of the night with a deep wound to my leg and concussion.
“It made a lot of noise when I fell and I thought that someone in a flat had probably heard. I was in pain but I could have finished, but because of the noise I got on my bike and rode home.”
With practice he has become a skilled climber, able to scale the backs of buildings via drainpipes and ledges to get to roofs where his work is almost impossible to clean without scaffolding.
He said: “One thing that is dangerous about rooftops in busy places like Camden Town is you get drinkers looking up and shouting at you, drawing attention to you.
“Another thing is that people in flats with windows below will think you’re trying to burgle their house.
“But mainly no-one’s looking up there at night – it’s dark up there. But in the daytime your name’s above everybody.”
Train yards, by comparison, have become increasingly dangerous places to go, with infra-red security systems and razor wire, although that hasn’t stopped Panik.
He said: “I’ve nearly been caught in Highgate yard. It was like a film – I got out through a hole in the fence and the trackie was there on the other side and couldn’t get through because he was too old.”
In another scrape, Panik escaped from the tracks at Gloucester Road on the District Line by climbing along electric cables along the wall.
As it stands, he cannot foresee a time when he will stop writing graffiti.
He has been out painting with other writers in their 30s, some of whom make a living doing legal commissions during the day and then go out to do illegal work at night.
He said: “If you love it that much, it’s a good way of living. You have more freedom than the majority of people or even the majority of artists.
“To get into a gallery you have to impress other people, but when you’re writing you’re not asking for anyone’s opinion.
“When you climb a tall building there is a view over all of London – you can see the whole city and you feel like you know the city better than anyone else.”