Eric Clapton<\/a>, who recalls in his autobiography how Milton would spin Howlin\u2019 Wolf and channel the music into dance and acting: \u201cI understood how you could listen to music completely and make it come alive \u2026 it was a real awakening,\u201d he wrote. Milton never lost this knack for performance. But whereas his old mate Pete Brown worked as lyricist for Clapton\u2019s Cream, Milton reckons he passed up similar opportunities for Pink Floyd, whose managers Andrew King and Peter Jenner were also on the scene.<\/p>\n\u201cIf success was presented to Ted on a silver platter, he\u2019d piss on it,\u201d declares Roger Law, co-creator of Spitting Image. He\u2019s at home in Norfolk at a kitchen table piled with books and illustrations, including Milton\u2019s rough-hewn poetry pamphlets. The pair first met at the Cambridge School of Art and raised hell together, and linked up once again in London, sharing their dark sense of humour and appreciation for the absurd. \u201cIf you talk to Ted,\u201d says Law, recalling their benders together, \u201cyou can\u2019t tell the surreal from the reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the late 1960s, Milton took a post at a puppet theatre in Wolverhampton. \u201cThen I moved to glove shows.\u201d He mimes a Punch & Judy style performance with his hands. \u201cIt\u2019s a whole different dynamic: violence. So I moved to that. I call it performance animation.\u201d Law lauds Milton\u2019s uncanny ability to bring puppets alive; the man behind Spitting Image should know. But for Milton, \u201cpuppets\u2019 eyes are dead. They don\u2019t feel challenged, they\u2019re not afraid. This gives you this unrecognised but really potent possibility to get into people, and you can go to places in their head they don\u2019t want you to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Playing with his son George in 1971. Photograph: Courtesy George Milton<\/p>\n
Milton\u2019s skill in puppetry \u2013 showcased on Brighton\u2019s West Pier, and then to numerous school audiences across Europe \u2013 led to some of the strangest support slots in 70s rock music, for Clapton and Ian Dury among others. Milton compares it to the urban myth of salesmen hardening themselves up by hawking peanuts on the street. \u201cI was doing support for Clapton [in 1976], we were doing a performance in the round. I got the puppet theatre out there, the puppets are this big \u2013 \u201d he holds his hands a small distance apart \u201c\u2013 and we\u2019re talking about 1,000 people. Immediately, a roar comes up: \u2018fuck off!\u2019\u201d Dury, meanwhile, would sometimes come to the stage to ask the audience to cool it.<\/p>\n
But Milton\u2019s outrageous, profane performances, with their anti-authoritarian message and Brechtian aesthetic, featuring characters such as Deepthroat Porker, Constable Nosey Parker and The Egg Dog, eventually gained a rep. Tony Wilson featured Milton\u2019s puppetry on his groundbreaking So It Goes TV show in 1976, which caught the attention of Graham Lewis and Colin Newman, soon to be of post-punk band Wire. The puppet show slotted seamlessly into the violent medieval anarchy of Gilliam\u2019s film Jabberwocky. When Milton then picked up a saxophone a few years later and formed Blurt, Wilson made them one of the first bands from outside Manchester to feature on his Factory Records label, and Wire invited them on to their bills. Milton\u2019s subversive art had found a new home in the post-punk era.<\/p>\n
Milton pictured in 1985. Photograph: Paul Wigens<\/p>\n
Milton is a born performer, and Wire\u2019s Lewis was immediately hooked: \u201cBlurt were totally captivating,\u201d he enthuses. A 1984 solo Milton track, Love Is Like a Violence, would even become an unlikely floor-filler at Glasgow\u2019s hip Optimo club night in the 2000s. Although Blurt bounced between many record labels over the decades, Milton always made his way back to the spotlight eventually.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s very much front and centre of The Last Puppet Show: the film is a reckoning with the man Milton used to be, which for his associates was a driven artist, and for his family a sometimes wayward father. A chunk of the budget is intended for creating a new set of puppets to dramatise its scenes; Milton says the old ones were either sent to Alaska, or symbolically burned. \u201cI don\u2019t suppose I made any attempt to make any concessions to anybody anywhere along the line,\u201d he admits, looking back on his wilder days. \u201cOne person beat me up.\u201d I ask who it was, and it turns out to be one of his own bandmates.<\/p>\n
While Milton\u2019s anti-authoritarian streak remains as strong as ever, age has now forced him to start making compromises. \u201cThe last couple of shows I\u2019ve had to do sitting down, which I really dreaded. But actually it kind of opens up a different dynamic,\u201d he says, looking forward as ever to the next gig. \u201cIt seems to make things more concentrated somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I don\u2019t suppose I made any attempt to make any concessions to anybody anywhere along the line\u2019 \u2026 Milton and friends. Photograph: Sarah Lee\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
I ask what he thinks it was about his performances that gripped Eric Clapton all those years ago, and whether he\u2019s the same person now. \u201cI think we\u2019re talking about charisma. And charisma is a form of psychosis, to my mind.\u201d He cites Alice Miller\u2019s book The Drama of the Gifted Child, whose thesis holds that children are often forced to suppress their authentic selves, to support his point.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis kind of intense self-consciousness has abated, mercifully,\u201d he reflects, with a more easy-going perspective brought by age. \u201cOne person described it as feeling like you\u2019re walking about on stilts all the time, and that\u2019s it \u2013 every movement it\u2019s like someone looking at you.\u201d In other words, you felt like a performer all of the time? \u201cYeah. I\u2019m not like that any more. Hahaha!\u201d<\/p>\n
Blurt are currently on tour across Europe. The Odes\u2019 D\u00e9jeuner Sous L\u2019Herbe is released by Not Applicable on 6 February. The Last Puppet Show is crowdfunding<\/a> its final stage of production and is set to be released later this year<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The big bloke in the khaki suit speaks quietly these days. We are nestled in the corner of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-272233","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}