In 1972 a young woman pitched up at an artist’s home to meet her idol. Angela Barratt was 27, with no experience in journalism, art criticism or interviewing blunt northern men of a different generation. LS Lowry was 84, a notoriously private painter who lived alone and increasingly at odds with a world changed beyond all recognition from the industrial heartlands he’d spent a lifetime documenting. Over the next four years the unlikely pair struck up a bond. They met at least 15 more times in Lowry’s home. On each occasion, amid his parents’ portraits, paintings propped up on the piano, and the whirr of the reel-to-reel recorder, the artist bared his soul.
It’s an amazing story, and one that could so easily have been lost. Barratt never did get round to writing up her interviews, the last of which took place just one month before the painter’s death. In 2022, after her own death, the tapes were discovered by her son. Now they’re broadcast for the first time in LS Lowry: The Unheard Tapes. This landmark BBC film is a dense collage of dramatised scenes in which the interviews are reconstructed by lip-syncing actors alongside archive material and commentary from a multitude of talking heads: Jeanette Winterson, Stuart Maconie, critics, curators, biographers, even a psychotherapist. In short, there’s a lot going on.
The actor gifted the words of the Salford and Greater Manchester artist who painted the people and places others ignored (or, in Lowry’s words, “that nobody wanted”) is one of the greats of our own time. Lancashire’s Ian McKellen. Lip-syncing can be toe-curling to witness, and it took me a moment to accept Lowry’s words – minimal, deadpan, thickly accented – flowing from McKellen’s expressive mouth. Then, I started to marvel at both masters: the artist and actor in perfect sync. McKellen’s Lowry is a thing of bleak and beautiful northern wonder, all obfuscating harrumphs and carefully placed blows on his hankie. “Were you often by yourself?” asks Barratt. Lowry: “I like it like that, yeah … I like it like that now.” Pause, yawn, sniff, nose wipe – all exquisitely timed. The interviews are filled with revelation, beauty, and a distinctly northern self-effacing tenderness.
In 1909, Lowry and his parents moved from Manchester’s affluent Victoria Park to Pendlebury, an industrial landscape dominated by mills and factories. At first he hated it. In the end it was the making of him. Nobody had painted such workaday scenes: “So I said I’ll do it as best as I can.” He started making sketches on the backs of envelopes and in notebooks, working them up into paintings at night. What he doesn’t reveal to Barratt is a secret he kept from everyone: for 42 years Lowry, who was ultimately middle-class, worked full-time as a rent collector. Perhaps he didn’t want people to think him an amateur who painted in his spare time. Perhaps he didn’t want people to know he was collecting rent from the working classes he portrayed. Yet, the fact that he wasn’t one of them (nor did he fit into his own class) was what allowed him to observe his subjects so sensitively in his “matchstick men” paintings.
Lowry was an outsider, a loner (also, interestingly, a conservative), who never married. “I might have …” he mutters. “She died in an epidemic.” In the next breath, down the shutters come again: “I’ve never been in love.” In 1921, he sold his first painting for £5. “My family got the shock of their lives … they couldn’t believe it was possible I could sell a thing.” His father “used to have hysterics” when he sold a painting. When people came to the Lowrys’ home, his mother would turn her son’s paintings to the walls. “People thought I was a great joke,” he says. By the time success came, the industrial world was vanishing and his parents had died. “It were a bit too late for me,” he tells Barratt. “I was past being interested.”
There are many heart-rending moments. “She thought I’d be awkward,” he says of why his mother, who had a reputation for being highly critical of her son, didn’t teach him the piano. “Guess I would have been, too.” Barratt: “Do you think you were awkward when you were a child?” “I was a terrible child, they say,” he replies with a little snort. When asked about the happiest time in his life he says it was “up to 1932”, after which “the deaths began”. His father died that year. Lowry cared for his mother until her death seven years later, which crushed him. Still, he kept painting. “Kept me out of the madhouse,” he tells Barratt. “I’m serious, you know.”
All of which is delivered by McKellen with immense precision, dexterity and understatement. Never have those pale blue eyes looked so watery and brimming with undeclared feelings. Annabel Smith powerfully conveys Barratt’s gentle yet astute questioning, her compassion, respect and affection for her subject. They’re so brilliant that The Unheard Tapes might have worked better as a one-off drama, an intense and intimate two-hander that would have given the words on the tapes more room, and allowed the omissions and silences to speak their volumes.
LS Lowry: The Unheard Tapes is on BBC Two / iPlayer
