Cold War Steve: 'These positive pieces come few and far between for me'

The collaborative artwork is intended to celebrate the city’s community – and he is seeking suggestions from local people about who and what to include.

“These – I call them positive pieces – come few and far between for me,” says the artist whose real name is Christopher Spencer. “My main work is obviously horrific dystopia reflecting the times we live in, so to do a piece where it’s positive and encouraging unity and joy in a particular area is always good to do, especially Sheffield because I love Sheffield.”

Benny’s Babbies, a previous commission for Birmingham Arts Galleries, included such well-known Brummies as Black Sabbath, Julie Walters, Guz Khan, Toyah Willcox and the Crossroads actor Paul Henry alongside less-famous figures. “That was just a joy to do, and I want to do the one for Sheffield in a similar way,” Spencer says. “What I didn’t want to do is a just a poster with Pulp, The Human League and the Crucible – although those are great – and then disappear. So I’ve put a call out for suggestions because I want to get everything in there.

“For my Birmingham piece, for instance, there’s things that only Brummies would know and only Brummies celebrate, and I think Sheffield has that similar sensibility. It’s a great industrial city like Birmingham, but also Sheffield and Birmingham don’t always trumpet on about themselves like Manchester. Sheffield and Birmingham are as great if not better...but we don’t harp on about it.”

From Benny’s Babbies, he cites the inclusion of Mr Egg, “a greasy spoon café that everyone used to pull into when the clubs would close”, explaining: “Birmingham celebrates Mr Egg in the same way that Manchester celebrates the Haçienda. That’s not to say that Birmingham hasn’t got great clubs...it’s just that humour and self-effacing attitude. That’s what I’m looking for – Sheffield’s answer to Mr Egg.”

He adds: “We all know the brilliant array of musicians and bands and artists and actors from Sheffield, it’s maybe the ones that aren’t as well-known that I would like to include as well. It’s going to be a huge piece that will include people that are known worldwide but also I want people in Sheffield to look at it and say, ‘Look, you’ve included such and such’, and have that connection with people, to say how a diverse city of cultures can give so much to the rest of the world.”

Spencer was originally working as a probation officer when his collages, first posted on Twitter, took off in 2016. For a while he was “juggling the two”, making pieces on his bus rides into Birmingham on his way to work.

“The bus into Birmingham city centre could take an hour-and-a-half sometimes because of the traffic and I’d just be making these bits of artwork on my phone for my own amusement, really, more than anything, then it started to take off, much to my surprise and glee,” he says. “Then juggling the two became more and more difficult, so I had to make a decision. I spoke to my manager at the probation service and they said, ‘Why don’t you take a sabbatical, take a year out from the probation and see how you get on?’ I was really appreciative of that as an opportunity because there was a bit of a safety net there, then. Understandably my wife was worried, because we’ve got kids, and paying the rent and everything, but I had to take that opportunity because I thought the chance to make it as an artist had long gone, so I grabbed it with both hands and went for it.”

His early published collages featured politicians such as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage in a series of hellish landscapes – Spencer freely admits to finding the Brexit vote “devastating”, adding that the artworks were “really just an outlet for my own angst”. His artistic inspiration came from Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. “I was always fascinated by them from a young age, and those hellscapes lent themselves so well to 21st century political landscapes. We’ve just got such grotesque characters in charge,” he says.

A constant figure in them was the everyman presence of EastEnders’ Phil Mitchell (played by Steve McFadden).

“It was where the (Cold War Steve) name came from,” Spencer explains. “He was introduced at the start because it was quite funny, I’d get a Cold War scene featuring Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev and I’d put a drunk Phil Mitchell in there – that was the whole joke. It started out as the incongruity of a drunk Phil Mitchell with the Cold War era leaders and I flogged that idea to death. When I started to make more satirical work Phil Mitchell would still be there, but rather than being drunk he became the everyman of the piece – or me. You’d have the hellscape and the wrecking crew doing whatever they were doing but in the back, looking over a fence, you’d have Phil Mitchell looking on with existential angst.”

Latterly, Spencer’s work has focused on Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin (although Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have not been immune from his satire). But Spencer admits he is gravitating away from X as a platform for his art.

“Twitter is where I made it,” he says. “It gave people like myself for the first time ever a chance to display our work bypassing the usual art world. All of a sudden you’ve got this platform where you can do a piece of art, share it and if people like it you develop an audience that way, so it was brilliant for that, and it’s really sad where it’s ended up now.

“I will always call it Twitter, it’s never going to be X, but (Musk) has totally destroyed it. Luckily there are other platforms that I use – Instagram and Bluesky in particular is a new one that seems pretty OK. Twitter was always a bit of a bearpit but since Musk came in my following plummeted. Now I daren’t look at the feed on Twitter, it’s become a horrible cesspit of far-right nuts – I look at some of the comments I get and the people have actually got swastikas in their profile pictures, how have we got here?”

Get Together takes place at Kelham Island, Sheffield on Saturday May 17 and is headlined by English Teacher, BC Camplight, Katy J Pearson and The Moonlandingz. https://www.gettogetherfestival.com/

Suggestions can be made to artist-in-residence Cold War Steve about his Sheffield collage via the Get Together Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/gettogetherfest/?hl=en