Pete McKee to reveal love story of The Snog characters Frank and Joy in new Sheffield exhibition

The street art was initially done to promote McKee’s exhibition of the time, The Joy of Sheff, and he named the two characters Frank and Joy; the latter in reference to the show and the former after his father.

McKee has returned to the pair – who he describes as a “shorthand for love and comfort and reassurance” – for inspiration in the years since, most notably for the Pub Scrawl event he curated in which artists showed off their work in local hostelries for one night only.

But he is now basing an entire exhibition on them, with Frank & Joy – A Love Story also acting as a deeper exploration of what pubs mean to communities thanks to the life-changing moments they play host to.

McKee is still hard at work on paintings for the exhibition, which is opening in November, with the show also due to include a selection of photographs people have taken by The Snog.

Meeting The Yorkshire Post at Fagan’s on a Tuesday afternoon, McKee says he remains delighted at the resonance Frank and Joy has had in his beloved home city.

“That instant connection with it was fantastic. People warmed to the characters themselves and the fact I’d done this mature couple in an embrace kind of signified the warmth Sheffield has as a place. I was surprised by the reception because I had never done a mural or a piece of street art before and I was kind of making it up as I went along.”

He says he was helped with advice from Sheffield street artists Phlegm and Kid Acne. “I bent both of their ears about making street art because they are absolute legends of it.

“I learnt what processes I could use – so you don’t necessarily need spray cans, you can use paint and a brush. I had a clear focus of what the image was going to be but how to execute it was a different matter because it was the first time I used spray paints. I used those for the black outline and then filled it all in by brush.”

McKee says there were relatively limited preparations. “I had one go at a practice in a back wall in my studio and it wasn’t necessarily good,” he adds with a laugh. “It is one of those lucky things where you try something for real and it works.”

A decade on, he is returning to the story of Frank and Joy and how central events in their lives played out in a fictional pub called the Buffer’s Rest. Fagan’s is part of the inspiration but it is also an amalgamation of several other pubs in Sheffield – while McKee reveals the story of Frank and Joy has parallels with his and his wife Jane’s own real-life romance.

“A pub like this one was there to furnish factory workers,” he says of Fagan’s. “This fictional pub that I’m now using starts its life in that same manner where its main clientele were factory workers but then it is also used by local residents and transients as well.

“It shadows Fagan’s for its starting point and within my research I’ve deliberately picked other pubs to set scenes in just so it becomes more of an everyman pub. I like to make things anonymous so we can put our own memories onto things.”

The story of Frank and Joy opens with their very first meeting in the pub. McKee explains: “She is sat in the corner and he is at the bar and he looks across the room. Within the story, he doesn’t realise they are set up as a blind date but they got both there early. So they have already fallen in love before they realised they had been set up to meet.”

It partly mirrors McKee’s own first meeting with Jane at the Washington pub on the other side of Sheffield city centre. “I also met my wife in the Washington and we ended up having our wedding reception there,” he adds.

“It was almost like a blind date set-up in that she was going to the same party I was. It was above my flat. I had been invited and wasn’t going to go but then I realised if I didn’t go, I’d just be listening to the noises upstairs so thought I might as well join in. We got chatting at the party and have stayed together ever since.”

It was in the mid-2000s that Jane encouraged McKee to give up his job at Tesco and make the leap into becoming a professional artist. His exhibitions now regularly attract thousands of visitors, while he has worked with musicians including Noel Gallagher, Arctic Monkeys and Richard Hawley. Gallagher recently named his latest album Council Skies after the title of a McKee book.

In his latest show, the story of Frank and Joy and their favourite pub plays out over a few decades, with the exhibition charting the heyday and gradual decline of the Buffer’s Rest.

But throughout it all, the love of the couple endures – another parallel with McKee’s own life with Jane. “Frank and Joy are very much in love with each other and there for the long haul. I used some of our experiences within that story. I talk to Jane all the time about my work and always listen to her advice. I lean heavily on Jane to make sure I’m getting Joy’s story right.”

McKee has a better understanding than most about the challenges facing the pub trade – alongside fellow members of his band the Everly Pregnant Brothers, he co-owns the Brothers Arms in Heeley. “We base it on our impression of what the ideal pub is – basically no TVs and games machines,” he says.

“When we took it on, it was basically dead on its feet and in danger of ending up being either a restaurant or a supermarket. The pub we took on was tied to a pubco. They still own the building but we negotiated a ‘free of tie’ deal with them so we could offer a really nice range of beers at a reasonable price.

“When we first opened up eight years ago, we set out so you could buy four pints for a tenner. Obviously inflation has crept that up but it is not too much more than that – it is like £2.65 a pint. The most expensive high-end beer is creeping towards a fiver but we try and keep everything as reasonably priced as possible. The pubco business model is terrible, it doesn’t give landlords a chance to make anything.”

These days McKee is a non-drinker and sips at an alcohol-free Guinness during our interview. He gave up alcohol following a life-saving liver transplant in 2017 after being diagnosed with a genetic condition called alpha antitrypsin disorder.

He says the change has not affected his enjoyment of going to pubs. “The actual medical thing is I could have two or three pints a week but I choose to drink alcohol-free.

“As long as I can drink alcohol-free beer and be part of everybody else’s enjoyment, it is absolutely fine. That is why I think it is so important pubs start selling alcohol-free on draft because it is important to have that pint in your hand.”

He is still finalising his new exhibition but McKee says he has high hopes for it. “I’m hoping it is going to be quite a powerful experience because it is about relationships. It is also about how pubs end up not being frequented as much and being repurposed. There’s a hint of that in there but the love story is the main thing. I want people to feel warm and to leave feeling they have experienced something that has touched their hearts.”

​Frank & Joy – A Love Story will run at Trafalgar Warehouse in Sheffield city centre from November 4 to 19 and tickets are available now. As part of the exhibition, people are being asked to submit photos of their own The Snog from either in front of the mural or in or outside their own favourite pub. Entries should be emailed to [email protected] by July 31.