[The interview took place on Saturday 13 April 2002, at Ms Blow's studio in Cornwall. The interview started from within a preceding conversation so that it had no formal opening.]

LU: Alaric would take me to paintings he approved of, and stand me in front of them. For my own good! He would tell me I had to like them; or I had tell him why I didn't like them; and your paintings were very much among those he, what shall I say, among those that he advocated.

My sense of it, from what I remember of him talking to me about your work, was that he had seen your work before; and, finding that you were in the same town, was galvanised. Do you remember when you first met him?

SB: I think it was 1995.

LU: Do you remember how you first met him?

SB: I associate meeting him with Ken [Turner]. I was living with Ken Turner at the time; and he was quite a close friend of Rory. Ken was doing various things including getting people together. We had several meetings. We all got to know each other. The forum, it was called. We talked about why we were there and what we were doing, because nobody really knew each other. And some of that group eventually began to show at New Millennium. Quite a lot of them.

Rory, I think, was also a friend of Rose Hilton's, who is a close friend and the reason I came down, really.

I am not sure how, but they too, Rory and Alaric, were connecting with Ken; and there were some performances of which there are tapes. Alaric was hilariously funny in one of them.

LU: I've got bits and pieces. And I interviewed Rory about the one at Penzance Arts Club. He is very amusing about it.

SB: I think that one went wrong for Rory.

LU: He's not entirely complimentary about his own role there; though I have heard other people say he was fine.

SB: It went off on the wrong foot, I think, or he didn't do what he said he would do or what he was supposed to do.

There was one in St Ives when we went through the streets and outside the Salthouse. Alaric was dressed in a white coat. A procession went through the town. I think it started at the cinema and wove its way through to the Salthouse and then on to the Tate. He was so funny. He was quoting absolutely straight sentences from a Russian novel, but quite out of context and it was hilariously funny.

LU: But you had contact with Alaric quite separately to that.

SB: Yes. I had a Porthmeor studio and Alaric very often came on his own; and would want to see what I was doing. He used to get quite effusive, and become excited by whatever was going on; and it was lovely seeing him.

Of course, I saw him other places. I remember once we met in Newmill, at Melissa Hardy's house. There was a private view, I think. What I remember being impressed by was that Alaric walked home, because he loved walking. It was quite a walk, but he loved walking along the cliffs... Another time, he said to me that it would take five minutes from Porthmeor to the station. It would take me longer than five minutes to walk; but I think he would always stride out.

LU: Walking was one of the points of contact I had with Alaric.

SB: You walked with him?

LU: Only once. We had plans, but they never resulted in more than one walk. I meant that there was an understanding that one would want to come to a place like this and walk; not everyone shares that understanding. I used to walk far and wide, but he was often happy repeating walks, and walking around Porthmeor Beach.

SB: I was amazed by what he wrote in that book on Porthmeor Beach. I did the illustrations for it; and, within a week, I think - I couldn't believe it - he had written so fully and so quickly and so well about them.

LU: Going through his manuscripts and note books, I am beginning to gain an understanding of how he worked that I didn't have before. It seems to me that he repeated or trod water or displaced his creativity for a long time and then worked furiously. So I can well believe what you say.

SB: It was astonishing. They were very vivid and somehow explained or made the things clear. He did it so quickly and so well.

LU: When he asked you to make the drawings, you were already good friends. Would that be true?

SB: Yes.... but it all seemed to drift off. We missed them sadly. To begin with there was a very intense friendship which lasted several months, I think, between Alaric, Rory, Ken and myself. I was staying at Ken's home and there were meetings there with long discussions and meals. I liked them. It was very interesting for all of us.

But after a while I think they found Ken's ideas were not theirs. There was some performance in London, which Ken participated in; and that apparently went wrong because Alaric felt that Ken's interpretation of what he was reading wasn't what Alaric would have liked it to have been. So there was a divergence of attitudes. I think they also felt, because Ken has had years and years of experience in Performance Art, that he was overpowering their own ideas. But to begin with it was fascinating.

LU: I think you summarise it very well. I heard of it particularly from Alaric. I hardly knew Rory - I didn't know him very well, I'd say - until after Alaric died.

SB: His death was extraordinary. I have never understood it.

LU: There was, as I understand it, a malfunction, something in his heart which would have been undetectable. But it was there and it killed him; but it could have killed him that day or thirty years before or after.

SB: He was very fussy about what he ate. I thought - it didn't make sense - but I thought he had eaten something he shouldn't have. I even thought it was cheese.

LU: That's exactly what it was. He believed, probably rightly, just before he died, that he had eaten cheese in something that shouldn't have contained it, at Dartington. He had a violent cheese allergy. I saw him once after he had eaten cheese and he was a mess. So that was real.

If I've got it right - and in a way the details don't matter - he couldn't see a doctor in Totnes so he came back here; and his doctor here told him he didn't have a cheese allergy.

He was here 3 or 4 days before he died, I believe. I wasn't in much contact with him, just then. We had seen a lot of each other a few weeks before, giving what turned out to be his last performance, so we were having a break from each other.

He was sending other people emails saying "I'm a bit sick with an allergy. I'll talk with you again when I have recovered."

He was, I understand, very weak, getting weaker, and then... just stopped. It took a while to find out what it was that had stopped him.

SB: There was an autopsy?

LU: And more. It took specialists to find out what it was. By which time... It's a process they have to go through in order to have evidence for natural causes; but it was quite distressing.

SB: It was a total shock!

LU: Yes! And a ridiculous idea. The man was so full of life.

SB: Exactly! And full of ideas, and with so many prospects for the future. It was appalling. And so charming. He was a darling.

LU: We had just done the performance in Totnes of his newest book, a wonderful thing with big pages of graphics and text; and we had improvised it together. It had been very well received; and he was full of energy about that. This is the way it must go! We must involve others but you and I are going to do more things together. This was his new collaboration.

The next day we had lunch together, before I went back to London, and made plans. I offered him use of my place in London; and he said "And you use my place, then we'll both have 2 places, one in London and one in Cornwall; and we can work on our own projects and we can work together and produce new works." He was buzzy. Then we parted for a couple of weeks. His new piece, with Joseph Hyde, Nekyia, was about to be launched in May, and there was that and other things he had to work on. It was at the Nunnery Gallery in London; and, in the event, I took his place!

He was about to do some very big things. It was that unexpected. No idea of it. None of us had.

SB: Nor he.

LU: No. What it was like for Rosemary, I can't begin to imagine...

May I take you back to Waves on Porthmeor Beach? I never thought to ask him this. Did he say to you "I have written this: will you make drawings?"?

SB: I'm afraid it's not clear to me how it came about. I think it is most likely that he must have asked me for the drawings. I can't think that I was doing things like that just on my own. What I was trying to do round about that time - I was so fascinated by the sea and the sky outside the window and it just kept evoking Turner for me - in fact, one night, I actually thought I was Turner. Anyway, I was going out and using water colours. It was a nightmare. because I hadn't been painting out of doors for years; and I found the paints fell in the grass and the wind blew the water over. But that was what I was doing; and the drawings in the book are black and white. So he must have asked me to do them especially. And I must have done them for the book. That's the likelihood.

LU: Yes! That's does rather clinch it. I'm grateful to you for that, and for the information about the speed with which he worked.

SB: They were so fully described, with such feeling and passion and imagination. I was just astonished. I thought it was brilliant to have done such a good thing so quickly.

LU: And then the Millennium Gallery, Text out of image.

SB: Yes, I had a show at the New Millennium and he made work for that. It was wonderful. I have no clear memory of how it came about, but I remember we discussed it first.

LU: There are two levels to it, aren't there? There are his responses to individual poems which constitute the poems, and he could easily have started that on his own; and then there is the site-specific event with John Drever, and obviously he would have discussed that with you.

SB: Oh yes.

LU: Do have a recording of it, or a film?

SB: I don't. I don't have any voice recordings although he can be heard on what videos there are. All I have is John Drever's CD.

LU: I think it's some of his best writing. Waves... is good, but I think Text out of image is better...

I'm still in two minds about what to put in the feature. The bulk of his writing is unpublished - he was so self-demanding - so there is material to choose from; and I am wondering if I shouldn't hold back some of these Text out of images so that people don't just rush through... They deserve close reading.

SB: Perhaps we could include reproductions of the paintings he is writing about.

LU: That would be wonderful... I was going to say that I may break up the pages of text with some of his own graphics -

SB: I didn't know his graphics.

LU: ... He wasn't too bad, and he could have been very good. Rosemary Sumner speaks of him at one point, and I couldn't tell you what age that was, when he was asking himself "Shall I become a writing or a graphic artist?"

SB: Really?!

LU: I think he was right to decide to be a writer.

SB: He was brilliant with words.

LU: But he had an eye.

SB: Yes. He seemed to love my work and his visits to my studio were thrilling because his responses were so marvellous. They were hugely enjoyable.

LU: I would have thought that you don't encourage people just turning up at your studio.

SB: No, no, indeed, no, I don't. I try to discourage people unless we've made arrangements; but I adored him...

There was some dividing line which may have been to do with Ken; or it may have been that his interests changed, from my work to other things, so the focus shifted. There was a kind of sad split... Nothing definite...Then he went to Dartington.

LU: Yes, there was a split, but mainly he had moved to Totnes; and the job knocked him sideways even though it was a part time job; but he did it with total dedication.

SB: I remember, at his funeral, the sadness of those people from Dartington.

LU: And I remember when the coffin was interred. That stays with me more than anything. There wasn't a cough.

SB: I missed the "Dust to dust..." I didn't like the silence.

LU: I didn't like the silence... What I felt, though, was that it wasn't just because it was the burial of one atheist by another atheist there wasn't going to be any religiosity; but also there was a deep silence... of absence, of complete loss... I looked around... I had managed to come out beside Rosemary and felt that was inappropriate. I dropped back and Rory came forward; I thought that was more appropriate.

SB: He was very close to her that time, wasn't he?

LU: He was wonderful. He was just there, all the time.

I looked at that curve of people, ending in the people he worked with and all those youngsters; and I thought "None of us can believe this is happening.".

And Rosemary stepped forward, and looked down into the grave a long time... and then away...

Anyway, there were all those things which took him away from what he had been doing. It wasn't so much a break as him moving on.. So there were so many things which took him away; but certainly at the event in London... I felt the atmosphere.

SB: You were there?

LU: I organised it. I put it on! It was my idea it happened, that is, that Alaric performed; and he brought Ken and Rory. But I was the organiser.

SB: Ken did it in his way and Alaric thought he was spoiling it. I think he thought it was deliberate, which is quite untrue; but he's got very definite ideas.

LU: Yes. In the interval, I asked Alaric what was happening. It wasn't working. I knew the texts. What Alaric wanted was two others to take direction and what Ken wanted was to use a text to be interpretative, and not taking direction.

SB: No, he wouldn't. There was another performance which was a total disaster. It was at the Island Centre and Ken was in charge of the sound; and it didn't work. What was that about?

LU: I don't know. I haven't pursued it; but at some point I shall talk to Ken, when he can.

SB: What was that performance?

LU: I don't know. The main thing which people remember is the lack of the sound. General Specific work is not my immediate concern now, but I shall want to deal with it when I have done more on the later pieces. 

SB: We both loved Alaric very much.

LU: I don't doubt it!

The only other thing that I had made a note of was to speak with you about that downstairs room at your recent show at Tate St Ives -

SB: Alaric's room...

LU: Yes! Good! Alaric's room, it is... From your point of view, how did that come about?

SB: Well, the extraordinary thing is, and I say this with regret, though I was delighted when I knew it was there, I hadn't actually asked for it to be there. I don't know how it came about. When I knew it was there, I was very pleased it was there, but I didn't associate that exhibition with Alaric. So I don't know whose idea it was.

LU: Well, Susan Lamb instigated that. The actual choice of texts was made by Rosemary [Sumner], which they then edited. They had the Drever recording, so they used that.

SB: I was very pleased that it was done. It was a surprise, but a very glad surprise.

LU: Thank you so much for the interview.