Under Milk Wood in Pictures: Peter Blake Does Dylan

In this former fishing village of Laugharne,

is the shed where Dylan Thomas wrote his masterwork -

Under Milk Wood.

"To begin at the beginning."

This is legendary pop artist Sir Peter Blake.

"It is spring, moonless night in the small town..."

And this is West London studio.

Early art by Sir Peter defined an era.

For more than 25 years, Sir Peter has been producing artworks

inspired by the words of Under Milk Wood.

"See the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and button tops,

"bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nail parings,

"saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams."

Take these words and interpret them,

and that's precisely what he's done.

"The dead come out in their Sunday best. Listen to the night breaking."

This extraordinary body of work includes

over 60 portraits of every character in the Dylan Thomas Play For Voices.

-"There's a husband for you.

-Bad as his father.

-"And you know where he ended.

-In the asylum."

There are 27 watercolour dream sequences.

"'Don't spank me, please, teacher,' whimpers his wife at his side."

Peter wants to love and adore the subject of his work.

That's important to him.

There are 50 new collages.

"Nearly asleep in the field of nanny goats who hum

"and gently butt the sun, she blows love on a puffball."

And when words do that kind of lyrical thing,

like they do in Under Milk Wood, it does kind of grab hold of you

and as an artist, you want to visualise it.

It was the difficulty and impossibleness

that finally made it so exciting.

But the Dylan Thomas centenary is approaching.

An exhibition at the National Museum of Wales of Sir Peter's Under Milk Wood artworks

means a deadline on Peter's never-ending obsession.

Sir Peter's London studio is a collection of past obsessions,

from Elvis to Marilyn,

from boxers to badges.

But the words of Under Milk Wood appear to have cast

the ultimate spell.

I've probably played it 200, 300 times.

"And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now."

I've worn out about 30 pairs of scissors.

But in spite of a museum curator and a publisher

breathing down Peter's neck, many of his artworks remain to be completed.

Word of Sir Peter's Under Milk Wood inspired art is spreading.

'Right now it's Cerys.'

I've come across this artist who's as obsessed,

probably more obsessed than me, about Dylan Thomas.

In fact, he has had this project going for over 25 years,

that is Peter Blake.

Cerys Matthews has long been a champion of the Dylan Thomas legacy.

I know it might be a never-ending journey, this.

The best art never gets finished,

it just has to be put out where you can get it.

Absolutely tremendous stuff. Louis Armstrong, Potato Head Blues...

Under Milk Wood begins in the pre-dawn hours of a village

where its inhabitants are introduced by their surreal dreams.

"Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux,

"bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organ playing wood."

It became a work of art rather than illustrations to a book

with a deadline. It went beyond that.

Sir Peter's consuming passion for Under Milk Wood

began in 1986 with a modest proposal from book designer Michael Mitchell.

He was going to illustrate it with, say, a dozen wood engravings.

He had turned it into really quite a considerable obsession

for a very busy man.

It reached a point where I needed to go Laugharne

to take some photographs and just to see Laugharne,

see this town that Llareggub was based on.

It was during Sir Peter's first visit to Laugharne in 1986,

accompanied by Michael Mitchell,

that the Under Milk Wood obsession unexpectedly took root.

While we were wandering around the town, we went into the bookshop

and to everyone's surprise, found Dylan Thomas's widow there.

It was the first time she had been back for Laugharne for 30 years.

She had left Laugharne when Dylan Thomas died,

never gone back until that day, and there she was in the bookshop.

Caitlin Thomas was there to promote a new memoir

about life with Dylan Thomas.

I mean, it is beyond understanding, really.

And Peter saw this as a wonderful omen, so off we went.

It was as if Dylan Thomas was egging Peter on from the grave.

Somebody has left £1 and a penny.

Tourists are used to throwing money into fountains and things.

Laugharne was a remote and isolated fishing village

when Dylan Thomas first visited in 1934.

I think that Dylan Thomas arrived in Laugharne

and felt quite at home, because he was a character

and here was a town full of characters as well.

Laugharne was one of the inspirations

for Thomas's fictional town of Llareggub.

I wonder if we are on Llareggub Hill here.

You wonder whether this is what he would've looked up at from the boathouse.

Eventually, Dylan and his wife Caitlin moved into this cliff-side boathouse.

Laugharne is a quirky place.

Dylan called it this beguiling island of a town.

Years ago, the whole community would meet up in the Brown's Hotel

and it was like having a party every weekend.

"'Dancing isn't natural!'

"Righteously says Cherry Owen who has just downed 17 pints of flat,

"warm, thin Welsh bitter beer."

Laugharne locals are believed to have inspired

some of the characters in Under Milk Wood.

When Mr Thomas used to visit us here, he used to always tell me

that he were writing a play and I would be in that play.

I would ask him, "What is the premise of it?"

"Oh, you wait and see."

"'Oh, you cat butcher!'

-"'Yesterday we had mole.'

-'Oh, Lily! Lily!'

"'Monday, otter. Tuesday, shrews.'

"'Go on, Mrs Beynon! He's the biggest liar in town.'"

"And the inspectors of cruelty fly down to Mrs Butcher Beynon's dream

"to persecute Mr Beynon for selling owl meat, dogs' eyes, man chop."

He struggled to get the metres of the poetry just perfect.

It's like a game, like a science, right?

Most of his poetry he had to read out loud in that writing shed.

It's the sound of the poetry.

If you walked past there and he was still there today,

you'd hear this crazy man repeating his poetry

and getting it just right.

"Only you can see in the blinded bedrooms, the combs

"and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins,

"the glasses of teeth, 'Thou shalt not,' on the wall

"and the yellowing dickie bird watching pictures of the dead."

The musicality in his work is just astonishing.

He was probably the world's first hip-hop artist, without knowing it himself.

"'Help!" cries organ Morgan, the organist in his dream.

"'There is perturbation in music and Coronation Street

"'and the babies singing opera.'"

Don't want to spoil it, so I don't want...

"The cows from Sunday Meadow ring like reindeer

"and on the roof of Handel Villa,

"see the women's welfare hoofing, bloomered in the moon."

"Hoofing bloomered in the moon."

I'm sure if I listen to it again in a minute, I'd find another image.

The more I read it, the more layers there are

and there's extraordinary, kind of, innuendo.

-Hello, Geoff.

-'Yes.'

-How are you?

-'I'm good.'

Jeff is Jeff Towns, a friend of Peter's

and the ultimate Dylan Thomas know-it-all.

Oh, how wonderful!

The first ever LP of Under Milk Wood was that.

Jeff has collected almost every edition and translation

of Under Milk Wood since it was first published in 1954.

It's been printed everywhere, so there are Danish and Yiddish...

He has got a tattoo inspired by a Dylan Thomas poem.

He lives in a house where Dylan Thomas used to stay

and even drives across Wales in a mobile bookstore

filled with books about Dylan Thomas.

Under Milk Wood is set in a Welsh sounding town called Llareggub.

If you spell it backwards, it's "bugger all."

So, if you are researching sexual undertone in Under Milk Wood,

Jeff should know where to look.

I mean, obviously there's something going on when Nogood Boyo

is out in the boat, there's kind of dreams and apparitions.

Clearly there is a lot of sexual innuendo going on

and I've picked up on a lot of it, but I wonder if you'd do me a favour

and if you go through and find all the sexual innuendo you can.

-It's an odd request, I know.

-'It's a wonderful challenge!'

That I think is the very latest edition, a copy of it done

for kids in school, but interestingly it's not been censored.

It's still got all the innuendos that you would want to be in there,

so it's a kids' edition with the full text.

It's not pornographic, it's earthy.

When you look at the text, and I have looked at it very hard

and Peter has looked at it even harder, the innuendo

and the double-entendre and the downright filth is on every page.

"Tall as the town clock tower,

"Samson-syrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot.

"'Ooh! You old mogul!'"

He got away with blue murder, I think.

"'Don't spank me, please, teacher!' whimpered his wife at his side.

"But every night of her married life, she has been late for school."

Obviously she was into a little bit of mild S&M

and Pete has illustrated that and it's there in the text.

"Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast and slow asleep."

"In Butcher Beynon's, Gossamer Beynon, daughter, school teacher,

"dreaming deep, daintily ferrets

"under a fluttering hammock of chickens' feathers."

"In a slaughterhouse that has chintz curtains

"and a three-piece suite and finds, with no surprise, a small,

"gruff, ready man with a bushy tail winking in the paper carrier."

You are not even illustrating literature.

You're illustrating the kind of barminess of poetry.

"Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

"Time passes. Listen.

"Time passes.

"And the dawn inches up."

Eventually, all the dreaming characters in Under Milk Wood

wake up.

The poem unfolds as one day in the life

of a seemingly mad fishing village.

The whole point about Dylan Thomas is this universal voice he has.

Having travelled the world as a musician for all of my adult life,

you go off any main route and find a small town,

you're going to find mad places like Laugharne.

By the late 1950s,

the madness of Llareggub was already inspiring art students.

When I was a student at the Royal College,

some of the Welsh students did paintings about it.

That's how I was introduced to it

and then I became interested in it later on.

As a young British artist in the 1960s,

Peter Blake's pop imagery and collages defined a generation.

# Substitute your lies for fact... #

I can remember when I sat and wrote my first three or four songs

for The Who, I had Peter's pictures cut out of books

and magazines on my wall. That's what I wanted to live with,

that was the image that I felt informed the way I wanted to write.

I know there were chevrons on one of them.

# ..I'm a substitute for another guy... #

And I had a picture of a self-portrait, I think it was,

of him with medals.

# ..I look pretty young But I'm just back-dated, yeah... #

With respect to Peter's work, I didn't think "album cover".

What I thought was "clothing".

In 1967, Peter was commissioned to design an album cover

for The Beatles.

It would turn out to be one of the most influential rock albums

and one of the most memorable album covers in history.

My main contribution was to make this kind of magical crowd.

By using cut-outs and hand colouring them, the crowd could be anybody.

So I asked all The Beatles to make a list of their heroes

and I made a list of mine,

and amongst John's list was Dylan Thomas.

This kind of magical crowd,

which is something I've used again and again.

"Down with the waltzing and the skipping!"

There are lots of crowd scenes in Under Milk Wood.

"Dancing isn't natural!"

At the dance is a crowd and emerging from the dead is a crowd.

"Dancing Williams.

"Still dancing.

"Rosie, with God. She has forgotten dying..."

One of Peter's artist friends from the '60s

has dropped by his studio to see some of his newest artworks.

Good to see you, mate. You find it all right?

Everybody gets lost coming here.

He also happens to moonlight as a guitar player

for the Rolling Stones.

It's like an organised version of my studio.

Organised being the operative word.

I just moved in here yesterday because I come in

and work in here in the winter.

-Is that Sonny Liston?

-Yes.

-I thought so.

-I have a signed glove from him.

-Do you?

-Given to me by Muhammad Ali.

Before a glimpse of some of Peter's Under Milk Wood artworks,

Ronnie gets the Peter Blake studio museum tour.

-These are two of the cut-outs from Sgt Pepper.

-That's Maxie boy.

That's a painter called Richard Lindner.

It's nice to see another fellow artist mix in the musical world.

He's not a musician himself, Peter, but he is very akin to a musician.

So these are the unfinished ones.

-They are the two old people who look like kippers in a box.

-Flattened.

"At the sea end of town,

"Mr and Mrs Floyd, the cocklers, are sleeping as quiet as death,

"side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown,

"like two old kippers in a box."

-A wonderful challenge, innit?

-Extraordinary.

It must have been over at least 28 years or more.

Some of mine remain unfinished

because I just can't get that last little bit in place

and I think, "Well, I'm not going to get hung up over that."

I carry on with the new one I've started, or

I've got one in my head that I can't sleep over and then get up and do it,

-and then go back to bed.

-And then come back to it maybe a year later.

This one is the dead coming out of the grave,

so it's a bit like the Stanley Spencer resurrection.

"Through the voyages of his tears, he sails to see the dead.

"'Dancing Williams. Still dancing.'"

There are people crying, people upset, there are people obviously

having a great time when they died and they've just come

out of the graves and carried on kind of dancing about.

"The dead come out in their Sunday best.

"Listen to the night breathing."

It's very surreal.

I think it's not too far removed from that kind of Wizard Of Oz,

Alice in Wonderland...

um...

mood-altering chemicals and drugs and mushrooms and acid

and alcohol-induced thoughts.

That's the one, without any explanation, he says,

"Be careful there, angels, with your knives and forks."

"Wedding-ring waist and bust like a black-cloth dining table

"suffers in her stays.

"'Oh, angels, be careful there with your knives and forks.'"

I think this is one of my kind of ruralist hippie garments

that I now wear as a painting jacket rather than a shirt.

The thing that will make it look like Dylan Thomas will be

somewhere around the mouth. I'm not sure yet what it is,

whether it's a shadow on that side or a little highlight of some kind

on the lip, but right at the very end that happens and,

hopefully, it's at that point that it really looks suddenly like him.

Peter will never know what Dylan Thomas thinks about his artworks,

but he is about to find out from Dylan's granddaughter Hannah

what she thinks.

-Hannah. How are you? Nice to meet you.

-I'm so sorry.

That's OK. Everybody gets lost.

I like...the little bow tie there

because it is giving it a little bit of character.

A bit of detail, yes.

You have caught the hair colour as well because...

Just like a casting director for a film, Sir Peter has drawn

portraits of every character who appears in Under Milk Wood.

It's difficult because obviously you have an image of yourself.

That's what's interesting, isn't it?

-I'm assuming that's Polly Garter.

-No.

-Lily Smalls, maybe?

-No.

It's...

The images Peter drew were his ideas of what the characters looked like,

but I have a very different idea of what the characters look like.

I'm going to look at which one is Captain Cat now.

-That must be Captain Cat.

-Yes.

"I'll tell you the truth. Seas barking like seals,

"blue seas and green, seas covered with eels and mermen and whales."

"# What seas did you sail?

"# Old whaler, when...? #

"Lie down, lie easy.

"Let me shipwreck in your thighs."

He's not trying to disguise the fact that these are copies

of photographs, because you can tell from the drawings that he has done

that they are from photographs. They are real people.

"Me, Lord Cut-Glass, in an old frock coat belonged to Eli Jenkins

"and a pair of postman's trousers from Bethesda Jumble."

Many of the portraits have anonymous origins, but not all.

If you went through it as a game, you could find these elements.

So one of the women is Terry Wogan for instance,

so it's Terry Wogan's face but he is wearing a woman's hat.

There is one character who has more than a passing resemblance

to Humphrey Bogart.

Another, Beryl Bainbridge.

Captain Cat is wearing my beard.

It's someone else's face and someone else's hat,

it's just my beard, so that's kind of a self-portrait, I guess.

Like when you look at a Rembrandt painting, he's got

assistants playing the characters or somebody else.

You never get a painting where somebody...

Even Bacon, where you have these ugly, grotesque heads,

he's still getting an image from a newspaper and putting it in there.

It's collage and how do you create reality and believability.

"A green leaved sermon on the innocence of men.

"The suddenly wind-shaken wood springs awake

"for the second dark time.

"This one spring day."

In all those collages, there's a kind of place

and then are things and then there are people and they are

in a kind of between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space.

They're not flat. I mean, they are flat.

If you turn them that way, it's a line of paper

and they are made from paper, a lot of them.

But I think he touches on the real world and the dream world

and he kind of links the two.

Under Milk Wood was never completed.

I don't think Under Milk Wood would ever have been completed

because my grandfather would have kept wanting to add things

and improve it, and any good writer will want to look back

years later and think, "I could have done better,"

and I suspect the same is with Peter.

With Hannah in his studio, Peter's curiosity about the death

of her grandfather got the better of him.

The pressure of people, you know...

I think there was an awful lot of pressure.

He was in New York and he had a tour with vast amounts of reading

and work to be done and he still hadn't finished Under Milk Wood

-and it was due to go on.

-Thirty-something?

39, just a few years older than me, which is very strange.

-I should know this, but was he ill?

-Yes, he had...

He had terrible bronchial pneumonia and I don't think he was eating.

He was drinking more than he should do.

People assume he died of drink, don't they?

I think he didn't die of alcohol poisoning. Probably the fact he was

drinking more and drinking whisky rather than beer and not eating.

There was a doctor who gave him morphine, which was helping him

get through really,

but the injection had the impact of slowing his breathing,

which then had the impact of having less oxygen going to his brain.

-He was in hospital by then?

-No, this was before.

So, basically, the oxygen didn't go to his brain

and many, many things happened. It was a tragedy really.

Death is one of the many themes that permeate the quirky

and eccentric town of Llareggub.

"Less than 500 souls inhabit the three quaint streets

"and the few narrow bylanes and scattered farmsteads that

"constitute this small, decaying watering place,

"which may indeed be called a bad water of life without

"disrespect to its natives who possess, to this day,

"a salty individuality of their own.

"The River Dewi is said to abound in trout, but is much poached.

"The one place of worship, with its neglected graveyard,

"is of no architectural interest."

The people that were in Under Milk Wood and in his poetry,

they are still around today. You just have to look.

Different to my Captain Cat, but very good.

Underneath all this is me. It is actually my body.

John Bradshaw, the mayor of Laugharne, may be the only

person in the world to model for and perform the part of elderly

Captain Cat and to also have once played a child character in Under Milk Wood.

I was in the first live performance done in Laugharne in 1958.

-As a child?

-As a child, yes.

But someone like Captain Cat would have been a professional seafarer

in the merchant Navy presumably.

Laugharne was certainly full of those.

There were lots of retired sea captains living in the main street.

-Oh, really?

-The big Georgian houses.

I think it was a place that people retired to.

"From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

"Steaming Gossamer and strip her to the nipples and the bees."

It's a long time for Peter to be working on this project.

It's a good obsession. There are a lot worse obsessions to have.

Obsessions and deadlines don't always get along,

but for the museum exhibition of his Under Milk Wood artworks,

Sir Peter has delivered.

Peter said that he never finishes anything.

I don't think I allowed myself

to think that he wouldn't meet the deadline.

People would think of me as a pop artist,

someone who does record covers.

I think what has been particularly exciting

is that it has surprised people.

He's done Under Milk Wood and done it credit.

We've waited too long, too long.

I've got a feeling my grandfather has been here tonight.

Suddenly, just before the big kick-off of the event,

it went black. All the lights went down and I think my grandfather

was playing a little trick there, playing around.

I've taken on the impossible in a way and done the best I can with it.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd