Joe Rush on the Apocalypse Hotel and Frestonia
Excerpt from an interview originally published in The Idler (Issue 36) Money Madness: Your Money or Your Life? by Tom Hodgkinson.
Joe Rush
…Then I came back to London and was living in a house called Apocalypse Hotel which was in Frestonia in Latimer Road. Then I started putting the Mutoid thing together. I had a nervous breakdown, and quite a lot of things happened. By 1984 I had recovered, and I had discovered that I could make sculpture and I had this style thing going on.
Interviewer
How did you come up with the name?
Joe Rush
I wanted it to be about mutants, people who were suffering from mutation or who were in a state of constant mutation. So “muted” came from schizoid or paranoid or mongoloid, and was a description of a person who lives in a state of constant change. In 1985 we built the first truck, in the gardens of this independent state of Frestonia, which was a load of tumbledown houses with the gardens knocked into one. We were the thorn in the side of this hippie utopia with our house. The Clash were photographed outside it; it was quite a wild building.
I first met Joe Rush at Stonehenge Free festival in the late 1970’s. Later I visited him one evening at the Apocalypse Hotel, while I was there we came under fire from a neighbouring house. While it was only an air rifle it was nevertheless somewhat daunting for a new visitor to witness, several shots were fires and I am not sure now if the windows were open or broken possibly because of this being a regular event.. My previous jaunt into Frestonia had been to visit Lone Watty with my brother Jungleyes Cism Love, here we marvelled at his practice of re-feeding the waste of his Champion Juicer back into the Jucier numerous times producing very solid balls of vegetable and fruit matter.
Later when trading under the Westway at Portabello Rd Friday Market Joe stopped for a chat and purchased a moth eaten taxidermy otter for £13 which possibly had signs of woodworm around the mouth, he said he was intending to add it to a sculpture….