In his favourite London cafe, Jeremy Deller discusses political art, gentrification – and his mum’s steak and kidney pie
Jeremy Deller arrives for lunch in long shorts and a T-shirt of swirling colours that’s vaguely reminiscent of the cover of some long-forgotten prog-rock album. Like everyone in London today, he’s perspiring lightly – though the heat is not about to put him off his lunch. “I come here most days,” he tells me, taking a seat on his customary bench in the window at EZ & Moss, a Mediterranean-influenced vegetarian cafe on the Holloway Road in Islington, north London. “I spend a lot of time at home by myself, so it’s good to see the world outside. Sometimes I come for breakfast as well as lunch. I’m always happy here.” Is he a vegetarian? “More or less.” He eats meat only rarely now, and while he does still like fish, he wouldn’t dream of touching lobster or squid: “We should be worshipping them, not eating them. They’re amazing creatures.”
We’re meeting a little before Festival Number 6, named for The Prisoner (Patrick McGoohan’s character is known only as Number Six), and held each year in Portmeirion, Wales, where that series was shot. Deller will be introducing three of his films, among them Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode (2006), about the band’s most fanatical followers, and So Many Ways to Hurt You(2010), starring Adrian Street, the son of a Welsh miner who became a prowrestler in the US (77-year-old Street will be in attendance, his first public appearance in the UK since the 80s). “It’s a bit like the extras on a DVD,” Deller says. “I can describe to the audience what really happened: a kind of directors’ cut.” Does he have his own groupies? He laughs. “They’re usually middle-aged men like me [Deller is in his early 50s], so not in the traditional sense, no.”
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