The Complete Lewis Floyd Henry
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Walking along a rather quiet stretch of St Leonards seafront the other day in the warm greyness of late September, you may have been surprised to hear a loud, Hendrix-type bass guitar riff and a voice announcing the art and music of Lewis Floyd Henry. Ruby’s Rooms has a penchant for exhibitions that involve unique troubadors – you may remember Xed Le Head’s wonderful mandalas earlier this year.
There are artists whose personal appearance and demeanour say nothing about their work. You’d pass them in the street thinking they might be accountants – then you discover that their work hangs in the Royal Academy or adorns the side of an airport building. There are others who comprise in their person their own complete art form. Lewis Floyd Henry is one of these.
The Hendrix vibe modifies a bit once you meet him, except for the mass of locks held under a head-tie. His guitar is a rather smart double-neck electric, an instrument usually favoured by virtuosos such as John McLaughlin, Eddie Van Halen, and the extraordinary Yngwie Malmsteen (crazy name, crazy guy! – ed.) who put his name to the Fender version.
Lewis Floyd has the Japanese Arbiter version. As a long-practised street musician, it’s convenient for him to have the bass and melody guitars as one entity. He expertly uses four different foot pedals, and puts a bass riff on a loop while he plays rock-style grooves over the top. And it’s super-loud – one of his several albums is helpfully called One Man and His 30-Watt Pram. I’ve seen him and his kit down here in the middle of town and also on the corner of Tottenham Court Road, and he never fails to draw a crowd. It’s odd to hear him in Ruby’s Rooms’ rather genteel, living-room type surroundings, but there’ s nothing genteel about his songs and lyrics. As a fiercely updated version of the traditional one-man band, he’s notable. Billed as ‘The One Man Rock-and-Roll Machine’ he has played not only in the streets of London and Hastings but in an assorted variety of pubs and rock venues across Europe.
His paintings adorn the walls, and they are good. Like many radical artists he trained at Central St Martins, and he has that essential quality that good artists have – the ability to compose a view as though that were the only way it should be seen. The style is graffiti-influenced (he was once or twice imprisoned for tagging in South London where he grew up), but the subjects, rather surprisingly, range from picturesque urban streets to harbour boats to views of Antibes. This context becomes clearer when you see that he cites, as his influences, artists and printmakers from HR Giger and MC Escher to Salvador Dali and Vincent Van Gogh, and that he divides his time between here and Dover.
He loves his style – his unashamedly post-hippie appearance, which involves a patchwork jacket which he told us belonged to his grandmother (who must have been a groovy woman). The head-tie is clearly necessary to keep his hair from falling over his face while he sings, and his foot-pedalled drum and home-produced speaker are adorned with his name in circular patterns. So he’s the complete package, with an appealing authenticity; he’s also his own best publicity agent.
Lewis Floyd Henry is showing and playing at Ruby’s Rooms, Eversfield Place, St Leonards. More information can be found at lewisfloyd-henry.squarespace.com, and on most social media platforms, particularly Instagram.
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