Steven Appleby

Early life

The oldest of four children, Steven Appleby was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1956 and grew up in Wooler, near the Scottish border.

Appleby recalls a childhood spent making camps, climbing trees, and hoisting flags outdoors, and reading books such as Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. The worlds of cartoonists such as Ronald Searle (St Trinian’s) and Charles Addams (The Addams Family), found on his parents’ bookshelves, also made an impression on him as a child.

In an interview with The Guardian, Appleby describes his mother, Ibbie, as coming ‘... from Canada, a distant land of snow and french toast, far away across the sea, where she skated and skied in the day and danced to big bands by night.’ Towards the end of the Second World War, having fallen in love with Steven’s father, Walter, she came to Britain on a convoy. ‘She travelled alone to live with my father’s family in a tiny village on the coast of north Northumberland while he was still away flying planes in Burma. Together, after the war, they bred boxer dogs, performed with the village amateur dramatic society and laughed at The Goon Show on the wireless.’

Appleby attended Wooler Church of England Primary School, where he won prizes for Plasticine modelling until, aged eleven, he was sent to Bootham School, York, as a boarder, where he pursued his interests in music and art. He played keyboards in school bands and, inspired by Jesus Christ Superstar, wrote and performed (with Nick Battey) Inwards & Outwards, a rock cantata.

After school, in 1974, he took a foundation course in art & design at Manchester Polytechnic, followed by one term on the BA graphic design course (with Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville) after which he dropped out to play with school friends in a band called Ploog, which was influenced by prog rock and complicated pop that he has described as ‘far beyond their playing capabilities.’ In 1977 Appleby returned to art education. He studied graphic design at Newcastle Polytechnic (1978-1981), then illustration at the Royal College of Art (1981-1984), where his tutor was Quentin Blake. He has lived in London since 1981.

Career

While at the RCA, Appleby met writer George Mole. The two collaborated on a number of projects, including their first book, No, Honestly, I Couldn’t Eat Another Mouthful (1984), various cartoon spreads for Punch (Daily Life On Other Planets, Lost Cars), The Observer (Home Economics in the Nineties), The Oldie, and a further three books.

Beginning while he was at the RCA, Appleby worked for his friend and fellow Manchester art school alumnus Malcolm Garrett, who had been commissioned by editor Kasper de Graaf to design a monthly music, art and fashion magazine (New Sounds New Styles). After graduation, Appleby continued to assist Garrett at his company Assorted Images; he worked on book design (When Cameras Go Crazy, More Dark Than Shark), and record sleeves, particularly for Duran Duran. His work on designs for Duran Duran merchandising gave Appleby ideas which would eventually feed into the world of Captain Star, when he was invited by the New Musical Express to submit an idea for a cartoon strip.

Appleby gave up commercial design to concentrate on his own art and creative work in late 1986. Garrett and de Graaf, business partners in Assorted Images, continued to employ him, providing him with a studio and use of the Assorted Images facilities while he developed his own work. A three-year period of patronage followed, allowing Appleby the freedom to make drawings and paintings for various exhibitions. During this time, he developed Rockets Passing Overhead – the Annals of Captain Star for New Musical Express, as well as creating drawings for Punch and many other magazines. He was also able to create Small Birds Singing for The Times and to write, design and draw the comic book Rockets – A Way of Life by Captain J. Star, which was published by Assorted Images in 1988.

In 1987, animator and commercials director Pete Bishop approached Appleby, suggesting they work together. Their meeting led to various Captain Star short animations, a series of TV commercials and the development of the Captain Star TV series (with Frank Cottrell-Boyce). The pilot, written by Cottrell-Boyce, was made in the Assorted Images building. Captain Star (featuring the voices of Adrian Edmondson, Richard E. Grant, Denica Fairman, Gary Martin and Kerry Shale) aired on CITV in the UK in 1997 and was seen on various networks throughout the world, including Teletoon (Canada), YLE (Finland), Canal+ (France), ZDF (Germany) and Nickelodeon. One series of 13 episodes was made.

In 1989 Appleby left his employment at Assorted Images to establish his own studio. Kasper de Graaf continued acting as his agent until 2005.

Appleby has created cartoon strips for publications including The Guardian, The Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit, The Sunday Telegraph, The New Musical Express, The Daily Express and The Observer. He has also written and drawn over 24 books, including Men – The Truth, Jim – the Nine Lives Of A Dysfunctional Cat and Steven Appleby’s Guide To Life – the Complete Guardian Loomus Cartoons, and The Captain Star Omnibus. In 1994 his book of cartoon strips from Die Zeit, Die Memoiren von Captain J. Star, won the Max & Moritz Prize in Germany.

His other works include the musical play Crocs In Frocks (with Teresa Early & Roger Gosling), performed by theatre company New Peckham Varieties at The Magic Eye Theatre, Peckham and at the ICA, London (2006); and the radio series, Steven Appleby’s Normal Life, which ran for two series and a Christmas special on BBC Radio 4 from 2001 to 2004.

Since 2007 Appleby has collaborated with Linda McCarthy (of Tiny Elephants Ltd) on a series of stop motion animated films based on his eccentric country house cartoon strip Small Birds Singing. A new Small Birds Singing short film, Bob Bobbin and the Christmas Stocking, is currently in production. They also collaborated, in 2011, on a looped gallery piece entitled A Small Repetition of Myself in which a puppet Steven Appleby thinks, draws, discards, then starts over – forever.

Appleby has had numerous solo exhibitions of paintings, prints and ceramics, including Islands (2011) at The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh and Tell Me All Your Secrets And I Will Put Them In My Drawings (2005), Icebergs (2008) and REAL | UNREAL (2016) at ArteArtesania, Soller, Mallorca.

Appleby spent 2013 as the artist appointed to create all the art for the Royal Brompton Hospital’s new Centre for Sleep As part of this project he made approximately seventy drawings and paintings, including a large glass screen, ‘sleep maps’ painted directly onto the walls, and a book, Into Sleep, to celebrate the completion of the work. He is currently working on a new sleep commission for the hospital.

His images of rockets feature on the Pixies album sleeve, Tromp Le Monde, and in 2014 he produced over 100 drawings for The Good Inn, a novel by Pixies frontman Black Francis & writer Josh Frank, which was launched with events in New York and at The British Library, London.

In March 2016 Appleby was one of five artists invited to take part in a residency at The Carlton Arms Hotel, New York, where he spent a month painting a mural on the walls and in the bathroom of room 9a.

Personal life

Appleby lives in Camberwell, London with his wife, her partner, his two sons and three step-sons. He writes, paints and draws in The Shop, a studio he shares with animation director Pete Bishop.

Having been a secret transvestite all his adult life, Appleby began, in the mid-1990s, to come out to friends and family; in 2008, he began living full-time as a trans-person.