IN an alley behind Victoria Road in New Brighton a black, white and red 80s noir-inspired mural can be found.
The artwork, created by local artist Adam Bresnen, pays tribute to Wirral artists Aidan Hughes and Malcolm Bennett, the creators of a darkly comic, noir-inspired graphic magazine, Brute!.
The pair met in the summer of 1977 during a dance at the Riverside ballroom in New Brighton before later discovering they both lived in Egremont.
Malcolm, a poet, and Aidan, an artist, began writing letters to each other after Malcolm was sent to prison after an altercation with police.
Aidan told the Globe: “I was living in Amsterdam at the time so we started writing letters to each other which just started out as gossip but then after a while, the gossip turned into stories.
“Then I moved to Bristol and when he came out of prison he moved in with me and we turned our apartment into a unit to produce them into a graphic magazine.
“We were taking stories we’d invented and taking famous books and boiling them down to their essence really. We read about 1,000 books trying to design this new vocabulary and we got a lot of inspiration from 1940s and 50s books.
“We started out with detective books then romance and then every single genre so after about a year of research we started writing these very short stories.
“When we first started doing it we were trying to get into the local classified section because funnily enough there was a girl who used to put her stories in the back of the Wirral Globe.
“She used to put these little cryptic one-liners in the classified section. It was all the rage in the late 70s so we thought this is great we’ll do ours in the classified section of the Bristol Evening Post. So funnily enough it was the Wirral Globe that originally helped to inspire Brute!.
“But after about a week of doing it, we were completely broke because they charged by the letter or something like that.”
After a year of research and writing, the pair received a phone call from their printer.
Aidan said: “He told us that our last book had been destroyed in the rain so he said we can have a whole new book or print another one. We were so sick of carrying these other ones around because they were so heavy so we decided to go for a small pocket book and make it a humorous satirical book instead of all the heavy political stuff we’d been doing.”
Their decision led to Brute! being born with the first print being sold out within two weeks.
Aidan said: “By the third print we were dishing out like 5,000 copies at a time.”
They started selling the magazine in trendy bookshops, record stores, cafes and eventually outside gigs, schools, and protests.
Aidan said: “We’d sell them anywhere we could because they were so easy to carry.
“Some people would tell us they couldn’t afford to buy one so what we would do is give them 10 and say you sell them and then give us the money back and you can have one free so that’s how we spread it.”
In the mid-80s, Malcolm moved to London and managed to get himself an internship at Blink Studios in Soho while touting Brute!.
He said: “I was earning about £3,000 a day and after being on the dole two years previously it was a bit of a culture shock.
“I remember once we went to dinner and Michael Caine was sat at the next table and I thought, ‘I’ve arrived’.”
“Sadly, it all sort of went to Malcolm’s head and eventually he lost all of his work and subsequently I did too because people paired us together.”
The pair went their separate ways and didn’t see each other for 30 years until they reunited in 2014.
Aidan said: “Eventually we got back together to discuss another book when he came to Prague to visit me and we had a tearful reunion.
“He said to me before we do anything new we should reprint the old Brute! books so we decided we were going to do it.”
The pair began working together again but on March 1, 2015, Malcolm died.
Aidan said: “So he left me to try and find a publisher so a couple of years later after a lot of attempts we found a publisher. A lot of people wouldn’t touch it because it’s from the 80s.
“It launched when Covid hit so no book festivals or signings or anything like that so I’ve been trying my best to promote it since.”
That’s when Daniel Davies and Rockpoint Leisure came on board to commission the piece.
Aidan said: “It was Dan who suggested we do a commemorative mural for the book. I think the final piece is amazing.”
The mural was painted by local artist Adam Bresnen, known as Brezaux. Aidan returned to Wirral to help add the finishing touches to Adam’s mural.
He said: “Loads of people really love the mural and even people who didn’t know anything about Brute! came down to support it which is fantastic.
“It was great to see Adam and visit my hometown again - I’ll be back again soon.”
To find out more about BRUTE! click here.
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