How Biro artist Elton is drawn to success

Manchester artist Elton, has two new books full of fabulous drawings. Enjoy this interview with him as we explore part of Manchester and it’s history in words and pictures.

Elton Darlo and me walked the same moribund Victorian streets of 1970s and 1980s rainy Manchester.

I was a young writer making my way in the metal clatter of the city’s Fleet Street of the North and Elton was a skinny pub bouncer at places like the Thompson Arms, a glass and panel halfway house under the bus station near Canal Street.

People like us were the young dudes then, dressed in Stacks and flares, roll top jumpers or tank tops. Hair bouffanted like Steve Marriott.

We smoked Bensons and Capstan Full Strength and swigged warm Watney’s with abandon to impress the girls.

Yep, people like us were slick as switch-blades. And as hard as nails.

We knew people too… both Elton and me were friends with George Best and Hurricane Higgins, the inarticulate drunken faces of Manchester’s sporting life.

We knew Quality guys like Dougie Flood, Jimmy Swords and Peter Tut Tut.

Drank with them in the Circus Tavern, the smallest and tightest-knit pub in Britain at the time. Deals were done there, people were set and ripped off there, threats and kickings were arranged in the fug of the back room.

I went to the Circus for the stories. And so did Elton.

Me, I was brought up in the woebegone ways of Moston, in a house near the Ten Ten Hell’s Angels HQ – Brown’s Dance hall was just around the corner too.

The Ten Tenners used to like to smash up Brown’s every other weekend or so because it was a honey-pot for squares and Mods on the pull.

Elton, was brought up near Belle Vue and eventually on the rough and rowdy shadow streets of Tower-block Alley, Longsight.

We were the tough-guy artists, one from the wrong side of Oldham Road, the other from the wrong side of Rochdale Road.

Dougie Flood lived near Rochdale Road in arrogant splendour in the mansion behind the trees.

Jimmy Swords lorded it in a Longsight tower block next to Oldham Road.

As the 80s headed for the 90s Elton and me both hit the road. I had the time of my life becoming an alcoholic journalist, travel writer and broadcaster.

Elton spun around the world going to LA, becoming a wrestling coach. But life got him too. He ended up homeless and with mental health issues.

Funnily enough we never crossed paths until a few days ago. And then it was on Zoom. I am in lockdown in Slovakia and he is back on the streets in our City of Tall Towers.

Elton is 72 now. I’m not quite as old as him!

I’m looking for a publisher for my book Ravine and Elton has just self-published another one of his own, this one about lockdown in Manchester in 2020. It’s a captivating collection of sketches in Biro and washes, Lowery-eaque in some ways but in others almost Scarfe-ian.

They can be brutal too, scratched in to the page with an earnest desire to capture a moment in pen and ink, an old and unusual medium to be working in nowadays. But it works.

Elton said to me: “It’s been a funny old life really… until my books started to come out my only claim to fame was really being an Elton John impersonator for a laugh. That’s why I’m called Elton … the Real Elton apparently got to hear about me and mentioned me once on telly, in the US. But that was it – oh, except when I was a sort of roady for Springstein… but that’s another tale.

“It’s strange really when you think, it took me until I was in my 70s and something like Covid to come along to get me noticed!”

Yep, Elton, after all these years I noticed you and your artwork.

Cheers

Leigh

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