‘Charisma is a form of psychosis’: Eric Clapton’s inspiration, and having children at 70… The irreverent life of post-punk puppeteer Ted Milton | music

THe’s a big man in a khaki suit who speaks softly these days. We’re tucked into the corner of Ted Milton’s studio above his rehearsal space in Deptford, London, surrounded by record boxes, books of poetry and one big, bright suitcase, and I had to push the recorder closer to catch his voice. Milton – saxophonist, poet, counterculture survivor and avant-garde puppeteer – is 82 years old, uses a few canes to get around, and yet is once again on the road across Europe with his long-running band Blurt, as well as releasing a new album with his duo The Odes.

Today, he makes custom standard covers for the tourist merchandise table with the help of his old wood setup. “That orange bag?” He points across the desk. “I just bought it.” He let out a chuckle, as if to prove that he still had the lung power to control the room. “I’m a luggage freak. I know how to survive on tour. Haha!”

In many of the game-changing moments of British post-war culture, Milton was lurking in the background somewhere, with mischief not far away. He remembers sharing cabs with William S. Burroughs when the Godfather of the Beatles came to London in the early 1960s. He was described as a visionary by his old drinking buddy Eric Clapton; His puppet show made its way into the Monty Python universe via an appearance in the 1977 Terry Gilliam film Jabberwocky; The legendary lost promotional film for Pink Floyd’s 1967 hit Scream Thy Last Scream is rumored to feature Milton’s coattails in the lead role via the animated wonder. And there’s no band like Blurt, a bass-less trio of drums, guitar and Milton’s horns and vocals leading to raucous jazz explosions. “The groove they had was absolutely fantastic,” says long-time fan Graham Lewis, of post-punk Wire.

Now, in the fall of a long and sometimes infamous life, the Milton family has turned the tables. He has been married three times and had five children, most recently when he was nearly 70, and a new film by his son George Milton, The Last Puppet Show, aims to explore his father’s business and sometimes fraught relationships through the ingenious medium of newly brought to life puppets. “It’s like a therapy session for kids,” he says of the film cautiously. I say that it is your family that confronts you with their point of view. “And that’s what I’m afraid of.”

Milton had a fragile relationship with his parents, who planted the seeds that blossomed throughout his rebellious career. “My parents moved to West Africa when I was 11 and I went to boarding school,” he recalls, which brought independence, but also repression and bullying, and he found solace through music. “I had a dansett record player — Elvis, Carl Perkins, Little Richard.” But his other safety valve was disobedience. “I was looking forward to disrupting classes. Just being a dick, you know?”

He became involved in art studies at Cambridge, as well as the city’s jazz scene, before eventually falling in, quite literally, with the bohemian group in London. “I went to this jazz festival. I was saved from lying in the mud by a group of beatnik-looking people, including [poet] Pete Brown. They brought me back to London.” Brown promoted his poetry, and it even landed in the Paris Review in 1963. As Milton admits, he sometimes invoked the career of a struggling poet simply to serve drinks to strangers.

By the middle of the decade, Milton was living with his girlfriend Clarissa in a “period of bohemian debauchery on Long Acre.” [Covent Garden]. Eric used to come there often. This was Eric Clapton, who recalls in his autobiography how Milton revolved around Howlin’ Wolf and channeled music into dancing and acting: “I understood how you could listen to the whole of music and make it come alive… It was a real awakening,” he wrote. Milton never lost this talent for performing. But while his old colleague Pete Brown worked as a lyricist for Clapton’s Cream, Milton believes he missed out on similar opportunities for Pink Floyd, whose managers Andrew King and Peter Jenner were also present in the scene.

“If success was presented to Ted on a silver platter, he would piss on it,” says Roger Low, co-founder of Spitting Image. He is at home in Norfolk at a kitchen table filled with books and illustrations, including Milton’s carved poetry pamphlets. The pair first met at Cambridge School of Art and raised hell together, reconnecting in London, where they shared a dark sense of humor and an appreciation for the absurd. “If you talked to Ted, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between surrealism and reality,” Law says.

In the late 1960s, Milton took a position at the Puppet Theater in Wolverhampton. “Then I moved on to glove shows.” He imitates a Punch & Judy style performance with his hands. “It’s a completely different dynamic: violence. So I moved into that. I call it performance animation.” Law praises Milton’s uncanny ability to bring dolls to life; The man behind Spitting Image should know. But for Milton, “Dolls’ eyes are dead. They’re not challenged, they’re not afraid. And that gives you this unrecognized but really powerful potential to reach people, and you can go places in their heads that they don’t want you to go.”

Milton’s puppetry – demonstrated on Brighton’s West Pier, and then to numerous school audiences across Europe – led to some of the strangest support slots in 1970s rock, for Clapton and Ian Dury among others. Milton compares it to the urban legend that vendors harden themselves by selling peanuts on the street. “I was supporting Clapton [in 1976]We were performing on tour. I have a puppet theater there, the puppets are there This is big – “He puts his hands at a small distance” – and we are talking about 1,000 people. Immediately, there was a roar: “Fuck!” Meanwhile, Dory would occasionally come to the stage to ask the audience to calm down.

But Milton’s outrageous and sordid performance, with its anti-authoritarian message and Brechtian aesthetic, featuring characters like Deepthroat Porker, Constable Nosy Parker, and The Egg Dog, eventually gained fame. Tony Wilson featured Milton dolls on his groundbreaking TV show So It Goes in 1976, which caught the attention of Graham Lewis and Colin Newman, soon to be a member of the band Wire. The puppet show fell seamlessly into the violent, medieval chaos of Gilliam’s Jabberwocky. When Milton picked up the saxophone a few years later and formed Blurt, Wilson made them one of the first bands from outside Manchester to appear on his Factory Records label, and invited Wire to pay their bills. Milton’s subversive art has found a new home in the post-punk era.

Milton is a natural artist, and Wire’s Lewis quickly became hooked: “Blurt was absolutely captivating,” he enthuses. Milton’s 1984 solo track, Love Is Like a Violence, became an unexpected filler at Glasgow’s Optimo club night in the 2000s. Although Bellert bounced between various record labels over the decades, Melton always eventually found his way back into the spotlight.

It’s front and center in The Last Puppet Show: the film is a reckoning with the man Milton used to be, who to his comrades was a dashing artist, and to his family a sometimes wayward father. A large portion of the budget was allocated to creating a new set of puppets to add drama to its scenes. Melton says the ancient statues were either sent to Alaska or symbolically burned. “I don’t think I made any attempt to make any concessions to anyone anywhere along the line,” he admits looking back on his wilder days. “One person hit me.” I asked who he was, and it turned out to be one of his band mates.

While Milton’s anti-tyrannical streak remains as strong as ever, age now forces him to begin making concessions. “I had to do the last two shows sitting down, which I was really dreading,” he says, looking forward, as usual, to the next gig. “But actually, it kind of opens up a different dynamic.” “It seems to make things more focused somehow.”

I ask him what he thinks his performance captured Eric Clapton all those years ago, and whether he’s the same person now. “I think we’re talking about charisma. And charisma is a form of psychosis, in my opinion.” He cites Alice Miller’s book The Drama of the Gifted Child, whose thesis is that children are often forced to repress their true selves, to support his point.

“That kind of intense self-consciousness has subsided, fortunately,” he says, with the more accessible perspective that has come with age. “One person described it as feeling like you’re walking on stilts all the time, and that’s it – every movement is like someone looking at you.” In other words, did you feel like a performer all the time? “Yes. I’m not like that anymore. Ha-ha-ha!”