Mutoid Waste Company

A mixture of rude boys, preachers, ghosts, performers, inspired lunatics. The Mutoid Waste Company has been around for quite a long time. There isn’t an exact date of their creation: it came together gradually, as life started from the bubbling lagoon in a thousand dark nights. At ‘86’s Glastonbury Festival they built a major replica of Stonehenge with trashed cars. During ’88 they organised all-night parties on a huge squatted site near King’s Cross and scared audiences from an open stage alongside bands like Screech Rock and 2000DS at the Waterloo Fire Station.
Then , this 20th Century motorized tribe went touring around Europe in their mutated vans, rumours aboard said that the hurricane-like winds that bounced the ferry-boat manically as they crossed the channel was a Mutoid conspiracy.

Disappearing into Europe for 17 years where there exists an culture to alternative street theatre and performance ,The Mutoids were received with open arms, working with a rehearsed structrure along the lines of French circus Archaos “but there is a main difference: they perform it and we live it. This is the way we live.” The Mutoids live and work the life. leaving Britain had been very good for them
Now back in Britain they have just finished their sell out exhibition MUTATE BRITAIN, the final part of 2008 saw a huge collaborative effort with Behind the Shutters Gallery in London. In a cheeky take on establishment art the project was titled Mutate Britain, 'a multimedia pile up of artistic endeavour celebrating the evolution of artistic spirit'. The 5-week exhibition proved hugely successful featuring a mixture of new cutting edge artists as well as some of the biggest names in UK Street Art. Central to the show was a reworking of some old military scrap from the Mutoid/Spiral Tribe collaboration in Berlin circa 1994, when the “Company” liberated two East German Mig jet fighters to decorate a Techno Festival at a squat near the Reichstag.

Highlights include, In the middle of an industrial estate near Place d’Herbert, surrounded by working factories, a two hundred metre long warehouse was designated Mutoid land. A uniform line of factory cars decorated the road where a three-wheeled motorbike was being driven by two Mutants, one sitting behind the engine between the exhaust pipes.

2002 saw not so much as a comeback, more a return to home turf when the Mutoid Waste Company returned to Glastonbury Festival after a 17-year hiatus. Working in partnership with up-and-coming performer and creative instigator Ruby Blues, Joe Rush and the Mutoids embarked on a series of projects commissioned by the festival which included the Joe Strummer Memorial Tree in 2003, the pyrotechnic burlesque circus spectacular Pyrettes in 2004 and the apocalyptic Victorian stylings of Midnight’s Carnival in 2005.

2007 saw the creation of Trash City: an intergalactic red-light district themed area that combined a mind-boggling animatronic robot show with apocalyptic bombed-out venues, cruise vehicles and cutting edge underground music and performance.

In 2008 building on the foundations of Trash City the collective received their very own field where they hosted the first ever Gay venue at a UK music festival; The NYC Down Low. On the perimeter in more ways than one Trash City was one of the most talked about elements of last year’s Glastonbury.
2008 also saw a small Mutoid delegation debuting at America’s Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Rising to the challenge of the “American Dream” theme they built a rusting 3-ton stallion from a V8 powered 4x4 and a pile of classic Chevrolet and Cadillac parts. Replete with an old style covered wagon that housed a sound system and decks, they trundled into the desert sunset, in a film of their own imagining entitled -“Spaghetti West 10”.