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Jump to full article: The Observer (uk), 2009-11-01
Intro: Talking to Hockney, you are struck by a kind of heroic optimism in that endeavour, one that goes defiantly against the grain of his innate scepticism. As friends and interviewers over the years will attest, he can get bogged down in particular irritations – the long-standing one is the smoking ban, against which he is a stubborn and passionate objector – but even while he is in the curmudgeonly depths of these obsessions, a smile dances around his mouth and eyes. It's that, as much as anything, that always makes his career feel like the best kind of lark. . . .
That thought, of course, sets him off in one of his intermittent rants against anti-smokers, punctuated by drags on his cigarette. "The cause of death is birth, and on your way there you might want to enjoy things…"
Can he recall his first drag?
"I was probably eight or nine. But I've smoked pretty regularly for 55 years. I don't see a reason to stop now. It's all gone dull, I think, Britain. We are being taken over by medico-fascists who want us all to live in germ-free clinics…"
Some of this anger seems to have a psychological root. He was, he says, watching a documentary the other evening in which four anti-smokers "were lined up to tell us they were saving lives, and I said to my sister: 'Don't they remind you of someone?' She said: 'Kenneth' straightaway – my father."
Hockney's dad was, among other things, a great anti-smoker, though all his five children smoked like chimneys.
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