It was 1982 and young film-maker Paul Oremland was in an east London leather and denim pub, about to meet a character who would change his life. “Andy was pretty unforgettable,” recalls Oremland. “Full of amazing tales, and with a wealth of knowledge about people, places and quirky London life.”
Oremland had been talking to the fledgling Channel 4 about making a series of documentary films about gay life. This was the era of Aids, Thatcher and queer bashing – gay people only ever seemed to be on the television as the subject of shame or the butt of a joke. But the proudly out Andy Marshall – with his beguiling mix of toughness and fragility – didn’t conform to these stereotypes. Oremland decided to feature him in one of the films he created for the channel’s pioneering Six of Hearts series.
You only need to watch a few seconds of Andy the Furniture Maker to understand exactly what Oremland saw in Marshall. This man in his mid-20s was a magnetic presence, his cheeky smile offset by the ever-present sense of danger. He was also incredibly talented – the film focuses on his ability to make dazzlingly original furniture from the discarded wood he would find in local skips or derelict buildings. There are giant chairs made from enormous baulks of timber, discarded joists sanded down and turned into stool tops – and all of it came about, says Marshall, because one day he was bored and realised he had nothing to sit on.
This wasn’t just a DIY project. Norman Rosenthal, then exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts, appears on camera to enthuse: “It has lots of style … it’s kind of sculpture, really.” Production designer Christopher Hobbs traces a line to punk, claiming that Marshall’s early works are a “fight against respectable furniture”.
As the film progresses we hear Marshall’s tales of a life lived against society’s expectations. He had worked as an oyster fisher in his native Brightlingsea (where he was once dunked underwater near the boat’s propeller for being lippy), joined the merchant navy at 15 (“Don’t bother – it’s terrible, you get called names for two years”) and then escaped to London where he gleefully embraced a nightlife full of “every degenerate you can imagine”. When he ran out of money he became a rent boy, sometimes offering his services to straight men when the local female sex workers were unavailable. “I’d jump in the car and say ‘Will I do?’ And 99% of the time I did, ’cos all they wanted was a wank.”
Marshall was taken under the wing of avant garde film-maker Derek Jarman, who – after bailing him out of jail – swiftly set him to work on his movie sets under the guidance of Hobbs. Jarman compares Marshall’s furniture to the work of William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and praises his “extraordinary eye” and the “Japanese sparsity” of his flat. Yet another person spellbound by Marshall’s charm.
“You remembered Andy from the minute you saw him because he was very endearing,” says Scarlett Cannon, an old friend of Marshall’s who was enlisted – at his request – to interview him for the film. “You wanted to give him a hug, because that’s what he looked like he needed, even though, to look at him, you might think he was a docker or a builder.”
Cannon was 22 when the documentary was filmed and looks utterly fabulous with her Blitz Kid shaved head and dark eye makeup. “We had a hoot making the film,” she says, and you can tell – at one point she can’t even keep a straight face because of Marshall’s presence.
Their friendship allows her to extract a number of tales from Marshall that sound implausible to say the least – such as the time he stole a Chevrolet Impala from outside the Hilton hotel, smashed up a Mini and then hid from the police underneath the wheels of another car after a chase through Mayfair. Cannon says she was always sceptical about how true Marshall’s stories were – especially the ones about hanging around on boats in Brightlingsea with big, hairy fishers. But when they visited the Essex town for the film, his extravagant tales were all confirmed. “So actually, most of Andy’s stories were true, even if they might have been embellished.”
Watching him regale these wild antics is a joy. Yet Marshall had a darker side. In the film, Rosenthal alludes to Marshall’s “self-destructive” and “aggressive” character, and Cannon agrees that he could be a nightmare. “He would go into terrible low glooms, and it would all be everybody’s fault.” What we are not told in the film is that he’d had what Cannon describes as “a really horrible childhood, filled with violence and not being wanted.”
Oremland says avoiding this troubled past was a stipulation of Marshall’s participation. In fact, he says Marshall was originally a little uneasy about being in the film at all. “I don’t think people realise how brave Andy was when he agreed to be the subject. There hadn’t ever been this sort of gay man seen on screen in the UK.”
Andy the Furniture Maker became the best-known of Oremland’s six shorts, which also captured the lives of lesbian comic and singer Carol Prior (Waiting for the Green Light) and 80s music writer and activist Kris Kirk (A Boy Called Mary).
“Neither of us thought it would have as big a response as it did,” says Oremland, who credits Marshall with coming up with several of the film’s best ideas, such as the decision to film him in shadow when he talks about his time as a rent boy. The musical choices are fantastic, too – especially music hall icon Max Wall’s Dream Tobacco, a 1979 release by Stiff Records which was apparently one of Marshall’s favourites.
The film builds to a climax in which we see Marshall, having escaped his small town upbringing, eating fine food at a restaurant surrounded by his new diverse and creative milieu. “Andy had friends from all walks of life – from hardened gangsters to lords,” says Oremland. “I thought it would be good to have them together to share a dinner.”
“Oh, God, we were all so loaded,” laughs Cannon, before falling quieter. “There are so many people in that restaurant who are no longer with us, of course, because of Aids.”
Marshall avoided that fate, but his demise was still tragic. “Andy got stuck on a terribly morose downward spiral,” says Cannon. “When I saw him out he was always really negative and drunk and just awful. Then he got stomach cancer, because of the drinking I believe. He would push me away, and he did that with a lot of his friends, even though we all loved him.”
As Marshall’s drinking increased, his propensity for making inventive furniture declined. At some point during the mid 00s, Cannon says he came off his bicycle while riding and simultaneously pushing another bike (“something he’d done a million times before, but he was probably pissed.”). He had to have part of his skull removed because of the brain swelling and ended up in a hospice. “He’d given up on life by the end,” says Cannon.
Watching the film, and its beautiful portrayal of a genuinely rebellious spirit, it is hard to imagine someone with Marshall’s spark giving up on life.
“That film was Andy at his finest,” agrees Cannon. “And the fact that people are still watching it and talking about Andy – that is a real legacy.”
• Andy the Furniture Maker is showing as part of Queer on 4 at the Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre, London, on 1 February
