Small talk: catching up with renowned Notts street artist Kid30

How did you first get into art and graffiti?

I've been into art for as long as I can remember. However, my introduction to graffiti was riding the trains with my grandpa in London, that was the first time I ever saw any of it. Then I got into painting banners for raves. I grew up just outside Oxford, in the countryside and painted my first big wall at Oxford Brookes student union. It just said "TIME". We told them we'd done it before, when we hadn't. We used bits of card to get the straight lines because we didn’t have the skill then to do it with the cans. 

What brought you to Nottingham?

I was putting on parties at uni in Portsmouth with a friend called Adam who was one half of a duo called Transit Mafia. The other half, James Busby, had just moved to Nottingham and was setting up Detonate. I didn't have anywhere to live, so I came up here. I ended up doing about ten years of flyer design for Detonate, and it got me more flyer gigs for other nights like Drum&BassArena and Birmingham’s Progression Sessions. It was a good era; a time of early Mac design. I think I quit doing that after about 1000 flyers.

How did designing flyers transcend into painting on walls?

With Detonate we also put on a handful of gigs at Rescue Rooms with Coverage, which was the local spray paint shop run by Dilk who now runs Montana. We booked artists like Pitman and DJ Swamp and we painted a lot at the bigger Detonate events too. I started to make friends and become part of a crew.

Tell us about your crew Oxygen Thieves. Who’s in it and what do they each bring?

Oxygen Thieves is a graffiti crew headed by Mr Deamz, with Mobs, Kaption One, Dregs, me and a few others. I got asked to join around 2000, and Deamz was the one who really schooled me, along with an early artist called Creak. We were all quite different characters, but somehow we all gelled. Although we still do paint together we aren't really an active crew anymore. Deamz has moved away now and we all got older. But we do meet up and eat curries together. 

Tell us about the Nottingham street art scene. Did you ever think about moving somewhere with a bigger scene, like Bristol or London?

Nottingham's scene goes in waves. It's had quieter moments, but it's currently really active. It's also got a genuinely rich history with people like Pulse (ILC), Pops, Dak and others who had real connections to early New York graffiti. I stayed here mainly because my friends were here, and I like an easy, quiet life. If I'd been more career-driven I might have moved to Bristol when that scene was exploding, but there are loads of good artists and writers in this city. It’s probably more interesting here right now than it's been in a long time.

Before we get into the Nottingham work, tell us about some of what you've done further afield. There was a group show in Bristol last year called War and Peace, with loads of other artists including Banksy?

Yes, I sent a piece over for that. It was a painting on slate of a cartoon bomb painting a peace sign, with its other hand's fingers crossed behind its back. 

You’ve also had art at Glastonbury festival several times. What was that?

That was with Oxygen Thieves, through a company called Bassline Circus. We'd go down a week early and paint loads of things, including some stuff we probably shouldn't have. We built a couple of big 3D totem-pole installations that you'd walk through into the music tent. I remember in 2009 - the year when Michael Jackson died – we made it into the festival catalogue.

Let's talk about some of the big Nottingham pieces people will know of yours. There's the mural near on Broad Street, which is the "small kid" logo mashed up with Dennis the Menace.

Yes, I self-funded that one ahead of a big show; I wanted one mural that was entirely mine, with no compromise. We hired a cherry picker and I had some help from Kaption One. It was one of the first "mega murals" in Nottingham, before that became a common thing.

You also had access to a billboard on Huntingdon Street for several years.

Yeah, we had a studio in that building – that's where Shrunken Heads, an illustration collective, came from. The manager, Brendan, couldn't get anyone to rent the billboards, so I offered him free promotion for his carpet company in exchange for painting on them. That grew from one billboard to two, then the whole thing. It was horrible to actually paint; so high up and the boards would wobble about, but we had loads of different artists through it. That whole stretch of road is skyscrapers and student flats now.

Let's talk about your exhibitions. Relic (2025) was one of the best art shows I went to last year. What was the thinking behind it?

It came from two places: my concerns about the future of AI, and being a dad, plus looking back at my own late teens and early twenties, which were full of pirate radio and rave culture. I included original audio and footage from a joke pirate station we ran as kids.

It's strange looking back now: when I started planning that three-year body of work, if you’d said "AI" to someone, they'd just think of Terminator. But by the time it opened, it was a conversation everybody was having. I wanted to see how far I could actually push my painting technically; whether I could make something like a pig's head look right, and to stop worrying about whether people actually liked it. Quite a lot of that work sold after and it helped me break even on the costs of the exhibition, but why anyone would want to display it in their home baffles me. I've got all the stuff that didn't sell hidden up in my loft.

You invited some other artists to take part in that show too. Tell us about a few of them…

Roadman Rails built a dystopian model railway car-chase scene that you experienced by going into a tent in near-total darkness with a kid in a balaclava sitting next to you. Mark Evans did a big metal sculpture and Boaster and Grimfinger both painted onto paintings that I gave them. The venue itself was a building that was still mid-renovation, so there were piles of sand and bricks, half-built toilets and someone's actual cement mixer left on set. I liked that. People couldn't tell what was staged.

A year before there was also a taster of that in an earlier show, Mind Your Head (2024)?

Yeah, that was in Bikes Love You on Haydn Road, which is my friend’s bike shop. It featured 100 silver clay heads, all made in the evenings when I was going through a rough patch. I wanted to test how people would respond to something genuinely weird. Everyone who came had to wear a hat, there was green lighting only and a smoke machine that stunk the place out. Some people queued for an hour and a half to get in. That response is what pushed me towards doing a bigger version.

Going back further was Misspelt Youth (2019), a show of cartoon mash-ups that many people probably remember best.

I did two shows around that. The first was a load of mash-ups painted in reverse on glass. The second was a retrospective of things I loved like Calvin and Hobbes, Tintin and Asterix mixed in with my logo. I was raised on that kind of imagery and my kid had just been born, so I was looking back at my own childhood, half-remembering and twisting it. I was riffing on popular culture and it was quick, enjoyable to paint, and gave me a structure. Obviously I've gone back to it to do the 200th cover of LeftLion. Always a pleasure to come back. I remember the first cover I was part of, which I think was issue three in 2005, working alongside a load of other artists. We’ve done a few more along the way since too. 

You've also recently been placing ‘art dispensers’ in pubs? Tell us about that. 

Yep. They’re Rotten Johnny's Art Dispensers. I met a bloke whose family has run condom vending machines in pubs for years, but with fewer people buying those now with coins he had a few spare retro-looking machines going. I bought one off him, then about ten more since. If you see one and drop in three quid and you get a little box crammed with mini artwork – bits from illustrators like Quick Style and Shifter, craft kits, art pins and a LeftLion-themed one coming to mark issue 200. They sell out fast. You can find them in the Angel Microbrewery, Goose in Boots, Lost Property, Bunkers Hill, Montana, Bikes Love You and Robin Hood pub in Sherwood, plus some custom ones that turn up at art shows.

What else do you have coming up?

I’m running an event called Between The Lines on 10 October at Sneinton Avenues, a live illustration event with forty-plus artists, everyone drawing in black and white on a board. It's inspired by the old Secret Wars battles, more pen-and-paper illustration than spray paint, with open drawing walls for anyone to join in. I've also done a couple of street art tours on bikes through Zigzag Tours and ArtFest recently, focused on Nottingham graffiti culture.

When might we see something on the scale of Relic again?

In a couple of years, maybe. It goes in waves; I can't force it. Right now I'm just drawing, not painting, and I don't have the urge to set myself a brief like that. After Relic I told my wife, "That's it, you won't have to put up with this again." She wasn't convinced though and I guess never say never.

Between The Lines, a free day of live art and illustration is at Sneinton Market Avenues on Saturday 10 October. 

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The LeftLion X Rotten Johnny’s Art Dispenser will be at the Angel Microbrewery from early October. Place 3 x £1 coins into it to get one of only 75 limited edition art packages produced to celebrate our 200th issue.