Meet Emtee Lids - the tin-art Banksy who leaves hand-painted free gifts for gig-goers to take at concert venues.
Mark Taylor, a retired art teacher, paints the recycled tin lids with music-themed art - including album sleeve designs and portraits of band members - so gig-goers can take them home as a freebie.
Many of his designs can be seen on the walls at the Waterloo Music Bar in Blackpool - although it took the staff a while to figure out who the mystery artist was.
Mark Taylor, a retired art teacher, paints the recycled tin lids with music-themed art - including album sleeve designs and portraits of band members - so gig-goers can take them home as a freebie.
Many of his designs can be seen on the walls at the Waterloo Music Bar in Blackpool - although it took the staff a while to figure out who the mystery artist was.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00I call myself MT Lids. My initials are MT so that relates the MT but it's also what I class as
00:07it's an empty lid with a hidden surprise. I was actually inspired by another artist who is a
00:14street artist and he goes by the name of My Dog Sighs. He came up with this idea for something
00:20called Free Art Friday where he'd leave his artwork out for people to find and if they found him he
00:26took them home and kept them and I thought that was a really nice idea and that's where the
00:31pebble art came from, people painting pictures on pebbles leaving them out. So I started with
00:37pebbles and that started to build up and I go to a lot of concerts and I thought it'd be quite nice
00:47to paint pictures related to the bands I was seeing and leave them lying around. I did that
00:52on some pebbles but then I suddenly thought it's possibly not the best thing to leave lying around
00:57a concert hall would be a pebble that might get thrown or something like that. I like to just
01:02leave them lying around the venue for people to find and realise that they can take them home
01:12because on the outside they always write it's free art. The Waterloo Music Bar in Blackpool
01:19which is my main local venue, absolutely fantastic venue, gets loads of great
01:25quite heavy punk bands and stuff like that. That's where I go quite a lot. The owner didn't know who
01:31I was for at least two years so I'd go and secretly just learn how to walk around and
01:39place it as I was walking around and stuff like that and it was quite interesting seeing once
01:44he realised I was in some of the bar staff would run around to places because I had
01:51certain places where I'd put them and they've actually got a really nice collection which
01:58he's stuck on his wall in the backstage bar next to it. But yes they discovered who I was because
02:05of my bracelets on my arm and because I do little videos of me doing these and I post them on
02:14YouTube and I post them on my Instagram page. They didn't see my Facebook they saw those so
02:18one night they actually came wandering around the Waterloo looking at everybody's wrists and found
02:24me. But even then the boss didn't know who I was because they kept it quiet for a good year or so.
02:28The outside is a print of my dog's paw print. He passed away and when he passed away I told
02:36the vet I was going to get a tattoo and the vet said well would you like me to take a print of
02:43his paw? Got it tattooed on my leg. Again when I was thinking about these lids I thought yeah we
02:49can have the picture on the inside but it really needs something on the outside as well. So I needed
02:55what in effect is a graffiti tag. So I came up with a stencil design. I paint it white first
03:04and I stencil the water splash and then I stencil the paw print on top of it. Well my big
03:09year was a Fairport convention. I've been following for a long long time and yes I started
03:17I go to their festival every year down at Cropperdy. I left them all around the village
03:21around the campsite and around the festival field and I also did a special set for Fairport
03:28which had the portraits on each lid and then I put them in a jam jar and asked them if they
03:35wanted to raffle it because they do a big raffle every year and they were
03:41very happy to do that and asked me backstage to get my photograph taken with them.