What’s On pals Hype bring you art, style, street culture that swims against the tide. Star of graffiti art in Dubai star Steffi Bow meets Maddy Butcher.

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Maddy Butcher (Madz by both name and nature) is a huge mass of personality and creative talent. Spend five minutes with this lovely lady and everything around you will be chaos, loud, and fun. Lots of fun. She sings (no microphone needed, though), writes witty lyrics and paints big walls. Hype columnist Steffi Bow was delighted to catch up with Her Royal Madzness…

Where do you come from? I’m from the UK. Birmingham, and the Lake District, to be precise. Industrial, multi-racial, self-deprecating weird-accentness; and mountains, rain, real ale and smelly dogness. I get homesick a lot.

Tell the truth: do you have a creative guilty pleasure? Buzzfeed. If I can’t find an idea, I lose 20 minutes to Buzzfeed, 9Gag or a couple of friends’ blogs. I find that when you’re knocking on your skull and nothing wants to come out, something will come to you if you’re feeling more playful. And these sites feed that.

Tell us about your street art style and the last wall you painted… My style is linear, drawn portraits and abstract patterns. I normally draw people I admire or with a backstory, although I do love drawing old hairy men for the stories you can read on their faces. I don’t do enough walls in Dubai and mostly use chisel tips on interiors rather than spraying outside. The last wall I worked on is my current piece, Wall Of Fame, at Media One’s Dek On 8.

Wall of Fame, Media One Hotel, Dek On 8 Wall of Fame, Media One Hotel, Dek On 8

Who is Drusilla? Drusilla is Dubai’s only bald nudist. She’s my piece of weird – an art project that’s just for fun. I found her at Dragonmart and she now lives in our metre cupboard, and as an Instagram-based portrait project (@drusilladoesdubai).

What is your best ever one verse lyric? It’s from Piece Of The Man, a track I wrote about my dad, which I haven’t recorded with anyone yet. It’s not my ‘best ever’, and they’re all personal but this is the most personal, and it’s harder to sing without getting a little light of breath, which means it needs a soul track I can belt out. I’m saving it for the right composition.

If you could be queen for a day, which queen would it be? I’d actually be the current British Queen, Elizabeth II. Since she was 25, she’s been on the job for 60 years, and in a new hat every day. However folks feel about the monarchy, she’s seen a century of upheaval, from a country telling a third of the planet what to do, to a multi-racial exporter of ideologies, helping to establish democracies, and mucking around where it should and really shouldn’t have. And despite an ‘opinionated’ husband, she’s stayed loved, shaking a million hands without swearing at anyone or saying anything stupid. I couldn’t do that!

What’s your next project? I’m a writer by trade and the best way to marry writing and art is to make a story with pictures. I’m hoping the result, either a book or animation, will be useful to women in particular, talking about ‘bigging up yourself’ and getting stuff done.

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