Lowry speaks for himself

Fifty years after LS Lowry's death, a documentary including audio tapes of the artist being interviewed explodes much of what we thought we knew about him

- Nick Curtis

All the little figures. It's like a disease. You can't stop it." These are the words of the painter LS Lowry, discussing the compulsion that led him obsessively to depict the spindly hordes of the industrial working class in early 20th-century Manchester despite decades-long indifference from the art world and his own middle-class family.

They are delivered by Sir Ian McKellen, lip-syncing to long-undiscovered interviews Lowry granted to fan Angela Barrett between 1972 and 1976: an edited recreation of their encounters forms the core of new BBC Two documentary LS Lowry: the Unheard Tapes. The programme unpacks a fascinating and complex story, both of Lowry himself and of UK attitudes to art and heritage.

When he died, shortly after his last recording session with Barrett in his parlour in Mottram in Longdendale and with his reputation at a lifetime high, Laurence Stephen Lowry’s estate was valued at £289,459. In 2022 – coincidentally, the year that Barrett died and her tapes were discovered – his canvas Going to the Match sold for £7.8m to the arts centre in Salford that bears his name, where the churning mills and factories he depicted once stood.

I thought I knew about Lowry: we all think we do. “I don’t suppose there is an adult in the land, who wouldn’t recognise a Lowry at 100 paces,” as TV presenter Robert Robinson puts it in a 1960s archive clip. The hunched, matchstick-legged figures slouching towards their toil; the terraced backyards; the looming chimneys, stark against flat white skies.