Bruce Lacey

Bruce Lacey
On stage with Fairport Convention, 14 August 2004. Photograph: Brian Marks
Background information
Occupation(s)	Performer, artist

Bruce Lacey (1927–2016) was a British artist, performer and eccentric. After completing his national service in the Navy he became established on the avantgarde scene with his performance art and mechanical constructs. He has been closely associated with The Alberts performance group and The Goon Show. He made the props and had an acting part in Richard Lester's The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.

Ken Russell made a fifteen-minute film about him called The Preservation Man (1962), which linked Lacey to Chaplin (in a Keystone Cops-style sequence) and featured some of Lacey's nightclub act (knife-throwing/robots) and a lip-synched performance of "Sleepy Valley", which Lacey had recorded with The Alberts. Along with The Alberts, he starred in two short comedy films (Uncles Tea Party and Defective Detectives), directed by pinup photographer George Harrison Marks.

Lacey played a mad scientist in the 1967 comedy film Smashing Time, but his most famous appearance on film remains George Harrison's flute-playing gardener in the Beatles' 1965 feature film, Help!. He made and animated many of the props for Michael Bentine's "It's a Square World".

Lacey contributed to Jasia Reichardt's Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, exhibiting a robotic owl and actors: Rosa Bosom and Mate plus a sex-simulator. In the same year he also worked on developing Humanoid Structures with Joan Littlewood for her Fun Palaces scheme called 'Bubble City' at the City of London Festival. He also exhibited his The British Landing on the Moon in Simon Chapman's 1969 Cybervironment Plus, an experimental arts festival at Aston University, Birmingham. Photographs of some of his mechanical devices can be found in Reichardt's book, Robots (Thames and Hudson, 1978).