Geoff Barrow of the bands Portishead and BEAK> posted his own tribute, remembering how when he played with the latter at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, and was selling merch afterwards, someone asked him to sign a poster: Mural by Two Times, artwork by Eamonn DaltonĭOOM died on October 31st, 2020, but the news wasn’t announced until New Year’s Eve, when his wife Jasmine posted a eulogy on his Instagram page, ending by writing he had ‘transitioned’ two months earlier. Whenever I asked someone ‘in the know’, they started shifting uncomfortably, pausing before answering, as if trying to work out what they could say and what they definitely couldn’t. I started asking around, hoping to find out if it could possibly be true. The story came from a Facebook post by a Leeds DJ claiming he knew someone who had bought DOOM’s old house. The details were sketchy: DOOM was supposedly living in Shadwell and apparently died in Leeds General Infirmary. “It’s all over Twitter.”Īll over Twitter was an exaggeration, but there were quite a few tweets relaying the same story, and the same disbelieving reactions. “Did you know he was living in Leeds?” they replied. A couple of days later we were having a pint in North Bar and he complimented one of the staff on a DOOM tattoo on their arm. Sam talks a lot of bollocks, so I didn’t give it much thought until a couple of weeks later, when I remembered my housemate was a collector of DOOM’s records. I had the same reaction when my friend Sam told me the same story shortly before Christmas. When Craven first heard, he assumed his friend was talking “nonsense”. Neither artist knew DOOM was rumoured to be living in Leeds when he passed away. It’s mad thinking we could have been sat in the same bar as him having a pint. “And then we found out DOOM was supposedly living in Leeds for a bit. “Seeing everyone posting it online, commenting, taking pictures in front of it, it’s quite overwhelming really,” Craven says. Two Times have painted murals in other parts of the city and at schools around Yorkshire, but the reaction to the DOOM mural was always going to be different. When you’re painting something like DOOM, I don’t mean this in a spiritual way, but there was a gravity to it. I don’t want to use the word ‘organic’, but it is organic: it flows. “When it’s just an idea and we’re coming up with the initial design, we don’t think much about it. “It’s weird the more I think about it,” Edan says. Below is the lyric, ‘There are four sides to every story, if these four walls could talk they’d probably ignore me.’ If you walk down the side street next to the Belgrave, you’ll be greeted by the wall-high face of MF DOOM, who based his musical persona on the comic book character Dr Doom, hidden behind the trademark Gladiator mask he was never pictured without. They both share Kollakowski’s love of DOOM’s music, so after eighteen months of “sitting at home playing games” in lockdown, they ignored the “shit British weather” and got to work. Two Times is a partnership between artists Benjamin Craven and Edan MF (the initials are a coincidence rather than a nod). Kollakowski loves DOOM so much he took the name of his promotions company, Super Friendz, from one of his lyrics. When the rapper MF DOOM passed away towards the end of 2020, Ash Kollakowski of the Belgrave Music Hall approached Leeds art collective Two Times, asking if they wanted to paint a mural on the side of the venue in homage to one of hip-hop’s most influential and enigmatic artists.

Operation doomsday