Born in Liverpool in 1956, James Cauty is one of the most uncompromising artists of the 20th and 21st Centuries. His career has encompassed performance art, publishing, graphic art, graffiti, painting, finance, film, television, acoustics, popular music, mechanics and massive scale pranksterism.

He also founded the Blacksmoke Organisation, an eco-friendly post-terrorist peacenik art collective, but he resigned his post there in 2005 to spend more time with his stamp collection.