Posts Tagged ‘Laurence James’

I Just Can’t Get Enough Spanish Fly: Stewart Home interviewed by Joan Cabot

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

I did this email interview a few weeks ago for Mondo Sonoro in Spain who mostly cover music but were interested in the translation of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured they’d have had time to run it in Spanish so I might as well run it as I wrote it here now.

Joan Cabot: Memphis underground is the first of your fiction books translated to Spanish, can you tell me more about your previous fictional works and how MU fits into your writing practice?

Stewart Home: My writing generally emerges from my reading, so my earlier novels were a product of my attempts to read in new ways certain strands of British pulp fiction that had interested me when I was 12 or so years old. When I was in my early twenties I started reading through all the books I could lay my hands on by a number of authors as if they constituted a single work. Among the many writers I re-read the one I liked most was Mick Norman (AKA Laurence James), in whose books the the gay hell’s angels were even harder than the straight bikers and whose politics were of the liberal left. The best known of these hacks is James Moffatt AKA Richard Allen who wrote a series of skinhead books.

With this more focused re-reading, what I noticed is that a lot of the authors I’d checked out when I was young repeated plots and sentences and sometimes even paragraphs from one book to the next. So I thought it would be interesting to write fiction about youth cults in which I compressed this process, with every other page being an almost identical sex scene (which made writing the books very easy). I decided to use lots of deliberately repeated words and phrases in a single book.

I was taking different influences and mixing them together. I was aware of the way surrealism and the French nouveau roman had inscribed elements of pulp prose into what were essentially non-linear and highbrow novels. I wanted to take that further and apply Jean Baudrillard’s notions of simulation (it was the eighties) to plot within my books – so they resembled pulp more closely than say the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet but at the same time because they collapsed the repetitious effects of reading a dozen novels by the same pulp author into one book, they effectively deconstructed themselves as fiction and escaped being easily categorised as either art or low brow prose.

Over the course of five very similar novels – Pure Mania, Defiant Pose, Red London, Blow Job and Slow Death – I felt I’d perfected what I wanted to do with this approach to writing. Therefore after completing Slow Death, the last and I’d say my best book using this third person condensed and collapsed pulp style, I wanted to move on. I then decided to do a self-consciously non-linear book about the occult and mind control. My first five books were written in the third person and I wanted to switch to writing in the first person; this really limits what you can do as an author but I figured if the narrator’s personality changed every time he had an orgasm (due to mind control – and there is a lot of sex in the book), then working in the first person wouldn’t be too difficult. Once this book – Come Before Christ and Murder Love – was published, the critics in the UK immediately noticed I’d been influenced by Robbe-Grillet, whereas although he was a major influence in my earlier books the way I worked this through was less obvious and many critics didn’t understand that I was producing a simulacrum of pulp and had no interest in writing pulp books.

Anyway, as I’ve continued to write novels I’ve used different approaches with different books. But until my last anti-novel I stuck with first person narration – in both male and female voices. I’ve tried to structure each book differently. With 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess I set the book in Aberdeenshire (which is a part of the British Isles not much used as a setting for fiction) and incorporated a lot of capsule book reviews. With Cunt I was self-consciously creating a post-modern variant on the picaresque novel. Whips & Furs was a cut and paste novel where I simply altered two nineteenth-century books and spliced them together to make a work with a more contemporary structure. In many ways that was an editing job since I did very little original writing to produce it. In Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton every paragraph was exactly 100 words long. With Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie – my most recently published book and written after Memphis Underground – I wanted to make bigger changes to my writing style so I wrote in the second person (which I hadn’t done before – addressing the reader as ‘you’ rather than referring to the narrator as ‘I’) and I used a lot of sampled penis enlargement spam in the text. With Memphis Underground I wanted to structure a book using a classic science-fiction device but at the same time not write sci-fi. So the first half of the book is the events in the life of the narrator six months apart and cut against each other chapter by chapter, and because the narrator has changed his name the reader may not realise straight away that the alternating chapters are about the same person.

Joan Cabot: In the book you write that MU is a book about how housing projects affect people’s life (sorry, it may not be the exact words, but I have to translate the translation…), but I think you talk about a lot more things in the book…

Stewart Home: Obviously Memphis Underground is also about art and London and celebrity and many other things. It is also concerned with writing and how most so-called contemporary literature is old-fashioned and ill-suited to the times in which we live. Of course the book also deals with sex and the idea of death… But there’s no point providing an exhaustive list of the various subjects it covers, including of course train travel in Germany!

Joan Cabot: I think art is in fact the main subject of the book. How will you define your relation with the art world?

Stewart Home: I think that my relationship to the art world is troubled. But at the same time I’m well connected within it, particularly in London, and could be described as an art world insider. It is part of the nature of the art world that no one thinks they are truly inside it, but of course many are. Where I take a different stand from many others is in being more critical of the commodification of culture and in viewing the role of the artist dialectically. Thus because I know disalienation is integral to the communist project, I also understand that to become truly human we have to realise every aspect of what we are – what is sometimes called our ‘species being’. Aside from being social that also means integrating our physical, emotional and intellectual activity. So rather than one person being a brain worker (white collar) and another performing physical labour (blue collar), in a classless society (which will also be one without money and nation states), we’ll all do a bit of everything and have a lot of variety in our lives. To look at the role of the artist in a positive light, it is a deformed prefiguration of how we’ll all be in post-capitalist society. But the artist is also a specialised non-specialist in a commodified gallery system, so you can also look at that role negatively and stress it’s alienation and disconnection from what it is to be truly human.

Joan Cabot:  I always though that art should be indistinguishable from vandalism nowadays…

Stewart Home: There’s not much new in that, it runs through a lot of modernism and post-modernism. Dada was the first worthwhile modernist movement to stress the suppression of art and negation and the negative in general, and I find that preferable to surrealism that mistakenly attempted to realise art rather than treating it as a product of capitalist society. In the second half of the twentieth-century the negative again rose to the surface in art movements ranging from nouveau realisme through Fluxus to auto-destructive art. In the visual arts post-modernism has tended towards a recuperation of this negative attitude and its diversion into commercial ends. Late twentieth-century writers such as William Burroughs and Kathy Acker were on the whole using the negative in more interesting ways than gallery artists.

Joan Cabot: I’m sure you have another idea about the motivations to work against the establishment of modern art, but, isn’t it fun just to piss them off?

Stewart Home: Sure. That’s why I inserted the names of many well-known artists into the penis enlargement spam I appropriated to use in my last book. In New York the piece that got quoted the most was: “7 inches simply isn’t big enough to pleasure the Gorilla Girls.” And while many found that funny, those who make the mistake of taking post-modern art seriously were upset by it.

Joan Cabot:  You’ve written books about utopian artistic movements and punk… Which interest came first? How much of the relation between art & music movements are true and how much just a way to legitimate the music that we like?

Stewart Home: One interest doesn’t really come before the other – although I was into pop music first. I have clear memories from when I was two years old. So I remember some sixties music from the time – but what I mostly heard when I was small wasn’t of much interest to me. Too much of The Beatles and not enough of mod and freakbeat bands such as The Small Faces, The Who, The Downliners Sect, The Creation and The Action. I remember one morning when I was taking the bus to school and all the kids were talking about the news that the Beatles were breaking up. Some of the older children were quite upset but I was one of the younger ones and I really didn’t care about The Beatles and the fact they were breaking up didn’t bother me. The first music that got me really excited was glam rock. I liked T. Rex best of all. I liked it most when they were doing tunes like Get It On And Jeepster. I also liked bands like Slade and The Sweet – and from the USA Alice Cooper and Suzi Quatro. But then just silly songs like Me & You & A Dog Named Boo by Lobo also appealed to me. But after 1973 the quality of glam singles started falling away. So by the time I was 12 I was looking back into the history of pop…. That’s when I discovered old soul records like Tainted Love by Gloria Jones, or You Can’t Sit Down by the Phil Upchurch Combo: and at the same time started digging all the London mod and freakbeat groups of the 1960s….

I came across dada and happenings and pop art when I was about 12, in books to start with. I guess I was into music before that but the two interests both kept growing – with music way ahead until I was about 20. The idea of what art is has changed a lot of the last thirty years – so now you have people talking about pop music and football as art, which didn’t happen in the old days. The most over-hyped relationship between music and the kind of anti- art that interests me is found in discourse around punk, which some pundits claim is situationist inspired. Such claims are ridiculous as I demonstrate in my book Cranked Up Really High. It’s just a way for silly American music journalists to pretend they’re art history professors, and for English cultural studies lecturers to pretend they’re hip… Rock and roll is somewhere else entirely!

Joan Cabot: Do you think that your books are understandable and enjoyable for anybody. I mean, what kind of people is interested in your work? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?

Stewart Home: My books are written for people with a sense of humour. I really enjoy the way they wind up and upset those who are upright and serious about literature and music and art. I tend to scream along to the sound of my keyboard as I type my novels, and I’m very happy when my readers laugh out loud when looking at my books. Intellectuals are a sorry bunch so I don’t expect them to be grooved by my prose.

Joan Cabot: Some of your former fictional books are not translated in Spanish. Do you know if there are plans to do so?

Stewart Home: I guess if Memphis Underground sells well then more of my novels will be translated into Spanish. But I haven’t signed any contracts for more books yet. It’s curious watching which books get translated into what language. I have books in many languages but it was my two full-length non-fiction books – Assault On Culture and Cranked Up Really High – that appeared first in Spanish. Both those and another non-fiction book came out in Italy before a small publisher did one of my novels there. In French, Russian, Finnish, German, Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian etc. I only have novels published. In languages such as Lithuanian, Portuguese (with a Brazilian publisher) and Polish only my non-fiction books are translated. It is very hard to predict what will happen with translations.

Joan Cabot: What are you working on now?

Stewart Home: I recently finished a novel based on the life of one of my relatives who was a famous cat-burglar and prison escaper – he was originally from south Wales but pursed his life of crime in London from the 1940s to the 1970s. That book’s called The Nine Lives Of Ray The Cat Jones. This week I have to install a solo show in a London gallery. But with the nice coverage I’ve been getting for this new translation of Memphis Underground I think I might well spend the summer getting to know some hot Spanish girls very very well… that’s the kind of ‘work’ I like doing best!

Joan Cabot: In the book, you say that you cannot distinguish between England and any other country, but I think that something like MU is in some sense a very British book…

Stewart Home: There are different cultures around the world and what you’ll write in English is going to be different to what you’d write if you were using – for example – Spanish. That said I’m against national borders, not against regional difference. But London is now a very European city. It is much much cleaner than it was when I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, and with that cleanness it has lost much of its old identity. That said not everything has got worse. The food you can eat in London today is way better than what you got when I was small! The food used to be really terrible but now it’s actually very good if you pick and choose. I’m not sure that Memphis Underground is that British, I think I’m more a product of London, and I find it extremely difficult to identify with the rest of England let alone the rest of the British Isles… My mother was Welsh but came from an Irish family, so we’ve been moving slowly east. I don’t really want to go anywhere, I like London… although it is always nice to have a change and visit somewhere like Barcelona or Bilbao or Valencia or Madrid, or even some of the smaller towns like Burgos or Carmona…

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

Stewart Home Gives You Better Orgasms! An Interview With Playground

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

This is an interview I did with Playground Magazine for translation into Spanish around the publication by the Barcelona based literary press Alpha Decay of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured I might as well run it here in English too! I’m told this interview was published about ten days ago but the urls I was sent to it don’t work – so I can’t link you to the Spanish version here….

Playground: First of all, I’d like you to tell me about the place you are at the moment, answering these questions. What things do you have around (is there a cup of coffee, a little pencil, something like that)?

Home: I’m sitting at a desk in a flat in east London. I’ve got a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse plugged into it. The computer is sitting on a pile of books. Also on the desk is a lamp, a half drunk cup of green tea (it had coffee in it before I finished that and made the tea), a 2012 diary, a few pens, and a DVD copy of the old school movie “Kung Fu Vs Yoga” which I bought in a bargain store on Broadway in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago and haven’t gotten around to watching yet.

Playground: Let’s talk about John Johnson. Where does his (in so many ways, filthy) life come from? Do you feel him like a sort of an alter ego?

Home: When writing fiction I draw on elements from my own life and the lives of other people I know – but also from books, the media and folklore. John Johnson can thus be viewed as containing elements of me – but my life is much filthier than that of the narrator of this book. Ultimately John Johnson is an everyman figure rather than me.

The name John Johnson has his origins in folklore and folk song. The name comes from a recursive English language rhyme entitled “Yon Yonson”. This is often sung in a Scandinavian accent. If recited in American or British English the name Yon Yonson would be pronounced “Jan Jansen” or “John Johnson.” The song is sometimes credited to Jan Sophus Jansen (1870–1953). Jan Jansen (pronounced Yon Yonson) was born in Amager Denmark. In 1893 he emigrated to Berlin, Wisconsin (USA), where he first worked in a lumberyard and later as a carpenter, cabinetmaker, and wood pattern maker. Jansen was known to sing his namesake song while playing the concertina as he walked the streets of Berlin: “My name is Yon Yonson/I come from Wisconsin/I work in a lumberyard there/Everyone that I meet/When I walk down the street/Says “Hello! What’s your name/And I say: My name is Yon Yonson…” (repeated again and again).

It has also been claimed the song has its origins in the Swedish play “Yon Yonson” (1899). The play was set in a Minnesota lumber camp (Minnesota is a neighboring state to Wisconsin – and part of “Memphis Underground” is also set in Minnesota). The song has appeared in many places including Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse 5” and the single “Yon Yonson” by Canadian post-punk band The Dave Howard Singers. A friend of mine in London was very fond of The Dave Howard Singers and often played the track when I visited him in the late eighties. So I chose a metafictional name for the narrator of the book – because he isn’t simply me, he’s everyone!

Playground: When did you start writing “Memphis Underground”, and why?

Home: I probably started writing the book in 2002 or 2003. I don’t remember exactly – I do know I finished it several years before it was first published. I wrote it before my novel “Tainted Love” which was published in English in 2005. I started it because I wanted a challenge, to construct a novel in a different way to anything I’d done before (there is quite a lot of variation in the ways my different books are structured). I’d always liked the sci-fi device of alternating chapters with the same character at different stages of their life, and I thought that would be a good way to do a mash up of different styles without being explicitly science-fiction. I mashed in the music I was listening to as I wrote the book by including the song titles as chapter headings. There were non-formalist concerns as well, since I wanted to address the housing situation in London among other things. And I guess I also wrote “Memphis Underground” because I’d finished my previous novel “Down & Out In Shoredtich & Hoxton.”

Playground: In this novel music plays a significant role, like in all of your work. I heard you wanted to be in a band more than becoming a writer. Tell me how music has influenced your work (this specifically, but also the rest) and your life. And why the band idea didn’t work out.

Home: I only started writing because I wanted to get free records and to get into concerts for free, so when I was teenager I began penning music reviews. Some people told me I was a really good writer and I should concentrate on that… but I was more interested in playing music than prose.

When I was teenage I played in bands at small venues around London, and I was okay on the bass, but then I realized that guitar players tended to have better looking girlfriends than drummers and bassists, so I switched to guitar. That was a mistake musically because although my bass playing and rhythm guitar playing were alright (I wasn’t a particularly good musician – but then that isn’t really an issue in a lot of rock and pop bands), my lead guitar came out back to front. I’m never sure if I’m right or left handed (as I do some things one way and some things the other). I learnt to play bass and guitar right handed, and I think I should have learnt left handed when it came to lead but by the time I realized this it seemed like too much effort to start learning to play guitar from scratch again as a left-hander. Eventually I just stopped playing music, although I still listen to a lot of music. I’d have probably rather been a singer but my voice is weak – it was always my dream to be able to sing like Aretha Franklin, but like most people I just can’t.

Music influences my writing in many ways. Records create a mood and I like a driving beat when I’m working so I also feel like I’m being propelled forward with the book as well as in my life. But then, of course, I use my knowledge of music in different ways. The rhythm of my sentences in English is important to me. They have to flow when they’re read aloud, so I try to get that from the monster beat of the tunes that groove me. Also I use parts of the history of popular music in my books. For example, my first novel “Pure Mania” parodied the London punk scene of the 1970s. And of course I’ve also written a non-fiction book about punk “Cranked Up Really High”. But I’ve also always listened to a lot of soul and funk. I’m not stuck on just one genre of music.

Playground: Reading “Memphis Underground”, the first writer that comes to my mind is Hubert Selby Jr (specially that Hubert Selby Jr of Last Exit to Brooklyn, all this Queen is Dead stuff), because of the self-controlled rage and the (in cases) filthy way you describe everything… Is him one of your favourite writers? Can you tell me your favourite ones? (I was thinking about Irvine Welsh as well).

Home: I read “Last Exit to Brooklyn” when I was teenage but nothing else by Selby and he’s not important to me as a writer. My first novel was published four years before the first book by Irvine Welsh came out, so he couldn’t have been an influence. What I like about Welsh is that he gets up the noses of the literary establishment in London because he’s not some upper class twit, but beyond their working class setting his books aren’t particularly to my taste as I don’t particularly like his prose style. I always wanted to used a clipped journalistic prose style while combining elements of both pulp and experimental fiction. You can see that in writers like William Burroughs or Kathy Acker. However, my biggest sources of inspiration when I started writing fiction were 1970s British youth culture novels by writers like Mick Norman (real name Laurence James) and Peter Cave, whose style I set out to cross with that of people like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Perec. A British experimental writer who particularly grooves me is Ann Quin, and my book “69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess” begins as a riff on her first novel “Berg’.

My reading is quite wide, so when I was younger I ran through a lot of pulp authors like Clark Ashton Smith and Abe Merritt. Also forgotten genres such as future war are an influence on my novels and in books like “Red London” I was drawing on largely forgotten writers and works such as “Angel of the Revolution” by George Griffith and “Hartmann The Anarchist” by E. Douglas Fawcett. Other writers I really like would include Clarence Cooper Jr., Blaster Al Ackerman, Calvin C. Hernton, Michael Moorcock and, of course, Karl Marx. My reading is wide ranging and so it would be a mistake to think only a few big names influenced me, it is more whole genres than indivudals that I’m drawing on. And I’m also influenced just as much by film.

Playground: You talk about an anti-ego narrative, but you include an interview with yourself in the middle of the book… It’s the whole thing a big joke to the literary establishment?

Home: The interview you mention is a mash up. I took the answers from an email interview I’d written in reply to questions from a fanzine and replaced their questions with the things I’d asked a really dull and ttalentless singer when I’d taped an interview with him at the request of a third party. I think that is a way of saying that rather than being unique most cultural figures are interchangeable and that most music and books simply don’t matter…

I have repeatedly described myself as “an ego-maniac on a world historical scale.” My problem with most egotists is that they take themselves so seriously they’re not able to be as egotistical as I am. I’m unsure what you mean by “an anti-ego narrative,” so it is difficult for me to respond to that part of your question. I can’t recall saying anything along these lines – although possibly you mean something within “Memphis Underground” (but if that is the case this is an example of my fiction and I often have characters express things that I personally would not agree with).

Playground: I’ve heard you are not a big fan of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie… Did you meet them? What kind of things you didn’t like about them?

The first thing that is wrong with Rushdie and Amis is that their writing is awful. They are typical of the talentless hacks promoted by the English literary establishment. Both are products of exclusive schools and Oxbridge, and neither have anything to say worth hearing either. They don’t know the first thing about how ordinary people live and they don’t know how to write. I’m lucky in that I’ve never met Amis; but one time when I’d won a prize from the Arts Council of England, Rushdie was handing out the money for them. He spoke to everyone else who’d been given a writing award that year, but not me, which I found very funny. I didn’t want to speak to him – or even meet him –but I did want the money.

Playground: Johnson feels like a fake person when pretends to be a middle-class guy, why are you so worried about middle-class?

Home: I’m not worried about the middle class, I just find them uninteresting culturally and in every other way. They also side with the bourgeoisie in its conflicts with the working class. I just wanted to show the middle-class as I see them, in other words as a bunch of tossers.

Playground: In the book you also talk about the concept of the ghetto and the suburbs. In terms of music, what kind of music de you think people of the ghetto would listen? And the suburbs people?

Home: That would all depend where in the world they were. But, for example, in south London a lot of people listen to dance music genres like grime. But then a lot of people in England are being displaced from the city into the suburbs, and in that way London is becoming more like Paris, so probably people are listening to grime in the suburbs as well.

Playground: Talking about music, which are your favorite bands at the moment?

I don’t go and see many bands these days. The music scene in London isn’t as interesting to me now as it was in the late seventies when I used to go to rock concerts roughly four times a week on average. Then in the eighties there were still good American bands coming over like Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers. Now there isn’t so much worth seeing. The bands I see these days are mainly people I know personally like Chicks On Speed or Luke Haines. I saw Billy Rath’s Street Pirates recently because he was using a friend of mine, Chris Lowe. as a pick-up drummer. Billy Rath had been out of the music scene for a long time and I’d last seen him playing bass in Iggy Pop’s backing band in London in 1979! The Street Pirates mostly played songs from his old band The Heartbreakers. I spent more time listening to old soul records from the sixties and seventies these days than anything else. Although I still also listen to a lot of electro and rap from the eighties, and minimal and hardcore techno from the 1990s. I don’t listen to that much rock music any more.

Playground: What were your top ten albums of 2011?

Home: I don’t really like to do chart listings, and there weren’t ten new albums I really liked released in 2011 anyway. The only album I can remember writing sleeve notes to last year was ‘Wyrd” by Brend – which is an amazing experiment in crossing over dance beats and Scottish folk music orchestrated by Glasgow based DJ and producer Guy Veale. That is definitely a stand out release, but although I did the sleeve notes last year, it wasn’t issued until last month, so it is a 2012 release!

Playground: Best song ever is…

Home: Always the last one I played, which right now happens to be “Soul Galore” by Jackie Wilson, but give me a couple of minutes and it will be something else.

Playground: Tell me the name you imagine for that band you want to get it when you were a little kid…

Home: The band name I always wanted to use when I was younger, but could never get the rest of the group to agree to taking on was The Teenage Pricks. In one band the singer objected on the grounds she was a girl and not a guy and she wasn’t teenage anymore either…. Which all seemed a bit literal to me!

Playground: Do you usually listen to music when you’re writing? If so, does music shape the way you place the words, helps to find a rhythm?

Home: Yes, as I explained above.

Playground: I read you’ve said that these days in London youth culture is far less visible than it used to be twenty or thirty years ago, can you figure out why?

Home: I’m not sure I said that about youth culture, it seems more likely I was talking about subculture. Youth culture is everywhere, it is ubiquitous and that’s partly why subculture has largely disappeared. Gentrification has changed a lot. Kids find it difficult to afford living in London, so do most people, but if you’ve been around a long time you’re more likely to have found somewhere relatively cheap to rent. The other factor is everything is instantly available now via the internet, so kids can get into something new every day or hour or minute. This means they’re less likely to evolve a unique style of their own over time. But you see youth culture in the form of sportswear brands all over London, it’s completely mainstream.

Playground: You state on your website that one of your motivations is blurring the lines between artistic mediums and literary genres. What do you hope your readers’ gain from this blurring of the lines? A new type of genre, a “non-genre”?

Home: A precursor of what we’ll all gain from revolutionary activity, the overflowing of capitalist canalization and the realization of our species being. It isn’t a question of being this or that, we can be everything at once. An end to the separations that characterize our social alienation under the current system of anti-social relations. Genres will disappear too!

Playground: What were your motivations to create the Neoist Alliance?

Home: To make trouble and have a bubble bath (laugh). This anti-group was also a way of confronting the question of communist organization, something I’d been involved in debates about since the 1970s. What happened was that a bunch of us in London all created one-person ‘groups’. So there were things like The London Psychogeographical Association, The Association of Autonomous Asttronauts and Decadent Action. That meant the person who constituted the group could organize an action and those who constituted other groups could choose to get involved with that action or not, but didn’t have to take any responsibility for it.

Playground: I’ve read you hate capitalism (you define yourself as a communist). What do you think about the economic collapse these days?

Home: The collapse of capitalism goes back a long way, don’t forget the USSR was also a capitalist state despite it’s phony rhetoric about being Marxist. So the euphoria the western bourgeoisie expressed about the collapse of the USSR was at best short sighted. You can’t expand economically indefinitely, so capitalism was bound to collapse. The important thing now is to organize a non-hierarchical world where everyone gets what they need, rather than a few having far more than they deserve while millions starve to death.

Playground: The way the world should run, according to Stewart Home, is… (Imagine there are no rules and you can choose a new way to make the world run).

Home: I don’t want a world run by one person or an elite. The only sensible way to organize is by everyone collectively working together.

Playground: Are you writing now? Or working on any new project? Please, tell us about it.

I recently finished a novel called “The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones” based on the life of one of my relatives who was a burglar. He made the front pages of all the British newspapers in 1958 when he escaped from Pentonville Prison in London, but many of his court cases were also reported in the UK press. Ray Jones always stressed that the reason he stole from rich people was as act of class war. So having finished that book I’m doing a humorous plagiarized work about the artist David Hockney’s time at The Royal College of Art in London.

Playground: Give us a reason to read “Memphis Underground” RIGHT NOW.

Home: It will give you better orgasms, improve your blood circulation and make you roar with laughter too!

Playground: And, finally, what can readers and audiences expect from you in the future?

Home: Anything could happen in the future, so they should expect the unexpected!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, counterculture, exhibitionism, humour, literature, performance, politics, talk | 21 Comments »

10 Greatest Anti-Art Suicides (Before Mike Kelly)

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

The news that LA art scenester Mike Kelly just topped himself led me to wonder whether in ten years time he’d make anyone’s list of best ever anti-art suicides. Was his death a resolute ‘NO’ to capitalist exploitation? Or was it as tedious and pathetic as the suicide of Kurt Cobain? I’ll leave you to judge that one and give you instead my top 10 suicides. Since Kelly founded the bands Destroy All Monsters (who I saw in London in the late-seventies after he’d left the group) and Poetics (with John Miller and Tony Oursler), I’m including musicians in this alongside those involved in more visual and literary forms of anti-art.

1. Ray Johnson – a pop and correspondence anti-artist. Ray makes number one in my list because although I never met him, I did have a very minor correspondence with Johnson about 25 years ago. So there’s a small personal connection and we all know nepotism rules in the art and anti-art world. ‘New York’s most famous unknown artist’ drowned himself off Long Island in 1995 – some say it was a final work of performance art.

2. Ann Quin – a 1960s British experimental novelist who did many things before and better than her now more famous contemporary B. S. Johnson (he topped himself by slitting his wrists while lying in a warm bath shortly after Quin’s summer 1973 death). Although Quinn’s first novel Berg (1964) made an impact, by the time she drowned herself, her critical stock had dwindled. Like Ray Johnson, she swam out to sea – but into the English Channel from Brighton’s Palace Pier, rather than the North Atlantic.

3. Arthur Cravan – was a dadaist who specialised in boasting and reinventing himself. Among other stunts, he fought world boxing champion Jack Johnson drunk, and was quickly knocked out. In 1918 Cravan disappeared sailing a boat in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico and is presumed to have drowned. His rather ambiguous suicide set the tone for the deaths of later artists such as Bas Jan Ader (who was lost at sea in the North Atlantic in 1975). For me death at sea is the best way to go (it’s oceanic), but having given you three of these I’ll move on to lesser forms of suicide.

4. Donny Hathaway  – is probably best known for his duets with Roberta Flack but his solo work constitutes some of the classiest soul made in the 1970s. Despite success as a singer and songwriter, Hathaway demonstrated to the likes of Herman Brood that the best way to end it all is by throwing yourself into the street from the glittering heights of an exclusive hotel. In Hathaway’s case this was from floor 15 of the Essex House Hotel in New York. Hathaway appears to have been suffering from schizophrenia before his death. His funeral was conducted by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

5. Jacques Vaché – was a friend of Andre Breton and thus French surrealism’s most famous suicide. He didn’t really do much but maintain an attitude of indifference and disdain towards the world. Vaché killed himself by taking an overdose of opium, and thus blazed a trail for punk rockers like Darby Crash of Los Angeles band The Germs (who deliberately took an overdose of heroin in 1980).

6. Graham Bond – was in at the start of the British blues boom of the 1960s, but he is inevitably included here because he appeared in Gonks Go Beat, an unbelievably bad British movie that Mike Kelly saw on late-night TV somewhere and wanted to see again because he couldn’t quite believe what he’d been viewing. Via a mutual friend I was asked if I could help Kelly locate this item (this was before it was reissued on DVD). I found a bootleg version and passed on the information about where and how to buy it. Returning to Bond, his career basically spiralled downhill from the late-sixties onwards with this decline fuelled by drink, drugs and involvement in the occult. I picked up a typical story about Bond looking for money when I interviewed one time New English Library (NEL) editor Laurence James back in the 1990s, although I don’t seem to have included it in the published version of my conversation. Bond turned up at the NEL offices one day demanding money because somehow a photograph of him had found its way into a Hells Angels magazine published by the company (who’d thought this was a picture of a hells angel and had not realised it was in fact an image of a musician). Bond pretended to be outraged and claimed this mishap would ruin his public reputation. James gave Bond a few quid and the musician went away a happy man because he’d scored enough money to buy whatever drugs he needed that day. In 1974 Bond did the decent thing and jumped in front of a tube train at Finsbury Park Station in north London.

7. Herman Brood – is well known for songs like 1978′s Rock & Roll Junkie (which includes the line: “and when I do my suicide for you I hope you miss me too…”). in later life this Dutch rocker swapped pop excess for a career as a not particularly interesting painter. Sick from prolonged drug use and unable to kick his habit, in 2001 Brood leapt to his death from the rooftop of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. When I heard about this the first thought that popped into my head was that I’d thought Brood’s leather jeans looked ugly and uncool when I’ d seen him perform with his band Wild Romance in London in the late-seventies.

8. Adrian Borland – is someone I almost have a personal connection to, since he knew a number of my friends. In the late-eighties I spotted Borland posing outside a London rock venue. He was once in a seriously obscure band called Rat Poison (with a friend of mine in fact) although he later falsely claimed his first group was The Outsiders. As far as I’m aware Rat Poison only ever played one gig at New Malden Town Hall (in south west London). When I came across Borland he was obviously waiting to be recognised, and he gave me a huge smile as I walked over to him. “I know you!” I said before pausing dramatically. “You was in Rat Poison!” Borland’s jaw dropped, he’d lost his rock star composure but eventually managed to blurt: “I’m Adrian Borland. I’ve gone solo now but I used to be in The Sound.” “Never heard of ‘em mate!” I shot back before stomping off leaving my victim completely bemused. When Borland ended it all by jumping in front of a train in 1999 I wasn’t surprised – he seemed to have been in the rock business for the wrong reasons. He was more interested in fame than music and that was bound to result in him becoming very frustrated. Of course, Borland only makes this list because I like to flatter myself I made a small contribution towards his death!

9. Wendy O. Williams  – was the singer in the dire American hardcore punk/metal band The Plasmatics. I always liked the idea of Williams far more than the music her band made. She’d started her career in the entertainment business by performing in sex shows, and never really moved away from that since she was usually topless on stage. Frustrated at her inability to break into the mainstream, in 1998 Williams went into the woods near her home and blew her brains out with a gun.

10. Guy Debord – this lettriste and situationist claimed that he wrote less than most writers but drank more than most drinkers. Little surprise then that in 1994 Debord shot himself because he could no longer bear the pain of the illnesses brought on by his excessive consumption of alcohol. Debord only limps in at number 10 because a more interesting dadaist suicide appears to be a completely fictional character. Julien Torma allegedly wandered ill-clad into the Tyrolian mountains at the age of 30 to end it all, and was never seen again. I like to laugh along with Torma’s aphorism: “Perfection is mediocrity. Only excess is beautiful.” Debord by way of contrast, seems to have taken this absurd joke seriously.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in art criticism, drugs, exhibitionism, music | 28 Comments »

Terry’s Taylor’s cult novel ‘Baron’s Court, All Change’ is a classic – official at £238!

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Copies of Terry Taylor’s 1961 novel Baron’s Court, All Change don’t come up for sale at all often but until now when they did they’ve never been particularly expensive. I have a paperback that came from an exchange stall and it cost 20p. I was looking for a hardback for about 4 years until I finally acquired one via eBay – and no one else even bid on that copy of the book. I’ve been checking the obvious online places for further copies since then (eBay, Amazon, Abe Books), and I’ve not come across a single instance of Baron’s Court being offered for sale over the past few years until now. As I write, Repton Readers are offering a copy of Barons Court on Amazon UK Marketplace for a whopping £238 plus postage.

So how does a hard-to-obtain title go from being offered for sale for a few quid to an asking price of hundreds of pounds? Obviously, it is a combination of buzz and a bookseller chancing it with a high price. Baron’s Court is a far-out drugs novel that fell through the cracks and disappeared for forty odd years – the main problem being that it was at least five years ahead of its time. That said, it only needed a handful of relatively ‘young’ hipsters to realise that the book described mod and the counterculture in very early stages of their evolution, that it was the first British novel to mention LSD, and that the author Terry Taylor had a quite incredible life story, for interest in it to rocket. Since my mother (Julia Callan-Thompson) was a friend of the author, when I started researching her life at the turn of the millennium, I came across Baron’s Court and once I’d obtained copies for myself I started talking the book up. I not only wrote about Baron’s Court, I was so knocked-out by this novel, I mailed photocopies of it to key contacts – and after receiving a Xerox from me, Andy Roberts even bigged it up in his recent history of British acid culture Albion Dreaming.

If you want to know why Baron’s Court is so hard to find,  you have to understand both publishing and the used book trade. It is the difficulty of obtaining a title like this that leads dealers to asking an exorbitant price for it. I don’t know the print run of the hardback edition of Baron’s Court, but I’d guess it would have been between two and five thousand. It seems to have generated some coverage, but not massive interest – after it was published Terry Taylor was invited to do some reviewing, but the paperback rights didn’t immediately sell. Taylor’s follow-up, which drew more explicitly on the literary experimentalism of figures like William Burroughs, was rejected by his publisher. So Taylor has been to date a one-shot novelist, and was thus unable to draw readers to his earlier book through the publication of further tomes.

The publication of a Baron’s Court paperback four long years after the appearance of the MacGibbon & Kee hardcover edition is probably best explained by the burgeoning drug culture. By 1965 ‘with-it’ publishers were aware of a growing interest in drugs and casting about for books dealing with the subject. The Baron’s Court paperback was published by Four Square (later New English Library) who by the late sixties/early seventies did first printings of their books in runs of 20,000 and they only reprinted if this first run sold quickly (see my interview with NEL editor Laurence James as an example of background research I’ve done in this ares). If we assume the company worked in the same way in the mid-sixties, then 20,000 seems a reasonable guess for the print run of Baron’s Court in paperback. We can conclude that in its two editions to date possibly as many as 25,000 copies of Baron’s Court were printed. Most of them will now be destroyed. I don’t know exactly how the book sold, but since it clearly wasn’t like ‘hot cakes’ (if it had there would have been more reprints), it is possible some copies were pulped by one or both of the publishers. I have yet to properly determine the initial reception of the book, and if anyone can point me in the direction of contemporary reviews I would be grateful.

Mass market paperbacks put out by companies like Four Square are cheaply made – perfect bound rather than sewn and printed on pulp papers that deteriorate quickly – after being read a few times this type of book tends to fall apart and get thrown away. Although the paperback will have been printed in a far bigger run than the hardback, my guess would be that far fewer copies of it survive than of the first edition. That said, I wouldn’t be particularly optimistic about many copies of the first edition surviving either! It is likely the majority of hardbacks sales would have been to libraries, and library books are often roughly handled and suffer damage – before being either sold off or thrown away at the end of their lending life.

But what about those copies of Baron’s Court that were offered to secondhand dealers over the years? Since the book had no buzz about it until recently, few dealers would have wanted to buy copies even if they had recognised the title or author (and very few would have done so); and if they did acquire copies in job lots of books, they may have simply thrown them away or used them for fuel. Owners of copies of Baron’s Court who were unable to sell them to dealers may have treated this once hard-to-sell tome in an equally caviler fashion. Precisely because until recently there has been little to no market for Baron’s Court as a novel, the overwhelming majority of copies will have been destroyed.

Now there is some buzz about Terry Taylor and Baron’s Court, the remaining copies of the book have a greater potential value than many other out-of-print titles precisely because its earlier lack of popularity makes it rare. Baron’s Court is also, without a shadow of a doubt, not only a cracking good read but of considerable historical significance. So fingers-crossed that some clued-up publisher puts it back in print, and rather than having to shell out hundreds of pounds for a used copy, you can buy it new for roughly the same price as any other mass market tome. And if there are any interested publishers out there, I’d be happy to put them in touch with the author who still controls the rights….

Terry Taylor’s story is one with a relatively happy ending for those who like to believe fairy tales about ‘literary immortality’, but don’t let it blind you to the fact that the vast bulk of books published every year are very quickly forgotten!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, counterculture | 24 Comments »