HOME ON THE DERANGED: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF STEWART HOME

Stewart Home is possibly the only living English writer possessed by genius. The literary establishment loathe him, while his supporters in the music, style and gay press hail his work as a reinvention of world culture in its entirety. Selecting No Pity as his book of the year for 1993, Richard Smith declared in Gay Times that Home had 'consolidated his reputation as the only person currently writing fiction worth bothering with'.

Home's new novel, Red London, features a sickening mix of polymorphous perversion in the form of sexual violence and violent sex. The book demonstrates once again that Home has grasped the future direction of our culture and is creating a fictional vision that will stand the test of time. While the work of other English writers is doomed to sink without trace because a wave of nostalgia has deprived contemporary literature of energy and life, Home has married the avant-hip theories of the Situationist International with the narrative techniques of pulp hacks such as Richard Allen and Guy N. Smith. The result is a cultural hybrid that is unprecedented in its originality and vigour.

However, Home is more than a mere novelist, he has an extremely high reputation among the cognoscenti of the art world. Simon Ford of the National Art Library recently organised a competition to determine which twentieth-century artist had the largest press file in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Home made the top twenty alongside such luminaries as Picasso and Andy Warhol. This 'intellectual terrorist' has assuredly established himself as one of the greats, and he has a busy schedule that matches his position as the pre-eminent creative individual of the post-war period. I caught up with the man i-D magazine described as 'an ego-maniac on a world historical scale' at the Tate Gallery, where he'd pulled an unusually large crowd for a lunch time lecture in the middle of the week.

There were several questions I wanted to ask but they had to wait because having wrapped up his talk, Home was busy chatting to everybody from The Modern Review's John O'Reilly to the American novelist Peter Plate. The Melody Maker has praised Home's writing as 'speed-freak prose' and watching this multi-faceted phenomenon socialise, I could see that  swiftness is a natural talent rather than something he's learnt. Fuelled by endless swigs of coffee and coke, Home revealed in his ability to conduct several conversations at once.

I tagged along as Home led a 'drift' through central London. The idea was to follow the unconscious solicitations of the architecture, so that the results of these wanderings could be used to draw up new emotional maps of the city. Home was not surprised to find his party draw towards the area around the Temple, finally ending up at Blackfriars Bridge. "What's it all about?" I demanded. "It proves the power of Masonic mind control!" Home shot back. "We've done a complete reversal of the drift I organised last year!" Apparently this was deeply significant. Home and his colleagues from the London Psychogeographical Association left my head spinning as they ranted about Calvi, the Bishop of Stepney and Gresham College.

Next on the agenda was a reading with several rock bands at the Dome in Tufnell Park. On arrival, there was a hasty discussion with Nick Abrahams about the production schedule for a Red London promo video. After confirming a few dates, the writer turned to me and said: "Nick and Michael Tompkins did a tasty job on my No Pity video. They're good to work with, I've written a film-script for them, the movie is called Sex Kick and it goes into production later this year." Abrahams is equally keen to praise Home. "Stewart is great to work with, he continually throws up creative ideas and he's got an amazing presence on camera. Unlike most writers, who take themselves very seriously, Stewart is quite happy to send himself up. Usually I make pop videos but it's very rewarding to make an exception in Stewart's case."

Home kept his act short and aggressive, reciting from memory two stories entailing blow jobs, one gay and one straight. A drunk at the bar shouted 'boring'. The skinhead author immediately launched into a diatribe about Kierkegaard considering boredom to be the demonic side of pantheism, adding that a talent for this mixture of admiration and supreme indifference was something peculiarly English. Home concluded by inviting the lush to come on stage if he'd anything intelligent to say, but the heckler had been reduced to silence. The writer recited another story and left the stage to thunderous applause, returning briefly to announce that he didn't do encores.

Afterwards, as Home signed books, I popped another question. "How does it feel to have critics describe your work as explicit beyond belief, fascinating in an ugly way, one step beyond most violent fiction?" I enquired. "I love it," Home replied, "it's very gratifying when I'm hailed as having written the ultimate cult novel. However, I'd also like a bit of recognition for my psychic abilities." It transpires that these are quite extraordinary, many of the incidents Home has created from the depths of his imagination and typed into his Apple Mac, transform themselves from fictional ideas to facts in the physical world.

"An example from my new novel is where I satirically suggest that a racist Tower Hamlets council plans to change the name of the Canary Wharf Tower to Oswald Mosley Tower. While the book was at the printers, the East London Advertiser ran a story saying that if elected, the BNP planned to rename Jack Dash House as Oswald Mosley House. If you look at something like the riot in my novel Defiant Pose, which was written in 1989, it's a very good description of the Poll Tax riot which at that time hadn't even taken place! It was spooky, these days I have to be very careful about what I write in case it comes true!"

Home's idea of winding down after a busy day was to rush over to the Disobey Club near Highbury Corner, so that he could catch the Charles Gayle trio in action for the second time in a month. "It's not the sort of thing I listen to at home, but I like the energy of free jazz in a live setting. Did you know the drummer used to play with Funkadelic?" Then Home was off across the room to discuss the possibility of taking part in a Disobey tour of the United States, a proposal put to him by Blast First supremo Paul Smith. Moments later, Home was chatting to house DJ Bruce Gilbert, who used to play guitar with the experimental band Wire.

I grabbed hold of Home again to ask him if there was any truth in the rumours circulating about his sex life. "Oh that," he responded, "the story started going round last year, I'm supposed to have all these mistresses who wear dog collars and crawl before me on their knees. Apparently, I never see them for longer than it takes to have sex, my catch-phrase supposedly being 'I'll fuck you and then you'll have to go'. I read about it in some magazine, so it must be true!" Another rumour about Home is that he works for the Iranian intelligence service. "If you believe that, you'll believe anything!" he snorts. "A reviewer in the Guardian falsely claimed I was a veteran of some hang Rushdie campaign, but if I was working for the mullahs, it seems more likely that I'd want to see Rushdie stoned to death."

Next, Home is swapping anecdotes about pranks with Bill Drummond of the K Foundation. It was amusing to watch Britain's best known art terrorists get together for a chat. An attractive girl kept interrupting to ask for a light, despite Home informing her that he didn't smoke. He wasn't interested in chicks. He wanted to talk about levitating the Pavilion Theatre in Brighton to protest against a Stockhausen concert and the psychic attack that was made on the book trade to mark the first anniversary of the suicide of highbrow hack Richard Burns.

" My next tactic against the literary establishment was to distribute fake Booker Prize invitations to down and outs," Home gleefully informed Drummond. "The Sun chose to ignore the fact that this was done under the aegis of the Neoist Alliance and reported it as an act of sabotage perpetrated by a 'fed-up author'. I followed this up by submitting a piece of my own work for the Literary Review Grand Booby Prize for Bad Sex in Fiction. Lacking a sense of humour, Auberon Waugh disqualified my entry despite the fact that there had been nothing in the announcement of the award banning an author from entering his or her own work. Melvyn Bragg won the prize, demonstrating yet again how things have been stitched up by literary insiders who are quite prepared to cheat and change rules as they go along, in order to prevent those they don't want within their 'charmed' circle from gatecrashing the party!"
           
Some people might conclude from this that Home is obsessed with himself and his own activities, but then I can't think of an author who isn't. Certainly, he's more willing to talk to the media than Drummond. However, the conversation eventually shifted to Rachel Whiteread and the K Foundation award. "You're the only writer to get close to us about that one," Drummond wryly told Home. This was interesting but I went to the bar to get another drink and by the time I returned, both Home and Drummond had disappeared as mysteriously as the many ships lost in the Bermuda triangle.

Written by Stewart Home under the pen name Karen Eliot and first published in Rouge 17 Summer 1994.

Interviews

Bibliography