Chris Hall revisits J.G. Ballard’s childhood and finds the future in the past

The opening of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) has young Jim watching British war propaganda films with fellow choristers in the crypt of the Holy Trinity church in Shanghai, which was designed by George Gilbert Scott and built in the 1860s and is due to reopen this year after extensive renovations. Ballard himself attended the church’s prestigious boys school, a 1920s Art Deco addition. It’s a nice thought that Ballard’s archive is going to be in the British Library, right next door to another Gilbert Scott building, what used to be the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras railway station in London, also recently restored to its former glory.

I was recently in Shanghai, researching a book about Ballard, and this was one of the many places from his childhood there (from 1930 to 1946) that I visited, including the Ballard family home on what used to be Amherst Avenue. It’s now another restaurant – the Xinyue Club – after some recent renovation work and, though internally much has changed, the structure of the house remains. Ballard described it as being in the “stockbroker style of the home counties”. A Chinese friend who lives in the city steered me there and we pretended that we’d come to take a look at the private dining rooms upstairs to hire for an event. Seeing what would have been Ballard’s bedroom as a “luxury and elegant private room” hammers home his belief that “reality is a stage set”.

It hit me while I was there that a great deal of those quintessentially Ballardian obsessions are seeded in Shanghai – gated communities, suburbia, his interest in Art Deco, etc. As Ballard himself said, the Art Deco buildings of Shanghai – the city is thought to have a higher concentration of them than even Miami Beach – seem somehow more modern than the steel and glass skyscrapers that tower above them.

Further south is Lunghua pagoda, which the Japanese used as a flak tower against the US planes and which features a lot in Empire of the Sun. The pagoda is oddly affecting when I finally chance upon it, and, like the Ballard house, it’s a very moving sight. Ballard wrote about the time shortly after his family’s internment: “During the American raids the pagoda had lit up like a Christmas tree, tracers streaming towards the low-flying Mustangs, but now its guns were silent and unmanned”.

From the ghost towers of Bangkok and the very real atrocity exhibition that is the War Remnants museum in Saigon, to the empty streets of Hong Kong the day after Chinese New Year and especially the drowned world of Brisbane, my trip had been a little too Ballardian for comfort.

Further Resources:

• Chris Mitchell: In Search of Ballard’s Shanghai

Burksey: The Autobiography of a Football God – Peter Morfoot

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This has got cult classic written all over it. Burksey is the spoof autobiography of Tristan Stephen Burkes, a world-class footballing genius and monstrous idiot. Although a fair amount of football knowledge over the past few decades is assumed, Burksey isn’t about football per se, it’s also a broader satire on celebrity and contemporary society, from new age therapies and rehab to BritArt and fandom.

Burksey is a savage indictment of the greed of modern-day football (Burksey signs a new 110k a week contract for his new club, Sporting Meriden, on World Poverty Day) and is also very, very funny. One of the brilliant conceits is that the book has been ghostwritten by about seven people, each one presumably unable to continue working for such an ego-maniac; another is the hilarious and outrageous plugs for one of his sponsors, the Stelsat Corporation of America.

A lot of the fun of Burksey is the all-too-plausibly preposterous situations he finds himself in, such as partially sacrificing a goat and putting Ossie Ardiles into a hypnotic trance. Zelig-like, Burksey is involved in most of the major sporting and social events of the past couple of decades, of course drawing all the wrong conclusions (he’s a big fan of “Mrs T” naturally). But somehow, much as with other certain footballers who you know to be venal, money-grabbing bastards, you can’t help rooting for Burksey.

Another joy of the book is trying to spot the bits that Morfoot has made up, interweaved as it is so seamlessly with scarcely credible factual stories. I’m not entirely sure, for example, that the biscuit rota at Chelsea supposedly brought in by Glenn Hoddle is untrue. And the spoof Chris Morris programme, Brass Knuckles, in which Burksey fulminates on behalf of the children attacked by underwater bees is worthy of the great man himself.

Morfoot is obviously, despite everything, a huge footie fan and one senses a deep disgust at the way in which the game has developed. The only downside is that I won’t be able to look at Delia Smith’s ginger sponge ever again.

Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album – Matthew Robertson

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In the late 70s, the mysterious, topographical radio waves of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures appeared like a burst of energy in an empty void, signifying the arrival not only of one of the best bands this country has produced but also its finest independent record label, Factory. It’s not too strong to say that Peter Saville’s sleeves for Unknown Pleasures and New Order’s Blue Monday are up there with Peter Blake’s Sargeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and Vaughan Oliver’s 4AD covers. The design mostly matched up to the quality of the music.

The chaotic, quixotic Factory Records existed from 1978 to 1992, from post-punk to rave, and continues to influence those making music now, not only in nostalgic terms but because they were essentially purely about the music – and the design was all about enhancing the music. Ironically, it was on the very front that Factory couldn’t compete that it ended up competing on – design. This is the label whose die-cut Blue Monday single by New Order, the best-selling 12 inch of all time, cost them money every time someone bought the record.

Of course, Factory is most closely associated with the graphic designer Peter Saville. In the summer of 2003 there was a big Saville retrospective, The Peter Saville Show at the Design Museum and a book, Designed by Peter Saville, which of course featured a lot of his work for Factory. [See Spike's interview with Peter Saville]. Saville’s book presented his art work and other writers put it into context with long, considered essays; what this book does instead is simply catalogue the work and provide minimal expositionary notes. Unlike the Saville book, it highlights the work of other people involved in the Factory story and shows how it evolved beyond the visually literate aesthetic of Saville.

The shadow background of the artwork in FAC461 reinforces the idea that these are objects, artefacts, photographed as if from above on mini-plinths. Ironically, a lot of the artwork published here that we are forever told works best as a 12" vinyl or 33rpm sleeve is shown at pretty much the exact dimensions of a compact disc.

There is a fantastically pretentious but sublime introduction from Factory co-founder and twat-about-town Tony Wilson whose register and sentence construction is unique. How about this, with its brilliantly ambivalent "or": "It all began after a very, very bad Patti Smith gig in late 77 or early 78…"; or this, explaining the Factory design rationale, the pick of the crop: "Does the Catholic Church pour its wine into mouldy earthenware pots? I think not." How can one not love this man (other than by meeting him perhaps)? [See Spike's interview with Tony Wilson for much, much more in that vein].

However, Wilson’s got a gimlet eye for the design success of the Happy Mondays album Bummed, writing about its controversial inside sleeve: "It wasn’t the fact that the woman was middle-aged, it wasn’t the shaved pubes, it was the colour quality which made the viewer feel dirty. Sheer genius, that."

The Durutti Column album The Return of the Durutti Column (1979) designed by Dave Rowbotham is composed entirely of sandpaper and was inspired by the situationist Guy Debord‘s Memoires, "a book bound in raw sandpaper designed to damage all other publications around it" – perfect for punk.

Of course, Factory didn’t just operate in two dimensions – as Tony Wilson might have said – there was Ben Kelly’s Hacienda nightclub, for a while the most famous club in the world, with its chevrons, bollards and cats eyes – a kind of theatrical industrial space, which included the Gay Traitor bar, with its spot lights and furtive air of treachery. (Saville said astutely that "Instead of being a monument to the 80s, the Hacienda is the birthplace of the 90s".) Then there was Factory HQ on Charles Street, a disused textile warehouse (since the 70s they had operated from Alan Erasmus’s one-bed flat) – "a mausoleum to the corporate brand that the label could never be", plus the Dry bar, a continental-style bar, one of the first of its kind in England, all in Manchester.

There’s even info here that’s new to a Factory nut like me (and I made sure my son’s initial allowed me to have a FAC family code, though perhaps that’s a retrospective justification), such as the f-hole logo which I’d always taken to be f for Factory but it’s actually f for Fractured Music, Joy Division’s company (fascinating eh?). Also that there was a cigarette pack design for the Joy Division video Here Are The Young Men, got up like 20 John Player Special’s – I want to trade my VHS copy now! There’s even plenty to drool over in corporate terms such as the stationery and the Factory Christmas cards, especially the one from 1987 designed by Johnson Panas (they were of course commissioned and absurdly lavish), a cardboard model kit of the Hacienda.

While Saville continued his "grand tour for the masses", a visual journey of cultural heritage, with the New Order covers taking in De Chirico for Thieves Like Us, Futurist Fortunato Depero’s Dynamo (1927) for Procession (1981) and appropriating Jan Tschichold typography, there is a sense of a fast-approaching dead end. Luckily, the Happy Mondays covers rescued Saville’s anally retentive control freakery and let rip: they were garish, often unreadable and trippy. Happy Mondays’ Lazyitis single by Central Station Design looks as if they can’t be bothered, which is perfect of course, the bloated lettering slurring its way across the sleeve – you half expect the cover to belch in your face.

It’s been 70 years since HG Wells published The Shape of Things to Come but there has been a far more astute chronicler of our contemporary reality living among us in the suburbs for more than half a century. JG Ballard’s gimlet eye for the psychopathology of everyday life has never deserted him. Instead of characters with emotions, a history and a moral compass, Ballard’s fictional landscape is peopled with affectless casualties of the nihilistic, over-mediated consumer landscape, searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. This is fiction as biopsy, and its results are devastating.

Millennium People is the last in a trilogy of detective thrillers – along with Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes – to examine what might happen when all we have left as an ideology is consumerism. “People resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour the next car will be,” he says witheringly. “All we’ve got left is our own psychopathology. It’s the only freedom we have – that’s a dangerous state of affairs.”

I meet Jim Ballard at the Hilton International hotel on Holland Park Avenue. “I used to come here a lot because there was a Japanese restaurant called the Hiroku for many years. It would be impossible to identify your location,” he says approvingly, looking around the virtually deserted lounge we’re sat in with its palm trees and low-level skylight.

Despite reports, Ballard does not permanently reside in the suburbs – he spends two or three days a week in London visiting his girlfriend, Claire. “But living out in Shepperton gives me a close-up view of the real England – the M25, the world of business parks, industrial estates and executive housing, sports clubs and marinas, cineplexes, CCTV, car-rental forecourts… That’s where boredom comes in – a paralysing conformity and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.”

Millennium People begins with a bomb attack at Heathrow airport, which kills three people. The proposition of the novel is that “the middle-classes are the new proletariat”, with the residents of Chelsea Marina, another gated community of his, so sick of school fees, private healthcare costs, stealth taxes and parking meters that they begin to dismantle the “self-imposed burdens” of civic responsibility and consumer culture. They are led, as is the psychologist narrator David Markham, by a charismatic paediatrician, Richard Gould, into attacking the shibboleths of the middle-class metropolis – the National Film Theatre, the BBC, Tate Modern – and then out into the suburbs.

But how seriously do these middle-class rebels take their claims of oppression? At one point in the book, there is the suggestion that the residents of Chelsea Marina might change the street names to those of Japanese film directors, but this is quickly scotched as it “might damage property prices”…

It is full too of perverse inversions and unsettling paradoxes – “Nothing brings out violence like a peaceful demonstration’ or “If your target is the global money system, you don’t attack a bank. You attack the Oxfam shop next door.”

Millennium People describes in part a murder with strong affinities to the Jill Dando case. “What all these murders – Hungerford, Dunblane, Jill Dando – have in common,” says Ballard, “is that they appear to be meaningless. There are no motives. Dando wasn’t even a celebrity. It may be that this is their great appeal.

“There are shifts in the unseen tectonic plates that make up our national consciousness. I’ve tried to nail down a certain kind of nihilism that people may embrace, and which politicians may embrace, which is much more terrifying; all tapping into this vast, untouched resource as big as the Arabian oilfields called psychopathology.”

Ballard continues to be endlessly engaged in what’s happening now. And as he says himself, he’s bucked the trend by becoming more left-wing as he’s got older. He is particularly disturbed by the apparently motiveless actions of our Prime Minister and has been following the “great smokescreen” that is the Hutton Inquiry. “Blair has this evangelical commitment to what he believes is right, and he invents the truth when he can’t find it out in front of him,’ he says incredulously. “I think we’re living in dangerous times and most people aren’t really aware of it. They’re worrying about asylum seekers or abortion or paedophilia…”

Does it get harder the older he gets (he’s 73), to anticipate, as he’s put it before, the next five minutes?

“I have no shortage of ideas and a peculiar kind of compulsion to get them down. Not that it makes a damn bit of difference…”

In what way?

“When you’re a young writer you want to change the world in some small way, but when you get to my age you realise that it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever, but you still go on. It’s a strange way to view the world. If I had my time again, I’d be a journalist. Writing is too solitary. I think journalists have more fun!”

A Box Of Matches – Nicholson Baker

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Or, Something Funny Happened On The Way Down To Tie My Shoelaces. Yes, after a few (highly idiosyncratic) non-fiction outings we’re back in the terrifyingly detailed world of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. Where there were escalators, urinals and drinking straws, there are now cafetieres, soap bars and envelopes.

The novel is 33 short letters from Emmett, 44, to no one in particular, each one presumably representing one of the matches that he uses to light his early morning fires. He has the idea of waking at around 4am each day to be conscious when no one else is, leaving his wife and two children upstairs asleep. This gives him the chance to fully examine his thoughts, which range from oddly lyrical reminiscences about a pet ant to noting how "painfully incongruous" a sock in a bin is – all in some way to do with entropy and a phobia of forgetting (Baker’s narrators always recall Brian Friel’s Translations, "To remember everything is a form of madness"). And, of course, this is not so much a mid-life crisis as a seminar about one.

But for all its many pleasures – Baker’s prose is as sharply intelligent as ever – the even, measured sentences of Emmett can be tiresome. The Mezzanine and its hilarious footnotes had a purpose of tone and variety of cadence that drove the recounting of the exploded lunch hour, whereas Emmett’s reveries with his coffee and pet duck and log fire in the dark are all a bit too cosy, a bit enervated.

Perhaps Baker slyly alludes to his return to this world of micro-observation: "The way to make steady money in the textbook business," writes Emmett, "is to bring out a new edition of your book every two years, whether it needs to or not." Disappointingly, A Box of Matches is in the latter category. Compared with earlier, similar fare then, "average contents" indeed.

Speaking from her home in Aberystwyth on the day of the Stop the War rally, Patricia Duncker is excitedly bellowing down the phone. “My niece called and asked if I was going on the march and I said “ABSOLUTELY NOT”! – I’m all for the war!

“All we are saying,” says the author wearily but with tongue in cheek, “is give war a chance. But, I’m just perverse.”

To judge from Seven Tales of Sex and Death, her impressive new collection of apocalyptic and uncanny short stories, Duncker’s imagination certainly is. From the opening ‘Stalker’, we’re deep in darkly ambiguous territory without a moral compass. Duncker says that she conceived of these gothic tales in response to the narrative cliches of the late-night B-movie dreck that she often finds herself watching on French TV when she’s alone writing. And particularly, she says, those with serial killers: “They are the sex beast in the dark. And the interesting thing about him is that largely he doesn’t exist. Most women are going to be attacked by men they know. So I find that intriguing; the obsession with them is obviously something displaced in our imaginations.

“The first two tales in the new book are based on Ovid, a favourite of mine. Now, Metamorphoses is one rape after another. In Ovid, when you see the gods catching up on you and you are a poor, naked nymph you can transform yourself into something else, whereas of course real women can’t do that.’

Does her imagination take her by surprise?

“I do surprise myself because I’m very interested in what goes in and stays. I have what is known in the family as “The Tape”. I recall everything.”

Everything?

“I have total recall, which is most peculiar and not a blessing. I can run The Tape and I can blank out bits but they’re like deleted messages in a computer – I can undelete the deleted. So that in remembering things, I have no choice in what I remember. I remember everything.”

Duncker, in her writing and in conversation, is clearly steeped in literature. “I read all the time: night and day. My notion of influence is that you want to be influenced. That’s the only way you’re going to get any better. Reading is mainlining adrenaline and blood – it’s where your sense of energy comes from. Writing is about language and other writers and other texts. Behind every book stands another book – it’s up to you to choose what those books are.”

Duncker’s cracking debut novel, Hallucinating Foucault (1996), was about a young English student’s obsession with a novelist, Paul Michel, who is driven insane by the death of Michel Foucault, for which she picked up several best first-novel awards. Duncker followed this up with another critically acclaimed fictional account of a real-life Victorian woman who masqueraded as a man, James Miranda Barry, of which Duncker hopes will soon be a Channel 4 film. As well as her teaching posts at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and in France, she is professor of Creative Writing at UEA. “I love my students,” she enthuses, “especially the 18 to 23-year-olds; when they’re bumptious and full of themselves.”

Duncker agrees that the story ‘Sophia Walters Shaw’, about a man who relives his wife’s rape over and over, is easily the darkest story in Seven Tales…, perhaps because of its uncanny inspiration. “I was working in a castle in Germany as a writer in residence and there were all these painters and sculptors and artists busy shagging away, which was all extremely irritating. So I decided to send off for a pornographic book, because that would be better than nothing,” she explains matter of factly, before breaking off and laughing throatily. “So I sent off to an unmarked address in Basingstoke, and thought I’d use my home address in Wales so it wouldn’t get lost in the German post and my family could send it on. But it never came. But the publishers insisted that it had been signed for and tracked down the Securicor tab – it was signed for at my address by “Sophia Walters Shaw”. Some time later I had a call from the university at Aberystwyth saying that there was a parcel for me, and – lo and behold – there was my book, which had been re-wrapped and re-addressed to me at work. But I’ve never found her. So I wrote the story instead, with the contents of the book in it. So if you’re out there, Sophia, get in touch.”

“Peter Saville drives a skoda”. The appalling idea scared him off of renting one when it was offered in place of the VW Polo that he’d ordered. “I know everyone says they’re really good cars now, but I’m not gonna be in a test group for them. It’s still a Skoda,” he says, terrified that people would think he drove one.

Instead, Saville pulls up at his studios near Old Street, East London in a rented Fiat Stilo, the Doors still playing on the stereo. His own car, a 16-year-old BMW 3 Series, is in the garage and he hasn’t quite got used to the replacement, checking and double-checking that he’s properly locked it. He’s worried about how much the repair bill is going to be when he collects the BMW. In fact, he’s worried about bills full stop.

He has a big tax bill to pay this month, which he says he can’t afford. The bailiffs have been round, who he fended off by lying to them, and the phones have been cut off. Plus his own financial involvement in The Peter Saville Show which opened in May at the Design Museum in London, and a book published by Frieze, has meant that he’s on the verge of personal bankruptcy. Oh, and he’s just about to be kicked out of the house he’s been staying at in West London for the past two years and might have to move in to his studio which hasn’t got a toilet. Or blinds. Or a bed.

You wouldn’t think that this was the same Peter Saville who’s designed some of the most original and iconic album covers ever with Joy Division, New Order, Suede and Pulp; who’s worked for Christian Dior, Givenchy, the Pompidou Centre, EMI and Selfridges, among many, many others; whose seminal work for fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has influenced a decade of “anti-advertising” advertising, and who’s been recently voted the “most admired individual working within the creative industries” in Creative Review. The Peter Saville who’s been quietly amassing an impressive body of work as a graphic artist over the last 25 years, who at the age of 47 is being officially recognised by the mainstream.

It’s the weekend, which means he’s working, and he’s arranged to do some quick picture editing with one of his colleagues, Sascha Behrendt, just before he meets me. But he’s running late, so they have to look at the prints of a shoot he did a few days earlier for Stella McCartney while I’m there. He’s dressed in his trademark white Helmut Lang jeans, a black T-shirt and some tan leather shoes (no socks). He speaks in a soft Mancunian accent deepened by nicotine, and has a distinctive sustain when pronouncing his Rs. Saville puts on his black-framed glasses and goes over to the table to look at large-format Polaroids of Kate Moss in knee-high leather boots. “The professional situations I have at the moment are really quite abusive,” he says matter of factly. “It’s not a straight, commercial relationship I have with my clients. They come to me for something special, and yet for the most part they know that they can get it cheaply and they do, and that offends me. But I have to take what’s on offer.”

He has his lunch at 5pm; a solitary sausage roll, which he’s eating from a large white plate with a knife and fork. What about all these flash restaurants he’s supposed to go to all the time ­ I thought it’d be a take-out from Claridges or something? “I go to the Ivy about once every two months, despite what’s been written,” he laughs. “I spend about £20 on a meal.” He goes off to the kitchen area of his white-floored and white-walled studio space every so often to make himself an espresso in his Richard Sapper stove-top, making sure that everything is left clean and tidy. He mentions that he is going to watch the Monaco grand prix the following day and has been following the qualifying sessions. With his understated elegance and slightly egotistical charm, he could be a poor man’s James Hunt. “Yes, there is some of that going on,” he admits, a little embarrassed by this particular reputation, but he’s more interested in moving from talk of playboy to Playboy: “I’d like to redo Playboy magazine. I find it lamentable that there isn’t an intelligent, erotic magazine. There isn’t a magazine that was like Playboy was 30 years ago, and I find thatŠ dumb. Why isn’t there any intelligent, abstract eroticism? I can find the artist Lucio Fontana’s colour fields incredibly erotic juxtaposed against a bit of Rocco Siffredi [a porn star].”

From 1978 to 1991 when he was art director at Factory Records in Manchester (which he co-founded with Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus) he had carte blanche creatively. He designed the posters for the legendary Hacienda nightclub in the city, the album covers for the Factory bands (Joy Division, New Order, OMD, etc) all seemingly quixotically free of financial considerations. His artwork for the cover of New Order’s Blue Monday 12 inch in 1983 was die-cut to make it resemble a floppy disc, and, depending on whose version of events you believe, cost the record company anywhere from 2p to 75p everytime a copy was bought. Which perhaps would have been fine had it been a limited edition, but it just happened to become the biggest selling 12 inch record ever. “What I did in my local zone was how I wanted everything to be,” says Saville. “I was spoilt in the beginning by being given a big playground to play in and remarkable freedom.”

The very first poster that he designed for Factory with its “Use hearing protection” strapline, along with the architect Ben Kelly’s design for the Hacienda (which Saville collaborated on), foreshadowed the industrial warehouse chic that would come to dominate interior design in the following couple of decades. (After noticing recently that the originals were fetching £1,500 on eBay, Saville decided to produce 500 re-editions of the FAC1 poster which will cost £100 each. But how much this is motivated by the horror that it’s out of the reach of the masses, and how much by what must be a fairly easy income generator, is hard to say.)

With Blue Monday and the earlier New Order album Power, Corruption & Lies there was an interest in coding the work, so that the titles were spelt out in colour. He pushed this idea further with later albums. With New Order’s Brotherhood (1986) and Technique (1989), it was clear whose work it was from the enigmatic, restrained and visually innovative sleeve design, respectively a sheet of Titaanzink metal and a Warholian cherub. One of the persistent legends that attaches to Saville, is that, like the author Douglas Adams, he loves the sound of deadlines whooshing past. Stephen Morris, the drummer of New Order, confirms this, recalling Saville’s most infamous late delivery. “It was the programme he did for us on an American tour that turned up on the last gig, and we’ve still got 1,000s rotting away in a warehouse somewhere that we can’t get rid of.”

But Brett Anderson, the lead singer of Suede, forgives Saville’s tardiness. Anderson is a friend of Saville’s and worked with him very closely on their albums Coming Up and Head Music. “A lot of it was done sitting and chatting and drinking coffee. It’s a real exchange and a discussion. It’s all part of his charm. What you miss with deadline efficiency is made up for by the incredible level of personal care he takes in the work. He really immersed himself in the music. He’s not driven by money or fame, just a genuine quest for aesthetic beauty.” Saville is currently working with the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans on Suede’s greatest hits cover, due for release in September.

Because of his concerns to get a job done right, Peter Saville and business have long had an uneasy relationship. “There’s no notion in any industry that they will wait for graphic design. They will not wait. They’ll spend longer negotiating your work-for-hire contract than giving you to do the job!” he says with rising incredulity. “It’s just the finishing, but it’s in the finishing that you make it or break it.”

Does he think that his deadlines are unrealistic? “They are if you want something resolved or of any quality,” he says. “My problem comes when it’s my work. I become territorial, and self-indulgent and maybe arrogant. If it takes till next Friday, it’s gonna take till next Friday. You know, I had this mistaken understanding of professional when I was younger that it meant being really good.” He laughs in cynical astonishment. “But it’s actually about doing what has to be done within the circumstances within which you are allowed to do it.”

The way Saville tells it, his designs have actually influenced the music. He claims that the musical direction of what was to be Joy Division’s final album, Closer, was guided by its funereal sleeve photograph by Bernard Pierre Wolff (the lead singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself shortly before its release). But Morris, who’s currently in the studio writing songs for New Order’s next album where they recorded the ambient music for the Design Museum retrospective, is having none of it. “I think that’s too strong, but not for Peter,” he says, laughing fondly at such hubris. “I remember him and Rob Gretton [New Order's former manager] having a discussion and the upshot was that Peter said people bought the records for his sleeves, not for the music.”

“I come to every new job as if it’s Everest to climb again,” says Saville, lighting up the next of many, many Gauloises. “I foolishly approach everything as if it’s really important and that it has to be done, in some tiny way perhaps, in a way that it hasn’t been done before. I won’t just repeat myself. I don’t know why I do it. Partly it’s about anxiety and fear. Partly it’s about the music business where people would want something completely different.”

He comes across as a perfectionist, utterly disillusioned with big business, confused by his being in a grey area where art meets design and wanting to break free of his financial bonds and take a new direction. One can’t help but feel that with the kind of reckless candour with which he talks about the shortcomings of just about every client he’s ever worked for he’s trying to talk himself away from commercial art through autosuggestion. Icon’s photographer, Jamie, met Saville a few days earlier and was taken aback: “He was unable to resist art directing himself in the local playgrounds and parks. And I was amazed at how open and warm he was.”

Saville clearly has a lot of steam to let off. “Absolutely everything except the creative act is stretched out as long as is needed and there’s this notion that you can resolve the creative issues and problems [clicks his fingers] like that’s the bigger the budget the more people sign-off, the more bland and generic it will be. No one wants to take a chance. I mean, what is happening in car design? It’s either hideously bland or really quite perverse.” The record industry was only ever going to be a professional cul-de-sac for someone fast-approaching 30, and Saville seems more savvy than Machiavellian when he says that he “learnt quickly how to manipulate the record industry to my own ends. I took a selfish, bloody-minded approach to the work and I made life hell for the people who were paying for it. To me the work was going to be my passport out of it.”

With Peter Saville Associates in financial crisis and Factory Records on the verge of collapse, he finally hit commercial reality in 1990 and joined the Pentagram group in LA as a partner. With Saville’s odd working hours ­ he rarely gets up before the afternoon and works until midnight ­ and his antipathy, not to say hostility, towards corporate till-ringing, the relationship was doomed from the start. “I just will not make this analogy between what I’m being paid and how much time we spend on it. It gets as much time as it needs.”

The current interest in Saville has a lot to do with the demographics of the creative industries. There is a whole generation who grew up as fans of, in particular, Roxy Music, Joy Division and New Order, who are now making the decisions. “When I first met the president of Givenchy Parfum,” says Saville, “he said ‘Oh, Monsieur Saville, I am a fan of Joy Division, I am a fan of Peter Saville.’ I was 45 and he was 39.”

And it wasn’t just with couture fashion. “Throughout the Eighties I saw the High Street convert. At Next, I saw so much of what I’d done for Ultravox. It was everywhere.” He explains: “At the design firms, the grown-ups weren’t hands-on anymore and the work was left to the kids.”

At the Design Museum retrospective (designed by the architect Lindi Roy), Saville’s work is arranged chronologically. The middle section is very dark, and shows his catalogue and advertising work for the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. The Game Over series of photo library stock images from 1991 ­ for Yamamoto ­ captures the sense of consumerist exhaustion and overkill amid an impending recession, which has been much copied in terms of its abstraction and typography. A Guide To Never-Never Land adumbrates the future of advertising in the 1990s, where the product is so far off the page that it almost becomes anti-advertising advertising. A car production line, all flashbulbs and gleaming surfaces, stretches off into an infinite hell of consumerism, as much a break with reality as Saville’s image is from Yamamoto’s clothing.

When he’s talking about the retrospective, it seems as if Saville’s incapable of letting go and trusting his work to others. “I’m unhappy towards the people who I do the work for,” he says. “That’s my mood right now, which is kind of ironic after what would appear to be a successful show and book. It’s not what you would imagine. No one has gathered a comprehensive review of the work done by Peter Saville Studios over 25 years and looked at it in order to write about it or curate a proper show for a museum. Nobody. Has. Looked. At. The Work.” He says that the Design Museum exhibition lacks context, that there is nothing explaining why the work is important. And when he says that the show is his “greatest hits”, he means it pejoratively.

Although he sounds exhausted by the demands of running his business, he talks hopefully about the future. There is the Pirelli calendar that he’s working on with the photographer Nick Knight, a long-time collaborator, and which, despite being “a bit cheesy”, has kept his interest. A project he’s working on for the software company Adobe and its Photoshop packaging neatly ties in his attraction to recycling and to reflecting contemporary ways of living. In 1998, he started to experiment with the Wave filter on Photoshop and found that he could produce stunning digital paintings with all kinds of imagery, starting with New Order covers. “What’s interesting when we make the Waste Paintings is that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s fascinating. We did one last week and it was mindboggling. We did it for the Adobe project. If I could work a computer, I’d show it to you! It’s beautiful. Print it out ­ it’s done.”

Saville has spent years agonising over a context or concept in which to place his many boxes of notebooks full of thoughts, sketches and ideas. “I was interested in the industrial estate, the country estate ­ different ways of understanding the word estate. It led me to ‘Estate of’. I though, shit, if I retire or die what will someone do with all of this stuff that I haven’t been able to work out? They’ll put it all together and they’ll catalogue it, and flog it. I thought, well why don’t I?”

It would appear to have opened up possibilities for the graphic designer to move forward with his work and at last untie himself from those abusive client relationships. “A few years ago I was giving myself a hard time about not being an artist because what is it that I do regardless of other things? And then I realised ­ oh, I do this [the notebooks]. I’d done the work. I’d been filling notebooks for 10 years about the things I ought to do ­ preparatory notes. I’d done the work, but I’d never thought about it as writing it.”

This is the big project, after all the hassle with clients and the financial frustrations and worries of his studio work, that he wants to do next, with himself as client: “I’ve learnt not to leave this kind of thing to chance.”

[This article previously appeard in Icon magazine]

Chris Hall: First off, congratulations on the birth of your new son, Luther.

Will Self: Yeah, little baby Luther. He was born on August 8, so he’s a couple of months old now.

CH: So I suppose you’ve had people pointing out the Superman connection with your other son Alexis (i.e. Lex Luther)?

WS: Yes… It just arose. In my experience with names, they just arise. I was always quite keen on Dmitri because Alexis and Ivan so with the third one you could have the Brothers Karamazov. But Deborah didn’t think that was funny.

CH: So how do you find the time for all this writing then?

WS: Well, I have cycled back quite a lot this year in that I resigned from the Independent before Luther was born, so it’s the first time in more or less 10 years when I haven’t had an ongoing newspaper contract. So, I took fairly extensive paternity leave. But, you know now it’s building back up again.

CH: No plans for a regular column again?

WS: I don’t think I’m going to take another weekly contract of any kind in the foreseeable future. I’ve got this floating series of interviews with women that I was doing for the Sindie [Independent on Sunday], none of which are in Feeding Frenzy [Amazon] but which will get a book of their own. I must of done 20 to 25 women over the last two to three years but I wanna do about another ten before I pick my best women to put in the book. But, I haven’t found a home for my women yet. I mean, the Independent were happy for me to do them freelance but to be frank I just wasn’t interested.

CH: Why did you only interview women?

WS: I like women! Dammit, I like women!

CH: You gave Margaret Beckett the full treatment didn’t you?

WS: I was very mean to her. And of course you always regret it because I think in interviewing there’s a real sense of ‘did I have a successful bowel movement that morning’ kind of feeling about it isn’t there? You go in to interview someone and you’re constipated and you think they’re the worst person you’ve met and you go in to see them another day when your stomach is full of gaily coloured butterflies and you think they’re the best thing since sliced bread so you grow weary of that as an interviewer if you’ve got any wisdom – but at the same time if dyspepsia collides with something you perceive in the other person you just let rip.

The problem with interviewing, which is an aspect of our culture, is that there seems to be a licence to be psychically ruthless. It’s almost encumbent upon an interviewer to allow themselves the full traverse of the psychic rifle.

CH: And Tracey Emin, who you said was a termagant?

WS: Yeah…you know I kind of resent it when people interview me and assume that, because I’ve been well-known for a fair amount of time, that it’s kind of open season, but the truth of the matter is that Tracey really liked that piece. You have to ask yourself why is that and quite frankly when it comes to Tracey, although one or two of her pieces have a certain odd, jejune quality, her art work is essentially a peg on which she hangs her media persona which is her main work.

So she didn’t mind that piece and I think that that’s what you’re up against with a certain kind of interview subject. Now with Beckett I’m perfectly confident that she really hated and was upset by that piece and I noticed that after it she started to make some very sour comments on the media publicly for quite a while. But you know, she’s a politician, you have to reckon that someone’s going to take down verbatim what you’re saying. Why wouldn’t they?

CH: Do you normally use a tape machine?

WS: Well, I think that’s why the Beckett interview was such a devastating piece because I just transcribed answers to questions. Because she talked such complete bollocks. You know, why bother?

CH: Is one of the attractions to journalism the lack of needing to suspend your disbelief so much?

WS: I think it’s an opportunity to get you out and about. It gets you interacting with the world in all sorts of different ways. It also gives you the opportunity, funnily enough, to suspend disbelief more readily because you’re presented with an area of fact that you can then instantly turn into an area of fiction or at any rate embellish in some way. I’m not making great claims for my journalism but I think that what I do that gives me cachet and makes editors want to employ me is really colour writing, it’s really lifting what otherwise might be fairly dry into something that is quite outlandish sometimes. I suppose I am in some ways a practitioner of gonzo/new journalism in that I am prepared to inject my own warped sensibilities into a piece.

CH: You say that you read very little fiction now, a problem with suspension of disbelief, but do you just mean new fiction or do you really not read the classics?

WS: No, I don’t read classic fiction either.

CH: I was thinking of the Amis line about disparaging your youngers but exalting your elders…

WS: What you mean so you don’t see us nipping at your heels? No, I don’t think that’s the way I think about it, but unlike Martin, I’ve never been a sort of fiction-open person. Martin exists in a perpetual competition of some sort, whereas I’m absolutely convinced that only pets win prizes and I don’t think that literary art is a competition of any sort.

CH: Don’t suppose you saw the Booker prize the other day then?

WS: No. I mean what could you possibly win, apart from cash and the kind of frankly transitory and ephemeral applause of certain kinds?

CH: I suppose there is the argument of reaching out to a wider audience…

WS: You could say that the whole kind of prize giving and the whole Lit Crit newspaper based establishment represents a kind of infotainment service for fiction in that way, and beyond a certain point it doesn’t make a work a great work – it doesn’t really change someone’s life or supply that missing X factor that makes them exponentially increase their involvement with the world or with literature. Those things are not what make a work last. The only thing that makes a work last is lasting. And that again you cannot tell. You can look at countless examples of that, of books that have lasted that you wouldn’t have reckoned on lasting.

I’ve just finished writing a long introductory essay for the Penguin Modern Classics of Junky [Amazon]. I mean who would have thought that Junky, published back in 1953 as a paperback bound back to back with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent for 35 cents, a penny dreadful shocker, would become probably the greatest confessional novel about heroin addiction written in the 20th century – and I think undoubtedly so.

CH: That must have something to do with his subsequent notoriety though.

WS: Oh no, I think that even if he’d written nothing else it would still stand.

CH: Junky‘s very hard-boiled isn’t it?

WS: It is, in fact he took Hammett as his model for it.

CH: He wrote that as William Lee didn’t he?

WS: Yes, for a Burroughsian it’s got a lot of sign posts towards later theories and fictional methods that he then took up and practiced through Naked Lunch, etc, but actually it’s a really good book. I make the argument in my essay that it’s one of the great existentialist novels, that it’s on a par with Nausea [Amazon] or The Fall [Amazon].

War and pacifism

CH: Someone was interested in a recent Today essay that defined the boundaries of your pacifism. They wanted to know why this position is marginalised by the media?

WS: Well, I think States depend upon a component of armed force – they depend upon the notion of coercion at some level and it’s very hard to find a state that hasn’t had a standing army or militia of some kind. So I think the notion of armed force and violence is integral to the kind of command-based hierarchies that states have. To paraphrase Dubya, “anyone who isn’t with us is against us”, so if you’re against all armed force you’re going to be necessarily squeezed out of the discourse. It won’t even be conscious, there will be people who simply cannot hear what you’re saying because it’s so inimical to their idea of state authority.

I think this war has rather crystallised my pacifism. I think in the past I was like a lot of people who said I’ve got pacifistic inclination but I’m not a pacifist because what I couldn’t find in my own mind was the answer to that perennial question: ‘Ah, yes, but what would you have done when the Nazis were coming?’ And as someone with Jewish blood I’ve always found that difficult to answer, but the thing with this war which makes it so wrong in so many different ways is.that it exposes that argument about the Nazis as a specious argument, in that it assumes a conditional assumption i.e. that you are in 1939, because it can be answered with a similar kind of conditional question: ‘But hang on a minute, if everyone had been a pacifist in 1914 then the Nazis would never have come to power.’

So that to me pushes up the argument to let’s just be pacifists now. Maybe that’s the adequate moral response to the phenomenon of violence in all the forms – I get really angry in the street like we all do. I’ve now taken to bicycling, so I get cut up on my bicycle and I get absolutely furious because it’s so dangerous. I’m a big guy and I’m a very aggressive guy and I feel tempted to rip open cars doors and pull people out and beat them to a bloody pulp but, hey, I don’t do it. It seems to me that there comes a point in your life as a moral being in society where you decide that violence is not the solution to car incidents so there can be the same kind of decision at a macro level.

CH: But it’s still your first response though; you’re not claiming to not have those thoughts?

WS: Well I think that people who say they don’t even think like that anymore are probably self-deceiving. I think it says somewhere in How The Dead Live [Amazon] that there’s no one as angry as an Occidental Buddhist and there’s nobody less forgiving than a fundamentalist born-again Christian. You have to acknowledge the impulse to violence, to say that it’s completely gone is a dangerous thing.

CH: What would you do with the World Trade Centre site?

WS: Mmm.. I’d be leery of venturing an opinion on that. It seems to me that’s something for the people of Manhattan to decide. It’s a grotesque singularity, the snuffing out of that many lives in one place… it also seems to me that it’s going to be an inevitable equivocation between civic pride and something to do with the symbolism of what has occurred.

CH: Is it true about you doing the new series of Shooting Stars with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer?

WS: Yes, that is true. I’ve replaced Mark Lamarr.

CH: Given that Lamaar became the greasy Fifties throwback, what have they got in store for you?

WS: I can assure people that that has not been my fate. In fact, au contraire, I have become a sinister kind of John Dee-type figure who controls Vic’s mind by use of instantiated eye beams which fiddle with his mind.

CH: This just developed organically?

WS: Yes, it developed organically over the show that Vic, Jim Moir, became convinced that I was controlling his mind. I think I’ve claimed the upper hand there actually… It was a fun show to do not least because it’s pretty good not to take yourself too seriously, and to get paid well for not taking yourself too seriously is a real bonus. I’m not sure how good I’m going to be on it because it’s not quite my humour, it’s not verbally based, it’s very visual humour – they are rubber-legged funny men. I hope it works for their sake, after all it’s not my main gig but it is theirs.

Water, water everywhere

CH: You’ve written of the benefits to the imagination of living near a large body of water. Could this be why you live so close to the Thames, albeit unconsciously?

WS: Mmm, I think with the Thames… Mmm, yeah I suppose that it does help. I hadn’t really considered that aspect of it: it is tidal, it does move. With the Thames I always think that because it’s such a conspicuous piece of physical geography going right through the heart of something that is oppressively human in that way that it annuls or at any rate vitiates the oppressive sense of human geography and provides you with a sense of topography really, because you know you’re next to a river, you know you’re in a river valley, you know you’re on a planet that has natural features whereas if you’re just in the middle of Acton then it’s rather difficult to hang on to -

CH: You’ve got it in for Acton haven’t you?

WS: I’m thinking of moving to Acton actually. That’s why it comes to mind. I concede that the river may have been why I chose to live in Vauxhall. In fact, I was looking at renting as an office, a very unusual house-boaty thing that’s down by Cringle Dock waste disposal station in the lea of Battersea Power Station, which is this weird thing on two great pontoons built by a load of Finnish architectural students. But I just wouldn’t spend enough time on it to make it practical, but the idea of writing on top of a body of water was enormously appealing.

Schzoid sensitivity

CH: On the South Bank Show a few years back you said that a psychologist had put “schizoid personality” on your case notes. Now, this might sound like a conceit from your own fiction, but I got the impression that you might have interpreted this as meaning that you were schizophrenic, but diagnostically it means a personality disorder characterised by “extreme shyness and oversensitivity to others”.

WS: I did know that, but the same diagnosis had borderline personality written down as well which would be another form of that. But, increasingly I’ve come to view addiction itself as a mimetic illness in that way – it mimics other psychopathologies. People who essentially have addictive personalities are diagnosed as manic depressive or schizophrenic or certainly depressive. What they really are is addicts. The addiction decides, if you think of it as an autonomous thing, to pretends to be another pathology because the addict finds it bizzarely more comfortable to think of themselves as schizophrenic or manic depressive or whatever, rather than confront the fact that they are an addict which of course means that they’re going to have to stop doing what they want to do above all.

CH: So are you shy and sensitive?

WS: I think I am still quite shy. A lot of the extroversion or flamboyance is always a compensation. It’s better to tough it out rather than sit there cowering.

CH: Did you retreat from the limelight after being found snorting heroin aboard John Major’s plane during the 1997 election?

WS: No, not at all. Two things happened on that front. One was that I didn’t go to ground which was useful. In fact, I counter-attacked. I rolled with the punch in the initial aftermath. Doing Have I Got News For You was quite frankly a calculated thing to defuse criticism. I think that there’s a certain level at which English or British society operates as a kind of particularly beastly lower sixth form common room. If I’d gone to ground at that point I think I would have been in trouble. And it did serve to defuse interest in it.

The other thing is cleaning up from drugs. It made me less interesting to people in that kind of prurient way. And there’s always that level in the media and society as a whole just as the papers are full of stories about illicit drugs and strange sexual practices so that was the basic voyeuristic level of interest in me as someone who got completely fucked up on drugs and booze. And if you’re not doing that anymore then you’re not vulnerable in that way.

CH: Have you read your brother Jonathan’s book, Self Abuse [Amazon], which is partly about growing up in what he sees as a dysfunctional family. Can you comment?

WS: Well, I can’t. I have read it, but I made a pact with myself not to comment on it publicly because I just don’t do that stuff. What I can say in answer to the question is that there are a lot of factual inaccuracies in it.

CH: The introduction to Feeding Frenzy refers to a cabal of restaurateurs who wanted shot of you saying you’d tried to buy drugs off the doorman of his restaurant…

WS: That was before [the Major incident] of course. That was actually a malevolent restaurateur rather than the tabloids themselves. He was someone who didn’t like the reviews I’d been giving his restaurants.

CH: So there genuinely was this plan to get rid of you?

WS: Oh yeah, that’s true.

CH: A cabal?

WS: Yeah, as far as I know is true as well. That’s not just rhetorical rubbish.

CH: That’s a bit weird isn’t it?

WS: No, it’s not weird. I mean I don’t think it was said with any great seriousness. What I think is, you know what these guys are like, they all sit around getting drunk and think ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could bump off Will Self?’. I don’t think they were serious but it does show you the level of naffness and the extent to which criticism can bite. I remember Deborah pointed out when I said ‘I don’t know why these fucking celebrity egg flippers get so upset about these reviews, you know they go on parceling up three bits of raddicio for £45, why are they bothered?’ and she said ‘Well, some of them really do regard what they do as an art form’

CH: You often just criticised the interior design of the restaurant rather than the food…

WS: Well, these guys, and I do know some of them, aren’t stupid, what they realise is that by concentrating on the restaurant you’re completely dissing the food and the whole culture that they represent in which it’s really important to drizzle olive oil in a particular way. You’re saying that ‘Hang on, this isn’t important’. Not only is it not important it’s a kind of grotesque moral singularity: You’re sitting around thinking about adding huge amounts of monetary value to ingredients that would barely keep a starving Somalian alive for a day. If you start criticising the food you start to take it on its own terms. You can’t allow it that much credence. You’ve suspended disbelief in what’s being done. Whereas my approach was to say ‘I just don’t buy any of this shit’ you know.

Novel uses

CH: I liked the long ‘travel’ piece you wrote in Australia. You’re very much a spiritual person aren’t you?

WS: Yes, when I went to see the whirling dervishes. Yes, I think so. Middle-age tends to afflict us in this way doesn’t it? And I think that cleaning up from drugs necessarily entails a revaluation of the spiritual facet of yourself. In order to shut off an entirely self-destructive way of life you have to look for a positive direction. But I think for people viewing my fictional work it’s always been there. I think that, this is a broad brush, but people tend to mistake me for a nihilist but I’m not really like this at all.

CH: Ballard gets misunderstood in that way too.

WS: Yes, I don’t think people really get what he’s up to in that respect. I think people who do understand, really understand, and people who don’t understand just don’t understand it. I’m unashamed of saying that: that I am more interested in spiritual questions. I’m looking at writing a novel about revealed religion at the moment.

CH: What about the other novel you were writing on ‘land use’?

WS: Yeah, if only I’d written it before foot and mouth. No, I mean what I wanted to do was set something in a rural context and that’s what I will do with this book on revealed religion. It’s not about the farm industry. I’m engaged in rather an odd thing which is that I’m going to turn a screenplay of Dorian Gray that I’ve been writing for about three years back into a novel.

So, I’m basically going to rewrite Oscar Wilde [Amazon], which is something I would have never done off my own back, but having been commissioned to write a screenplay and realising the very strong likelihood that it will never get made, I wanted to make something out of the material I already had.

I’ve transposed Dorian to the gay scene of the 1980s and 90s, into the epicentre of the Aids epidemic and I think it’s an interesting treatment of it and it’ll make an interesting novella. So that’s going to be the next fictional project. The fascinating thing about Dorian is that – I’ll probably get hung, drawn and quartered for this – it’s not actually that great a novel. What it is is an incredibly powerful cultural idea.

Just like the idea that Dorian himself is impervious to time, so the text itself has been impervious to time because in many ways it, rather like a Ballard book – you know he’s one of the very few writers to have been able to foretell the cultural future in that way. Wilde foretold the probable shape of a kind of aggressively “out” gay culture in the 20th century. I think that’s what’s fascinating about Dorian and the way in which gay culture in the late 20th century has become a synechdoche of the narcissism, and media obsession of western culture as a novel, and that’s where I pick up on it today.

CH: So it’s nearing completion?

WS: Err, no. But I would like it to be published some time next year, but when I really get my teeth into something it comes fairly quickly, and it is all there. It just says “Interior. Night. Scene 82. A bar in Greenwich Village.” I have to knock all those out and put it into prose and I’ve got a book hopefully.

CH: Have you been approached by any filmmakers regarding adaptations of your stories?

WS: An amateur made an amateur film of Cock And Bull [Amazon], which he wanted to push commercially, but after seeing it I confess I denied permission for this. In truth, I never would’ve allowed the amateur production to go ahead had he not come on with a sad story about already having spent aeons working on the screenplay. Cock has also been optioned for film twice by the producer Christine Vachon (‘Boys Don’t Cry’) but nothing has come of it, despite my seeing one excellent screenplay written by a guy called Nix (I kid you not). Otherwise, not a single one of the other narratives has been optioned.

CH: Would you be amenable to films made of your work, or do think it might be disastrous?

WS: I think for a writer it’s an almost always an artistic lose-lose scenario. Either you take the money and abrogate all responsibility for the finished article (which then, in all likelihood, ill serves the original), or else you take less money and become creatively involved (if they’ll have you), in which case, in all probability, your participation will be vitiated to the point where it makes no difference anyway. I know several of my peers who have spent years working on film adaptations of their work, only for them either to come out badly, or else not come out at all. Martin Amis has it about right when he says: ‘Don’t believe they’ve made a movie of your book until you rent the video.’ In part, I feel obscurely satisfied that there have been no film adaptations. To my mind it proves that I’m doing something which can only be done in the form of prose fiction. Mind you, the bank manager might well have a different take on this.

CH: Which stories would you be interested in seeing adapted?

WS: I’ve always felt that ‘Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys’ (the story) would make a great British road movie. The problem with road movies in Britain is that there isn’t usually enough road, but by starting in Caithness, on the north coast of Scotland, and having scenes the entire way to London, I think this story avoids the usual pitfalls. I’ve even gone so far as to rough out a scene plan for it, but because of all the problems mentioned above, I’ve never gone any further. I also think ‘The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz’ together with its sequel ‘The Nonce Prize’ would make a good movie. As for the novels, well, Cock would be good (no sight of the genitals – just reaction shots); and Great Apes [Amazon], I feel, could be made quite easily and effectively, by simply having humans play chimpanzees, without any makeup, just half-naked, copulating freely, grooming etc.. And with subtitles (they would sign as in the book).

CH: Which filmmakers would you trust with your work?

WS: Completely trust? Well, Cronenberg for Cock, Gilliam for My Idea of Fun [Amazon] or How the Dead Live.

CH: And finally, what question would you ask yourself?

WS: Erm, I think the question I ask myself most is, and this comes up particularly in relation to this anti-war stuff which is the first public political thing that I’ve put my head above the parapet for kind of ever. So I’d be inclined to ask myself: do you really believe that your work as a writer represents a significant or a meaningful contribution to political and social debate or do you think there’s something more you should be doing? So that’s the kind of question I tend to ask myself most.

Fin

If you mention to any intelligent individual under the age of 25 that you saw Nirvana and The Pixies live you’ll get a response along the lines of “you lucky bastard”. However, if you say that you saw Bill Hicks live, the reaction is qualitatively different. There is a crestfallen look. For those fans who have come to worship him from his albums and videos, it only reinforces the knowledge that they will never see this late and very great comedian for as long as they live. He died in February 1994 from pancreatic cancer at the pitifully young age of 32.

I only saw Hicks play the once but the memory of that evening is as seared into the cerebral cortex as so much steak on a griddle. I still have the fading ticket: “Bill Hicks. Brighton Festival. Sun 10 May 1992. 8pm. Comp.” Complimentary because this was also my first review for the university magazine I wrote for. The expectancy of that evening was immense. There had been a Channel 4 programme on him and we had picked up snippets from time to time from the NME and Montreal Comedy Festival clips. Here was someone taking an interest in the outside world again, not ploughing a furrow of flim-flam – Is It Me Or Is Airline Food Really Bad? For my friends and me, just on the evidence of that evening, Hicks was the greatest comedian there ever had been, or ever would be.

For some, humourless PC types, his “goat-boy” persona threw them off track. It was the side of Hicks that mined personal, rather than political, obsessions (of course, not necessarily his own obsessions). It was difficult for some to square the Marxist, sub-Chomsky perspectives with a man who would talk about renting “Clam Lappers” and “Anal Entry volume 500″ from his local video store. Live, Hicks was more extreme in all directions. The time I saw him, people in the front row must have been deafened by his screams of admonition to boy pop bands of the day to “Play with your fucking heart!” (How perceptive I was in noting in my review, with what I obviously thought of as devastating understatement, that Hicks was “more Lenny Bruce than Lenny Bennett”). He also had a peculiar air of physical omniscience over the spatio-temporal coordinates of the room, where he cadged a Silk Cut from someone at the front of the audience and dropped it only to catch it without looking at it and without his eyes straying from us to say nonchalantly “I doubt it…” before lighting it in one graceful movement.

Even though the act was honed and down pat so that he could riff around it (“excuse me why I plaster on a fake smile and plough through this shit one more time”) when I saw him at Brighton he was consummate in fielding questions from the audience (on subjects as diverse as the then recently launched Euro Disney in Paris to how Labour lost the 1992 general election).

I thought of Hicks as soon as Dubyah “won” the US election. One could simply replay the Hicks material about George Bush from the time of the Gulf War and apply it to Bush II. History repeating itself first as farce and then as a Bill Hicks routine. Where was Hicks when we needed him during Clinton’s dreadful Presidency? The Lewinsky affair, the impeachment hearings, the Presidential pardons – you feel that he would of made such an incredible impact had he lived. Who knows, perhaps he would of given direction to the growing Western response of anti-capitalism? He was that inspirational.

Hicks used comedy in a way that Lenny Bruce had used it in the Sixties, as a consciousness-expanding one. The appeal was one of a manichaean righteousness that could of course slide into savage arrogance. There is a joke he tells about a waffle waitress who, seeing him reading a book, asks him “Why y’all reading for?” to which he replies, and it’s hard not to blanch from the savagery of it: “Well, I guess I read for a lot of reasons, the main one being so I don’t end up being a fucking waffle waitress.” So there we have it – comedy that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, but which makes sure to afflict the afflicted as well.

In the evolutionary sense, a subject he was particularly interested in, Hicks’s lines continue to be highly successful memes: “You’re not human till you’re in my phone book”, “Human beings are just a virus in shoes”, etc. I can’t of been the only one to notice in the dark poetry of Hicks’s faux heartfelt tribute to his dying Grandma who he wants to see used in stunts in a martial arts film, the intimation that here was potentially a great writer too: “Do you want your grandmother dying like a little bird in some hospital room, her translucent skin so thin you can see her last heartbeat work its way down her blue veins? Or do you want her to meet Chuck Norris?”

Hicks arrived, in mass media terms, at the tail end of those seemingly monolithic Republican and Conservative governments of the 1980s and early 1990s and what a fillip it was to have such a hardcore exorcism of our anxieties and anger. We loved the fact that here was someone you genuinely knew would never sell out (hear Hicks’s response on Rant in E-Minor to a British company that wanted him to advertise their “Orange Drink”). For a while, my girlfriend and I kept our own “Artistic Roll Call” on the wall, where we would strike through the names of “artists” who’d just appeared in an ad for family hatchbacks or a new online banking service (“Do an ad, and you’re off the artistic roll-call for ever.”). It was a depressing and shaming list.

Part of the sadness at Hicks’s death was the sense that a powerful, not just a very funny, political critic had been lost, and one who was irreplaceable. He has cast a very long shadow for comedians since his death. Someone that unique is always going to bring out the imitators, the paraders of his feathers (the lamentable British film Human Traffic has a Hicks segment on drugs, and even has the gall to end the film with one of his lines).

One doesn’t have to strain that hard to hear the tropes or cadences of Hicks in any number of present-day comedians. I saw Rich Hall, a Perrier Award winner no less, shamelessly adapt Hicks’s Jay Leno fantasy routine where Leno, the straw man who has the revelation “Oh my God! What have I done with my life?”, shoots himself and a spray of blood in the shape of the NBC peacock is produced (with the venomous pay-off: “A corporate man to the bitter end”). But righteous anger is not so easily commodified or corrupted, as Denis Leary must have realised by now. To my mind, Rob Newman is the only comedian to have come even close to Hicks’s level of insight and intensity.

Mark Thomas said witheringly in interview, “If he couldn’t be angry when he had a few months to live, then there’s something wrong.” (Thomas told me rather laughably that he felt that “Hicks is the American Mark Thomas” and that Hicks was doing very similar material to him when Thomas went to see Hicks at Edinburgh.)

What’s even more galling is the conflation in the minds of some people of Hicks with Leary. Yes, they both smoked a lot, yes, they both wore black. End of similarity. Leary is (or should I say was?) a one-trick hack, the one trick being No Cure For Cancer, who ended up taking “cameo” roles in films like Judgement Night and Demolition Man while advertising piss-weak beer (“Another corporate shill at the capitalist gang-bang”).

The appetite among his fans for all things Hicks is partly a function of the lack of a biography – the Nick Doody biography has been due to be published for years.- or much new material since the posthumously released Rant in E Minor and Arizona Bay. Given that Hicks was gigging from the age of 14 in Austin, Texas (incidentally where Jenna Bush, Dubyah’s 19-year-old daughter, was recently arrested for under-age drinking) right through to his death aged 32 there must be a lot of material that hasn’t been seen yet. Hicks’s friend Kevin Booth, who ran Sacred Cow Productions with him, runs an excellent website dedicated to Bill Hicks, www.billhicks.com, which occasionally adds new audio and video clips of Hicks.

In America, as far as I can gather, he was a genuinely marginalised figure, and continues to be. There was a sense, though, that, as in the case of that other great American maverick export Jimi Hendrix, it was maybe going to be a case of Hicks making it in Britain first. I met a journalist in San Francisco, Jack Boulware, who interviewed Hicks for Arena magazine in the States. He told me that the reason he thought Hicks was beyond the pale in America was simply that he seemed to be so anti-American. It’s often said, quite rightly, that Hicks was in essence a preacher (indeed he admitted it himself) and I’ve always thought of him as Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, choosing not self-aggrandisement but enlightenment, beating sense into comatose America with those fists marked love and hate.

A fascinating Index on Censorship article from December Issue 6 2000 details the machinations that prevented Hicks’s segment from being broadcast on an edition of the David Letterman show (he’d appeared 11 times before on the same show). Hicks’s letter to the journalist John Lahr – his Dear John letter to life in some ways – is a cri de coeur: “Jokes, John: this is what America now fears – one man with a point of view, speaking out, unafraid of our vaunted institutions, or the loathsome superstitions the CBS hierarchy feels the masses (the herd) use as their religion.” One of the “hot points” that CBS highlights as “unsuitable for our audience” is the following “pro-life” skit:

Bill Hicks: You know who’s really bugging me these days. These pro-lifers … Smattering of applause. Bill: You ever look at their faces? ‘I’m pro-life!’ (Bill makes a pinched face of hate and fear, his lips are pursed as though he’s just sucked on a lemon.) Bill: ‘I’m pro-life!’ Boy, they look it don’t they? They just exude joie de vivre. You just want to hang with them and play Trivial Pursuit all night long. Audience chuckles. Bill: You know what bugs me about them? If you’re so pro-life, do me a favour – don’t lock arms and block medical clinics. If you’re so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries. Audience laughs. Bill: Let’s see how committed you are to this idea. (Bill mimes the pursed lipped pro-lifers locking arms.) Bill: (as pro-lifer) She can’t come in! Audience laughs. Bill: (as confused member of funeral procession) She was 98. She was hit by a bus! Audience laughs. Bill: (as pro-lifer) There’s options! Audience laughs. Bill: (as confused member of funeral procession) What else can we do? Have her stuffed? Audience laughs. Bill: I want to see pro-lifers with crowbars at funerals opening caskets – ‘get out!’ Then I’d be really impressed by their mission. Audience laughs and applauds.

Hicks ends his letter to John Lahr with a passionate plea for sanity: “This is what I think CBS, the producers of the Letterman show, the networks and governments fear the most – that one man free, expressing his own thoughts and point of view, might somehow inspire others to think for themselves and listen to that voice of reason inside them, and then perhaps, one by one we will awaken from this dream of lies and illusions that the world, the governments and their propaganda arm, the mainstream media, feeds us continuously over 52 channels, 24 hours a day.

“What I realised was that they don’t want the people to be awake. The elite ruling class wants us asleep so we’ll remain a docile, apathetic herd of passive consumers and non-participants in the true agendas of our governments, which is to keep us separate and present an image of a world filled with unresolvable problems, that they, and only they, might somewhere, in the never-arriving future, may be able to solve. Just stay asleep, America. Keep watching television. Keep paying attention to the infinite witnesses of illusion we provide you over ‘Lucifer’s Dream Box’.”

For anyone doubting the veracity of Hicks’s analysis, a good recent example of news being managed in such a way that it keeps us “passive non-participants” is the virtual US press black out over the recent Kyoto protocol all under the guise, no doubt, of it being of no interest to the American public that the US has an appalling environmental record.

Hicks has his revelation while watching the Letterman show the week after being pulled. The scales fall away from his eyes, and he’s looking at the real reason. He’s looking at a “pro-life” commercial.

Gore Vidal once gave a definition of real politics as “Who collects what money from whom to spend on whom for what” with the corollary that “no politician in the US dares address that subject for fear we’ll discover who bought him and for how much.” Follow the money, indeed. And what was one of the very first things that Dubyah did as President? It was to cancel the funding of abortion clinics abroad.

London – Peter Ackroyd

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Those who have read Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem will recall that the word golem comes from the medieval Jewish for an artificial human being brought to life by supernatural means, a “thing without form”. Ackroyd’s latest book, London: The Biography, has itself managed to breathe life into a seemingly formless city – a tangible sense of London as a living organism permeates this remarkable work.

Indeed, even the endpapers show “seven phases in the evolution of Old London Bridge, 1209-1831″, perhaps a subtle reinforcement of his idea that London is a living organism, that it has a “human shape”, echoing the seven stages of man.

He has a strong faith in London as a palimpsest: “London has always been an ugly city… It has always been rebuilt, and demolished, and vandalised… one of the characteristics of London planners and builders, over the centuries, has been the recklessness with which they have destroyed the city’s past.”

There is a fascination with London as a built environment (after all, he does say that London is made “half of stone half of flesh”), of what London does to its citizens. There is the novelist’s sensibility here, looking for form: “The emphasis upon finance is sustained by the enquiry of the late 20th-century prostitute, ‘Do you want any business?’ ”

London: The Biography rings with the city’s peculiar echoic quality which Ackroyd is always attuned to. He writes that the London Eye has its precursor in the 17th century at Bartholomew’s Fair, and that following the GLC’s abolition in 1986 “in effect London resumed its ancient life, with the separate boroughs affirming distinct and different identities”.

For Ackroyd, it is this historical imperative that shapes London. “Whenever the opportunity and location are offered, it replicates its identity. It is a blind force in that sense, not susceptible to the blandishments of planners or politicians…”

Temporal simultaneity to Ackroyd is as real as the Thames, flowing through time as well as space. He is quick to point out that “contemporary theorists have suggested that linear time is itself a figment of the human imagination”. Indeed, his book itself moves “quixotically through time” forming a labyrinth, and can be explored from a multitude of entry points.

The book is arranged into themes such as London as theatre, crime and punishment, London as crowd, London’s radicals, and for every main thoroughfare of London: The Biography there are scores of delightful or macabre side streets to wander down. Take the following list of synonyms for prostitutes, which reads like a bizarre incantation: “… smuts, cracks, mawkes, trulls, trugmoldies, bunters, does, punchable nuns, molls, Mother Midnights, blowzes, buttered buns, squirrels…”.

Within each theme we have Ackroyd’s compendious learning tripping the switches between past and present. He is no Eric Hobsbawm or Asa Briggs, he is neither ideologue nor pedagogue, instead it is through anecdote and vivid description that we are led through labyrinthine London.

Of course, any thesis that London, as it were, imprints itself on its citizens is going to occasionally sound overblown: “London drives some of its citizens mad. A psychiatric survey in the Seventies revealed that cases of depressive illness were three times higher in the East End than in the rest of the country”. But these criticisms, like pointing out lacunae, miss the point, for in a very real sense, as he himself says at one point, there are 7 million versions of London being written everyday.

This is very much the book that Ackroyd has been building up to, or even the one that he was born to write, prefiguring it in his biographies (Blake, Dickens) and fiction (The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor).

London: The Biography doesn’t just have sources, it has an essay on sources, and at over 800 pages you might be forgiven for buying the audio version read by Simon Callow (who is also, incidentally, appearing as Dickens in Ackroyd’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens). Ackroyd has put in a heroic amount of research, and it would be churlish indeed to disabuse his book of its definite article.