Sebastian Horsley

THE ONLY WAY TO SUCCEED IS TO MAKE PEOPLE HATE YOU. THAT WAY THEY REMEMBER YOU.

Here are the first two reviews of my book …

From The Sunday Times

August 19, 2007

Dandy in the Underworld: An Unauthorised Autobiography

By Sebastian Horsley. These memoirs offer the reader a consistently hilarious season in hell.

Reviewed by Christopher Hart

Sebastian Horsley is a dandy and artist manqué who was briefly famous a few years ago for getting himself crucified in the Philippines. “I’ve suffered for my art,” he forewarns us, “now it’s your turn.” A sexual and intellectual pessimist who lives “poised between Savile Row and Death Row”, or, more prosaically, between narcissism and boredom, he isn’t easy to comprehend. Maybe it has to do with seeing too much too young.

Certainly his upbringing was unorthodox. His mother tried to abort him but failed. “Had she known I would turn out like this she would have taken cyanide.” He was born in 1962, in Hull, “so appalled I couldn’t talk for two years”. The Horsleys were proprietors of the vast Northern Foods empire, and lived in a sprawling Yorkshire fortress. His father was “a drunk and a cripple”, his mother drunk and manic-depressive. She tried driving to the off-licence on a motorised lawn mower when her car keys were confiscated, and when her father died she ate his ashes sprinkled on her porridge. A family photo from little Sebastian’s early years shows his mother “on the floor face down in a pool of her own vomit. On the sofa sits Gogo [his granny], her wig awry, her lipstick skid-marked across her face. Next to her sits Father, his drink in one hand and his cock in the other. Home sweet home”.

Years later, his mother visited him in a clinic where he lay drying out from multiple class-A drug addiction. She sat by his side. “Have I failed you as a mother, Sylvester?” “It’s Sebastian, mother.” That one’s too good to be true, surely, as indeed may much of the book be. But the upside to this horrendous life, and Horsley’s preposterous defensive dandyism, is the humour. These memoirs offer the reader a consistently hilarious season in hell, even if some of the best jokes are stolen, unacknowledged, from sources as diverse as Dr Johnson and Sharon Stone. “I became a vegetarian not because I loved animals but because I hated plants.” “Artists are easy to get on with – if you’re fond of children.” And I shan’t forget his description of Will Self’s face resembling “a bag of genitals” in a hurry.

A sense of humour is also common sense in overdrive, and although Horsley the spiritual aristocrat would hate to think he possessed anything common, even sense, it often redeems him. He knows that taking a lot of drugs doesn’t make him a 21st-century Rimbaud – as Pete Doherty sadly doesn’t. Nor does the road of excess lead to the palace of wisdom. Crack made him sit “in a darkened room for six months watching Home and Away”. His fondness for prostitutes, on whom he reckons he has spent around £100,000, is on a par with the drugs: excessive, but uninteresting.

More original is his swimming with great white sharks; his affair with a Glaswegian gangster; and that crucifixion. He fell off his cross, but at least it hurt. He considered calling the subsequent photographic exhibition, “Is There a God or Am I Too Fat?” Jesus was crucified to save mankind, while Horsley was crucified to save his career. “In my opinion,” he reflects, “we both failed.”

There are moments when your bourgeois stomach turns. I would like to forget, but never will, the manner in which he and Hugo Guinness expressed their tendresse for each other with a cucumber and a lavatory bowl. But you can forgive him a lot, for having produced one of the funniest, strangest and most revolting memoirs ever written. A world without Horsleys would be almost as dull as Horsley already finds it.

******

THE 'ARTIST' WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN CRUCIFIED; DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD: AN UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BY SEBASTIAN HORSLEY

20 August 2007

The Evening Standard

PETE CLARK

The warning - and dear reader, I should heed it well - comes in the subtitle: An unauthorised autobiography. In that small phrase may be contained all you need to know about Sebastian Horsley. There is a sense of self here, of course, but also of rebellion. It's as if even when writing about himself the man is not to be trusted. He might even kick against the traces of what it means to be him. You may also detect the faintest tendency towards the witticism, a Wildean compulsion to meddle with words until they squeal with your laughter. That is here too.

Should you wish to travel further into these dark waters - and, by the way, you'd be a fool to pay for this book because the light-fingered author certainly wouldn't - then prepare yourself for a journey into the dark soul of Sebastian Horsley, a man who has absolutely nothing to declare but his own lack of talent.

We begin with his childhood, which would have been perfect were it not for the fact that the silver spoon intended for his mouth somehow got stuck up his bottom. Father was a rich and contemptuous drunk, mother was a lackadaisical drunk. Sebastian grew up wanting to be a girl and worshipping Marc Bolan who was, needless to say, a reflection of himself, only perhaps not such a dab hand with the eyeliner.

You might say Sebastian had some adventures but the truth is he never travelled further than the edges of his own ego. This man is the ultimate vanity case. He is a self-proclaimed dandy, the type of fellow that thinks a loud suit will make a mark in a drab world. That the rest of the world looks at him and sees only a prat only adds to his sense of supreme worth.

The wittering on about clothes is just about bearable but patience comes to an end with the endless details of our hero's passion for getting off his head.

If there is anything more boring than reading about other people taking drugs, then I have yet to stumble upon it. Even Hunter S Thompson gave it a break once in a while.

Horsley's other great outlet for self-adoration is sex. He is essentially a wanker, as he freely admits, but there are some unfortunate couplings with other people so that a little self-loathing can be added to the mix. The passages involving Jimmy Boyle and Hugo Guinness should be avoided by anyone of a nervous disposition who has recently eaten solids. The passages involving various ladies should be avoided by anyone who has a fondness for the female sex.

The question that may enter the enquiring mind is this: what exactly is the point of Sebastian Horsley? The answer would seem to be that he is an artist who once had himself mildly crucified. I know nothing more about his work.

He is also, however, a tireless worker in the mines of aphorism. There is not a sentence in this book that has not been messed about with, extensively buffed and pored over. No amount of burnished blather can alter the fact that this is a book about someone who, au fond, does not like himself very much. Do him a favour and bin it.

 

******

Well I say!

Wilde said: “When the critics are divided the artist is at one.”

And of course he was right. For a man to be great opinion must be divided on that score.

It is vital that the artist pisses off the right people. If you make the right people hate you, then that will make those that like you, love you that much more intensely.

Besides, Not even Jesus was loved by everyone.

Mr Clarke’s attack wasn’t very well written except that one intriguing line. “He might even kick against the traces of what it means to be him." I like that and may steal it. It’s a Sebastian line.

The review doesn’t really mention the book. He doesn’t like what I represent. You see, I represent, he resents, the life beautiful. You see, my darlings I saw a picture of him …

But maybe he is right. If I read about myself I wouldn’t like me. I would be threatened by me. The only difference is : I would admit it.

Boo Hoo. I am a controversial figure : People either dislike me or hate me.

Of course, I wrote to him :

“A fly sir, may sting a stately Horsley and make him wince. But one is but an insect, the other a Horsley still.”

Good day, you little bald ugly potato face.”

Poor little man. Welcome to the English : A Puritanical, tyrannical, ungrateful, hateful race. He is the unpleasant face of that hateful race. This couch potato face reviews Television programmes for the Standard. He doesn’t even make Television programmes. He reviews them. And he reviews them only occasionally as the stand in for the talented Victor Lewis Smith. Beneath him, there is only a social void.

Poor little spud dud. You see, we all have our fantasies of flying. Life, for most of us, is a process of gradually shedding them. Feather by feather we shed until our wings are bald.

But some of us say : “Not me. Watch me now, I’m going to fly.”

And when we fly we remind others of their broken dreams and broken schemes ; rather than join us they will the fate of Icarus on us so as to console themselves in the fluid of their own failure.

What I love is the FRUSTRATION these so-called writers elicit when they meet someone airborne with sangfroid.  It is so easy to clip a bird’s wings.  No one quite knows how it flies. 

THE DEVIL IS A DANDY

Sebastian Horsley, the artist, was recently crucified in the Philippines.
The resulting images formed the basis for his most recent show. Dandy,
columnist for The Erotic Review and rake par excellence. Sebastian gives
Large an exclusive interview.



G: When you were little, how did you see yourself and how you related to
the world?

S: How did I see myself? Incessantly.

G: When did you first think you might be a dandy? Did you dress up as a boy?

S: Well that was my mother's influence. She used to alternate between an
incredibly glamorous movie star and a tramp. She led me into a life long exotic swoon from which I have never really recovered. When I was ten I saw Marc Bolan and that really did it and then I went through a phase of wearing my mother's clothes, women's clothes...

G: As one does...

S: But being a dandy is not a profession, it's a condition, something you
just can't help...

G: You mean a vocation?

S: No, a condition. It is both a response to suffering and a celebration of life.

G: A treatable condition?

S: Yes, clothes are the medication.

G: When did you have your first sexual experience and with whom?

S: Does Onan the Barbarian count? (masturbation)

G: No!

S: At 12 with an Indian woman who I fell in love with. We remained friends.
I still have the receipt.

G: What is the strangest sexual experience you've ever had?

S: Hmmn... (pause) Look, I'm not a fag, but I suppose the strangest have
been with men. I'd go for men (I don't any more), who were very dominant and potentially violent... that's what I liked. I liked to have my free will
taken from me.

G: What do you think of pigeonhole terms like gay, bi or straight? Are they
realistic?

S: I hate faggots. I take great pride in my prejudice. But these terms are
very limiting. After all, the difference between homosexuality and
heterosexuality is merely a couple of bottles of wine or one smoke of crack.

G: You've lived in Soho for a long time, why?

S: I like to be close to my sin. Also, In a beautiful area I would be superfluous. In an ugly one I am a narcotic. Originally I lived in Shepherd's Market but that went down hill when the prostitutes moved out, but Soho's gone down hill. Ten years ago, on a good night, you could get your throat cut. Now it's full of weave-your-own-yoghurt places, gay hairdressers and coffee bars. There's even a fucking health club. A heath club in Soho for Satan’s sake. That’s like having a brothel in a church.

G: What was your first experience with drugs?

S: Well, I never touched drugs until I was twelve. I remember stealing a friend's marijuana.

G: Do you see yourself continuing the noble tradition of the rake and if so
who are your heroes?

S: I am a peacock without a cause, a rebel without applause. I am also deaf to everything except applause. I would define myself as a Romantic Nihilist and yes, I am a dandy, but that all depends on how you define a dandy. Dandyism to me is not a suit of clothes. Clothes are the least important part of a dandy. Dandyism to me is a spiritual doctrine. It's a way of stripping
yourself of everything, except your true identity, so you can only judge the
style by the content but you can only reach the content through the style. And of course style is merely the outer skin of your ideas. I am actually wearing my thoughts, my attitudes to life.

G: What about your heroes?

S: I am a disciple of Satan and Satin. Actually, my first, as I think I said, was Marc Bolan and then Baudelaire got hold of me. (the decadent French poet of the 1890s) After that Arthur Rimbaud, Francis Bacon, Tintin, Quentin Crisp. Dandies are roped together like mountaineers heading to the summit of beauty. I looked into their mirrors and saw myself.

G: And Byron?

S: Well I don't know so much about Byron, but the way he lived his life...
it was so much more important than his work. You see pictures and books are only things but artists are people. And who else? Well, the Sex
Pistols and Johnny Rotten had a huge influence on me when I was about
fifteen and continue to do so in a way.

G: Do you think drugs influence art? It's often said that artists, poets and
composers take shed loads of drugs. Is this a romantic myth?

S: It's not only a romantic myth, it's nonsense. I don't know who's
responsible for it. Me probably. But this is the connection: - The
type of person who creates is often quite sensitive and that's why he
creates for the rest of us. But that sensitivity, if it's not checked, can
lead to your own destruction. It's not that you take drugs and that makes
you creative, it just doesn't work that way, and the idea of creating on
drugs is as preposterous a notion as the idea of driving a car when you're
drunk. I mean the whole point about being an artist is that he's supposed to
be more aware. The point of taking heroin is to make you forget your
leg's just been cut off. So the connection isn't that you take the drugs and
create, the connection is that the sort of person who is drawn to art is
also drawn to drugs. But I’m actually a drug addict with a painting problem if you must know.

G: What do you reckon is the most unusual cocktail of drugs you've ever
taken?

S: Are you saying my favourite? Or Unusual?

G: Whatever, when you used to.

S: What, like last night or something? No, I'm off now, but injecting, that
was the thing I really liked. The whole ritual, the way you become a
hermaphrodite - a vampire at your own veins. But my preference was speedballing, which is a combination of heroin and cocaine.

G: Heroin can keep you looking young I'm told.

S: Heroin preserves everything actually, except secrets.

G: When did you clean up and why?

S: You see I am no longer a practising drug addict. I'm perfect. I cleaned
up because I couldn't work. And because it was making me too happy. It's a very simple exchange for me personally. If I drink or take drugs I can't do anything else. I reduce the whole of life’s experience to one experience - the drugs. I have this obsession with freedom but drug taking is like placing yourself in another kind of prison. I will sit in this room, I won't answer the phone and the only people I see are my dealers and my hookers. I can't write, I can't paint and dandyism goes completely out the window. As a drug taker I end up fit only for the undertaker.

G: Do you expect to be revealed through your art or be concealed?

S: I live in terror of being understood. No question. That's part of
dandyism - give me a mask and I'll tell you the truth, which is curious.
You know a dandy is a liar who tells the truth. Why I get on people's
nerves, particularly the British, is firstly because I've got the airs and
graces of a genius and no talent and secondly because the dandy is just an exaggerated extension of us all. All dress is fancy dress, except our natural skins. And life is nothing but a game of dressing up and pretending. We all perform our lives - just look at doctors and lawyers - they think they're real people. So, in a way, dandyism is the lie that reveals the truth. And the truth is that we are what we pretend to be. I may be a phoney but at least I‘m a real phoney.

H: So what's your definition of a genius?

S: Someone who brings new meanings into the world. The whole point about
genius is it's very, very rare. Although now the term has gone to confetti. I read the other day that Morrissey is a genius. What does that make Mozart then? Double genius with chips?

G: And today everyone desires celebrity.

S: That's a totally different thing. I used to be a universe, but now I'm
only a star. Celebrity is a comedown, which is the curious thing, not that
I've got it, but the problem is it's a trap, another form of prison. How can you talk about the concept of freedom on the one hand which you willingly give it up with the other? If you are somebody who wants to break through things and find new meanings for yourself, how can you struggle through all these different layers of disapproval, hostility and convention only to arrive at another form of convention? Personally I’d rather be an anonymous star than a famous non-entity.

G: Penultimately Sebastian, what words would you choose to define yourself?

S: I'm a Romantic Nihilist. As Coleridge said, Romanticism is something
ever more about to be. I believe passionately in nothing. Life is utterly
futile, merely a spasm of brutality meaning absolutely nothing. Your life, my life, is utterly and completely pointless. Sorry to break it to you. But rather than making us depressed, it frees us to overact appallingly and bring drama, richness and texture into existence. A man should always be impeccably dressed for the firing squad you know. And give the order himself...

G: And finally... do you like animals at all?

S: Hate them all. I have enough dumb friends without getting a pet. Basically, animals should be delicious and fit well.

THE VAMPIRE AT HIS OWN VEINS

Ennui woke me and with a yawn I swallowed the dawn. From the abyss of sleep to the abyss of life. From nightmares to daymares.

I rise and paint myself a face. Like the flowers one lays on graves so I lay on my life. I am the wound and the knife. I am the shadow and the strife.

I descend into the city. My hunger is an insatiable vampire coveting this great city as its feeding place. The twisting, swarming streets of Soho, snaking their way like arteries and veins through a body are where I feed The Great Need.

Like a suicide I shall open these veins to freedom. I love you horrible life. I love you horrible city; your bloody fingers point to heaven. Everything you have rejected, everything you have lost, everything you have scorned and broken I shall covet and collect.

I shall extract beauty from evil and evil from beauty. To show that virtue and sin exist in everything. For in Soho every human flaw, from a single wound to the corrupt heart has been sealed in the amber of artifice. From the glitter to the litter. From the whore to the poor; the harlots and the hunted have pleasures of their own to give, the vulgar herd can never understand. I shall wander across the moving shadows of this great city in search of pity.

The anonymous energy of this great city sweeps people apart, violating love and permanent relationships. And what is love but a crime? A crime which needs an accomplice. An accomplice who can be shared, and bought and sold.

I opened the door and stood before the poor stark flesh upon the bed. The room was malevolent. Clad with a cold and sinister beauty. The bed, stripped of sheets and covers, the striped mattress as naked as a corpse. The room is like a morgue in which love is laid out.

There are some women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills me only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze. Full of brilliant and violent colour; blinking her useless eyelids at nothingness. Her voice was the death rattle of a woman who had been forgotten by the world. She gave me her skeletal kiss and I could smell the graveyard stench of her breath.

I had come to commit a crime. And I wanted her to save me. Save me like a tourniquet. And like the rising dead she struggled upwards and I wanted her to bleed in her struggles. To hear her moans as the red flesh was tattered away from the white bones. But I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous silence came upon me. I heard her voice echoing down the centuries. I saw her eyes drowning with lies. And I felt like an insect. I was dying though my body still clung to me.

I fucked her; gulfs of silence between each stroke. I laid her open like a girl. And she opened vaster and vaster every second, an incredible wound of nothingness, into which I was falling. And then through the thick swathings of darkness, first the dull slaps of flesh on flesh and then hatred like a flash of lightning that broke through the gloom and glittered.

I enfolded myself in the cloak of evil and put my fate into Satan’s hands. I was seized with the poetry of cruelty as we came together in our hideous coupling, flailing our eight limbs like some giant suppurating insect. Blood mingles with sperm and sperm with blood. She stared skywards like a dead woman on a battlefield trying to guard in herself her own particular wound. But to no avail. Her savage eyes betrayed the scene of carnage. And the more she resisted the more I insisted. With my crown of birds of prey I had come here to make her bleed for me and bleed for me she would. Oceans and oceans until with a graveyard howl she cried “No more!”

And then it was my turn. I knelt as if to pray and let this carrion crow lacerate my flesh; I wanted her to destroy me and as she flogged me she made my existence into something exceptional, hideous, poetic. My wounds blossomed like flowers.

I looked at her; corpse yellow - a heap of entrails. Oh my little lover how I hate you. Cover up your ugly udders with sad rags.

Once left, she torments and follows me. I walk through the veins, down which flows all the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history. The woeful roads that stretch towards the sad, dark heart of the city. The city in its dusks and dawns that change more quickly than the human heart.

I hate you horrible life. I hate you horrible city.

The sun sinks in its own blood. I looked at my watch. It was 5.00pm. Rush hour. I snaked my way home and shot up in my room. Why am I so beautiful but so obsessed with doom?

The careless, not to say impatient way in which I bear the burden of life does leave a vague hope in me that I might loose or cast it away at any moment. But it is not to be. I overdose and wake up five hours later with the needle still in my arm. I stand firm in my refusal to remain conscious during a crisis. I cannot die. I am dead already.

ROME REGENCY HOME

“I love the word decadence” gushed Verlaine, “all gleaming with crimson.” The word mimics the symptoms of disease and is made up of a mixture of carnal spirit, melancholy flesh, and all the violent splendours of the Byzantine Empire, loved as an emblem by the French decadent dandies of whom Verlaine, Baudelaire and Rimbaud were the clearest sickly voices.

Not believing in the future is the essential mark of the decadent dandy. When you don’t believe in that future, particularly if you don’t have a god to punish you if you step out of line or reward you with heavenly bliss when your otherwise pointless life is over, what do you do? You know that the religious promise of immortality is a pure illusion, fit for children. What can you do? You can decide that the only real power that you have in this life is over your own body, so why not drink and drug it to death? After all, as all self-respecting dandies know, suicides are the aristocrats of death.

In the dandy’s spiritual home all roads lead to Rome. Monstrous emperors devising exquisite new cruelties or else consumed by awful boredom. The excesses of individual behaviour which, in Christian times, would be labelled as the sins of a avarice and voluptuousness. Tiberius wanted to see little girls strangled but he had respect for the religious laws against the strangulation of virgins. So he ordered the executioners to fuck them before they were throttled. Nero castrated his boy Sporus to turn him into a girl, and solemnly, magnificently married him. Then he went off to the circus, where he dressed up in the skins of wild animals and had himself locked into a cage, from which he was released to attack the genitalia of men and women tied to stakes.

In the Roman Arena the games became more and more depraved, with women, children, dwarfs and even the disabled being pitted against each other. Once, when there was a shortage of suitable victims, Caligula ordered a section of the crowd to be thrown to the animals. Occasionally live sex shows were staged. Women convicted of sexual offences were raped to death by bulls after being smeared with the secretions emitted by cows when on heat. Public burning to death provided the floodlights for matches after dark.

If a slave killed himself, or attempted to within six months of his purchase he could be returned alive or dead to his old master and the deal was declared invalid. In this glorious age people would offer themselves for execution to amuse the public at five minae (about £150), the money to be paid to their heirs; the market was so competitive that the candidates would offer to be beaten to death rather than beheaded, since that was a shorter torture, more painful and so more spectacular.

Later, in the Regency period, there was an era marked by extravagance of behaviour and personality, one which swung betweens extremes of elegance and refinement and depths of sodden brutality. An age of extravagance and exoticism, when the ruling class, blazed, cracked and fizzed in a torrid Indian summer before the dismal winter of democracy descended. An age marked by great eccentricities, a devil may care individuality, homosexuality, and criminality. Gothic fiction, rakes, strumpets, gamblers, murderers, drunkards and artists. Gentleman are having their shoe laces ironed while half naked children are sweeping their chimneys. Wilberforce is denouncing the slave trade while Beau Brummell is denouncing with equal gravity an imperfectly tied cravat. HA! What about that?

It is no longer possible to be exotic.

What has happened to us? Whatever happened to the good old days when children worked in factories?

Look at our shitty little lives.We give people a box in the suburbs ; it's called a house. Every night we sit in it starring at another box ; it's called a television. In the morning we run off to work in another box ; it's called an office, we return from one box to the other box in another box on wheel ; it's called a car. Finally we go off in another box forever ; it's called a coffin.

Fuck that baby. Not me. If I had a throne, you could call it home. And what is a home but a comfortably padded lunatic asylum?

I ain’t no loony. Do I believe in capital punishment? Not since it ceased to be a public occasion. Force is all that maters. War is sacred. Hanging is excellent. We don’t need too much knowledge. Build more prisons and fewer schools. Knock down the hospitals and old people’s homes. Give me your fucking money. And suck my fucking cock while your at it.