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. 

Comments

[Jack]

Nice save of that trite Samuel Johnson quote, bravo.

[Tony O'Neill]

Dear Sebastian,

I hope your note gave the little toad something to masterbate over.

[St Paul]

Got your book yesterday - I was at Dawn's crack reading it.The passages on heroin-induced constipation reached a new low - bravo! My question: it's none of my business, of course, but did Rachael 2 have a steamy affair with Catherine Zeta Jones?

[Letitcia]

Those that can-- FUCK, and those that cannot vilify the high flyers.
Remember, most men lead lives of quiet desperation and we my friend are the uncomfortable reminder of that.

[Peter]

Dear Sebastian,

Some people won't like the book because its honest and that scares them, they don't see what is happening with people around them or they choose not to see.

I personnally loved the book, but in the sequal (you see I have faith) tell it how it really is, no cover ups!

Having seen both Rachel's you are indeed a v. lucky man, although you wont want to believe it. Are they both spoken for at the moment?

Its a pity I missed you in Clouds, it would have made the time pass more elegantly.

Hope your doing something really despicable to celebrate your sucess, yes sucess !

A question, did the errr lady on the cusions in Amsterdam, say anything.......

[Hannah]

I might have known you had a blog, you absolutely wonderful thing.

I enjoyed your book greatly. I'm a bookseller and I shall be recommending it to those of my customers who I think could take it.

I wish I were a man so I could be a dandy. Breasts spoil the line of a suit.

x

[LP]

I am writing a cookbook for cannibals and am interested to know how you would like to be cooked...

[Hannah]

ny guess? spit roasted. ;)

[JTC]

Amazing book. Often hilarious, occasionally disturbing, always honest. My only disappointment was to find out that you neglected to shave on the day of your crucifixion.

[Polly Fraser]

Pretty pointless really. just more avoidance dressed up in clever language and 'dandyism', stop wasting time!

[jamie williams]

Dear Seb

Is it possible for me me to buy a signed picture of you? If so where can i buy this, or even better get one free. xx

[Clare Dundas]

He's gone, and there's a dank and dreary chill in the air because of it. x

[coach purses]

If you want to sing a song. Make it simple to last your whole life long. Don't worry that it's not good enough For anyone else to hear.Just sing, sing a song!

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[Belstaff Jackets]

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