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Sebastian Horsley interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2002
Sebastian Horsley sashays into the restaurant at the Ritz, resplendent in a perfectly tailored pale pink three -piece suit with jewelled cufflinks. Pockets have been inserted especially for his syringes, he reveals, sweeping jet-black hair back from his porcelain-pale forehead with a careful gesture. As he takes his seat, elegantly, and orders a Coke, an entire table bursts into rapturous applause. We turn to find out why. They are Americans, it appears, in London on holidays and they are so wildly impressed by his appearance, they simply could not contain themselves. Another kind of Englishman would be mortified, to be applauded for his outfit. He has upstaged the carpets and the curtains and even the Trompe L’Oeil. But Sebastian is delighted, for he was born to be noticed. Even the name was chosen by his mother especially for its dashing, dastardly connotations. Sebastian Dangerfield, Sebastian Flyte, Saint Sebastian. With a name like that you simply have to shine. He is vain and he admits it. He is a narcissist who wants to “be loved by the entire world, fuck the whole world and get everybody’s attention.” As if to prove this, he went to the Phillipines, for his thirty eighth birthday, and got himself crucified. Sebastian is an artist. Was that art? Or was it a publicity stunt? ‘Of course it fucking was!” he laughs. “And so what if it was? Everything is a publicity stunt. A song, a painting, a poem, the motivation for any artist is ‘Look at me, Mum!’
The crucifixion wasn’t a hoax or a scam, it was genuine. The nails were real and the wounds were real, I saw them. Sarah Lucas, the artist who filmed the event, fainted, with the camera in her hands. “The most literal exercise of artistic suffering since Van Gogh cut off his ear,” said the Telegraph. ‘Heroically stylish.’ ‘Flagrant Exhibitionism” said “Time Out”. But what’s interesting about Sebastian isn’t so much the fact that he got himself crucified. After all, he wouldn’t be the first person to do that, even if he is the first artist from the West, to do it. What’s interesting about him is the unnerving honesty with which he is capable of examining the motives which lead him to do it. Fame, sex and money being just some of them. He could be forgiven, had he chosen to pontificate endlessly about needing to suffer for his Art, but he doesn’t.
Of course he did suffer and the pain of being nailed up even caused him to faint, but he refuses to be pretentious about it. Sebastian is an artist, he says, because he was crap at being a rock star and if he had succeeded in the music business, he would have been a cross between Johnny Rotten and Marc Bolan. Motivated by anger and giving the finger to the Establishment. As it turns out, he is a quietly brilliant and very well respected painter, but this is something he doesn’t talk about. He, himself, he insists, is the work of art, the paintings are a side-effect. Something he does to fill in the time, when he’s not doing crack or shagging prostitutes. Both pursuits which he confesses to with an unnatural relish, the details of which can be enjoyed by fans of his regular ‘Sewer Life”column in the ‘Erotic Review”magazine. A column which regularly features such nasty little quips as ‘I generally think women are like nappies. They should be changed often, and for the same reason.’ He once included his home telephone number in the column and nobody telephoned, which upset him terribly.
One naturally wonders about all of this attention-seeking behaviour and one wonders what kind of a child grows up thinking that most of life’s problems can be solved by dressing up. One wonders, also about someone who wants to be famous, in order to be adored and is willing, at the same time to reveal more vulnerability, more human frailty than is considered decent, even by ‘Big Brother’ standards.
The answers to these questions lie in an unorthodox childhood, in Hull. ‘Hell’, he calls it. The eldest of three children, Sebastian was born into a wealthy, but defiantly middle class family. His grandfather, a Quaker, founded a dairy which supplied Cadburys, Frys and then Marks and Spencer with milk. He was, Sebastian says, extremely left wing, and regularly gave money to armed robbers and murderers, including Myra Hindley and Jimmy Boyle. His father, Nicholas was ‘a brilliant industrialist and a billionaire who was also a fucking socialist! Can you imagine? The worst of luck.” The children inherited only ‘beer money’ he insists. His father and mother met in New Orleans and married after knowing each other for only three days.
“When my mother found out she was pregnant with me, she took an overdose,’ he laughs. “And my father gave her the pills! There’s nothing like being made to feel welcome. The interesting thing is that the life-force in me was too strong for the violence that Mother had done it. My memories of Mother are of her either in hospital or in bed. Good old-fashioned Mother, always in the kitchen with her head in the oven!”
Won’t she sue? I ask, sensibly. The notion amuses him. He’s been writing about his family regularly in his column.
‘Oh, that’s so sweet! I wrote a letter to my mother, do you want to hear it?
“Dear Mother, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Everything great in the world comes from loonies, they alone have created our master-pieces. You created me, for example.”
His father has been in a wheelchair for most of his life.
“He was always falling over. Everyone in my family that should have been vertical was horizontal! My mother’s mother killed herself on booze and pills. Alcoholism and suicide didn’t run in my family, it galloped! There’s a lot of restlessness in me and it comes from the background that I was born into. Everyone was drunk, and mad. Mother had four suicide attempts and Father was always fucking other women in front of her.”
He has inherited his father’s appetite for women.
“ I love women and I can’t limit myself to one. If I just married you, for example, I’d make you happy, but I’d make all the other women unhappy. What right have I got to do that?”
Like Jesus, he sees absolutely nothing wrong with his predilection for prostitutes, either.
“I love prostitutes, I always have. It’s so exciting and you feel so guilty. Part of me likes to be humiliated, it’s fair to say. I also think they are the most honest people on God’s Earth. Because no-one is being conned, what greater proof of love could there be than money? And who says you can’t pray in a brothel? There’s something very pure about prostitutes, they are very good people. They are people who have crossed the line that you and I haven’t crossed.”
But he has crossed that line.
“Well, yes I was a prostitute, it’s true!”
Despite all this, he insists that there is no fear of intimacy at work.
‘That would be much too dreary, wouldn’t it?” he giggles.
His father was, he says, a man who withheld affection.
‘He never showed any love to me, never ever. I was sent to boarding school when I was ten and he never visited not once, never wrote. Nothing. He couldn’t contain his indifference to me. My sister was an academic, so he approved of her, but I’m quite thick. What you need, if you want success is ignorance and confidence. I’m not clever enough to realise the extent of my shortcomings!”
He’s grateful, though, for his background.
“I may be the victim of a broken home but a lot of people are the victims of intact homes and if you are the victim of an intact home, you’ll never produce anything of merit.
The better the artist, the more vulnerable he is.”
Having seen Marc Bolan, at the age of ten, the youngster realised that he was in Hell, but that he wasn’t alone. And he took to wearing women’s clothes and make-up, which got him beaten up regularly by ‘thick, ugly peasants from Yorkshire.”
And having been thrown out of the boy-scouts and then art-school, he decided that he was too middle class to make music.
“So what happened next was that I went up to Edinburgh, when I was eighteen and met Jimmy Boyle, as he came out of prison. I was dressed as a Nazi, for some reason. And we stayed together for ten years.’
It was love?
“Yes, I did fall in love with him. I soon came to realise that I was meeting the same person in a thousand different disguises on my path through life-Father, Jimmy Boyle, Hugo Guinness, Nick Cave, Will Self…..We meet ourselves time and again. Because my father withheld his love, I’ve never really got over it. But we have to find our own fathers, within ourselves. Jimmy was my father, no question about it. What I was attracted to was his ruthlessness and his violence and his passion.’
The pair started a business and made a fortune. Enough to afford three Rolls Royces before Sebastian was twenty one. And he got married, which turned out to have been a bad idea and got divorced again and gambled away a lot of the money. In his autobiography ‘Dandy in the Underworld’ he describes himself thus: ‘Having been only an alcoholic for ten years, he becomes a crack addict and gets into a considerable amount of trouble. He explores homosexuality and sado-masochism, finding to his alarm that he is rather good at both. He jumps out of an aeroplane stoned, breaking his leg, and after a gamble too far on the stock market faces bankruptcy. He becomes a Madam and a prostitute, turning his home into a brothel and advertising himself for sale in the pages of “Hello.“ Eventually after a series of lucky breaks he becomes an intravenous heroin addict. His friends and his brother-in-law all die of overdoses. He overdoses and lives.”
Meanwhile, he also paints. And the paintings are surprisingly good. The first show is of Great White Sharks and in order to paint them, he got into a basket and was submerged, on the Barrier Reef, despite being unable to swim. He followed that with a series of paintings of flowers, all of which were based on human wounds. He paints in a small, dark studio in Soho, with the shutters drawn and surrounded by human skulls. In order to maintain his image, while painting, he has a selection of Gucci suits which are made specially for the purpose. There is no sofa, no telly, no coffee table, in his apartment and his bedroom has a velvet bedspread and is mostly taken up by the wardrobe full of tailored suits in every conceivable shade, mostly velvet, also. There is nothing in the fridge and the kitchen is never used.
‘I have the home of a man who is on show, but does not want to be visited!” he laughs. But because it’s not possible to be witty and charming and beautiful to look at twenty four hours of every day, he lives alone. And is sometimes lonely. But now that he’s been crucified, he’s finally famous. People recognise him all over the place. And he seems to like that. Why not? He says.
“We all have fantasies of fame and greatness and life, for most of us is a process of gradually shedding them. Some people aren’t prepared to shed them and they get attacked. It’s very difficult to walk with wings. That’s what envy is all about.”
But being famous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
‘No, that’s right.”
Yet he keeps on trying to be more famous.
“I know, it’s absolutely ridiculous, isn’t it? What we really want is to live forever. And we can’t do that. Being crucified was an attempt to try and build a monument to my transience. What I would have liked to have done is to have died on the Cross and I’m really sorry I didn’t. I’m a failed suicide! In today’s climate which is one which is hostile to poets, it’s hard to do something poetic and I have a poetic sensibility. I’m a Romantic Nihilist.”
And the problem with fame, he says, is that it’s a trap.
“Artists do their best work as they make the journey from the dark into the light. It’s lovely to be praised, but it’s actually opposition which pushes you forward into new regions of your own soul. So in a way it’s better that people call you a cock-sucker and say that you are shit. But we’ve got to try and transcend this human form, this useless stinking human form.”
Why does he hate the human form so much?
“The human form is revolting. I want to be an angel; and fly. I don’t want to defecate and sit on a lavatory, it’s disgusting for a man of my stature Am I talking too much? You do realise that everything I say is rubbish?”
Yes.
‘That’s good. The best way to contradict me is to let me speak!”
Did Sebastian meet God, I wondered, while he was up there?
“ I think God is beautiful. He must be, if he made me in His own image, but I don’t know if I met Him.”
He doesn’t believe in life after death.
“I’ve had quite a few near death experiences and I can tell you for a fact there’s nothing on the other side. The point about being a man is that you’ve got to look futility in the face and still see promise in the stars. I yearn to escape from the prison of my personality. It is to this urge to self-transcendence that I owe alcoholism and drug addiction. The whole point about the artist is the desperate urge to transcend the limited animal that he is.”
He’s tried heroin and crack, but they don’t work.
“Nothing works. It’s the futility of the pursuit which is so exciting, don’t you think? You take heroin because for a time, it works. And you stop when it becomes a problem.’
Why not just kill oneself?
“I’ve tried!’
He keeps a loaded gun by his bedside, I remind him, so he could still do it.
“I do have a gun and I look at it every morning, but I’m an optimist. I’ll tell you why I don’t kill myself yet, it’s because my song is not yet sung.”
It’s for the sake of Art that he carries on living?
“Right.”
What will happen when he loses his looks?
“Ahh, darling. Every day in the mirror, I see death at work. It’s hopeless.”
Can he accept it?
“No. What I’m most terrified of is losing the power to seduce.”
He could do charity work.
“Absolutely not! I loathed all that Save the World nonsense. Fuck the world! Marc Bolan wore more clothes in a day than Gandhi wore in his entire life, but Marc Bolan is far more of a Saint to me than anyone. Glamour is a far greater asset than any other quality.”
But the most glamorous people are dead.
“I’m not!”
But how to top the crucifixion? What will he do next?
“I don’t know but I yearn to go out in a blaze of ignominy. Maybe I’ll come and save the Irish first!”
Sebastian Horsley’s ‘The Butterfly Pinned”, featuring the Crucifixion film, prints, the nails the paintings and of course Sebastian himself, in person is at the Lead White Gallery, Clyde Lane, Dublin 4 from January 16.
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