Sebastian Horsley: visiting the Dandy author of a wicked autobio

Interview, May, 2008 by Jessica Berens

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Sebastian Horsley's recently published--and justly acclaimed--autobiography, Dandy in the Underworld, is a true story of love and drugs and clothes and marriage and money and gangsters and actually getting crucified to see what it's like. He sometimes paints and sometimes doesn't; he says this doesn't matter really as he doesn't have much talent. He talks a lot and writes magnificently about his greatest work of art, which is himself.

He lives in a tiny apartment in Soho, London, opposite his tailor John Pearse, which is useful as he believes if you have a good tailor, you don't need a psychiatrist. He has a lot of suits and gloves and handmade ties, velour fedoras, and an umbrella or nine. The apartment contains the pictures on which he is not working, a shelfful of skulls, and a snub-nosed Colt .38. The decoration also includes the artist himself, who is shifting about the place with a stovepipe hat in

one hand and an empty mug in the other.

JESSICA BERENS: Are you going to sit down?

SEBASTIAN HORSLEY: No.

JB: God, I'm bored.

SH: You're bored! I'm bored. I've been talking about myself for the last week.

JB: You've been talking about yourself all your life--at least now you're being paid. I'm genuinely worried about what is going to happen to you when the publicity stops. Have you got a plan?

SH: I have no idea. Rest on my laurels until they become wreaths. The trouble is, I'm a one-trick phony. Shall I put my hat on?

JB: You can do what you like as long as you remember that nothing you do will impress me.

SH: [laughs] I think trying to impress someone and failing is quite a good look.

JB: Do you have to bend to go through the door in that hat?

SH: Yes.

JB: Have you been around Soho wearing it?

SH: Yes. Every day for the last three weeks.

JB: DO people take your photograph?

SH: Yeah. I do get photographed. It's really interesting because 50 years ago, if you didn't wear a hat everyone looked at you. It just proves that everything is fashion. I like it when people roll down the car window and go, "Fuck off, you fucking posh cunt."

JB: It's worth writing a second book just so that you can call it Posh Cunt.

SH: I'm not a posh cunt! I'm flash brash trash. If someone thinks I'm posh, it just shows how lowly they are. Some people think I went to Eton. I'm far too stupid to get into Etch.

JB: How old are you now?

SH: I'm not telling you.

JB: You're well over 40.

SH: Yeah, I'm 45. I had to go on a vegan diet after I got on the scales and they said, "Come back when you're alone." I was like 15 stone. Getting old is horrible, but it is interesting ... one of the things I've realized is that growing old is compulsory, but growing up is optional. I will be a senile delinquent and overact. Anyway, I might be old, but I'm still desirable.

JB: Depending on how much cash you have on you. How are your finances, by the way?

SH: Well. Not quite so bad as they were. The pieces from the show [Horsley's 2007 exhibition "Hookers, Dealers, Tailors"] sold 35,000 [pounds sterling].

JB: It didn't! That's great.

SH: I know. Unbelievable isn't it?

JB: I thought it was very funny in your book when you drew attention to the fact that you had very little talent as a painter.

SH: Did you like that? Well, it's true.

JB: I also liked the description of meeting Quentin Crisp. I had a similar experience.

SH: Do you know how much money he had in the bank when he died? Just over $600,000. Does that make him a miser or does that make him someone who didn't want to change his life? My only criticism about Quentin Crisp is that the subversive must be ready to subvert themselves. I may dress for myself, but I undress for everybody else, whereas he never did that--he was never prepared to drop a bomb on everything he did.

JB: He was about being himself at a time when being a queen was actually dangerous. To undermine himself would have been to collude with all the people who had persecuted him.

SH: I saw him as a warrior and as a spiritual giant. His books are holy. He had incredible knowledge and wisdom. And he was a dandy. Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't, he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere--much more Calvinistic, more neurotic--it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.

JB: What are you going to say to the Americans? They are very politically correct.

SH: Oh fuck, another form of censorship. All the people I admire have stiffed in America--Marc Bolan, the Sex Pistols, Jarvis Cocker.

JB: Your affair with Hugo Guinness might entertain a few people. I particularly enjoyed the description that he was "incandescent with moral decay."

SH: That bit is really written with tenderness. I didn't want to upset him. He's not litigious is he? Some of the weirdest people are. If I hear that people are litigious, I immediately dismiss them.

JB: Is it worse than being fat?

SH: I like fat girls. A woman can never be too poor or too fat. I'd take a poor fat girl over a rich thin girl like Kate Moss. She's revolting. A woman is supposed to have curves like an old Bentley, not like some old bike. I wouldn't take a ride on 'er. I hate her and I hate the society that worships her and Pete Doherty. Pathetic, stupid, spineless, talentless, and potato-faced. There's no moral content and it really annoys me, having grown up with people like Bacon and Beckett and Johnny Rotten. What happened to defiance? I think if you're pissing off English people, you're doing your job. I told you I met Johnny Rotten.