Cast of characters

Boots looking suitably Oriental

Famous-ish people seen across the road out of the corner of my eye. Or dead.

Kathy Acker

The one advantage of hanging around Compendium bookshop loads was that Kathy Acker came in a couple of times to chat with Mike on the front desk and I could earwig. She was small and feisty.

Me and Brigitte went to see her do a reading in Hammersmith. We were the first ones there and seeing our goth-look her fellow co-presenter just stared at her as if to say “I think your crowd has turned up”.

Damon Albarn

Dave Allen

This is a typical example of different expectations.

Our idea was just to go out for a very different meal. So we booked a special Scottish restaurant as it would be nice to try some unusual food. Of course, we sat down at the main table and was surprised to see Dave Allen sitting opposite. It was Burns Night. We just wanted to try a few random things on the menu. Needless to say, Burns Night is a big deal and you are supposed to buy the special menu.

The chef was speaking to Dave Allen and they both looked suitably disgusted at us.

Keith Allen

I caught the mystery of the last ever of Keith Allen’s (Lily’s dad) Whatever you Want – which, from memory, mainly consisted of Keith talking to the camera and sitting in an empty, wind-swept studio. I wrote a letter saying it was the best programme I’d ever seen. Someone wrote to me thanking me for my comments and sending me the diagram of a pirate radio transmitter.

Joe Ambrose

I met Joe at the back of the Beaconsfield Art Gallery in Vauxhall. We talked a lot about Brion Gysin (as you do) and Joe’s ace book of Gysin’s life.

J. G. Ballard

In a typically unpretentious way, J. G. Ballard was two people in front of me in the queue for the film of his book Atrocity Exhibition at the ICA. The staff didn’t seem to have any idea who he was.

Jean Baudrillard

Having read his difficult to read observations the idea of being able to run from the stall in Camden and see the cult author was pretty amazing. Typically a low desk had been set up next to the main front desk in Compendium book shop and he was sitting behind. I popped in but like most people, I couldn’t speak French and he could speak no English. He sat there for an hour while not a single person spoke to him.

Leigh Bowery

This was at the Tank Girl event in Camden at the old Roundhouse with the big hole in the roof. Leigh Bowery was like a giant slug playing drums in the band Minty. The lead singer was female with a transparent coat and not many clothes on.

Bernard Bresslaw

Typically I got some short term part-time work looking after a second-hand book shop. In came Carry On hero Mr. Bresslaw. He was super polite but we all soon realized that I been given no instruction on how to give special discounts. He quickly went away.

John Calder

Though I spoke to him years later at his bookshop on The Cut, Waterloo, I mainly remember him leading Gysin up the escalator at Bedford library and introducing the event.

Angela Carter

Luckily thanks to I guess City Limits (the What’s On magazine of the time) I ended up in what seemed like a front room with Ms. Carter reading from one of her books.

Soo Catwoman

This was a bizarre meeting arranged by Angel (who had previously briefly been her kind of landlady) at a flat in a shopping center in West London. So to the hapless journalist, I think my ambitions were to do an interview but the event mainly seemed to consist of sitting on a sofa in her front room while she played with her toddler.

Miles Davis

As the Southbank Centre was just down the road and I knew absolutely nothing about jazz it seemed like a good idea to buy a Return Ticket for this Miles Davis bloke and see what the fuss was about. It kind of went over my head but in retrospect, it was good to see the guy. He died a couple of months later.

Felix Dennis

I think Felix was under the impression that I was a proto-poet whereas I just remember going on about Nietzsche. I was asked on camera who my favorite poet was and came up with “Kenneth Patchen”(cf. Outlaw of the Lowest Planet)- the only poet I could remember. But a poet’s poet.

I went to his poetry and plonk evenings and even talked to the great man. I never really understood Gormenghast until I saw Felix surrounded by all sorts of people whispering in his ear to give them money.

Ken Dodd

I had the offer of free tickets to Ken Dodd at the Palladium, thanks to the theatre ticket company I was working for. I invited Boots early on in our relationship.

For some reason she declined.

Michael Eavis

The highlight of the Green Gathering at the time of the Falklands war was doing Tai-Chi on the Glastonbury main stage and buying milk from farmer Michael Eavis.

In a perfect world you imagine looking out from the main stage to a field of cows but I seem to remember not a great deal being in the field except a few tents.

Karen Finley

I went to see her a few years ago at the Barbican. She and a musician were doing a musical performance. I was sat at the front in my wheelchair. Very kindly she came over and shook my hand.

Fuse

Met him at the hotel on the Albert Embankment when I was going there for a separate meeting.

Paul Gilroy

I meet him at some north London conference. He was due to speak and had just arrived.

Glosswitch

I think Glosswitch was totally mystified to be stopped by Millennium as she walked down a corridor minding her own business. We were at Blogfest and I instructed Millennium to ask Glosswitch to come over.

Gary Gygax

I interviewed the creator of ADVANCED Dungeons and Dragons for my Blunderbus fanzine at an ADnD convention at Reading University as a new 18 year old.

Brion Gysin

I went to see William Burroughs at Bedford Library for a John Calder literary event. But Burroughs didn’t turn up and Brion Gysin was whisked over from Paris to stand-in. I had just finished reading “Planet R -101”, so was expecting something apocalyptic though the audience mainly seemed to consist of suitably scandalized old ladies. Gysin sat at a long desk at the front smoking a roll-up beneath a huge sign saying “No Smoking”.

Michael Hardt

City Limits were advertising a Nietzsche philosophy course. It was a proper philosophy. I only got on it because I had just finished my first year at uni (ergot thrown off) of a philosophy course at Southampton uni.

Mike Hart

Mike always was on the front desk at Compendium when I used to go round from the stall in the market. I seem to remember meeting suitably perspired version of Mike at a Pogues gig. He introduced me to the Proper Fanzine Writer.

Peter Hook

Met him at the Midnight Express Club, Bournemouth when he was chaperoning the band Stockholm Monsters. Age 17 shared a lift with him carrying the equipment into the club

Alan Hunter

Knew his son much better who via his shop introduced me to everything from Heavy Metal magazine to Viz Comic.

Anita Pallenberg

Initially bowled over by her watching her in “Performance”, the obsession would leave me and Dr Awkward to stand out outside the house in Nothing Hill when we were teenagers (not realizing of course that it was only the front of the house that was featured in the film). Years later I would come across her doing an event at the Horse Hospital.

Jacqueline Pearce

Came across Ms. Pearce at an event at the Cinema Museum in Kennington as I waited outside for my cab.

The Pope

Like VIP’s of the order of Ken Dodd of course, I’ve never met the geezer. Typically it was when I was returning from my shiatsu massage down the hill in Clapham and heading for a lunch meal I happen to be at the junction when the dear old pope-mobile sauntered by. I guess this was in the 2000s.

Proper Fanzine Writer

Interviewing a Proper Fanzine Writer and making up that you’re a radical Cockney geezer with all sorts of ludicrous stories was probably the most disastrous mistake I’ve ever made. I couldn’t have been more Dick van Dyke than if I’d clicked my heels together upon leaving.

I thought it had gone really well but in retrospect, he was less then impressed.

Proper Performance Artist

The Proper Performance Artist lived at the other end of the street in Hackney in the 1980s. The house seemed really antiseptic but he was always good for a chat.

In order to raise some money, he went for medical experimentation. One of the strangest conversations I ever had was visiting him at the experimentation place. It was a couple of floors up in what seemed to be a standard office full of medical beds. He was completely out of it but explained a future performance. In an unlit hall wearing only a flashlight on his head a block of ice would be visible. At that time performances were meant to take hours. The block of ice would slowly melt reviling a dead horse.

Often I’d go there to hang out with his flatmate down the pub at the end of the road.

Genesis P-Orridge

Gen was a background presence to Hackney at the time. In a suitably cut-off world, you’d imagine that the split up with Brigitte in the back streets of Barcelona was very final. But I think when we were heading to Bethnal Green tube going down Mare Street when we saw Gen. I guess he was off on his way to Beck Road dressed in the typical acid house gear of the time.

He became notorious for promoting ecstasy at a nightclub.

Waris Hussain

I was very pleased to have met the creator of probably the most definitive and anarchic British kids film (ie. the brilliant 1971 film Melody).

Derek Jarman

I was delivering theatre tickets at the bottom of Charing Cross Road (as you do). I had a terrible phlegmy cough but there always seemed people walking around at that moment so I couldn’t clear my throat. Finally, the pavement was empty. I was able to make a very noisy green gob. At precisely that time Derek Jarman came out from a gated courtyard to my right. He looked suitably disgusted.

Of course, later on, The Proper Performance Artist would consult me as to whether he should do some performance on a Channel 4 programme, Club X. I suggested, of course, he shouldn’t do it- therefore forever missing the chance to attend a South London Comunity Centre in Vauxhall. When years later I was chair of Vauxhall Gardens Community Centre we had an artist at the back who lived very close to Dereck Jarman’s old cottage in Dungeness.

Simon Lau

I finished my Wing Chung kung fu course and explained that I was about to start a Japanese language course in Osaka. I think he was used to people finishing by saying they were going of into some kind of Oriental exoticism (though in this case, it was actually true).

Ian Livingstone

In order to advertise Blunderbus and appear suitably Dungeons and Dragons-y we, of course, dressed as Cowled Monks. I fought a chain-mailed guy on the pavement outside. Being a practitioner of the martial arts I, of course, insisted on fighting in bare feet. Unfortunately, there was glass on the pavement and I ended up in A and I.

George Martin

Typically this should be a ’24 Hour Party People’- like a story but I was working as a troubleshooter for Japanese TV in the UK on a programme about Linda McCartney. I rang Abbey Road Studios and was put through to him. Mr. Martin very patiently explained the absolute impossibility of the project. I was young and stupid and really didn’t understand the significance of talking to him at the time (he was just some bloke you needed to talk to).

Nico

I can’t even remember where I saw her but I guess it was somewhere in South London. She was the famous singer who sung with the Velvet Underground so what could possibly go wrong? She was absolutely terrible.

Biba Kopf

To get started and to learn tadalafil for sale more information on the latest diagnostic FGIDs tool contact us for immediate online access. The routine Those who engage in sounding for sexual interest generally recommend the following: The man should be lying down flat on his back before inserting the sound. free prescription for levitra There were no Katas in Chow’s Kenpo Martial artistry viagra sales uk training while Kenpo Jiu-Jitsu has 4 Katas, Nihanchi 1 & 2, the Keep Kata and Old Man Kata. In the end, all events link cialis tablets uk to one another by a matter of degrees.

When I read the NME as a teenager, I always read Biba Kopf. Years later, it’s funny, I should get to know him via my mate on The Wire.

Jacqueline Pearce

A few years ago I attended I guess what was a comic convention at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London. In the 80s I remember watching Blakes 7 every week. The villain was called Servalan. Poor old actor Jacqueline Pearce – it meant cropping her hair in order to be a character. I went to the Cinema Museum in my wheelchair and waited for a cab outside. This coincided with her getting her cab and being caught by some autograph hunter/ fan.

Julien Temple

I was going to meet Boots at the airport. It was a long journey by coach from Omiya to Narita. Of course, Boots missed the flight, so needless to say I was waiting in vain but who should be the first person off the plane and waited for by a typical Japanese with a sign? Of course, it was Julien Temple who was gratefully ushered away.

Tracey Thorn

Stupidly I didn’t hang around after she gave a great talk upstairs at Foyles. Meant to tell her of the world that existed parallel to the sludge of Red Wedge – French meals drinking red wine with Russian sea captains, midnight adventures on boating lakes in central London, Huysmans-like discussions in a La Bas-like kitchen in the clouds shooting fireworks off the roof into the night, etc.

John Tidmarsh

Visiting the World Service Outlook studios in the mid-eighties in your most disheveled jeans, listening to the programme without comment and making a job application to the BBC saying you should be employed because you’d written an article for a Brixton- based newsletter and your mum knew the presenter probably wasn’t a great launch of a radio career.

tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE

When I lived in Hackney, the Proper Performance Artist lived at the end of the street. One day, there was a knock on the door and a six-foot skinhead said that he had been diverted to the house because the PPA was out. He had a brain tattooed on his head though was very polite.

He came in and we drunk some tea.

The cast of characters, alphabetically, includes:

Angel

Art

Boots

Brigitte

was a fabulous girlfriend I split up within tears in the backstreets of Barcelona. As you do.

Brian Williams

Chi

Dad

As a refugee to the UK after the war, it was as if my dad was reborn again which was why he always seemed to have that “Being There” vibe.

Dave the Rent

I am sure Iain Sinclair would appreciate the fact that Dave used to come around to collect rent from the housing co-op and regale us with his psycho-geographic stories. He was a definitive ’80s Hackney psycho-geographer collecting rent from our Hackney co-op house near Victoria Park who fell in with the bad crowd and died young. We didn’t hear that he’d slit his wrists in the bath.

Dr. Awkward

Prem Dutt

Prem was a great mate who helped me with Vauxhall Gardens Community Centre.

The General

Guy

H

was an amazing person I spoke to about Performance Art. The last I heard was that she had decided to do something in a room at college and locked herself in. They were so worried that they broke in.