The Beatification of Algernon De Beajolais

Algernon De Beajolais raised a gnarled, tobacco-stained finger and stroked the chin of his particularly handsome face. How, in the name of Aphrodite’s Anus, had it come to this? These were reduced circumstances, even for him.
He was sixty-five years old and the product of a marriage between two of England’s most prestigious families. He was schooled, and routinely buggered, at Eton. He’d had an extraordinary life as England’s most intrepid explorer and had discovered the one-eared floppy-fringed vampire flea of San Diego-Suarez Madagascar. He had taken tea, biscuits and heroin with four American presidents, two kings, numerous heads of state, and an old hunch back with a scalded left testicle who swore blind he was His Holiness The 14^th Dali Lama.
He’d deflowered more virgins than one could shake a stick at, but a love of strong liquor and powerful opiates had instigated his decline many decades ago. Indeed, he had to sell most of his internal offal including a lung, a kidney and one of his two hearts, to assuage the violent anger of Columbia’s most feared narcotics trafficker, Juan Cornetto, following a bungled career as a drug mule.
He had endured four failed marriages, including an ill-fated liaison with a marmoset monkey who cheated on him with the RT Hon Tarquin Cattle-Prod (MP). He was friendless, destitute, and years of high-living had left him with the cognitive skills of a pox-riddled chinchilla.
And so, Algernon De Beajolais had reached his nadir. The 25^th floor of a tower block in Mile End, London E3. In the capital’s most cosmopolitan borough he now resided, in the fabulously inappropriately named Ku Klux Klan House.
Number 520 was indeed bleak, like the black hole of Calcutta - only in Newham. Two rooms, mould everywhere, and the unmistakable smell of unicorn faeces hung in the fetid air.
As the days and weeks passed, Algernon De Beajolais began to settle into his new life of soul-destroying mediocrity. He spent his time listening to owl pornography on the wireless and tending to his only pet, Bob Marley’s grass snake, Trevor. He began to get to know his neighbours. They saw an old white man dressed in Harris Tweed and built-up shoes, and he saw a motley collection of feral, but oddly likeable teenagers. He was fascinated by their names - Ashkay, Manshukh, Delbert, Kwame, Kojo, Ladyblossom, Jillisha and Marlene. He was enthralled by their love of music - Dancehall, Grime, Trip-Hop, Ragga-Jungle-Hip-House, Hard House and House Clearance. He played them his ’78 record collection including Victor Sylvestor and Joe Loss, but Ladyblossom threatened to cut his head off if he did that again. He taught the loveable scamps the dances of his youth - the Charleston, the Jitterbug, and the timeless Let's String The Black Fella Up, I’m Sure He’s Guilty Although There’s No Evidence.
The teenagers language intrigued him, bereft as it was of adverbs, prepositions and pronouns. It took him an eternity to work out that “Cah man dem West rip bare shit” loosely translates to “Come chaps, let us scurry to the West End where we shall remove merchandise from up-market stores without money exchanging hands.”
The weeks rolled into months and Algernon De Beajolais found that he was actually enjoying life in Ku Klux Klan House. Most evenings, the teenagers and their parents would gather at flat 520 where he would enthral them with his tales of daring do, like the time he circumnavigated the globe on a seahorse. He had stopped drinking, although he did like to mainline Bovril occasionally. He persuaded the teenagers to return to their studies and they all attended evening classes together. He became quite the expert on Malcolm X and Timmy Y. Everyone liked him, they didn’t judge him, and cared not that he was penniless.
In the summer of 2010, Kwame became ill after being bitten by the local newsagent. The only thing that could save his life was a kidney transplant, and bizarrely enough, Algernon De Beajolais was the perfect match. He agreed to help without hesitation, knowing that the operation would kill him. At the Royal London Hospital the night before the transplant, Kwame’s mother hugged Algernon De Beajolais to her ample bosom and cried, “Lord! Look aftah your son Mistra De Beajolais, cah him really is a saint!”
Algernon De Beajolais would have cried, if he didn’t posses two glass eyes.

Jazz Is Like The Kind Of Man You Wouldn't Want Your Daughter To Associate With

I slip the disc from its decaying cardboard sleeve and take a moment to fill my lungs with the musty scent of time. I can still detect hints of my father's cigarette smoke, exhaled by his eighteen-year-old self in an unkempt council flat as frantic blue-note rhythms dart against the plasterboard. 

The hue of exhaled nicotine and spilt beer are married to the fibers of the vinyl, and I feel as though I have been granted access to the air of 1977.  Drinking in the aroma of the record, I find myself sitting aside him in one of the ramshackle armchairs immortalised in polaroids, our heads nodding in unison as Coltrane showers us in melodic liquor. The frenzied saxophone notes become almost as intoxicating as the cans of Red Stripe cooling our palms, and through the thick of melody I cast an appreciative nod in my father's direction. "One day this record will be all yours, kid." My fingers itched with anticipation.

Old Friends

We were positioned exactly as we usually are on a suburban Friday evening. I was perched atop the bath ledge, my feet crossed beneath me and my hand subconsciously offering a joint to my lips. I sucked hard as though I were a foal at the breast of its mother, each sharp inhalation of smoke more sustaining than any maternal offering. She was also engaged in a comforting act, draped as she normally was over the porcelain toilet with her long limbs strewn about her. Her skin was pale to the point of concern, and for a moment she was lost to the white of the toilet bowl. It was only after she roused to take another sniff that I was able to differentiate between the two. Raising an unsteady hand to her nose, she breathed in sharply and ignited a shudder in her spine which shook her fragile foundations. Through the fog of smoke her wild roaming eyes met with my own, and wiping a string of coke-flecked fluid from her nose she looked at me and smiled with blissful vacancy. “What a fine night it is to be young, thin and drug-fucked”, she slurred, as if one could ask for nothing more.

Marina Abramovic: The Saviour of Insanity

To most, Marina Abramovic is the bearer of two conflicting titles. In the eyes of modern art aficionados and Clement Greenburg-style analysts, she is single-handedly fanning the flames of a dwindling and often ridiculed movement. To others, she is simply one more by-product of the modern art machine, spat out from its churning elements to join the existing ranks of formaldehyde showmen and bodily fluid enthusiasts.
And as if the dubious credibility of ‘Modern Artist’ wasn’t enough to contend with, Abramovic moves within the most revered and questioned branch of modernism - performance art. The very utterance of this term is enough to provoke proverbial eye rolling and communal titters. And speak those two words in any location but the trendier parts of London or New York, you will probably find yourself being dragged from the premises on the grounds of sheer pomposity.
But for me, Abramovic stands aside from other performance artists (or as they are more commonly referred to, ‘bullshit mongers’) because for some obscure and incomprehensible reason, I like her. Of course, it goes without saying that her creations are totally void of artistic skill and completely lacking in competent execution, but there is something about her unbridled and seemingly genuine insanity which endears me so.
Perhaps I am simply pining for a modern day solution to Frieda Kahlo, but I crave nothing more than a contemporary female whose projections of mania I can believe. Much like my Mexican messiah, reoccurring themes of inner torment can be seen consistently throughout her performance pieces. What the stillborn child is to Kahlo, the communist star is to Abramovic, and rather than elegantly painting her anguish onto canvas she prefers to cut these symbols of pain and oppression into her pale Serbian flesh.
Born in former Yugoslavia in the late 1940’s, Abramovic is the child of two individuals who successfully fought for the communist partisans during World War II. "We were Red bourgeoisie," she once told an interviewer. Bourgeoisie perhaps, but the grey war-torn landscape visible from the windows of the family home certainly had a profound effect on the young artist, which would later manifest itself as public displays of brutality.
Justifying her performances as "testing the limits of myself in order to transform myself", Abramovic has graced the sparse rooms of art galleries all over the world with such pieces as Rhythm 0, which saw her lying prone on a table for six hours surrounded by an array of carefully selected instruments, including matches, lipstick, saws, nails and perhaps most disconcerting of all, a loaded gun. Visitors were invited to do as they desired with her body.
Another piece entitled Lips Of Thomas, which took place in the Innsbruck Krinzinger Gallery, allowed visitors to observe the artist eating one kilo of honey, violently whipping herself until she no longer felt pain, and lying naked on a crucifix made of ice for thirty minutes.
And so it is because of acts of insanity such as these that performance artists should be hailed. Not of course, as significant contributors to art, but as a cathartic process of observing an individual with more loose screws than yourself. Perhaps if Abramovic and her fellow performance art gun-slingers repackaged themselves as performance therapists, their decidedly shaky reputations would glean sturdier foundations. They can't paint for shit and their attempts at sculpture would probably resemble the efforts of a limbless Chernobyl victim - but put me in a room with a woman who flagellates herself for kicks and I will leave a little less concerned about the voices in my own head.

Musing In The East End: Bangladesh and Bhangra...

The lengths of my stride shorten as I approach the sound of furiously pulsating hand drums. Such scenes of bedraggled street performers are ever-familiar in London town, but here in Brick Lane the hastily duck-taped instruments and calloused weather-worn hands belong to a slightly more exotic contingent. There are to be no wailing Oasis covers on this East End corner today. No pale sinewy limbs strumming guitars and pleading with Lady Fame to return for them. Instead, four sets of mahogany eyes stare intensely at the tautened skins of the drums beneath them, their vivid adornments flailing with every deliberate strike. Bhangra, in its purest form, beaten out in perfect unison by the hands of eastern strangers and rising up into the atmosphere to dwell amongst the hookah vapours and foreign chatter. These throbbing rhythms allow me to transcend the restraints of geography, and for a brief moment I leave the ashen East End pavements behind. Instead, for one fragile second in time, I find myself enveloped by the whooshing of Shari’s and the sweet scent of fruits carried aloft on ebony scalps.

Never Mind Love - Inaccuracy Kills

Fastidious Viewing: Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy
On the 2nd of February 1979, Sid Vicious died alone in a damp New York bedroom, his pulse halted by a lethal dose of heroin injected into his twenty-one-year-old veins. Less than seven years later, a film chronicling the hazy highs and crushing lows of his fleeting existence was released to a global slack-jawed audience - the darkness and despair of his final years played out against the insolent crunch of popcorn.
The film, simply entitled Sid and Nancy, was almost the scripted equivalent of Sid’s own controversial nature, and caused as much of a media frenzy and communal uproar from those who knew him personally and admired him passionately as, say, his violently haemorrhaging chest.
And just as Sid left a deliberate wake of anarchy in his trail during his short and raven-haired years, the 1986 Technicolor descent into oblivion came under fire for being distastefully premature, riddled with rock and roll clichés, and perhaps most uncomfortably of all, glamorising the desperate world of heroin addiction. A chorus of disapproval rang out from friends, family and ex-bandmates upon the film’s release, raining down on its factual and artistic credibility with as much the same vigour as the wall of spit one might have been confronted with at an early Pistols gig.
Written and directed by Alex Cox, a middle-class Oxbridge graduate who by all available accounts (including his own) was certainly never a fixture of the late 70’s punk rock scene and was never personally associated with Sid, Nancy or indeed any of the metal-studded Pistols entourage. Of course, that notion need not be an obstacle in the face of creating an accurate and sensitive biographical work - I don’t for a minute believe that Richard Attenborough drew on first-hand accounts when creating his widely acclaimed Gandhi biopic. But surely the key to avoiding any sense of exploitation when reenacting the life and times of someone who has already lived that life is to, quite simply, know your shit?
John Lydon, Sid’s former bandmate and partner in anti-everything philosophies, has long been shouting (or sneering, as he is better acquainted) from the rooftops about the film’s shortcomings. Lydon maintains that he was not consulted in any way during the writing or production of the film, and that instead of obtaining his notes from the people that knew Sid personally, Alex Cox “drew his points of reference - of all the people on this earth - from Joe Strummer!” Rotten continues in his autobiography No Irish No Blacks No Dogs, “What the fuck did Strummer know about Sid and Nancy? That was probably all [Cox] could find, which was really scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Lydon has also been one of the biggest advocates in damning the film’s glorification of drug addiction, a notion that Alex Cox strongly denies. Lydon insists that to him, Sid and Nancy is “the lowest form of life”, and goes on to stress the following: “I honestly believe that it celebrates heroin addiction. It definitely glorifies it in the end when that stupid taxi drives off into the sky.”
That stupid taxi driving off into the sky which Lydon holds with such contempt is just one of the many points in the film where fantasy has forced itself in place of reality, resulting in the sense that we are viewing a canvas painted by Cox’s own imaginings.
“It was all someone else’s fucking fantasy”, Lydon reiterates. “Some Oxford graduate who missed the punk era. Bastard.”
However, anyone who is by any degree acquainted with the sinister relationship of Sid and Nancy will be well aware of the mystery surrounding their final days. The true nature of their dying moments and the events that preceded them are lost to the shady recesses of rock and roll history, and only the walls of their squalid New York hotel room can really know the truth. The issue at hand does not lye with the not knowing, but with the superior perception that one can rewrite the pages of another person’s life in order to suit the condensed flow of a 90-minute screenplay.
However, the fantastical and romanticised ending of Sid and Nancy is by no means the only instance of reworking - or indeed outright untruth. The film is smattered with skewed takes on reality and misplaced information, the most glaring of which shall be exposed thusly:
Although Sid and Nancy was hailed by critics for the painfully accurate casting of the two main protagonists (“I saw that film the other day and at times I actually forgot that I was watching a movie. It’s so fucking spot on it’s unreal. And Oldman, man, he has got Sid down.” says original Sex Pistols disciple, Don Letts), some of the other characters prove far less persuasive.
During one of the opening scenes, Nancy enters a seedy East End venue to witness the Pistols perform live for the first time in her hedonistic little life. Before they take to the stage, however, and with our attentions fixed firmly on Sid and Nancy’s burgeoning love affair, we are presented momentarily by the presence and melodies of another band. In the background plays Alex Cox’s interpretation of The X-Ray Spex - a wildly important outfit in the punk rock scene. But instead of casting a mixed race, slightly overweight and orthodontically-challenged actress to step into the neon shoes of frontwoman Poly Syrene, a skinny white woman somehow clinched the role. Although this may seem like a slight overlooking on the part of the director, Alex Cox received harsh criticism for deliberately altering the very characteristics that made Poly Styrene stand alone from just about every other female contemporary of her era. Cox also appeared to cast a Jack Osbourne doppelganger in a ginger wig for the part of Pistols drummer Paul Cook, but there aren’t really any feminist undertones involved there. It was just ridiculous.
Another instance of the truth becoming skewed within the questionable script of Sid and Nancy is the inclusion of Wally Nightingale, who played guitar for a very early incarnation of the Sex Pistols. Not only is Wally portrayed as a spiky-haired punk rocker (the real Wally was actually more partial to tweed slacks and moth-eaten jumpers), but he is also depicted as a close friend of Sid’s. In fact, the fictional Sid and Nancy spend their first night of drug-fucked passion in Wally’s north London flat while he shreds an electric guitar in the background.
The reality of the situation, however, is that Wally was ejected from the inner clique that surrounded The Pistols as soon as Malcolm McLaren had deemed him “too nice” to become a permanent fixture. Because of the manner in which Wally was brushed under the proverbial carpet, he and Sid certainly never formed a blossoming friendship, and most accounts point to the possibility of their paths never having crossed. “After I left in ‘76, before the Pistols became the Pistols as everyone knows them, Steve [Jones] and the others slagged me off in the music press really badly. I never really knew why; I never did them any harm”, bleated the real Wally Nightingale.
And this is but one instance of many in which snippets of historical certainty have been borrowed and misplaced. Other uneasy examples of fact placement can be found with the Pistol's final gig scene, in which the character of Johnny Rotten utters the infamous, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” line in a completely different context to how it was originally delivered. Another superimposed detail lies with the fight which takes place in the same scene. It was really brick-shithouse built guitarist Steve Jones that swung his fists into the crowd of hecklers, not a crazed and perhaps vilified Sid Vicious, as the film suggests.
While most of these points may seem somewhat trivial on the surface, one must not forget that any decisions to alter an established chain of events can and will be deemed as manipulative. This is precisely why so many individuals have pointed the finger of blame at Cox for using drugs and violence to perpetuate the common misconceptions of what was, in the opinions of those who knew him best, 'a very sweet boy'.
And as for one of the final and most unsettling scenes of the film, in which Sid drives a hunting knife into the pasty abdomen of his beloved, the action can only ever be the director’s own imaginings because the desperate duo were the only souls present at the time of her murder. And because the film was orchestrated so soon after the actual event, Cox did not allow himself the luxury of considering the many other possibilities for Nancy’s demise – many of which were offered up by the people who were closest to the pair during their final days. Sid’s companions have branded him “too nice” and “too in love” to so much as playfully slap the back of her hand, and various New York hangers-on have nominated the couple’s drug dealer as the true killer.
But the infamous ‘taxi in the sky’ ending is perhaps the most wistful of all Cox’s imaginings – not least for its suggestion that drug addiction and murder will win you an automatic place in the heavens. Most glaringly of all it overlooks the fact that the real Sid Vicious got himself a brand new whiney American girlfriend, all before Nancy’s body had grown cold on the mortuary slab.
And so, whilst Cox may have wanted to create a punk rock Romeo and Juliet – two souls bound together in life and in drug-induced death – is there really any need for such a bleak legacy to be embellished upon and romanticised to suit the misty-eyed needs of one director? Sure, Sid and Nancy and its blinding glow of cool may have shone less lucidly had Alex Cox not flinched from certain aspects of truth, but even in pursuit of conveying the perfect punk rock love affair, accuracy should not be an afterthought.

In Anticipation Of The Number Three

Drip follows drop / in the tin bus stop / as emphysemic lungs / spew out thick fast coughs / Phlem coats blood / with a slimy kind of thud / hitting wrinkled hands / from pre-cancerous buds / Screams from prams / like a slaughtered infant lamb / ring out through the shelter / until the single mum's hand slams / Men in crombie coats / with whisky flasks to tote / breathing rancid breath / and dousing passers-by in smoke / Lidl bags spill / when the workers start to drill / releasing cut-price products / to make your healthy insides ill / Street sweepers sweep / as they shuffle on their feet / tidying dried up vomit / making concrete wastelands neat / Try as I might / to get my lighter to ignite / I can not escape the rain / inside this corrugated site.