A Review:

Saturday 10 September 2005, 3pm

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

presented by Bill Redwood & Antony Clayton

An Alien in London - Terre Haute 11

A review by Jim Pennington

It was a threatening September afternoon that saw, under the cupola of the Warwick Road exit with platform tannoy echoing and inter-cutting danger ahead, an intrepid band of London Adventurers assembled, eager to trace the footsteps of a visionary novelist. Threats of rain appeared but there were breakthroughs in a grey sky. We were told of spells that might be overcast. Spells incanted in a dry southern US cracker drawl via feed-back, fold-in, film and cut-up. We could feel the heat closing in.Luckily it was just the London sultry air and not the Nova Police.

Bill and Tony / Tony and Bill lead us to the former site of the Empress Hotel on Lillie Road where William Burroughs first stayed on his escape from Tangiers and Paris in 1959. Here the Soft Machine was cut and folded into shape. We re-traced our steps, with a pause in the Brompton Cemetery to synchronise with Virus B23 and the headstone of an eminent virologist, Dr John Snow, and moved on to Trebovir Road where the Hotel Rushmore still stood. Cut-ups, diaries and tape experiments took place here.

Then we took a silver arrow through the night-dark subway to seek and find 8 Duke Street, St James, where WSB spent productive years (1967- early 1974) finalising The Ticket that Exploded, The Wild Boys and the Job . Under the portico of the former Museum of Mankind, Yage and Mayan connections were made. Away from the roar of Piccadilly, in Albany courtyard, Graham Greene, peered past a curtain. Distant echoes of a coffee-bar spell were heard. Antony Balch got WSB to call up Hexan curses. Through a narrow alley into Masons Yard, at the dynamic Indica Gallery which once radiated 60’s counter-culture mayhem, WSB solicited candidates for a Scientology Audit.

In Duke Street, we learned of a dysnumerate calendar (Terre Haute 11 may well have been our date for that day), and of delinquent ‘Dilly boys. And a suggestion of despair on the part of WSB that London was now a terrible place to be as we stood opposite No 8 – did a curtain flap in that top right hand window? - …arcane licensing hours, un-responsive and incompetent publishers and agents, a literary scene defined by class, privilege and patronising rewards (£25 and a glass of sherry), a degenerating economy. John Brady with a meat cleaver in one hand, a bottle of Scotch in the other and A GIRL!! in tow. Time to move on. Burroughs to New York and us to the nearest Red Lion for an excellent wind-down in an upstairs room spacious enough for all the adventurers – how many were there of us? …a spooky 23.* Plus our Bill and Tony, to whom we are all indebted for their knowledge, enthusiasm and imagination.

THE BEGINNING IS ALSO THE END

I am not an addict. I am the addict. The addict I invented to keep this show on the road. I am all the addicts and all the junk in the world. I am junk and I am hooked forever. Now I am using junk as a basic illustration. Extend it. I am reality and I am hooked, on, reality. ………I need a human host…….since my arrival here five hundred thousand years ago I have had one thought in my mind. What you call the history of mankind is the history of my escape plan. I don’t want ‘love’. I don’t want forgiveness. I want out of here.

A section from a 1963 Burroughs routine read by Antony Clayton in the covered alley to Masons Yard. (White Subway, The Burroughs File 1984)

 

[* 32 people in all commenced the walk, with a further two joining us at Piccadilly. NGT]

 

Tony (left) & Bill & London Adventurers in Brompton Cemetery:

 

 

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