THE WILLIAM BURROUGHS INTERVIEW

WILLIAM BURROUGHS’ 

 ‘FINAL ACADEMY’: 

 TWILIGHT’S 

LAST GLEAMING? 

An interview and overview of 

 William Burroughs and Psychic TV 

at the ‘Hacienda Club’, Manchester

This can be no neutral tract of reportage.

We’re crammed in on wraparound concrete stairwell. A bodyguard like a Mormon salesman, smart suit, laser-set hair. William Seward Burroughs shakes my hand, but avoids eye-contact. Is courteous and pleased to talk, but – distant, amputated, disconnected. Jeff Nuttall’s ‘nervous hypnotic man.’ Not quite registering anything. L’Homme Invisible stood like a dead ancestor. Philosopher-King designate of a private fantasy zone. Adrift like a muttered trance on a killing floor…

A single bronze-wood table, solid, lathe-turned legs. A ‘v’ of angled silver mikes zigzag in. Burroughs wasted, thin and expressionless, in green shirt, brown patterned tie, brown jacket, C&A white-‘n’-grey sectioned jumper, grey sox, an air of bored grey resignation. It’s unreal. A mid-Manchester Club vaulted tram-shed high, cat’s eyes and M-way bollards fencing the dance area into a traffic island, industrial severe and austere. Twin huge screens slurred with Factory Records direct relay video slicing in at table, mikes, aged Beat relic, heroin novelist, subversive fag nihilist. A humourless humourist. Slightly unhinged. Freeze-dried in a cerebral slum of spiritual numbness.

The camera is the eye of a cruising vulture at a slaughterhouse carnival.

There’s much ratty satin-‘n’-tat. Dressing down in Oxfam chic. Much movement and bored ritual display. It’s frayed at the edges and veered off into wrongness. Sure, there’s a token infiltration of Lit-freaks and word-junkies, but I’d guesstimate most here know Old Bull Lee largely from cryptic notes dropped obliquely in Bowie interviews. Item: ‘Cracked Actor’ (BBC2, 26 January 1975), film with cut-up lyrics in the backseat of a speeding Chevvy. And who here among this throng of pathetic, repressed, sexless, repressive, cultural beggars knows that Burroughs’ jaded influence has spread way beyond that point, like a nerveless discomforting disease to so irradiate Rock culture it goes undetected? The lead exhaust in the air you breathe? How does THAT stand cold and old, frail, vulnerable and antique, here in the epicentre of Now? What’s been did is history, and what is yet to do still indeterminate. Their attention drifts, a lethal dissection of metal and flesh without discrimination.

 I’m here with pirate publisher/fantasist Michael Butterworth, and his Japanese Lady. She speaks fractured English, so our describing Burroughs in ‘Ladybird Books’ keyword-manual vocabulary and elaborate semaphore mime isn’t easy. CP Lee hangs on from his ‘Lord Buckley’ review, while clusters of self-nominated celebs hang out beneath the screens. The Burroughs-(An)tony Balch cinema verité movie ‘Towers Open Fire’ (1964) swivels few heads, there’s spasmic jerky monochrome movement, panning across Tangiers Harbour 1962, syringes in wooden flesh, firearms, narcotics, retributive atrocity exhibitions of the several senses, flashes from the archives of Beat Hotel oblivion, Rue Git-Le-Coeur in Paris, the orgasm gun. The lens blurs in ferocious hand-held distortion, an iron brain spewing out random codes and scrambled components that escape into the two-dimensional auto-suggestion of flat celluloid. 

Released from film. He coughs. Sips some what-looks-like water. Shuffles fleshless legs and shuffles A4 typescripts. No introduction. No warmth. Just straight into ‘Place Of Dead Roads’ (1983) recited in a dead language void of inflection or emphasis. Autobiography? ‘he has a dark side to his character – and he loves it.’ Paranoia? ‘dead people are less frightening than live ones.’ Scripts and dark dark spliced sentence fragments that hit like knee-cappings from blurry speakers, soaking like acid corrosion, like Virus B-23. Malcolm Whitehead’s video bounces and out-focuses from green haze to alarming razor-cut clarity. Germ warfare with smallpox-impregnated Bibles. Equestrian telepathy, tales of Junkie cannibalism. A statement from the Immortality Control Board, ‘immortality is the only goal worth striving for… immortality is something you have to work and fight for, like everything else in this life and another. We want the whole tamalé! It’s ours and we’re going to take it.’

These are head dramas dense with narrative threads running vertiginously. Like the ghosts of unwritten novels. Blueprints to wrest control from the ‘Boards, Syndicates and Governments of the Earth’. From the conspiratorial systems of social, cultural, genetic and sexual coercion. “Shoot-Out At Dead-Ass Saloon” with the Wild Fruits. You must ‘identify with death’ he instructs, to rapt attention, providing open cranium image trax from ‘Ah Pook Is Here’ (1979) and ‘Port Of Saints’ (1973). New codes. New as in ‘Nova’. There’s laughter and jumpy applause at the more grotesquely blood-spattered gross-outs of the ‘Dr Benway’ tract (‘performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets, operating with one hand, beating the rats offa my patient with the other’), the ‘Do-Rights’, and the ‘No Nukes Is Good Nukes’ punchline.

His words are a disease that attacks cell-by-cell. Already I’m jet-lagged from going nowhere. A zone of drones. But there’s no doubt he’s closing all kinds of synaptic connections in unprepared brain-centres with the mere black opacity of his presence, underscored by his understated delivery. He ends his Final Academy some twenty minutes later with “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” from ‘Nova Express’ (1964) – ‘cross the wounded galaxies we intersect, poison of dead sun in your brain slowly fading’, and he’s gone. Doubtful if he saw the audience, if their presence even registered. But against the odds he’s spun the weight of a four-decade mythology and come off with it intact. What’s been did, and what’s yet to be done.

New York poet John Giorno slots on. By contrast with Burroughs’ minimalist starkness, Giorno’s pugilistic projection tags loud Disco-mix tapes onto his powerful “We Got Here Yesterday, We’re Here Now, And I Can’t Wait To Leave Tomorrow”. It’s a massively charged incantation, and he’s a pioneer of this Rap delivery. It’s eager and aggressively anxious to please. Then Genesis P Orridge’s Psychic TV videos flash up. A skull test-card. A print-out reading ‘THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT’. And a twenty-three minute chromatic montage running a repeating image-chain of technological violence, castration, napalm, ritual torture, fellatio and military chic. Burroughs’ lateral implications and junk-games ripped off the page onto naked celluloid. Words falling. Photo falling. Breakthru in grey rooms. Then and now. Then into now.

But I’m already worming backstage over cables and power-lines, crammed in on wraparound concrete stairwell, shaking Burroughs’ cool, smooth, pressureless hand. A guy who tokes so much impedimenta of legend that what do you say he hasn’t already been fed seventy-two times? He looks bored, humourless, sad, a look of borrowed flesh. And there’s something else, something vaguely unnervingly absurd about a tall angular sixty-eight-year-old St Louis gentleman hung out behind the soundstage of a Manchester Disco. He seems amiable, accessible, mellow even. It’s a peak experience for me, cool gone beyond boiling point, syllables cracking open and clogging in the back of my throat like a stuttering fan. Just two people I’ve encountered REALLY scared me. Bo Diddley was one. WSB is the other. Both times the barriers are on my side.

I insert an opening wedge gradually, suggest it must be gratifying to get such reactions from this charnel-house assembly. ‘Absolutely. They are a good audience’ he replies. His voice dry, a monotonous desiccation to it. His eyes avert, to pace across the copy of my magazine which I’ve passed to him.

The biggest responses came to the more obvious obscenities and the more visceral passages in the ‘routines’ I offer guardedly. Do you think you’re always appreciated for the right reasons?

‘I’m not prepared to say what makes people react. Or whether their reasons for reacting are right or wrong.’ But do YOU respond to their reactions when you’re performing? ‘I may make changes as I go along, according to how I feel an audience is reacting.’ He speaks of his ‘routines’ as ‘almost like a stand-up Comic act, when you analyse it. Short pieces. Usually comic. Very pointed.’ The humour of Lenny Bruce reconfigured by the Marquis De Sade and ghosted by Dr Goebbels. Everything viewed through anal-tinted spectacles and fed through that Burroughs Adding Machine computer brain, tapes shredded and spliced.

How do these audiences compare with… ‘with the last time I was here?’ Alright, sure. Let’s relate past to present. What’s been did and what’s yet to be done.

‘They are more alive this time,’ spake without conviction. But also – perhaps, on this trip – as distinct from his six-year London period, there IS less vehemence. Less perversity. On this trip he DOES seem to enjoy his fame-notoriety. And if what he says is anything more than platitude then that could be interesting. They once tagged him ‘Guru for the Flower-Power set’. An inaccuracy. Allen Ginsberg, yes. Jack Kerouac even, yes. Their vision has an optimistic naïveté segueing neatly onto that movement. His friends/lovers – yes, but William Burroughs was always too cynical and cold, too evil to catch that role. He’s more at home here with the dead 1980’s generation. He catches, but also challenges the cult of defeat, of disillusion. What he laid down in the past comes truer now than then.

There are elements of ‘Happening’ at the Hacienda, I suggest, but the atmosphere, the garb is wrong. ‘The way of dressing is a demonstration, and it is useful as such,’ delivered in a scabrous drawl.

‘I wasn’t involved in the sixties at all’ he concurs unbidden. ‘I was out of the country (out of the USA) most of the time. I really led a very secluded life. Apart from the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which I wrote about.’ He speaks low, now side-face, and in a rush so’s I miss some of it. He paces up and down in the confined concrete cell talking. Yes but I’ve read the ‘Exterminator!’ (1973) account of those trendy riots, mace, night sticks, busted heads, shattered glass, truncheons, ‘youths washing teargas out of their eyes in the fountain’ (“The Coming Of The Purple Better One” originally for ‘Esquire’, November 1968).

But before I get chance to cut in and get to specifics, he switches tack. ‘Do you live here?’

And I explain how I’ve travelled some sixty miles, and a literary lifetime, across the Pennines to reach this place. But a small price. I wouldn’t be writing the style I’m writing now were in not for ‘Naked Lunch’ (1959), ‘Soft Machine’ (1961, revised 1966), ‘Junky’ (aka ‘Junkie’, 1953), ‘The Ticket That Exploded’ (1962, revised 1967) et al. This CAN be no neutral tract of reportage.

He’s politely interested, but amputated. Restless with a nervy edge. The Mormon salesman smiles beatifically and benignly while glancing at his watch. A single frame in ‘Towers Open Fire’ shows a right hand with index finger missing. The hand – I’d been assured, was Burroughs’. The missing digit a self-inflicted mutilation, severed as token of a mild homosexual crush. I note his finger-count is complete, and the story collapses. But Burroughs attracts myth, and – aware of their potency, refuses to confirm or deny any of them.

Pity tour organiser Genesis P Orridge couldn’t make it tonight, I suggest. ‘No. He couldn’t be here. He’s ill with some skin infection or something. But there are the films…’

…And it’s a fascinating exercise to compare the films. The contrasts between – say, ‘Towers Open Fire’ and ‘Psychic TV’, the then and the now. The ‘sex magic’ that’s also present in Burroughs’ then-current novel ‘Cities Of The Red Night’ (1981). The shift in perception that occurs when Burroughs’ textual sex and death preoccupations get naked visualisation in – um, less subtle mediums. The differences…

‘But there are similarities. I feel there are common points too. They are statements of a kind.’ In Burroughs’ fiction the medium of print, celluloid, and vinyl get intermeshed. He experiments at length with tape-effects both in the ‘Ticket That Exploded’ novel, and on his Industrial-records LP ‘Nothing Here Now But The Recordings’ (1981, with Brion Gysin, Industrial IR0016) with P Orridge’s sleeve-scrawl, while his character Agent-23 gets literally sucked through the film barrier. ‘Most parts of a film are left in the cutting room, as in music or recording as well. But because a written text is visual does not necessarily mean that it’s cinematic.’

‘Naked Lunch’ itself was compiled in this cutting-room tape-editing fashion. ‘For every ten published pages there are fifty pages of notes to be edited, some on tape, and some filed.’ And the guy who once quoted ‘writing techniques are at least fifty years behind those of painting’ now deals in frames-per-second, enthuses about Malcolm Whitehead’s video from tonight, and encapsulates his words as often on vinyl as in print. Main soundtrack source for much of the Hacienda texts tends to be the new Burroughs-Laurie Anderson-John Giorno live ‘Red Night’ double album ‘You’re The Guy I Want To Share My Money With’ (1981, GPS, Giorno Poetry Systems), on which WSB sprawls and drawls across all of the third side. While vintage-1965 ESP-Disk ‘Call Me Burroughs’ has been reissued in cassette form by S Press of West Germany (and then by Rhino Word Beat in 1995). Each edition adds new dimensions and emphasis to his work, indicating new directions and consolidations for future explorations.

But aren’t there also dangers? He comments aside that the authorities ‘use sex as an addiction for control, just like alcohol and drugs.’ But extracted from the context of Burroughs’ dense prose and projected up stripped down into video visualisation, or marketed through the vinyl circus, isn’t there a danger that the images get subsumed into that control? He provides his own pre-emptive answer. ‘That’s true. Absolutely. It’s a very old tactic. The English are particularly good at that, at absorbing dissident elements. The authorities always try to put dissent into a category where they can deal with it more easily.’

Burroughs’ form of dissidence is more difficult to categorise. But before I can get down to analysis, at a signal, he turns to go. ‘Desolate thin blue overcoat, far to go, a sweet sadness in his eyes looking for a name.’ He hesitates and comes back again. Re-offers that same bone-ridged hand, but still not his eyes. Then he’s gone.

The smiling Mormon (James Grauerholz) blocks me. ‘Was that alright?’ voiced like a post-coital ritual. And even though circumstances fall far below optimum levels I can only confess that yes, it was way more than alright.

William Seward Burroughs was born 5 February 1914. His contribution to the Rock-Lit infrastructure is second to no other writer, although he claims no great love for it, preferring older music forms. He near-invented the literature of verbal assault, and now that some claim the power of language is exhausted and debased by repetition, he returns to show it not only stunningly alive, but more essential than ever before. Immortality now his only goal worth striving for. An earlier interviewer flung a line at him – ‘I am bound to the past’, from ‘Cities Of The Red Night’, and asked how it applies to William Burroughs in 1982.

He dismisses it. ‘It’s the statement of a character. Obviously I intend to continue…’

Absolutely.

In a subsequent correspondence, James Grauerholz, Burroughs’ business manager and eventual literary executor, chides me in an amused way for characterizing him as a Mormon salesman