It’s Always A Rabbit Out Of A Hat: On magick, fantasy and creativity, with Alan Moore
In October of this year, I spent a balmy evening talking with Alan Moore for the Irish Times, on the week that he had two — count ’em!— new books on the nation’s shelves; his magical compendium The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic (Top Shelf) and the first in his long-promised Long London fantasy series, The Great When (Bloomsbury).
This was my third time speaking with Alan — you can find transcripts from those two conversations here and here — and the longest chat we’ve had, by far. So long, in fact, that I’ll skip the preamble and just jump straight to it.
Please note: I have included links to resources for people, books and ideas mentioned. I’ve also incorporated images to illustrate certain points while supplying full credit to those artists, but will be happy to remove should anyone object.
Enjoy!
You have two books about magic out in one month, is this mere scheduling kismet or part of some great working you’ve had in plan for decades?
I never have great workings planned even days in advance. So, no this is purely just the way things have worked out. I started working on the Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic fifteen years ago, around 2010 or so, back then we were expecting it to be out in a couple of years. Then the project expanded and Steve passed away, and we realised that although we’d got all the writing done for it we hadn’t got any of the art commissioned. So that’s what the last few years have been about, getting it all drawn.
As for The Great When, it wasn’t deliberate so much as a coincidence of scheduling but, yes, it’s two books about magic that even have some crossover. Well, the bumper book is about magic, whereas The Great When has got some magicians in it, but it isn’t really anything that is traditional magic — I was prepared to just make most of it up. The Bumper Book is an encyclopaedic history of magic and all sorts of other things as well, but we’ve got characters like Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune in both.
So, there’s a tiny bit of overlap, but the intents of both books are different. One is to explain magic as it is and as it has been, and the other is an attempt to try and create something new in fantasy, without relying upon all the magical tropes you get reiterated so often in fantasy novels.
Bumper has shades of Boys Own Adventure annuals and Make & Do craft books — was this tone always the goal or was there ever a more sober volume in mind?
No, right from the start me and Steve decided that in our experience magic is not a big, spooky, dark thing that is intimidating and full of nightmares and horrors. Yes, that’s all there if you’re looking for them, but that is not our experience of magic. We thought of magic as something that was actually quite beautiful and which, at times, appears to have a sense of humour. I mean, magic has got to have a sense of humour just in order to put up with the spectacularly absurd parade of magicians that have emerged over the centuries. We also wanted to dispel with all of this kind of exclusivity about magic. The little that I know of the occult scene today, because I don’t really tend to move in scenes, it seems like there’s an awful lot of what you might call LARPing involved. It’s people who are professing to be magicians or something of that nature but it’s just a thing they can identify with, it’s a fantasy roleplaying game, it’s not actually what people like Éliphas Lévi and all the other magicians in history were going for.
Some of them, yes, they were just doing it for appearances and to appear mysterious or esoteric, but a lot of these people were doing it because they genuinely thought there was something there that was worth understanding, so we wanted to dispel with all of that “we’re magic and we’re spooky and we know things that ordinary mortals would ever dream or dare to imagine”. We wanted to get rid of all that.
We were thinking, if we were to have a book of magic, I wanted something that a seven-year-old looking at it would say “yeah that definitely looks like a book of magic”. Because the child’s perspective on magic is, I think, as important — it’s where most of us get our attachment to magic and magical ideas. It’s not for children, it’s clearly for adults, as we say on the back cover. But we also wanted to have the “best children’s annual ever made” kind-of feel to it.
When I turned toward the back and saw the “cut out and assemble” Moon & Serpent Temple, I honestly cheered. I was so delighted you stuck the landing with that gag
We nearly didn’t get that in! We were originally gonna have it be a pop-up page but we couldn’t work out the technical side of that, but at the last minute John Coulthart, the wonderful John Coulthart — I mean, the book is me and Steve but if there’s a third contributor it would have to be John, not only for his own beautiful art but his design of the entire book, and making all the other artists fit into it so beautifully. It was him who decided to have the cut-out and assemble temple at the back and the puzzle pages with the goat of Mendes as a join the dots picture, that was him. We thought as well as the immense amount of information in the book, we should have some fun as well. Something that reminds me of an old British annual like the Beano.
I loved the Old Moore’s Guides To The Great Enchanters sections, it got me in a great rabbit hole of sorcerers. You also refer to the fact that Aleister Crowley claimed to have been a spy during the war — has anyone written the great Crowley spy novel yet?
I don’t think anyone has, probably somebody should do — maybe they can even work out who he was spying for [Laughs].
There’s a bit in the first part of The Great When, where he and Dion Fortune are sitting having a reconciliatory cup of tea in a backyard in Hastings and there’s a bit where he’s saying “the war’s going to be over by the summer and yes we’re going to win, I doubt Germany will last the cricket season, it’s all such a shame, I thought this was going to be my Aeon of Horus, all stern and radiant with sunwheels everywhere but alas it was not to be”.
The Book of the Law is pretty fucking fascist, and Crowley was writing for the German press during the First World War. He said he was doing that to parody the German sentiments. He asked in one of his columns, he said that the Germans have recently bombed a part of London, but to his distress they hadn’t hit his aunt’s house, so he published the address of his aunt hoping the Germans would bomb her.
I looked up Crowley’s A∴A∴ and it occurred to me that it was founded in 1907, but the other AA (Automobile Association) was founded in 1905
I wonder when Alcoholics Anonymous was founded
I looked that up too! 1935 in Akron, Ohio
They were a latecomer, then
Well, I just love that there was a brief period where a mix-up would have resulted in some extremely drab magical gatherings..
[Laughs]
…and some very interesting adventures in breakdown assistance
Absolutely, that could have worked out pretty well, actually. But, yes, with the Great Enchanters there were some bits that me and Steve were inordinately proud of. I say proud, I probably mean smug.
This is a safe space for smugness
Well, the thing we were probably most smug about was the job we did on Faust. We’d assembled all of the reference material so we knew that it was the Abbe Trithemius who was the first person to mention a Faust, when he was talking about Georgius Sibelicus Faustus Secondus — this was a paedophile diabolist who had been thrown out of a school not far from Trithemius’ abbey, for interfering with boys there. A very unpleasant character, and we then worked out that there was another Faust around at the time, who was Johannes Faust — a doctor of divinity at Heidelberg, who was known as “the God of Heidelberg” because he was just such a marvellous divinity student.
Then, we found out that there was a canon who was travelling around that part of the world and had written a letter saying “I was in a tavern the other night and the most dreadful person came in, it was apparently Faust, the so-called God of Heidelberg, he was the most filthy man, talking about diabolism”. So we realised that this guy was the root of the confusion, he’s got the two men confused. And this is also how Faust the diabolist has become a doctor, so we were thinking that sorts that out. It’s a very simple thing, but it has evaded most of the renaissance scholars, including Frances Yates and people like that who surmised that maybe they were twins. No, it doesn’t need that, it’s just this very simple [name coincidence].
Then, I complicated things when we were wrapping it up, I said, “wait a minute” — and, having only had a grammar school education, my grasp of Latin was a lot shakier than Steve’s — “am I right in thinking that Georgius Sibelicus Faustus Secondus means George Sibelicus Faust the second?” and he said “yeah it does”. But he’s the first mentioned Faust? So we looked through all of Steve’s reference books and couldn’t find a previous Faust and Steve lookedup the word in his Latin dictionary. And apparently, the word Faustus means a lucky, or fortunate, man.
So, we thought, this is a phrase and fable kind of thing; it’s like somebody who had all the luck, you might think he couldn’t have got that without magic, so to call someone a lucky man might be an indication they were a magician, like the name Prospero — that suggests someone who’s prosperous, but it’s the name of a magician. We might say, that guy he’s a bit of a Merlin — it doesn’t mean Merlin existed, but it’s just a thing in our phraseology, so the first Faust was just a guy in phraseology, it wasn’t a real person, so we put this one to bed.
And then as we were finishing it all up, I said to Steve, we’ve done this one before — this is the same story as Simon Magus!
It’s got the guy being carried in the air by demons, it’s got Helen of Troy turning up in both stories, and so we realised that the Simon Magus story was a Christian propaganda story at the very birth of Christianity, deliberately conflating two people: Simon the magician, who was a travelling charlatan and Simon the Gnostic, who was the head of Christianity’s biggest rivals, the Gnosticism, and the Faust story, as in the details in Goethe and Christopher Marlowe, seems to have been taken from the popular chapbooks about Faust, and they’re combining two people; this disreputable diabolist and paedophile, and a Catholic Divinity student. And this isn’t happening at the dawn of Christianity, like the Simon Magus story, but at the dawn of Lutheran Protestantism, and it’s exactly the same thing, the conflation of two people as a propaganda story — and they even used the same material from the original propaganda story. So, perhaps a bit dry and technical, but we were really proud of that on a purely scholarly level, because nobody’s sorted it all out before.
Reminds me of Christianisation of various Irish “saints”, figures like St Bridget loaned from the Pagan tradition, co-opted with folk tales that gave her a Christian spin
Well St Bridget is St Bride, which means she has quite a bit to do with The Great When. One of the entry points into the other London is Bride Lane.
Oh, of course! I hadn’t clocked that
Which is just down from St Bride’s Church — that’s Bridget or Brid, a mother Goddess. You might notice at the back of the book, there’s a very spooky picture of me taken by my wife Melinda, during rehearsals in 1994 for a performance that Ian Sinclair was putting on at the Bridewell theatre. And during rehearsals, Mel took a photograph where there’s this ethereal gauze, that is over the entire picture.
I presumed that was a photo effect?
No no no, we don’t know what it was, it wasn’t a double exposure because it’s obeying the same lighting rules. I’m sitting in the spotlight and the bit of the gauze that is drifting into the spotlight and over me and the part of the table I’m sitting at, that is being lit up, but it wasn’t there. So that has always been a very mysterious picture.
When I was writing The Great When, as an entry point, I decided to have one of them in Bride Lane, right where the Printers Institute was that is now the Bridwell Theatre, or was in 1994, I trust it’s still there. That picture is captioned Alan Moore, David J and Her Train” which is the name that we’ve given to this floating length of curtain in The Great When.
I love those names, The Bride And Her Train, The Beauty of Riots, the Pope of Blades
I had fun with that — this is what I meant when I said I didn’t want to make this a thing of traditional magic, I wanted to make up The Beauty of Riots or The Pope of Blades, and Harry Lud and all the rest of it.
The whole time I was reading, I kept thinking ‘is this something that already exists that I should know about?’, and again the magic trick you played on me with fucking Thunderman, I was googling things to see if they existed all the time.
[Laughs]
So, was this something that came to you fully formed from the ether, or triangulated from loads of intersecting interests?
Much more the latter. The basic idea probably came from the ether, but it involved an awful lot of history-wrangling. I always make a rod for my own back with these things but on the other hand, I think it’s worth it. For the first book, I was working out what Prince Monolulu’s timeline was, because how can you resist a fantastic character like that? There were just so many brilliant characters laying around neglected, unused and forgotten in London’s history, and I thought why doesn’t someone just grab all these and make them a cast of characters in a series of books or something. So I did.
Ironfoot Jack, his career, where Jack Spot’s criminal career was at in 1949, getting all of these. Austin Spare, where was he? Well, it turns out he was going out for drinks with Kenneth and Steffi Grant and John Galsworthy and everywhere they went the Harry Lime theme seemed to be playing, and he was living in a basement surrounded by cats in Brixton, after having his studio blown up during the war. And, yes, he had his first exhibition in a pub in 1949, all of these things getting them to fit together is more of a problem with the second book, because the first book the time frame of the events is only a few weeks, whereas the second book is nearer to a year. That’s alright, it doesn’t spoil the pace as much as you think it might, I just have to write very interestingly over long, boring stretches.
Well, reading the Long London sections reminded me of something you said the first time we spoke, about Lovecraft, and his overloading of descriptions as a modernist technique. I was struck by that when you slip into Long London and you have the text in italics, it’s this almost maddening overstuffing of description where it’s hard to make it all cohere. It was difficult for me to do it at first, and then I just surrendered to it
That’s exactly what I wated, Séamas — with the sequences in Long London I thought I want these to feel as disorienting as it would do if you were suddenly in another world. One of the things about this book is I’m really tired in current fantasy about how the kids go through the back of the wardrobe in Narnia and it’s not really a big deal. Y’know, people go into these worlds as if it was visiting Milton Keynes.
Or if they get to Narnia, it’s just a lion that’s talking, it’s not an amorphous, incomprehensible, six-dimensional slime being
Yeah, and people’s reactions. Like even if it is an amorphous six-dimensional slime being, they’re like “oh that amorphous six-dimensional slime being, that was really unpleasant! I’m glad we got away from that in one piece” etc etc. No! You’d be booking yourself into psychiatric care! You’d have a complete mental breakdown! Any time any of my characters enter The Great When, they’re vomiting, weeping, fainting, because that’s what I figure ordinary people would do, if something even slightly fantastic happened. If something happened that challenged your whole ideas of reality, you would fall to bits. Any of us would. We certainly wouldn’t be acting like action heroes. I wanted to get the alienness of this other world, I wanted to establish that. So I thought when we get to the Great When, we shift to italics, because italics makes everything seem more urgent, and shift to the present tense to make it more immediate.
I also use Celine’s three-dot effect. I’m not so fond of his anti-semitism, but the three dots effect, that is something I can use. So that was to create this disorientation, so you actually feel that you’re in a different world and the prose becomes more intense and poetic, perhaps a bit more ambiguous and difficult to focus on. It does the job, and also allows me to really take the breaks off and do a drift of hallucinogenic prose.
Can I ask, where people like Prince Monolulu famous at the time, or where they fringe figures even then?
They were famous, Prince Monolulu was the best-known black man in Britain, certainly in England.
As a racing tipster predominately?
As a racing tipster, who claimed he was an Abyssinian prince, and was just a wonderful theatrical character. He was often in trouble with the law, once I believe — according to his autobiography, so there is that asterisk — for calling Hitler a cunt. And he said, “but as an Englishman, surely it is my duty?”. You gotta love him. He was getting in the papers nationally, but he was mostly known in London, but people all over the country would have heard of Monolulu.
Ironfoot Jack was mainly known in London. I was reading that before he died, which was in 1959, he had been visited by a probably very young Ian Dury, because Ian Dury had polio and he saw Ironfoot Jack as a kind of Bohemian legend with his long white hair and his homburg hat, the theatrical cape and a cravat.
All of these people, in the second book, that I’m writing now, Joe Meek is I think the character find of the century. I’m having such fun writing him. And I’ve just had the strangest thing happen to me this Saturday. I’m just working on the end of the second book at the moment, I’ve got Joe Meek and Dennis Knuckleyard entering the Great When.
[At this point, Alan was a tad free with spoilers for the next books in the series, which I will not here repeat. Eventually, we moved on to the topic of manifesting reality from art]
I had the great pleasure of interviewing Chris Morris, recently
Oh, wow. Chris Morris, now there’s a character.
And he said something which reminds me of your own thoughts on manifesting things from fiction — what he and Armando Iannucci were doing with The Day Today was what they thought was an absurd take on the news of the time
A ridiculous parody, yes.
Which you can now look back at now and, because of how accurate their own forecast was, it’s almost quaint, because the real news has now overtaken them, even the graphics, the blustering presenters, the constant nonsense from their reporters
Even like the endless graphics of the opening credits of Brasseye.
You’ve got that for real now, the graphics department has just gone berserk. I mean, Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci just two of the most wonderful comedians of our time. I mean, everything he’s done. Four Lions was absolutely stunning, and I keep forgetting its title but the one with the group of revolutionaries being setup by the FBI
Our Day Shall Come
Our Day Shall Come! Aw, I thought that was fantastic. He’s got a really brutal eye, that is just what you need for these brutal times, he is so funny. But I can see that our times have outstripped us all. Nobody, not even the most absurdist social satirist would ever have come up with Donald Trump. Probably even with a Boris Johnson — people would say that’s going too far, you’re making him too much of an unsympathetic character. Real Tories, they wouldn’t be as disgusting as that. But they are. People never think about us fantasists — we’re the real victims here.
Well, last time we spoke, it was in the reign of Liz Truss
Ah, the forty days.
The lettuce hadn’t even been bought. How do you parody that? There was a lettuce that was nationally famous.
I was reading something in the Guardian that was about Led By Donkeys and it actually gave their contribution details and I banged one in immediately, because they did that wonderful banner.
And she walked off the stage in tears saying “that’s not funny”.
Which is a pretty good sign that it was
It really was.
She has the good grace to stop you from feeling sorry for her, by being such a despicable person
And she cost us £30 billion! 30 BILLION. Even Brexit only cost £45 billion, and in her brief forty days, she managed to outdo even that. You gotta hand it to the woman.
So, what I’m wondering is: Looking at things like this, those moments of history in the making right now, are you optimistic or pessimistic about that future? I go back and forth myself.
I try to be neither. I am a hopeful cynic. I didn’t vote in this last election, because I was going to end up voting in a conservative, wasn’t I? This is just Tony Blair round two, this is really dispiriting. I can see nothing good — this is where the cynicism comes in — in the political landscape, but I am hopeful that this means that politics as it is at the moment is pretty clearly breaking down. It is not fit for purpose, our political ideas don’t work. They didn’t work particularly well in the times they were designed for. But in our current times, they don’t work at all. It is my hope, that we have the technology, we have the ideas, there are ways we can bypass our command structures.
I’ve been an advocate of the sortician approach to democracy for quite a while. It wouldn’t solve all the problems but it would be better than what we have now. This is where, if there is a thing of national importance for the country, you have a lottery. You appoint, say, 50, 100, however many you want, people from across the whole of the population — unlike in Athens, where they didn’t let slaves have a say for example. But the basic principle is you take people from right across the population and you have them as a jury and then they have both, or as many sides to the question as there are, put to them by expert counsel. And then when they’ve had a chance to ask all the questions they want to, they make a decision. At that point, the jury is broken up and returned to the population. So, there’s absolutely no point in them voting for higher pay for jury members, say. It removes most of the abuses of power right there. I was reading in the New Scientist about ways we could, and probably should, overhaul our political system, to make it fairer and in fact functional. It just depends whether we get round to doing these things or whether we get round to doing so quickly enough.
But, what with the environment, I’m equally cynical, but hopeful. That, given the time frame of these things, a relatively short time after developing the industry that has fucked things up so badly, we have started to respond as a species and are trying our best to rectify those problems. The broad majority of us are not behaving too badly at all, it’s just this minority that are our leaders. This 0.00001% that cause all our problems.
I also think the doomerism you see from some people — whose horror over climate change or democracy I would certainly share — is self-defeating. The output from “climate change is not real” and the output from “climate change is real, but we’ve fucked it so bad there’s nothing we can do about it” is the same: nothing.
This has always been the same. Back in the eighties, I remember saying “nobody is thinking of the future”. You’ve got one party who think the future is going to be pretty much the same but with smaller radios, so it’s not going to be much different, why do anything about it? And the other party think that there isn’t going to be any future, it’s all going to end with a mushroom cloud exclamation mark, so why bother preparing for it? In neither case, is there anybody thinking, we’re going to have a future, maybe we should think about how we organise it.
Obviously, I like environmentalists, thank God they are there. Was it Just Stop Oil, where a few of them got sent down?
For a Zoom call — they didn’t even do a protest
Yes, a couple of them were from Northampton. We’re quite big on the old protest here. However, some of the environmentalists, when they start talking about human failings as a failed species, it would be better if we’d never been here because we’re messing up the planet. No. It’s vital that we’re here, because as far as we know, we are the most intelligent life in the universe and as far as we know, the life that happens to be in this minor planet in a minor solar system is the only biological life in the universe. You’d think that there’d perhaps be more out there but until we know exactly how life formed, we can’t possibly calculate the odds.
There’s a great Brian Cox story where he’s standing in some desert looking at this crystal clear arm of the milky way in the sky, and a world-renowned astronomer waves his arm across its vast expanse and says “all those worlds — and the best we can hope for is slime”
And even if there have been creatures of our, or similar intelligence, that was probably a long, long time ago, or will be in the future. The chances of us living in the same universe at the same time — and even if we did — the black bits between stars are horrible. They are so huge, even if there is other life in the universe, and they’re trying to find us as desperately as we’re trying to find them, it’s never going to happen.
That’s what my money is on. I think we should try to value ourselves a lot more. We should think “there might not be a single scrap of moss, anywhere in the universe, other than here”. That puts quite a weight of responsibility on us, doesn’t it?
Or Arthur C Clarke’s quote ‘Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.’ If we are on our own, let’s act accordingly.
Let’s act as if we’re on our own. If we do find some nice aliens at some point, that’ll be a treat, but let’s act as if we’re on our own and actively try and sustain life on this planet. Let’s not have these science fiction wank dreams that people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson seem to be having, this cosmic circle jerk. Let’s not talk about terraforming Mars, because anyone who knows about that stuff knows it’s impossible. First we’d have to work out what turned Mars’ electromagnetic field off in the first place, because it hasn’t got one, and then turn it back on, if that’s even possible.
Ah, there’ll be a switch
You’d hope. But there is a planet that’s semi-inhabitable, and has an atmosphere and it will support human life, and that’s this one. Why not try to sort out the mess you’ve made of this one before you think of baling out with your rich friends to Mars, because that’s just a schoolboy fantasy about there being an end of the world but me and my pals will go and live on Mars and we’ll get the atmosphere up and working and get crops working and we’ll be fine.
Did you ever get into that hard science fiction stuff of the ’50s, where it was very much about the actual physics of it all?
No. I’m kind of pathologically against hard science fiction, to a certain degree. I did an article in my beautiful but doomed underground magazine Dodgem Logic called ‘Frankenstein’s Cadillac’, where I argue that the origins of science fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — there are precursors but they’re more fantasy — was an attempt at a scientific sort of story. You’ve got that and HG Wells-
Jules Verne
Jules Verne. But they’re a bit different. HG Wells’ works were all apocalyptic warnings. Jules Verne’s were supposed to be apocalyptic warnings, like what if this incredible technology existed but it fell into the hands of a fanatic like Nemo or Robur.
However, you always got the impression that Verne was fantasising about being Nemo or Robur. Basically, the original science fiction as it emerged in Britain and Europe, that was dystopian generally, and a warning about the dangers of messing with science and what this might lead to in the future.
It was only in America in around 1915 that the popular science magazines started introducing scientific fiction, like the Hugo Gernsback sort of stories. The most popular hero of that time was Tom Swift, the boy inventor.
He hadn’t got any particular training in physics, he had a lot of American know-how and he was a pretty good engineer and he could make all the scientific breakthroughs of his day, just with that. And he was pretty good with his fists in a fight.
Like all those engineers we know
Yeah, all of them. So this was American science fiction. So, I argued, is American science fiction what they have instead of a history. I said, if we want to get our population charged up, perhaps in the event of a war, then we’ll start banging on about King Arthur or Churchill and the Blitz, all this national mythology, we’ve got a couple thousand years of it. America, they’ve got 250 years and most of that is genocide and slavery. So, they haven’t really got an actual history: look at what we were, even if that’s all made up and mythological, we can still say it.
America can’t say that, so I thought is American science fiction what they have instead: look at what we will be. The American Empire will extend itself into space, and won’t it be great. Tom Swift is a good example of it, he was a complete bastard. You’ve heard of tasers, haven’t you?
Of course
That was an acronym for Thomas A Swift Electric Rifle.
Oh I remember reading that, but had forgotten any relation to a fictional character?
He hadn’t a middle name in the original stories, but they added the A in because TSER didn’t sound very impressive. It was a rifle he invented that had a little harpoon, a barbed projectile connected to a battery by a wire so the projectile would get stuck in to your opponent and give them a nasty shock.
Exactly the same concept as a taser, so that’s why it was called a taser. He was a young American fascist who was indomitable and having all these brilliant ideas and was showing the world what down-home American knowhow was capable of.
I always think of the Jetsons. In 1962 they imagined a far-off distant future with flying cars and robot butlers, but couldn’t conceive of a financially independent woman
It was also that the Jetsons were just the Flintstones. The Flintstones of the future, and the Flintstones were the Jetsons of the past. And both were pretty much modern mid-20th century life.
Can we talk names? I loved reading Dennis Knuckleyard every time it came up, and I have seen you mention that it was something that just came to you?
Well, it was the first time it’s ever happened to me where it came to be semi-conscious, and I suspect a name like that can only come to you when you’re semi-conscious. I was drifting off to sleep and I was in that hypnagogic wilderness between awake and asleep, where there’s just a load of nonsense going through your head. Just a word salad, a stream of connected words and thoughts that don’t really connect but become a narrative you’re telling yourself as you’re drifting off to sleep.
I was just on the verge of sleep when the internal narrator said “so then Dennis Knuckleyard went…” and I sat up in bed, laughing. I just thought that is the most ridiculous name I’ve ever heard, I’m going to write that down. I did have a pen and pad by the bed for writing down dreams but I’m undisciplined when it comes to that so I don’t generally do it. I’d never written an idea down in the middle of the night before, but I put the light on, wrote “Dennis Knuckleyard” and then went off to sleep. It’s a great name, I did a little piece for the local Arts Lab magazine, an experimental piece where I actually tried out the name, not the character, but it wasn’t very satisfying. When it came to The Long London books, I thought that’s the one, isn’t it.
When I found out that there had never, in the history of the world, been anybody or anything called Knuckleyard then, rather than be discouraged, I thought let’s make him part of the story; that both Dennis and his mother have no idea where his now deceased father got the name from in the first place. Did he make it up as a joke? Is it a misspelling of some foreign name? They’ll never know. It was something of a gift.
Did it give you a sense of who he was as a character, the way a Dickensian character called something like Spindly Longshanks immediately brings a physical form and an attitude to mind?
Yes, it is a bit of a Dickensian name. It’s perhaps Dickens via Peake, because Peake’s names are fantastic and I always felt that he probably built upon Dickens for that. I do make quite a bit of Peake in this second book, and I have Dennis thinking about he really admires Peake’s ridiculous names, without a shade of irony. I think that when I was doing this thing for the Arts Lab magazine, I was thinking Dennis Knuckleyard sounds tough, like someone who settles things with his fists in a pub garden. But when I started to write him, I thought he’s kind of hapless, isn’t he? He’s well intentioned, he’s not stupid but he’s awkward and hapless, and it seemed like the right name for that kind of character, it seemed to fit.
It’s also useful to have a character like that within the insanity around him, he lets it all happen to him, but it becomes a foil for the reader because he needs to have everything explained to him so clearly
What I’m enjoying about Dennis is that in the first book he’s 18. The book I’m writing now he’s 28, he’s not grown up a huge amount but he’s grown up some and he’s doing some of that in the course of the book. At 28, you’re only just out of your adolescence, we don’t get out of adolescence until we’re 25, 26, so you’re not quite settled into adult life — you’re having to pretend that you’re an adult, but you’re not quite settled into what feels like an adult identity yet. That’s where Dennis is at the moment, and it’s interesting. One of the things about writing these books, one’s in 1949, 59, 69, 79 — twenty year gap — 1999.
So, characters like Dennis, you can show their development up through fifty years and you can also do that with the book’s main character, which is London. I can look at things like the art in London, the state of crime, and the state of black culture, queer culture, what was the politics like. And what was happening in the world, you can bring all these different threads, what were the films like? In the first one we’re talking about The Third Man which was the big film in 1949, and in this one we’re talking about Room At The Top and I’m All Right Jack, and a couple of others. I think A Kid for Two Farthings is the other one. I have Grace and Dennis going to the cinema quite a lot. So I can comment on culture as well as the stuff in the plotline, because it’s all part of the plotline, to see how all of these things have developed in London since the tabula rasa of the post-war period, where London was just rubble, physically and psychologically. You’ve got a kind of clean slate, it has to rebuild itself from. Watching the process of that rebuilding and how we got to here from there, is a big part of what the Long London quintet is all about.
I’d never read N by Arthur Machen [which forms an integral part of The Great When] so I was delighted to discover it was about my olds ends of Stoke Newington. I lived there five years, but never saw [metaphysical liminal space described in said short story] Canon Park
Nobody has!
More’s the pity
Stewart [Lee] was a huge help, at least in the Stoke Newington parts. I think it was during lockdown that he decided to do a psychogeography project, which was also — because he can’t do anything without being sarcastic about it — a thing about men who walk round the streets of London doing what they say is psychogeographical research when actually it’s obvious they’re trying to displace personal problems.
He’d accrued all this psychogeographical detail about Stoke Newington, which due to lack of space I could only use a bit of, but it was still invaluable. It was this dossier about the area- this is where the police killer Harry Roberts holed up after committing his crimes, and Stewart’s really big on obscure bands from the 70s and 80s, and his knowledge about them which was encyclopedic.
He’d got one place that was a house that had been lived in by a 60s radical group, and there was an 80s indie band, and then the comedian Kevin Eldon, who’d all lived in this same house, but twenty years apart.
Oh, was it Psychic TV? A friend of mine lived in that house! [After contacting said friend afterward, I can now confirm he merely went to a viewing of said house]
Was it? I should have a look in my dossier, but I was thinking it was another band. I have issues with the late Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle and all them. I didn’t think much to his magic and I thought he was a little shit.
[Pause]
He, uh, he maced my wife, Séamas.
He maced your wife?
He maced my wife. She was at a party, she was talking to another woman about rape and he was walking past and heard these two feminists talking and did a brilliant magical prank and sprayed them with mace.
Jesus Christ
The cowardly little fucker. So I did have some people say “oh perhaps you might want to meet Genesis P-Orridge” and I said if I met him I’d put him in a fucking wheelchair, so it’s best that we didn’t. And also, I am friends with someone who was a genuine magician, who gets a couple of mentions in The Bumper Book of Magic, Joel Biroco, a really dangerous practical magician, and I remember I was reading his magazine Kaos. He had heard that the Chaos magicians up north were going to bring out a magazine called Chaos, so he thought “that’s a shame, I’ve always wanted to bring out a magazine called Kaos”. And then he thought, “well, if I’m a magician, I can make it so that I have brought out a magazine called Kaos”.
So, he worked upon Kaos Issue 2 and solicited from some of his friends like Ramsay Dukes, people on the magic scene and got them to write letters saying how great Kaos 1 had been, that he included in his letters page and sent a copy of Kaos 2 to the people up north to review. So they abandoned it and had to call theirs Kaos International.
But Joel, in one of the issues of Kaos, he did this thing like a sports page in a paper where he’d say “is it true that Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth’s top striker, Gensis P-Orridge is considering a transfer to David Lietti’s OTO Wanderers?” and “Is he really going to abandon the karma of all his followers by abandoning the OTO after getting them to join Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth?” And in the next issue, it said “well our last issue doesn’t appear to have gone down well at Genesis P-Orridge’s hackney squat, apparently he came running out of the ballroom in the attic saying “there are demons amongst us””.
He thought that Joel Biroco was actually a demon who had taken human form, and when I met Joel, I got on with him splendidly, and I asked him did P-Orridge react like that because it was all true? And Joel said yeah. So where did you get the information from, and he looked a bit sheepish and said, “actually it was from a Ouija board. I said you’re joking, he said “no, I got the Ouija board, I got the planchette and I asked it a question about him and it suddenly started spelling out this entire story and I said, what will happen if I publish this, and the planchette went all about the alphabet spelling out the…. Shit… will… hit…. The…. Fan…goodbye”.
And that was what led to Genesis P-Orridge moving from London to Brighton and then from Brighton into exile, when a Temple ov Psychick Youth film was misunderstood, I think, or at least that was story.
Can you talk to me about one of your own idols, the snake God Glycon?
Am I right in thinking he was a glove puppet?
He was a glove puppet, yes.
That’s a pretty good example of the effect you’re describing
The first ventriloquist act, I believe.
What year are we talking?
We’re talking first century AD. The Glycon cult lasted for 150 years after Alexander of Abonoteichus’ death, which is saying something. That’s not a bad amount of time. And considering that it was a cult based on ventriloquism, my belief is that people obviously knew that. They weren’t stupid, this was the Roman Empire at pretty much its peak. They knew Glycon was being made to speak by ventriloquism, but they understood it in a different way. Back then they would have understood it as neo-platonist statue animation, which is where if Gods are ideas then an image that represents the God is, kindof, a God.
Because the idea of the God is a God. So you can meditate on the God, your statue or your painting, can be said to contain the God itself. Which is actually about the most sophisticated view of what Gods are and how we might alk to them that I’ve ever come across.
It’s ontologically very sneaky, it’s proving that Gods exist by a kind of ontological back door. By saying, no the idea is the only thing that needs to exist. Gods are made of ideas. And it’s difficult to argue that Gods are not made of ideas. So, that is my basic proposition. And Glycon was probably the most sophisticated application of magic as a technology that occurred just before the Christian church wiped out the whole of the Gnostics, possibly because as I argue in the book of magic, because both shared the same figures.
Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mother, and all the rest of it. No one knows which came first but I think you can make an excellent argument from logic that it had to be the Gnostics that came first with their metaphorical story, with their parable, that they had composed — not meant to be a true story, just as something to illustrate the ways you could improve yourself spiritually. I believe the Christians came along and took it all literally, and said we’ll take all this but it has to be literal, this person really was crucified and all the rest of it.
And then of course we’ll have to wipe out the gnostics, which they did. I think Glycon and Alexander of Abonoteichus were actually a pinnacle of magic just before Christianity erased magic for most of human culture, about a thousand years during the dark ages. I’ve got my picture of Glycon lit up here now.
Glycon is in the room with us?
Glycon, in various forms, is in the room with us. He’s on a bunch of Romanian postage stamps and money, that I’ve been sent over the year that have images of Glycon on.
It’s still a very big part of my life, even if he was a glove puppet. Especially because he was a glove puppet.
It speaks to what you’ve been saying about magic as the moment of creation, whether that’s inside the human mind, whether it’s external or internal. It could be someone coming up with a story, or communing with a spirit to create reality. But if there’s nothing and minutes later this something, it doesn’t have to be more mysterious than that?
It’s always a rabbit out of a hat, an idea out of an empty mind. And that, along with a whole universe out of a quantum vacuum, this is the essence of magic, it’s something from nothing. And I think that it’s in our consciousness, that’s the only place they need to be, these Gods, these demons. Look at how much Jehova has caused when he doesn’t actually exist!
They don’t need to exist, they just need to exist in peoples’ minds, and they can cause all the religious wars and changes to society you could imagine. You don’t need a guy standing there in a toga.
But it’s nice to have.