Latest / Half the Picture / Alan Moore talks Long London, Watchmen, The Simpsons & why he walked away from comics (4K)

Transcript

Alan Moore talks Long London, Watchmen, The Simpsons & why he walked away from comics (4K) · Half the Picture

• 0:00
  Life isn't divided into genres.
• 0:02
  It's a tragic, comic, horrific, science fiction, cowboy detective novel, perhaps a little bit of pornography thrown in if you're lucky.
• 0:16
  Comics now means superhero movies.
• 0:20
  It doesn't mean a magnificent sequential art form.
• 0:25
  That was what Watchmen was about.
• 0:27
  It was a showcase of what could be done in the comics medium.
• 0:32
  It wasn't about superheroes, it was about comics.
• 0:36
  any act of art.
• 0:37
  You need to commit yourself completely.
• 0:40
  You put every last drop of yourself into a project.
• 0:44
  If you're not doing your very best work, then you'll always have that flaw to look back upon.
• 0:50
  That thing that you wished you'd done it better,
• 0:53
  Were you always a big fan of The Simpsons?
• 0:54
  I was always an admirer of it.
• 0:56
  It was the first thing of its kind.
• 0:59
  It was a breakthrough.
• 1:00
  Then they asked me if I'd like to be on it.
• 1:04
  I made your favourite superhero a heroin-addicted jazz critic who's not radioactive.
• 1:10
  It does show off my ripped physique.
• 1:16
  It was fun.
• 1:17
  For artists, I think it is your duty with your art, with your writing, with your music, with your filmmaking, with whatever.
• 1:26
  Now is the moment.
• 1:27
  Go on the attack.
• 1:28
  Don't hold anything back.
• 1:30
  Be as wonderful and beautiful and artistic as you possibly can.
• 1:35
  Pull yourselves together, smarten yourselves up and get to doing the job that you are meant to be doing.
• 1:44
  we have a small favour to ask all of you.
• 1:46
  Please, could you check right now if you've clicked the subscribe button.
• 1:50
  It's one simple, free thing that you could do to help us keep this show free and to keep improving it week after week.
• 1:57
  So please, double check if you've subscribed.
• 1:59
  Oi, how are you?
• 2:01
  I'm doing very well, sir.
• 2:02
  How are you doing?
• 2:03
  Not too bad, not too bad.
• 2:06
  Great.
• 2:07
  Well, hey, welcome to Half the Pitch.
• 2:09
  It's a pleasure to be chatting to you today.
• 2:11
  Thanks for giving up your time to come on and talk to me.
• 2:14
  Oh, my pleasure.
• 2:14
  My pleasure, Billy.
• 2:15
  Pleasure to be here.
• 2:17
  Likewise.
• 2:18
  Is your friend Joe there?
• 2:19
  Joe, he's got the camera here.
• 2:22
  Hello.
• 2:22
  Hello.
• 2:23
  That was Joe.
• 2:24
  Hey, Joe.
• 2:25
  How are you doing?
• 2:26
  Yeah, fine.
• 2:27
  Fine.
• 2:30
  Thanks so much for getting this all set up.
• 2:32
  By the way, just as you're there as well, I've got to say, big fan of Mandurula Festo, the song you guys both did.
• 2:39
  Oh, well, that's very nice.
• 2:40
  That's good to hear.
• 2:41
  We don't hear that very often.
• 2:43
  Yeah, right.
• 2:43
  But no, that's fine.
• 2:44
  No, that's fine.
• 2:45
  I listened to it again on the way into work today and it made me laugh all the way up Brick Lane.
• 2:49
  It's hilarious.
• 2:51
  By the way, before we sort of dive in, Alan, I've got to ask, so my family are sort of Northampton born and bred for many sort of decades.
• 3:01
  We're the Barnells.
• 3:02
  We go back to Northampton in the beginning of, sort of around the beginning of the 20th century.
• 3:07
  And I want to say, do you recognise these?
• 3:10
  These posters?
• 3:12
  Can you see those there?
• 3:14
  Let me see.
• 3:14
  I know that one.
• 3:16
  Yeah, that was one that I did for a band called Reducer.
• 3:21
  Yeah.
• 3:23
  Yeah, that other one was not done by me.
• 3:26
  That was done by somebody called Alan Smith.
• 3:30
  Oh, okay.
• 3:30
  Oh, it's going to say Alan Smith, and then it was like a free artist worked in this one.
• 3:34
  Alan Smith, Alan Moore, and then someone here saw Alexander, I think.
• 3:39
  Alexander.
• 3:41
  I don't know.
• 3:43
  I maybe did do something on it, but the lettering may have been mine.
• 3:49
  The lettering lower down.
• 3:51
  No, the other one, that's all me.
• 3:53
  Yeah, well, I mention it because my uncle Julian, who you might know as Hooli, is one of the members of Reducer.
• 4:01
  Oh, right, yes, I remember.
• 4:03
  Yeah, he sent me these and said, Oi, mention these, because this is something you did back in the 80s for them.
• 4:09
  I like this one in particular.
• 4:10
  It's like a guy sort of disappearing into a, what is it, like a mirror in the street?
• 4:15
  An infinite regress.
• 4:16
  It's a person walking past a poster on which they are on the poster, and that person is walking past a poster with them on the poster.
• 4:29
  It's like the Quaker Oats Packet.
• 4:31
  Oh, that's fantastic.
• 4:31
  Well, my uncle, Hooli, he actually has this in his bathroom, just to say.
• 4:35
  So he has the original.
• 4:36
  Oh, that's what happened to it.
• 4:38
  Ah, yeah.
• 4:39
  He's a big fan.
• 4:40
  Or he has a reproduction.
• 4:41
  He has one of them.
• 4:42
  He has it in his flat in Dryan.
• 4:45
  So, no, he asked me to say hello.
• 4:48
  Oh, well, say hello back to him.
• 4:50
  I certainly will.
• 4:52
  No, as I say, thanks so much for coming on Half the Picture.
• 4:55
  It's such a pleasure.
• 4:56
  I mean, I've been a mar of yours for years.
• 4:58
  And so just to be sitting here chatting to you is great.
• 5:00
  I guess as a as a kickoff question, because I've always been fascinated by your writing process and how you sit down and go about your work.
• 5:08
  Like out of interest, like what's like a day in the life of Alan Moore look like?
• 5:12
  You know, like do you sort of get up, make a cup of tea and start writing?
• 5:15
  Like what's a day in the life for you?
• 5:17
  Well, these days, a day in the life is I will get up because I will probably be working until very late into the morning before.
• 5:31
  I will get up very late.
• 5:34
  It will take me some while before my brain is up to working speed.
• 5:42
  I will have breakfast.
• 5:43
  I will have a cup of tea and then I will largely sit...
• 5:47
  for a few hours, just smoking, having more cups of tea, and trying to get my mind into gear for...
• 6:03
  some creative writing.
• 6:04
  I will sometimes start during the afternoon and will probably, if uninterrupted, will carry on typing until it was nearly three o'clock in the morning yesterday.
• 6:19
  This is, it's not unusual at this end of my life to find myself doing that, which is strange because that was how I began.
• 6:31
  Um, when I was 24, 25, and living up on a sink estate outside Northampton, um, the day would be spent looking after our new baby, um, and doing the things that people have to do in the course of an ordinary day.
• 6:52
  And then in the evening, I'd settle down to draw, uh, probably listening to the John Peel show, because it was a long time ago,
• 7:01
  And, um, at the end of the John Peel show, I wouldn't be able, I wouldn't be bothered to stand up and turn the radio off.
• 7:11
  So I'd listen to Brian Matthews around midnight.
• 7:15
  And then I would listen to you, the night in the music, uh, which was a very strange sort of radio to program.
• 7:26
  Um,
• 7:27
  And by that time of the early morning, you're probably starting to hallucinate anyway, and it's a sort of...
• 7:35
  It's a weird atmosphere.
• 7:37
  So that is...
• 7:38
  I found myself back in that space, but it's not bad because I have a theory that working really late at night, it's kind of better in some ways because...
• 7:54
  You can't hear anybody doing things like you can during the day.
• 7:58
  There's no cars in the street outside.
• 8:01
  There's no loud car radios or anything like that.
• 8:05
  But better than that, you can't hear anybody thinking.
• 8:10
  because they're all asleep.
• 8:12
  And you don't realise that you can hear people thinking, not hear people thinking, but you can hear a background hum that is there psychically during the entire day, but at around about 2 o'clock in the morning, it completely shuts off.
• 8:30
  And so you've got a kind of psychic silence, which is very good for creating in.
• 8:36
  So that is kind of...
• 8:39
  what I find myself getting back to.
• 8:43
  I will just attend to the affairs of the world and phone calls and people visiting and things like that during the day.
• 8:53
  And it will probably be during the afternoon or possibly the early evening when I shall get round to doing my four or five hours work, you know.
• 9:04
  Yeah.
• 9:05
  Sounds like a great way to do it.
• 9:06
  And how do you relax out of interest?
• 9:08
  Like when you're not writing, how do you relax?
• 9:12
  Well, I suppose the brief honest answer would be massive amounts of hashish, which I've been indulging in since I was 15.
• 9:24
  And seems to be the perfect drug of choice for me.
• 9:30
  I know that a lot of writers do prefer alcohol, which I don't understand at all.
• 9:37
  I've had some writers say, so do you like to sort of do your writing when you're a bit drunk late at night?
• 9:46
  i mean you know of course you always have to do a lot of rewriting in the morning and i'll say no no i i don't drink and uh so i prefer to um yeah with a large amount of hashish to do my writing at night and i am with hashish unlike say with alcohol your criteria get much much stricter um with alcohol you get really sloppy
• 10:16
  It's sort of... No wonder you have to rewrite most of it the next morning.
• 10:22
  I don't have to rewrite a word.
• 10:26
  It's always right there and right.
• 10:28
  It's exactly perfect.
• 10:29
  It's just what I intended.
• 10:31
  So that's how I relax.
• 10:35
  It does...
• 10:37
  actually cost a great, great deal of money for me to relax.
• 10:42
  It's sort of, and yeah, I have to do that because otherwise I would be consumed with anger from dawn till dusk.
• 10:53
  So sort of, you know, this works for me.
• 10:58
  that's absolutely iconic i must just say sir absolutely iconic and by the way huge fan of your t-shirt by the way and again iconic reading is fun folks read it reading was fun i thought that this had been released by the reading tourist board but ah yes thank you for that
• 11:19
  They're editing a cultist tourist board.
• 11:21
  Is that a pentagram I see on there?
• 11:23
  Good thing.
• 11:24
  I remember one of your short stories in Illuminations.
• 11:27
  Is it Location, Location, Location?
• 11:29
  It's a story about a cult in Bedford bringing back Jesus.
• 11:34
  Is that correct?
• 11:35
  Oh, yes.
• 11:36
  A similar landscape.
• 11:37
  The Pan of Saiyans.
• 11:39
  The Panaceans were completely real and all of their story is exactly as it's recounted in Location, Location, Location.
• 11:51
  It was just that I thought that the idea of a cult assuming that the end of the world would be coming at a predetermined date
• 12:04
  and that the end of the world would feature the return of Jesus to earth.
• 12:10
  And the Panaceans thought, well, he'll need somewhere to live.
• 12:15
  And where would Jesus, after the apocalypse, where would he want to live?
• 12:23
  And the answer was obviously in Bedford.
• 12:25
  So they bought this house.
• 12:30
  um in bedford for jesus when he gets back after the apocalypse and i thought that is such a ridiculous idea what if it was true um what if yeah the apocalypse happens as uh as predicted
• 12:47
  Jesus comes back and has to meet up with the estate agent or solicitor to hand over the keys to his new address in Bedford.
• 13:00
  I thought, from the estate agent or solicitor's point of view, that could be a really fantastic story.
• 13:08
  So, yeah, you know, and I've met people who,
• 13:13
  lived in Bedford who quite enjoyed it because they knew the area that I was talking about and they thought that it would be much improved by the Little Apocalypse, you know.
• 13:25
  My girlfriend's actually from Bedford.
• 13:26
  I actually confess I haven't showed her this particular short story yet, but no doubt I'm going to see if she says, if it strikes a chord, you know?
• 13:34
  Yeah.
• 13:35
  I bet it will.
• 13:35
  Yeah.
• 13:37
  With, I was just struck there.
• 13:39
  I just remembered something that I was listening to an interview with your daughter, Leia, who's another terrific writer.
• 13:46
  And she was saying about your writing process that you've, over the years, you've worn out typewriters and keyboards
• 13:53
  because you write so much.
• 13:54
  So for you, you're writing every day and you wear them out because you're typing so much.
• 13:58
  Is that true?
• 13:59
  Oh yeah, yeah.
• 14:00
  There was one particular keyboard.
• 14:05
  My keyboards, they look subhuman.
• 14:09
  They have got,
• 14:12
  burned holes in them, they're partly melted.
• 14:16
  There is hair and drugs and ash between all of the keys.
• 14:23
  They are absolutely disgusting.
• 14:27
  And I remember this was a number of years ago, this would have perhaps been back last century.
• 14:32
  I remember that the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Belgium,
• 14:38
  was apparently very, very keen to acquire one of my keyboards.
• 14:43
  And since I used to get rid of one every six months or something, you know, I said, yeah, well, I've got a keyboard here that's obviously doomed and on the way out.
• 14:56
  So if they want to come up and pick that up, that would be fine.
• 15:02
  Meanwhile, the keyboard, there'd been blue candle wax had melted over it.
• 15:08
  It was just getting worse and worse.
• 15:10
  And then when finally they sent a young woman up from London to pick it up for me, I walked down to the station.
• 15:17
  There was a torrential storm.
• 15:21
  I'd just got this keyboard in a plastic carrier bag.
• 15:26
  which was partly full of water by the time that I got down to the station.
• 15:31
  When I took the thing out of the bag to show her, it was dripping with black water.
• 15:42
  Apparently it's still on exhibit in the Musee de Beaux-Arts in Belgium, but
• 15:50
  What is it about Belgians?
• 15:52
  I really can't understand this.
• 15:55
  What is epic pleasure are they getting out of that?
• 15:58
  It's just horrible.
• 16:01
  It makes me look so human.
• 16:02
  But, yeah, me and keyboards.
• 16:07
  And I had an industrial keyboard that was supposed to be able to take power hoses from all four directions
• 16:18
  and raining hot debris.
• 16:23
  This was an industrial keyboard for use in heavy industrial conditions.
• 16:31
  and within about three months, I've managed...
• 16:34
  I felt quite proud, actually, that within about three months, it was already starting to stick and jam and things like that.
• 16:42
  So it's not a good life being one of my keyboards.
• 16:51
  How many do you think you've got through over the years?
• 16:54
  I really couldn't tell you.
• 16:55
  Any idea, Geoff?
• 16:58
  Well, it's certainly double figures, isn't it?
• 17:00
  Certainly double figures.
• 17:03
  But that could be anything between 11 and 99, couldn't it?
• 17:08
  So I can't really be much more helpful than that.
• 17:10
  I don't think it was 99, but it was probably more than 11.
• 17:15
  Aye, aye.
• 17:16
  And on these keyboards, of course, you're writing these brilliant stories.
• 17:18
  I mean, I've actually got a couple of them here.
• 17:20
  You know, your most recent work, you know, the Long London series, The Only World, the latest one, which came out a few months ago, which I absolutely love these books.
• 17:29
  They're terrific.
• 17:31
  And one of the things that's fantastic to me about the books is the fact that there's so much exuberance to them.
• 17:38
  There's so much abandoned.
• 17:39
  They feel like they're written by a guy in his 20s who's just now discovered prose fiction and is attacking it with everything he's got.
• 17:46
  But of course, you've been in the game for years at this point.
• 17:49
  I mean, when you're writing them, do you feel young when you're writing them?
• 17:54
  I always feel this, maybe I do, or maybe when I started writing I always felt old.
• 18:01
  I'm always, my writing brain is the same age as it ever was.
• 18:07
  Erm, and it started out old.
• 18:11
  Back when I was writing my early stuff, the personality that was doing the writing was older and more mature than the person who was living the life.
• 18:24
  I've caught up since then, and yeah, my physical body has completely collapsed, but sort of, but my...
• 18:34
  My writing ability and the mind that I use for that writing ability is as sharp as it ever was, and it's also probably as juvenile as it ever was.
• 18:48
  I've become quite a dusty intellectual person
• 18:56
  over the past sort of 40 years or whatever it was, but I can still go for a good knob gag.
• 19:07
  You know, it's, I, yes, I think that I have got a mature writer's voice, but there is a very immature writer's voice that I'm happy that is still in there somewhere, you know.
• 19:24
  Yeah, that sense of kind of youthful joy, as I say, just the act of writing is absolutely in the books.
• 19:29
  It's one of the things I love about it.
• 19:30
  And particularly, like you say, that kind of, you know, the knob gags.
• 19:33
  Like there's always been a sense of humour in your work, which I've always felt like running all the way from the beginning.
• 19:39
  But particularly in the first book, Great When, which I really loved, like there are more laugh out loud moments in it.
• 19:46
  then I think I actually can remember reading for a book in a while maybe I'm just not reading enough funny books but like Coffin Ada like her whole that whole character is just absolutely hilarious you know I mean where did that come from yeah
• 19:59
  Coughing Aider emerged from a conversation with the late and very great Kevin O'Neill.
• 20:11
  When I was talking with Kevin, as we did once or twice a week back in the day,
• 20:18
  and he was reminiscing about the South London bookshops of his boyhood and he told me about how one of the proprietors, he'd seen him it was a man he'd seen him, a customer had sort of attempted to haggle with him over the price of the book and
• 20:46
  The man had been so incensed, he had torn the book to pieces in front of the customer and thrown it at him and referred to him as a haggling little cunt.
• 20:59
  And I thought, this is wonderful.
• 21:03
  It would be funnier if it was a woman.
• 21:05
  That was the genesis of Coffin Aida, who kind of started out as a...
• 21:14
  a secondary character, a necessary secondary character, but probably a humorous foil character.
• 21:25
  But as with all characters, they do what they want.
• 21:31
  They mature into what they want to mature into.
• 21:39
  And it was only a chapter or so into the first book that I suddenly realised, oh no, she's not called Coughing Ada because she coughs.
• 21:53
  she's called Coffinada because of something to do with a coffin.
• 21:59
  And that has become, that is a plot line that develops further in the second book.
• 22:08
  In the third book, which I completed a few months ago, that gets, that is even more to the fore
• 22:18
  And I've even worked out a way that Goffinader's backstory does play a principal part in book four.
• 22:28
  So, yeah, these things, they sort of, you plant the characters and then you see what they're going to grow into.
• 22:37
  It's sort of, and it's always better if stuff happens like that by accident than if you've methodically planned it all out.
• 22:48
  I try to these days.
• 22:52
  I like to have a little bit planned out.
• 22:55
  so that I know roughly what I'm doing and then just leave all the rest up to, you know, just a chance and see what the story suggests that it wants to do.
• 23:11
  But, no, well, I'm glad that... And with the humour, I mean, this is more because I don't really like genre.
• 23:23
  I love genre, but...
• 23:24
  But I...
• 23:27
  There's a lot of limitations with it.
• 23:29
  It's like...
• 23:31
  I've got to...
• 23:32
  I made a statement some years ago where I was saying that life isn't divided into genres.
• 23:40
  It's a...
• 23:43
  tragic, comic, horrific, science fiction, cowboy detective novel with perhaps a little bit of pornography thrown in, if you're lucky.
• 23:56
  This quote, minus the final section about pornography, this quote was taken by an American greetings card company who asked me if they could use it on an inspirational greetings card.
• 24:11
  And so I said yes, because I just generally do.
• 24:16
  And then it became a fridge magnet, which they sent me a sample.
• 24:21
  And so I do actually have that particular magnet with that place of advice on my fridge.
• 24:28
  And I've realized that in writing the long London books where I'm trying to make it
• 24:36
  a low-life piece of realistic fiction, touches of crime fiction, fantasy, horror, and a lot of humor, all crammed into the same narrative, I've realized that I'm basically having to live up to my fridge magnet.
• 24:59
  So that is where I find myself.
• 25:05
  But I'm glad that, you know, you're enjoying the humour in the books because I think it's important to reproduce life by cramming as many elements in as possible.
• 25:17
  I mean, in the middle of life, we can have absolutely awful things going on and then somebody will be compelled to make a joke or a smart remark.
• 25:29
  And in the middle of our most comical times, something terrible can happen.
• 25:34
  Life switches from genre to genre, moment by moment.
• 25:38
  And so that's what I'm trying to get across in these Long London books.
• 25:44
  Well, you are, you are, absolutely.
• 25:46
  I mean, and the moment, everything you just said there reminded me of the scene in the second book where, I mean, spoilers for anyone who hasn't read the second book yet, but like Coffinator basically holds Dennis, not holds Dennis hostage, but, you know, traps him in his flat, you know, to interrogate him.
• 25:59
  And of course, you know, it's tense and, you know, it's scary because she is scary.
• 26:04
  But it's also hilarious because you're interrupting it with her spasms of coughing.
• 26:08
  Like you just said, the haggling little cunt line, I think, was the line the first time I laughed out, had to suppress laughter on the tube reading the book.
• 26:18
  Because it just got me so good.
• 26:20
  And the horror as well, and the other genres.
• 26:22
  You really have that because your writer has always had a real finger on the pulse of horror, but also the humour as well in the other elements, yeah.
• 26:29
  Yeah.
• 26:29
  I mean, like, also with the second book, in terms of humour,
• 26:34
  and tragedy and all of the other things that I mentioned, fantasy, horror, all the rest of it.
• 26:42
  Joe Meek was an absolute gift.
• 26:48
  Once I'd managed to work out how he would have spoken, because my thoughts about Joe Meek were that
• 26:59
  Actually, one of the things that plagued and tormented Joe Meek during his life was the fact that he was gay in a time when that was illegal.
• 27:12
  And gays were persecuted.
• 27:14
  It's getting a bit better now, but not entirely.
• 27:18
  There are all of these homophobes and transphobes everywhere.
• 27:25
  But with Joe Meek, I thought, actually, being a gay person in the music industry in London in the 1950s,
• 27:37
  wouldn't have been that much of a big deal.
• 27:40
  You know, Brian Epstein, a lot of the music producers and managers back then were gay people, but they were suave, urbane, middle-class gays who spoke, received English.
• 27:59
  They had wonderful, suave, metropolitan voices.
• 28:05
  Whereas Joe, who came from Newham in Gloucester, he would have had that West Country accent.
• 28:12
  And also he was probably autistic, very probably, and was constantly flying into rages about everything.
• 28:30
  He was, I thought that that would have, it would have been the Gloucester accent.
• 28:36
  he wouldn't have fitted in with those sort of suave, metropolitan, urbane, gay music people of that time because he'd have sounded like a yokel.
• 28:53
  And once I'd got that voice, I was able to, and also by having by complete...
• 29:03
  a quirk of fate or destiny, I got a letter through the post, which I do get some letters through the post, and some of them are very nice, and some of them are a bit weird.
• 29:18
  This one looked like it was probably in the latter category, because on the back of it, it's got a little cat sticker with, in Biro, a graveyard drawn in around the cat,
• 29:31
  and a speech balloon coming from the cat saying, Hello?
• 29:37
  Help me!
• 29:40
  And I thought, uh-oh, this looks like it's going to be one of those letters.
• 29:45
  I opened it up, and it was a lovely letter from a woman called Elaine the Duke, who had somehow, without my knowledge, been living on Northampton's Eastern District for...
• 30:00
  God knows how many years, decades, had with a bunch of children.
• 30:07
  And she was the widow of Robbie Duke, which still didn't really set off any, you know, bells of recognition in my memory.
• 30:17
  And then she explained that Robbie Duke had changed his name from Patrick Pink.
• 30:24
  And I suddenly thought Patrick Pink, he was the studio technician who was the last person to see Joe Meeker-Lowen.
• 30:34
  He was the person who was there when Joe shot his landlady, Mrs. Shenton, and then shot himself.
• 30:44
  Patrick Pink was a 17-year-old boy.
• 30:47
  Where have you witnessed Orges?
• 30:50
  I mean, it's horrific.
• 30:53
  It's horrific.
• 30:55
  And apparently Robbie, Pat, had got PTSD for probably the rest of his life, you know.
• 31:03
  But we didn't know what that was then.
• 31:07
  But Elena was able to sort of give me a lot of really beautiful details of Robbie's, Pat's relationship with Joe.
• 31:21
  you know, and their friendship and the way what Joe was like.
• 31:28
  And Elena thought that I'd captured Joe pretty much, that he's likeable and you would never have want to know him because he would have been a complete nightmare.
• 31:41
  He was very lovable and a complete nightmare.
• 31:45
  So, yeah, the character of Joe Meek was a real gift.
• 31:53
  He unfortunately doesn't last beyond the prologue of book three.
• 32:00
  But that's one of the things about these books.
• 32:03
  You've got people who turn up and...
• 32:09
  the real people that I've used, they died.
• 32:14
  And they died at specific dates.
• 32:16
  And so that's what I'm tied to.
• 32:20
  And that's good.
• 32:21
  You know, like in the second book, which is dealing with the 1950s, I mean, Ironfoot Jack Neath, he died in 59.
• 32:32
  So you're tied to that.
• 32:34
  Obviously, Spare, who features quite a lot in the first book,
• 32:38
  But he checks out in the prologue of the second book because Spare died in 1955.
• 32:48
  I've got a lot of room into how I can write little fictions around those established historical facts.
• 32:58
  This is a lot of what the Long London novels are about.
• 33:02
  It's taking an elastic skin of fantasy and fiction, and then stretching it over an armature of established historical fact.
• 33:18
  That established historical fact, that won't move.
• 33:22
  That's established.
• 33:24
  But you can dress that up with fantasy and fiction.
• 33:30
  You can fill in the cracks.
• 33:33
  It's almost like historical facts are like bathroom tiles or whatever.
• 33:40
  But by using fiction and fantasy as a kind of grouting, you can connect them together into new arrangements that have
• 33:52
  new meanings and suggest new stories.
• 33:56
  So this is pretty much my technique with the Long London books.
• 34:01
  I didn't say this actually, but right here, so we're recording this on this end in Brick Lane, which is just around the corner from so many of the locations in the book that you write about with so much knowledge.
• 34:14
  You know, like Folgate Street, where Grace lives, is like two minutes that way.
• 34:17
  I pass it every time I go for lunch, you know what I mean?
• 34:20
  It's just so, and I lived in Whitechapel for ages, so reading about the London that you're creating, you know, the mystical London and the real London, the fact that you got those details, obviously as someone who's a proud Northamptoner, the fact that you got those details spot on was just so impressive to me when I was reading it.
• 34:38
  Well, it's probably even more impressive.
• 34:44
  If you think that I have, I don't think I've been to London for 10 years.
• 34:53
  It's been, it's more or less been after Steve Moore died.
• 34:58
  That was my main reason.
• 35:01
  for visiting London.
• 35:03
  And I would generally tend to arrive in Euston and, boy, the quickest route possible, probably a cab to Charing Cross, train to Lewisham, another cab to Shooters Hill.
• 35:22
  I would only pass through London then.
• 35:24
  I'd got a huge fascination with London, but...
• 35:30
  increasingly don't like what it has become and increasingly these days I don't have a choice about I'm more or less confined to Northampton, I'm more or less confined to this armchair so I'm not going to be visiting the place again so I have to do
• 35:54
  All of the... Yeah, I can do research in books and, you know, barriers are the main means, but sort of...
• 36:03
  It's a kind of remote viewing that I'm doing for the Long London books.
• 36:09
  It's a kind of...
• 36:13
  I'm glad that the details are right because an awful lot of them are simply imagined.
• 36:20
  But there again...
• 36:21
  I'm quite good at that over the years.
• 36:26
  I've acquired an ability to project myself into different places or even different people.
• 36:35
  But I'm glad that it reads authentically because I'd wondered, I would have preferred it if I'd have been doing this...
• 36:48
  10, 20 years ago, then I would have certainly been going down to London and looking at all these places and visiting them.
• 36:57
  But no, a lot of my research is done probably on the astral plane these days.
• 37:06
  You know, I will imagine a place fiercely enough
• 37:14
  and will suppose that that is probably how it is.
• 37:20
  But no, thank you for that reassurance.
• 37:24
  I'm glad that it does seem authentic.
• 37:28
  I mean, I remember having a...
• 37:30
  There's an episode in the first book where I've got one of the characters running under the Holborn viaduct,
• 37:38
  And I'd got, I was trying to think, was that even there in 1949?
• 37:48
  I don't know, but I'm guessing it was.
• 37:53
  And yeah, it turns out it was.
• 37:56
  There's been more impressive things when I'm in the very, the opening of the first book, I've got a scene where, um.
• 38:07
  You've got the Cable Street riots going on, the Battle of Cable Street between the EastEnders and Mosley's fascists.
• 38:18
  And I've got the poet David Gascoigne as an 18 year old young man who's attending the Battle of Cable Street and he's very excited by it.
• 38:35
  who has just got his third book out and who is reminiscing about how about a year before he'd hosted the first international surrealist exhibition in london and had had to save the life of salvador dali when dali had insisted on turning up in a deep sea diver's suit
• 38:57
  and then had realized that he couldn't breathe um and so david gascoigne had had to leap to the rescue with a spanner and actually take off the faceplate of dali's diving suit thus saving his life but i i didn't know that gascoigne had actually been
• 39:19
  involved in the battle of kibus i knew that that was the year he joined the communist party and he'd gone to spain to fight against franco
• 39:29
  But I really didn't know whether he'd been at the Battle of Cable Street.
• 39:34
  But then I spoke to Ian Sinclair, who knows everything.
• 39:38
  And he said, oh, yeah, David Gascoigne.
• 39:41
  He was at the Battle of Cable Street.
• 39:42
  I used to... Ian used to sort of call up David Gascoigne whenever Gascoigne was in London.
• 39:50
  They'd got a friendship.
• 39:52
  Ian's been invaluable.
• 39:53
  I mean, I...
• 39:55
  There's another sequence in both of the books where you've got a tribunal of severed heads in glass jars full of potpourri that are all gathered in the Crown and Dolphin, which is right on the corner of Cable Street and I think the new Cannon Street Road.
• 40:17
  It's right on the corner there.
• 40:19
  And I knew that they had stolen and displayed the head of John Williams, the alleged Ratcliffe Highway murderer, who was buried with a stake through his heart at a crossroads on the Ratcliffe Highway, but whose head was missing because it had been taken and was used as a conversation piece and trophy in the bar of the Crown and Dolphins.
• 40:47
  I also had heard rumours that Emanuel Swedenborg's head had ended up in the same place, because Swedenborg Gardens is just around the back of the crowning dolphin, and Swedenborg's head was missing when Sweden wanted his body back.
• 41:10
  A bit embarrassing, it hadn't got a head.
• 41:14
  Although a head did turn up and it was returned to Sweden.
• 41:22
  However, I knew about those two heads and I thought I might be stretching it a bit by having tons and tons of heads in this kind of weird back bar tribunal.
• 41:40
  then Ian told me no no no the crown and dolphin had loads of heads there was a sewage outlet not far from the pub and the sewer men would often find as you would they would often find severed heads and skulls in the sewers and so they worked out that if you took them along to the crown and dolphin you could probably exchange them for a point or two so even my most grotesque
• 42:09
  imaginings have turned out to be actually surpassed by London history.
• 42:18
  I mean, that thing about Swedenborg's head being returned and taken off to Sweden for burial, that is all true.
• 42:28
  They then found out that it wasn't Swedenborg's head.
• 42:31
  It was the head of a woman.
• 42:35
  Nobody knows who...
• 42:37
  It's all right, this is all worked out now, but nobody knows who the woman is to this day.
• 42:43
  They did eventually find Swedenborg's head.
• 42:48
  It matches up with DNA and stuff like that, so it is definitely Swedenborg's head.
• 42:54
  They found it in a junk shop in Cardiff.
• 42:58
  Oh, Swansea.
• 43:00
  Swansea.
• 43:02
  There was a weird jump shop that specialised in taxidermy and things like that.
• 43:08
  And it happened to have the head of Emanuel Swedenborg there.
• 43:13
  If I'd written that, nobody would have believed it.
• 43:17
  You actually have to rein in the delirium of real life in order to write a convincing fantasy.
• 43:26
  Absolutely, I mean hey, truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.
• 43:30
  I mean that's absolutely a prime example of that, isn't it?
• 43:32
  Yes.
• 43:33
  And earlier you said that you've finished book three, that was a couple of months ago.
• 43:36
  I mean how does it feel to now be halfway through the London books?
• 43:40
  I'm more than halfway through I mean there's only four of them so I've got another two more to do yes and they're coming along very well I'm pleased with how they're turning out it's sometimes a bit hair raising um
• 43:57
  Because as I said earlier, these days I do prefer it if as much as possible I can avoid overplanning these things.
• 44:12
  I like to leave areas that I know are going to cause me problems.
• 44:19
  because I'm fairly confident that after all of these decades of writing, I'll be able to get around them.
• 44:28
  You know, I've learned a lot of techniques and tricks that sort of will probably get me out of most collet corners.
• 44:36
  But there's always that element of danger,
• 44:39
  that sort of, yet you really don't want to screw up this entire series that is going so well so far by not having thought something through.
• 44:50
  But on the other hand, I do kind of like that excitement of, how am I going to get myself out of this?
• 44:58
  I've looked at my original proposal for these books that...
• 45:03
  The thing is, I write proposals and I write notes and I write copious notes planning out each chapter and then I never look at them again.
• 45:15
  I was looking back at my pitch for the Long London series.
• 45:22
  I've hardly done any of that.
• 45:25
  These are completely different books.
• 45:28
  I've got Dennis Knuckleyard was originally a young occultist.
• 45:36
  And I only had to write half a page and I thought, he's not an occultist.
• 45:42
  He's just an 18 year old idiot living in London.
• 45:46
  No, that's the way to play him.
• 45:49
  Don't play him as an occultist who understands any of this.
• 45:53
  You know, sort of much better to play him as an 18-year-old who doesn't understand the real world, let alone this peculiar fantasy parallel world that he stumbles into.
• 46:08
  So, yeah, a lot of my... And I believe that the third book, when I saw my notes upon that, it was...
• 46:16
  largely talking about the death of brian epstein uh which hasn't figured at all in the third book because that was an idea that i must have dropped
• 46:30
  lack of, I don't know, perhaps lack of researchable material or stuff like that.
• 46:38
  The books are more or less doing what they want, but you have to trust them.
• 46:44
  You know, there's a sort of...
• 46:47
  I know what's going to be happening in book four, but not how it's going to be happening.
• 46:54
  The same goes for book five.
• 46:55
  I've got a brilliant conclusion to the series, but I don't know quite how I'm going to be conveying it or writing about it.
• 47:08
  But that's a good thing.
• 47:09
  It's good to leave these things open, although it will be kind of nerve-wracking.
• 47:16
  But that's part of the process.
• 47:19
  You know, I think my nerves do need to be wrapped in order to get the best out of them.
• 47:27
  Well, I for one, I can't wait to read the next one, and then book four and five.
• 47:31
  I mean, there's a question, something that I've always been curious to ask you about your work is that, because you're a writer who's explored so many different themes across the decades, but there's two that you've explored that have always interested me particularly, which is,
• 47:45
  Because you identify politically as an anarchist.
• 47:48
  Am I right in saying that?
• 47:49
  That's still what you identify as, that we're all masters of our own destinies.
• 47:54
  And that's the idea, right?
• 47:57
  Yeah, that was the point that Darwin reached at the end of his life.
• 48:01
  He died as an anarchist.
• 48:04
  And Oscar Wilde and a bunch of other people as well.
• 48:06
  So, yeah, sorry, carry on with what you were saying.
• 48:09
  I was just going to say the idea that everyone should be their own leader, everyone should be master of their own destiny, which is something that I've always connected with with your work, the kind of humanistic, you know, this idea of sort of self-determination.
• 48:22
  But then there's also another idea, a kind of eternalistic idea that you explore in your work, which is this idea about time, a kind of physics based sort of view of things where time is a kind of simultaneous event.
• 48:34
  There isn't a past, present and future event.
• 48:37
  it's just all one sort of great now, if you like.
• 48:39
  And it comes up in work like Jerusalem, even a little bit in the long London.
• 48:44
  And that idea, it seems to me to like negate the idea of free will of like, you know, self-determination.
• 48:50
  And I was wondering as someone who has written about both of these and has explored them and you know, it's both the idea of sort of self-determination but also the sort of time and is sort of negating that free will self-determination.
• 49:02
  Now, how do you reconcile them for yourself?
• 49:05
  Well, to me, it seems quite easy to me, but there again, I am taking a lot of drugs.
• 49:14
  The basic thing is the idea of eternalism, which is what I've found out that this belief that everything is eternal, that is related to Einstein's concept of a blocked universe.
• 49:27
  Right.
• 49:28
  which is space and time are inextricably one thing.
• 49:33
  And so when the universe comes into being, it is space-time that comes into being.
• 49:40
  That includes every particle in the universe exploding out from the Big Bang or whatever it was.
• 49:48
  It also includes every moment in the universe.
• 49:54
  So there's this huge space-time solid, a block universe,
• 50:01
  ...that exists, that has... ...all of the moments... ...of the universe, from its origin... ...to its eventual end... ...contained within it.
• 50:12
  Now, that means... ...that it is a predetermined universe...
• 50:19
  that there is no free will, which has got a lot of interesting implications, because if there's no free will, that screws up, I think, both religion and science, to a certain degree, because how would religion get by?
• 50:36
  If there was no free will, then there's no sin, and there's no virtue.
• 50:43
  everybody is just following their predetermined script, which may not have even had an author.
• 50:52
  And so, yes, you can't make moral judgments of anybody if looked at from a fifth-dimensional perspective.
• 51:05
  If you were somehow above this, if you were God,
• 51:10
  then you could look down and say, yeah, you know, Adolf Hitler, Mother Teresa, there is no moral difference between them, between, you know, William Blake and Fred West.
• 51:25
  There is no moral difference between these people because they're all doing what they had to.
• 51:31
  That's if you are some kind of fifth-dimensional deity who can look down upon this, but we're not.
• 51:39
  And the reality from our point of view is that we do have free will.
• 51:47
  Because, of course, we're going to think we have free will.
• 51:50
  Because if we want to suddenly wave our arms around completely spontaneously, then we can't imagine that those random movements could have been pre-programmed from the beginning of the universe.
• 52:07
  We like to think that we had a choice about whether we made those movements or not.
• 52:11
  I don't think we do.
• 52:13
  But from our perspective, to live in the world, we have to see it as if we have free will.
• 52:21
  And we have to have things like morality and judgment.
• 52:26
  Because this is the world on the level that we are dealing with it.
• 52:31
  And on this world, I mean, presumably, I was always destined to become an anarchist and to believe in the principles of anarchy, if this is a predetermined world.
• 52:49
  That, from my perspective, doesn't change anything about my anarchist principles.
• 52:57
  We must behave differently.
• 52:59
  as if we have free will.
• 53:04
  Because that is what this world suggests to us.
• 53:08
  We must behave as if we have free will because we could not live otherwise.
• 53:14
  We could not psychologically survive otherwise.
• 53:19
  So I'm quite happy to leave all of that stuff to an imaginary fifth dimensional person who can look down and say, no, they haven't got free will.
• 53:32
  They are just existing in a solid state in space time.
• 53:37
  That is probably true, but I don't think that that alters the fact that we feel that we make moral choices.
• 53:45
  We believe that we make moral choices.
• 53:48
  That is how we live.
• 53:50
  And on this level, I believe that personally, anarchy is the only political position that I could countenance.
• 54:02
  We're doing what we have to.
• 54:04
  We are believing that we have morals and that...
• 54:09
  as the characters in a story must.
• 54:12
  You know, you couldn't have Dennis Knuckleyard and Grace sitting and saying, you know, I think that ultimately we're characters in a story and we haven't really got any free will.
• 54:25
  It all depends upon what the author is going to make us do next.
• 54:30
  We're trapped.
• 54:31
  The books would stop, wouldn't they?
• 54:34
  the books depend upon the characters believing that they're not characters and that they have free will in a real world.
• 54:43
  That's how art and fiction and everything work, and I suspect it's the same for us.
• 54:50
  If I ask what FaceTime is for, the only thing that I can think of is that...
• 55:01
  Well, if morals and sort of things like that don't really exist, if cause and effect don't really exist, then we should perhaps pay attention to the narrative aspect.
• 55:19
  Human existence seems to me like a narrative.
• 55:22
  Of course it would do, because I'm a writer.
• 55:25
  But on the other hand, I do feel as if
• 55:32
  the narrative aspects, the grand story is perhaps all we have.
• 55:38
  But sort of...
• 55:41
  I do sometimes see the entire universe as some stupefying hyper-novel or movie, something that is entertainment or edification for...
• 56:01
  beings or intelligences that are so much bigger than our own that they can take in something with 8 billion characters and sort of that is of thousands and thousands of years duration.
• 56:24
  You know, just like we in a book,
• 56:27
  if we're reading, I don't know, Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow or something like that, we can take in all these characters and their entire environment and the history of it and it is real to us?
• 56:42
  Maybe.
• 56:43
  The whole of existence is some form of art for an audience that we cannot possibly speculate upon.
• 56:54
  But if that's the taste, then it's doing okay.
• 57:01
  I'm quite enjoying it.
• 57:03
  And I think that the set is spectacular.
• 57:10
  You know?
• 57:12
  So that is how I reconcile them.
• 57:15
  You know, I am an eternalist and I am an anarchist.
• 57:19
  And I don't really see, yes, they only fail to connect in the way that any eternalist view will of course fail to connect with perceived reality because they're two different realities.
• 57:39
  The eternalist view is saying, no, it's a predetermined universe.
• 57:45
  Everybody is doing and saying exactly what they are scripted to do and say.
• 57:50
  But we can't see it like that.
• 57:53
  We will always see it as us having free will.
• 57:58
  This is reality as we have to deal with it.
• 58:01
  We have to deal with it as if it wasn't predetermined.
• 58:06
  But absolute reality, I believe it probably is predetermined.
• 58:12
  But that is a problem for God, not really for us.
• 58:19
  This is the world as we have to handle it and react to it, as if there wasn't predetermination.
• 58:29
  But it's as well to bear in mind.
• 58:33
  that there is this other perspective, one that may only be shared by divine beings or multidimensional beings or whatever, where looking at it, there is no virtue, there is no sin, there is no cause and effect.
• 58:51
  there are just this wonderful fireworks display of events and moments that sort of, we will of necessity interpret in terms of the level that we are viewing it from.
• 59:09
  Yeah, so we have to believe we have free will, we have no choice in the matter.
• 59:13
  Yeah, yeah.
• 59:14
  It's a bit like in the third book I have,
• 59:19
  Grace in the third book absolutely stuns a group of very important creatures from the Great Wentz.
• 59:36
  She stuns them by quoting Wittgenstein.
• 59:44
  Wittgenstein's idea that
• 59:48
  nothing of a thing exists except for the words that we use to describe it.
• 59:55
  That nothing can be said to exist apart from the words that we use to describe that thing.
• 1:00:02
  And Wittgenstein, which is a pretty stunning argument, and Wittgenstein wasn't an idiot.
• 1:00:10
  And in his neck, that was in the tractates that he said that.
• 1:00:15
  But then after that, he said, but of course, we could not live like that.
• 1:00:22
  We could not live believing that we and everything in our world are just collections of words.
• 1:00:29
  He said, so you, the reader, must climb beyond me.
• 1:00:35
  You must sort of reach a point beyond my argument that you can live with.
• 1:00:42
  And it's that sort of thing for the idea of predetermination.
• 1:00:48
  Yes, that is almost certainly what the situation is.
• 1:00:52
  But that is not how we're living with it.
• 1:00:57
  And we can only live with it from the point of view of our three-dimensional world where we are trapped in time and everything appears to have morality and consequences.
• 1:01:09
  It's like one of the descriptions that I made of the process of this eternalistic view of the world is to look at the world as, say, a section of a Charlie Chaplin film.
• 1:01:24
  It's a strip of celluloid.
• 1:01:26
  The images on that celluloid are not changing.
• 1:01:29
  They're not doing anything.
• 1:01:30
  They're remaining completely static.
• 1:01:33
  But if you put them through a projector, or in the eternalist idea, if the light of our consciousness shines upon them as we're moving through space-time,
• 1:01:46
  Then you get movement and you get Charlie Chaplin saving the girl and beating the baddie and doing his funny walk.
• 1:01:59
  And you've got a story and narrative and you've got morality and you've got heroes and villains.
• 1:02:08
  But it's just a series of frozen images
• 1:02:12
  And in our lives, it's a series of frozen movements and moments until the light of our consciousness plays across them like a projector beam and we get the illusion of Charlie Chaplin saving the girl, defeating the baddie, doing his funny walk.
• 1:02:33
  You know, narrative and morality, they only come with time.
• 1:02:41
  with this apparently illusory element of time.
• 1:02:46
  That's what gives birth to all of these things, to every narrative.
• 1:02:52
  Narratives, they depend upon a sequence of events.
• 1:02:55
  So, yeah, we live how we must, whatever the state of space-time is.
• 1:03:06
  And for you then to sort of reconcile those two, does it not at all... Is it not at all difficult?
• 1:03:11
  Does it not at all disturb you?
• 1:03:13
  The idea that, like, this eternalistic idea of, like, no control, is it disturbing at all for you?
• 1:03:18
  Or do you just...
• 1:03:19
  It just is what it is and, you know, and that's fine?
• 1:03:23
  Everybody else, all of my friends...
• 1:03:30
  pets and house floors and every other creature in the universe seems to be getting along with this okay.
• 1:03:42
  I've got no complaints about it.
• 1:03:44
  As long as we have the illusion of free will, we're fine.
• 1:03:50
  And even for someone like me, it's not really an illusion of free will.
• 1:03:56
  It's just, if it is, it's an illusion that I accept because it's a necessary illusion.
• 1:04:03
  You know, it doesn't really bother me that I'm trapped in the glue of space-time like everybody else, because it's not like I deserve special treatment.
• 1:04:17
  If everybody's trapped like that, then this is our human condition.
• 1:04:21
  And we're all making the best of it that we can.
• 1:04:24
  No, it doesn't present any problems to me at all, Billy.
• 1:04:27
  It's sort of because even if we are all predetermined to do everything that we're going to do, that includes becoming anarchists or becoming magicians.
• 1:04:44
  One of the interesting things about an eternalist view is what a mess it makes of conventional magic.
• 1:04:50
  with Alistair Crowley relating everything to the will, with magicians changing things, changing reality in accordance with their will.
• 1:05:04
  That doesn't really work for me in an eternalist viewpoint.
• 1:05:11
  Or if the magicians have got anything to do with changes in reality, the magicians themselves have been put in that position by a predetermined universe.
• 1:05:24
  So it can only be the will of the universe, if you're talking about will, which is why in our Bumper Book of Magic, me and Steve Moore redefined magic as...
• 1:05:40
  any purposeful engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of consciousness, which neatly skirts the idea of will and also allows art back into the magical fold, and science for that matter, any deliberate,
• 1:06:07
  and purposeful engagement with the phenomena of consciousness or what we might possibly be able to do with consciousness that's art that's science and that is i believe magic so uh yeah adopting an eternalist view has
• 1:06:29
  changed or nuanced a lot of my previous beliefs, but it hasn't altered them.
• 1:06:37
  And, of course, Steve Moore had become a convinced eternalist by the time that he died.
• 1:06:49
  And then a couple of his neighbours saw him after he was dead,
• 1:06:58
  Um, you know, it's sort of, which kind of messes up.
• 1:07:05
  I'm not sure where ghosts fit into the eternalist picture.
• 1:07:08
  So, uh, that, that, that introduces an element of doubt and question.
• 1:07:15
  I don't know whether any of this is true, but I believe that it, the world behaves better if we act as if it's true.
• 1:07:26
  I mean, like when Nietzsche came up with something that was quite similar to eternalism, but was based not upon Einstein's theory, but upon the idea that this was an infinite universe that would go on forever.
• 1:07:42
  And Nietzsche believed that if that's true, then the most minute detail of our circumstances will be reproduced infinitely differently,
• 1:07:55
  somewhere else at some other time in an infinite universe.
• 1:07:59
  Now, that doesn't turn out to be the case, but it's something like it.
• 1:08:04
  And what Nietzsche had said was that this was the best form of belief in an afterlife.
• 1:08:18
  He said that this was the best religious belief, not even a religious belief, but the best belief in an afterlife because whether or not it was true,
• 1:08:29
  people who live their lives believing that would have better lives.
• 1:08:37
  And that seems to me to be perfectly true, that if you don't live your life thinking that it's going to be completely extinguished at your death, that you will be having that life over and over and over again.
• 1:08:55
  and it will always feel like the first time, then that kind of puts the onus upon you to have a good life if you're going to be doing this forever, and don't do anything that you can't live with forever.
• 1:09:10
  You know, be kind to people, sort of, and don't live your life in fear of death, because that negates your living.
• 1:09:22
  It's sort of, and don't think that you're over with your death.
• 1:09:29
  You know, that's not the way to have a good life.
• 1:09:34
  So, yeah, this is, to me, the best life I can have, believing the best things that I can possibly believe, given my situation and condition.
• 1:09:47
  That's a nice way of putting it.
• 1:09:48
  That's a very nice way of putting it.
• 1:09:49
  Well, thank you.
• 1:09:51
  Screeching in the complete opposite direction of eternalism.
• 1:09:55
  So 20 years ago, because I want to say, were you always a big fan of The Simpsons before you guest starred on the show, like 20 years ago?
• 1:10:04
  Were you always a fan?
• 1:10:05
  I was always...
• 1:10:08
  I thought that The Simpsons was...
• 1:10:11
  Very clever.
• 1:10:11
  I was always an admirer of it.
• 1:10:13
  You know, I thought that it was a really, really innovative and brilliantly done TV cartoon.
• 1:10:22
  It was the first thing of its kind.
• 1:10:25
  It was a breakthrough.
• 1:10:27
  you know, so yes, I really enjoyed it, and then they asked me if I'd like to be on it, and we had a very nice man, Tim...
• 1:10:43
  forgotten his second name, it was so long ago, but he came over to Northampton, we recorded my bit in the Lodge studio in town, he told us lots of unrepeatable Simpsons gossip, which was very entertaining, um,
• 1:11:05
  And that was it.
• 1:11:08
  I must admit that I haven't, because I stopped having a television signal.
• 1:11:16
  It was something to do...
• 1:11:18
  I was making some principled stand about the decision that everybody would have a digital television.
• 1:11:28
  And I haven't been consulted on that.
• 1:11:31
  So I decided that I wasn't going to get a digital television.
• 1:11:38
  Um, and so when they made the switch over, I, uh, didn't have a signal anymore.
• 1:11:47
  Um.
• 1:11:48
  But I could still keep my television to watch box sets on and things like that.
• 1:11:53
  Then when it malfunctioned, I did get a digital television, but I don't have the signal connected, so I don't receive...
• 1:12:06
  It's good for watching DVDs on things like that.
• 1:12:10
  But I've got out of the habit of television.
• 1:12:14
  I don't watch television news and I don't watch really any...
• 1:12:19
  Sometimes I'll see the old program, you know, that is being broadcast on television, but...
• 1:12:25
  I don't watch television.
• 1:12:28
  I've not really kept up with The Simpsons.
• 1:12:32
  I believe we've probably got most of the episodes on DVD somewhere, but I don't watch an awful lot these days.
• 1:12:43
  It's very rare.
• 1:12:44
  I'm generally either sitting and thinking or I'm writing, so I've kind of lost touch with it, but I believe it's probably still very, very good, you know, from everything I hear about it.
• 1:12:56
  So what were you going to say, Billy?
• 1:12:57
  What were you going to ask me about it?
• 1:12:59
  I was just going to say that, like, cause it's such a memorable episode and like your sequences with Art Spielgemann and Dan Klaus, you know, these other great, you know, creatives are just so memorable.
• 1:13:09
  I mean, if you go online on YouTube, like those clips, you know, people love them.
• 1:13:13
  People come back and watch them because, you know, they're so funny.
• 1:13:16
  I mean, when you recorded that and then the knowledge that you're there with Art Spielgemann and Dan Klaus, like how, I mean, I guess, what was that like?
• 1:13:24
  Well, I was doing it in Northampton.
• 1:13:27
  I didn't actually get flown to Springfield.
• 1:13:30
  I didn't have one of my fingers removed and I wasn't alive yellow.
• 1:13:34
  It was Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes that they weren't there.
• 1:13:42
  They were presumably filmed in their own locations, and this was composited afterwards.
• 1:13:52
  It was just an interesting afternoon out in Northampton, really.
• 1:13:56
  We took Tim for a pizza, and like I say, he told us lots of...
• 1:14:03
  unrepeatable Simpsons gossip about, like, the Michael Jackson episode and things like that, you know.
• 1:14:11
  So, but that was it.
• 1:14:13
  It sort of... And also, that episode did come when...
• 1:14:22
  I mean, it was a fantasy, not just me being yellow and only having four fingers on each hand.
• 1:14:28
  That was a fantasy because I had long stopped having anything publicly to do with comics.
• 1:14:36
  So the idea of me being in a comic book shop doing a sign-in with Art Spiegelman and Dan Klaus was as much of a fantasy as, like...
• 1:14:52
  Krang and Kotos, the aliens.
• 1:14:58
  It was, I think, perhaps, and also it was perhaps an idea of, I was playing up to
• 1:15:05
  a projection idea of what people thought Alan Moore was probably like.
• 1:15:11
  You know, sort of, um, all the stuff about, uh, me having taken radioactive man and made him into a heroin-addicted jazz critic.
• 1:15:22
  I consider that is a broad parody of how people may have seen my writing style, that, oh, he's really grim.
• 1:15:32
  If you've only read
• 1:15:33
  watch Men of V for Vendetta and all those comic books, then, oh yeah, Alan Moyes, really grim and dark and dystopian because we haven't read any of the other stuff because we really, really love superheroes.
• 1:15:48
  And we are not going to even investigate anything else that he might have written, even if it's in comic book form.
• 1:15:54
  If it's humorous, if it's not dealing with superheroes, then we don't understand it, we don't want to read it.
• 1:16:01
  And so we will keep to this image of angry Alan Moore, who is angry about absolutely everything.
• 1:16:10
  And so you needn't really take any notice of anything that he says, because it's all just anger.
• 1:16:18
  And if you make the criticism of the comics industry or, you know, mentions any kind of moral position, then you don't have to pay any attention to that because he's an angry old man.
• 1:16:31
  which is probably the reason why I have business comics and really don't want anything to do with them anymore.
• 1:16:40
  It's sort of where I've reached a point where I would really like to disassociate myself as far as possible from my career in comics.
• 1:16:53
  It's a wonderful medium.
• 1:16:55
  It is a medium that is still largely unexplored and I think will probably continue to be unexplored.
• 1:17:05
  There are some wonderful talents out there, but I think that the way that the medium is set up and to a degree the way that its audience is set up and their expectations will forever...
• 1:17:18
  keep the comics medium in a kind of protracted infancy.
• 1:17:24
  Um, so I do have a, uh, a figure that somebody 3d printed all Simpsons me that I have on my mantle face, because it does show off my, my ripped physique.
• 1:17:46
  that I think that I get far through it with anxious books.
• 1:17:50
  But sort of other than that, no, I probably won't be going back to watch that episode again.
• 1:17:58
  It sort of, it was fun.
• 1:18:01
  It was fun doing it.
• 1:18:02
  And yeah, The Simpsons do a good job.
• 1:18:06
  But that was another me in another life a long while ago.
• 1:18:15
  So I probably won't be reliciting it.
• 1:18:18
  That's totally fair enough.
• 1:18:20
  Totally fair enough.
• 1:18:21
  I remember you saying, because in Illuminations, the Fundaman story, which is terrific, by the way, if anyone's not checked out Illuminations, that particular story, that was almost like an exorcism of those feelings about, you know, I guess the industry and the comics business.
• 1:18:34
  It was like a release of that.
• 1:18:36
  Is that fair to say?
• 1:18:37
  Yeah, it's fair to say.
• 1:18:40
  It did me a lot of good, that story.
• 1:18:44
  And it is really grotesquely horrible.
• 1:18:50
  And it's really funny and really well written, I think.
• 1:19:00
  I did that story, which is almost novel length.
• 1:19:03
  I think you'd be pushing it as a novella.
• 1:19:06
  It's almost novel length.
• 1:19:08
  It's a short novel.
• 1:19:10
  I did that whole thing in three months.
• 1:19:14
  It was just a rush of vile, I suppose.
• 1:19:19
  But I'm very, very pleased with that work.
• 1:19:24
  you know, it managed to, in a blackly satirical way, to say more or less everything that I wanted to say about the...
• 1:19:38
  Hieronymus Bosch landscape crossed with Sesame Street that is the comics industry.
• 1:19:47
  You know, it's a world where, looking back, I really don't know how I managed to stay in it for as long as I did, and it looks more grotesque the further I get away from it.
• 1:20:03
  That sort of...
• 1:20:06
  a massive case of horribly arrested development throughout the industry, which didn't used to be the case.
• 1:20:16
  That wasn't the comics industry that I got into.
• 1:20:20
  It was a comics industry where most of the people were young people.
• 1:20:25
  A lot of them were children, technically.
• 1:20:28
  Sort of, intelligent children.
• 1:20:32
  That was who I was writing for because that was, when I was an intelligent child, I really appreciated that.
• 1:20:38
  But it has changed.
• 1:20:40
  It has become almost a fetish.
• 1:20:46
  The spandex costumes, the cloaks and the masks.
• 1:20:50
  And it's not even really about comics anymore, is it?
• 1:20:53
  A lot of people these days who say that they are really big, really, really big comic fans may not have ever read a comic.
• 1:21:01
  What they mean is that they saw the last three Avengers movies.
• 1:21:06
  When I walked past our local HMV some years ago, there was a big sign in the window saying that this was comic book month.
• 1:21:16
  There wasn't a single comic book in the shop, but there were rack upon rack.
• 1:21:21
  of superhero movies.
• 1:21:23
  So comics now means superhero movies.
• 1:21:27
  It doesn't mean a magnificent sequential art form, the possibilities of which were only just beginning to be explored.
• 1:21:39
  That was what Watchmen was about.
• 1:21:41
  It was a showcase of what could be done in the comics medium, or perhaps in retrospect, what I could do in the comics medium.
• 1:21:51
  Yeah.
• 1:21:53
  It wasn't about superheroes.
• 1:21:54
  It was about comics.
• 1:21:57
  But everybody thought, oh, dark, gritty, depressing superheroes.
• 1:22:04
  This is clearly the way forward.
• 1:22:06
  This is really cool.
• 1:22:09
  And nobody seemed to notice any of the storytelling effects.
• 1:22:14
  Or if they did, they couldn't reproduce them.
• 1:22:17
  You know?
• 1:22:22
  the Neolithic period and having somehow planned, designed and constructed a Porsche.
• 1:22:36
  You know?
• 1:22:37
  And then you've had your Porsche stolen from you by a lot of cavemen.
• 1:22:46
  Which is a bit annoying.
• 1:22:49
  But on the other hand,
• 1:22:51
  you do get that sense of amusement because you know that if they ever get the thing started, they will drive it straight over a cliff or into a wall.
• 1:23:03
  So there is that sort of degree of satisfaction that you can get from it.
• 1:23:08
  But no, I'm afraid that... Yeah, otherwise it's sort of...
• 1:23:19
  Obviously, I learned a great deal during writing in comics, but that's because on me.
• 1:23:25
  It wasn't because of comics It was because of my approach to the writing in comics that taught me a great deal That I have been able to move across to writing Literature, but then again, I've been writing prose and
• 1:23:47
  probably before I was writing comics.
• 1:23:51
  I was writing, I've been doing all sorts of things during my career.
• 1:23:56
  I've released, I think, seven or eight albums
• 1:24:00
  which is more than...
• 1:24:01
  I mean, Sex Pistols managed one.
• 1:24:04
  I'm not suggesting that I am as influential as the Sex Pistols, but I'm saying that I had, I think, a reasonable career in, you know, producing music and albums.
• 1:24:21
  I've done Voice of the Fire, Jerusalem, short stories.
• 1:24:26
  So it's never just been about comics.
• 1:24:28
  It's just been that that seemed to be the area that I was good at it.
• 1:24:38
  And so it seems to be an area where I could continue to work and perhaps improve the medium.
• 1:24:46
  But when I got to a point where I thought, no, you're not actually improving the medium, the medium is in fact, if anything, worse for your involvement.
• 1:25:01
  But that was when I decided that, no, best to end this and, you know, do more one last production with Kevin O'Neill, the last book of the league.
• 1:25:16
  And, yeah, Kevin, I remember him saying that when we were talking about, shall we just take 18 months off, do Cinema Purgatorio, and then get back to the League and do a last book of the League?
• 1:25:34
  And Kevin said, yeah, I think that sounds great, because he said, I don't want to die in harness.
• 1:25:40
  to not want to die in harness.
• 1:25:42
  People who haven't worked in comics perhaps won't even understand what Kevin meant by that.
• 1:25:47
  But, uh... And then, sadly, you know, sort of give it a couple of...
• 1:25:54
  I think it was while we were getting the proof copies back of that last book of the League that Kevin got his diagnosis.
• 1:26:05
  And...
• 1:26:08
  but some of my comic book work
• 1:26:14
  handful of titles i remain immensely proud of you know lost girls the league and a few others sort of uh but uh now the rest of it is long beyond i don't have copies of it in the house and i'll never be looking at it again you know so which was painful but sort of it was a necessary amputation because it had gone septic
• 1:26:42
  so hack it off seems to be the best solution hmm
• 1:26:48
  Yeah, that's totally fair enough.
• 1:26:49
  I mean, because I heard the stories and yeah, I mean, just from how I see it, it seemed totally fair enough that, you know, that would be what you do, of course.
• 1:26:58
  And, you know, and the prose work is wonderful.
• 1:27:01
  Like, you know, we were saying at the start, Mandrilla Festo, it's a banger.
• 1:27:05
  So, you know, the breadth of work that you've done is fantastic, whatever the medium.
• 1:27:09
  That was also eerily prescient.
• 1:27:13
  The Mandrilla Festo was eerily prescient.
• 1:27:16
  We'd just put together a revived Northampton Arts Lab, which was better and more diverse and bigger than the first one even, which I thought was wonderful because it created me.
• 1:27:29
  But we were deciding to do our first gig, and we were going to be ambitious about it.
• 1:27:36
  And so I thought, well, we're perhaps not going to be very good, because this is our first gig, and a lot of people here haven't done performance before.
• 1:27:46
  So why don't we come up with an overall concept whereby all of the art in the world has just died overnight?
• 1:27:58
  the paintings have all slithered down off their canvas, the architecture, the music, the pop songs, it's all just flown away and we're left completely without art in this post-apocalyptic landscape where people are kind of getting together uncertainly and trying to recreate art without knowing what it is.
• 1:28:26
  and we were calling the event Artmageddon.
• 1:28:29
  And so we've got people pretending that they didn't know what they were doing and trying to do an evening's entertainment, and it worked really well.
• 1:28:39
  And then I came on at the end as this awful creature that is arising, this fascist creature that is arising to fill this vacuum in culture.
• 1:28:53
  and sort of we had got it set for 2016, June the...
• 1:29:01
  I forget what actual date it was, but it was the Friday after the Thursday of the EU referendum, which we hadn't paid that much attention to because we were preparing our first Arts Lab gig.
• 1:29:20
  And of course, everyone turned up upon that Friday with looks of stunned disbelief.
• 1:29:26
  Because there suddenly overnight, there had been something awful had happened.
• 1:29:35
  to the state of the nation, which seems to be invoiting all of these fascists into the picture, into the political picture.
• 1:29:48
  And so that was when we were doing the Mandrilla Festo.
• 1:29:53
  It was eerily prescient.
• 1:29:56
  You know, even if it did happen the day after Brexit.
• 1:29:59
  Yeah, I really enjoyed doing that with Joe.
• 1:30:02
  It was great.
• 1:30:04
  You know, it sort of, perhaps a bit of its time, so we may not be repeating it.
• 1:30:11
  We're not going to take it out on tour, I don't think.
• 1:30:14
  But it was really good.
• 1:30:17
  It was really good fun.
• 1:30:19
  And the makeup that I was wearing, yeah, I mean, sort of, Joe's Ward Tampson had got me, I did look as much like a mandrill as it is possible for a human being to look.
• 1:30:35
  I'd got the sort of the pink nose and the blue stripes on the cheek and the sort of the...
• 1:30:42
  glaring eyes, yeah, it worked pretty well.
• 1:30:45
  So, yeah, I enjoyed being the mandrill for those couple of occasions when I performed it.
• 1:30:52
  I'll say.
• 1:30:53
  Yeah, it's a fantastic track and performance.
• 1:30:56
  As a kind of wrap up question, I remember reading a quote from you from the 80s when you were, you wrote a fantastic essay about when you were writing, when you were writing for comics still, breaking down your process as a writer.
• 1:31:06
  And then you did like a postscript in 2003 where you basically said, ignore the advice I gave in the 80s, I was too young and didn't know what I was talking about.
• 1:31:16
  here's the advice I give now.
• 1:31:17
  And you basically said, to be a good writer, you should be a good human being and you should love people and you should love the world.
• 1:31:22
  Cause it's only when we love things that we really see them and understand them.
• 1:31:26
  And then you have a funny little segment where you say, just remember that in around 2020, I'll be dishing out some other advice that says, ignore this.
• 1:31:35
  And I was wondering now that it's 2026,
• 1:31:37
  like what advice would you give, I guess to yourself in 2003, but I guess just generally, what advice would you give to writers at whatever stage of their career, beginning or end?
• 1:31:49
  Well, funnily enough, this is going to sound like a plug, isn't it?
• 1:31:54
  But I assure you that I had no idea that that question was coming.
• 1:31:59
  But, however, at the moment, what I'm working on right now, before I begin book four of Long London, I'm working on something which is called storytelling.
• 1:32:13
  And this is basically the maestro course that I did for the BBC.
• 1:32:21
  The original idea was to take that, take a transcript of that,
• 1:32:26
  and published that as a book.
• 1:32:28
  But I've looked at the Maestro course, and I think it was good, and we seem to be getting an awful lot of good response to it.
• 1:32:38
  but it's a bit thin.
• 1:32:41
  I mean, I was being asked by the very, very nice people who were filming it over at Weed & Beck in Northampton.
• 1:32:52
  I was being asked by them, these little modules on specific subjects in the art of writing that I'd broken the overall talk down into, they were saying, yeah, if you could make each of them about 10 minutes long,
• 1:33:07
  So I was taking quite a lot of material and compressing it and gabbling through it.
• 1:33:14
  And yet people have liked the Maestro course.
• 1:33:18
  But I think that that's probably because of my personal charm and charisma.
• 1:33:26
  And because I was dressed up very, very nicely for that shooting.
• 1:33:31
  I've got my velvet jacket on and all the rest of it.
• 1:33:34
  So, yeah.
• 1:33:36
  I think that what I'm having to...
• 1:33:37
  I thought that, no, I can't just print this transcript.
• 1:33:42
  Because also, the way that you talk when you're talking is different to the way that you talk when you're writing.
• 1:33:48
  Right?
• 1:33:49
  When you're writing, it's much more considered.
• 1:33:52
  You can take out all of the pauses and the stumbles and the errs and things like that.
• 1:34:00
  The only disadvantage to writing it is that the readers, of course, can't see when I'm making the wanker sign or anything like that.
• 1:34:11
  But I think that they'll probably understand in context.
• 1:34:14
  That's what I'm doing.
• 1:34:16
  So I'm going through the The transcript of the Maestro series and I'm kind of doubling it in size.
• 1:34:23
  I'm rewriting all of it.
• 1:34:25
  I'm hoping that this will be I'm probably not going to be around for the one in 2046 so This will probably be it still will probably be incomplete and
• 1:34:38
  But this is probably my last word.
• 1:34:41
  This is everything in my brain that applies to writing.
• 1:34:47
  So I'm about halfway through it at the moment.
• 1:34:50
  I'm just in the section dealing with character and extreme character.
• 1:34:56
  And it's...
• 1:35:00
  What is the overall message that you need to commit yourself?
• 1:35:06
  Any act of art, you need to commit yourself completely.
• 1:35:11
  You need to, um, Alistair Crowley when, cause he said some very strange and, uh, probably horrible things.
• 1:35:20
  But so one thing he did say when he was talking about his apocalyptic goddess, Babylon,
• 1:35:28
  who will be riding on a seven-headed beast during the revelations, he was saying that the saints must drain every last drop of their blood into the chalice that is held by Babylon.
• 1:35:51
  For if they withhold even a drop,
• 1:35:55
  then the entire venture shall be as nothing.
• 1:36:00
  And I don't know about its magical use, but creatively, I think that that's true.
• 1:36:07
  That you put every last drop of yourself into a project and then it will be replenished tenfold.
• 1:36:16
  Because you'll always have that perfect work that you did.
• 1:36:21
  to take pleasure in.
• 1:36:24
  But if you're being a bit lacklustre, if you're not doing your very best work, then you'll always have that flaw to look back upon, that thing that you wish you'd done it better.
• 1:36:39
  So, yeah, commit yourself to your art.
• 1:36:43
  Make it the most important thing while you're doing it.
• 1:36:47
  squeeze every last drop of yourself into even the least important
• 1:36:54
  pieces of work.
• 1:36:57
  And then, yes, then it will reward you a thousandfold.
• 1:37:04
  It's sort of, and if you withhold a drop, then the entire venture will have been as nothing.
• 1:37:12
  So, yeah, if you...
• 1:37:16
  There was also a thing where when I was doing the show,
• 1:37:22
  where there was a scene in that where I'd got my Mr. Metterton character rearranging playing cards that have got letters on them instead of, you know, numbers or, you know, the four suits or whatever.
• 1:37:39
  And they've got the letters C, T, A and G.
• 1:37:44
  which are the four letters that make up the dna sequence the cytosine uh thiamine adenine and guanine so i've got mr meadowton making new words by rearranging these cards
• 1:38:02
  And that's all right for tag and act and a couple of other words.
• 1:38:13
  But I thought, there must be a longer word that I can generate using these four letters.
• 1:38:20
  And the only word in the dictionary that I found was it doesn't even use the G, but it's attica.
• 1:38:30
  A double T, A double C, A.
• 1:38:33
  Attica, and it's a musical term, and it means play with attack.
• 1:38:40
  You know, sort of play with attack.
• 1:38:43
  And that is, I think, the element that is missing from a lot of modern culture is that there is not enough attack.
• 1:38:55
  You should be aggressive with your beauty and with your art.
• 1:39:02
  You know, there are lots of things in the world that are neither artistic nor beautiful.
• 1:39:08
  And I think that they are endangering and harming our lives on this planet.
• 1:39:15
  So for artists, I think it is your duty with your art, with your writing, with your music, with your filmmaking, with whatever.
• 1:39:25
  Now is the moment.
• 1:39:27
  Go on the attack.
• 1:39:28
  Don't hold anything back.
• 1:39:30
  Be as wonderful and beautiful and artistic as you possibly can because nothing else is good enough.
• 1:39:38
  You know?
• 1:39:39
  So that would be my position upon it.
• 1:39:44
  You know?
• 1:39:45
  That is what I've learned.
• 1:39:47
  You know?
• 1:39:47
  It's... Yeah.
• 1:39:50
  Always do your very, very, very best.
• 1:39:53
  Try to use your art to do something about the world that you're in because that's what art is for.
• 1:40:01
  art of any sort is to modify the human condition.
• 1:40:05
  It's a way of critiquing ourselves.
• 1:40:08
  It's a way of reminding ourselves what the possibilities are.
• 1:40:14
  Reminding ourselves what we should be reaching for.
• 1:40:17
  I think I was hearing a quote the other day from somebody, I forget who, but they were saying that it is a big misconception to think that humans invented art.
• 1:40:32
  Whereas the truth of it is art invented humans.
• 1:40:37
  We weren't human before we had art, before we had representation.
• 1:40:43
  that these lines on a cave wall, they stand for this buffalo over here.
• 1:40:50
  Just that simple, huge leap of understanding, this can stand for that.
• 1:40:56
  That is what allowed us language, and language is what allowed us consciousness, and consciousness is what allowed us to get ourselves into this mess.
• 1:41:09
  So art is at the beginning of everything.
• 1:41:13
  And I would like to think that it's still our best way out of these current circumstances.
• 1:41:22
  So artists out there, you know, sort of pull yourselves together, smarten yourselves up and get to doing the job that you are meant to be doing.
• 1:41:34
  Fantastic.
• 1:41:34
  Well, hey, I don't think we could ask for a better note to end on than that, Alan.
• 1:41:38
  I mean, and hey, too right.
• 1:41:40
  You know, I agree 100 percent.
• 1:41:42
  And that's the thing that I've always found so inspiring about you and your work is this exact, you know, these exact ideas, you know, like artists, you know, they have a role in society that's really important.
• 1:41:51
  And it's about time that we slash they, I guess, wake up to that.
• 1:41:56
  They have such a huge importance in the world today.
• 1:42:00
  We're not simply here to entertain the crowd.
• 1:42:04
  as they're being led into the slaughterhouse.
• 1:42:07
  That is not what art is for.
• 1:42:10
  Art is to wake people up, not to sedate them.
• 1:42:14
  So, yeah, let that be every artist's mission, you know.
• 1:42:20
  Fantastic.
• 1:42:21
  Thanks so much again, Alan.
• 1:42:22
  This was such a pleasure.
• 1:42:23
  As an admirer of yours over the years, it was just such a pleasure to chat to you.
• 1:42:27
  So thanks for giving up your time to come on off the picture.
• 1:42:30
  My pleasure, Billy.
• 1:42:31
  And thanks a lot, mate.
• 1:42:32
  It was a great interview.
• 1:42:34
  You take care of yourself.