On stalking and other social interactions

(Originally posted on 5th October 2007)

I've been poring lasciviously over a feature in the latest issue of Record Collector magazine on the 60 "most interesting" David Bowie rarities (I have two!), which reminded me of a rather endearing authorial encounter a few weeks ago.

We'd been promised a visit from Sebastian Horsley, the artist best known for having himself crucified and, in true Libertine spirit, spending tens of thousands of pounds on prostitutes; he recently published an autobiography, Dandy in the Underworld.

I'd first seen him at Sceptre's party back in February, when he'd swept in wearing a floor-length mink coat, teetering on outrageous stack-heeled boots and dripping in make-up, accompanied by his amanuensis, Rachel, resplendent in very little at all.

My participation in the evening's glamour was restricted to sharing an ashtray with Tracey Emin and reluctantly dancing with colleagues so drunk that the next day they had no memory of, in one case, her own dancing, let alone (mercifully) mine, and in the other, of how he had come by the bruised knuckles (enthusiastically punching a pillar, I was able to reveal).

We had a couple of dozen copies for him sign: a few minutes' work with another few for pleasantries was all I expected. Twenty-five minutes after his arrival, he'd managed six, owing to his racounteuring (sorry, I know verbing weirds language) like an amoral and quite filthy Peter Ustinov and an insistence on adding a message, different in each case, to his signature.

Struggling a little for aphorisms, he decided that one book should be inscribed with his home address and the next with his telephone number. He regularly finds death threats on his answerphone, he explained, but he feels that people who give advance warning of murderous intentions rarely carry them out. Indeed, he likes to phone them back, which I should imagine would deter all but the most psychopathic of stalkers.

By this time, his publicist was slumped in the seat next to him, clearly resigned to the fact that fulfilling their next appointment on time had been a plan born of unjustified optimism.

Now, David Bowie's extraordinary 1995 album, 1.Outside, came about in part because of Bowie's ongoing interest with those who inflict violence upon themselves in the name of art. Wondering if Sebastian Horsley's self-crucifixion might just have ushered him into Bowie's circle and hoping that maybe this was the man to help me fulfill my quest to meet him, I probed as subtlely as I could about a link.

"Why do you ask?" said Sebastian. "Is he a friend of yours?"

Will Self describes Horsley as "simultaneously enthralling, charming and fantastically annoying". I couldn't have put it more perspicaciously myself.