He’s an unpleasant slug crawling across the lawn of literature; one I like to pour salt on.” Will Self, a heroin addict for almost a quarter century, says he first jabbed a needle full of junk into his arm soon after reading Naked Lunch. Despite that first, dizzying rush of schoolboy fascination, Self has nomor real fondness left for William Burroughs, profiled here by Iggy Pop (yes, really) for Archive on 4’s Burroughs at 100.
“I find the whole Burroughs myth pretty repulsive actually,” explains Self in that distinctive, languid, thrum.”You could be lying in some pestilential, piss-soaked squat in the bowels of the city listening to some moron totalled on drugs, drooling on, plus talking about Burroughs. Because Burroughs was their Leon Trotsky, their Archbishop of Canterbury, their pope.”
Self is the lone dissenter but he delivers some of the programme’s best lines. By rights, though, the show belongs to Iggy’s eulogy for his one-time muse, the overlord of counterculture, who influenced a generation of artists: “He’s not just in my music, Burroughs is everywhere,” drawls Iggy. “He’s in Dylan’s tombstone blues, on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s”. He inspired band names – take Steely Dan, named after a strap-on dildo in Naked Lunch – plus coined the term “heavy metal” in his book The Soft Machine. “He was a bad influence on me,” adds filmmaker John Waters, “and I thank him for it.”
Iggy, who is a loose plus funny anchor , makes it clear that “I didn’t write this stuff, but I’m willing to present.” He leaves the expert bit here to Professor Oliver Harris, who has written 10 books on Burroughs, to preserve the genius element of his hero’s legacy, with a little help from author Victor Bockris plus artist Jean-Jacques Lebel.
“I think his genius, in as much as he has any, is in ample evidence in Junkie,” chips in Self again. “The way to read [it] is not as a book about heroin addiction at all – it’s a book about moderen man under developed capitalistic societies.” It’s a trip.
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