From hell, with love

It’s no great surprise that Alan Moore felt compelled to make a record celebrating the work of poet, philosopher, painter and all round Cockney renaissance man William Blake – after all, both have come to be regarded as equal parts visionaries and madmen. Granted, Moore works in what is considered the ‘lowbrow’ area of comic books and graphic novels, but over the last two decades he has done more than any other to elevate a pulp form into popular art.

A graduate of the arts labs of the mid-60s, hotbeds of hippy experimentation, Moore began writing for the then cutting edge 2000AD in 1980, moved to Warrior where he perfected the paranoiac masterpieces Miracleman and V For Vendetta, and was subsequently hired by DC comics, where he produced The Watchmen, described by film director Terry Gilliam as the War And Peace of the comic book genre. Of late, he has become better known as the author of the Jack The Ripper yarn From Hell, recently adapted for the big screen by the Sayles brothers, with Johnny Depp in the lead role.

Moore’s homage to Blake, Angel Passage, is a fecund eruption of language delivered in a meaty Northampton accent and offset by Tim Perkins’ grandiose orchestrations. Following The Highbury Working from a couple of years ago, it’s the pair’s second album for Steve Severin’s RE label, and was originally performed at London’s Purcell Rooms as part of the Tygers Of Wrath Blake retrospective alongside sets from Billy Bragg and Jah Wobble.

“I suppose the main thing that ended up nudging us to doing the CD was simply being asked to do the performance,” Moore explains. “I know that William Blake is a kind of rock ‘n’ roll figure, but to me it’s less the counter-cultural connections and more the magical connections. Blake was a self-described visionary: that was his job, what he had on his passport.

“This is somebody who lived in abject poverty all through his life. He and his wife ended up being shovelled into an ignominious pauper’s grave. He was somebody who never received any acclaim, never got a good review, did one gallery exhibition throughout his life which was a disaster, but yet right until the end completely believed, was never disappointed, never railed against god for having given him such a shitty lot in life. Madness plus the courage of your convictions equals magic.”

Moore’s work has always waged war on chronology in this fashion. As he declaims on the new album: “Into eternity out of one stinking moment/Clocks reversing . . .” Consequently, one of the most interesting ideas proposed in From Hell was that the Whitechapel murders were a seed event of the 20th century, and the 1880s a kind of locked box containing the code for the ten or more decades to follow.

“That’s the way it seemed to me when I was putting the thing together,” Moore affirms. “Around the time we were doing it, 1988 I think, that was within a year or 18 months of Mrs Thatcher’s famous cry for a return to Victorian values. So that was one aspect of it: if we’re going to return to Victorian values, let’s see what they were. Would it be a child up every chimney and a butchered prostitute in every back alley? And when I started to actually look at the 1880s I saw all of these parallels to the world of the late 20th century.

“In technological terms the machine gun was invented, the motor car, the Mitchelson-Morley experiments in 1882 which proved that the ether didn’t exist and opened the way for Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity. You’ve got the French invasion of Indo-China, which would lead to the Vietnam War. In art and literature you’d got the Impressionists who were painting pictures of prostitutes and dancing girls and things that hadn’t previously been considered fitting subjects for art, you’d got Zola writing Nana.

“It’s an interesting decade whichever way you stack it, and all of these things which blossomed – often horribly – in the 20th century often seemed to have their seed events in the 1880s. And if the 1880s was a microcosm of the 20th century, it seemed to me that what happened to Mary Kelly in the little room off Miller’s Court, the last of the Ripper murders, was a microcosm of the 1880s.”

So did he ever bother going to see the film version of his masterpiece?

“Nah, I’m waiting for the video still!”