Sebastian Horsley

"I’ve been off drugs for a while now, but that’s by no means a permanent thing," declares Sebastian Horsley in an affectedly disaffected Wildeean drawl. "I’ll definitely go back to doing them again at some stage. I just fucking like them too much! I mean, as I’m sure you well know, few things in this life can match the sheer orgiastic pleasure of shooting pure cocaine into your cock, and then being sucked off by an experienced whore."

The patrons of the Shelbourne Hotel’s main restaurant obviously aren’t used to hearing such gutter talk near their tables, but Horsley – who, as you’ve probably guessed, quite likes to shock – couldn’t give a toss. Heads turn, conversations falter and our snooty waiter’s face turns the same colour as the expensive Bordeaux he’s just splashed all over the linen, but the controversial artist remains totally oblivious to all the frosty stares.

A big fan of centre-stage, Horsley is undoubtedly used to being glared at anyway – and not just for his regular and deliberately non-PC pronouncements. A self-confessed narcissistic, nihilistic nutcase, Horsley is a ridiculously handsome, preening peacock of a man, positively brimming with charm and arrogance. And he’s unashamedly proud of his self-pride.

You can tell that he’s ‘different’ at a glance. Writing about him recently in The Independent, his good friend Will Self described his appearance as being "so out of time that there appears to be an odd penumbra about his elongated form, as if he had actually been cut out of some other space/time continuum and pasted into this one."

He’s onto something there. Horsley’s eccentrically gothic style is probably best described as retro-Romantic. Tall, ghostly pale, shockingly coiffured and immaculately clothed in an electric blue silk tie and black John Pearse suit, the 40-year-old painter looks like some kind of otherworldly cross between Edward Scissorhands and Lestat the vampire. Or, if you prefer comparisons with real people, Adam Ant and Lord Byron.

A self-styled, modern-day dandy who describes himself as "an expert painter, writer and poseur" and lives his life by the motto ‘we are what we pretend to be’, Horsley also holds the rather dubious distinction of being the first and only Westerner ever to take part in the world-famous Easter crucifixion ceremony in the tiny Philippines island town of San Fernando.

But we’re not going to talk about that – not yet anyway. Tired and hungry, having just flown in from London this afternoon to finalise arrangements for the Dublin showing of his new exhibition, he’d suggested that we do our interview over dinner, but unfortunately it’s proven far too noisy to record in here. I’m not in any particular hurry anywhere, so we’ve postponed it until afterwards, leaving us with the not insurmountable problem of having a conversation that doesn’t stray too far into any areas that would be better discussed on tape later. In Sebastian’s case that’s quite difficult as, in many ways, his life is his art, and just about every word that comes out of his mouth is eminently quotable.

Inevitably, we skirt the edges of things a little, without getting into too much detail. For example, I don’t yet ask him how it felt to get up close and personal with man-eating sharks off the Great Barrier Reef (as he did while researching his first solo exhibition in 1997), but I do enquire if he enjoyed his stay down under.

"Oh, I simply loved Australia!" he exclaims. "I was there for two months and I must’ve slept with everyone in the entire country!"

When I mention Dandy In The Underworld, the autobiography he’s reportedly received a large advance for, he’s amusingly ambiguous about how much of the work is complete.

"How far into it am I? Well, I’ve written the title – so four words," he deadpans. "There’s a dull stretch in the middle but it picks up at the end."

He continues like this throughout dinner – never letting up, taking nothing seriously, every anecdote a performance, every line a punchline. His world weary witticisms, bon mots and flippant asides are sometimes a little too obviously rehearsed, but he’s still hugely entertaining company – self-deprecatory, mischievous, hilarious, flirtatious and, as befits a man who writes a column called ‘Sewer Life’ for the Erotic Review, occasionally downright lewd.

He lives in Soho, in a large apartment that’s empty save for his 50 suits, large collection of human skulls and solid silver revolver. Naturally enough, he loves the neighbourhood. His tailor is just across the road from him and there’s lots of street life to watch pass by his window.

"Oh, how Horsley loves the whores!" he guffaws. "They are the most honest and open people on God’s earth. The reason I rate prostitutes is because they obviously rate themselves. They obviously rate themselves because they charge for their services. Normal girls give themselves to you for nothing and then wonder why you piss all over them. I ask you."

"But didn’t you say you had a girlfriend?" I ask (ignoring for a moment the fact that he’s already told me that he actually has two – neither of whom are talking to him at the moment).

"I have got a girl at the moment, yeah," he grins. "She’s the finest woman that ever walked the streets. All I ask for from a woman is that she can see through me and still enjoy the view. And she does that."

Like every dandy, though, he can be a little annoying – especially when he makes you the fall guy for his indiscreet sexual ambiguity. When he finally finishes eating ("Food just doesn’t work – five or six days later, you’re hungry again!"), I innocently suggest that we adjourn to his hotel room to do the interview, as the Horseshoe Bar is thronged with pre-Christmas revellers.

"Oh yes – the bedroom!" he enthuses loudly, putting one arm around my shoulder and flamboyantly waving the other in the direction of the exit. "Wonderful idea, darling! Let’s both go to the bedroom and we’ll do it there!"

"Enjoy your evening, gentlemen," the waiter smirks, as we leave under the watchful and amused gaze of half the restaurant.

Although Sebastian Horsley was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, his Quaker family’s strong left-wing beliefs and ideals ensured that it had been removed long before he’d figured out how to cook up a shot with it.

His grandfather Alex Horsley had founded and made millions from Northern Foods, which then passed to his father, Nick, before becoming a public company, thereby denying Sebastian, older sister Ashley and younger brother Jake the chance of carrying on the family business. While he ran with the children of other rich northern industrialist families like the Frys and the Cadburys in his youth, neither he nor his siblings ever actually inherited much of the family’s considerable wealth.

"I got some money, but nothing really," he sighs, pulling up a chair in his room and inviting me to help myself to anything I want from the mini-bar (though he’s off the booze as well). "In a way I was rather disappointed because I’d have never needed to get out of bed again. Of course, that would depend on who I was in bed with! But on the other hand, maybe if I’d had all of that dosh, I’d have never done anything at all with my life. I don’t know."

He may not have been left much money, but what he did inherit from his grandfather was a strong capitalist streak and a sound business sense. Unlike the vast majority of his impoverished art-scene contemporaries, Horsley can well afford a room in the Shelbourne, mainly thanks to some shrewd property deals and stock market speculation in the ’80s. His artistic reputation is skyrocketing at the moment but, even without the respectable income that his paintings generate, he’s still an immodest man of immodest means.

"I’m rich enough to do whatever I want," he admits with a shrug, "but being really rich to me is having about £30 million or something. I don’t have anything like that. I’m just rich enough to make a beast of myself."

It wasn’t always like that though. His childhood may have been more privileged than most, but his late teens and early twenties were lived without any real family support. Having attended a left-wing public school in his native Hull, 18-year-old Sebastian decided that university life wasn’t for him and, much to his parents disapproval, he took himself off to London to become a punk rocker instead. A long-time devotee of Marc Bolan, he characteristically assumed he had what it took to make it in the music business. Sadly, he didn’t. All told, he fronted three bands – The Fauves, The Void and Rhythm Of Life – before eventually realising that there was, indeed, no future for him in punk.

"I just made records that were so bad, I can’t understand why they weren’t successful," he muses. "We were awful, I mean really awful. And not awful good – just awful. We made records that were deleted by popular demand."

Having failed to make it as a rock star, he began attending the prestigious St. Martin’s Art College but, rather impressively, managed to get thrown out after only two terms.

"It’s actually quite difficult to get thrown out of art college, so I have to say I was quite proud of it," he grins. "I didn’t get a grant and in those days I didn’t have any money, so I forged a document that said that I’d got a grant and just turned up. I was there for two terms, and when they found out that I was there and nobody was paying they got quite upset. So they fucked me out on my ear."

He didn’t leave empty-handed though…

"I had totally plundered the place. I used to go in there with bags and just nick everything. Easels, paints, skulls – I literally cleaned the place out. Which they didn’t know about – whoops, they do now! And a friend of mine came to see me afterwards and told me that they’d got a photograph of me and blown it up, like a ‘Wanted’ poster, and put it on the front of St. Martin’s, saying under no circumstances should this chap be allowed enter the building. So that was the end of my art college career."

Having exhausted the possibilities London had to offer, young Horsley relocated to Edinburgh, where he occupied himself with setting up an alternative arts centre for ex-prisoners called the Gateway Exchange with the infamous gangster-turned-sculptor Jimmy Boyle.

"I met Jimmy through my grandfather," he explains. "My grandfather was incredibly liberal and left-wing and as he was getting older, he started getting completely, em… being polite you’d say ‘eccentric’, but it’s probably closer to the truth to say ‘potty’. He lost his judgement. I’m not sure if he was actually giving money to people like Myra Hyndley and the train robbers, but he was certainly involved with people like this – rapists, psychos and paedophiles. And I think he financed one of Jimmy Boyle’s exhibitions, but they knew each other. My grandfather used to prison visit, and that’s how Jimmy and I met.

"Jimmy was convicted for a murder which he says he didn’t commit, but he was a gangster and a real hard man. He used to run with the Krays and when they wanted dirt doing, he did it for them up there. He was really tough. And I liked him and we got on, and we set up three different projects together. One was called Gateway Exchange, which dealt with people coming out of prisons and mental asylums. They came to us and we had a theatre and a darkroom and an exhibition space. None of us got paid, we raised all the money independently and we took no government funding, so it was really pretty out there in its day, it was pretty radical what we were trying to do."

In order to generate some extra cash for the Gateway Exchange and their other artistic projects, he and Boyle also formed a drink import company called Champagne Scotland. Unsurprisingly, the business venture didn’t last very long.

"It was a complete disaster," he chuckles. "We drank the entire company dry. We didn’t like selling it and were just resentful that anyone would take any of our product off us. This is ours!! It was a complete disaster, but very, very funny."

He remained working with Boyle in Edinburgh for almost ten years, serving an artistic apprenticeship of sorts, before eventually returning to London in the mid-’80s, where he made a small fortune gambling on the stock exchange. It was around this time that the drugs began to take hold of his life. He was already a heavy drinker and coke-user but, as he puts it himself, "I suddenly had so much money coming in that I had to take up crack as well."

Had you always used drugs?

"No, I didn’t start taking drugs till I was… twelve," he smiles. "But before that I’d never touched a thing. I got off to a flying start through my parents – alcoholism doesn’t run in my family, it gallops! No, mine’s a classic textbook case – I started on booze, then went onto coke and crack, and wound up on smack, the needle. The whole thing."

When did you first start using intravenously?

"I actually came to that quite late. I don’t regret the amount of drugs I’ve taken, I only regret that I didn’t take them earlier. I didn’t really start that till I was 30."

What drove you to it then?

"I just liked them, nothing drove me to it as such. As you well know, they’re just incredibly pleasurable – until they start going wrong, and then it’s like shooting up your own tears. But there’s a point where they work beautifully, they work absolutely perfectly for whatever it is you want. I still look back on them with an exhilarating remembrance. I don’t regret it at all. There was a time when it was warrior-like. There was time when it was really, really full-on, but now it’s not that way. I had this obsession about freedom and yet the drug experience is a loneliness beyond loneliness. It’s a horrible place to be, after a while, and you just end up with absolutely nothing at all."

Still, as he readily admits, there was a silver lining to his cocaine cloud. It’s all experience, after all, good artistic material. And every ying has a yang.

"The depths you fall to will ascertain the heights you reach," he says. "They’re intimately connected, there’s no question about that. But all this nonsense that’s been spoken, I don’t know how it is over here but this idea that drinking and drugging somehow engenders creativity, that’s absolute hogwash. I don’t know who’s responsible but it’s not true! I sat in a darkened room for five years watching Home & Away!!"

Perhaps it was watching the Aussie soap that ultimately led him to the Great Barrier Reef. In 1997, fresh from yet another stint in rehab and aware that time was running out and he still had much to prove artistically, Horsley flew to Australia to go swimming with fishes of the Great White variety. He’d been painting sharks for years, but never really to his satisfaction. For reasons he still can’t quite explain, he felt the need to get closer to his deadly subjects.

"Well it was quite curious really because I can barely swim, but I learnt to dive, and I’m absolutely terrified of the sea – it’s one of my real phobias. And the reason I’m terrified of the sea is because of sharks. After I’d seen Jaws I was frightened to have a bath! So it was a very incongruous thing, you know, me on a boat with all of these rugged Australians. But I went because I wanted to get closer to my subject."

And what are Great Whites like up close?

"It’s like going back in time 400 million years. It’s like seeing a dinosaur. The first thing you think when you see them is how on earth did anything ever get that big? They’re totally out of scale with life as we see it. You just think what the fuck does this thing eat to get to be that size? Seventeen foot long, black eyes… Actually when you get close they’re not as black as Hollywood would let you believe – there’s some orange there. And the other curious thing is they’re silent. You expect them to come at you like this – ‘YEARRGGGHHH!!’ But they don’t, they just glide by, which is really disconcerting. They’re beautiful, absolutely beautiful. And tough – you can reach out of the cage and feel them as they go by. The whole experience was totally exhilarating."

Fortunately, it proved to be artistically exhilarating as well. The resulting shark paintings became his first solo show (simply entitled ‘Great White Series’) and immediately garnered him a reputation as one of the more talented and adventurous of contemporary UK artists. The fact that the likes of Bryan Ferry and Nicole Kidman bought his work did him no harm either. His next solo show – a series of flower paintings based on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal – wasn’t quite so dramatic in terms of its subject matter, but it further established his name, with many critics comparing his work favourably with Francis Bacon’s. Others began calling him ‘the dandy Warhol’.

The show that really hit the headlines, though, and made him a household name in households worth naming, is the one he’s here in Dublin to promote (simply called ‘Crucifixion’ when it opened in London last July, it opens over here on January 16 under the title ‘The Butterfly Pinned’).

On August 9, 2000, the day after his 38th birthday, Horsley truly suffered for his art when he had himself nailed to a cross during a religious ceremony in the Philippines. He says he did it mainly in order to be able to paint from the experience, but ultimately admits to having mixed – if not downright confused – motives about the whole thing.

"It would be dishonest of me to say that there was one reason for doing it," he muses. "There was a whole host. I think that the honest reason is that I’m a romantic. I’m a romantic nihilist. I know we’re not supposed to define ourselves, but we can. And I just thought it was a really interesting thing to do, to try and reinvent the crucifixion.

"I first became aware of it about five years ago, because the Filipinos go through this. And as soon as I knew it was possible to do it, I knew that it was something that I was gonna do. I just knew. There were so many different ways that it interested me. It interested me as an image, it interested me formally, but I suppose the thing that really interested me about it was that I call myself an atheist but I like the idea of putting myself in conflict with myself.

"The other thing is that I was interested in derailing my entire personality. I mean, I sit here and I say these things and you think I’m this person. We don’t know who we are. It’s only in extreme situations that reality reveals itself anyway. I don’t know who I am a lot of the time."

Understandably dubious, the Filipino authorities took some convincing before they allowed him to proceed. While his rather unusual application was being considered, a couple of fellow artists came on board. Sarah Lucas filmed the event and photographer Dennis Morris, best known for his work with the Sex Pistols, documented it. Both the film and the photographs now form a major part of the finished exhibition. While the actual paintings evoke the haunting experience of the act itself, the photoworks capture the grandiose vitality of a flamboyant dandy juxtaposed with the vulnerability of someone facing such a profound ordeal.

"What happened was I went over in Easter 2000 and asked them to crucify me with their own people, and they refused on the grounds that they don’t crucify people outside of their community. Had they agreed, I’d have been crucified and we wouldn’t be sitting here, because there’d have been no documentation of it, so in a way they did me a favour by saying ‘no’. I then came back and mounted a campaign to try and allow them to crucify me – and that involved tourist officials and village captains and all the rest of it.

"You see, a Japanese guy had done it a while before and then turned it into a porn movie – as only the Japanese could – so then the government stepped in and banned it for foreigners. So for them to crucify me, they had to overturn the ban."

Eventually the ban was lifted and Horsley was given the go-ahead. He admits to feeling hugely uncomfortable as he waited for his crucifix to be prepared, but not for the reasons you might think. Typically for a dandy, he was more worried about his appearance than his impending agony.

"I wasn’t afraid of the pain while I was waiting," he recalls. "It was embarrassment that I felt – standing around in a fucking loin cloth. I looked like a peeled prawn standing there out of my shell, just thinking ‘What a tosser! What am I doing this for? I look ridiculous’. And the cross, as they were raising it, looked like a big black brutal thing, it looked like a tombstone, and I suddenly thought, ‘This is too big for me.’ Even though I don’t believe. I don’t believe in God – even if he exists. It’s one thing to say that, it’s another thing… what’s that lovely line? – there are no atheists on a turbulent aeroplane. And when you’re up against something like that…"

He pauses for a moment, looking serious for the first time all night. "It was curious to me, as someone who’s cultivated this whole image of the dandy and all of that, just the act of subversion. In the end, you’ve got to be prepared to subvert yourself. I was interested in the idea because it seems to me that the test of an art-form and the person, is whether it can stand laughter and test itself to destruction. In this, I had both. It was a very fine line between being an artist and being a performing seal or being a holy man – all of those kinds of things. For me, this was where they all met, and I was aware that I was taking a ridiculous risk, but it might produce a gain – a fresh gain. I’m interested in the idea of… in order to understand love, sometimes you’ve got to go beyond love. And in order to understand pain, sometimes you’ve got to go beyond pain. It’s all part of the same thing."

When the five inch nails were being hammered through Sebastian Horsley’s hands, the pain was indescribable, far worse than anything he’d anticipated.

"As the nails went through my hands I remember thinking that it was a lot worse than I’d imagined it was going to be. And I started to pass out as they hauled up the cross. I couldn’t really see, my eyes filled up with water. I just had this vague notion of being like some kind of pinned insect, looking out, and there was all this water and all this sky and there I was up there. Just feeling completely bewildered."

As it turned out, things didn’t quite go according to plan. The cross gave way and collapsed after just five minutes ("I felt that either I’d just been rejected by a God I didn’t believe in – or I was too fat!"), flinging him to the ground. Although his hands have now healed completely, as a painter, was he not worried about permanently damaging them?

"Yeah, I was," he nods. "And I was advised by doctors, and by my friends and family that it was a ridiculous risk to take. But that’s the nature of risk – if you don’t risk anything, you risk everything, that’s the whole point. Risk is very exhilarating."

Did you take any painkillers in advance?

"No. They did try to offer me painkillers, which I didn’t take. It was curious that having taken painkillers for no apparent reason all my life, the one time I needed them I didn’t want them."

Were you using smack at the time?

"No. Absolutely, completely clean – had been for some months. Soon as I got back to England I was, but it would have been absolutely ridiculous to have done it like that. The whole point of it was to experience that and, as you well know, the thing about opiates is you take them to make you forget that your leg’s been cut off. As an artist you’re supposed to be more aware, that’s the whole nature of it. The piece in a way was about surrender. I think the key to the piece is that it was an act of narcissism but when you see the film it was also an act of negation, it was an act of vitality but it was also an act of vulnerability, and it was an act of grandiosity and it was an act of humility. I think if you see just one, you miss the whole point of it."

What did your family think of the idea?

"My mother was horrified but she knew who I was," he says. "She knew it would be like trying to stop a shooting star. Some things you just have to do, because your life isn’t worth living if you don’t do them. It’s just as simple as that."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only person who attempted to dissuade him from doing it was his good friend Nick Cave – a man who definitely knows a thing or two about the religious significance of crucifixion.

"Nick, funnily enough, was horrified at the whole idea. He was the only person who tried to stop me doing it. I was quite surprised. I think he couldn’t understand why I would want to put myself through so much pain. He’s seen the film now and he’s changed his mind I think – slightly. But then, Nick thinks he’s Christ. I’m joking! I’m actually very fond of Nick… I just wouldn’t have a good word said about him. No, he’s fucking funny. It’s his irreverence I like. I love the Australian sense of humour. It’s very compatible with the dry, laconic English wit."

Although the exhibition made headlines and was for the most part critically lauded, certain critics accused Horsley of being a far better self-publicist than he was an artist (the real truth is that he’s actually an absolute genius at both pursuits) and, em, crucified him in their reviews.

"Those things don’t really bother me," he shrugs. "Nobody asked you to exhibit yourself – nobody asked you to write, nobody asked you to paint, so therefore you must take the criticism that comes along. You have invited criticism, so therefore you must take it."
He’s obviously only recently arrived at this particular philosophy. Last year, he gave as good as he got. When Metro art critic Fisun Guner attacked the exhibition last July, she swiftly received a Tiffany gift box containing the artist’s excrement in the mail. It sparked a police investigation but no charges were brought in the end.

He bursts out laughing when I mention it. "How did you hear about that? Ha! It was an artwork. It was called ‘The Shit Has Hit The Foe’. Yeah, it’s absolutely true. I just thought it was about time. I mean, she’s a fucking critic! I’m an artist, I can take art, she’s a critic, she should be able to take criticism. That’s her job. So I decided to criticise her in the same medium that she had used to criticise me. So I got a Tiffany box and shat in it, and covered Horsley No. 2 with Chanel No. 5 and sent it to the cunt."

She claimed in her offending review that you have nothing to say. So what are you trying to say with all of this?

"What am I trying to say?" he mulls. "Well, it shifts, doesn’t it? I’m trying to say one thing, one day, and another thing the next. I’m trying to live my life as I want to live my life. I’m a romantic. In the words of Coleridge – ‘something ever more about to be’. If I’m really honest with you, I’m not particularly interested in art. I’m not particularly interested in music or painting or any of those things really. The artists who’ve really touched me were those whose lives were more interesting than their work – people like William Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, Quentin Crisp, Byron and so on. So really I just want to just follow my passions, and the art that I leave behind is just evidence of that struggle. But I’m leading my life first."