Sheer art attack

You will no doubt have seen the reports of what one US marine called Saddam’s “love shack” in the suburbs of Baghdad, the well-appointed little bolthole to which he would repair with his mistress for some well-earned r&r, after a hard day executing people who didn’t like the cut of his moustache.

The Sunday Times reported sniffily that the joint showed your man had more money than taste, recalling the famous remark of a journalist after interviewing Ike Turner at his Hollywood home: “Until now, I didn’t think it was possible to spend a million bucks in Woolworths”.

The Times made much of the profusion of clashing colours in Saddam’s palace of sin and his apparently insatiable appetite for the kind of ’70s chic that was naff even in the ’70s.

In particular, they guffawed at a garish print dominating one rose-coloured wall, a ferociously lurid work depicting a naked blonde, backdropped by a horned demon, attacking a gladiatorial male with the help of a giant, fanged serpent. Other works showed gleaming sci-fi missiles blasting into a cloudy sky and another a naked lady being menaced on a cliff top by a talon-clawed dragon.

Pure dreck

If the Times was unimpressed, The Guardian was positively incensed. “They are from the universal cultural gutter – pure dreck,” art critic Jonathan Jones fumed. “They look spraypainted, in a rampant hyperbolic style where all men are muscular, all women have giant breasts and missiles are metal cocks. They are art for the barely literate, or the barely sentient, dredged from some red-lit back alley of the brain.”

Steady on, old chap. Okay, we may never see an exhibition of this kind of painting discussed on The View, but there’s even more to be said it for it than that. Frankly, I felt very sympathetic towards the work, admiring its energy, vivacity and especially its well-delineated big tits. But more than that, I was struck by a nagging feeling of familiarity, a strange sensation which only began to make sense when, not moments after I’d put the papers down, the telephone rang. It was my old buddy Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon.

“Yo Rummy, what’s happening?” I greeted him in time-honoured fashion.

“You know exactly what’s happening,” he replied with uncharacteristic gruffness. “Sam, you’re going to have to stop selling original Foghat sleeve artwork to the regime in Baghdad. We have enough on our plate with the pesky Syrians without having to explain to the world’s media how art for the southern-fried boogiemeisters, personally signed ‘To the greatest rock ’n’ roll dictator in the world from the greatest rock ‘n’ roll journalist in the world’, ended up adorning the walls of the love nest of The Evil One.”

Worse, I thought, how am I going to explain it to Foghat?

Chemical weapons

Thanking Donny for his kind attention, I returned the receiver to its cradle and reflected on what a topsy-turvy, rock ‘n’ roll world this is. Back in the ’80s, when Saddam was a favourite son of the west, one of my spook contacts at the Pentagon wondered if there mightn’t be some nice hard rock type original works I could send to Baghdad to help keep their man sweet. “Nothing too heavy, Sam,” he counselled, “he finds Roger Dean a tad cerebral.”

So it wasn’t going to be Tales From Topographic Oceans then. I’d have to save that one for Tony Blair. Fortunately, my close ties to Foghat – I mentored, managed and exploited the bastards for 10 happy years – meant that I could pretty much do with them and their works what I would. And since they couldn’t get arrested, never mind get a record deal, at the time, it didn’t take much ingenuity to gather up all the unused sleeve artwork and ship it off to Baghdad in big metal drums marked ‘Chemical Weapons’ so no-one would get suspicious.

Ah, simpler times. Now it looks like another market for the ’Hat has definitively dried up. Then again, I always did think their last hope was the road to Damascus.

Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq