The day I was in town, things looked to be going well for the egregious Bono, and his partner in development, the Edge. Their plans to have Norman Foster revamp their Clarence Hotel – also on the banks of Holy Liffey – were flowing through the planning board meeting, and despite some sour remarks from a local conservationist, Michael Smith, who described the proposed building as a “cannibalistic behemoth”, it looked as if they’d get the go-ahead.

I couldn’t get excited about the new hotel – but then, who can? Show me someone who’s excited about a new hotel, and I’ll show you a raving eejit with the soul of a shebeen-keeper. Vivian drove Cormac and I out to the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, not, you appreciate, because we were old soldiers who needed taking care of, but because the historic building (complete in 1684, two years before the Royal Hospital in Chelsea), is now home to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. We were going to see an exhibition of William Burroughs’ shotgun painting, bizarrely juxtaposed with examples of Hans Christian Andersen’s beau coupage. Hmm.

The paintings were shite, basically, any old junkie with a shotgun could’ve pulled it off, but more importantly there was one of Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s original “dream-catching” machines. The whirligigs of light and motion that the two writers believed put them in touch with the noumenal world. I’m already hot-wired to this, but Peter – who we’d picked up en route – was a tad dismissive: “It’s basically a Lava Lamp,” he said, but I came back at him, “What’s wrong with Lava Lamps? I love Lava Lamps; in fact, I love Lava Lamps more than I love people.” Incidentally, the Andersen cut-outs were quite pretty.

In the bowels of the ancient building, where James Connolly was held for a time after the Easter Rising until the Brits got round to executing him, we chanced upon a potent symbol of Ireland, old and new: a photo-real image of a man’s hands cradling a rugby ball made from the hide of a living cow, complete with several teats. “It makes me feel queasy just looking at it,” Cormac said, but I caught the hint of desire in his tone.

Last time I was in Dublin, the European Union heads of state were there; this time it was José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission. Barroso was intent on selling the benefits of a new World Trade Agreement, but the Irish farming community weren’t so sure; they’d come up from the sticks in force, and as Cormac and I reached Heuston Station there they were, florid-faced men in tweed, their fingers itching to grab the teats on a living rugby ball.

This was to be the highpoint of my visit: last time I was in Dublin, the traffic was all snarled up because they were building the track for the new light railway, the Luas, but now it was done and we were to take a ride. “It wasn’t open two days,” Cormac said, “and they were calling it the Daniel Day.” The Daniel Day hove into view, all shiny and new, but still, unmistakably … “Look, Cormac,” I told him, “I don’t know how to break this to you, but that’s a tram.”

We rode the tram into Jervis, by the Four Courts, and then crossed the James Joyce Bridge to the other side of the Liffey. At least, I think it was the James Joyce Bridge; it could’ve been the Samuel Beckett Bridge, or the Jonathan Swift Bridge, or the Flann O’Brien Bridge. At the rate they’re going with these writerly Dublin bridges, they’ll have one for old Maeve Binchy ‘n’ all. Still, if they know how to honour their writers in Ireland, they also know how to honour their painters. After all, Francis Bacon’s London studio was painstakingly dismantled, crated, shipped, and then reassembled in a Dublin art gallery.

It’s the same with smoking. That night we dined in a small bistro where an outside area had been equally painstakingly contrived to look like a room, complete with walls, carpeted floor, and an almost ceiling. Space heaters kept us warm as we puffed, supped and munched. Last time I’d been in Dublin, it had been … exactly the same. Pure genius, indeed.

03.05.08

To see Ralph Steadman’s accompanying artwork, visit here

Each week I went to the STD clinic at the nearby hospital, where a middle-aged consultant applied an acidic preparation to the glans of my penis. One day, while he was actually holding the afflicted portion, he remarked — quite casually — that the best way to rid the country of HIV/Aids would be to “castrate all you junkies — and the queers, too”.

You didn’t need to have a well-developed persecution complex — which I did, anyway — not to find this a little aggressive.

At the time, Aids was the nasty new kid on the infectious diseases block; the first few cases had appeared in England, but those of us in the high-risk groups could already see the battle lines being drawn across the Atlantic: the blameless sheep with “good” Aids — haemophiliacs, faithful heterosexual partners — being sectioned off from those with “bad” Aids — gay men, IV drug users, prostitutes — and the field day that the so-called “moral majority” were having.

I’d already been tested for Aids a year earlier when I’d been in hospital and, so far as I knew, I was HIV negative. Perhaps because of some early hard-drubbing into me of the basic facts about hygiene, or possibly because — in this aspect of my malady, at least — I was less chaotic than my peers, I was never a big sharer of needles. Needless to say, although I can only think of two or three occasions when I did so, of the five other people involved, two are now dead, while the other three may not have Aids but did contract the almost as nasty hepatitis C.

Elizabeth Pisani’s thoughtful and necessary book, at some length, and by following her own picaresque journey through the international Aids prevention industry, explains the evolved consequences of experiences I’ve limned in above. The message of her book is simple: no matter how much money the global community (another priceless oxymoron) chooses to throw at stopping this killer disease, entrenched attitudes — and practices — will ensure that the spectre of “slim”, as it’s known in sub-Saharan Africa, just keeps getting fatter and fatter, as the virus gorges on human life.

When Pisani — a journalist initially — became interested in epidemiology, qualified, then began working in the Aids field, the big battle was to secure funding for prevention campaigns. In part because of the chronic wonkery of the UN, in part because of the activism of the US gay community — vital as it was at the time — but mostly because of the practices that spread the disease, and their unacceptability to the Jerry Falwells of this world (and, presumably, the next), the most obvious and practicable ways of stemming the epidemic were neglected.

Instead we were given campaigns like the Thatcher government’s countrywide mailshot, warning maiden aunts in the Cotswolds not to “die of ignorance”, when the truth was that if public health had been managed effectively, they could’ve died happily ignorant of what Aids was at all. Apart from in sub-Saharan Africa — where, as Pisani plainly states, sexual mores have allowed for rapid transmission through the heterosexual population — your chances of contracting HIV/Aids remain small, unless you are an IV drug user, a prostitute or engage in anal sex.

But as Aids, because of the African epidemic, moved up the agenda of righteousness, and precisely those “moralists” who were happy for whores, queers and junkies to be shovelled out with the rest of the trash seized upon the new “good” sufferers as worthy aid recipients, so their entrenched attitudes ensured that their efforts were as useless as a condom that looks like a colander — because condoms is where it’s all at; condoms and clean needles. US government aid is not only tied to programmes that Bush and his fundamentalist backers approve of, but the recipient governments and NGOs must spend that money on anti-retroviral drugs, needles and condoms made in America.

As Pisani so elegantly establishes, this is the public health equivalent of burning taxpayers’ money in a brazier and magically expecting people on the other side of the world not to contract the virus.

It is, though, only the most glaring example of the waste, profligacy and wrong-headedness that undermines the worldwide effort to curtail a disease the transmission of which is — compared with TB, or cholera, or flu for that matter — relatively easily to guard against.

Pisani’s training as an epidemiologist leads her to commonsense conclusions — which is not to dismiss the hard, committed work she did establishing HIV/Aids prevalence across Asia, or campaigning for funding to fight its spread.

Nevertheless, it turns out that the consultant burning my warts and talking eugenics was on the money all along. He may not have expressed himself sensitively or humanely, but completely curtailing the sexual — and injecting — activity of gay men, drug users and prostitutes would certainly put the mockers on the epidemic; short of that, there are free condoms — with incentives to use them — and free sterile needles.

You can feel Pisani’s frustration as she details the idiotic lengths politicians will go to in order not to be seen to endorse the practices that pass the virus on. The provision of needle exchanges in British prisons is one obvious way of stopping them being Aids factories — and a complete political no-no.

But, I ask Pisani, weren’t things ever thus? When it comes to Aids, polio or diphtheria are not the relevant comparisons — it’s syphilis. Nothing is rational when it comes to sex, and everything really goes tits-ups when you throw drugs into the mix. Pisani isn’t exactly jolly-hockey-sticks but she’s still a ewe when it comes to Aids; unfortunately, it was already clear back in the mid-1980s, to those of us who were in high-risk groups, that this is a ram’s world.

The Wisdom of Whores is published by Granta at £17.99
01.05.08

In view of this, Barney championed the writing of Smokey Robinson. Indeed, he went further, saying that Robinson was incomparably the best postwar pop lyricist. Perhaps to be contrary - or maybe because I genuinely believed it - I passionately dissented from this view, arguing that a lyricist such as Bob Dylan managed to be at once experimental and deeply poetic, while still packing a perfectly sweet pop punch to the gut.

As I recall, the argument eventually came down to a single couplet from Dylan’s song “Visions of Johanna”: “On the back of the fish truck that loads / While my conscience explodes”. Barney contended that this, in and of itself, meant absolutely nothing at all. Therefore, it could only be viewed either as a self-indulgent verbal riff, or as filler, marking time until the beat cranked up again.

Being forced to analyse the meaning of this trope was, initially, unwelcome. I had no desire either to descend into the nerdish, psycho-biographical slough of the Dylanologists or to ascend to the arid heights of those academics, who have hung on to their tenure by maintaining the view that some songwriters may be considered quite as much “poets” as their unaccompanied counterparts. So far as I’m concerned this approach has always prompted the question: if lyricists are poets, then what are poets? Presumably one-man bands without a band?

Over the past two decades, to my own satisfaction, at least, I’ve come up with not just one viable interpretation of the vexed unloading fish truck, but many. Moreover, I’ve come to an understanding of the nature and purpose of lyrics that satisfies me, while incidentally explaining the collapse of poetry as a popular art form. Nowadays, if we picture the poetic muse at all, it’s as a superannuated folkie, sitting in the corner of the literary lounge bar, holding his ear and yodelling some old bollocks or other. Whatever need we have for the esemplastic unities of sound, meaning and rhythm that were traditionally supplied by spoken verse, we now find it supplied in sung lyrics.

Curiously, it was also Hoskyns, a couple of years before, who nearly effected an introduction between me and a young Australian punk band that he was then in the process of championing. I was hanging out with a mutual friend, lost in the toxic imbroglio of those telescopic times, when the invitation came to head up to Clapham and meet the Birthday Party. We never made it. We never got our pounds 10 party bag.

I was aware of Nick Cave, of course his incendiary performances - setting fire to the gothic catafalque above pop’s tomb, and writhing as it burned, burned, burned - were a defining part of the same, troubled era. However, I came to the music late. Indeed, I knew Nick himself, socially, long before I immersed myself in his oeuvre. Looking back on that time - the late 1980s and early 1990s - this seems staggering. I’m often reminded of the first line of Woody Allen’s parody of Albert Speer’s disingenuous memoir: “I did not know Hitler was a Nazi, for years I thought he worked for the phone company.”

I may not have thought Nick Cave worked for the phone company, but I had no conception of the extent to which his creative gestalt was shot through by harmony quite as much as semantics. He was an affable, if gaunt, bloke I saw at barbecues with his kids.

Then I read his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel and was exposed, full force, to the great Manichean divide that rives the Cave worldview. Exposed also to his very individual and mythopoeic terrain: a landscape, present in his songs and his prose alike, wherein sex kicks up the dust, murders take place in the heat (of the moment) and the sins of the fathers are visited on everyone. To those unfamiliar with the very particularity of the Australian hinterland - both physical and cultural - the backdrop to many Cave ballads, with their talk of guns, knives, horses and brides, may seem cut from a similar cloth to that of lyricists such as Johnny Cash, Dylan and the blues men and country artists they revere.

Not so. Cave’s mise en scene is as particular to his Australian patrimony as the whorls are to his fingers, or his lexicon is to his idiolect. Here, in rural Victoria, the light is harsher, the flies’ legs are moister and the blood takes longer to coagulate. A persistent atmosphere of the uncanny pervades the world the songster summons up. While immersed in a Cave lyric, it’s easy to believe not only in full temporal simultaneity - the indigenes are hacked to death, even as a football is kicked across the oval - but also that this sepia land marches with ancient Israel itself, both the Pharisees and the Kelly Gang having been clamped by the neck for the time necessary to secure a group portrait.

Cave, as a poetic craftsman, provides all the enjambment, ellipsis and onomatopoeia that anyone could wish for. A word on eroticism and the dreadful dolour of knowing not only that all passion is spent - but also that you’re overdrawn. If Cave were to be typified as a lyricist of blood, guts and angst, it would be a grave mistake. He stands as one of the great writers on love of our era. Each Cave love song is at once perfumed with yearning, and already stinks of the putrefying loss to come. For Cave, consummation is always exactly that.

I must also mention a vein of irony - satire even - that runs through Nick Cave’s lyrics. One of my personal favourites, “God Is in the House”, demonstrates his ability to ironise, then re-ironise, and then re-ironise again, engendering a dizzying vortex as received values are sucked down the pointed plughole. Arguably, such a light heavyweight touch runs counter to Cave’s espousal of the Old Testament verities, yet I prefer to acknowledge it as of a piece: Ecce homo.

So, in the last analysis, it seems that the decades-old wrangle about lyricists was quite as devoid of meaning as the unloading fish truck, for, at that very time, in the existential inner cities of London, Berlin, New York, Paris, there was tapping away a songwriter who was far more than the sum of these parts: the aching heart of Smokey, implanted in the tortured breast of Zimmerman.

Nick Cave: The Complete Lyrics is published by Penguin

29.04.08

Of course, seldom has anywhere more gentrified become more chavvy. Dickens, a habitué of the town, has one of his characters in The Pickwick Papers almost expire with relief once she reaches the haven of the Albion Hotel in Broadstairs, having had to endure the day-tripping of Margate en route. Dickens wrote to a friend of the town, that “[It] was and is, and to the best of my belief will always be, the chosen resort and retreat of jaded intellectuals and exhausted nature; being, as this Deponent further saith it is, far removed from the sights and noises of the busy world, and filled with the delicious murmur and repose of the broad ocean.”

He eventually bought the misnamed Bleak House, which still stands above the little horseshoe bay, looking not remotely grim, but more like a castellated Victorian fantasia on chivalric domesticity. What, I wonder, would he make of the town now, perfused as it is with tracksuited, gel-haired denizens of Margate and Ramsgate? Indeed, the whole of this coast feels like some suburb of outer East London, so full is it of the sights and noises of the busy world.

The sandy bay that is the town’s focus remains, girded by white cliffs of chalk and terraced houses, complete with micro-interwar pleasure gardens and a lift down to the beach that looks like an off-whitewashed crematorium chimney. There’s Morrelli’s, the beautifully preserved 1950s gelateria, where you can get Jammie Dodger sundaes, and glass mugs of vaguely caffeinated froth, then consume them under a bizarre oil painting of a flooded Venice – the water creeping up over St Mark’s. These are good things, and up the steep High Street there are chip shops and charity shops and Doyle’s Psychic Emporium (”Open Your Mind”), and a sweet shop selling orange crystals, spearmint pips and liquorice wheels. There’s even an optician’s trading under the name of See Well.

We hung out on the beach, fetching teas from the Chill Time café. One ageing hopeful came metal-detecting along the strand, Dr Who gadget held out in front of him, nuzzling the sand. Then another came up along, his gaze fixed on the gritty mother lode, his headphones clamped over his cartilaginous ears. Disaster! One metal detector detected the other, and one treasure seeker grabbed for the other’s wand. A vicious mêlée ensued as the two men fought for the right to possess these found objects. The kids and I sat in the beach hut and laughed like gannets.

A happy scene, but come nightfall and the profile tyres began to screech on the tarmac, and the darkness was full of harsher, more discordant cries. I took the dog for a walk in the local park. The blackout was complete, but I was aware of the presence of many others. In any large city these might have been furtive seekers after fleeting, anonymous congress, but here, in Broadstairs, they turned out to be enormous gaggles of teenagers, wheeling around on the mown grass, their mobile phones held under their chins so that the wan uplight weirdly illuminated their vestigial features. As I grew closer to one of these gaggles I became aware of an insistent and peculiar gobbling noise; the sound of many breaking voices intoning “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off” over and over again.

I blame Hengist and Horsa for Broadstairs’ current fall from gentility. The two Danes – or, possibly, Germans – were invited by King Vortigern of Kent to come here in the fifth century: an early form of economic migration. Fifteen hundred years later, in 1949, the anniversary of their arrival was commemorated by some latter-day pseudo-Vikings: Danish oarsmen who completed the voyage in a replica boat. They landed on the sands below Dickens’ Bleak House, and the local municipality laid on a slap-up feed of hot soup, cold poultry, and potatoes with fresh salad in ample portions. Later there was heavy-footed dancing to the accompaniment of Joseph Muscant’s salon orchestra.

But, not content with such a welcome, the town councillors foolishly changed the name of Main Bay to Viking Bay. Doubtless they thought this would cement Anglo-Danish relations, but so far as I can see the main upshot has been that the town’s inhabitants go berserk from time to time. Waiting for the train back to London, I overheard two Thanet warriors discoursing on the platform: “‘E’s a cunt inne?” said one, “always bum-licking, but if you turns yer back on ‘im ‘e’ll give you a smack in the mouf.” They were drinking Stella Artois; if only it were reassuringly expensive.

To view Ralph Steadman’s artwork, visit here

26.04.08