John Deakin: the perfect anti-hero of the tawdry Soho scene

During the various lockdowns I found myself wondering how Iain Sinclair was coping with the restrictions. It seemed unthinkable that this unflinching punisher of pavements could be stuck with 30 minutes round the park. But, as it turns out, sequestering, in a fashion that only the Scots word ‘thrawn’ can do justice to, has resulted in the most archetypal Sinclair book yet.

John Deakin is the pariah genius of the title. During the ‘brain-dead hibernation’ of the pandemic, Sinclair got a short-term loan of ‘17 albums of John Deakin’s photographs, fresh prints made from recovered contact sheets; a substantial history of his labours, a flickbook parade of the stunned and waxy faces of his time and place’. From this Sinclair tried to create a ‘psycho-biographic fiction’. The milieu and the manner suited him perfectly, and it seems ironic that the enforced inability to travel and the ‘resurrected eidolons of a story that was not mine to tell’ has created a far-flung book, taking in Wales, Malta, Paris, Rome, Athens and Tangiers, and ending with death in an insalubrious hotel in Brighton.

Deakin, to Sinclair, is rather like God to Voltaire: if he did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. He was not only the subject of paintings by Bacon, but his photographs were the basis of Bacon portraits. He was marginal and central, his role behind the camera being a search for willing victims. There was no attempt at best sides or good light. His subjects look like dress rehearsals for a morgue shot – not just Bacon, but Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud, as well as the poets George Barker and Dylan Thomas.

Deakin was the perfect anti-hero of the tawdry Soho scene. George Melly called him ‘a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom’.