In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I had greatly admired. Ackroyd initially knew Sinclair as a poet, author of Lud Heat, an influence on his own wonderful novel Hawksmoor. Passionately interested in London, the three of us began to meet regularly. Sinclair was an admirer of the French situationist Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle) and popularised psychogeography in Britain. In his blending of myth, literature and close social observation, I felt he combined the virtues of Orwell and Pound.
Before long, in company with the likes of the rock guitarist Martin Stone, the creator of Watchmen Alan Moore, the crime novelist Derek Raymond and the gangster Tony Lambrianou, associate of the Krays, I found myself acting in The Cardinal and the Corpse, a film about the quest for a mythical Flann O’Brien Sexton Blake story. Conceived by Sinclair, directed by Chris Petit, the film blurred the lines between fiction and documentary in a manner which soon became distinctly Sinclair’s own.
His ambition is inspiring. Sinclair is one of our finest writers, and his works about London form an interlinked library: autobiography and biography mixed with anecdotes of the city’s great eccentrics and obscure geniuses. Nothing in his work is quite what you anticipate. The familiar frequently takes on a sinister, emblematic or exotic aspect. Each piece can be enjoyed independently of the whole.
Often unclear about my role, I appeared in his first London essay, Lights Out for the Territory, became an MC at an Albert Hall poetry event, read a story through a megaphone across the Thames to the House of Commons, appeared in several other theatrical events and films (once as a cowboy), with the likes of Nick Cave, Alan Ginsberg, Paul McCartney, Ed Dorn and a familiar cast playing out their own quasi-invented narratives and Sinclair’s scenarios.
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