Sebastian Horsley, artist and wit, who once crucified himself in the Philippines and wrote a superb memoir, Dandy in the Underworld, in which he exhibited his sinister and glittdring bons mots, was found dead on Thursday morning of a suspected heroin overdose. If, when the news gets round, the policemen wear black cotton gloves and there are crepe bows on the white necks of the public doves, Horsley would be worthy of the tribute – his attention to sartorial detail was second to none. The stovepipe hat of the man who ran up a £10,000 bill with his tailor and modelled for Comme des Garçons will be sorely missed.
Last time I mentioned Sebastian Horsley here was in an article bemoaning the slow demise of the English eccentric. Many an outraged commenter suggested that Horsley was not eccentric, only idiotic, and a hopeless artist to boot. Bill Drummond would be a better example, Lord Bath, Brian Sewell …
But what was so wonderful about Horsley was that, whether he was any good or not, he was striving, very hard, to make his life something more than a nine-to-five grind, to chisel his quips until they hit the funny bone, to live in a flat filled with skulls if he wanted to, to take his totally miserable childhood and make of it the antithesis of a misery memoir: "This is the perfect book for every fey, victimised 20-year-old with dyed black hair in your family," said the New York Review of Books. He had a larger view:
"You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things all a man's endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach. The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic."
In the words of Jeremy Vine, he was "a pervert who stands for everything that is wrong with British society today". He was the symbol of seamy old Soho, when the whole wonderful place was full of foul behaviour rather than chain restaurants. He claimed to have slept with over 1,000 prostitutes and to have worked as one himself at one time.
Reviews for the stage adaptation of his book, Dandy in the Underworld, a one-man play currently showing at the Soho Theatre (starring Milo Twomey as Horsley), have not been good. "For much of the 80-minute monologue this is every queeny, smart-ass undergraduate poser you have ever edged away from at a party (and then spent the night feeling guilty about, in case your rejection is the last straw and he jumps out of the window)," said the Times's new theatre critic, Libby Purves, with unfortunate timing.
But the posers of Purves's youth probably didn't have Horsley's sense of humour. After being crucified, and falling off the cross because his foot support broke (it was sheer luck that someone was there to catch him before the nails ripped right through his hands), he wrote in his diary:
"There is no question in my mind. I have been punished by a god I don't believe in and he has thrown me off the cross for impersonating his son, for being an atheist, and for being a disaster. I have made a complete fool of myself. I am going to be a laughing stock. The film will end up on Jeremy Beadle."
In an age of corporate press releases touting Lady Gaga's latest outfit and the betting odds on Cheryl Cole's latest beau joining Strictly Come Dancing, Horsley was a blessed relief. Totally obscure, totally weird; always interesting, always funny. Deported from the United States on the grounds of moral turpitude, banned from Germany, objecting to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ on the grounds that the actor didn't have to haul about the cross like he did – he was the diary reporter's secret valentine.
Horsley may have died pretty much destitute and denounced as a mediocrity, but in this, he's in good company. So did Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt … all feted only after their deaths. His book, at least, is due to be made into a film by Stephen Fry's production company, and as with the death of any artist nowadays, the price of his works will surely rocket. The saddest thing, though, is that Horsley won't be around to see it. Only last month, he was proudly saying of the new one-man play, "You realise all people will be saying every night is: 'Who's that cunt in the front row with the top hat on? I can't see a fucking thing.'"
Except now, of course, they won't.
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