Joy Division was given its first opportunity to play outside the United Kingdom on 16 October 1979. That alone would have distinguished the gig for the band, but of special interest to Curtis and his mates was the fact that they would be opening for Burroughs. The avant-garde theater troupe Plan K, which had made a specialty of interpreting Burroughs’ work, were founding a performance space in a former sugar refinery in Brussels, Belgium. The opening was conceived as a multimedia spectacle. Films were to be screened — among others, Nicholas Roeg’s Performance (starring Mick Jagger) and Burroughs’ own experiments with Antony Balch. The Plan K theater troupe were to perform “23 Skidoo.” Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire were to give “rock” concerts. And Burroughs and Brion Gysin were to read from their recently published book, The Third Mind.

Before the evening’s events, Burroughs and Joy Division gave separate interviews to the culture magazine En Attendant. Graciously provided to RealityStudio by the interviewer and the organizer of the Plan K opening, Michel Duval, these have been translated from the French and are reproduced here for the first time since their publication in November 1979. You can read the French original or the English translation of Duval’s interview with Joy Division, as well as the French original or the English translation of Duval’s interview with William Burroughs.

After Burroughs’ reading brought the opening of Plan K to its climax, Curtis attempted to introduce himself to his literary idol. This meeting, like so many things about both Curtis and Burroughs, has already become legend — which is another way of saying that its factual basis may have receded into darkness. If you search around the internet, you’ll see sites describing the encounter in terms like this: “Unfortunately when Ian went up to talk to him the author told Ian to get lost.” And this: “Burroughs probably was tired and bored with the concerts and when Ian went up to talk with him the author told Ian to get lost. Ian got lost immediately, not a little hurt by the rebuff.” Chris Ott’s book Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures repeats the story, and Mark Johnson’s book An Ideal for Living asserts that Burroughs refused to speak to Curtis.

To anyone familiar with Burroughs, the thought of him telling a fan to get lost is perplexing. Burroughs tended to be unfailingly courteous, even a touch “old world” in his manners. Typically he was generous with fans and admirers, particularly with young men as handsome as Ian Curtis. What could have prompted such an exchange? Was Curtis insulting? Burroughs in a bad mood? Were there mitigating circumstances?

RealityStudio began doing research on Joy Division as an offshoot of its work on Savoy Books, aka David Britton and Michael Butterworth. It was a natural progression: both the band and the writers hail from Manchester; both drew inspiration from literary and counter-cultural sources; both toyed with Nazi symbolism (or rather, with the public’s notions of Nazi symbolism); and in fact they intersected in Savoy’s bookshops, where young Ian Curtis hung out and where he may well have discovered Burroughs for himself.

Taken together, this research forms a dossier that paints the encounter of Burroughs and Curtis in a more complicated light. What follows are primary documents — accounts, recollections, and interviews that tell the story. Editorial comments by RealityStudio, which have been kept to a minimum, are set [in brackets.]

Ian Curtis, Reader

Image from Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film Control showing a fictionalized vision of Ian Curtis’ bookshelf. Clearly visible are William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Ah Pook Is Here, as well as books by J.G. Ballard (Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition) and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

Sitting down to drink I ask Ian about his liking for the work of J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs. I discover that he has read a good selection of both authors’ works including Crash (my personal favourite), Terminal Beach, Atrocity Exhibition and High Rise by Ballard and Soft Machine, Naked Lunch and Wild Boys by Burroughs. He also has a small booklet by Burroughs called APO-33 which he happens to have with him. I glanced through it and found it very interesting. I wonder if any of the books have influenced Ian’s lyrics.

“Well, subconsciously I suppose some things must stick but I’m not influenced consciously by them.”

Then there were the shops run by David Britton and Mike Butterworth: House on the Borderland, Orbit in Shudehill and Bookchain in Peter Street, just down the road from the site of the Peterloo massacre. As Butterworth recalls, all three “were modelled on two London bookshops of the period, Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in Berwick Street, Soho — which sold comics, sci-fi, drug-related stuff, posters, etc — and a chain called Popular Books”.

With his friend Stephen Morris, Ian Curtis regularly visited House on the Borderland. Butterworth remembers them as “disparate, alienated young men attracted to like-minded souls. They wanted something offbeat and off the beaten track, and the shop supplied this. They probably saw it as a beacon in the rather bleak Manchester of the early 70s.”

“They came in every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. Ian bought second-hand copies of New Worlds, the great 60s literary magazine edited by Michael Moorcock, which was promoting Burroughs and Ballard. My friendship with Ian started around 1979: we talked Burroughs, Burroughs, Burroughs. At the bookshops he would have been exposed to an extremely wide range of eclectic and weird writers and music.”

Dropping out of school at 17, Curtis was an autodidact who took his cues from the pop culture of the time. In 1974, David Bowie was interviewed with William Burroughs in Rolling Stone. The actual chat was fairly non-eventful, but it made the link explicit — especially when Bowie was seen fiddling with cut-ups in Alan Yentob’s “Cracked Actor” documentary — and Burroughs would cast a major shadow over British punk and post-punk.

Ian and Steve came in [to Savoy's House on the Borderland bookshop] as schoolboys, on Saturdays.

The attitude radiating from the shop was fuck everybody in authority, and that’s what they responded to. The shop played loud rock’n'roll over the speakers which sounded out into the street years before other shops were doing the same kind of thing. And I mean loud.

After about six months or so, they both got expelled from school and then began hanging around the shop during the weekdays as well. They’d go out for sandwiches and hot teas. Sometimes they would accompany David [Britton] to wholesalers like Abel Heywoods, just around the corner, and help carry stock back to the shop, and then help stock the shelves.

What was he interested in?

Ian was interested in counter-culture and science fiction. David remembers them being enthusiasts about Michael Moorcock, whose hard-edged fantasy writing and lifestyle was a great influence, very rock’n'roll. Ian liked Jerry Cornelius and The Dancers at the End of Time. Steve was more into Elric and Hakkmoon, he thinks.

I’m afraid Joy Division never meant anything to me (unlike Mike [Butterworth], who sees something of worth in them). My cronies and I thought it was “crying shit in your underpants” music. Student angst. A glib dismissal, I knew at the time, but it was a comfort to think like that. Despite what [Jon] Savage says I’m pretty sure that Ian wasn’t much of a reader. A skimmer at best, but with the ability to read the right stuff and quote from it. For a Macclesfield lad, quite an achievement, I suppose. Of course, 30 years on from my meetings with him, the world has put him in a different perspective. Fair enough. JD have stood the test of time and have proved to be something far more substantial than I at first perceived. But can one be wrong, and also be right? Is it “Transmission” or “Papa Oom Mow Mow“? But at least it’s better to have JD representing Manchester music than Freddie and the Dreamers.

Burroughs in 1979: Junky (Again)

[The late 1970s were a strange period in Burroughs' life. He had done innovative work exploring the intersection of word and image with collaborators such as Brion Gysin (The Third Mind), Malcolm Mc Neill (Ah Pook Is Here), and Bob Gale (The Book of Breeething), but the publication of these works was compromised by financial obstacles. He was greatly worried about his son Billy, who had undergone a life-threatening liver transplant. At the same time, Burroughs had become the gray eminence of the music scene. A month before the Plan K gig, he was going to Broadway to see Best Little Whorehouse in Texas with Frank Zappa. Plans were being made for a musical of Naked Lunch.

Ironically, with all the scenesters hanging about and with his partner James Grauerholz away in Kansas, "Burroughs," noted biographer Ted Morgan, "started chipping." For the first time since he had returned to New York in 1974, Burroughs was a junky -- again.]

Plan K

Situated on the Rue de Manchester in the Molenbeek district, Plan K was a labyrinthine former refinery built in the 1850s, six storeys high and adding up to 4,300 square metres… Disused by 1979, the industrial landmark was leased and renovated by choreographer Frédéric Flamand and his avant-garde dance troupe (called Plan K), seduced by the cloistered, industrial, pre-Hacienda architecture and the potential of 22 large rooms as a multimedia performance space. With the object of mixing diverse audiences and promoting new synergies, Flamand sought to combine dance, theatre, music and audiovisual art, so that the Plan K complex — like Brussels itself — would become an international cultural crossroads…

For several years Plan K succeeded famously, the place to be and the place to see. Many early musical bookings at Plan K were arranged by urbane journalist / economist Michel Duval together with Annik Honoré, then working as a bilingual secretary at the Belgian Embassy in London. Annik’s relationship with Joy Division lead to the rising Factory band being booked to appear at the formal Plan K opening on 16 October 1979. This more than lived up to Flamand”s multimedia ambition, and offered music, dance, film and readings across several consecutive nights. The focal point was celebrated addict and avant-garde writer William S. Burroughs, author of Junkie, Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, as well as The Third Mind, a collaboration with fellow cut-up pioneer Brion Gysin. Gysin also appeared on the bill, as did Kathy Acker, along with sundry other readings and lectures. Films included the infamous 1970 Mick Jagger vehicle Performance and two Burroughs shorts by Antony Balch, while the Plan K dance troupe performed a piece called 23 Skidoo. Although the “rock concert” featuring Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire was billed second from bottom on the Marc Borgers-designed poster, healthy import sales of Unknown Pleasures and the Cabs’ several singles on Rough Trade ensured a healthy audience of two or three hundred in the ground floor concert hall.

Video still of Joy Division performing at Plan K, 16 October 1979

I organised the famous Plan K gig and I did interviews of Burroughs and Joy Division. The interviews took place at Plan K hours before the event. Burroughs was very affable and courteous… I remember that both Ian and Rob Gretton [Joy Division's manager — ed.] were into Burroughs and also obviously the Cabs [Cabaret Voltaire] for the “cut up.” I remember very clearly Ian falling in the arms of William Burroughs at the end of the show. Whether they spoke really I don’t know.

Joy Division “capitalized on the chance to play at Plan K in Brussels on October 16th, with the more experimental Cabaret Voltaire, both groups supporting a reading from idolized American author and poet William S. Burroughs. (Ian was rebuffed by Burroughs, which hit him hard as he was a great fan.) At Plan K, Ian either met or reacquainted himself with Annik Honoré…”

I have no memory of seeing William Burroughs in Brussels or Ian telling me anything about it later… At the time I was living in London and I came back to Brussels for a very short time for the concert (and I remember on top of it having some kind of flu). Although I had known Ian for a few months, we were not going out together yet (this was on 26th October so after the concert in Brussels) and therefore did not spend all the time with them (and I stayed at my parents).

Philippe Carly, Ian Curtis at Plan K, 16 October 1979

Someone contacted me from some email group about something that Cabaret did when we played in Europe with Joy Division at a festival on the outskirts of Brussels called the Plan K, where in fact I actually met William Burroughs. It was a big festival on about three floors and was like this 60s happening — it was great. It was an old sugar beet plant: there was a stage on one floor, they were showing some Brion Gysin films, all sorts of things, performers, dance, readings — Brion Gysin and William Burroughs were on one floor just reading. Cabaret Voltaire were playing downstairs so we went over in a big furniture van.

The audience was very diverse: a serious group of intellectuals (French, Belgian, and American), a few posers, five tourists, more than three hundred rock fans. When Cabaret Voltaire, originally from Sheffield, went onstage at around 10:30 PM, the sound system wasn’t right and the sound coming out of the speakers was oversaturated…

Joy Division (from Manchester) made up for it. Though they were capable of even better, their set was incomparable. Those who have never seen Ian Curtis, the singer, on stage can only imagine a sort of epileptic with a mad, hallucinatory gaze, working his arms like a broken windmill and mouthing his lyrics in a bleak but exasperated tone.

Ian Curtis Meets William Burroughs

On October 16 the group journeyed on their own to Brussels Raffinerie du Plan K, an old sugar refinery converted into an arts centre. The evening culminated in a reading by beat legends William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin from their collaboration The Third Mind. “To be honest, we all liked that kind of stuff, but we didn’t go on about it,” says [Stephen] Morris. “We didn’t go around in black or wearing sunglasses inside. But occasionally [Ian Curtis] would reveal that part of himself. I remember he went smooching over to Burroughs. We were like, “Great, we’ve got a crate of double-dead-strong beer, can we get another?” He was off getting his book signed.

The next day we go to the gig and Ian was really made up that Burroughs was on, reading, and Ian’s a big fan. He wanted to tell Burroughs what a great person he thought he was. Ian went over and then somehow hoped that Burroughs might know something about him or his lyrics, but he just blanked him really, as if he was anybody in the crowd.

In Belgium we did this t.v. show, it was a compilation of various things. There was us, Cabaret Voltaire and William Burroughs who was reading from his new book The Third Mind. Afterwards we got introduced to him and I asked if he had any spare [books] but he hadn’t. As well as that there was these guys on the show making nasty noises on violins and shouting every so often, really awful.

Gerard Pas, William Burroughs reading at Raffinerie de Plan K. Brussels, Belgium, 1979

I think that the Burroughs intervention was done in the upstairs space at Plan K. Je n’en ai pas de souvenirs ou alors celui d’un petit monsieur (qui me semblait très vieux) dans un coin qui lisait des choses dans un brouhaha avec un mauvais éclairage bleu et blanc. [I only recall a small man (who seemed very old) in a corner reading in the midst of a brouhaha poorly lit by blue and white lights.] I remember the Joy division gig and I found that very hard (I know it is not politicaly correct to say that now). I didn’t like them live. But Cabaret Voltaire was incredible.

On arriving at Raffinerie de Plan K, I was impressed at the size of this huge hall, which was previously a sugar refinery. It was filled to capacity with some 10,000 people [more probably 300 — ed.] all there for poetry and literature. I was overwhelmed yet again that such an interest even existed and that these readings could be such a big draw. I remember coming in the back entrance and be[ing] escorted in the cavernous underbelly of the building to a waiting room filled with notable writers from around the world. There was Steve Lacy, Joy Division, Kathy Acker, Cabaret Voltaire and many more…

It came time for Bill to enter the hall. Bill sat down at the table as he often did when reading publicly with his manuscripts open before him as though it was his desk at work or wherever he wrote. Sitting there like “the chairman of the board,” he began to read from The Third Mind his collaboration with Brion Gysin, Viking, New York, 1978…

The formalities of the readings and the hoopla ended but we didn’t stay long to party and celebrate each other’s laurels with pats on the back. No Bill, [Soyo] Benn [Posset] and I high-tailed it back to the hotel so that we could expedite our journey back to Amsterdam and tame the monkey on our back. No cold shivers or shakes as Bill’s formidable knowledge of pharmacology had already tempered that back at the drug store. Yet we all knew where the real party was and it wasn’t here in Belgium, it was in the den of an opiate-induced hallucination and calmed by the thrilling rush of the heroin cursing through our veins. Amsterdam beckoned and we answered its clarion call by parting our hosts, friends, and celebrations with sudden dispatch. At first light I got the car, went by Le Plan K to pick up Bill’s cheque, and then we drove through the Belgium countryside with urgent speed, hastened like a galloping horse to be near our sweetheart the white nurse, or the black tootsie roll. Stopping along the way only to relieve ourselves and eat something — Bill was good that way he always took care of his body even as a junkie.

The lecture by WSB was fascinating — it was the first time I heard his amazing voice — but as far as the conversation between him and Ian Curtis is concerned, I wasn’t there…

How long did Burroughs read?

It was quite long, I’d say one hour.

How was he received by the audience?

Very respectfully, as far as I recall.

This was the opening night of the Plan K venue — were you impressed with the surroundings?

The idea of creating a “salle de spectacles” in an old sugar refinery was groovy — but then again I had seen the Plan K shows before in the strangest places (including a church & a sort of monument at the Parc du Cinquantenaire) — it was badly heated, industrial, I was very much into punk in those days and I sort of resented the pretentious & “intellectual” aspect of the whole Plan K concept (and their shows, a sort of local version of the Living Theater) — but then again they were trying, they were annoying the establishment, did shocking things like performing naked (ooooooohmyyyygoooood) — and that, I suppose, was good for the times — as was the idea of borrowing from WSB, which was good and very “branché” in the 70′s

Philippe Carly, Cabaret Voltaire at Plan K, 16 October 1979

Legend has it that Burroughs uncharacteristically told Ian Curtis to fuck off at the Plan K gig.

I very much doubt wether William told Ian Curtis to fuck off. I approached Mr Burroughs at the Plan K event, and mentioned I was a friend of Genesis P Orridge from Throbbing Gristle, who of course was known to William — he didn’t know me or had heard of my band Cabaret Voltaire, but was very friendly and a very polite old gentleman. I even gave him a Cabaret Voltaire badge, which he pocketed. This was the first of several occasions that I met Mr Burroughs.

Do you have any recollections of Burroughs or Curtis at the gig?

I already knew Ian quite well by the time of the Plan K event. Joy Division had played with Cabaret Voltaire at the Factory Club in Manchester, the Revolution Club in York, in 1978, and at the Futurama Festival in Leeds in 1979, and we were quite excited by the fact that Burroughs was going to be reading at the event.

My one enduring memory from Plan K was of sitting around a table with Ian, William and other band members of Joy Divison and Cabaret Voltaire. Ian asked William what he thought of Suicide (the band), William thought he meant the act of suicide, and I think said he disapproved. William was disturbed by the popping of champagne corks at the party, which he mistook for gunshots!

Do you have any recollection of Burroughs’ reading?

I did attend the reading. I recall the reading being given from a long table where William, Brion Gysin and others were seated. It looked like a political broadcast, until you heard what was being read! I can’t recall exactly what was read, but it was well received. Because it was a mixed media event it was attended not just by music fans, but also people from many areas of interest, including writers, filmmakers etc.

Any idea if Burroughs attended the musical performances?

I’m not sure, but the received wisdom was that William didn’t like stuff to be too noisy, so probably not.

Did you ever hear Curtis speak about Burroughs or his admiration for the man?

Yes, many times. I guess we bonded because of our interest in Burroughs, J.G. Ballard as well as music (Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Kraftwerk and so forth).

More generally, how would you describe the importance of Burroughs for bands such as Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire?

I can’t really speak on behalf of Joy Division, but I think it was mainly Ian who was interested in Burroughs. From a personal point of view, Burroughs was very important to me. I discovered Naked Lunch in 1974/75 and was very taken by its content, and did loads of cut-up text through until the early eighties. The anti-establishment / black humour / political satire and general contempt for society / methods of control was very appealing to a 17-year-old kid! Not the sort of stuff you show your folks! Later, I discovered the tape cut-up experiments that William did with Brion, and the films with Antony Balch, Towers Open Fire and the Cut-Ups (which were shown at the Plan K event) and saw a very big connection with the experimental sound / music and film that I was doing with Cabaret Voltaire. It was a great source of inspiration, knowing that people had done this kind of thing earlier, and I like to think that in some way I carried on that lineage / tradition with the work that I did with Cabaret Voltaire.

Suicide

[Ian Curtis committed suicide on 15 May 1980.]

It seems clear that Curtis used his books as mood generators. At the same time, his wife thought “the whole thing was culminating in an unhealthy obsession with mental and physical pain.” As she recently wrote: “I think that reading those books must have really nurtured his ‘sad’ side.”

I can’t see this suicide kick.

The English boy was talking about suicide, life not worth living. This seems incredible to me. I think I must be very happy. I got like a Revelation but can’t verbalize it.

Suicide is never good. “It is a cowardly vetch, O my brothers.”

Envoi

I can remember one day at the beach. I went there with one of my cousins and his friends. They were smoking hash but I didn’t. I was only listening on my headphones Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and reading The Naked Lunch. I get at chapter “A.J’s Annual Party,” and I can’t remember what happened. Everything had disappeared there were only the smell of smoke and the music in my ears. I was reading with my eyes closed. The lyrics were coming into me but I didn’t know how. That was the WSB work.

In 1979 Savoy Books was prepared to publish a uniform edition of works by Burroughs when it was subject to a series of police raids that temporarily forced it into bankruptcy. The project was scuttled, but Britton and Butterworth never lost their tremendous admiration for Burroughs. A few days after his death in 1997, the two gave an interview to Sarajane Inkster describing their visit to the Bunker, Burroughs’ abode on New York’s down-and-out Bowery. Now they expand on that interview to commemorate the 2008 publication of Horror Panegyric. A collaboration between Savoy Books and Supervert, creator of RealityStudio, Horror Panegyric features an enthusiastic analysis of the Lord Horror novels, excerpts from the hard-to-find books themselves, and a timeline of Lord Horror productions including books, comics, and CDs. The hardcover book may be purchased from Amazon, and the text is also available in its entirety at supervert.com.

Meeting William Burroughs

An interview with David Britton and Michael Butterworth at the Savoy Offices, 12th August 1997, ten days after Burroughs’ death. Conducted by Sarajane Inkster and originally published on Savoy’s web site.

On 23 May, 1979, Michael Butterworth and David Britton of the Manchester publishers Savoy Books took the opportunity to visit William Burroughs. They met him at The Bunker, his home on the Bowery, New York, before he moved to live in Kansas. The publishers were staying in Manhattan, en-route to the American Booksellers Association Trade Exhibition in Los Angeles. Michael Butterworth’s note book records the visit briefly with the barest facts:

NOON — William Burroughs, 222 The Bowery, between Prince St. and Spring St., on The Bowery. (Google Map) Call first by phone before knocking. We to make offer to his London Agent for Cities of the Red Night and arrangements to discuss The Job and Dutch Schultz. [Verbatim text from Michael Butterworth's 1979 American Notebook.]

Ostensibly their intention was to discuss with Burroughs a Savoy line of his work. However, although the meeting went well, the venture was ill-fated.

As of writing, the company has recently emerged from 20 years of persecution by the Manchester police and city authorities. Unknown to them in 1979 — the time of their visit to the Bunker — they were soon to be dealt a body blow. Returning to England, after successfully contracting to publish the paperback edition of Cities of the Red Night, Savoy was hit by the first of three big raids. (Two other raids, in 1989 and 1990, concerned the publication of their novel Lord Horror and various graphic works.) Led by “God’s Cop” Police Chief Constable James Anderton, this raid was a co-ordinated simultaneous swoop on their main retail and publishing premises, and almost achieved the intention of shutting down their company. It was the culmination of many smaller raids. In total, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stock were seized and not returned, including Savoy-published titles by Samuel Delany, Charles Platt, and Jack Trevor Story. At the same time, an unrelated action by the Times Mirror Organisation in America dealt a body blow to the publishing house New American Library. This had a knock-on effect on Savoy’s distributor-publishers, New English Library, who went into liquidation. Savoy was forced into temporary bankruptcy in 1981, and in 1982 David Britton was jailed — the first of two jail sentences connected with his publishing which he had to endure. Savoy lost Cities to another publisher.

Butterworth and Britton’s other agenda worked out well — they met one of their literary heroes, one of the great people of the 20th Century.

I asked them for their memories of that meeting.

David Britton: My memories of William Burroughs at that date are mixed up today with the images you see of him on film. You know — “Did I really meet him, or was it the dream celluloid Burroughs who sat opposite drinking tea?” However, I do remember thinking that the Bunker was definitely an extension of Burroughs’ personality. Burroughs added ambience to the place, which was an old gymnasium — the sort you would see depicted in gangster films set in the Brooklyn of the ’30s, where Pat O’Brien plays the honest priest, and all his young punks are working up a sweat in the gym — Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, etc. You could just see Burroughs as the Daddy, The Bowery Daddy, and the Dead-End Kids as his private street gang. Even their name sounds like one of his creations.

There was a flight of long stairs up to the Bunker which was a long room with a couple of side-rooms and a kitchen. I remember the “john” — a partitioned-off area with a row of old-fashioned tiled urinals, which had the sort of sleazy sex connotations you would expect of Burroughs’ living quarters.

Michael Butterworth: The Bunker was in a run-down low-rise area of stores, bars and light industry, very like Ancoats in Manchester, only busier. On the ground floor was what seems in my memory to be a used furniture store selling tall cabinets and cupboards, or wardrobes. It had open iron security gates, and was the general entrance to the building. I can’t remember how we got upstairs, or who met us to show us up. It may have been Burroughs. Possibly we walked up after calling on a door entry system. I remember Burroughs brewing us tea. During the meeting there was the sound of typing coming from a small side-room — probably his companion, James Grauerholz, who was also his secretary and manager. It was Grauerholz who — with Allen Ginsberg — did so much to help gain establishment respectability for Burroughs. It would figure, because at this time Victor Bockris was being allowed to make introductions between Burroughs and celebrities like Susan Sontag, Lou Reed, Nicolas Roeg, Andy Warhol, and Tennessee Williams. [Bockris was the author of With William Burroughs, A Report From the Bunker, 1981, Seaver Books, New York.]

Inkster: How did you arrange your meeting with Burroughs?

Butterworth: We phoned Burroughs before we called round to see him. We told him that we were interested in doing the UK paperback edition of Cities of the Red Night, which he was still working on. At first he wondered why we wanted to see him rather than his London agent. I said we would do this, but we would still like to meet him as we were in New York and could show him our titles, and explain to him what type of company we were. On reflection, he probably realised that we were looking for a slender reason to meet him, and he very kindly allowed us his time. Yet we were seriously interested in publishing Cities, which we thought was his best novel since The Naked Lunch. We also told him that we seriously intended to make available new paperback editions of harder-to-get works like The Job and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. We were planning for these to be in uniform editions, if we could, and this seemed to please him. When we got back home we contracted with John Calder, his UK hardback publisher, to do the paperback edition of Cities. This was to have been the first title in what we saw as a Burroughs line, which could establish Savoy as a major publishing company.

Britton: We offered what was for us a high advance of £10,000, and were surprised when it was accepted. For someone of Burroughs’ calibre, it was a low figure. It made us wonder what other publishers had offered, what they thought he was worth. He never did earn a vast amount of money, despite what people think. When he was in England he was reported as saying that he was earning what the average plumber would earn.

Inkster: How much time did you spend with him?

Britton: It’s hard to recall how long we were with him. (Records show no more than about 2 hours). We’d brought with us a selection of our titles. I can remember discussing The Savoy Book with him. This is a collection of fiction and graphics which we’d just put out. It had such writers as M John Harrison, who worked for us at the time, and Harlan Ellison. We’d published Harlan’s book, The Glass Teat, and were going to see him next, to discuss further titles with him at his home in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. Our good friend Heathcote Williams was in there… and artists such as Jim Leon, who had illustrated for Oz magazine. It was a showcase collection for Savoy. We would also probably have left with him titles like Charles Platt’s The Gas, Delany’s Tides of Lust, Michael Moorcock’s The Golden Barge, Jack Trevor Story’s Screwrape Lettuce, and Henry Treece’s Celtic tetralogy. We discussed Harry Clarke, the Irish artist, who Burroughs knew of. Clarke illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination — which suggests that we also talked about Poe. At the time we were contemplating doing a book of Clarke’s colour and stained glass work…

Inkster: Was there any sense of the atmosphere at the Bunker being “contrived” in any way?

Britton: No — not at all. It was very definitely a home, first and foremost. The place was very clean, and pleasing to the eye, with no sense of the dereliction of the streets outside. It was open-plan and so from where we were sat we could see across the room to the kitchen area, where he made us tea. Burroughs dealt with everything, and he knew his way about. We saw no one else. He was the perfect host.

Butterworth: There were no windows. It was where Burroughs lived, slept and worked — like a bunker. But it was strange because you were actually upstairs, on the first floor. We sat on one side of a longish table, with him facing us, constantly smoking thin cigarettes. He was very polite and well dressed in a light suit. He looked and behaved exactly as you would expect from his public profile, but his formality broke and he became genuinely interested when he came across one of Dave’s illustrations. The picture, from The Savoy Book, was called “A Fortnight on Calvary: Don’t Put Me Down Like All the Other Fish.” It has a weird alien landscape, in which are two figures. The main figure was Count Sublime Hubris, one of the characters who later appeared in Lord Horror, imperiously tall, black, and dressed in finery, like Little Richard, but with an exposed cunt. The other was also black, but winged, small and naked, and fierce, with a very large hard-on, sucking on a tube which has been fed into the Count’s vagina. It made Burroughs chuckle, and he asked who had drawn it.

Inkster: Were you nervous about meeting someone who was obviously so important to you?

Britton: Yes, it was nerve-wracking, and easier that we had been a pair visiting him.

Inkster: How much did this meeting with Burroughs mean to you?

Butterworth: It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. As a writer he had had an altering effect on me — after coming across his work I was not the same person. He opened my mind to possibility more than any others except other greats like Rabelais, or Lautréamont or Bosch. He was by far the most important person I have met or probably will ever meet. I regret that we took no pictures, but that was what everyone else was doing, which was not the Savoy style. Savoy was a calling card that allowed us to legitimately meet people we admired, like Burroughs, Gerald Scarfe or Burne Hogarth. At the time, that was enough.

Britton: There was something magical about meeting him. I thought of him as a sorcerous “Tinkerbell” — and some of his inspiring talent might just dust off. Mr Burroughs was Chaos Magick incarnate and, like the best oneiric spells, your memories of what was said and done are fractured. Just the “distant wonderland” of it all stays with me. It was a very important moment in our lives.

Inkster: Can you think of anyone else to compare him with?

Britton: Ironically, despite his anti-drug stance, Frank Zappa comes immediately to mind. Particularly the early Zappa, who had a similarly cynical turn of mind and cold intelligence. It goes without saying that Burroughs was the greater, original artist. Andrea Dworkin has his passion, though her obsessions are elsewhere. It’s difficult to think of Burroughs having any peers. To me, he never seemed to quite fit with the Beats, nor with later contemporaries like Vidal, Mailer, Bellow or Updike. They were writing about the present, but Burroughs was “leaking in” the future for us: which will be alien. His mindset was genuinely alien, his mental umbilical chord was cut off from the rest of humanity, and he could articulate that discord within himself with the most powerful of visions. Burroughs had opened himself up, fallen into hell and climbed back out again. There are no other living writers capable of sustaining such visions. He was a mutant product of those strange decades, the ’30s-’50s. They gave him a primitive quality denied to later generations of writers — who are urban, literate in computers and technology, but lacking his connections with the fleshy and sinister.

Butterworth: I can’t compare him with anyone except, strangely, considering what Dave has just said, in a small way to Don Van Vliet — Captain Beefheart — with his ability to draw so directly on experience to make art. Burroughs’ work is so different to what went before. No one today has his idiosyncratic genius. He has had such a diverse effect — on literature, music, films, and electronic culture. Whatever detractors say of him — that he is misguided, lightweight, or whatever — will only serve to confound all the more, as his influence is seen to continue to grow, particularly now that he is dead. He is a hybrid genius, a great poet of the technological age, and a great satirist… and to some a spiritual leader.

His best poetic writing, especially his depiction of things gone, in broken, fragmented images — a yearning for the absolute, and at the same time an intense sadness or grief for man’s inability to attain ‘something’ lost — produces an acute nagging pain inside me. It is like the worst love sickness, a terrible ache in the stomach, a feeling of fragility. I sense his loss, his fear. I pick it up off him like a worrying parent does off a child. Of course, if his writing did just this, that would not make it great. What makes it great is the way he is able to use this peculiarly intense emotion to describe reality, unbearable beauty and awfulness of the universe, of distant galaxies as well as the human life processes.
Inkster: And now that he is dead?

Butterworth: His death — his final editor — only intensifies everything he has written. What he has recorded between 1914 and 1997 is truly awe-inspiring, and has had an effect on the way we perceive things and how we communicate these things ourselves — his is a way of seeing humanity in all its pain and humour that cannot be reversed.

A great deal of my writing which I most identify with is not written out of any sort of objection at all, it’s more poetic messages, the still sad music of humanity, simply poetic statements. If I make a little bit of fun of Control with Dr Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, they say, “This dark pacifist who’s paranoid, who’s motivated completely by rejection of technology.” This is a bunch of crap. [From an interview with Victor Bockris.]

To me, death was something that Burroughs always seemed to face head on.

Butterworth: Burroughs wrote a novel as long ago as 1970 called Ah Pook is Here, which is about him trying to come to terms with his death. "Ritual and knowing the right words," he says with dry humour, is no solution to the problem. Death can come on the unprepared suddenly, like a "forced landing, or in many cases a parachute jump ". Far better, he writes, to know your landing site — where and how you are going to die — in advance. Cultivate a mindset of "alert passivity and focussed attention". When he finally came in to land on the far shore across the sea of his life, I hope he landed exactly where he planned, give or take a few yards.

More about William Burroughs

Email interview with David Britton and Michael Butterworth, 2008

RealityStudio: Michael, you published with the seminal New Wave magazine of the late 1960s, New Worlds. Did Burroughs have an influence on you and the other writers working at New Worlds?

Butterworth: The general atmosphere of New Worlds was imbued with Burroughs. Burroughs was living in London in the 1960s, of course. Not only did Michael Moorcock promote him in the magazine, JG Ballard also did. Michael was one of the main supporting contributors to the ‘Ugh!’ correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement, and on his travels made a habit of bringing Maurice Girodias titles into the UK before they were available here. He and Charles Platt promoted authors like myself (Michael wrote about me in an introduction that I “sprang full-grown from the head of William Burroughs!”). He even wrote an experimental science fiction novel called The Deep Fix, with a character called Seward. Then there were the New Worlds parties, at least two of which were attended by Burroughs. These could be “star”-studded events. At a celebrated one Mike introduced William to Arthur C Clarke, and apparently they got on well.

It was a very heady time. New Worlds is hardly ever mentioned in books on the UK 60s’ scene, not even in surveys by Miles (whose Indica Books was just around the corner from the NW offices), but to a small group of people it is the most influential magazine of the last 50 years. To me, one of the younger writers, thoroughly corrupted by cut-ups and unable to read linear prose, and used to having work rejected, the magazine seemed to be tailor-made to fit, and appeared just at the right moment. When it finished, many of us were left directionless, a condition compounded by the disillusion felt by the ending of the 60s.

RealityStudio: You didn’t cross paths with Burroughs at any of these parties?

Butterworth: I went to several of the parties, unfortunately not the ones Burroughs attended. I lived too far away to go to more than a few, and only learned afterwards in agonised constriction that Burroughs had been to the ones I missed. Jimmy Ballard attended some, so it’s very likely he met him there.

My memories (as a 20-year-old) of Ballard are frustrating. I didn’t know what to say to him, even though he was there in front of me at a party and was talking to me and only me. By the time I met Burroughs I was twelve years older and had brought Dave as cover, so got slightly more out of that. Regardless of what you manage to take away intellectually, you get something else off these great people. As Andy Warhol once said, it’s best you DON’T KNOW THEM in any way, because that way they still have an aura to touch you with.

RealityStudio: Jed Birmingham has written extensively of Burroughs’ contributions to Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag. Were you aware of Nuttall, his zine, or other small-press ventures?

Butterworth: The small press Burroughs and Burroughs-related pamphlets and books I managed to buy over here were got mainly from a bookshop called Compendium, in North London, and visits there were rationed because of distance (200 miles from Manchester).

That Burroughs regarded the small press magazines as his saviours makes sense of something that happened to me around the same period. I was about 17 or 19 (1964 – 1966), and co-editor of a new college magazine to be called “Top Drawer.” Imagine my surprise when I wrote to Burroughs to get a contribution — and very promptly received one, a kind of permutation! Alas, I dropped out of college, and so far as I know that was the end of the magazine. Youthful stupidity prevented me from keeping a copy of the contribution to run in a later, then unenvisaged, Concentrate or Corridor. (Zines produced by Butterworth — ed.) What an irony for me, then! Burroughs was routinely contributing to Nuttall in Leeds, Nuttall’s home town, where Nuttall was a teacher, only thirty miles away from where I was based, and may have regarded the North as fertile ground. For many years it worried me that he may have wondered what happened to my magazine. Very likely he forgot about it. But somewhere out there, is an unaccounted Burroughs contribution, perhaps lying forgotten in a top drawer….

RealityStudio: As Englishmen, did you find the language of Naked Lunch difficult?

Britton: On its initial reading it gave me no sense of confusion. As a front-row kid of the 1950s, I was well versed in Americana, serials, dime novels, B-movie noir, Faulkner, Hemingway, Mailer, American comics and of course that great universal binding blanket, American (50s) rock’n'roll. And Lash LaRue, the rebel cowboy, a creature from the Place of Dead Roads if ever there was. This cultural exchange, as you know, worked in reverse, when America picked up (a decade later) on The Who, the Beatles and the Stones, all reselling a warped mirror image back to America. Now that smells like teen spirit to me.

John Lennon, for instance, had pretty much the same sensibilities that we had. He supped on Larry Williams and hard-sold songs like “I Am the Walrus” with its children nursery rhyme-like lyrics (“Yellow belly custard, green snot pie, dead dogs’ giblets, green cat’s eye”) which was a song we all sang in the playground. Like much of Lennon’s work, it was taken directly from working class culture, as is Meng & Ecker. Once you’ve got Bo Diddley down your neck, Niggaz With Attitude are no problem. Compton is much like Miles Platting, Manchester.

Willie Burroughs’ take on sexuality was the infusion that threw me, not the language. But when eclectic prose and sex conjoin they conjour a powerful brew. There will never be another book as talismanic as Lunch. The world is now too small a place.

Butterworth: Did I find Naked Lunch difficult because of the slang and American 50s’ patois? Yes. I had a father who forbade television and American comics. Unlike Dave I grew up in a more sheltered middle class culture. Also, in terms of books and film I was drawn to sf and horror and westerns, rather than to crime and hard-boiled books. So when I came to read Naked Lunch in my late teens, apart from it lifting my head off I found it perplexing and mysterious in equal measure; its strange words increased its awesome imaginative power. Eg, “I can feel the heat closing in.” Now I had no idea to what “heat” referred. The way Burroughs said it, it seemed like a metaphysical alien radiation of some kind — which of course it was also; the way Burroughs used words, they had multiple meanings. Then words like “lush” and “roll.” I knew they were not being used “correctly.” Encountering them, I didn’t at first question these strange words, but as I read through Naked Lunch I imbued them with “tonal” meanings, much as I had done in my early and mid-teens encountering Poe’s Victorian prose. Eventually, of course, I began to use the slang glossary Calder had helpfully supplied for English readers. Gradually, over the months, after I’d read and seen more, I “wised” up. Knowing what the words mean did not decrease the book in any way.

Language, and what Burroughs did with it, fascinated and shocked me more than the sex. I first read about him in the Times Literary Supplement, after encountering a passing reference about a writer who was cutting-up writing. My initial reaction was that this was a cheap way of proceeding. In fact it outraged me. Dave (a Catholic) was more shocked by the sex. (Around this time he was probably taking Little Richard’s homosexuality on the chin — a revelation which outraged working-class kids who saw the American rockers as heroes; the very last thing they wanted to hear was that he was queer.) One good thing my father DID do for me (but for the wrong reasons) was to send me to an eccentric Quaker English boarding, where, among many other things, I encountered male sex. It was a mixed progressive school, so all kinds of sex was going down, but the girls and boys slept in different wings in the houses. Though I had lived a more limited cultural life, Burroughsian sex, at least, did not come as such a shock. Though the way Burroughs mixed it did. Overall Dave and I are agreed that Burroughs’ mix of graphic sex, literary experimentation and imagination was explosive.

RealityStudio: Cut-ups clearly influenced the “concentrated” writing you (Michael) were doing for New Worlds. Dave, did they also influence the later Lord Horror novels in any way? Much has been said about the transposition of an anti-gay speech into Lord Horror, but there are numerous other passages (especially in Motherfuckers) that seem to imply the technique.

Britton: Lautréamont and the surrealists used a form of cut-up that’s more applicable than Burroughs to the Lord Horror book. Ernst would cobble together illustrations from Victorian art books to gain entry into a mysterious absurd world. That always seemed more useable to me than Burroughs’ method, which as you know influenced people like David Bowie in a more productive way.

My own preference is thieving from a whole range of texts. Am always on the lookout, and collect cheap books with eclectic subject matter — fiction or fact. I will nose out this pirate stuff like a shark turning over a coral reef. Sometimes I lift paragraphs, with slight changes, which you’ve astutely noticed. Not only Motherfuckers, but every Lord Horror spin-off has this weirdness inserted like a deviant germ. A flowering of disease that makes the whole thing shake and shimmy. The ingredients of the soup again. Carefully chosen spices — a bit out of fiction, a bit out of a voodoo book, a cookery book, a botanical book, a bit of Cotton Mather, pieces of some really obscure pulp writing, and so on. The way certain authors write sentences will appeal to me, and I’ll lift them and drop them into the narrative stream. Hopefully I get the “fit” right, but if I don’t I’ll at least get something interesting. Like Topsy, it just keeps on growing.

RealityStudio: Naked Lunch was considered an unpublishable book, and yet Burroughs’ market had been primed by Kerouac and Ginsberg. Savoy’s market may have been primed by your bookstores and by other bits of alt culture, like rock and roll. But otherwise your books seem to have just careened into consciousness.

Butterworth: When you say that Burroughs’ market had been primed by Kerouac and Ginsberg and that our market has been primed by our “bookstores and by other bits of alt culture, like rock and roll”, this is it in a nutshell, and puts the finger on the probably insurmountable difficulties of inventing an entirely new market possessing such a degree of eclecticism — the length of time of the undertaking, the very real likelihood of failure. Once we’re no longer around to plough money, time and energy in, the shebang comes to an undignified and unnoticed stop.