Stewart Home, author of “Fascist Yoga”, has been an artist and writer since the early 1980s. He is the author of 17 novels, 8 books of cultural commentary, as well as collections of short stories & poetry. In today’s episode, Cathy and Stewart talk about 69 Things to do with a Dead Princess, infiltrating the art world, his early career as a musician, and becoming a novelist.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Fascist Yoga
69 Things to do with a Dead Princess
Transcript:
Cathy Evans (00:11)
So a huge welcome to Stewart home. Welcome to the indie book club. And Stewart, you’re a provocateur, prankster, author, filmmaker.
Stewart Home (00:10)
Right.
Cathy Evans (00:24)
artist, not necessarily in that order and also several of those things at once as well.
Stewart Home (00:31)
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. In fact, I think I’m wearing the t-shirt if you can see. Traveling in several directions at once. Yeah.
Cathy Evans (00:36)
Oh, his t-shirt says, moving in several directions at once. Yes, I think that’s
a great app t-shirt for you, definitely. And, sorry?
Stewart Home (00:45)
Although it’s off screen.
It’s off screen most of the time.
Cathy Evans (00:50)
And you are the author of Fascist Yoga. And before we get into discussing the book, the book really exposes yoga’s sort of dark history, if you like. And before we get into that, I thought it’d be quite good to start from the beginning and step by step go through your career a little bit. And
how that leads to fascist yoga. I do think you’ve made a career out of attacking anything that the middle class holds dear. Is that a fair description?
Stewart Home (01:20)
⁓
well, I haven’t gone around to everything quite yet. I haven’t done a book on cricket.
Cathy Evans (01:26)
Ha ha ha!
Stewart Home (01:28)
But I don’t like cricket, we never did it at school. We did football or soccer as Americans call it and ⁓ cross country running and that was all we did.
Cathy Evans (01:37)
well, that sounds quite a lot.
Stewart Home (01:39)
Although, you know, my cousins who grew up working class in Wales, they appreciate rugby, which has killed me as well. But that’s a different country. So, yeah.
Cathy Evans (01:48)
Well,
whales and rugby are definitely, synonymous. So as well as whales and rain. So.
Stewart Home (01:55)
Yeah, yeah.
Wales is a beautiful language as well, which is growing in its years, which is fantastic, although I haven’t learned any.
Cathy Evans (02:00)
how I.
No, neither have I and I went to school in Wales so I have less excuse. Yeah.
Stewart Home (02:08)
Yeah, you have less excuse. My
mother, who was born in Wales, learned some as an adult. But yeah, growing up in South Wales in an Irish family, you’re not going to… In the 40s and 50s, you’re not going to learn a lot of Welsh. But she did learn some as an adult. Yeah.
Cathy Evans (02:24)
No, I suppose not. But it
is great that they’ve made such an effort to revive the language because now you have quite a few Welsh medium schools and kids are really encouraged to learn it, which is great.
Stewart Home (02:35)
Yeah,
no, mean it’s really fantastic because we have to preserve ⁓ our smaller languages. mean losing them is a huge loss to ⁓ everyone, not just the speakers, but for the speakers it’s their whole culture. So it’s been fantastic to see what’s happened to Welsh speakers and see the numbers increase. Although they were never really low, know what I mean? It’s not like Cornish where it died out and had to be revived. There’s always been Welsh speakers.
Cathy Evans (02:59)
⁓
Well, especially in North Wales. So speaking of your school days, that’s probably a really good place to start because I saw a podcast that you did and you mentioned that actually by remaining strictly within the school rules with your school uniform, you actually managed to piss the teachers off.
even more than the kids who were wearing flares or had their hair really long. This is probably the start of very long career of poking the bear with a stick.
Stewart Home (03:32)
Yeah, probably.
was the summer of 1976. We had the Green Goddesses, a very hot summer. And there was a fireman strike, so we had the Army Green Goddesses on the street. And I discovered punk rock as a 14-year-old, or kind of London punk rock, over the summer. And went back to school and discovered one other girl in my year had discovered punk rock. So we were the two punks in the seven classes in the school.
Cathy Evans (04:03)
How did you recognize each other?
Stewart Home (04:04)
Well, you could tell by our hair it got shorter. It was the 70s, so long hair was the fashion. the boys all wanted to have their ties as wide as possible. They’d try and make these hugely wide ties, which wouldn’t go down very low because they’d made them so wide. And they’d wear wedgies, which were the platform shoes. They went up at the back.
Cathy Evans (04:08)
⁓ okay, right. Yeah.
Stewart Home (04:30)
⁓ The heel to make you look a bit taller, but you know if you’re into punk rock you wanted a flat shoe You wanted straight trousers and Oxford bags were the big thing with the kids saying because it was well Came out the skinhead was in the suede head and then the boot boy look so look at my school was boot boy so it was the Oxford bags and the Picture shirts the tank tops and all that stuff, but you know Huge flares so when we you know you could recognize the other person who got into
because we were kind of making everything short and small. So I had a very thin 60s mod tie that I’d managed to find in the colour for the school tie.
so we got lined up for uniform inspection and they came down the line and they had a ruler to measure how high the wedge at the back of the shoe was and how wide the tie was and exactly how long your hair was so they…
never had a problem with my hair but it got cut short. So yeah, they just looked at me and said, where did you get that tie? That’s pathetic. Looked at my trousers and everyone else has got flares and I’ve got, just straight trousers, straight leg. I mean, when you went to buy them back then, you you go to the market store and the guy would say, what do you want straight trousers for? They’re unfashionable.
But you know by 78 everyone was wearing straight straight trousers and shmurra Yeah, yeah two years ahead
Cathy Evans (05:49)
So you were a pioneer.
Yeah, I can imagine a girl with very short hair in the 70s must have stood out quite a lot.
Stewart Home (06:01)
Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that’s how we recognized each other. And then it was all code like, are you into EFN? Which meant extra fast music. Although if you listen to 70s punk rock, it isn’t that fast, but it was faster than the kind of plotting heavy metal or whatever. I mean, the big sort of culture at my school, music culture was actually Northern Seoul. Although, you know, we were a long way from a vegan casino, but kids did go up there.
Cathy Evans (06:19)
Yeah.
Stewart Home (06:31)
So the punk was a kind of minority thing and the kind of progressive rock, the Pink Floyd and the heavy metal was for the grammar school kids. We didn’t listen to that.
Cathy Evans (06:40)
Okay, and certainly no disco either, I imagine. really?
Stewart Home (06:44)
no no, some disco was okay with some ripples.
Yeah yeah, but I mean the punks weren’t supposed to like it but I like Northern Soul so I always had problems with the punks as well because it’s like, well you like good music like, you know, whatever it was at the time, the Sex Pistols or the Stranglers. So why do you like that other stuff? But you know…
Cathy Evans (07:02)
Yeah well, it doesn’t preclude
you from liking anything. You can like several genres of music but actually it was that same podcast. There was some hilarious quote from Captain Sensible about the Sex Pistols music.
Stewart Home (07:16)
yeah, it sounded like Old Man’s Steptoe. was a bad Black Sabbath demo. Less popular. With Old Man’s Steptoe on vocals, yeah. They raced to get a copy of anything in the UK when it came out and put it on and couldn’t believe how bad it was. They were pretty good the damn time, especially when Brian James was on the guitar.
Cathy Evans (07:19)
You
Yeah exactly, exactly.
Stewart Home (07:38)
Not so much. I saw him when they reformed but without Brian James they just weren’t the same. Sadly dead now as well. But yeah really showing my age with these references as well.
Cathy Evans (07:46)
⁓ A
lot of the people we’re talking about are sadly not on the face of the earth anymore.
Stewart Home (07:54)
No, exactly.
A lot of good writers as well.
Cathy Evans (07:57)
So after school there was a hagel period wasn’t there?
Stewart Home (08:01)
Well,
the immediate thing after school was a job making Bondi Court products which meant the floors of buses and stuff. Although I was cutting them up and counting them out because if you were under 18 you weren’t allowed to work the presses. But yeah, then I decided it was better to be on the dole than working in a factory or whatever.
when we had a decent welfare system and I spent a lot time reading Marx and Hegel and things like that which I wouldn’t… Yeah, yeah, did make a lasting impact. It’s good to read. mean, the quotes kind of stick in the mind more because Marx is gifted and very comic when he puts his mind to it, right? The ponderousness of Hegel makes it harder to remember the quotes but there was something… ⁓
Cathy Evans (08:32)
And this has made a lasting impact.
Mm.
Stewart Home (08:50)
fantastic about at the same time.
Cathy Evans (08:52)
I’ve
never heard Marx being described as a comic author.
Stewart Home (08:56)
no,
it’s fantastic.
all the, you know, there’s all the famous Marx quotes, you know, religion is the open of the people, but it’s all, you know, it’s all the Hegelian inversions. There’s a lot of really famous Marx quotes and, you know, a lot of really funny metaphors and put-downs. He’s great put-down artist, for his opponent.
Cathy Evans (09:04)
Yes, but.
Maybe I should read
him then.
Stewart Home (09:16)
Yeah,
yeah, you just have to pick out the right parts, you
Cathy Evans (09:19)
Yeah,
no, definitely. think that religion is the opiate of the masses is definitely something I agree with. this is something that that comes up again and again in your work as well. That, holding anyone up to some sort of guru like standard is pretty foolish. And you should actually start thinking for yourself.
Stewart Home (09:38)
No, exactly.
And Marx is a good way to start thinking rigorously, reading through it. You don’t have to agree with everything. I mean, he was wrong on certain subjects like America, but fundamentally he’s a solid political theorist and wanting to apply it to the world. The philosophers have interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it, being another of the famous quotes.
But you know, he’s also a laugh a minute when you get the right parts. I mean, even theories of surplus value, which was never finished, there’s a famous footnote which I rip off in one of my books about how the criminal creates all value in society because without the criminal you wouldn’t have the cop or the judge or the jailer and all these other things. You know, some really hilarious passage of the mob.
Cathy Evans (10:24)
That is, well,
that’s a different way of looking at it, isn’t it? You’ve always been a big reader, haven’t you? Were you a big reader at school or did that come to you afterwards?
Stewart Home (10:28)
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, used to, you know, the TV was so boring in the 70s, so what else could you do? You know, you had to wait for the Saturday, nine o’clock, and they’d show some German expressionist film like Metropolis or Nosferatu on BBC Two when they still showed silent films on TV. And, you know, the Universal, Frankenstein’s and Dracula’s were on ⁓ Thames,
Cathy Evans (10:39)
Yeah.
Stewart Home (10:57)
They were on about 11 o’clock at night and kids TV was like Blue Petrel or Magpie. So you were left to read a book. So I read a lot of pulp fiction and non-fiction as well, lots of books about martial arts and stuff. But I’d read a book pretty much every day when I was a kid. So a lot of them were very short, 40,000 word novels. ⁓ And one of the important things we all used to read at school was the New English Library Youth Culture book. So that was the Skinhead books.
written by Richard Moffat. His real name was ⁓ Richard Allen. His real name was James Moffat and all the Hells Angels books, the author I particularly liked was Mick Norman who I learned years later was really called Lawrence James and he actually edited a lot of the early Richard Allen’s Skinhead books as well but gave up on him because he got so fed up with the racism. But in his Hells Angels books again, Angels were harder than the straight Angels and the
angels were the only hope for freedom from an authoritarian British government after the government smashed the angry brigade if people remember that kind of. ⁓ The angry brigade was a group in the early 70s that was busted who attacked things like Miss World broadcast and prominent Tory politicians of the time but they attacked property they didn’t kill anyone they only attacked property but they planted a few bombs and things.
Cathy Evans (12:01)
What was the angry brigade?
Stewart Home (12:20)
⁓ But obviously in the context of the kind of troubles in the north of Ireland it was pretty tame but there was a big trial over it and they were a big deal back then. you you got different politics and also I used to read a lot of Michael Moorcock ⁓ who I got to know later, great bloke. Do you know Moorcock who did the charity? Well, there he is.
Cathy Evans (12:27)
trivial stuff.
I don’t know.
Stewart Home (12:45)
series. that’s the more intellectual side of his things and the more literary praise in some of later novels. But I start when I was about 12 on Elric, which are the fantasy novels, the kind of warriors. But yeah, I was reading all sorts of stuff. mean, you people have probably forgotten, but figures like T. Lopsam Rampa, who was a fake Tibetan guru, really Cyril Henry Hoskins, a plumber’s son from Devon.
Cathy Evans (12:58)
Okay.
Stewart Home (13:15)
⁓ So he did these books like The Third Eye and he claimed to be have been you know he telling you about going inside a UFO as a child and how he discovered all these strange objects which are basically descriptions of things like knives and forks but you have to remember in Tibet I would personally say things. And he was exposed by the guy who did the seven years in Tibet. I had a private detective to follow him around to find out who he really was.
Cathy Evans (13:32)
clever.
Stewart Home (13:42)
So after he was exposed as being Cyril Henry Hoskins, he claimed that he’d been living in Thames Ditton and climbed up a tree and fallen out, which is when the spirit of the monk Ramper had entered his body. So he was genuinely the Tibetan monk. But I mean, I didn’t take that stuff too seriously. I used to read, do you know Aleister Crowley? Yeah, yeah, so he’s mentioned in fascist yoga, but I used to go to a shop called Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in St Anne’s Passage in the 70s when I was still at school.
Cathy Evans (14:01)
Yes.
Stewart Home (14:10)
and they sold lots of sci-fi stuff and I came across Crowley there, the novel’s diary for drug fiend, Moonchild is the other one. You know, so when I thought he was hilarious when you had all these chapter headings like, heroin, heroin, you know, it’s a kind of whatever, 12, 13, 14 year old, I thought that was really funny. I never took his magic that seriously. But some people did.
Cathy Evans (14:36)
Well, yes, exactly. I
was a big fan of Eric von Daniken.
Stewart Home (14:43)
yeah,
I read those books as well, they were complete nonsense.
Cathy Evans (14:45)
That was complete
nonsense. I was so, I suppose I really wanted to believe they were true and then he was done for fraud. I love the idea of us not being alone in the universe and having the desert being a landing strip for aliens and things like that. I just lapped that stuff up and of course it was complete rubbish.
Stewart Home (15:06)
Yeah, ancient batteries and all that stuff. Then there was the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, if you remember that one. Agent Lee and Lincoln. And that was some French hoaxers who were of planting materials for them. ⁓ That was a good one. It was all exposed. Absolute nonsense as well. But all those kind of books were fun. And I would also read all these books like
Cathy Evans (15:12)
Yes, I do.
Yeah.
Well, it is.
Stewart Home (15:30)
John Gilbert’s Secret Fighting Arts of the World, which was Robert W. Smith writing fiction, but it was marketed in the UK in the 70s. mean, they were older books, but they pulled out the old rights when the Bruce Lee craze was on and put them out as kind of genuine books. The UK publishers, when I came across them, absolute rubbish and it was never intended to, you know, it was a satire of tall tales from martial artists. He did a few books like that.
But he did also write serious books on Chinese martial arts, is a area of expertise, CIA operative. So he was in Taiwan and able to learn lots of Chinese martial arts there.
Cathy Evans (16:12)
But you’re into martial arts yourself, aren’t you? Is it Tai Chi now that you like?
Stewart Home (16:15)
Yeah, I do a little. Yeah, ⁓
Yeah,
it’s Tai Chi, a bit of Chen and bit of Wu, which if people know the family styles, they know what I’m talking about, Chen’s the original style. But I started with a really obscure Wan Lam, which is a mixture of Yang and Sun, really. But there’s lineages of this style. I just think it’s nice. In the Wu, I really like the foot movements when you’re turning around. They’ve got a lot of emphasis. It’s like ballet, but ballet for old people.
Cathy Evans (16:44)
Is it like ballet?
Stewart Home (16:49)
It’s not as difficult. But to do it correctly, takes a lot of practice and does take skill. But yeah, it’s not as hard as ballet. But that’s one of the things that’s interesting with the yoga that a lot of the early yoga gurus, Pierre Bernard and then later Richard Hiltelmann, they had ballerinas.
essentially dancers demonstrate their yoga moves and the women demonstrating didn’t get good from doing yoga, they got good from their dance training so they look very slick moving between the exercises. yeah, a bit of that. And yeah, to go back to the childhood reading, I mean my first novel, which I wrote some stories in the style first of all long short stories and then write a novel because people like short stories. I just thought you could rewrite all the kind of youth culture books I read.
you know they got passed under the desk at school. I didn’t like the swine hassle which were the kind of
tales of Nazi warfare and terror. But I never liked those books, fortunately. But they were.
Cathy Evans (17:47)
My brother
was a total fanatic. He loved those books.
Stewart Home (17:50)
Yeah,
I thought they were awful. I mean, there was that, the youth culture novels and the kind of James Herbert the rats and stuff like that. Everyone. Yeah.
Cathy Evans (17:58)
⁓ yes, I remember those were so big, the rats
and the cockroaches and the various, they were horrible.
Stewart Home (18:04)
Yeah, then the crabs
came out, Guy and Smith, which was, I didn’t start reading those until after I’d left school, but we used to read them aloud to each other because when he started off he was such a poor writer he kind of got mediocre, so the books got less interesting. But the crabs would first be as big as rats and then as big as cats and then the size of a London taxi and then as big as a bus and when they appeared it would be click, click, clickety-click on the page. We thought they were absolutely hilarious and wouldn’t, no.
Cathy Evans (18:32)
Yeah, I’m sure.
Stewart Home (18:34)
in my group
Cathy Evans (18:34)
Yeah.
Stewart Home (18:34)
would read them, we take turns reading them aloud.
Cathy Evans (18:38)
Well, they certainly
did the rounds in our school and there were ones on spiders and all sorts of horrible things. Yeah, gross.
Stewart Home (18:43)
yeah, yeah. But
yeah, the youth culture stuff I thought could just be reconfigured to… ⁓
kind of create something new. mean the first story I did when class war were getting a lot of headlines in London and through, I was never an anarchist but through kind of left politics you get to know anarchists and some of the people who’d gone to a thing called London Workers’ Group joined class war which we saw as a degeneration into anarchism but I thought… ⁓
Cathy Evans (19:08)
So you were
never an anarchist, but you were associated with anarchism.
Stewart Home (19:12)
Well, I was never an anarchist, but I was also didn’t like Bolshevism. So I wasn’t a Trotskyist or a Stalinist. So if you were coming out of a more what you can call left communist position, like council communism or the situation is international, whatever, people would think you were an anarchist because they couldn’t place what your politics were. But now with the internet, they can look it up and find out where they come from.
Cathy Evans (19:36)
Everyone gets to it
and holds very quickly.
Stewart Home (19:38)
We would
encounter the odd anarchist and I would come across the people from Class War so it’s quite funny to see them described in the newspapers as this huge threat. So I just thought you could take the style of the old youth culture novels about bikers and skinheads and rewrite it as a tale about Class War. So where in a biker novel you’d have a rivalry between the President and the Lieutenant in the Hells Angels chapter.
you transfer that into a kind of anarchist group and then the guy who was a left-hander will be thinking, but anarchists don’t have leaders, I can’t think of that, I’ve got to take it over.
Cathy Evans (20:11)
Well exactly, that’s what I was thinking. It will never
be a credible threat because how can they organise themselves?
Stewart Home (20:18)
Yeah, but also it’s a, just a place where you can parody their belief that they don’t have leaders because when you look at the group you would see leaders.
Cathy Evans (20:24)
It’s a.
huge seam of humor, isn’t it? ⁓
Stewart Home (20:29)
Yeah, exactly. So yeah,
you know, that was how the early book started off. A combination of that and the fact that it was the 80s, so I was reading lots of postmodern theory as well, and particularly like Jean Baudrillard because he basically took Marx’s critique of alienation and commodification and flipped it on his head. So whereas Marx said it was bad, Baudrillard said it was good, you know, the black…
cloud or hole or whatever he described it the masses absorbing meaning. So I kind of thought when you look back through literary history and you looked at the surrealists or the Nouveau roman people like Alain Rogriet, Natalie Sorot, Claude Simo and those writers I read all that stuff when I was a kid, teenager in translation my French isn’t that good.
You know, they inscribed elements of pulp fiction within their prose, but had a more experimental narrative form or non-narrative form generally. Didn’t adhere to kind of strict storytelling techniques. And I thought you could apply with Baudrillard the notion of simulation that he used to a kind of experimental fiction. So what I…
noticed through reading a lot pulp writers that they tended to repeat themselves. If they liked a phrase, they’d repeat it through their books, you know, as in what I took some of the phrases they used, like the bastard staggered backwards, spitting out gouts of blood and the occasional piece of broken tooth, which was in Hell’s Angels books, Peter Cave. He used it more than once. And so I just take the phrase and use it repeatedly.
Cathy Evans (21:43)
Yes.
Stewart Home (21:53)
But I thought you could kind of have a simulation of a pulp narrative, but it would be incredibly repetitive, so it would kind of deconstruct itself. So that was the kind of theoretical end of my early work, while the critics just thought I was trying to write pulp fiction, but it was a bit weird. They didn’t realise I’d read both of you.
Cathy Evans (22:08)
wasn’t
your… Your first publisher got it, didn’t they? Until they were sold to Edinburgh University Press, is that it?
Stewart Home (22:13)
Yeah.
I’ve written the long short stories, know, 15, 20,000 word stories. So I thought I’d write a novel for, you know, whatever reason. I thought it’d be interesting to see if I could get a publisher and send it around a load of places and got rejections. And then Peter Kravitz, who I knew because I did a bit of writing for Edinburgh Review and he was the guy who discovered James Kelman and Tom Leonard.
You know, obviously won the book, one of the more unusual writers to win the book, one of the few I actually think is a decent writer in fact. And so he was a big deal in Scottish literature and he had run Polygon when he was a student but because it was run out by the students at Edinburgh originally, he’d left. And I gave him a copy of my book and said, ⁓ I’m not having any luck getting this book published.
maybe you can suggest someone. said, did you just know that EUP have bought out, Edinburgh University Press have bought out Polygon and I just became the editor six weeks ago. I said no, because I didn’t. And he said, well, if I like the book, we’ll publish it. So he came back two weeks later and said, yeah, it’s great. We’ll publish it. But he got it. Yeah. Yeah. Playing with the form. Yeah. And then EUP looked at it.
Cathy Evans (23:22)
So he got it, he got the fact that you were, that it was a satire and a parody, yeah.
Stewart Home (23:33)
and didn’t like it and commissioned readers to look at it who didn’t like it and said it had no literary value. So they told him that he couldn’t publish it and he said, well, he committed to publishing it and that he would leave if they wouldn’t let him publish it, which was great for Peter Kravitz. I mean, that’s an editor really standing out for an author. I mean, really, really fantastic to have that level of support. So it was agreed that he could do the one book and they wouldn’t publish anything by me ever again.
Cathy Evans (23:47)
A matter of principle, wow.
Stewart Home (23:59)
⁓ yes that was…
Cathy Evans (23:59)
That was like a
of a mixed blessing, wasn’t it?
Stewart Home (24:03)
Yeah, you know, so I bounced around different publishers for years. And I got incredibly rude rejections because, you know, people would hear that I was doing interesting things and then I’d send them a manuscript and then they’d send me back a note saying that, you know, I was a next door neighbor to a brown shirt, which is, you know, the kind of
left faction in the original N*zi movement, yeah. Because they obviously didn’t realise that I wasn’t identifying with the characters, that I was being satiric and critical. it’s maybe more obvious now because I wrote a story in character as a cop who investigated my mother’s death and it’s a pretty unpleasant piece that was in London Noir, edited by Cathy Anelsworth.
Cathy Evans (24:25)
Well, mostly you practice movement,
Stewart Home (24:49)
But if you see that, then you’ll see that the kind of more anarchist figures also fit into the kind of same technique of using the character but actually not identifying with the character.
Cathy Evans (24:59)
course, isn’t that the whole essence of fiction is to create a character that is not yourself?
Stewart Home (25:05)
No exactly. mean you occasionally
you might be feeling lazy and write a roman-à-clef but most of the time…
Cathy Evans (25:11)
But then again,
very, very boring very, very quickly, wouldn’t it? If you’re constantly writing about yourself.
Stewart Home (25:15)
Yeah, yeah, if that’s what you did.
If you did it every time because you wouldn’t be have any new material. so yeah, that was the early works. And then I did five novels pretty much in that style. After which I got.
Cathy Evans (25:21)
Hmm.
You are incredibly
prolific. You’ve published a lot of books. must admit And haven’t you also had book launches for fake books as well?
Stewart Home (25:31)
Yeah. ⁓
There was some people decided to do a book called Harry Potter and the Quantum Time Bomb and attribute it to me and I had a launch for it. There’s also a fake book called Stone Circle which was written by group of people as a kind of fiction project which they attributed to me and published.
Cathy Evans (25:58)
That’s
very funny. Actually, that can bring us quite neatly to 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, which I’ve just finished reading that. It’s very fun to read. Although it polarizes a lot of people, I think, because in between literary discourse, there’s an awful lot of sex.
Stewart Home (26:07)
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (26:25)
some people describe it as pornographic. I don’t see it that way at all. It’s actually very matter of fact, the way that it’s described. It’s almost like describing how you make a sandwich or how you cook a recipe or something. ⁓
Stewart Home (26:38)
Yeah, exactly. There’s also
a very detailed description of lot of Aberdeenshire stone circles. I mean, was enormous…
Cathy Evans (26:45)
Yes,
I had no idea actually you really bring Aberdeen to life in a way. I always thought it was a pretty grey boring, I’ve only been there once or twice. yeah, and they even have their own dialect apparently.
Stewart Home (26:58)
No, first went in…
Yeah, yeah, the direct. And yeah, you’d hear all these old, weird, Scotch phrases from older people. I mean, I first went there in 84, probably the most… A guy called Pete Horrobin, who I met in London, and he decided I was an interesting young artist because he was down in London for six months doing some events and said I should come up to Scotland and see him.
Cathy Evans (27:11)
What took you to Aberdeen first?
Stewart Home (27:27)
And I was…
Cathy Evans (27:28)
Hi everyone, Stewart.
We have to back up a second because you becoming an artist was not you being really talented at art or drawing or any of that and also not because you went to art school. You decided you were going to be an artist. So talk me through that process.
Stewart Home (27:45)
Yeah.
Well,
I’d been a musician without being a musician playing in punk bands. I literally started because a guy I knew who’d had a little punk band said, oh, we’ve got a ska band now. This was in 79. Why don’t you be the bass player? I said, well, I got guitar six months ago, and I’m still learning it. And I don’t have a bass, and I don’t know how to play. He said, oh, don’t worry. We’ve got a bass, and I’ll show you how to play. So I was in a few bands after that. I did improve slowly.
but was never that brilliant. the music scene just seemed to be getting a bit boring by 1982. It’s probably just an age thing and you like certain things. I’m not knocking people who like later music, but most of what I liked… I liked a lot of house and techno and stuff from later on, but not kind of rock music, which was what I was more confident to play.
So yeah, having been able to do music without really knowing anything about it, I thought why not become an artist and it’s really a matter of persuading people in the art world that you are an artist rather than having any innate talent. That was my…
Cathy Evans (28:48)
which
I’m sure is still probably very true. And so you describe it as manipulating the bureaucracy. So when you decided you wanted to be an artist, how did you actually go about doing that?
Stewart Home (28:52)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, did some, you know, I’ve been familiar with, Dada and futurism and surrealism and all this stuff. Although surrealism is more a literary movement than an artistic one, it’s both, but you know, the literature is probably more important. But I was familiar with all those kind of 20th century avant-garde. So it was just a matter of trying to take up where they left off. And some of early stuff I did was…
Cathy Evans (29:08)
Mm-hmm.
Stewart Home (29:25)
just take out ads saying things like, this is an advert, is this an advert, an advert this is with a telephone number. So, you know, was advertising myself as a kind of artist who could be hired for parties and stuff in local newspapers. And people would ring up saying, have you got a mobile disco? Didn’t think that someone would take out the odd ad to…
to promote their art career and putting out manifestos and doing whatever and performance stuff. So, you know, I knew bands and so I could say, oh, can I support you? But I kind of read sound poetry and held carrots at the audience. But when they picked up the carrots and held them back, I then figured out I could throw dry peas at them, which would be hard to throw back and they could slip on them as they were getting angry at me and running towards me on stage.
Cathy Evans (30:13)
So you were
conscious of their physical safety at all times? Your physical safety, yes.
Stewart Home (30:17)
yeah, yeah, all my physical safety. But
the trouble with the dry peas was every venue would ban me for using them. I mean, I also got banned from… Where was it? It was in Berkshire somewhere. I can’t remember the name of the town. It some little town in Berkshire. And I did a performance with a girl I worked with a lot at that time.
Cathy Evans (30:25)
Alright.
Stewart Home (30:36)
we were declaring people to be living works of art, know, kind of post-Gilbert and George way. So a couple of guys decided to have a sack race. We told them to get in these sacks and they had decided to have a sack race, but then one of them pulled the other’s trousers down and that got me banned from the venue for life as well. No, no, you know, because we were having an evil kind of effect on the audience, making them pull
Cathy Evans (30:54)
Even though wasn’t you who did? ⁓
I see.
Stewart Home (31:02)
each other’s trousers down and stuff from the work we were doing. Yeah, yeah, was corrupting and, you know, I’ve been banned from, I’m also banned from Brighton Pier for life and I’m banned from…
Cathy Evans (31:05)
You were a corrupting influence.
And who decides
whether you, who on Brighton Pier is going to say, that’s Stewart Home, get off our pier.
Stewart Home (31:21)
Yeah,
yeah, because when I filmed a video on there and I was banned from Filthy McNasties for life as well. again, that was I was on with Ken Kesey from the and, you know, the Merry Pranksters, one flew over the cookers nest. His audience didn’t like me. It was a free event which Paul Smith from Blast First had put on. So, you know, I was just winding them up more, with doing my act, which the hippies didn’t like.
Cathy Evans (31:36)
I
Stewart Home (31:46)
and there was some management meeting going on upstairs so they didn’t like all the noise. Ian Sinclair refused to read that night because the audience was so hostile to me but Ken Kesey went down well but I got banned for life but you know they’re closed now so the life ban didn’t work. I outlived them.
Cathy Evans (31:59)
I was going to say, I’ve never heard of Filthy
McNasty. What a brilliant name though.
Stewart Home (32:04)
Yeah, was this kind of… they did a lot of literary events there. It just started on Penton Mount between Angel and King’s Cross. But now it’s some other pub, so I’m not bound from it anymore. ⁓
Cathy Evans (32:17)
Well, it’ll be interesting to see if anyone chucks you off Brighton Pier. Have you actually, have you obeyed this stricture? I imagine not. Exactly.
Stewart Home (32:26)
No, no, I’ve been back since, you know, was a band that
was 30 years ago. I mean, they don’t, tell you about it for life. It doesn’t work. But yeah, maybe if the West Pier would be more of a problem, but no, was the one that’s still standing. But yeah, so I decided to become an artist and I’d seen a piece about the stuff Pete Horobin was doing. he was born in London.
Cathy Evans (32:33)
Exactly.
Stewart Home (32:49)
and grew up in Hammersmith too, he was 12, his mother was Scottish, so when he was 12 he went up to Kirkcaldy. And then went to art school in Dundee, so he lived in Dundee for years and years, and he had this project where he wanted to bring back the image of the Highland Tramp to Scotland, so he went around the Highlands pushing a pram, but I was living in a…
place that was originally squatted by David Madalla. So there was all his old performance art props. He’s a Filipino artist. It was a big deal in the sixties with these kinetic sculptures and stuff and also did lot of performance art. And he squatted a house in Kennington that I lived in for a while. So there was this old fashioned fifties pram in there. So I took that up to Scotland and then we used Super 8 cameras to film each other pushing the pram around to bring the image of the tramp.
with a pram back to the Highlands of Scotland. So we went up to Aberdeen and went out into the Aberdeenshire countryside and that was my first trip there in 1984. And you know, we were in a little village where the Scottish Sculpture Workshop is, basing ourselves out there and you know, with the Super 8 camera, the old boys who sit on the edge of the village green for something to do all day if it’s not raining.
kind of came up and said are you from the BBC when we’ve got this absolutely pathetic Super 8 camera and you know shooting on out of date film stock which you used to be able to buy then so you’d save a lot of money but it wasn’t a problem but the real professionals wouldn’t use the out of date stuff but we did because it was cheap. So yeah that was the first trip to Aberdeen and then I just I love Aberdeen and I’d always had an interest in stone circles got taken to a lot when I was a
Cathy Evans (34:13)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Stewart Home (34:29)
a small child, you know, back in the days when you could actually play on Stonehenge and eat all your food and there were no ticket gates or anything, you know, but not just Stonehenge all over the place. when I was in the 90s, I got very into going to a lot of Stone Circles. So, I went around a lot of the ones in Aberdeenshire and thought it would make a good book. So I got the idea.
On the 35th bus I was actually going to see John King, who’s a friend of mine, has been for years, who wrote Football Factory and all those books. So I had a Council Flank shortage and he was always living down in Clapham. And I took Anne Quinsberg, which I first read when I was 18, manager of one of the bands I was in, gave it to me. He was an English teacher for his day job and I believe that he had a musician in the band he was managing who read all these…
books that he thought were interesting, whether it was William Burroughs or Rob Grier and all that stuff. So he wanted to turn me on to the English kind of equivalents which weren’t as well known. So he gave me a copy of several B.S. Johnson books who was his favourite, but also Anquinsburg which blew me away. So the opening of Dead Princess is transferring Berg from Brighton to Aberdeen.
Cathy Evans (35:45)
Okay.
Stewart Home (35:47)
you know, with the lines about brightness, San Francisco on the south coast, then Aberdeen is Los Angeles on the North Sea because you kind of have this cruising culture around the beach. you know, back in the days before people went to the Costa del Sol, it was a big place for people in Scotland. You know, does have a very nice beach on a sunny day. It’s beautiful. ⁓ It’s unfortunately not sunny every day in Aberdeen. And, when the sun is out and the city is built of granite.
Cathy Evans (36:06)
and
Stewart Home (36:14)
It’s called the Grand Lucidie. You know, the sun’s sparkling on the Grand Lucidie. does look really beautiful. So, you know, and people didn’t… I mostly sent my books in London. I thought, why not send one in Aberdeen? That’s a different.
Cathy Evans (36:15)
Mm.
I’ve to
say I’ve never read a book except Nabedim before so it was definitely a first. ⁓
Stewart Home (36:31)
Yeah, there are, are,
but not, you know, it’s not a hugely popular area. So it’s saying, and the stone circles, there’s some serious research about stone circles. mean, obviously I’m not an archaeologist, but I did go to them all. But yeah, it was just the reading the Anquin and the fact that I’ve been visiting a lot of these stone circles in Avedincia and thinking, yeah, I can just translate one to the other.
Cathy Evans (36:44)
Mm-hmm.
You mention Anne Quinn quite a lot. I’ve never read any of stuff. What really spoke to you in Anne Quinn books?
Stewart Home (37:06)
Well, was the first one I read which was her first book, Berg. The fact that she was a kind of equivalent of the French nouveau-roman but in Britain and I thought a lot more successful than people like Alan Burns if you know, he was his book on America. The Man for the Band I was in gave me a copy of his fictionalized version of The Anchoring Brigade which is a really terrible book. I mean, I’ve seen him talk and I don’t know if he’s still alive but back in the day…
about his work at the ICA and stuff, but I’m not a huge fan, but Anne Quinn and Berg seem to be every bit as good as a kind of the French equivalent of that kind of novel, but have its Englishness and a kind of seedy, you know, and seaside. There’s a ventriloquist dummy in it as well, although the dummy doesn’t come alive and narrate a chapter as it does in my book, When the Narrator Sleeps In.
Cathy Evans (37:54)
Yes.
Stewart Home (38:01)
But yeah, she’s just a really interesting writer. mean, she committed suicide in what was it, 73, so she only wrote four novels. But ⁓ she was kind of forgotten for a while, but after I did my book, there was a big revival not that long after Dalke Archive reprinted all her novels. Yeah, yeah, I don’t think I can take all the credit, but timing is always good.
Cathy Evans (38:19)
must be quite gratifying actually to revive someone’s work.
Stewart Home (38:27)
As I’m also doing with the yoga book, mean, I’ve put it out just as Pilates is kind of overtaking yoga, but I can claim to have destroyed yoga’s user base, although it’s just a fortunate coincidence. But it’s learning how to make those claims.
Cathy Evans (38:34)
But the death knell of yoga.
Yeah.
Well, yes, that’s true. Yeah. So another author you mentioned in the Dead Princess book is Kathy Acker as well. I thought it was… Sorry?
Stewart Home (38:51)
Yeah, well, she was a friend. She
was quite hard to get to know. mean, she was a way, she had this very outgoing persona. And I think I first met her because I showed the film Decoder at the Scala in 1989. I brought it over with director Klaus Mack and we showed it in Glasgow and at the Scala in London. And she turned up to that.
but she was quite shy with me. She said she was knackered for writing a book. But subsequently I did quite a few readings with her and she’s a fantastic reader.
Cathy Evans (39:24)
such an interesting backstory as well, her life of, the family she came from and, you know, that relationship with her mother and yeah,
Stewart Home (39:29)
No,
and a lot of very autobiographical writing as well in fact when we were talking about writing a class but
Cathy Evans (39:39)
some of the best writing is. Yeah.
Stewart Home (39:40)
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, I was British council writer in residence in Tampere in Finland when she died, but it was really heartbreaking news, you know, the council in 97. But yeah, just she was, someone around, but who I really, really, I didn’t read a huge number of times with her, but the times I did, which was several.
She was just a fantastic person to read with because she was such a great performer of her work. And also, when she died, I felt she’d really died at the wrong time because her career, writer’s careers have ups and downs and she was definitely on a down phase at that time. And I guess me and other friends of hers in London…
we’re afraid that she’d be forgotten. That hasn’t turned out that way. There’s been the Chris Krauss biography. There’s another biography, I believe, as well, although I’ve only read the Chris Krauss one. And, you know, she’s had quite a revival, which is fantastic. But I think one of the reasons I wanted to put her in the book was that she wasn’t big at that time. In fact, Chris Krauss’s book, I Love Dick, is also mentioned in the book.
Cathy Evans (40:49)
Yes, it
is. Actually, to be fair, you mentioned so many books in Dead Princess so many that I’d never even heard of. so thanks to you, I actually looked up a few of them and that was one of them, Kathy Eker’s book. So, yeah, I will look out for her stuff.
Stewart Home (41:04)
No, she’s great and very experimental. the idea I had with Dead Princess was to slam kind of three things together, which was the stone circles, literary criticism. And I deliberately went and looked for kind of failed books. So I was going to remainder stores, which is harder to do now as there aren’t so many. But back in the late nineties, you still had a lot of remainder book shops where books that hadn’t sold would be sold off cheap.
Cathy Evans (41:30)
Mm-hmm.
Stewart Home (41:30)
So
just go and buy anything that I thought looked interesting. The Chris Krause didn’t come that way because I’ve met Dick Hebdige, but I don’t know him well, but I have friends who very close to him. So everyone was going on about Chris Krause’s book, I Love Dick, which is allegedly based on him. Yeah, yeah. And I was looking out for that and I found some copies in the ICA.
Cathy Evans (41:44)
Brilliant title.
Stewart Home (41:50)
bookshops. think I bought all ten or whatever it was because I knew all these people who wanted a copy of it. So that didn’t get through the remainder thing. But I had the idea of the female narrator because I wouldn’t always want to narrate in a male voice. My only book through all of them.
Cathy Evans (42:04)
Was
that your first go at being a female narrator?
Stewart Home (42:08)
No, I don’t think
it was. I can’t remember actually. I’d have to think about it in order. It may have been.
Cathy Evans (42:13)
How did you find writing from a female perspective? you have to change anything or did you just…
Stewart Home (42:19)
No, I didn’t. I didn’t particularly worry about it. I just thought you confidently announced that you’re a female narrator and hope people believe it. What I was more worried about was getting the Scottish accent correct, which was why I used the narrator was English, a student in Aberdeen. So that kind of solved the problem of getting the Scottish accent correctly, a direct one, would have been difficult. the basic. Yeah.
Cathy Evans (42:27)
Yeah, it worked.
is true yeah just make just give them any comprehensible accent
Stewart Home (42:47)
But the plot is basically the narrator is having a nervous breakdown and she either meets or is hallucinating an older guy interested in books so they discuss all these books through the text, they’re investigating a theory that Princess Diana’s body was ritually carried around all these stone circles in Aberdeenshire so they take her…
dummy way down with bricks around to the stone circles to see if it’s possible that this could have been done. So that’s how and obviously you know having a dummy in stone circles you have to have sex taking photos. So yeah it gave me the three elements but obviously a lot of their relationship is based on discussing literature. You know there’s a more recent novel I did called She’s My Witch ⁓ which a lot of the
Cathy Evans (43:20)
Of course you do. ⁓
Stewart Home (43:37)
the relationship between the male and female character is based on discussing music, of a certain era. But yeah, so there’s those elements I went out and found books that had essentially failed and been sold off as remained in stock in the bookshops and read through them
just to summarise in a paragraph of conversation between the two characters. So it’s not an easy way to get a paragraph to have to read an entire book.
Cathy Evans (43:58)
Okay.
No that’s true, It’s very, very dedicated of you.
Stewart Home (44:07)
Although
as a reviewer I’ve always believed no matter how much I dislike a film or book or album I’ll get through to the end before I review it.
Cathy Evans (44:19)
it was a good way of parodying the whole media circus around Princess Diana’s death and you know, the cult of celebrity, which I suppose really took off in the, the seventies and eighties. I mean, well, actually that’s probably not true. It’s probably always been.
Stewart Home (44:30)
Yeah, I mean, you know Marilyn Monroe
or, you know, Greta Garbo, you can go back. But yeah, no, I mean, it was a very strange experience, the Princess Dye thing, because, know, I had a flat and shortage, which is fairly central in London. And all like when she died, all I heard was people making jokes about her. You know, the one that sticks in my mind was what was Princess Dye’s favourite record, The Warp, I think Floyd.
Cathy Evans (44:38)
and
Stewart Home (44:59)
But you know, hear these jokes. ⁓ There was one…
Cathy Evans (45:04)
You know,
my brother, we told an awful lot of Princess Diana, very tasteless teenagers as well. Actually we weren’t teens, we were sort of 20s, but my brother lost a girlfriend because of it. She was so disgusted at the bad taste of my brother and his sisters that, you know, she decided that this relationship, this family was not for her. probably just as well, because it was evident in other ways.
Stewart Home (45:24)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (45:32)
you
Stewart Home (45:33)
Yeah, so
you know it was this bizarre thing of, and you know was just hearing people making those jokes in the poll, whatever, you know, it was people around me, I wasn’t necessarily being told them directly, but no one seemed at all bothered by Princess Di’s death, and yet you know in the media the whole nation was mourning, so it’s quite bizarre.
Cathy Evans (45:54)
I think it’s
quite possible to have been, you know, to feel the pathos of someone’s death and yet to find a joke about it funny. There’s no contradiction there at all, and there were certain things that were really heartbreaking, like the two little boys behind the coffin and all that, but a joke’s a joke, isn’t it? and actually there’s not enough in life to laugh about, so, know, you’re foolish to.
Stewart Home (46:02)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (46:17)
to turn down a joke even if it’s in bad taste.
Stewart Home (46:20)
Yeah.
certainly there were a lot of people who weren’t bothered by the death. ⁓ No, exactly. Well, I didn’t know her. I’ve never heard of her. You know, I was upset when Kathy Acker died because I knew her, you know, someone, you know, obviously it’s upsetting for friends and family, someone who dies, but just because I’ve heard about them in the newspapers, it’s not upsetting to me.
Cathy Evans (46:26)
Well they didn’t know her. That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? They didn’t know her. Yeah.
Exactly.
You know, I remember that the morning it happened, I’d just come in from a really, really late night and I staying at my friend’s house, we were both really hung over and she went to have a shower and I couldn’t understand why the music in the kitchen was all mournful on the radio. because I was trying to change channels, I think I didn’t want to listen to this boring stuff, I want to stay awake a bit. And then the DJ,
whoever it was, announced that Princess Diana had died. And my friend came out of the shower and I said, Deb, you’ll never guess what. This is what happened. And know, Diana’s dead. She goes, bloody hell, just when she got her hair right.
Stewart Home (47:26)
Hahaha
Cathy Evans (47:29)
so yeah, you’re right. There are a lot of people who I think it was some sort of cathartic outpouring for them. It was weird. It was like a national people had been possessed or something. It was very strange. So.
Stewart Home (47:29)
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, we see it again and again. mean, the Charlie Kirk thing has, seems to have died down now, but it was absolutely bizarre reactions when that happened, you know. Obviously, I’m against any kind of Vanguardist terrorist action like that. But at the same time, you know, I actually knew who he was, but it was bizarre because most people in the UK didn’t, you know, I was actually aware of it.
Cathy Evans (47:59)
Hmm.
I knew who
he was as well, know, he popped up on YouTube a lot for example but I mean I’m the same as you I just think you know obviously I didn’t know him but I don’t agree with violence in any way shape or form and you know I just feel really sorry for his family and also after his death
Stewart Home (48:21)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (48:26)
the people who are, so for example there’s a big hoo-ha about the Oxford Union guy who sort of said, Charlie Kirk’s died, woo-hoo. Actually, it may not be to your taste, but he actually has every right to say that. Like, freedom of speech does go both ways, doesn’t it? So, as George Orwell said, you don’t have the right not to be offended, so.
Stewart Home (48:40)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (48:53)
Anyway, but these are these are questions which not everyone is very rational about.
Stewart Home (48:59)
No, I agree. you know, the killer looks like a kind of confused 22 year old. You know, people are desperately trying to quite opposite politics on him. But you know, whether he could even tell you why he did it, I don’t know. You know, he’s just in the phrase, he was very online. And it’s very hard to decipher what his real…
motivations were, but it doesn’t particularly, you know, people insisting he was a follower of Nick Fuentes or insisting that he was a leftist, neither of them makes a lot of sense to me because I don’t think we’ve got the evidence even now and I don’t think he necessarily knows why he did it.
Cathy Evans (49:37)
It’s bizarre, isn’t it? Yeah. But also the, seems to be this, this desire always to pinpoint blame about that. That that was one man’s decision to do this thing. And yet there’s this blame game going on. between left and right. And it’s just crazy to me.
Stewart Home (49:38)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (49:57)
one man’s decision it was a terrible thing whatever you may think of Charlie Kirk he was a family man he had two little kids you know and no one should have shot him it’s as simple as that but to blame a whole section of society for his death is just nuts
Stewart Home (50:12)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (50:13)
Anyway, people are… Now it’s as queer as folk, so…
Stewart Home (50:18)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (50:21)
Anyway, going back to Peter Horobin in Aberdeen, can you tell me about the art strike? Was that the next thing or am missing anything out that’s important?
Stewart Home (50:29)
yeah, that just follows on.
No, we can just flip to that because we were talking about how I decided to become an artist as a kind of bureaucratic strategy. So I started in 1982, bureaucratic manipulation, and it took me a little while to feel my way into different parts of the art world. So in 1985,
I always used to go back and look at lot of figures who I found interesting in the world, in the art world or in literature or whatever else. And I was really fascinated by a figure called Gustav Metzger who did auto-destructive art in the 60s. He actually had a career comeback but in the mid-80s was… Older people in the London art world knew who he was but younger people didn’t. He was kind of forgotten. And I came across this text in an ICA catalogue.
when I was looking through material, looking for inspiration, about an art strike. So he declared an art strike in 1974 to go from 1977 to 1980, which he appeared to do. And he genuinely thought artists could kind of destroy the gallery system and seize control of the distribution of their own work, which by the mid-1970s,
Cathy Evans (51:39)
Ashton’s
so sweet in a way that he believed that because obviously what would happen if the artists stopped producing then the second tier of artists would just take their place, wouldn’t they?
Stewart Home (51:49)
Yeah,
but I think you have to look at it in context. you know, we had the effects of the oil crisis kicking in then, the 70s oil crisis, but it wasn’t kind of absolutely clear that there were going to be an endless series of defeats for the working class following on from this. So I think in the context of the time, you can understand why he might have had that kind of optimism. I don’t think it was an absolutely ridiculous position if you actually
Cathy Evans (51:52)
Yeah.
Stewart Home (52:15)
situation historically but it looked quite it certainly looks ridiculous now and it looked ridiculous in 1985. ⁓
Cathy Evans (52:22)
Actually,
I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think it was misguided, put it that way, or idealistic. Very idealistic. Sorry?
Stewart Home (52:28)
Okay.
but sometimes idealism is good as well. ⁓
Sometimes idealism is good, you know, can be inspiring. But I thought, well, I don’t know if my plan to become a successful artist is going to work. This was in 1985. The following year I got my first reviews in the kind of national press and stuff and in the art press. for a group show I was in called Ruins of Glamour.
Cathy Evans (52:35)
it is, it’s… yes.
Stewart Home (52:53)
using a fake name but I often use fake names to do things. it had taken off but I decided to have an art strike from 1990 to 1993 which would have given me a good opportunity to bow out if I hadn’t had any success up to that point as well. But I saw it more as a kind of propaganda exercise to annoy the art world to say that you know we go you know the art world and artists
Cathy Evans (53:10)
Exactly, yes.
Stewart Home (53:21)
on the whole thing that art is a good thing and contributes something positive to the world, well let me tell you that it’s actually completely negative, which wasn’t what they were wanting to hear. So, you know, it was more on the level of a kind of propaganda exercise, although I did take the chance to retire from my cultural production, which was actually making me a living by the late 80s and had to sign back on the dole for three years when it was…
Cathy Evans (53:44)
So are
you, your time as an artist actually made you a living?
Stewart Home (53:50)
Yeah, well, artist and writing because I was getting the books published and you have to remember that advances for books have generally gone down. ⁓
Cathy Evans (53:57)
my
word, they’re non-existent. Now you just have to rely on the sales, yeah.
Stewart Home (54:01)
Yeah, well, you know, I did get an advance for fascist yoga, but it was less than some of the advances I was getting in the 90s. So it was easier to make a living and also you could, you know, do, there was more guest lecturing in universities, particularly the art schools, which the universities just don’t have the budget to bring in external people for students, which is great for students because without…
Cathy Evans (54:09)
Yeah.
So were you invited
as an artist to go and talk to students at universities? That is so perfect. So you really managed to, to infiltrate that world.
Stewart Home (54:31)
Yeah, and do crits and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it’s harder to get that work now and also journalism, you know, I was in Oxford today to do a piece of journalism, but, there’s less well-paid journalism around than there was back then as well. it was much, it’s ugly. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it was just a lot easier to make a living, you know, ⁓ not living high on the hog, but, you know, getting by. So yeah.
Cathy Evans (54:49)
Well, the trouble is there’s so much free content, isn’t there?
But you
had this brilliant moment, didn’t you, when you first went over to New York on a courier flight? you had a moment in a gallery which I think every author would just kill for. So go on, tell us about that.
Stewart Home (55:14)
Yeah, so yeah,
for people who don’t know what courier flights were back in the days before the internet businesses needed documents transported between places. So I think a flight to New York in the late 80s probably cost hundreds of pounds, which I didn’t have. But I did have a friend in New York who I could stay with. And if you only took cabin baggage and courier business documents for your whole baggage.
you could get a flight for I think it was 25 quid I paid for that flight. So I went over.
Cathy Evans (55:45)
And
did you have to apply through a travel agent or how did it work?
Stewart Home (55:49)
I think there
was just some office and you rang up and said you wanted to do it and you paid them the 25 quid and then you had to turn up at the airport and they gave you the ticket you signed for the documents are in the hold you never touch them you had some documents and then you handed them over at the other end and you know you got your cheap flight to New York and back you know and then you could go to the thrift store and buy a load of clothes there was I mean it’s great clothes in American thrift stores in the 80s and
Cathy Evans (56:00)
Wow.
Brilliant.
They still are
on the Lower East Side. It’s amazing.
Stewart Home (56:19)
Yeah, really cheap.
yeah, so I got to New York, got the Village Voice, saw there was a Henry Flynn show and Henry Flynn was an artist who I thought had given up art because he said that art was the imposition of other people’s subjectivity on you and that you should develop your own subjectivity, which he called Bren. But there was a show by him at Emily Harvey Gallery on Broadway in the spring. I thought, well.
Henry Flynn showing again, I have to go and see that. Fantastic. So I went to the show and spent a long time looking at the work and the lady in vigilating said to me, ⁓ you seem very interested in this. You spent a really long time looking at Henry’s work. ⁓ Have you heard of a guy called Stewart Holm? Because there seems to be a lot of interest in England after you heard my accent. said, yeah, I am Stewart Holm. I have heard of myself. ⁓
And she said, Oh, fantastic. You’ll have to meet Henry and you’ve got to meet Lamont Young and blah, blah, blah. So from this one contact, you know, I started meeting all the kind of cream of the almond garden. My friend who was working construction jobs, but now has a successful artistic career, but back then was still trying to get it off the ground more. couldn’t believe it. So I’d go back to his place in, you know, early evening and he’d shake me down for who have you met today? What invites have you got? And he’d be, oh yeah, we’ll go to this one.
This is good. This is good because he knew the New York scene. But, you know, literally we were going to like Gerald Malanga’s birthday party in Chelsea, the guy who did the whip dance of the Velvet Underground. of the… Three weeks. Three weeks. ⁓
Cathy Evans (57:49)
Amazing.
How long were you there for in New York, that trip? Okay. And so how long
did it, so, because you went there, didn’t you, to go and track down the writers?
Stewart Home (58:07)
Ben Moraia
from Black Mask Up Against the Wall motherfucker who I didn’t, no one had heard of, no one knew what I was talking about. And I found all his publications in Newcastle when I came back, which I’ve been looking for. Librarian from Newcastle University had them all, Ron Hunt, ⁓ kindly photocopied them all for me. But yeah, I went to New York looking for that stuff. I mean, he’s had a comeback now, Ben, and I’ve met him, but…
Cathy Evans (58:11)
Yeah.
Stewart Home (58:32)
No, I mean, literally we go to, you know, go to Jerro Mellanga’s birthday party and we meet Billy Naiman, you know, who obviously did the silver foil for the factory and was a big, the big photographer for Warhol. But all the Warhol people, was just a couple of years after Warhol’s death, were kind of in eclipse. ⁓ So he couldn’t believe that we knew who was, you know, Billy Naiman. I mean, a few years later, he probably wouldn’t be surprised. you know, people like Carly Schleeman,
Cathy Evans (58:51)
Mmm.
Stewart Home (59:02)
being who did Meatjoy being told that I was an important British critic. So, you know, she’d be coming up to me and she thought I was interested in fluxes. So telling me she was a fluxes artist. No, you’re not, you know, you’re an important Happenings artist. I knew exactly who she was. But no, it was great. Met all these John Hendricks from Guerrilla Action Group. You know, I have my own little interests, but all that kind of downtown into Midtown scene. Just meeting people. It was just luck that literally the first day.
I arrived there one night and the next day I got the village voice and went to the Henry Flynn show and got my introduction to everyone.
Cathy Evans (59:38)
Well, it’s better to be lucky than good, isn’t it? So, yeah.
Stewart Home (59:40)
Yeah exactly
and it wasn’t what I was expecting I thought I was just going to be going around looking for this guy who was considered very pretty obscure by anyone I mentioned him to if they’d even heard of him but who’s had a big comeback subsequently has an interesting series of interviews as a kind of autobiography put out quite recently called Full Circle and he’s a great painter as well. ⁓
Cathy Evans (59:50)
Yeah.
It was back on Henry Flint.
Stewart Home (1:00:04)
No, no, I’m Ben Moriah. But I met on that trip, but I was looking for Ben, not for Henry Flynn, but Henry Flynn was visible. So I went and saw his work and got introduced to the whole scene. So that was good. Yeah. But you know.
Cathy Evans (1:00:07)
sorry, yes. Okay.
And did you keep
in touch with all that lot or? when you gave up your artistic…
Stewart Home (1:00:22)
⁓ With Ben and Maria,
with some of them, know, Henry got a little bit mad at me because he realised that I found some of his work humorous. So I revised some of his slogans like demolish serious culture because he had a group called Action Against Cultural Imperialism in the 60s. I mean, he stood in for John Cale in the Velvet Underground. There’s a lot of those kind of connections and he’s a brilliant musician. mean, his music is absolutely fantastic.
He’s quite critical of lot of Western music, which he sees as very four-square. He’s really into the rhythm. yeah, he’s very serious about his philosophy. And I found something quite…
Cathy Evans (1:01:00)
He didn’t enjoy
being ⁓ poked fun at.
Stewart Home (1:01:05)
Well I wasn’t poking fun, it’s just that I found some of his ideas amusing, but you know, I like when I read Hegel, you know, everyone gets off on their own thing.
Cathy Evans (1:01:10)
There we
Cathy Evans (1:01:17)
So that concludes the first half of my chat with Stewart. By the time we’d finished, we’d been talking for about two hours, so we decided to split this into two episodes. So join us for the second episode where Stewart discusses what propelled him to expose the underbelly of Western yoga practice and we talk about the wellness industry in general. Thank you very much for joining the Indie Book Club.