Donald Urquhart, An Alphabet of Paris (Arletty to Zizi), 2009 – courtesy Herald Street, London and Maureen Paley, London
I heard the old adage many years ago. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” Well, London can make you even more tired of life than you were when you moved there. When I hit London I was already tired of life: jaded, bitter, young, and a boy who modelled himself on Dorothy Parker. I grew more and more disaffected, until I could have made Parker look like Pollyanna, such was the effect of Lemming Town. The general energy of that city is one of a frenzied mass suicide. The clubs and bars I hung out in were throbbing with devil-may-care decadents who really didn’t want to see the next sunrise, never mind enjoy another sunset. Most are gladly dead now but the dissatisfied survivors remain, dependent on anti-depressants and schaudenfraude to keep them going.
“Sometimes you just don’t care if it is always night. Until you see Another Sky.”
I wrote that out on a piece of paper and left it in the slackened fingers of a friend who was pathetically hooked on Valium to keep him off the methadone which kept him off the smack. I wasn’t even 30 then. I had been up all night sitting beside him in case I had to phone an ambulance; or so that at least someone was with him when he died. I recall looking at the long curled shadow his eyelashes threw over his cheekbones, and wondering if it would be worth the effort to save him – or keep him going long enough to perhaps draw that beautiful sight. I plainly couldn’t be bothered as that is one of many, many drawings I never got round to thanks to London town. I believe he is still alive because that’s what I prefer to believe. I could be wrong.
In the days when sex was exchanged for centimes, before amour amounted to francs, and lifetimes before electronic transactions in euros, Paris established itself as the most exotic market for Eros. Rome may have burned but Paris sizzled. In London sex was always an escape, whereas in Paris it was a destination. The brothels in Paris were decorated way beyond the rococco splendour of even Versailles. The other night I enjoyed a glimpse of that epoch in rue Chabanais (the week before I had been sipping champagne chez Dita Von Teese, but that’s another story), where the great collector of erotica Madame Nicole Canet was launching her new book, Hotels Garnis – Garcons de Joie, a splendid volume celebrating male prostitution in Paris between 1860 and 1960. A bartender straight out of Pierre et Giles displayed his bulging tattooed biceps as he topped up our wine glasses. Behind a pink curtain, a corridor papered with toile de joie scenes of sexual excess led to a private chamber in which all sorts of objects pertaining to the satisfaction of lust were on show. A slender ivory switch from the 1930s waited in a glass case. A papier maché monk holding a glass of champagne stood boldly displaying his ruddy rampant member. When a man is tired of Paris he might as well become a monk.
I’d been ready to leave London before the giddy horrors of the Olympic Games were announced, but that was really the last straw. They slashed arts funding willy-nilly so that they could mount the most pointless and unrewarding extravaganza since the Spice Girls movie – and even threw in a reunion of those talentless ninnies to emphasise the brainless vulgarity of it all. I could not stomach it. Rather than kill myself I moved to Paris, where my self-imposed exile has caused my creativity to flourish. In two months I have written and illustrated a book on Leigh Bowery – and I think it is only Volume One. I couldn’t have got anything near that much done in the suffocating atmosphere of London. Since the do-gooders brought in the smoking ban, pub culture has died a death. The gay scene is dead. The nightclub scene is dead. Unfortunately, key members of the government are not dead, but you can’t have everything. Boy George has revived Taboo, the “musical”. The only thing worth celebrating is the Eurostar link to Paris. If I were to propose something for the much defecated-on Fourth Plinth on Trafalgar Square it would be a fully functioning guillotine by which I would happily sit with my knitting. Bedsocks anyone?