Pre-Post-NOW! #37 - Post #13 - Dandy in the Underworld

Dandy in the Underworld

A week after Paul Reekie’s passing on June 10th 2010, it was reported that Sebastian Horsley had died of an overdose. In 1981, Horsley, the grandson of the founder of the Northern Foods empire, Alec Horsley, sang lead vocals on ‘Uncle Sam’ / ‘Portrait of Heart’, the second single released under Josef K vocalist Paul Haig’s Rhythm of Life banner. The record was released on Allan Campbell’s Rational Records label, and featured a self portrait of Horsley on the back cover.

Horsley went on to become involved with the Gateway Exchange, the centre set up in Edinburgh’s Abbeyhill district by Jimmy and Sarah Boyle with artist Evlynn Smith to help rehabilitate drug addicts and ex offenders using art therapy. Smith and Horsley had married in 1981, and were together until 1990. In 1993, Smith co-founded bespoke art and furniture design company, Precious McBane, much loved by the likes of Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. Smith died in 2003 of a brain aneurysm.

While Sarah Boyle and Smith were key to the existence of the Gateway, Jimmy Boyle somewhat unavoidably became its public face. After being championed by Richard Demarco, Joseph Beuys and others, and creating his Gulliver sculpture for Craigmillar Festival Society, Boyle was now a full time artist. By channeling the progressive ideas of the Barlinnie Special Unit, where he had been first opened up to art, the Gateway was a continuation of those ideas, with Beuys’ notions of social sculpture at its core.

The Gateway’s theatre space - The Mandela - became a significant Edinburgh Festival Fringe venue, with the space spawning a company beyond it. Mandela Theatre toured Lance Flynn’s play, The Dorm, set in a young men’s detention centre, around community venues in Edinburgh. Mandela Theatre performed other plays by Flynn, who also wrote for the Traverse, before the company rebranded itself as Boilerhouse.

Following his own involvement with the Gateway, Horsley embarked on a life of art, excess and myth-making. In 2000, in the ultimate act of self-deification, Horsley travelled to the Philippines to be filmed experiencing crucifixion. The event was photographed by Dennis Morris and filmed by Sarah Lucas, with music provided by lead singer of Bush, Gavin Rossdale. 

This archive formed part of Horsley’s exhibition, Crucifixion, shown in London two years later. At some point, Edinburgh’s private view attending set were agog at the prospect of Horsley’s friend Nick Cave turning up at the City Art Centre, where a painting by Horsley formed part of a group show. 

In 2007, Horsley was in attendance at A Tribute to Billy Mackenzie, a live all-star charity extravaganza that took place at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in honour of the Dundee-born Associates vocalist who had taken his own life a decade earlier. Mackenzie had lived in Edinburgh for a time, where he collaborated with Paul Haig. The pair played gigs together, and recorded each other’s songs.

A memorable 1986 TV appearance saw Haig and Mackenzie duet on a Scottish Television Hogmanay show doing a singular version of ‘Amazing Grace’. Mackenzie initially played it straight, singing a capella before he and Haig launched into a guitar driven art pop rendition that seemed to bring in not just the new year, but a new pop music fit for the twenty-first century. This seemed to tally with Paul Morley’s grand statement four years earlier that Haig - who he had dubbed ‘the face of 1982’ - was ‘the enigmatic fourth man’ of a New Pop quartet that also featured Mackenzie, Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, and ABC frontman Martin Fry.

While pop history may have taken a slightly different turn, in 1999, two years after Mackenzie’s death, an entire album of Haig and Mackenzie collaborations was released on Haig’s ROL imprint as Memory Palace.

At the 2007 Shepherd’s Bush Empire show, Horsley looked resplendent sporting his familiar sparkly scarlet jacket. Standing alone, Horsley watched from the middle of the auditorium as Haig made his first live appearance in seventeen years. This saw Haig accompany the executor of Mackenzie’s will Jude Rawlins and former Associate Christine Beveridge on a version of Simon Dupree and the Big Sound’s slice of faux-psychedelic 1960s whimsy, ‘Kites’. Haig then donned a guitar to perform Josef K’s song, ‘It’s Kinda Funny’, written following the suicide of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. He followed this with a version of his more redemptive solo single, ‘Something Good’. 

Also on the bill was Claudia Brücken, former vocalist with German band, Propaganda, whose recordings for the ZTT label included a cover of Josef K’s Les Disques du Crepuscule single, ‘Sorry for Laughing’. At Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Brücken teamed up with fellow ZTT alumnus, composer Andrew Poppy, for a version of Mackenzie’s song, ‘Breakfast’, returning with OMD’s Paul Humphreys as One-Two to play Propaganda’s 1985 single and arguably their finest moment, ‘Duel’. 

In 2008, Horsley published a memoir, Dandy in the Underworld, named after the final album by T.Rex, released in March 1977, six months before the band’s driving force Marc Bolan was killed in a car accident aged 29. By the time the book came out, Horsley had constructed himself as a latter-day dandy and a fixture of bohemian Soho whose entire life was his art.

A one-man play based on the book was adapted by Tim Fountain and produced at Soho Theatre. Fountain’s previous theatrical outings included Resident Alien (1999), based on the writings of Quentin Crisp, with Bette Bourne - a veteran of New York drag theatre company Hot Peaches and his own Bloolips company - playing Crisp in Edinburgh and London.

Fountain also wrote Julie Burchill is Away (2002), a one-woman show drawn from the experience of former NME writer Julie Burchill while a columnist for the Guardian newspaper. Burchill had been one of the NME’s ‘hip young gunslingers’ hired in the wake of punk alongside her future husband Tony Parsons. Paul Morley joined the NME at the same time.

Fountain’s take on Dandy in the Underworld featured Milo Twomey as Horsley. Horsley attended the first night of the show, before being found dead the next day in his Soho flat of a suspected heroin overdose . He was 47. Those attending his funeral included Marc Almond, who had been championed by Jeff Nuttall as an art student in Leeds before becoming a pop star. 

In 2015, Edinburgh radio presenter and actor Grant Stott, who in 2021 would become a regular in the Stephen Greenhorn devised TV soap, River City, played Horsley in Willie and Sebastian. This was a stage play written by Rab C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison, and presented at the Gilded Balloon venue on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Willie and Sebastian focused on the love triangle between Horsley, writer and satirist William Donaldson, aka fictional letter writer Henry Root, and former Page 3 model, Rachel Garley.

Coming a week apart, and in very different circumstances, the deaths of Paul Reekie and Sebastian Horsley were tragedies that could have been avoided. While they came from opposite ends of the social spectrum, Reekie and Horsley’s mutual affinity with Edinburgh’s post punk underground saw them each find their artistic voice, rubbing shoulders in the same social and artistic bubble, autodidacts and dandies in the underworld both.