Beat Soundtrack #34: Leon Horton

Leon Horton is a UK-based countercultural writer, interviewer and editor. He is the editor of the acclaimed essay/memoir collection Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet (Roadside Press, 2024), and recently completed a long-form interview with author Victor Bockris for the forthcoming publication The Burroughs-Warhol Connection (Beatdom Books, 2024). He also conducted a notable interview with Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia earlier this year. His writing has been published by Beatdom, International Times, Beat Scene and Erotic Review among others.

What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them?

In my youthful exuberance and willingness to experiment with certain, shall we say, mind-altering substances and alternative…Nah, fuck that, it sounds phoney. I was young and gay, searching for a sense of belong and not finding it in the Manchester gay scene of the early 1990s.

I guess what first attracted me to the Beats were their lifestyle(s) as much as their work. Their anti-establishment, proto-punk attitude was something I readily tapped into as a young man. I don’t want to labour the point, but growing up gay in rural North Yorkshire in the early 1980s made me an outsider by default, and when I read the Beats – what they stood for, what they stood against, what they achieved within a ‘fuck you, I won’t be who you want me to be’ framework – I realised being an outsider was a joy rather than a burden. I think of it as a game of poker. You don’t get to choose the cards you’re dealt, but it’s up to you whether you play or fold.    

I first became aware of the Beats when a friend lent me a tattered, nicotine-stained copy of Naked Lunch after a night on acid back in 1991/92. The scales fell from my eyes. I couldn’t believe what I was reading – the residual effects of the LSD and my burnt-out, rabbit in the headlights brain probably helped. I couldn’t believe Naked Lunch got published, let alone back in 1959.

I read the book in one sitting; I couldn’t put it down until I’d finished it. If ‘finished’ is the right word. As Allen Ginsberg said, Naked Lunch is an ‘eternal book that will drive everybody mad.’ After that, I read On the Road, Ted Morgan’s biography Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, and Gerald Nicosia’s superlative Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. I was absolutely hooked on the misadventures of those angel-headed hipsters.      

Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?

A favourite text? I love the ‘routines’ that Burroughs wove into numerous books, the ‘Did I ever tell you…’ vignettes that are sometimes satirical, often pornographic, and always laugh-out-loud funny, most especially ‘Spare Ass Annie’ from Interzone or the one about Bobo, the ‘wise old queen’ whose haemorrhoids get wrapped around the wheel of a car in Queer.

My favourite novel – if we can call it that – is Naked Lunch, although I think Cities of the Red Night is Burroughs’ masterpiece. As for poetry, while I would never identify as a fan of Ginsberg, I think ‘Howl’ remains not just a defining moment in Beat literature but in American, nay, world literature; it stands up today as much as it ever did, presciently so.

I’m a huge fan of Gregory Corso (hence Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet) and I’m becoming more and more fascinated by the life and works of Bob Kaufman. I’m not sure if we can call her a Beat per se, but I absolutely love Fran Landesman’s ‘The Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ and ‘It’s Only a Movie,’ both of which are anthologised in A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation.      

What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?

The nascent Beats were, and forever will be, associated with jazz – jazz was the soundtrack to their lives. But what I know about that you could write on a postcard. As individual writers, the Beats’ relationship to music extended much further than jazz, of course, into folk, psychedelic rock, punk, even hip hop…

My essay ‘And the Hippies Were Boiled in Their Tank Tops’ (published in Beatdom #24) asks if the Beats begat the hippies and the late 1960s San Francisco acid rock explosion, and they did in many ways, of course they did. Most if not all of the Grateful Dead were heavily influenced by Kerouac, and Janis Joplin was a teenage Beatnik before she turned ‘psychedelic rock chick’.

It’s like Michael McClure wrote in Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems, ‘When the flower people moved into the Haight, the Beats became their advisors.’ And he should know. He wrote the lyrics for Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’ and later worked on live poetry/music shows with Ray Manzarek of the Doors.

I think in some ways the mid 1960’s saw the passing of the baton from Beat poetry to music, although when you look at naked lyrics on the bare page they rarely stand up as poetry, save for Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and one or two others.

Again, though, I think it was a two-way street. Witness Ginsberg’s friendship with Dylan. For my money, the two defining texts on the subject are Simon Warner’s Text and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll and Casey Rae’s brilliant William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll, which pretty much aligns with my own tastes in music.

Burroughs’ transgressive writing influenced so many great rock ’n’ roll performers, from Patti Smith and Iggy Pop referencing the Naked Lunch character Johnny in ‘Horses’ and ‘Lust for Life’, to the likes of David Bowie and even the Rolling Stones utilising the cut-up technique to write song lyrics. I know Burroughs’ relationship to music was pretty much one-sided, and that he refuted his ‘godfather of punk’ moniker, but I still think it was a hard-won and deserved accolade.

As a countercultural writer have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?

Did I ever tell you about the time I broke my ankle trying to watch a gay porn film? This was back in the days of third-generation VHS cassette tapes – mail-ordered in discreet brown packaging for the discerning ‘art film’ connoisseur – £50 to squint through an audio/visual headache. The film was Black Sweat, you dig, and I broke into a red one when I took a tumble down the stairs on my way to the basement. My ankle came up purple as a baboon’s ass, but since it was clearly broken I decided to watch the film anyway – my foot swelling on the coffee table – before I called for an ambulance.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist that. I’m guessing that’s not what you meant by ‘shaped or influenced’. This is a bit of a chicken and egg question, isn’t it? I don’t know that I would be a ‘countercultural writer’ were it not for the Beats, although I’ve had plenty of other literary and non-literary influences.

I can honestly say that Naked Lunch changed my life. I wouldn’t be here now, answering these questions, had I not read it. You know, it always makes me laugh when I read a book’s blurb and it says, ‘this book will change your life’, which of course is marketing talk for ‘this book isn’t worth the cover price’. But Naked Lunch – my god, how can you read a book like that and not be influenced?

On a more general note, I think my life has run certain parallels to what we might call Beat experiences. I’ve spent great swathes of it broke, had my share of dead-end jobs – driver’s mate, kitchen hand, court reporter – lived in damp, squalid, freezing cold apartments where the only mushrooms for breakfast grew in the bathroom.

When I moved to Manchester in1989, I was fortunate to fall in with a great bunch of people, many of them musicians. None of us had a pot to piss in, but we were young, ambitious and maybe a little suspicious of the old guard. I remember one particularly bad winter when three of us were huddled round a storage heater, eating buttered Weetabix because we’d spent all our money on weed. If that ain’t Beat, I don’t know what is.

I think my sense of humour is kind of Beat. I’m often accused of being irreverent – self-effacing at times too – to the point where people tell me off, but I think if you take yourself too seriously, you can end up pulling hairs from your ass with your own teeth.

Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links to the Beat Generation – and how?

Oh, Jesus, where do I start? I think it’s gotta be Bob Dylan who takes the lead here, doesn’t it? The Beats certainly influenced his formative years as a teenager, and his firm friendship with Ginsberg lasted from when they first met in 1963 until the poet’s death in 1997. They even recorded together and, of course, Ginsberg appears on the back cover of Bringing It All Back Home and in the film of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.

Dylan was and remains notoriously difficult to pin down, but I think  the man who wrote the lyrics ‘I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track / Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac’ in the 2020 song ‘Key West’ is most definitely making the link.

Who are your favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?

I’ve got fairly eclectic tastes when it comes to music, although my default setting is pretty much rock’n’roll, punk, new wave. I love the Stones, Leonard Cohen, the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, Bowie, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, all of whom had direct connections with or were heavily influenced by the ideas and attitudes espoused by the Beats.

I’m a big fan of Julian Cope – I must’ve seen him live six or seven times, and once went to a talk he gave on neolithic stone circles. I’ve got a signed copy of his autobiography Head On, with the inscription ‘For Leon, Awlrite, Eh – lad, forget the Burroughs trip! Gerroff bed + see the sunrise!’ – Which, of course, I’ve totally ignored.

My favourite band of all time is the legendary Manchester band the Fall. There’s no other band like the Fall. Mark E. Smith’s lyrics have a fragmentary, pithy, snarling, quality like Burroughs. I don’t know if Smith was a fan of Burroughs particularly, but he had his own cut-up method, I gather: in a carrier bag he carried around full of random lyrics.

I met him once in the Roadhouse in Manchester. We were drinking at the bar, talking about Nabokov novels and all the while we were talking – him cadging endless cigarettes off me – all the while I was thinking, don’t look like a fan, don’t look like a fan… and then I just blurted out: ‘Can I just say, I’ve just got to tell you, can I just say, I think the Fall are the greatest band in the world.’

Smith half-smiled, turned to the bar, ordered a pint, stuck it in my hand, kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘Right, go on, fuck off.’ It still makes me laugh. The best ‘fuck off’ I’ve ever had.

See also: ‘Book review #31: The Burroughs-Warhol Connection’, October 1st, 2024; ‘Interview #24: Leon Horton’, June 9th, 2024; ‘Book review #22: Corso: Ten Times a Poet’, April 15th, 2024