William Burroughs Centenary Celebration

In this centenary year of the birth of author and counter-cultural giant, William S Burroughs, Southbank’s QE Hall played host to an evening’s celebration of his life and work, curated by musician and actor Richard Strange. The results were a lot more light-hearted than you might have expected.

The ‘Pot Is Fun’ performance piece, featuring Gavin Turk, had a slight air of Vic Reeves & Bob Mortimer’s  ‘Talc and Turnips’  creation about it, as two amiable dopers try to hang a sheet with a brick pattern print on the wall. The Ginsbergian ‘Pot Is Fun’ apron proved a great favourite with the crowd.

Jeremy Reed and Ginger Light’s ‘WSB Trip-Tick’ took us into riskier territory, Reed reciting poetry, tossing handfuls of glitter from his pockets like some crossbreed of Tom Waits and a Victorian street-urchin, whilst Ginger Light provided the grinding soundtrack of doom to it all.

The absence of Bill Nelson due to illness was keenly felt, but his ‘Artifex’ montage was an eye-popping, hallucinogenic journey through religious, cabalistic, esoteric and masonic imagery, all perfectly complemented by his other-worldly yet engaging and enjoyable music.

Curator Richard ‘Kid’ Strange’s reformed ‘Doctors of Madness’ band showed them more than capable of playing after three decades’ absence. Still looking like a futuristic/retro street gang, and with songs that then sounded out of place within the mid 70’s glam rock movement they were assumed to belong to, their set was an affectionate look back on their own canon, rather than a comment upon the great man. Richard has spoken about the great influence WSB had on his way of thinking, and  songs such as ‘Bulletin’ and ‘Sons of Survival’ could easily be the soundtrack to one of WSB’s stories. Joined briefly on stage by Def Leppard’s peregrine singer, Joe Elliot, and name checking one of the band’s faithful roadies, himself in attendance in the crowd, the reformation was a treat for the nostalgic.

As we returned to our seats after the interval, we were all handed, rather mysteriously, square sheets of cardboard with two pinholes through the middle , as if to be worn like some Genettian mask. Its significance would not be revealed until later on that evening.

‘We’re All Here To Go’ , an energetic dance piece by Eryck Brahmania, confounded  our expectations for a second time, his parody/ social commentating meditations on American society, militarism, propaganda and indoctrination proved a powerful opener to the second half. WSB’s recorded voice rang out throughout, his condemnatory thank-yous for all the ills of the world that tend to accompany worldly success, drawled and spat out like bullets, in time to the pounding, aggressive music.

Dream Machine’s disjointed NY art house music felt a little dated, as did their cartoon goth clothes, but was followed by the evening’s most powerful piece, Rupert Thomson’s ‘ A Few Words From Mrs Burroughs’. The screens behind the actors flashed images of American iconography; boys playing cowboys and Indians, soldiers on manoeuvres, mountains of heroin and missiles, always missiles. Centring on the essential role that Burroughs common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, played in his life, the play portrayed her as lush, muse and angel, staging the ‘William Tell’ trick brilliantly. WSB once said that he might never have taken up writing had this notorious incident not happened, and Joan’s place in the story was respectfully celebrated.

The image of her as a black-winged angel, embracing Burroughs as he sits at his desk, and the identical multitude of Burroughs figures descending the auditorium staircase will stay with this viewer for a very long time. As the fluorescent lights were turned on, the sheet of card we were handed earlier revealed a spectral image of WSB, literally pinhole-eyed, staring back at us.

Tom Waits made another subtle appearance, though regrettably not a physical one, in the form of his ‘November’ song, with Richard, Kate St John, David Coulter, Terry Edwards, Jack Pinter and Atar Shafighian, in a gloriously and rightly shambolic performance.  ‘Pot Is Fun’ was reprised, and then into the final piece, Gavin Bryar’s ‘Langauge is A Virus From Outer Space’, especially written, and with libretto by Richard Strange provided a fitting end to an evening dedicated to the annihilation of all rational thought.