The Death of the Prince of Soho

Some days are blacker than others. On the morning of June 17, two days after a play based on his outrageous “unauthorised autobiography” Dandy In The Underworld, premiered in London, the final curtain fell on the outrageous life of artist, writer and self-styled dandy Sebastian Horsley. His girlfriend, beautiful ex-glamour model Rachel Garley (affectionately known as ‘Rachel 2’), discovered his lifeless body in the bed of his skull-festooned Soho apartment.

In a newspaper interview done to promote the play just a fortnight earlier, Sebastian had declared that, at the age of 47, he was “two thirds dead.” Tragically, a fatal heroin overdose speeded the final third up. In record time.
I’d left a message on Sebastian’s answering machine the night he died. He usually waited to hear who was calling before picking up the phone. On this occasion, he probably didn’t answer because he was already dead: “Horsley, you terrible cunt . . . it’s Olaf . . . pick up the phone. . . Okay, you’re not there. . . Look, I’ve written something about your play in my Herald column and they’ve used your picture . . . no idea why . . . give me a call.”
Although there was some media speculation that it was a suicide, his family and friends agree that, of all people, Sebastian would definitely have left a note. In fact, as detailed in his memoir, he’d already written it: “I’ve decided to stop living on account of the cost.”
The quip was typical of Sebastian, but suicide was never far from his troubled mind. Although always outrageously funny, he was never the happiest of individuals.
The seeds of Sebastian’s appetite for destruction were planted in his childhood. He was born to immensely wealthy, but chronically alcoholic, parents in Hull in 1962. The opening paragraph of Dandy In The Underworld reads: “When Mother found out she was pregnant with me she took an overdose. Father gave her the pills. She needed a drama from time to time to remind her that she was still alive. The overdose didn’t work. Had she known I would turn out like this, she would have taken cyanide.”
The unfunny thing was that he wasn’t joking. His mother did actually attempt suicide, and drank heavily throughout her pregnancy – and thereafter. Although he and his two siblings never lacked for material things, his upbringing was as dysfunctional as it gets. His parents totally despised each other, and both regularly engaged in alcohol-fuelled affairs.
Of his mother, Valerie, he once noted that “motherhood wasn’t her thing.” As for his father Nicholas: “He didn’t give a toss about me. And I hated him. But I hated Stepfather even more. He was a tosspot. I’d come home to find him in bed with Mother, and Father in bed with someone else. Clearly everyone in my life who should have been vertical was horizontal.”
As with many an unhappy teenager before him, Sebastian initially sought escape in music. He idolised Marc Bolan (in later life, he was a huge admirer of Axl Rose) and dreamed of becoming a rock star. Having attended a left-wing public school in Hull, he initially decided that university wasn’t for him, and took himself off to London to become a punk rocker. He fronted three bands in quick succession – The Fauves, The Void and Rhythm Of Life – before eventually conceding that there was, indeed, no future for him in punk. “I just made records that were so bad, I can’t understand why they weren’t successful,” he once told me, seeming genuinely perplexed.
Following his failed music career, he attended the prestigious St. Martin’s Art College, but was expelled for stealing equipment after just two terms. He then spent some time in Edinburgh where he met his future wife Evelyn Smith in a gay bar. Soon after their 1983 marriage, the couple became entangled in a bizarre bisexual ménage-a-trois with violent gangster Jimmy Boyle (with whom he had started a champagne import company). They eventually separated in the early ‘90s, and Ev died from a brain aneurism in 2003.
Although Sebastian had inherited his parents’ alcoholism, if not their billions, he took up a hedonistic lifestyle with a vengeance upon moving back to London in the mid-‘80s. Even so, he had a serious talent for making money. Having made millions playing the stock markets, he alleviated his boredom with narcotics. He once described injecting heroin as “the kiss of the archangels, breathtaking, heart-stopping, brain-burning pleasure.”
Sex was another distraction – in particular, sex with prostitutes. Having decided that of all sexual perversions, monogamy was the most unnatural, he began paying for sex (“I always remember the first time I had real sex; I still have the receipt”). He claimed to have slept with more than 1,000 prostitutes by the end of his life. At one point, he even briefly became one himself. He abruptly quit when a cuckold husband hired him to sleep with his obese wife.
Towards the end of his life, he was supplementing his income by renting out his Mearde Street (or “Shit Street,” as he called it) flat to local prostitutes. A few months ago, we were having lunch in the Indian restaurant across the road when he briefly excused himself. “Back in a few minutes,” he said. “I’ve got to go and change the sheets. I’m the madam.”
Despite his wealth, voracious sexual appetites and various addictions, Sebastian still dreamed of becoming an important artist. His paintings, colorful large-scale oils for the most part, drew on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal or featured the great white sharks among which he had swum in Australia, and were neither the subject of universal acclaim nor endless gallery displays. He once quipped that he was “successfully failing to become an artist.” Even so, he managed to sell quite a few. Bryan Ferry was a big fan of his work.
The high point – or perhaps the low – came in 2000, when he travelled to the Philippines and was crucified as part of their Easter religious ceremonies. He refused the offer of painkillers (despite the fact that he’d been consuming them in massive quantities, for no good reason, for many years) and was hammered into the cross by a Filipino who spoke only two words of English – ‘no’ and ‘problem’. After a couple of minutes on the cross, the footrest gave way and he fell to the muddy ground. “The locals thought that God had angrily thrown me from the cross. Personally, I felt I was too fat.”
The resulting paintings became part of a massively controversial exhibition entitled Crucifixion. Sebastian’s stark canvasses were accompanied by a film by Sarah Lucas (viewable on YouTube), photographs by Dennis Morris, and a soundtrack by Bush’s Gavin Rossdale. Most commentators thought the whole thing to be in very bad taste. It earned him a front page headline in the News of the World: ‘Art Freak Crucifies Himself’.
The exhibition opened in Dublin’s Lead White Gallery in January 2003 (though the title was changed to The Butterfly Pinned in order not to offend Irish Catholic sensibilities). I first met him in December 2002, when I interviewed him for Hot Press in advance of the exhibition. Although I declined his playful offer of sex in the Shelbourne Hotel, we hit it off immediately. In 2004, he contributed a blurb to my book Palace Of Wisdom.
Although we met face-to-face probably no more than ten times in the intervening years, we remained in constant touch through emails and phone calls. He also sent a few letters and cards (one of which featured a shockingly graphic – and, to the best of my knowledge, genuine - photograph of him having sex with an amputee dwarf).

GENITALS AND GENIUS
Despite his cruel, aloof and narcissistic public image, Sebastian was actually one of the sweetest and most gentle human beings I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.
A 2007 retrospective entitled Hookers Dealers Tailors aside, Crucifixion was his last major exhibition. In recent years he concentrated on writing and dandyism. He’d always dabbled in journalism, but his natural inclination to shock somewhat scuppered any chance of a proper career. Not that he ever wanted one. “Don’t tell mother I’m a journalist,” went one round-robin email. “She thinks I’m a prostitute.”
He contributed a monthly column to the Erotic Review from 1998 to 2004. His weekly sex advice column in the Observer didn’t last quite so long. He was unceremoniously fired after just four months following a particularly graphic piece about the pleasures of anal sex (published on Easter Sunday 2006).
Having been commissioned to write a memoir, the original publishers panicked when he delivered the manuscript of Dandy In The Underworld. Although they refused to publish it, he didn’t have to return the advance (“Just like the Sex Pistols,” he gleefully observed).
The book was eventually published by Sceptre in 2007. The Sunday Times described it as, “one of the funniest, strangest, and most revolting memoirs ever written.” The Independent said it “entertains as much as it revolts, is as tender as it is shocking, and is as genuine as it is false.”
To my mind, Dandy in the Underworld will be regarded as a classic in 100 years time. Raw, honest and utterly Sebastian, it’s the definitive laugh-out-loud book. While some of the lines are obvious steals from Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp, many of his own pithy quips will be quoted for years to come (“I like younger women. Their stories are shorter”).
In March of last year, Sebastian hit the headlines once again when he was publicly kicked out of America on the grounds of “moral turpitude.” Not that any of his supposed depravities had occurred on American soil. Having flown into Newark from London, US Immigration officials immediately stopped the ostentatiously top-hatted dandy (he’d removed his nail polish) and asked did he have anything to declare.
“Nothing but my genitals and my genius,” Sebastian rather unwisely quipped. Needless to say, this didn’t go down too well. When they discovered that he was visiting New York to attend the US launch of Dandy, they demanded to see a copy. After an eight-hour interrogation, they threw the book at him – his book.
He was refused entry into the country on the grounds of racism, misogyny, homosexuality, sodomy, drug addiction, whore-mongering, pimping, perversion and prostitution. “I suppose it was a relief,” he told a waiting reporter when he arrived back in London. “They seemed to have missed out the more scandalous charges against me.”
His deportation made headline news in Europe and America. An editorial in the Washington Post came out strongly in his favour – even pointing out that the stovepipe hat which had so affronted immigration officials was exactly the same kind of headgear once favoured by Abraham Lincoln (“Look, darling – editorial!” he emailed me).
While he revelled in the controversy, privately he was gutted to be banned from the States. Despite the intervention of international writers’ association PEN, the immigration authorities had no intention of ever letting him back in.
Even so, he was in good spirits when we last met about three months ago – midway through writing another book and a one-man show, looking forward to the stage version of Dandy, and pleased that Stephen Fry’s Sprout Films had optioned the book.
His July 1st funeral in St. James’ Church in Piccadilly (where William Blake was christened) was the saddest, sexiest and most stylish send-off I’ve ever attended. His coffin – done up to resemble a bright and sparkly red gift box, complete with ribbons and flowers – was drawn through Soho to the church by the same black horse-drawn carriage that carried Malcolm McLaren’s remains.
Most of the 300 or so guests were flamboyantly dressed (some showed up in rubber dresses). It was a mixed congregation – family, friends, relatives, rock stars, artists, actors, poets, writers, journalists, filmmakers, prostitutes and crack dealers.
It was a beautiful service – sad, funny, tragic. There were literally dozens of beautiful women weeping. As journalist Jessica Berens commented in her tribute to him, “I’m probably one of the few people in this church who hadn’t actually slept with him.” Stephen Fry did the eulogy, and spoke movingly of Sebastian’s “essential sweetness” and his “brown eyes, just short of pleading.”
Dublin-born literary agent Ivan Mulcahy apologised in advance before reading from the final chapter of Dandy In The Underworld. “Given the circumstances, I trust you’ll forgive me for giving away the ending.”
Dandy’s last chapter was horribly poignant, as was its final paragraph – which left not a dry eye in the house: “Let’s not carry on as if things end well. They do not end well. Anything that consoles is fake. I shall continue to lift up my face to the last rays of sunshine. I am now a reconciled Sebastian. I can allow the arrows to rest gently in my wounds.”
Farewell, Sebastian, you brilliant, bolshy, brown-eyed bastard. See you in the underworld... but hopefully not for quite some time. RIP.