{"id":10049,"date":"2011-09-26T03:56:33","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T02:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=10049"},"modified":"2024-04-09T13:25:43","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T12:25:43","slug":"william-burroughs-interviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2011\/09\/26\/william-burroughs-interviews\/","title":{"rendered":"William Burroughs interviews"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/bunker.jpg\" alt=\"bunker.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (1982) by Victor Bockris. Design by Neville Brody.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>If it&#8217;s interviews you want, some of the most entertaining are in <a href=\"http:\/\/realitystudio.org\/interviews\/interview-with-victor-bockris-on-william-burroughs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Victor Bockris&#8217;s collection of conversations<\/a> between\u00a0El Hombre Invisible and the various New York notables ferried round to sit at Burroughs&#8217; table in his Bowery Bunker. The British edition published by Vermilion was always preferrable for its Neville Brody cover design beside which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/1332671.With_William_Burroughs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the US original<\/a> looks very dull indeed. The encyclopedic Burroughs site <a href=\"http:\/\/realitystudio.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Reality Studio<\/a> has copious lists of earlier Burroughs interviews. <a href=\"http:\/\/realitystudio.org\/bibliography\/c-items\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">They also note<\/a> the occasions when he put on his journalist hat and went out to interview someone equally famous, usually at the behest of a music magazine. A couple of those pieces are online thanks to the diligence of various fans.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.teenagewildlife.com\/Albums\/DD\/cover_ryko.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/11\/diamond_dogs.jpg\" alt=\"diamond_dogs.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Diamond Dogs (1974), a blend of Lou Reed, George Orwell and William Burroughs.<br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n<p>One such is the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.teenagewildlife.com\/Appearances\/Press\/1974\/0228\/rsinterview\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1974 interview with David Bowie<\/a> for <em>Rolling Stone<\/em> in which Bowie discusses Burroughs as an influence while Burroughs informs the singer that the heroes of his latest novel, <em>The Wild Boys<\/em>, favour the Bowie knife as a weapon:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Bowie:<\/strong> <em>Nova Express<\/em> really reminded me of Ziggy Stardust, which I am going to be putting into a theatrical performance. Forty scenes are in it and it would be nice if the characters and actors learned the scenes and we all shuffled them around in a hat the afternoon of the performance and just performed it as the scenes come out. I got this all from you Bill&#8230; so it would change every night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/burroughspage.jpg\" alt=\"burroughspage.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A year later Burroughs got together with Jimmy Page for <em>Crawdaddy<\/em> magazine where the discussion circles around some of the same subjects, notably the writer&#8217;s obsession with sound as a weapon. There&#8217;s also this comment from Burroughs which is the kind of thing that always gets my neurons firing:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Antony Balch and I collaborated on a film called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ubu.com\/film\/burroughs_cut.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Cut-Ups<\/em><\/a>, in which the film was cut into segments and rearranged at random. Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell saw a screening of the film not long before they made <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0066214\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Performance<\/em><\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Roeg later directed Bowie, of course, and is one of the dinner guests in <em>With William Burroughs<\/em>, while Jimmy Page and Donald Cammell both appear in Kenneth Anger&#8217;s <em>Lucifer Rising<\/em>. The connections go round and round&#8230; Read the whole piece in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arthurmag.com\/2007\/12\/05\/willima-burroughs-onled-zeppelin\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a post I made a few years ago<\/a> at the late, lamented <em>Arthur<\/em> magazine site.<\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere on { feuilleton }<br \/>\n\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/themed-archive-pages\/the-william-burroughs-archive\/\">The William Burroughs archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (1982) by Victor Bockris. Design by Neville Brody. If it&#8217;s interviews you want, some of the most entertaining are in Victor Bockris&#8217;s collection of conversations between\u00a0El Hombre Invisible and the various New York notables ferried round to sit at Burroughs&#8217; table in his Bowery Bunker. The British &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2011\/09\/26\/william-burroughs-interviews\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;William Burroughs interviews&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,27,7,3],"tags":[2921,1164,1301,371,395,550,401,1302,461,149,306,679,1372,519,1190],"class_list":["post-10049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-borges","category-film","category-music","tag-antony-balch","tag-arthur-magazine","tag-david-bowie","tag-donald-cammell","tag-george-orwell","tag-jimmy-page","tag-kenneth-anger","tag-lou-reed","tag-lucifer","tag-neville-brody","tag-nicolas-roeg","tag-reality-studio","tag-victor-bockris","tag-wild-boys","tag-william-burroughs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-2C5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}