A Report on The Final Academy by Matthew Levi Stevens

Contribution to thee archive from Matthew Levi Stevens.

A Report on The Final Academy

Matthew Levi Stevens

17^th October 2012 saw the publication of ACADEMY 23: an ‘unofficial’ celebration of William S. Burroughs & The Final Academy, compiled & edited by Matthew Levi Stevens & Emma Doeve of WhollyBooks. Contents included:

- Articles, Essays & Reviews from Michael Butterworth of Savoy Books, John Coulthart, Paul A. Green, John May, Mike Stevens, and David S. Wills

- New & Previously Unpublished prose material from ‘Here To Go’ Show veteran Joe Ambrose, William’s former Naropa companion, Cabell McLean, and editor Matthew Levi Stevens

- An Account of a Conversation with William S. Burroughs about Books & Magic, which took place at the time of The Final Academy

- An Exclusive Interview with Phil Hine, in which he talks about visiting William S. Burroughs, and his relationship to Chaos Magic

- Photos of a visit with Brion Gysin in Paris from former Psychic TV associate Bee, and of shooting in Lawrence, Kansas, with Uncle Bill from Spencer Kansa

- Original Artwork by Emma Doeve in response to The Wild Boys

- Extracts from an Interview with Terry Wilson on meeting William & Brion, Here To Go: Planet R101 and finishing Perilous Passage

As well as its announcement online, Academy 23 also had a launch at the event FINAL ACADEMY/2012 @ The Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury, London on Saturday 27^th October, 2012. Organised by Joe Ambrose (who also co-produced Destroy All Rational Thought and 10% File Under Burroughs with Frank Rynne, and is himself a contributor to Academy 23), the evening featured Films, Music & Spoken Word:

‘Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs On The Road’ (directed by Lars Movin & Steen Møller Rasmussen) which featured previously unseen footage of Burroughs on tour in the late 80s, plus rare home movies of Burroughs in Kansas towards the end of his life. Contributors include Patti Smith John Giorno, Islamic Diggers, and Bill Laswell;

‘Language Virus’ by celebrated graffiti artist Raymond Salvatore Harmon, with music by Philipe Petite;

Soundtrack for the event provided by Testing Vault, The Plague Doctors (featuring Mix by DJ Raoul), Islamic Digger No1. One Way, Alma featuring Joe Ambrose;

In addition there was Discussion, Introductions, & Readings from Author & Poet Paul A. Green, Artist & Kinetic Sculptress Liliane Lijn (who knew Burroughs & the Beat Hotel regulars in Paris in the early 60s), ‘Post-Industrial’ veterans Scanner & Matthew Levi Stevens, and novelist Tony White.

Both Publication & Event received endorsement from original prime-mover of The Final Academy, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who sent the following email of encouragement & support:

Dear Matthew,

How great to hear from you! We really DO appreciate your mentioning our work in staging the First Final Academy. The original idea we had was to HOPE that further variations would occur. After so long it is good to see the meme expanding. we hope we see the book when it is finally out and wish you every success and FUN in all these activities.

Genesis

"VIVA LA EVOLUTION !!!"

‘Academy 23’

In the Beginning was the Word . . . In this case the words that William S. Burroughs wrote for British ‘men’s magazine’ Mayfair while he was living in London in the 1960s. Some years previously a young aspiring writer called Graham Masterton had written to Burroughs when he was still living in Tangier. By 1967, Burroughs was living in London and Masterton, who had landed the job of deputy editor for Mayfair, visited him at his Duke Street, St. James apartment to ask if he had any material he would like to contribute:

“He had long had the concept of an academy at which he could expound and discuss his ideas on government repression and big business and the future of social control, so I suggested that he write a series of articles which we would call The Burroughs Academy.”

The theme of an “Academy” where the young could be taught “a true and different knowledge” was one that engaged Burroughs increasingly as the 60s Revolution progressed. At the height of the Counter-Culture, he even entertained the notion of purchasing Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, former home of Occultist Aleister Crowley (which was in fact later bought by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, at the time himself an ardent admirer of the self-styled “Great Beast”), but funds were lacking. Instead William Burroughs created a ‘virtual’ academy: first in the pages of Mayfair, then in the various articles for the Underground Press, and books like The Job and The Wild Boys. In a letter of 17^th October 1968, he tells Brion Gysin: “Have finished the book of essays and interviews entitled Academy 23...” and although it would not in fact come out under that name, in its final published form as The Job the book of interviews with Daniel Odier, augmented with auxiliary texts, would include a long section entitled Academy 23. (As can be seen in the recent Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974, this desire to create some sort of ‘handbook’ would feed not only into the likes of The Job and The Revised Boy Scout Manual but also, ultimately, The Third Mind.)

Fast forward to the late 1970s, and another young man who had made contact with Burroughs during his London years, performance artist and “wrecker of civilization” Genesis P-Orridge, was also thinking of an academy... a FINAL academy. The Wild Boys re-envisioned via ‘Industrial Music’ as “psychick youth” - with a Temple all of their own. Uncle Bill and Gen had struck up a friendship of sorts in London in the early 70s, and through Burroughs Gen had also met Brion Gysin and Terry Wilson, who attended early Throbbing Gristle concerts such as the ICA launch and the show at the Nag’s Head. TG were profoundly inspired by Burroughs & Gysin and the idea of the Cut-Ups, particularly in relation to sound and the infamous tape-recorder experiments. TG co-founder, Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, had experimented with found-sound and location recordings, building equipment to manipulate tape playback long before the modern sampling revolution. He had also bonded with Burroughs when he visited him at The Bunker to show him some of his photographic work featuring young male models that Burroughs was very taken with. TG’s sidekick Monte Cazazza recorded a rendition of Brion Gysin’s permutation poem ‘Kick That Habit Man’ for their label, and many of the key ‘Industrial’ bands cited Burroughs & Gysin as primary influences. Later, when Antony Balch died P-Orridge was instrumental in saving the original film-reels of his work, and TG’s Industrial Records would release the first ever LP of the Cut-Up tape experiments, ‘Nothing Here Now But The Recordings’.

What follows is based on my actual Notes made at the time, previously unpublished. There has been some attempt at reconstruction – mostly with regard to the sets of William & Brion, who performed on all four nights – but otherwise this is as close as possible to my actual impressions & observations of 30 years ago (with the addition of occasional ‘editorial’ hindsight!) Word pictures of a moment in time . . .

THE FINAL ACADEMY:

LONDON/MANCHESTER/LIVERPOOL/LONDON

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1982

‘THE FINAL ACADEMY is not a homage but a development towards the future...’

- From the original press-release

“The Final Academy is an apocalyptic term. It is the place where knowledge and anti-knowledge are going to war.”

– Genesis P-Orridge interviewed by Chris Bohn, NME, 25^th September 1982

‘William Burroughs and Brion Gysin are two explorers of these New Lands [(that) little explored sit upon our shoulders] Both have shown courage in revealing their private thoughts, feelings, ideas and fantasies... Both have revealed the control mechanisms of those in power and seek to disarm them. But theirs is not a nihilistic gesture. They offer a future, a body of information that is beautiful, funny, and frightening and which points to the making of a New World.’

– Roger Ely, Statements Of A Kind

Organised by David Dawson, Roger Ely, and Genesis P-Orridge, The Final Academy consisted of a series of main events over four days @ The Ritzy Cinema, Brixton: 29^th September to 2^nd October, 1982. William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin would be celebrated in film, music, performance and readings. The famous experimental films shot by Antony Balch in the 1960s would be shown each night. There would also be performances by the experimental music groups that had been inspired by their example: 23 Skidoo, Last Few Days, Cabaret Voltaire and the debut of Psychic TV (recently formed from the ashes of Throbbing Gristle), as well as a variety of other poets and performance artists. Some, like John Giorno & Terry Wilson, were of course friends with Burroughs & Gysin; others, like Anne Bean, Paul Burwell & Ruth Adams, were associates of Roger Ely from the B2 Gallery.

An exhibition of Brion Gysin paintings, complete with Dreamachine, collages from The Third Mind, and scrapbook material ran concurrently at the B2 Gallery, Wapping. There was also a book-signing @ Compendium Books in Camden Town, William supported by Victor Bockris: A William Burroughs Reader, Cities of the Red Night and A Report From The Bunker: With William Burroughs all hot off the presses – and Here To Go: Planet R101 by Brion Gysin & Terry Wilson and the Burroughs/Gysin/TG special, both from RE/Search.

There were also ‘Regional Events’: Burroughs, Giorno, & Psychic TV @ The Haçienda, Manchester on October 4^th; Burroughs, Giorno & Jeff Nuttall @ The Centre Hotel, Liverpool on October 5^th; and a one-off @ Heaven, Charing Cross on October 7^th, billed as: William S. Burroughs, John Giorno, Marc Almond, Heathcote Williams + Derek Jarman, Psychic TV, Last Few Days, Cerith Wyn Evans.

I had made contact with Throbbing Gristle as a 14 year-old-schoolboy fan, already very much into William Burroughs. It seemed like no sooner had I met them than TG split, and over the next year or so Gen & Sleazy’s half evolved into ‘Psychic Television Limited’, with its attendant Conceptual Art gag masquerading as Fan-Club pretending to be a Cult, ‘Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth’ (sic). I was close friends with Geff Rushton (later ‘John Balance’ of Coil), only a couple of years my senior when he got together with Sleazy. Through my friendship with them I found myself for a while part of a circle that revolved around the ideas of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare: all Astral Projection, Dream Control, Sex-Magick and Sigils. Equally, the life & work of Burroughs & Gysin – with their Cut-Ups, Dreamachine, Playback, and Third Mind – offered a toolkit for similar ends.

“Dear Mom and Dad: I am going to join The Wild Boys. When you read this I will be far away...”

End of September, 1982: barely a month shy of my 16^th birthday, and for my sins I am a “Psychick Youth” - aspirant and unrepentant. The PTV entourage duly went to meet with The Old Man upon his arrival in the UK, and would be a kind of ‘honour-guard’ to William & Brion for the duration of their visits. Derek Jarman documented it all with his trademark Super 8 camera. Klaus Maeck filmed footage of Burroughs for the ‘Dream Sequence’ in Decoder. Sleazy helped set it all up, and can be seen - along with Burroughs & Grauerholz arriving by black cab - in Jarman’s Pirate Tape: a home movie of the filming in a used hi-fi & TV-repair shop behind Tottenham Court Road. Derek Jarman’s former boyfriend Howard Brookner was following the action with a camera, making his documentary Burroughs: The Movie - in much the same way that Victor Bockris had been Court Recorder at The Bunker, making With William Burroughs.

Thanks to Genesis P-Orridge I have a ringside seat when William S. Burroughs arrives. Everybody wants to get their books signed, or have their photo taken with him. I choose to do neither, deliberately. As well as the PTV connection, I have corresponded with J. G. Ballard, Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, and Bill’s old pal, Alex Trocchi; I am also a skinny, pale, intense, bookish young boy. I’m sure none of any of these details hurt. Eventually I am in just the right place at just the right time...

When I get a chance to speak to William in person, because of my interests at that time and the seeming preoccupations of many of those taking part in The Final Academy events, I ask him about Magic and whether he would care to recommend any books on the subject? Without hesitation he mentions Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense, even though he qualifies it as “a bit old-fashioned.” Then, without prompting on my part, he begins to talk of Black Magic and Curses in Morocco, travelling with Medicine Men up the Amazon, and Astral Projection and Dream Control. I realise that for Burroughs all this is UTTERLY REAL, the “Magical Universe” in fact. He tells me about a dream he had as a young man, working as an exterminator in Chicago: of watching from a helpless Out-of-Body point of view floating above the bed as his body got up and went out with some unknown and sinister purpose that he was powerless to influence. With a shudder, he tells me that possession is “still the basic fear.”

He asks if I would like to “get some air” and we take a walk round the block. To break the ice, I talk about books: he is delighted to discover that I have read his beloved Denton Welch, also J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time. I have found them in my old school library, and know both have been a tremendous influence on him in different ways. Knowing of his interest I also mention that I have just read Colin Wilson’s The Quest For Wilhelm Reich, published the year before. He likes Wilson, he says, jokes that “the Colonel” with his cottage in Wales in Wilson’s Return of the Lloigor and his own Colonel Sutton-Smith from The Discipline of DE are one and the same.  On something of a roll, I mention Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits, and he acknowledges that it has “some good information” – but is much more enthusiastic about Magic: An Occult Primer by David Conway [years later I would discover that Burroughs & Conway had in fact exchanged letters on various subjects pertaining to magic, occultism, and psychic phenomena – but that is decidedly another story!]

He talks about different kinds of perception, and I hear for the first time his famous remark that the purpose of all Art & Writing is “to make people aware of what they know but don’t know that they know!” He describes the ‘Walk Exercise’, in which you try to see everybody on the street before they see you - “I was taught this by an old Mafia don in Chicago… sharpens your ‘Survival IQ’…  It pays to keep your eyes and ears open” - as well as an on-the-spot illustration of the theory of Cut-Ups as Consciousness Expansion:

“As soon as you walk down the street like this – or look out the window, turn a page, turn on the TV – your awareness is being Cut: the sign in that shop window, that car passing by, the sound of the radio… Life IS a Cut-Up…”

I ask him about Cut-Ups with tape-recorders, a hot topic at The Final Academy. Telling me about his experiments with ‘Playback’ (where recordings are made, cut-up, then played back on location, often accompanied by the taking of photos) he actually describes it to me with a chuckle as “Sorcery!”

The impact of the Cut-Ups is very much in evidence at The Final Academy, you could almost say that it is the one thing that unites all the performers – certainly where the bands are concerned. In his essay The Academy (The Virus Spreads) – which is included in The Final Academy’s lavish program, Statements of a Kind - David Darby writes:

“Terry Wilson has described Cut Up as a form of ‘exorcism’. Burroughs says it is like table tapping; you can use it to read into the future, to see what is about to happen and thereby control it. A variety of today’s music reminds me of this ‘disembodiment’. Holger Czukay, the German musician and psychic believer who edits music... inserting snatches of ghostly voices taken off shortwave radio and TV. The LP My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne – title taken from the novel by Amos Tutuola, spiritualist and medium – with its mixture of Islamic chant and Black American radio exorcism and evangelism dubbed over strange rhythmic instrumentals... New York’s Grandmaster Flash, who cuts in snatches of other records... Then, of course, there’s Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, 23 Skidoo, Psychic Television, all of whom have declared... a desire now to create a new music with video and taped voices, to redefine music as a percussive soundtrack almost, a muttered trance as much as a dance in which real and imaginary visions are seen...”

Brion Gysin I only met very fleetingly, I was just another boy in a roomful of boys, the youngest and at that stage still something of a star-struck fan. I DO remember his response to our ‘psychick youth’ honour-guard, though: “Gen, I don’t know how you’ve done this, but I’ve never had so many pretty boys being so helpful all day long!” Terry Wilson was also there in his capacity as Brion’s informal secretary, friend, collaborator, and “apprentice to an apprentice” (as Gysin himself had said), and would be one of the performers on the bill as well. He was tall and thin, in a crumpled dark blue suit, pale face “fading away behind a fringe of hair” [as Felicity Mason puts it in her essay for event program Statements Of A Kind] and seemed nervous, shy: on the one hand in awe of Burroughs & Gysin, on the other wary of all the shaven-headed acolytes circling around event organisers Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV.                                 

The opening announcement, politely requesting that there is no flash photography and that there must be no recording, seems almost surreal: I have never been to an event that is so obviously being documented for posterity – it seems as if every other person has a camera or tape-recorder of some kind, and the strange binaural recording ‘head’ that I recognise from TG’s concerts is right in front of the stage at all times. I wonder what will happen to all the material?

Each night opens to a soundtrack of tape-recordings from the Burroughs archive, the kind of cut-up experiments that were released just last year as the final album on TG’s Industrial Records label, Nothing Here Now But The Recordings. Films are shown by the late Antony Balch (Gen helped to salvage them after he died of Stomach Cancer in 1980) Bill, Brion, Ian, Mikey Portman and others (hello Alex Trocchi!) in 1960s London, New York, Paris, Tangiers “Hello – Yes, hello – look at that picture – does it seem to be persisting? Thank You!” – Scientology training exercises - Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups, Ghosts @ No.9 (or Guerrilla Conditions), William Buys A Parrot - in colour!

The coming together of three generations, “like minds who share the common ground of The Third Mind – located at the intersection point of Cut-Ups, where the future leaks through – where logic is short-circuited, deprogramming Control.” William, Brion and John Giorno the older, literary pioneers; PTV and their pals ‘n’ peers being the younger New Wave. In between a more indeterminate crowd, performance artists and poets with a background in the Arts Lab Scene and ‘Happenings’ - they perhaps are the odder fit. Anne Bean & Paul Burwell acquit themselves well enough with their take on ‘White Man’s Got A God Complex’ (The Last Poets), but the lingering smoke from their fire-crackers didn’t do Brion Gysin’s asthma any favours. I’m not even sure Ian Hinchliffe actually appeared – the stage was in darkness, some barely audible mutterings on tape: was that him? Jeff Nuttall didn’t appear at all: apparently he was supposed to be met at the airport, and when he wasn’t just got on the next plane back to Manchester [a real shame, as I had been looking forward to finally meeting up with him; when Burroughs & Giorno appear alongside Jeff Nuttall later in the week at the reading he has organised at The Centre Hotel in Liverpool, any mention of Psychic TV or The Final Academy will be conspicuous in its absence...] Roger Ely’s story The Legacy was a haunting evocation of the perils of psychic attack and fallout from ritual experiments: a woman obsessed - or even possessed - by the spirit of her dead occultist father. I liked the slides that went with it, too (Ruth Adams?) The whole thing eerie after my first-ever conversation with Mr. Burroughs covering similar territory only the day before... “Possession is still the basic fear.”

The audience is a real gathering of the tribes: art students, bookworms, college lecturers, druggies, hippy survivors, political radicals, punks and queers. Wild Boys – and Girls! – of all ages, and of course a growing number of Psychick Youth. People have come from far and wide: I meet a tres serieux French couple who want to talk about apomorphine, General Semantics (but don’t believe that I have read Korzybski!), and an earnest, grey-clad group from Yugoslavia [Laibach] who have clearly hit it off with Last Few Days & 23 Skidoo.

There are sullen mutterings about the seating, lack of a bar, complaints that the event is “too literary” - others clearly don’t understand the connections: a schoolteacher asks: “What have all these weirdo bands got to do with anything?” Anne Bean is overheard to remark “I am neither psychic nor youthful!” A drugged-up punk girl sneers “Aren’t you a bit too young for all this ‘psychick youth’ bollocks?” – oblivious to the implicit irony. Terry Wilson treads uneasily between the more literary camp and the large circle of Psychick Youth acolytes, who flank Burroughs when he’s not reading. I keep a low-profile and thus secure a ringside seat on the edge of the group. Denise from Vox complains about the level of marketing: “we were constantly being handed leaflets about Giorno Poetry Systems, or Burroughs’ new book, or PTV’s Temple T-shirts. Not nice!” – but I just see this as a clash of cultures: the English ‘well-meaning amateur’ being challenged by American professionalism, and of course Counter-Culture from the Hippies through the Punks and on has always been wary of commercialism (as if nobody has to make a living!) Simon from Sounds is clearly a convert, though: talking of Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner, Austin Osman Spare - wants to know how he can get a copy of the PTV videos, gives out his contact details [Simon Dwyer (1959-1997) would later create world-renowned counter-culture journal Rapid Eye, in which he would showcase the likes of Psychic TV, Gilbert+George, Derek Jarman, and Kathy Acker.]

There is a weight of anticipation, expectation, about the launch of Gen & Sleazy’s new venture, Psychic Television, but they will not actually ‘perform’ as such. David Darby’s essay in the program Statements of a Kind suggests these are groups who are fast losing interest in what they see as the outmoded concept of band-on-stage. In the NME the week before, Gen tells Chris Bohn:

“William, Brion and the poet John Giorno used writing because in their day writing was the most vital, living form for propaganda. They got hold of tape-recorders and made films with (the late) Antony Balch, always trying to reapply what they discovered through writing to other media. Now you’ve got groups like Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo, Last Few Days and Psychic TV who have followed through and used tape, cut-ups, random chats and sound in the way they’ve read or at least been inspired in Burroughs’ and Gysin’s books. They’ve put it, though, into popular culture, i.e. music, which happens at the moment to be the most vital form.”

One solution is the move towards film, slides, video - and Psychic TV would seem to be at the forefront here: if the Revolution IS going to be televised, after all, then PTV are first in line with their bid for the franchise...

As well as the films and readings, each night there is a band:

23 Skidoo, a firm favourite, start off proceedings. Their recently reduced personnel of Alex, Johnny & Fritz have moved far beyond their Post-Punk Funk origins to a new ritual ambience: the sound of bells, cymbals and gongs augmented by tape-loops and gas-cylinder percussion, “urban gamelan.” In Statements Of A Kind, the lavish program for The Final Academy, they describe themselves as “cultural assassins” who “embrace this ceremony of the constant random factor.” Like shaven headed warrior monks, they go about their almost meditative business on a darkened stage – while above them the films flicker like ghost-light...

Last Few Days are new to me, an unknown quantity, but I recognise Fritz from Skidoo, also former TG soundman Danny (‘Stan Bingo’). Cello, clarinet, megaphones, tapes. Their imagery, such as it is, is apocalyptic. ‘Apocalyptic chic’ is very much the thing at The Final Academy. “Ours is a soundtrack for a dying age.”

Cabaret Voltaire are also ‘reduced personnel’ now: down to a duo, Chris Watson has left. They have been recently ably augmented by drummer Alan Fish, but not tonight. Keyboards, movie dialogue and The Reverend Jim Jones cut-up & looped. Ambient music accompanying scratch-mix video – a barrage of cut-up visuals and deprogramming imagery, like their Doublevision release [but definitely NOT the ‘ambient music’ of Brian Eno & co.!]

Genesis P-Orridge introduces Brion Gysin, all in white: “And now, the man who makes the impossible, possible!”

Brion announces that the Cut-Ups are now about 23 years old, “the average age of my musicians, and I hope the average age of the house.” Each night there are songs (“Some old words, and some new tunes”) with music: Ramuntcho Matta (son of the Chilean Surrealist painter) on New Wave Funk guitar – I recognise Tessa from The Slits on cello, and the drummer from Rip, Rig and Panic – plus a percussionist.

There are also readings from Here To Go (“I understand you can buy it in the lobby”): No-one can give you the keys, even if you know what a key looks like (Korzybski, again!) Teaching is anything except what you expect it to be. “Turn the Boys Over is one way of doing it” – seduce the Teacher – Terry Wilson: “The knowledge is stolen?” “Knowledge is passed from a Master to a Disciple by the actual Act of Love” (the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi)

From The Process: the smoking circle, Youngest Brother speaks of “our enemy the sun” and Hassan i-Sabbah. “Mr Ugly Spirit himself disguised as a hydro-helium bomb.” There is no friendship, no love – the desert knows only allies and accomplices – “There are no brothers” Everyone is always ALONE, their adventure in life a singular one. A criminal, a magician, is an Outsider.

“Magic, like Art, is outside the Law”

And now, the moment we have all been waiting for? Psychic Television, the propaganda arm of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (sic) – carrying on from the late TG’s ‘psychick youth rallies’(grey-clad acolytes, sporting shaven head and pigtail a la Tibetan Buddhist monks, very much in evidence)  – but “Psychic TV is not a group, we are not about entertainment”   – more a ritual in sound and visuals: a large video projection screen in the centre, TV monitors flank the stage, where Genesis P sits in near darkness, intoning a carefully prepared Statement to pre-recordings of soundtrack music, ritual ambience and holographic 3D sound effects, while Sleazy mixes the visuals. Tinkling bells and the moaning of Tibetan thighbone trumpets: the sound of souls in torment. A squeaking bicycle wheel. “Are you asleep, or do you want to wake up?” asks a pre-recorded, nasal voice. Then, amidst the swirl of lush strings, ‘A Message From The Temple.’ Meanwhile, the visuals: symbols of Control – “sex, power and magick” – I am amused to see that it’s clearly more than a lot of the hard-core Punks can take. The atmosphere is almost religious, for all that the images on screen are transgressive: bloodletting, genital piercing, initiation rites – something sexual, even if it isn’t clear exactly what. Glancing across to where William Burroughs sits, flanked by the Psychick Youth faithful, he seems captivated.

Speaking of the éminence grise, the Old Man of this particular Alamut: when Mr. Burroughs climbs onto the stage and takes his place behind the wooden desk, shuffling his papers and stretching awkwardly – like a doctor about to give a particularly unpleasant diagnosis – you could hear the proverbial pin drop. This is what everybody has come to see, to hear. At a brisk, business-like pace he starts with readings from the new book [the as-yet-unpublished Western The Place of Dead Roads] originally going to be called The Johnson Family after turn-of-the-century slang for ‘good’ bums, thieves, etc. A Johnson is a good man to do business with, honours his word – is not snoopy or judgemental – ‘Minds his Own Business’ – but also will not stand by when help is needed.

Burroughs introduces his alter-ego, Kim Carsons: a slimy, morbid youth, who adores ectoplasm, wallows in abominations – “when Kim was 15 his father allowed him to withdraw from the school because he was so unhappy there and so much disliked by the other boys and their parents” – He decides to go out West and become a Shootist “If anyone doesn’t like the way Kim looks and acts and smells, he can fill his grubby peasant paw” – He gets “a progressive education”  – “young man I think you’re an assassin” “I want to be one, sir!” – and recruits a band of flamboyant and picturesque outlaws, the Wild Fruits.

There are also extracts from Cities of the Red Night, Nova Express, and old favourites like ‘Twilight’s Last Gleamings’ and ‘The Do-Rights’ – the audience are attentive, rapt, respectful even, but lines like “He asks me what the American flag means to me, and I tell him soak it in heroin, doc, and I’ll suck it!” has us laughing in all the right places. Like the seasoned pro he is, William S. Burroughs has his audience right where he wants them.

Finally: The only goal worth striving for is Immortality, in Space: “This is the Space Age, and we are Here To Go.” Amen.

A final teaching for The Final Academy . . .

‘The Western Lands is a real place. It exists, and we built it, with our hands and our brains. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It’s ours, and we’re going to take it.’

- William S. Burroughs, from ‘Statement on the Final Academy’