Andrew Oldham

ARCHIVE: Hunter S. Thompson – Loathing and Fear for a Nation 1939-2005

Andrew wrote this obituary in 2005. ‘It was an awful few months in 2005,’ says Andrew, ‘A number of poets, writers and personal friends died. I had a spate of obituaries to write for a number of magazines. This is one of many I did on Hunter S. Thompson, it was written 24 hours after his suicide. He would have hated this obituary’.

Hunter S. Thompson: Loathing and Fear for a Nation 1939-2005. Article by Andrew Oldham

Hunter S. Thompson was much more than drink, drugs, guns and motorcycles, he was a million miles from the paranoid Doonesbury character, he was a continent away from the media portrayal of him in his latter years. This was a writer trying to make sense of not just a country but a home; and in many ways coming to terms with a growing right wing government and his own impending old age. Unafraid to view his thoughts and ideas, he did seem more and more afraid that he was unable to stop the tide, that the America he loved, the America he celebrated, the America he admonished had changed so rapidly.

This was not a liberal hippie or rebel without clue crying out with anger against apathy, this was not Howard Stern, he wasn’t climbing on any old band wagon. Thompson had seen the blooming and inevitable death of the American Dream in favour of money, control and mass paranoia. The America he would grow old in wasn’t the America of his youth or aspirations. Thompson had and was coming to terms with modern America, the puzzle that became the USA.

Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky on the 18th July 1939. His father, an insurance agent died from a rare immune disorder whilst the young Thompson was at High School. The young Thompson up till then had grown up in a comfortable, affluent home. Thompson was everything middle America wanted, a member of prestigious club called the Athenaeum Literary Association, he ran with rich, socially elite young people of Louisville and would have inevitably become a Republican but the death of his father forced his mother to take a job as a librarian to support the family. Suddenly he was the poor kid amongst his friends, the dreams of an Ivy League school were now beyond him. With increasing frustration and anger, the young Thompson rebelled against the Athenaeum Literary Association and became famous for outrageous pranks; flooding the ground floor of his high school with three inches of water, dumping a truckload of pumpkins in front of a downtown hotel. During this period he turned to writing and began to publish bitter and sarcastic essays for the literary association’s newsletter, including one called, Open Letter to the Youth of Our Nation, signed John J. Righteous-Hypocrite: “Young people of America, awake from your slumber of indolence and harken to the call of the future. Do you realize you are rapidly becoming a doomed generation?”

During his senior year, Thompson was arrested several times for vandalism and attempted robbery. He was eventually barred from the literary association, and spent thirty days in jail. When released, he joined the United States Air Force as a provision of his parole. He was honourably discharged in 1958 and began writing for any small newspaper that would take him. 1964 would be turning point for the young Thompson. During that year the California attorney general issued a report on a dangerous new motorcycle gang known as the Hell’s Angels, and the national media picked up the story.

Thompson was hired by The Nation magazine to write a brief article about the gang. A book followed: “For fifteen hundred dollars I would have done the definitive text on hammerhead sharks and stayed in the water with them for three months!”. With the advance Thompson bought a motorcycle and began his investigative journey; for several months he followed Hell’s Angels gangs across the States, until five Hell’s Angels suddenly turned on him and beat him senseless. In 1967, he published his book, Hell’s Angels. The first edition sold out immediately and broke onto the New York Times bestseller list. Thompson had a few problems with the sudden fame and the ensuing book tour; he showed up drunk for most of his interviews. By 1969 Thompson was one of the most prominent journalists of his generation. Writing for Playboy magazine, Thompson developed his first true piece of Gonzo literature, The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy. Playboy turned it down because the editors felt that it was too meanspirited. In reality, Thompson had stepped beyond the who, what, where, when, and why of mainstream journalism and delivered something quite different: a piece where the writer was not objective but subjective, allowing his own personality and impressions of his subject to emerge. Thompson had created and coined the phrase: Gonzo Journalism.

In 1971, Thompson published his most famous book, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, later made into a film by Terry Gilliam. Now firmly immersed in writing the life he lived, Thompson would become embroiled in the drug culture: “I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.” This sense of ‘fleeting’ would always be part of Thompson’s psyche, to him politics, history, countries and journalism would come and go, but the ride was worth grabbing hold of.

Thompson once wrote to his friend Susan Haselden: “In brief, I find that I’ve never channeled my energy long enough to send it in any one direction. I’m all but completely devoid of a sense of values: psychologically unable to base my actions on any firm beliefs. I seem to be unable to act consistently or effectively, because I have no values on hich to base my decisions. As I look back, I find that I’ve been taught to believe in nothing. I have no god and I find it impossible to believe in man. On every side of me, I see thousands engaged in the worship of money, security, prestige symbols, and even snakes”.

Hunter S. Thompson was found dead on Sunday the 20th February 2005 in his Aspen-area home. He died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 67.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Hunter S Thompson, Obituary

ARCHIVE: Hovis Has Risen and Left The Building

Andrew wrote this article in 2005. ‘I always found it hard to interview Hovis,’ says Andrew, ‘He would ask to see copy before it was submitted to the editor. I was new to journalism back then and stupidly, I always said yes. Hovis would inevitably return my copy with revisions galore. Mainly, he would tighten up jokes, move around sentences and make suggestions. When I was in my early twenties, cutting my teeth, I hated that. Now, I am much older, and I miss those notes from Hovis, I miss those suggestions’.

Hovis Has Risen and Left The Building. Article by Andrew Oldham

The first time I met Hovis Presley I was signing on and being forced to go through a soul destroying programme of back to work sessions, learn how to type, learn how to do your accounts, learn how to do just what we say. They were the kind of sessions run by middle-aged men who wore Burton suits, drove away in a saloon car as you stood at the bus stop in the rain and who had no problem in informing you that ‘they knew your pain, your lack of confidence’, and how they thought about this every time they took to the beach or the ski slopes. I remember telling Hovis this in a Bolton pub (it was raining outside and I could see his bicycle tethered outside to a railing), he replied that everyone has to do something with their life, he personally preferred a bicycle. He then asked me what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer and he was happy to give me some advice – ‘just write and don’t buy into believing your better than everyone else’. I’m paraphrasing, but it was a truth about Hovis, no matter how big he got, no matter how many times he appeared on stage, radio and television (he had a few plans for documentaries involving his Irish heritage, he mentioned a boat once and the coast of Ireland in one of our later interviews), he never gave up that bloody push bike or forgot who he was and what he wanted. To me he wasn’t just a comedian, or a performance poet, he was a giant of a man full of warmth and understated charm, the master of the pun, the flat delivery and the drole.

I kept bumping into Hovis over the following decade, both in my role as a journalist and as a writer. He was always laconic about why he took to the stage and why he wrote; “If I weren’t doing this I’d be looking for chewing gum under shop window ledges”. He cited his interests back then as postal ker-plunk and choosing eight sandwiches to take to a desert island (seven cheese and one egg). I interview Hovis for many people, The Big Issue in the North, Flux, BBC GMR, Manchester Evening News, Bolton Evening News and always enjoyed meeting up with him and talking with him about his work (he would always bring a friend that he felt I should interview as well, via Hovis I met many comedians, Pete Kay, Justin Moorhouse and Smug Roberts).

Years later, Peter Kay would offer Hovis a role in Phoenix Nights but he turned it down (he feared that this role would typecast him). He never bought into his celebrity, he influenced comedians across the country but he would only ever take gigs where he could get back to Bolton before the trains stopped. “The only place in the country where broken biscuits are still legal tender,” he once quipped. However, he was man of integrity and would often do charity gigs wherever and whenever he could, regardless of distance.

That first time I interviewed him was my favourite meeting, he gave me a hand made copy of Poetic Off-License, made in his kitchen. A friend had done the art, someone else had typed it up and Hovis had stapled them together (I still have it now on my shelf along with other copies that surfaced over the next three years, the re-editions and the holiday annual – before I moved from Bolton, he would phone me up and ask me to gigs or would say that he had a new book for me). He was generous and I will miss his presence in this world.

Hovis died on the 9th June 2005.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Bolton, Hovis Presley, Obituary, Peter Kay, Phoenix Nights, Poetic Off-Licence, Smug Roberts

Matt Simpson Dies

For those of you have anything to do with the poetry scene in Liverpool, there are two words that will make you smile, Matt Simpson. I met Matt several times under different guises, first as a performance poet, then as a journalist and then as an academic and at each meeting he was warm, friendly and a mine of information. He was also someone you could trust to be honest. He was always willing to give advice, point you in the right direction and introduce you to other poets.

I was sad to learn that he died after going into hospital last week.

Tags: Matt Simpson, Obituary

Michael Murphy Dies

I met Michael at a poetry reading several years ago in Manchester, he was reading with his partner, Deryn Rees-Jones. It was one of those lunch time readings that the Central Library are famous for, in the audience that day were William Park, Ian Parks and Steve Waling.

The truth was that Ian and I had come to watch Deryn, we had seen her many times before but it was Michael that day who raised the bar for poets who read. Michael was part of our conversation for years to come and on that day he was reading from a collection that was yet to be printed. It was raw, and it set the pattern for poetry to come.

Many years later I tried to arrange an interview with Michael but due to busy schedules and then his failing health, we never managed to meet again.

I was saddened to hear that  Michael had a brain tumour and that he died recently. You can read his obituary at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/13/obituary-michael-murphy

Tags: Dies, Michael Murphy, Obituary, Poet

okay okay!!! Going to bed NOW!!!

Even in death Lisa Ratcliffe had the capacity to make me laugh out loud. I spoke with her over the phone for the last time a few days ago. We gossiped. Talked about how she was going to ride her horse again, how she was going to prove the doctors wrong and get off that couch. Lisa was going skiing. Lisa would be there for her child’s birthday party later in the year. We spoke about death. We spoke about the possibility of death but neither of us believed in it. We were being honest with each other. I was behind her one hundred percent whatever she chose to do.

I believed in Lisa and still believe in her now, an hour after learning that she has died.

As we spoke on the phone, I could hear the morphine in her voice, but still she joked about farting and belching (it was a good feeling that cut her off the phone at one point), we laughed. I joked that we could attach the couch to skis or even get her a horse and carriage sans couch. The couch became a running joke during our last conversation. It makes me smile now to think of what she said, it is a conversation I will carry with me always, it is our last private words and they were filled with such joy, hope and love.

Lisa was The Hesitant Scribe, and throughout her illness she brought us a world that few of us will ever know. Beyond the illness, the pain, the cancer that could not eat her whole, she was a writer.

I will share one thing with you all from that last telephone conversation, in the hope you will learn something. We talked of procrastination, how we all do it but that in the end life is for living. Life is not for procrastination. This is something that bound Lisa and I as friends, the desire to live a full life, a positive life, a life worth living.

I taught at a University with Lisa for several years, had more lunches with her than I can remember. Over many bad meals, we moaned, laughed, bitched, swore, argued, fell out, made up and told honest, wicked tales about people we had known.

She was honest, caring, devoted to the people she loved, her partner, her children, she was proud of them. She would tell me the troubles they had got in, how they had all stood up and faced them down. All the time she would have that gleam in her eye, that smile.

From our first meeting to our last conversation, she told me the truth.

I have never been able to convey emotion very well in person but Lisa hammered down that reserve in me. She said to me once, that she was happy to tell me the truth because I had the kind of face that listened. That still makes me laugh.

Lisa Ratcliffe was a writer but more importantly she was my friend, and I will never stop missing her.

Andrew Oldham 05.02.2009

Tags: Blog, Hesitant Scribe, Lisa Ratcliffe, Obituary, Skiing, Writer