Feature: HOLLOWAY ARTS FESTIVAL - Interview with musician Nigel Burch
Published: 24 June 2010
by JOSH LOEB
I GET quite a few samples of writing from various writers and non-writers, and although your letter was interesting, I began reading your London Liver, rather expecting not too much as usual, and I was worse hungover than usual, so I took the bit to bed and soon I was laughing my ass off. You’re the best cure for a hangover I ever lucked across.”
Thus began a remarkably candid correspondence between cult American poet Charles Bukowski and a young painter, punk rocker and scribbler who was nervously seeking approval from his idol.
Nigel Burch, who plays the Boston Arms in Tufnell Park a week on Sunday for the last night of the Holloway Arts Festival, sets the letters he received from the author proudly on his shelf – alongside his 20 or so volumes of Bukowski’s poetry – and talks about the time he bared his soul to the “laureate of American lowlife”.
It was the early 1980s and he was playing with a number of new-wave punk outfits across north London.
Not expecting much of a response, he posted a handful of poems to Bukowski in Los Angeles – and a few weeks later was surprised to get a letter that would make any writer glow with affirmation.
“Many people seem to send me their poems and it’s discouraging,” wrote Bukowski in one of a series of doodle-covered, never-before-published documents that Burch showed the New Journal this week.
“Yours are another matter. You write these dark bright poems, a touch literary but aware of vomit.”
“Forgive the typing mistakes,” the German-born writer who died in 1994, continued. “A little along on this wine and tired from the track. Problem with a woman. She wants marriage. I just want her to cut my hair and clip my toenails and to keep the ring out of the toilet.”
The two discussed the trials of juggling the creative impulse with domestic life.
In one of the series of notes, Bukowski writes: “Like I think I told you, if painting, drawings are your strength, you gotta be some artist because your writing is strong, baby. I wonder about your influences? Auden? You’ve got a nice tight line but lot of dark music bristling there.”
The pair bonded over their backgrounds. Burch is an East Ender from a family of dockers. Bukowski had a notoriously hard upbringing – years of toil in factories – and his earthy writing style made him a working-class hero.
He wrote about the lives of the poor and the unlucky, people who had fallen through society’s cracks.
His detractors said he was a misogynist and a drunkard, but Burch defends him.
“He was a brutally honest writer,” he says. “You get lots of young guys who say they like Bukowski, but they just like the idea of him drinking a lot and sleeping with a lot of women. That’s taking a shallow view. If he was drunk all the time, he wouldn’t have produced so much. He has had more published posthumously than most people have in their lifetime.”
In his final letter, Bukowski asks Burch to stop writing to him.
“I have my own wars to conduct,” he says, adding: “Sometimes some of the time must go to me. ‘Let’s go to a movie,’ I sometimes hear around here. Hell, what am I going to do watching a movie? Which is another question I sometimes hear around here: well, what are you going to do? As if I just had these vast spaces to loll about in. So this is to say, it’s not you. Don’t feel singled. Hope your paints are roaring for you. And hello to all the English pubs.”
Burch went on to form a new ensemble, Nigel Burch and the Flea Pit Orchestra, whose music is influenced by the great German composer Kurt Weill and such artists as Tom Waits.
“Brechtian, Cockney-Weimar cabaret,” is how it has been described.
The band are popular in Moscow, apparently appealing to the Russian alcoholic sensibility.
Just like Bukowski, Burch is keen on writing about “the flea pits” – dirty hovels, smelly bed-sits, crumbling pubs and the like. But apart from in a few renegade publications, the musician has never had his poems published. And as for his famous one-time correspondent, he never heard the sounds of the Flea Pit Orchestra.
• Nigel Burch and the Flea Pit Orchestra will be at the Boston Arms, 178 Junction Road, N19, on Sunday, July 4 at 8.30pm. Tickets are £5 and can be bought on the door or through www.hollowayartsfestival.co.uk.
• Listen to Nigel Burch’s music at www.myspace.com/ nigelburch