*Tunetribe.com interview 2006. What caused you to disappear completely after a period of intense media interest? I think I went slightly mad really. A mixture of over work and over play, combined with all the people who were paid to work with me being sacked from EMI plus my business manager becoming seriously ill. All this came in one big splurge so I said, ” I’m tired of this game now, it’s not fun anymore, so I’m going off to become a different type of freak” Did you do much writing during this period? Not really. I think my main ambition was to become an out of work vegetarian gamekeeper on acid. Is it true that EMI wanted to market you as a pop star? What was your reaction to this? Yeah, the new team after the sacking of Clive black [EMI UK MD] and co, wanted to put me in a tight tee shirt and give me highlights. I said no thanks so they said seeya! What led you to drop the dandyish image? Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen. But strangely enough I snuck up to the attic the other day and found all the old clothes. I slipped on a pair of the trousers and OOOH sir! They suited me very well. I fear I may have to go back to Rakes and Dandies anonymous, I’ve been dreaming of sock suspenders and silk hankies again. Tell us about the incident at your Madame Jo Jo's gig… I walked on stage, admittedly looking very velvety. A loud and deep south London voice shouted. ‘Fuck off you fucking queer!” A bunch of transvestites stormed over to where the voice had come from giving it the “We maybe trannies but we no how to give it some” vibe. They soon turned on their heels and fled back to their booth. I tried to start my set another couple of times only to receive more of the same. So eventually I said to the sound guy “Why don’t you turn the house lights up so I can see what this asshole looks like?” Well, the lights went up to loud cheers from oblivious punters, only to reveal a huge beast of a man surrounded by his grinning henchmen. He stood up and shouted “ and now I’m going to fucking kill you, you queer cunt” Along with my cellist I took the long view and ran for it. Locked and barricaded the door of the dressing room, the beast pounded on the door for what seemed an eternity. When he had gone and Mick Pallant the promoter, had coaxed us out, we were told that the beast had just come out of Brixton Prison on remand for murder. Mick took great pleasure in telling me: “And do know what Murray? He done it and all!” Is there any one specific incident that prompted you to write ‘Simply Everyone’s Taking Cocaine’? If not, tell us about the thinking behind it. The first incident was, going into a Soho member’s bar and naively not realising why everyone seemed so incredibly confident. I felt so weirdly weirded out by it all and it just seemed to happen again and again in loads of different places. I new about Cocaine but just didn’t realise how wide spread its use was, until one day I got dragged to this nasty stockbrokers party in west London. I felt ostracised for the whole night by him and his macho mates. Thing crystallised when finally, by accident, I discovered they were all doing crack in a back room. Do you sit down to write or does stuff just pop into your head? The key to writing is to carry a little book around and make notes when you have ‘light bulb moments’. Otherwise you just end up sweating over crap ideas before spending the rest of the day guiltily web surfing under the pretence of research. Which people do you look up to as being real geniuses of the written/spoken word? John Cooper Clark, Shakespeare, John Lydon, Mick Jagger, Ivor Cutler, Snoop, Tennessee Williams, Joe Orton, Pam Ayers, some particularly foul mouthed Builders, the elderly, I could go on for weeks. Do you think people have a certain stereotype of live poetry, and if so how do you think those ideas can be broken down? Many people think that performance poetry is crap and anyone associated with it is uncool and cant make it in: comedy, proper poetry, or rock n roll. The problem is, that this view has quite an element of truth to it. I suppose the term “PP” rubs up against the British dislike of people getting ‘above themselves’ and "PP" is considered to be some sort of dodgy chiselling, like life coaching or hair sculpting. We ( UK ) usually tend to wait for America to deliver this type of thing before we jump aboard. Take slam poetry. If it had been invented over here I don’t think it would have got past the cynics in the pub function room. I suppose there are some British exceptions like Punk and drum and bass. They both went international but then they came from really strong urban movements, this is why some one like Attila the stockbroker will only refer himself as a Punk poet, because punk means: DIY and says “fuck you! I am politicised and I’m doing my own thing whatever you think or say” performance poetry to many says, “Hi my names Jeremy and I’m really cross” So perhaps a firm of highly paid image consultants is needed, or maybe Jeremy has to just stick out the abuse and keep going in the knowledge that its better to be a genuine failure than a carping cynic. www.tunetribe.com/murrayyoung