#fagburn

Here is a great article by Fagburn detailing his visit to Orton and Halliwell's former flat. It appeared in the January 2005 issue of Gay Times. Click on each image to read each page.

Fagburn, Richard Smith, will be missed. I really enjoyed reading his blog. It was nice to have his voice out there. His writing combined a good mix of wit and necessary criticism of queer media. And made me feel a little less alone in this world. [18.1.68 - 25.8.17]

A little respect: paying tribute to a great queer writer, Richard Smith

A lovely piece by Adrian Lobb on Fagburn’s Seduced and Abandoned, selected as one of The Quietus’s Top 40 Books About Music

The late, great Richard Smith was a wonderful writer with rapier wit combined with a lightness of touch, even as he tackled the heaviest of subjects. In this collection of essays, Smith covers a broad range of music – from Mixmaster Morris to the Happy Mondays, via R.E.M., Stock Aitken Waterman, RuPaul, The Kinks, Suede, David Bowie, Nirvana, Morrissey, Freddie Mercury and Erasure (spoiler alert, he’s not a fan) – looking at the many and varied way in which gay men create, shape and interact with pop music. Culture and identity politics, popular music as a platform from which to interrogate sexuality and gender, responses to the AIDS crisis and Smith’s own notes on camp and ‘ambisexuality’ are explored in a series of short but deep and loving essays that are serious but never sober. Playful, provocative, opinionated and profound, Seduced And Abandoned is a stunning collection of popular music writing (my copy has been overdue at the John Barnes library in Camden since May 7 1998, sorry), and highlights the huge vacuum left by former Gay Times and Melody Maker writer Smith when he died in 2017 aged just 49.

"Few able men have had a more destructive influence on art, reducing it to the mechanical processes of the production line; few men have so far dulled the standards of aesthetic achievement on the one hand and aesthetic judgement on the other that any vulgar fool with access to a camera and a print shop can pretend to be an artist; no man has so exploited the business of self-publicity that simply being an artist has become more important than any work an artist may produce. That it is now possible for any witless schoolboy to declare himself an artist, though he cannot draw, cannot paint, cannot sculpt, is illiterate, inarticulate, ignorant and has no skills of any kind, is largely Warhol's work, his donation to posterity. He was, as Carl Andre observed, 'the perfect glass and mirror of his age, and certainly the artist we deserved'. Of himself he said, 'If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings, and there I am. There's nothing behind it' - yet we persist in finding what was never there."

- Brian Sewell, Tatler (1989)

A stunning return to form, album of the year, etc, etc...

Thought this was a bit disappointing, really. It didn't add anything new to what was already known and there wasn't enough there to justify a new film. Most of it is reenactments of bits of the plays and some of Joe's diaries spoken by an actor trolling about. Worth watching, though. The best film on Orton is still the 1982 Arena documentary:

Several years ago, Orton and Halliwell's former flat came up for sale and Fagburn used the opportunity to go round and have a look.

It's tiny. You can see why Joe kept going out cottaging. And how Ken ended up - quite literally - driving Joe up the wall.

He used to say that he hoped one day the uncensored Orton diaries would be published/released. I have the vague memory that he thought we were never told the full truth about Orton's murder and certain revealing bits (perhaps alluded to in Halliwell's final note) were edited out.