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Interview [published June 2005]
Julie Burchill: Hurricane Julie
Ben Granger collides with Julie Burchill over several bottles of wine to seek
out the dreadful truth on chavs, Stalin, Ariel Sharon and Morrissey
“Never meet your heroes; they always disappoint”
runs the old saying. Invited from my humble Lancastrian
abode down to the Brighton realm of the greatest
shit-stirring iconic hack of our times, I wasn’t so much
afraid of Julie Burchill not living up to her reputation as
living up to it too much. Would she be gentle with me?
If Julie needs an introduction, it’s tough knowing
where to start. Running away from her working-class
Bristol childhood at the age of 17 to scribble speeddriven
venom for the NME at the height of punk,
marrying and deserting Tony Parsons prior to queening
it over the Groucho journo set, skipping gaily from
highly paid column to spiky column in a variety of
newspapers across the land. Enraging the Left with her
hard-line anti-liberalism and some-time Thatcher worship,
the Right with her brazen pro-Soviet Communism
and hatred of the bourgeoisie, and everyone with her
particular and peculiar blend of narcissism, iconoclasm
and rudeness. Leaving second husband Cosmo Landesman
for an affair with Charlotte Raven, subsequently
shacking up with Charlotte’s younger brother to whom
she is now married. Etcetera etcetera.
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
There’s no time for a biog here, but suffice to say
my longstanding admiration for the deliriously violent
punch of her writing, often despite myself, was why I
found myself here on the day. No I don’t agree with a
tonnes of what she says, but for me she has obtained
“Benefit of Clergy”, a phrase Orwell used about Dalí
(even though Julie hates Orwell too: worst offence in the
world in my book). This basically means offensiveness
is to some extent excused by how well it’s delivered,
and what’s behind it. But mainly how it’s delivered. It’s
what separates Jerry Sadowitz from Jim Davidson, and
South Park from the Sunday Sport.
Julie’s profile is higher now than for many a year after
finally breaking into the previously shunned medium of
TV. A Channel 4 adaptation of her lesbian teen-scream
novel Sugar Rush will be screened later this year, whilst
her typically pro-prole, contrary and acidly delivered
defence of the much maligned phenomenon of Chavs
on the eponymous Sky One documentary last February
slung a Molotov cocktail amongst the dinner party set
once again.
The journey down South is made all the more
122
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