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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com The hyperbole of the book can grate when running totally counter to your own thoughts. The pronouncement that the young Steven must have found Myra Hindley a “bad mother to offset his good mother” takes his speculation to offensively glib depths, and I for one can do without anyone talking up the dreadful Freud – as he does – even in passing. But then someone with Simpson’s provocative style is bound to piss off everyone at least once during a whole book, and quite rightly so. The book’s best achievement is it mirrors its subject in being pretentious without being pompous, and taking BUY Mark Simpson books online from and things very very seriously while at the same time relishing its own absurdity with a constant self-lacerating wit. It is under no illusions its subject is a spiteful, dishonest, difficult sod but loves him more, not less for it. As the man finally returns with a new album after seven long years, all those nervous fanatics praying for a new Vauxhall And I (rather than a Kill Uncle) would be well advised to have a copy of this book by your bedside to remind you of the childish stupidity and effortless brilliance of your obsession. It will prove you’re not mad after all; or if you are at least you’re in entertaining company. � 478 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Interview [published October 2002] Iain Sinclair: Width Of A Circle Iain Sinclair walked the length of the M25 motorway to research his book London Orbital. Chris Hall hears why Listeners of Radio 4’s Today programme recently voted London’s M25 the worst of the Seven Horrors of Britain in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if they’d done what the novelist, poet and ‘psychogeographer’ Iain Sinclair did and walked around the M25, they’d have thought differently. For this was his unique project – to walk anti-clockwise around the motorway and the areas that it enclosed from Waltham Abbey, exploring the huge tranches of unknown territory that lay bounded by the M25 outside of the city centre. And in doing so, comprehending the scale of the invasion of commerce in these zones and witnessing, as it were, an invisible landscape disappear. Sinclair describes the journey – taken in the millennial year – in his new book London Orbital. Most people would of course regard the idea of circumnavigating the M25 as a mad one, but was it really that dispiriting? “Not at all. The experience of doing it was incredibly exhilarating,” says Sinclair. “You didn’t know what you were going to find. Getting up really early in this weird landscape. You might as well have been in some BUY Iain Sinclair books online from and totally remote country.” It is the disconnection between our apprehension of London and its actual topography that Sinclair writes about. (As Will Self puts it: Londoners don’t live in London, they live in the tube map of London). London Orbital is full of developments that airbrush or ignore the history of their sites. Places like Enfield Island Village, described as “an exciting new village community”, of which Sinclair writes: “The village isn’t new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new. What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is suddenly ‘stylish’.” So what does he think about the housing forecasts for the South East, the recommendations of the Urban Task Force report, and the colossal amount of brownfield renewal that is necessary in and around the capital? “These seem to be projections made from a very privileged metropolitan standpoint about something that’s going to happen ‘out there’, without true knowledge of just what actually is out there,” he says. “The notion of decanting swathes of the populace into these amor- 479 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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