William S. Burroughs

Click to listen to mp3 excerpts...
- The Meet Cafe/Song of the Mugwump

"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train..." - William Burroughs, from Naked Lunch (1959)

So begins Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs' hallucinogenic roller-coaster ride through the darker recesses of the human psyche. Through its 21 chapters and Atrophied Preface, the reader is introduced for the first time to such unforgettable Burroughsian characters as Bradley the Buyer, A.J., Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid and the extraordinary Dr Benway. In Naked Lunch, Burroughs, with one deft swipe of his pen-scapel, cuts away all the bullshit and pretense surrounding Truth, Justice and The All-American Way.

Left in its place for all to see (if they dare to look) is The Algebra of Need, a metaphor which Burroughs uses to strip naked all the Goverments, Corporations and Organisations of the World, revealing their true intentions.

Naked Lunch means precisely what the title suggests: a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.

"No glot...C'lom Fliday."

I have chosen present this work using the principles of collage. This decision comes directly from the pages of the novel itself, since Naked Lunch is structured in that way - not as a narrative, but as a series of interconnected vistas onto and into the world of Burroughs' harrowing and hilarious fictional city of Interzone. My musical setting will be a kind of "Naked Lunch Experience", if you like, rather than a full reading of the complete text of the book.

Regarding the myriad characters who inhabit the NL world, the narrator will be required to switch between each as necessary, but also with the knowledge that they are all but aspects of Burroughs himself, or at least that aspeect of himself who transcribed these missives from the front-line of the real War on Drugs. As Burroughs himself says at one point in Naked Lunch:

"Sooner or later The Vigilante, The Rube, Lee the Agent, A.J., Clem and Jody The Ergot Twins, Hassan O'Leary the After Birth Tycoon, The Sailor, The Exterminator, Andrew Keif, 'Fats' Terminal, Doc Benway, 'Fingers' Schafer are subject to say the same thing in the same words to occupy, at that intersection point, the same position in space-time."

The music will consist of both live performance and pre-recorded tape. The scores will be distributed randomly to the performers, who will have to interpret the various instructions and notations on their parts in relation to what else is going on around them, which will be impossible to determine beforehand, there being many different possible combinations of activity occuring at any one time.

Part of the Naked Lunch project received its premiere performance on July 1st. "The Meet Café—Song of the Mugwump" was played to open a homage & symposium in Paris in celebration of the 50th anniversary of William Burroughs' seminal Beat novel. Organised by esteemed Burroughsians Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen, the three days and evenings of events held at the University of London Institute in Paris, July 1st to July 3rd, combined informal talks, academic papers, film-screenings, live and recorded musical performance, and a small exhibition of visual materials. There was also a special afternoon event at the old Beat Hotel in rue Git-le-Coeur.