Lord of the Dandys Sebastian Horsley has died: One of my favourite writers, who I was lucky to call a friend. I first met Sebastian Horsley in a toilet cubile in Soho, in 2003. I remember he was wearing a pink suit, platform heels and a large top hat, and it didn’t feel like there was enough room in the cubicle for the hat, and those two dancing girls. Later I would become Sebastian’s commissioning editor at Loaded, where we published a handful of his columns, mainly about debauchery and prostitution, topics in which he held a doctorate. They were works of art.
“Cut these words, and they will not bleed,” he signed off once.
Sebastian Horsley, should you not be aware of his work, was the author of Dandy in the Underworld, his memoirs of a colourful life as a drug addict, lover of fine clothes and ladies of the night. It was a book that changed the way I thought about confessional journalism. Over the years, I became a friend of Sebastian, and together we helped turn his muse, Rachael Garley, into Loaded’s candid sex columnist, a piece that still runs today.
At Sebastian's flat
As Toby Young has already written, you never left a meeting with Sebastian without feeling the need to write down something that he’d said. Only months ago, myself and Loaded photographer Ian Dewsbury were at Sebastian’s now infamous Soho flat, waiting for a prostitute to arrive. I was to interview a working girl for the magazine, and Sebastian was my first port of call, after a failed mission to a lap-dancing club. “I hate lap dancing clubs,” he sighed. “Why go to a buffet with no prospect of feeding?” I took out my pen.
Today, I feel sad reading our recent emails, each of them a classic. “I forgive you my dear, I forgive you,” he typed, after I forgot to send him his cuttings (he called them his ‘Gloriana’ and they were very important.). “That’s like an MBE from the devil….” I replied, to which Sebastian volleyed back, “Well Satan did model himself on me.”
We were both a long time off the booze, that day when the prostitute finally arrived. Quite a nice girl, actually, with a degree in marketing. But she was drunk and after the photographs she noticed the loaded revolver by Sebastian’s bed, and was peterbed. “Safe sex, my dear, safe sex,” quipped Horsley, and the girl’s mouth fell open.
Sebastian with his 'Gloriana'
The loss of Sebastian Horsley is a tragic one, but I was pleased that he got to see the theatre performance of his book finally played out on stage. “They say seeing your doppelganger is an omen of death,” he told the Evening Standard just days ago, hauntingly. I was supposed to be meeting Sebastian to talk about the forthcoming publication of Rachael’s columns into a similar book of memoirs, something I hope we can still do without him, but that can wait, of course. The first ‘Rachael’ columns we tried he ghosted himself, but the Editor insisted they sounded too much like Byron. I rewrote them myself and was terrified of what Sebastian would think. “I liked it very much once you got rid of Horsley,” he wrote. “I’ve been trying and failing for years to get rid of Horsley.”