Interview by Andrew Hedgecock (1997)

The Edge frequently features Sinclair and his books are reviewed in depth.

This interview took place just before the publication of Slow Chocolate Autopsy by Phoenix House in hardback (£17.99) and trade paperback (£9.99), and covers all of Sinclair's career, forming the best introduction to him we know of. The books mentioned below are or have recently been in print. The Falconer, a companion work to Slow Chocolate Autopsy, is due for transmission by Channel 4 this year. Sinclair's new novel, Landor's Tower, is in progress.

It is impossible to discuss London fiction without mentioning Iain Sinclair. His reputation as the capital's visionary laureate was established with his prose poem Lud Heat (1975), an investigation of the mythology of the city and its impact on the contemporary population. Its occult triangulation of plague pits, murder sites and Nicholas Hawksmoor's London churches became the inspiration for Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor.

Sinclair's novels are White Chappell Scarlet Tracings (1987), a baroque narrative fusing the contemporary misadventures of a predatory bunch of bookdealers and a historical investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders; Downriver (1991), the log of a series of urban quests and a lugubrious jeremiad on the 'cabalistic machinations' of politicians, planners and multinational companies; and Radon Daughters (1994), a portrait of Albion undone - the bleak but often comical tale of a group of damaged characters and their obsessions.

Lights Out for the Territory (1997) is a non-fiction diary of nine walks charting London's mythology, secret history and counterculture - it includes Sinclair's unforgettable encounter with Lord Archer.

Sinclair's books are complex and multi-layered, blending doom-laden political satire, black comedy, secret history, myth, mysticism and autobiography. And his voice is as varied as his themes - switching between gritty reportage, pulp fiction wisecrack and dense, ecstatic, visionary poetry.

Sinclair is also a film-maker. His work includes Ah Sunflower! (a portrait of Allen Ginsberg, made for WDR Cologne) and The Cardinal and the Corpse, a documentary on London writers mixing factual and fictional elements, made with Christopher Petit for Channel 4.

We meet in a wine-bar in archetypal Sinclair territory, Spitalfields Market. Spitalfields is a place where London's present does battle with its past. It's a place of plague pits; a stalking ground of Jack the Ripper; a strange interzone between wealth and want, lowlife and high finance, materialism and mysticism. Across the road from where we sit, Hawksmoor's Christchurch is sheathed in scaffolding and plastic sheeting - a prophylactic to contain the dangerous energies of this eerily beautiful church.

. . . think the first thing that you would recognise as being something like White Chappell Scarlet Tracings came when I was living where I'm living now, in Haggerston, in the late 1960s. . . I was interested in investigating this part of the city, its history and its mythologies. There were elements of these themes in all the previous little poetry books I'd published here in London, but I'd like to think my book Lud Heat was the first to be dedicated to this kind of subject matter. . .

It was like an alternative university because it gave me all the time I needed to wander around this area. At the Brewery we'd start work very early in the morning, tipping out ullage slops into a big cellar, and then we'd have a free breakfast in their canteen. And then we were free to take off and wander around Whitechapel for two or three hours. In fact, Brian Catling [writer, sculptor, performance artist and regular Sinclair collaborator] was working there with me at the time and that's when the two of us really started to map this area out.

I never considered that my stuff had any commercial possibility until the 1980s when books like Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, which made use of similar material to mine, were becoming very successful. And I thought, well maybe I can get one of these things published. By the late 1970s I could no longer afford to publish work myself and I wanted to finish anyway. I felt that I'd done that kind of thing and it was time to move on. I'd been putting large chunks of prose into poetry books like Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge and I wanted to do a complete prose book. White Chappell Scarlet Tracings was related back to these earlier books but I'd removed the threads of poetry that went in between in the prose segments. I saw Lud Heat, Suicide Bridge and White Chappell as a kind of trilogy. Peter Ackroyd. . .

White Chappell examines the hypocrisies behind the surface values of Victorian society - were you consciously writing in reaction to the tories' victorian values campaign?

. . .

You once suggested the writing of Downriver had been a kind of apotropaic ritual, saying: 'you have to show what you fear most and damn it to actually happen.' did you see the book as a means to ward off the evil of thatcherism?

. . .As it turned out, the horror went far beyond anything I could have come up with. A lot of things I imagined, I'm surprised to see, are actually happening now. I had prison boats, the hulks, coming back in Downriver. I thought, 'that's pushing it a bit', but now they are actually here.

Downriver and Radon Daughters were works of dissent, focusing mainly on what was going on in London in the 1990s.

Downriver was, very directly. It was something that was done in the present tense. At that time I was working closely with Patrick Wright, who wrote a book called Journey Through Ruins, a documentary account of some of the same events that I was investigating. I did the fictional version and he did the documentary version. We were putting together a film proposal about Whitechapel, which never got made, but I did use the experience in the book. There was a journalistic present tense aspect of the book which then became this gonzo fiction - we were actually out looking into something. We'd go somewhere, see something, and go back and write it.

. . .this next book, Landor's Tower, will be very different, but it's one that I would have written ten years ago if I could. It's about what happens to utopian consciousness when people move out of the city and set up a community in the country. And the book is the whole history of these really crazy people who've attempted it in this one spot in Wales, Llanthony in Gwent. There are people who've been there since the 60s and they really do look seriously strange, because of the effort of having survived there for so long. And what was a community has often dwindled down to just one hermit, who looks like he's been on the Russian Front for 20 years, but he's still there.

... basically the whole book will be about the consequences of removing yourself from London ...

I was reading a lot of pulp fiction when I was finishing off as a bookdealer. It's very easy to carry paperbacks around and you can read this stuff very fast. The techniques of cross-cutting they use, which is also a standard TV form, where they have two or three stories going on at the same time, and you leave one on a hook and move on to the next. . . I absorbed that but I didn't want to do it straight. The jumping about in White Chappell is somewhat related to that, but isn't used for the same reasons, because it's not going to leave you on a narrative hook each time and persuade you into the next thing. Downriver is completely different, in a way it's like the pulp version of Victorian fiction.

This is banal, but the stuff I read is directly what I need to feed into the project in hand. At the moment I'm reading. . .

. . .Reviewing now is little more than a career opportunity - it gives people a chance to show off and get to a position where they're going to be offered lots of money to do a really bad novel. And everyone else will scratch their backs because they're in the same game. There's a few demented characters on the broadsheet book pages who take this sort of ethical battling stance. But really it's a load of bollocks. There's nothing ethical about any of it. They're trying to take a Leavisite high ground about literature in a seething pit, a morass. They're just reviewing rubbish and scoring minor points by what is really hack work, without being honest hacks doing it.

. . .

It's deeply dehumanised - the City itself is a totally protected cell. Walk past Fat Boy's Burger Bar, that pastiche American Diner out there, and right in front you'll see a surveillance checkpoint. Guys with guns and cameras and your every single movement is photographed. the City is like Fort Alamo, sealed off. And they think because there's nothing happening on the streets of the City, that's fine. So the idea is that anything that might happen is pushed outside the City walls. To complain about that seems to me, if you can see it and read it, to be inevitable. You've got to say something, how can you sit comfortably with these things?

I felt it was literal when Thatcher was around. I thought. . .

Yes, when somebody has gone to the trouble of naming these secret state buildings Tintagel House, Camelford House - Archer lives in Alembic House - it can't just be a complete, bland accident can it? All this connects up with notions of alchemy, and particularly Elias Ashmole, who was a careerist, a Tory, a royalist and an occultist as a secondary activity, which is to do with collecting and controlling forms of energy. Ashmole started writing books on alchemy. Archer, I feel sure, is not literally an alchemist but the metaphor applies in that he turns his tawdry stuff into gold. His own bookcase shimmers with gold: he's bound up a collection of his books, a whole huge library just of his own books, with nobody else's there. When you take them out they're just paperbacks re-bound into silver and gold.

Will you tell me about Slow Chocolate Autopsy?

It started out as an autopsy on my life as a writer and a city dweller. The rest of the title comes from 'slow glass' - which is a glass that light passes through very slowly and therefore time is on a different scale than if it comes through normal glass. It's a way of slowing down time. You see it through a sort of chocolate sepia filter.

I thought of it as just a working title. The publishers said at one point, 'This is a very weird title, do you want to think about that again?' I agreed completely and said I wanted to call it The Breathing Time. It's from Hamlet - it's near the end just before he gets killed: 'I will walk here... 'tis the breathing time of day with me.' It's like a pre-posthumous moment. And I thought: that's very nice, so I'll change the title to that . . .

To what extent did working with Dave McKean impact on your writing? Was 'Hardball', the football story you did for Nicholas Royle's A Book of Two Halves anthology the starting point for Slow Chocolate Autopsy?

. . .It also cross-cuts with my film with Chris Petit, The Falconer, to some extent. You don't have to know that though. One story in particular is very much based on the film. I think the book is too complex and literary for the standard graphic novel market, you can't zap through it looking for shock-horror effects. It doesn't read like that at all.

The mainstream ran out of energy. It's the end of a cycle and they're falling back on these millennial themes - the apocalyptic, the gothic. It's exactly what happened last century, a form of decadence.

I think so, the whole fascination with the possibilities of science and how to cope with that. You'd never have been able to predict that Stephen Hawking would have become a mega-bestseller. When his books started appearing in the early 1970s I looked into them and used some stuff in Suicide Bridge, but it was thought then to be completely deranged. Now it's absolutely mainstream, everyone talks glibly about black holes and various other phenomena. And, of course, these elements feed into fiction.

Well, film changed the novel from the start. Joyce managed the first cinema in Dublin, and Ulysses is very cinematic in technique and includes parodies of cinema as a form. I always thought. . .

We were going to go through America and revisit people like Corso and Burroughs, some of the old Beat writers. We started off on this with no money at all and Channel 4 gave us a development budget of £15,000 or something, on which we made virtually an entire film. But the nature of the project changed completely because one of the first people we were involved with was Peter Whitehead, the Falconer of the title. And we decided he should become the focus of the whole film. So we ended up with this unreliable Citizen Kane style portrait of Whitehead. His career is completely amazing.

... Wholly Communion was his first well-known film, about the poetry readings at the Albert Hall with Ginsberg. Then he made Tonite Let's All Make Love in London and Daddy - strange film projects. After that he vanished from sight but he'd become connected with Howard Marks, in his various enterprises, and turned up as chief prosecution witness in Howard Marks' trial. He vanished again, then turned up in Saudi Arabia where he was breeding falcons. He is somebody who has been in the frame all along. You could compose a history of the alternate culture, with Whitehead always there but never quite visible.

. . .Then he started writing self-published novels, his current career. At the same time he had this bizarre life - affairs with Bianca Jagger, Nico and Nathalie Delon; Howard Marks the best man at his wedding; connections with the Goldsmiths and Prince Philip. He was filming Robert Kennedy just before he was shot, there's a film of them together. The story is that Kennedy says he's going to tell Whitehead something important the next day - and then he's shot. The most truly fantastic stuff. These amazing stories accrue around Whitehead. They don't all play back through his films or books, but there's a sense of something very mysterious going on. He's deeply fascinated with Egyptian mythology and the practice of magic - he's quite close to Alan Moore. So he was the perfect vehicle for us to build the film around, but it's not a documentary account of the career of Whitehead, it just goes back to him from time to time.

I've always felt it…