Fashion Neurosis with Hanif Kureishi

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1:10Hi, come in.

1:17Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, Hanif Qureshi. Thanks, Pala. It's a great pleasure. I've been looking forward to doing this with you. I'm so envious of all the other people you've invited to have on. So I'm glad finally I'm here. Me too. Can you tell me what clothes you're wearing and why you chose these particular ones today? I'm going to look down and see what I am wearing. I think I've got a blue sweater on. But I didn't choose my clothes. I didn't really choose my clothes anymore. I've got two carers in the morning, one who lives in and another one, usually a stranger, who pops in at 8 o 'clock in the morning and they get me dressed.

2:03When I was younger and before my accident, I went to a lot of trouble, or some trouble at least, with what I wore. And I thought about it and changed my clothes during the day. Since my accident and since my body became so injured and different, And I've kind of given up thinking about really what I wear or what I look like, because when I see myself, I'm so appalled and ashamed that I have to look away. So I'm not really aware of what I'm wearing, but Isabella chooses my clothes and I try and wear plain stuff because I don't want to be looked at anymore, to be honest, to tell you the truth. I mean, you don't look like you haven't taken trouble.

2:57So Isabella's doing a good job. I feel like you're looking like you normally do. You know, you look like you care about how you're out and about. And I wondered if there's anything that you do like to wear that you feel represents you as you've always been. I don't think about that anymore really because I don't care about it and I don't want to be looked at I don't want to be seen because when I see photographs of myself I see myself in a wheelchair the worst thing is being in Tesco's to tell you the truth they've got these huge screens Tesco's is one of my favourite places but they've got these huge screens and when you're going up the aisle you see yourself in your wheelchair like a little beetle progressing up the up up the aisle and of course when you're in Tesco's and you're looking around you can only see you're a sort of dog's eye level of everything and you see yourself in a wheelchair going up the aisle it's a horrible thing to have to see but I've still got my brain and my mind and I can think and write and do shit that is useful.

4:22That keeps me going. Because you're one of our greatest contemporary British writers and you're a novelist, a playwright. You've written screenplays including the Oscar-nominated My Beautiful Laundrette, which is one of my favourite films. And in December 2022, you fainted and woke up on the floor in a pool of blood, paralyzed from the neck downwards. And almost immediately you started writing and dictated to your partner, Isabella. And writing, you said, has kept you connected to wanting to stay alive. Is that? yeah it's really important to me to write to do stuff every day i get up when i finally get my clothes on i i like to go to work and i like to work on my blog which i do every day with uh my now i do it with carlo my second eldest son he comes to the house every day at 10 o 'clock and we write the the blog and if we're not doing the blog i do the the the film we're doing a movie of shattered or I do something else.

5:39It's really important to me to, you know, not to abandon the idea of myself as an artist, as a writer, which is what I am and I need to remain. Otherwise, you know, I'm just a broken body. I mean, most people who have had spinal cord injuries, they've fallen over or fallen out of bed or dived into an empty swimming pool or whatever and ruin their bodies, they can't go back to work, most of them. If you're a truck driver, you can't go back to work, et cetera. But I can work. I need to work for my dignity, for my sense of myself and not being a useless person, that I've got some dignity, which is my contribution, which is how I can earn a living and support Isabella and do something useful in the world.

6:38It really became much more important to me after the accident. When I was in the Gemelli Hospital after the accident, a few days after the accident really, Isabella would sit at the end of the bed and she would type the blogs into her phone. And then we would start putting them on Substack and people would start reading them and it went round and it got bigger. bigger very quickly. And that was very gratifying because you're lying alone in a hospital bed, you've had this devastating accident, you're completely traumatized, you think you're going to die. But at the same time, you can communicate with a big audience.

7:22At the same time, I designed for myself a new way of writing, which was the blog, which I'd never written a blog before. It's a kind of the mixture between a sort of mission statement and a diary. And so I just wrote down any shit that was happening to me, memories, things about my dad and my mom, things about being in Bromley in the 60s, and what was happening to me that day, what was happening to my body, what was happening with the physios and with the nurses and so on. So it was like discovering a new form of writing even as I was on the edge of death. And it's incredible to be creative at a time like that.

8:05But then you think, if I can't be creative now, when am I going to be creative? You can't wait for ideal conditions. Yeah, I mean, your writings just seems better than ever. I've been reading the blog ever since you started, and I've read your book. Yeah. And have you ever written with someone else before? because I watched a little clip of you and Carlo and him arguing about a word and why you should use another one, and it was so exhilarating. It was great. It's a brand new thing for me, Bella. It never occurred to me that you could write with anyone else before. I mean, me and Carlo, we write the sentences together, and then we argue about everything, the paragraphs and so on.

8:52But these are very productive conversations. Yeah. They're really good conflicts we have. It was so interesting listening to that, and it was clear what you were both going for and driving at and how everything that you both said to each other was making, improving it. And as a reader, it's so immediate, the experience, and it's so enjoyable and so revelatory. It's fantastic. Well, he's really tough. Yeah. He does what he's horrible, actually. What he does, he does something called pushback, a word I'd never previously come in contact with, which means that he fucking argues about everything. And he says, oh, Dad, Dad, this is so disappointing.

9:43You've said this before. And I can't, I don't want to hear another word about Bromley in the 1960s. Stuff like that. So it makes me do new stuff all the time. It's really hard work. But we have long conversations, conversations which we would never have had in normal circumstances about everything, about sex, about immigration, about politics, about Tesco, about trivial stuff and big stuff. But it means that I can write stuff that I haven't written before. And I really like the idea of it being quite random, what we're going to write. I mean, I might write about a trip to the shops, or I might write a political piece about me becoming a fascist, for instance.

10:29Yes. Which I wrote recently. I read that. So it's a great new form that I discovered after having my accident. Yeah, it's very exacting. It's amazing to find a new way of writing at a certain point in your life when you're so established and people love your work and look forward to what you're doing. And it's like you've got this sudden new dimension, this edge that goes along with having been in the worst accident. You know, you could never want this to happen. Well, you could say that trauma or what happened to me has created an opportunity for me to do something new. I wouldn't have done this if I hadn't got smashed my head on Isabella's floor in Rome.

11:27Yeah. But it creates an opportunity for you to do something new. I mean, I regret what happened. I wish it hadn't happened. But it's given me a new lease of life with the writing and the opportunity to write with Carla or to write with Isabella and to write stuff that I wouldn't have said previously. So it's a late stage flowering, you might say, that's come out of this terrible occurrence. But also, I mean, the terrible occurrence is where we're all going. And the kindness of strangers, of the carers, and the nurses, and the doctors, we're all going there. So I feel I'm writing about a common experience, It's one that most people have had in their families, i.e., you know, most of us have had accidents in our families and people have died, or where you are going yourself as well, you know, and how you'll cope with your own deterioration and your own eventual death.

12:29Can I ask you about clothes and whether there was a piece of clothing you were obsessed with as a child that you felt that would somehow change your life? Oh, yeah. Have other people have that? Yeah. I was very excited. I used to do my paper round in Bromley, get up at 6.30, go to the shop and haul this big bag of fucking papers around the streets. And I got very excited because I used to read all the papers, and I used to like reading newspapers and still do. Anyway, one of the reasons I was doing this paper round was to buy clothes. And what I really wanted was to buy a pair of Levi jeans, four pounds I think they were at the time.

13:22And I was saving up to get these Levi jeans. And I was very excited when I got my Levi jeans because the boy that I was in love with, a guy called David Goatley, who I'm still in contact with today, in fact. He told me that I should wear Levi's jeans. And so I got these Levi jeans, and then I got, I was a hippie. Everyone in the school was in a gang. So you were either a mod, a rocker, a skinhead, or a hippie. and I was a hippie and I wore jeans, I wore a purple shirt and my dad got me some kind of Indian waistcoat with, you know, kind of glitter things on it. I was very proud of this gear and I would walk around Romney High Street, which is what you had to do.

14:18Yeah. Walk around Romney High Street on Saturday afternoon in your clobber and so I saved up to get this clobber. And then after that, we used to take the train up to the King's Road. Oh, God. Wonderful. And we'd walk up and down the King's Road. And King's Road on the Saturdays, you probably remember it. Yeah. It was an incredible parade of people in their best clothes and there were these incredible boutiques in the King's Road. I remember thinking, this is it. This is London. This is where I want to be. It was a fantastic parade of incredible people wearing beautiful clothes. Yeah, I used to get the bus up there because I lived in Sussex, and I'd get the bus, the number 11 bus, to visit my friend who lived in Poulton Square at the end near World's End.

15:09But I became obsessed with what the bus conductors were wearing and these grey suits with a pale blue shirt. but this is what I remember, whether it was actually, and a tie. Yeah. And that was the sort of first bit of evolution of kind of my look, I think. I loved that journey down the King's Road. Yeah. But did you really start your writing career in the 70s as a pornography writer? I started writing porn around, it was really around after I'd left university, I'd left King's, where I read philosophy. But it was a year of punk. It was a year of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. I think it was 76 or 77, I can't remember.

16:04We'd left university, and we were living in squats and these cold-water flats and stuff around West Kensington. and everybody was hustling, you know, working as hookers, stealing. London was really rough in those days. And I used to write for magazines that had, you know, naked girls. But in those days, they used to have writing in the magazines as well. Amazing. Unusual that people would actually want to read pornography. It's completely absurd now. And I used to write stories for them. But I'd also write serious stuff, like about the Marquis de Sade. I remember writing a long thing about Aubrey Beardsley, who I used to love.

16:57So I started to make a living doing this stuff. It was a good introduction, but it's a stupid form, Paul, because there's nothing you can do with it, really, that's interesting. interesting so then i stopped that and then i started to write like early drafts of the buddhist suburbia i guess right which was a novel i've been trying to write for years but i couldn't what have we in 76 i started writing it really uh at the end of the end of the 80s when i wrote it properly because you mentioned and i think this was much later but you you knew jg ballard which he writes very well about sex and i'm just reading crash at the moment so oh yeah that's a great book i didn't know him at all but i've just written a blog about um shepherd's bush and the gold road and so on where i spend every day now roaming around in my wheelchair but i remember i used to see jg bella walking around shepherd's bush and it used to freak me out completely i think there's the world's greatest writers and he's walking down my road um and apparently he had a a girlfriend or a lover who lived above mcdonald's on shepsbush green this was according to legend so i was very impressed by that and and and love still love his work yes i've never read anything I've seen films, but I saw Crash, and then I started reading it now, and I wish I'd read it years ago because it's so interesting.

18:40But you were at school in Bromley with Billy Idol, and he gave you your first tab of acid, and you said that he made you throw the watch that your dad had bought for you, age 16 out of the window on the train saying, time doesn't matter. Yeah, I think he got that. Bill Broad was his name then. He used to wear little round glasses and a duffel coat. God. I think he got that from Easy Rider, actually. But Bromley was the most incredibly boring place and hell on earth on Sunday afternoons in the rain. But actually, it was really creative as well. I mean, a lot of the kids that I knew formed bands.

19:25A lot of punk came out of Bromley. Yeah, the Bromley Contingent. That was a big punk thing. Yeah, I was at school with the Bromley Contingent. I knew all those boys. I'm still in touch with some of them. And then we came to London and started hanging around Vivian Westwood's shop, which was then called Sex, at the end of King's Road. and all the pubs and bars around there were full of punks on Fridays and Saturdays. And so although Bromley was really dull, there was a lot of opportunity to be creative. And the Bromley contingent, I mean, those kids went into fashion. They worked for Vivian Westwood Photography.

20:05They were in bands. It was a very creative time despite the fact it was so deathly dull in Bromley. It was quite close to London. So you come up to London, go up the King's Row, buy clothes, and get involved in what was happening really at the end of the 60s and then into punk in the mid-70s. I wonder why it produced so many creative people, because it really did like all the, I mean, obviously David Bowie as well, and you and my friend Susie Cave, and there's just a lot of very groundbreaking people that came from Bromley. I remember seeing Billy Idol in, there used to be this punk club called The Vortex.

20:49Did you ever go then? No, I remember the look. He was so good looking that everyone slightly looked down on him because he was just like, he looked like a film star. It was just absurd how good looking he was. So everyone was a bit sort of contemptuous. Yeah. Well, it was a very creative time because of what happened earlier, which was then called the 60s, you know. and this explosion of talent and creativity in the 60s, but it really had begun to expand by the 70s. Everyone was doing it. Everyone was dressing up. You know, David Bowie had been to the school that I went to, and he obviously was 10 years older than us, but he had been a huge influence.

21:34Everybody thought if he can be in a band, he can do it. He's so unique and interesting. We can start dressing up and doing stuff, you know. And in those days, certainly in and around London, there was much more social mobility than there is now. You really felt that, you know, you could join a band or become a photographer or get into fashion and you could leave Bromley behind and become a new person and reinvent yourself and then get involved in the creative industries. There was much more flux socially than there probably is now. I mean, I was a mixed-race kid from the suburbs, and I thought, fuck it, I can be a writer.

22:21I can be a great writer. Even though there have never been any writers like me before in the UK and Britain, I thought, I can have a go at that. I can do that. It didn't seem to me to be insurmountable that I could do that, you know. Because Bowie wrote the soundtrack for your first novel, Buddha of Suburbia. He wrote the music for the TV version, the BBC version of Buddha of Suburbia that was directed by Roger Michel with Naveen Andrews playing me. Bowie was very keen to do it. He asked me if he could do it. Wow. How did that happen? He said to me, he said, I thought you'd never ask. I said, ask what?

23:09That I can do the music for the Buddha of Suburbia. I said, I didn't think you'd want to do it. He said, I've never done it before. He said he was going to do the music for the man who fell to earth, but he was too tired at the end to do it. So he offered to do it, and he was very keen to do it. And he worked really hard on it, actually. And his album, The Buddha of Suburbia, is a really good album, one of his best albums, I actually think. He made an album at the end of all the bits of music that he had composed for the soundtrack. God, that's amazing. I must get that. Yeah, it's a fantastic record.

23:46Because I remember once you saying that you'd written a song for him. He asked me to write the lyrics for a song on the album called The Buddha of Suburbia. and I said, how do you want to do this? He said, well, I do the cut-ups. So he said, write all the words down. So I went home, went through the Buddha of Suburbia and wrote all the phrases and words and bits of dialogue and all the stuff. Then I took it back to him, and he got his scissors out, and he did the cutting-up shit. And then he wrote the song around the words that I presented to him, and he got this cut-up method from Burroughs and Brian Geisen.

24:31Yeah, which was that you cut shit up and move it around and you create sentences. It's a very effective way of creating new sentences, new ideas. Is that why the songs, they have this kind of unexpected, well, they're just so brilliant, the unexpected phrases or things people are doing. Yeah, you can create new ideas and new stuff out of the random mixture of different words that you then move around and cut up and put in a line together. I used to do it with Keir, my son. We used to write poems like that. It's really effective, actually. I must try. Yeah. Such a good idea. Yeah. And growing up, you've written about receiving a lot of racist abuse being of Pakistani origin.

25:25And I wondered if you dressed to be anonymous or to attract attention as a way of dealing with it and maintaining your identity. Well, in Bromley at that time, at the end of the 60s, 70s, it was quite violent. There were a lot of skinheads around. And I knew all the skinheads. I'd been to school with them. I knew their families and so on. And I was a hippie. So you're in double trouble. Not only were you a Paki, but you're a hippie as well. you know we had long hair and and wore you know loom pants and all that stuff so you're in double danger of being chased around it was quite hair raising yeah i mean it really was it was quite rough down in bromley particularly in the 70s when um the end the national front were down there you know and the bmp were marching and around all the time gangs of of skinheads and so on but i knew a lot of those boys as i said and my beautiful lawn drat you know he's in love with her skinhead played by uh daniel day lewis and it kind of represents a a good friend of mine i was at school with who later on became a skinhead and uh you know wore a ben sherman and levi's and the big boots and you know, and Cromby and all that stuff.

26:51And about how, you know, we were really close friends. We were really close to each other. And how awkward it was when he became a skinhead and discovered that I was, in fact, you know, a paki. And that was the basis of that movie, really. It was so romantic how you showed the change, you know. it's just so brilliantly done I love it, it's incredibly moving and convincing well I wrote it originally as just a friendship I remember I was in Pakistan and I was writing it it was about two mates one who's a Pakistani one who's a skinhead and they were running a laundrette etc. but when I made it romantic when they had a kiss the film really kicked off it really came alive in some way and the dancing so magical and poetic incredible that was Stephen Friars' idea so good you've written about gay and bisexual characters at a time when it was taboo but there's a lack of shame in your writing and I wondered how you'd managed to avoid this cursed condition well well when i wrote my beautiful lawn draft which was around um i was going to say the early to mid 80s there was a lot of shit gay shit going on in london at that time you'll remember it particularly what derek jarman was doing um and also then there were the merchant ivory films quite soon after that which was posh gay bumming yes um but i wanted to do the, you know, a bit of rough gay bumming.

28:46And the big gay sweatshop, there'd been a lot, Simon Callow, and what they were doing. So there's a lot of gay stuff going on all the time in London. And when we were punks, we used to go to all the gay clubs. Do you remember the Sombrero? Yeah. And Ken High Street, we used to go there. Yeah. And to Louisa's Club, which was a lesbian club. So the gay scene and the punk scene were quite adjacent to one another. So it wasn't such a big step to write a gay relationship in My Beautiful Laundra. But as you say, it hadn't really been done in the cinema. It would have been quite difficult to do in America, for instance.

29:29No studio would have ever made a film about a gay skinhead, for instance. But you could do it in those days. You could do it on Channel 4 because Channel 4 was new and it just started. and you could do innovative and weird shit on Channel 4 because nobody ever watched Channel 4. Yeah, they were fantastic. It was a very good period in British cinema because Channel 4 invested a lot of money in films that Derek Jarman made, Neil Jordan made, Stephen Frears obviously made several films for them, Ken Loach, of course, et cetera. It was a very lively period in British cinema, actually funded by television.

30:07Yeah, it was wonderful. and who did you look up to style wise at that time in the in the in the 70s yeah well you know it was a big dressing up period you know because after uh uh punk everyone got got bored of wearing safety pins and black black leather everybody started dressing up and and it was the club we used to go to called the blitz which was in hoban which was a big dressing up place where boy george ran the cloakroom but i really stopped dressing up then i wasn't going to wear all that gear yeah that new romantic stuff yeah yeah i was not going to wear that stuff and i wasn't gonna walk around you know full face makeup and and all of that because you know i was becoming a serious writer then writers don't need to wear makeup because nobody ever sees a fucking writer you You sit at your desk in your pants.

31:09Yeah. And that's your job. So by then, I started to lose interest in clothes. And then it was the 80s, which was really good fun. And Soho started. Lots of more restaurants in Soho, clubs in Soho. There's a lot of television money, advertising money. So the whole scene changed really between the end of the 70s and the 80s. But by the 80s, I'd really kind of lost interest in what I was wearing, was much more interested in other people, being with creative people and starting to become a serious writer that was much more important to me than, you know, parading around in gear. I'm really pleased that the Jane Goodall collection with Brilliant Earth connects to my vision of how we can live in harmony with nature.

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32:51Download today. and if you fancy someone and you don't like something they're wearing does it kill your attraction to them that's a very interesting question because obviously because you as you suggest you're looking at people all the time you are looking at them what you're looking at is their face their gestures their eyes their mouth and so on but you're looking at their clothes and every day every single person in the world chooses their clothes don't they yeah and make a choice they're going to be looked at and they must think what are people gonna think when they when they look at me so yeah you would choose a person a lover a friend i mean if they wore hideous clothes would you would you dislike them but you don't do you some people i think are more allergic to certain things than others.

33:51But it's such an interesting thing how, even if it does put you off, whether you decide to override that or not. With my girlfriends, whoever they were over the years, I wouldn't want them to look a mess. I want them to look what I would think of as being good, that they would care for how they looked, would think about it. That would be important. I guess for a man, I don't know whether it matters so much for a woman, whether she would care what you wore or what you looked at. I think for a man it would be quite important that the woman had thought about how she looked. I think for a woman it's important, but not for that reason.

34:37It's more like having a kind of almost physical response of withdrawing or embarrassment. I suppose in the end it's always dependent on the person because someone you like can wear these terrible things even really quite sort of violently off-putting and you just think, oh, well, you know. And if you don't like them, you just think, I must never see that person again. I guess in the 1950s, everybody wore the same thing. All the mothers on my street where we lived in Bromley, they would all wear the same clothes. They'd usually wear a pinny as well. I remember my mum always wore a pinny. But by the 60s, clothes were cheap then by the 60s.