New Sensation, Old Hat

New Zealand Gerald has his own leaky Australian. Last week someone signing themselves “Australian Shane” emailed me a proof copy of Michael Hutchence: Original Sinner, purporting to be by one Pamela Hurst. I might as well come clean: I absolutely love Michael Hutchence – the man, the music, the Tiger Lily. Australian Shane must know this, but how? Until now, for reasons too numerous and salacious to repeat here, I have told no one of my Devil inside, of my adoration of the suicide brunet.

Some swift, goggling Googling determined that Australian Shane wasn’t in the business of playing practical jokes: Michael Hutchence: Original Sinner will be published next March by Gracenote Publishing, whose website describes the book as “so sensational that you will sin just by touching it”.

I of course devoured it in one sitting and could barely breathe as I read the final page – it was as if Sin, in the form of Hutchence’s leather belt, was strangling me for daring to read its secrets.

Bearing in mind the plight of WikiLeaker Julian Assange and fearing being extradited to Sweden on account of two unpaid parking tickets dating back to 1996, I knew exactly what I had to do: tell no one. Frankly, it’s more than my blog’s worth to reveal what’s in Michael Hutchence: Original Sinner. I can reveal, however, some of my own Hutchence discoveries – the products of decades of research – which I am proud to say Pamela Hurst seems to know nothing about. 

Behind Hutchence’s seemingly simple lyrics there is a rare, combining intelligence that, once recognized, changes your opinion of the man forever. Hutchence was obsessed with numerology – he was born in a fortune-teller’s tent in Luna Park – and even taught himself Hebrew and Ancient Greek in order to discover the full significance of the number 7 in the Bible.

By the time he was 27 Hutchence had developed an insatiable desire for numerology, discovering and digesting texts from every corner of the world. By the age of 30 his research had convinced him that it was in fact the number 3, not 7, that unlocked the secrets of the universe. Witness the opening verse of “New Sensation” (1988):

Live baby live

Now that the day is over

I got a new sensation

In perfect moments

Impossible to refuse

One could write volumes about these 30 syllables. Hutchence penned them on his 30th birthday, exactly 30 minutes after the time of his birth, which was exactly 3pm by the fortune-teller’s watch. The “baby” in the first line is clearly as much Hutchence as Tamara Nye, his then main squeeze (the letters of her name are divisible by 3). When on tour Hutchence referred to himself exclusively in the third person and only ever stayed in hotel rooms with a “3” in their number.

Close examination of the verse reveals Hutchence was foreshadowing his own death. Exactly 9 years, 9 months and 9 days after the release of the “New Sensation”, he filled his lungs for the last time. Prior to taking that final breath he’d spent 3 hours under the misapprehension that the Beck lyric “Loose ends, tying the noose in back of my mind” from the song “Jack-ass” (1996) was directed solely at him. Drug-induced psychosis takes no prisoners.

It should be clear by now that Hutchence’s “new sensation” and “perfect moments / Impossible to refuse” were heroin and incipient heroin addiction respectively. The chorus proves this beyond doubt:

Gotta hold on you

A new sensation

A new sensation

Right now

Gonna take you over

A new sensation

A new sensation

By the time Hutchence checked into his own Hotel California (he could never leave) in Sydney he was heating his “Judas” (a friend that betrays you) over 33 Bunsen burners using a specially commissioned spoon with the radius of a truck tyre. When not chasing the dragon, it was impossible to dissuade him from the belief that he was about to be squashed by a Godzilla-sized kangaroo. Amazingly, he had foreseen this ultimate chaos and sewn its desperate antithesis into the fabric of “New Sensation”:

Hate baby hate

When there’s nothing left for you

You’re only human

What can you do?

It’ll soon be over

Don't let your pain take over you

Love baby love

It’s written all over your face

There’s nothing better we could do

Than live forever

Well that’s all we’ve got to do

The bitter irony of the closing lines speaks for itself. There is nothing new under the sun and your new sensation is someone else’s old hat. Hutchence was sure to be found wearing nothing but his leather belt (around his neck) and the shabby pink Stetson Mick Jagger had given him in 1995 (a year divisible by 3).

The funeral was spectacularly interrupted by the well-known Australian lunatic Peter Hore, who shouted “This is how he did it, Paula! This is how he died!” before jumping over a balcony to which he had secured a 4-foot black cord, the other of end of which was tied to the dog collar he was wearing. Unfathomably, he was cut down before he was able to share the rocker’s fate.  

Hutchence’s “3 theory” did not die with its creator: his ashes were subsequently divided into 3: one third went to the UK with Paula Yates and his divorced parents argued over the rest.  

The Real Wordsworth

Dear A. S. Byatt,

While researching my forthcoming book Royal Flush: A Plumbing History of Buckingham Palace, I made a chance discovery that could shake the world of Romantic criticism to its foundations.

Last month I was in the University of Auckland (New Zealand) library checking the Oxford English Dictionary for the earliest recorded usage of the word “plumber” so spelled, with a “b” instead of a double “m”, which spelling had been found as early as 1387. The OED cited a line of verse, printed in 1797, by the otherwise forgotten poet Arthur Dewhurst, as the first usage of our modern spelling: “A plumber did my soup once steal”.

Now this line seemed somehow familiar to me, and I was convinced I had read it or something very like it before. There were, it transpired, just three surviving copies (one in the Bodleian, one in the Folger, and one in a private collection) of Dewhurst’s only published collection of verse entitled Epitaphs for Eatables, one of which (the Bodleian) had been used to create an electronic facsimile for a new database, POETBASE, which fortunately the University of Auckland subscribed to.

The Dictionary of National Biography has a very cursory entry for Dewhurst which reveals that the poet disappeared in mysterious circumstances in January 1798 and was never heard of again. The relevant poem was the first in a modest collection of twenty-four:

“A plumber did my soup once steal”

A plumber did my soup once steal;

He made real all my fears.

It seem’d something more than a meal;

Its bowl now holds my tears.

No potion have I now, no sauce;

No dregs or gritty lees;

Would that the plumber feel remorse

For my beef stock and grease!

I read and re-read this curio, this oddity of late eighteenth-century literature, growing more and more suspicious of its authenticity. And then I had it: the poem contained definite echoes of another poem of exactly the same length and rhyme scheme, a poem I reproduce below:

“A slumber did my spirit seal”

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seem’d a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

This poem, as you well know of course, was printed in 1798 in the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I have since gained permission from Dewhurst’s estate to catalogue the never-before edited papers that were found at the poet’s Lake District residence after his disappearance. They make fascinating reading, but the following unsent letter in particular transfixed me:

19 December, 1797

Dear Charles,

I had marvellous revels at the Fawcett Inn with Danforth and Grimsby last night, who brought with them a young poetaster—Wordswithe, or some such name. My memory of the evening is by no means complete, due to (even for me) rather intemperate consumption, but I do recall regaling the party with a fine recitation of my ‘A plumber did my soup once steal’, and that Wordswothe chap continuously scrawling away what seemed like the whole blessed evening . . .

Looking closely at Epitaphs for Eatables I was astonished to find that every one of the twenty-four poems (the same number published as being by Wordsworth in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads), poems completely unconsidered by Romantic scholars, contained echoes of “Wordsworthian” diction and meter!

What had I stumbled upon? For millions around the world Wordsworth is the first Romantic, and my discovery has revealed him to be a plagiarist! His appropriation of the works of the unknown poet Arthur Dewhurst who disappeared shortly after their meeting is nothing short of scandalous. I am undecided what to do next, as you might imagine, and would greatly appreciate your expert advice.

Yours anxiously,

New Zealand Gerald

  

PS: I thought your Possession was a remarkably original achievement.