Indiscreet astronaut

Among my more bohemian friends in 1980s London, Brion Gysin was a name spoken with a certain awe. He was the man who William Burroughs, the author of Junky and Naked Lunch, said was ‘the only man I ever respected’. Gysin was a modernist novelist, inventor and artist. He and his mathematician friend Ian Sommerville invented something called the Dream Machine, which was a spinning cylinder said to induce drug-free hallucinations.

He came up with the idea of literary cut-ups, arguing that writing was 50 years behind art in its innovations and this was the writing equivalent of collage. The idea, of introducing random elements by literally cutting up and reassembling either new or found texts, was, for better or worse, taken up with gusto by the likes of Burroughs and David Bowie.

Gysin was also the man who introduced Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones to the music of the Jajoukas in the Rif mountains of Morocco. I became rather fascinated by the trance strangeness of this music (which ended up being the first release on the Rolling Stones record label). On a trip to Paris in 1984, I called Gysin, whose phone number I had extracted from the writer Heathcote Williams. He was, miraculously, not only in, but suggested I might like to come and stay at his flat opposite the Pompidou Centre.

I asked him about taking Jones to meet the Jajoukas. Gysin said that he had the platonic idea that somewhere in the world was an individual’s perfect music, and that this was his. Their music proved that the great god Pan was not dead, after all. After he had first heard the Jajoukas, he told them he would love to hear their music every night for the rest of his life.