20 | August 29, 2013 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News
Music
Felix Dennis:
“I’ve spent like a drunken sailor and done the most crazy things you can imagine...”
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OU’RE talking to a guy who owns 17 kitchens. How crazy is that? How stupid is that? That means you’ve got to have 17 toasters and I insist that all the toasters are the same, I don’t know why – and all the coffee machines.” I’ve caught Felix Dennis on a rather polite morning. Instead of launching into a drunken tirade fuelled by a jumbled blur of memory, anecdote and fiction (he recently had to retract a statement he made to a journalist, saying he’d killed someone), we’re discussing the finer points of OCD home ownership, and sadly, on my end of the phone at least, there is no wine involved whatsoever. The 66-year-old publishing magnate (owner of Dennis Publishing), forest restorer, wine expert and – in his most recent reinvention – poet, is on holiday at his home in Mustique, (where his neighbour is Mick Jagger), and is quick to admit: “I’m one of those people who lives more lives than one.” In a monstrous career spanning decades of digital change with free love on the side, Dennis was the first person to say the c word on national television (while squirting a water pistol at David Frost), pre-empted the dotcom boom by starting a stack of cash-churning computer magazines, and played a major part in the Oz obscenity trials in the 1960s. “I think most of it is serendipity,” he replies when asked whether it was luck or hard work that led to those 17 identical toasters. “I’m not much good at these long-term plans. I think five years is a long time, I think 20 years is the biggest amount of time most human beings can envisage, 50 years is inconceivable for anyone to envisage, which is why we don’t understand evolution because we cannot really, we pretend we can, but we can’t really get our minds around hundreds of years let alone thousands of years.”
Dennis is quite a contradictory character. While apparently sceptical when it comes to how his life has panned out, putting it down to luck more than skill, he is also supremely self-confident, and only dabbles in self-awareness. Take the following rant: “I’ve never been any good at long-range plans and I’m suspicious of people who say they are. I wonder if that’s really true. “I think [our senses] often lead us astray and people, without saying they are liars, quite often tell you what they wish was true, they don’t really tell you what is true. They tell anecdotes and they come to believe the anecdotes, and if you challenge them on the anecdote and prove to them it couldn’t be true, they get very, very cross.” He adds: “That’s why you can brainwash people. That’s why dictators exist, that’s why soviet Russia existed. Orwell, in 1984, he told us: if you just keep on saying the same thing people will come to believe it.” Dennis is the king of anecdotes: he falls into them easily, a store of barmy, drink-and-drug-addled tales ready and waiting to just leap off his tongue, accompanied by a wry, hacking cough. You end up wondering just how much to believe, but that doesn’t stop him being wildly entertaining. I suggest his view of the world is quite bleak. “I am a bit bleak,” he barks back merrily. “You’re born, you live, you stave off boredom and then you die. You don’t get to choose to be born, you usually don’t get to choose when you die and you don’t get to choose all that much in the middle!” His middle bit has been more spectacular than most. “I’ve earned huge sums of money, I’ve had a huge amount of fun in my life, I’ve spent like a drunken sailor, and just done the most crazy things you can imagine,” he says, hints of pride and bemusement in his tone. “On drugs and sex and wine and
Editor: Paul Kirkley Writer: Ella Walker Email: whatson@cambridge-news.co.uk, ella.walker@cambridge-news.co.uk
Cambridge News | cambridge-news.co.uk | August 29, 2013 | 21
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The man is a legend in journalism circles – and in business, forestry and, perhaps most impressively, poetry circles too. Not that he puts success down to anything other than a hefty shot of luck. ELLA WALKER talks to Felix Dennis, and discovers his world is just as madcap
Felix Dennis on . . . Cutting his own hair
I lean out the bathroom window every three weeks and just wave the scissors, nobody believes it! The gardeners get very cross.
Who inspires him rock ’n’ roll and women!” he yells when I ask if it’s true he spent £100 million during his ‘lost decade’. “I was so far out of it,” he laughs wheezily. “I was just crazy, I’d literally go into a nightclub and spend 20, 30,000 quid, so I was mad, I was barking mad at the time, but I’m sure I had a helluva good time.” And now he’s a poet, and a bestselling one at that. ᔡ Felix Dennis: Did I Mention The Free Wine? Cambridge Junction, Monday, September 9, at 8pm. Tickets £20 from (01223) 511511 or www.junction.co.uk
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His seventh book of verse, Love, Of A Kind, was released earlier this year, and the book jacket is smothered with praise from the likes of Stephen Fry and Sir Paul McCartney. “People seem to like it a lot,” he says matter-of-factly, never one to indulge in modesty, and can’t help slipping into the lothario version of himself. “I have to say, especially the ladies – I’ve received a fantastic number of letters.” Love, Of A Kind was the name of the poem Dennis was writing as his doctor confirmed he had throat cancer – his most recent brush with death. (He has previously survived Concorde going down, Legionnaires’ disease and that ‘lost decade’, so you can see why he can say without doubt: “I think I was born lucky.”) As a result, this collection revolves around the themes of love, death and taking stock, and features poems that are by turn witty and love-struck, and dark and brooding. “I never set out thinking ‘what I’m going to do is try and become Britain’s biggest selling poet,’ – yeah right. I don’t think so. I just started writing,” he explains, putting his poetic success down to the fact he writes using rhyme, metre and old-fashioned forms of English poetry – perfected by John Donne, William Shakespeare and Rudyard Kipling (“I don’t try to pretend I’m as good as them”) – and adds a modern twang via the subject matter, with none of that free verse tosh. “No-one goes to listen to free verse, they just don’t go,” he says. “If you hear someone reading a lot of free verse, you’ll see nine people [listening] in the back of the library, and nine would be an exaggeration.” His stuff might be commercially successful (this is Felix Dennis we’re talking about after all), but critically he’s not quite there. Not that he cares, laughing heartily as he quotes Tom Wolfe (“A grand old man of letters”): “He says Felix Dennis will never get any critical acclaim because everything about him is wrong. He’s rich and he doesn’t live in a garret. He absolutely loves poetry and he loves performing poetry, but with modern poetry you must pretend that nobody is getting any pleasure in it, everyone has to sit there stony faced, noone must laugh, no-one must applaud.
“I think Tom Wolfe is right! I’ll never get any critical acclaim and I don’t expect it. I’ll live without it thanks, and the critics can live, all nine of them huddled in an old cave round a not very appetising fire, all saying to each other, we know we’re right – everybody out there, they’re all plebs, thickos and stupid people! And maybe they are right, but the rest of us are thoroughly enjoying ourselves!” The thing with Dennis is, despite his bumbling attitude to life, which is met by luck after piece of luck, he’s pretty damn likeable. From the way he buys books (“I own 23,000 books, I love books. I buy them all the time; every book store in England, when they see me walking in, they all start clapping!”) to the fact he’s opening up his wine cellar for his current poetry tour – don’t worry, it’s also visiting Cambridge Junction – aptly named, Did I Mention The Free Wine? It’s as though his entire existence is punctuated by exclamation marks – and it’s infectious. He is also almost singlehandedly restoring Britain’s native trees. Starting out 20 years ago, the aim is to recreate Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden (which only existed in memory, even then), and plant 10 million trees over 25,000 acres. “I know this sounds absolutely crazy, but when you plant a new woodland you see, within five years, all these hundreds of creatures start coming back; flora and fauna, everything from little beetles to mushroom and fungi to butterflies and all sorts of birds, deer and badgers, dormice,” he enthuses. “You don’t have to ask them, they just invite themselves in, make themselves at home.” I ask what could possibly be left for him to achieve, other than seeing his trees grow: “I think I need to write. It would be nice not to have to die because I really am getting better at this poetry lark. “And you can only get better at it when you’ve been at it a couple of decades, because it does take a long time to learn your craft. I’ve only been at it this 13 years, so I’d like at least another seven years please; I’ll take 15 if it’s on offer.” Knowing his luck, he’ll probably get 20.
Alan Turing, Einstein, who’s that wonderful professor in a wheelchair, who’s that marvellous man? Hawking! I find lives like these utterly inspiring, frankly.
How to listen to music
I only listen to music when I’m going to sit down and listen to music. I will not have music playing when I’m writing poetry, or music playing when I’m taking telephone
calls or having a meeting, or while I’m eating. I don’t like that. I spend a lot of time making music myself, I think it’s wrong to have it just as a background.
The future of magazines:
I think some ink-on-paper magazines will do very, very well. Ladies’ fashion magazines, the big thick ones like Vogue, current affairs mags like The Week, which is one of mine, and some fast car magazines. Some will last the next 10 years, but I think many will go over the next five.
What he’s currently reading:
Arguably – a collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens, a biography of Coleridge (Early Visions by Richard Holmes) and a seafaring ‘pot boiler’ by Patrick O’Brien called The 13 Gun Salute.