Sebastian Horsley is a dandy and artist manqué who was briefly famous a few years ago for getting himself crucified in the Philippines. “I’ve suffered for my art,” he forewarns us, “now it’s your turn.” A sexual and intellectual pessimist who lives “poised between Savile Row and Death Row”, or, more prosaically, between narcissism and boredom, he isn’t easy to comprehend. Maybe it has to do with seeing too much too young.

Certainly his upbringing was unorthodox. His mother tried to abort him but failed. “Had she known I would turn out like this she would have taken cyanide.” He was born in 1962, in Hull, “so appalled I couldn’t talk for two years”. The Horsleys were proprietors of the vast Northern Foods empire, and lived in a sprawling Yorkshire fortress. His father was “a drunk and a cripple”, his mother drunk and manic-depressive. She tried driving to the off-licence on a motorised lawn mower when her car keys were confiscated, and when her father died she ate his ashes sprinkled on her porridge. A family photo from little Sebastian’s early years shows his mother “on the floor face down in a pool of her own vomit. On the sofa sits Gogo [his granny], her wig awry, her lipstick skid-marked across her face. Next to her sits Father, his drink in one hand and his cock in the other. Home sweet home”.

Years later, his mother visited him in a clinic where he lay drying out from multiple class-A drug addiction. She sat by his side. “Have I failed you as a mother, Sylvester?” “It’s Sebastian, mother.” That one’s too good to be true, surely, as indeed may much of the book be. But the upside to this horrendous life, and Horsley’s preposterous defensive dandyism, is the humour. These memoirs offer the reader a consistently hilarious season in hell, even if some of the best jokes are stolen, unacknowledged, from sources as diverse as Dr Johnson and Sharon Stone. “I became a vegetarian not because I loved animals but because I hated plants.” “Artists are easy to get on with – if you’re fond of children.” And I shan’t forget his description of Will Self’s face resembling “a bag of genitals” in a hurry.

A sense of humour is also common sense in overdrive, and although Horsley the spiritual aristocrat would hate to think he possessed anything common, even sense, it often redeems him. He knows that taking a lot of drugs doesn’t make him a 21st-century Rimbaud – as Pete Doherty sadly doesn’t. Nor does the road of excess lead to the palace of wisdom. Crack made him sit “in a darkened room for six months watching Home and Away”. His fondness for prostitutes, on whom he reckons he has spent around £100,000, is on a par with the drugs: excessive, but uninteresting.

More original is his swimming with great white sharks; his affair with a Glaswegian gangster; and that crucifixion. He fell off his cross, but at least it hurt. He considered calling the subsequent photographic exhibition, “Is There a God or Am I Too Fat?” Jesus was crucified to save mankind, while Horsley was crucified to save his career. “In my opinion,” he reflects, “we both failed.”

There are moments when your bourgeois stomach turns. I would like to forget, but never will, the manner in which he and Hugo Guinness expressed their tendresse for each other with a cucumber and a lavatory bowl. But you can forgive him a lot, for having produced one of the funniest, strangest and most revolting memoirs ever written. A world without Horsleys would be almost as dull as Horsley already finds it.

DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD: An Unauthorised Autobiography by Sebastian Horsley
Sceptre £12.99 pp325
Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (inc p&p)

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