Julie Burchill

The Brighton & Hove connection

by Alex Lockwood

THE Julie can be seen, with son and toyboy husband, regularly promenading along her Hove seafront. And it is hers. Born in Bristol in 1959 and having set fire to 70s and 80s punk London with her pyromaniacal journalism for the New Musical Express (along with former husband Tony Parsons), it's been Brighton and Hove ever since. There isn't so much a connection with the city as an umbilical cord, although in which direction the motherly love flows is up for debate.

Julie Burchill is one of the few who can claim to have given life to the city we know today, a city she once called the "glinting pink jewel in the crown of Sussex." She's our own Sarah Jessica Parker: but one who knows how to write, actually. Perhaps more than any journalist she's chronicled the city's growth, not least its slow grind under the millstone of capitalism (she's a life-long communist) since her first years living above the Sussex Arts Club. But top of her loves is the city's decadent response to all things global. "When I lived in the Lanes," says Julie, "the mesh of 30 or so streets that make up the ravishing Old Town, you could buy a thousand types of sapphire bracelet there - but you couldn't get hold of a lightbulb."

Apart from Tel Aviv (she's a lover of all things Israeli) there's not a place in the world she'd rather be. Julie loves the "raddled, ageing beauty" of Brighton's Kings Road façade, and, as a three-times married "gay gone wrong" she typifies Kemptown's class-straddling metrosexuality. But, despite what her well-publicised affairs and lesbian teen novel might suggest, it's not the sex of the city that attracts her to the place she calls home. "Brighton, for all its airs and graces, is a very provincial town," she says, "and I like it that way. I don't want to be like a young bunny putting it around, it was never my way anyway." Be prepared. Her next book is a gathering together of all her contradictory, sexy, churlish and brazen insights into this place called Brighton and Hove that we think we know. It'll be a different place to live once Julie has had her say.

Bibiography
The Boy Looked at Johnny (co-written with Tony Parsons) Pluto Press, 1977
Girls on Film, Proteus Publishing Company, 1984
Love It or Shove It, Ebury Press, 1985
Damaged Gods: Cults and Heroes Reappraised, Ebury Press, 1986
Ambition, The Bodley Head Press Limited, 1989
Sex and Sensibility, Harper Collins, 1992
No Exit, Sinclair Stevenson, 1993
I Knew I Was Right, William Heinemann, 1998
Married Alive, Orion, 1999
Diana, Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1999
The Guardian Columns 1998-2000, Orion, 2000
On Beckham, Jonathan Cape, 2002
Sugar Rush, MacMillan, 2004