Obituary: Death of Soho writer Sebastian Horsley - Flamboyant libertine with a love of debauchery

Published: 25 June 2010
by SIMIN WROE

SEBASTIAN Horsley, the Soho writer, artist and libertine who achieved infamy through his lurid lifestyle and gallows humour, has died aged 47.

A flamboyant figure rarely seen in public without his excessively tall top hat, Horsley was best known for crucifying himself in the name of art – and self-promotion – in the Philippines in 2000.

Dandy in the Underworld, an account of his debauched exploits with drugs and prostitutes in Soho, had just opened in a version for the stage at the Soho Theatre this month. 

“Why should I go to the theatre to see rape, sodomy, alcoholism and drug addiction? 

“I can get all that at home,” Horsley said of the play.

He died of a suspected heroin overdose at his two-room Meard Street flat last Thursday.

It is believed he had gone on a drink and drugs binge following a wake for his friend Michael Wojas, (obituary, West End Extra, June 18) the last owner of the famous artists’ drinking den, the Colony Room Club in Dean Street.

Horsley was born in Hull, the son of the Northern Foods millionaire chairman Nicholas Horsley and Valerie Walmsley-Hunter. 

His childhood was an unhappy one, and in later life he claimed his  mother “…only got out of bed for funerals and to visit the off-licence”.

After failing to get a place at Edinburgh university he was eventually accepted at St Martins College of Art, though he was soon expelled.

It was the first act in a long career of misbehaviour. 

He courted the press and controversy in equal measure. 

His flat was decorated with human skulls and he maintained that he slept with a loaded pistol by his bedside. 

He claimed to have slept with more than 1,000 women, had an affair with the Glaswegian artist and former gangster Jimmy Boyle and spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on prostitutes, money he had won playing the stock market in the 1980s.

He once said: “If I had known I was going to live this long, I wouldn’t have taken such care of myself.”

Scandal followed him, but friends remembered a different side of him.

Playwright Tim Fountain, who adapted his memoirs, said: “Sebastian in print and Sebastian in person were two very different people. The real man was one of the sweetest, kindest, funniest people I ever had the privilege of meeting.”

Sebastian Horsley, artist and writer, born August 8 1962, died June 17 2010.