‘Après moi le deluge’ (attributed to numerous kings, courtesans and politicians around the time of the French revolution — and later).


This was written after I learned of the death of the gifted artist, Martin Sharp, at his home in New South Wales, Australia.  Sharp’s 1960s and early 1970s posters sold to British students and young people in their hundreds of thousands. It was virtually impossible to visit a university dorm or a bedsit and not find a Martin Sharp poster featuring Dylan, Hendrix or a Legalise Pot Rally on the wall. He also created memorable covers of the underground counter-culture magazine, OZ; a satirical magazine he had helped to found with Richard Neville and Richard Walsh in Australia. When OZ came to Britain, Martin’s influence changed it utterly; all pretence of satire was abandoned and a quintessential rag of ‘fun, travel and adventure’ was born, often in colourful pages of eclectic art that made it almost impossible to read. For a while, I hung out with him at a flat he shared with Eric Clapton in the King’s Road. Later, Martin began painting edgier work, especially featuring three of his great obsessions: Vincent van Gogh, Flying Saucers and Tiny Tim. Martin taught me to drop acid, to hold a paintbrush correctly, how to listen to music vastly outside my comfort zone (especially from North Africa) and how to play the Jew’s harp. He distrusted my business influence upon OZ (I had begun selling advertising for the magazine) and joshed me to turn from ‘the Darkside’ to the wholly creative. What he saw in a young South London lad I never learned — shared confidences were not part of his habitual vocabulary — but all the same he became a mentor to me, of sorts. Difficult, moody, scarily talented, he wore his aristocratic genius as lightly as a feather. Later, Martin was one of the first to read my early attempts at poetry and to firmly, if wryly, insist I continue writing verse at all costs. Martin Sharp was one of a kind.