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"Peter? He was basically a fucking cunt. He
was an enormously soft-hearted/hard-hearted, sweet/sour, vulnerable/invulnerable
man. He lived on the edge of two poles. I enjoyed Peter on my own,
but with somebody else we always got into an argument. We always
got pissed at each other. Peter was always pissed off with my nitpicking,
logical mind. And I used to get pissed off at his lack of directness
in dealing with people. I don't know if you can say we split up.
If something right had come along for us we would both have been
delighted to do it, I felt that Peter was more interested in doing
caricature stuff than in acting. He was a very funny comedian but
he's not as interested in comedic acting as I am. Right now, I just
consider what I'm doing solo stuff.
It's true, though, that after we'd taken 'Good Evening'(sic)
to Australia things just ground to a halt. But we did go on to do
other things, such as the Derek and Clive albums. Peter and I wanted
to do some material we couldn't do on the radio, TV or stage. So
we went in a recording studio and basically improvised... The first
out - or the first cunt, as we say in the vernacular, or the venereal
- was 'The Worst Job I Ever Had'.' Peter said, 'The worst job I
ever had was gettin' lobsters out of Jayne Mansfield's arsehole.
Jayne used to go swimming off the beach at Mally-boo and these fuckin'
lobsters used to go flyin' up her arse. And I used to have to pull
the fuckers out.'
Again, I love that image. It's like a reversal,
if you'll pardon the expression, of a cunt having teeth. Up the
arse are giant lobsters ready to get you: No matter where you stick
it, you find teeth...
What we basically did was speak the unspeakable.
Take, for instance, cancer, which Peter and I discuss on one album.
Cancer's one of those subjects that, when they come up, cause everyone
to put on a serious face. Everybody fears it, because we all secretly
feel it's self-induced through anxiety or doubt. I know that sometimes
I sink into days when I get so anxious that I conjure up an image
of a white-eyed, greedy little rodent gnawing away at my arsehole.
That's cancer-causing.
Anyway, even though Peter and I knew that cancer
was awful, it was something we wanted to ventilate. And in doing
so we got into the most outrageous convolutions until we ended up
competing with each other over who had the worst cancer...'I've
got cancer of the wife'...'Only that? Well listen, I've got cancer
of the house.' And it went on like that until we both got hysterical
with laughter. As Peter said, there's absolutely no socially redeeming
value about cancer, which is one of its greatest merits.
True obscenities are not orifices. Shit and holes
of the human body are not obscene - nor is making love or screwing,
or whatever you want to call it. Pictures of war or violence can
be obscene. You know, a woman being handed her husband in a plastic
bag in Vietnam. Dreadful. And obscene.
I remember the time I asked my mother: 'What does
cunt mean?' Well, she farted, snorted, her head blew off and her
arms fell out. She didn't know what to do with herself. She said
it was the filthiest word that had ever been invented. Imagine.
...We caused a certain small tempest in a teacup
among the British press, which pretended to be selfrighteous and
moral. Generally, the disapproval came from those newspapers that
ran a girl with bare tits on page three and talked about a vicar
fucking a rooster on page four. They were the ones who objected
to us boys talking dirty or calling people fucking cunts...
I have a ribald sense of humour, what
is conventionally known as obscene. It's always been there, it's
just my way of thinking. People always wonder how, with this ribald
outlook, I can also write such moving, emotional music. Not to make
a comparison, but Mozart had a very scatological sense of humour
too. He was always talking about farts and cunts and arses. He had
a very basic sense of humour. I don't find anything wrong with that.
. . But there's a misconception that if you talk dirty, you're not
a serious person. I'm very, very serious indeed. Gosh. Absolutely.
Profoundly serious. Very, very, very serious. Phew. Gosh. Golly.
Fucking A-serious."
(filched from 'Dudley Moore' by Douglas Thompson,
1996.)
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