'Evil Julie' Burchill is trying to lay off the vitriol these days, but old habits die hard. Donald Clarke comes face to face with the woman he thought was too naughty to exist
Julie Burchill, columnist and occasional novelist, is one of the greatest comic creations to emerge from Britain over the past century. A helium-voiced rabble-rouser with a super-human ability for self-contradiction, she has, since her arrival as Punk's Dorothy Parker in the mid 1970s, nurtured an instinct for delicious hatred that makes Gore Vidal seem like Marion Finucane. I have only agreed with her half-a-dozen times in the past three decades - once about the brilliance of Bananarama's 1982 LP, Deep Sea Skiving - but I have never stopped delighting in the pungency of her outbursts. Whoever it was who dreamed her up deserves an award.
Until now, I have never had to face up to the worrying prospect that Julie Burchill might actually exist. From her early years with the New Musical Express to her recently concluded tenure with the Guardian as a hilariously mean-spirited counterweight to that paper's cabal of hand-wringers, she has always seemed far too naughty to be real.
So, as I sit down to talk with her in the Hotel du Vin in Brighton - a town she will, with the slightest encouragement, rhapsodise about - I find my hands actually shaking. It is rather like getting to meet Boadicea.
We are here to discuss her new book, Sugar Rush, a riotously depraved novel for adolescents that seems calculated to send the Daily Mail into a fit of the vapours. Julie, however, has other things on her mind.
"Are you a Protestant?" she asks.
Er, um. Well, yes, I suppose I am. Or I was, at least.
Having discerned that I am from the North, she asks, in the tone you might use when inquiring why someone chooses to sleep in an open sewer, what possessed me to move to the Republic. "I am very interested in the Irish question," she says, unexpectedly adopting the language of Gladstone.
Before our meeting, presuming that she must have said something frightful about Ireland at some point, I called up Google and typed in her name followed by a series of racial epithets commonly used about the Irish. Sure enough, it seems that some years back she got into trouble for accusing "Eire" of "almost compulsory child molestation by the national church, total discrimination against women who wish to be priests, aiding and abetting Herr Hitler in his hour of need, and outlawing abortion and divorce".
"Yes, that was the famous English understatement," she laughs. "I knew it was rude and that was why I said it. But I do think that the Catholic Church has said so many rude things about Protestants and about other people who aren't Catholics. When it comes back at them they shouldn't throw their hands in the air and get all upset."
Burchill has recently found God. But, characteristically, she seems to define her (would you believe) Lutheranism entirely in terms of opposition to something else: the Catholic Church. Having identified my origins, she seems enormously disappointed that I turn out to be a bit of a drippy liberal who refuses to agree that the Pope is an anti-Christ or that "Catholicism is a religion of great evil".
Still, she seems to have decided that I am on her team and for that, remembering how she behaves towards her enemies, I am grateful. In fact, we couldn't get along better. Prone to knee touching and the conspiratorial use of Christian names ("Oh, Donald, you wouldn't believe it"), there is no evidence of the shyness that she claims has crippled her throughout life.
"When I joined the NME, when I was 17, I was so shy I couldn't put two words together in the presence of somebody I didn't know," she says, swallowing a mouthful of her vodka Martini.
Burchill, who is obsessively proud of her working-class Bristol roots, had famously answered an advertisement in the back of the NME, then still under the control of Pink Floyd fans, looking for "Hip Young Gunslingers". She and her future husband, Tony Parsons, were duly hired, and the two leather-clad iconoclasts became the voice of punk on the paper.
"It was so freaking funny, Donald. I was shy, but during the punk thing we were all taking that amphetamine sulphate - very rough stuff - and that made you talk a blue mile. I was forced out to interview this protest singer: Country Joe McDonald. And I put some in his tea. Well, as luck would have it, he had been engaged to Janis Joplin and he knew Jim Morrison. All his friends had died of drugs. The PR person saw me do it and there was hell to pay."
Nick Logan, the NME editor, banned Burchill from ever leaving the office again, which suited her just fine. She and Parsons, appalled by the overpowering smell of hippie about the place, fenced off their desks from the rest of the room to form the legendary Kinderbunker. "We put a noose over the desk and we surrounded it with barbed wire, but they made us do that because of our class. In the media you can be black or Muslim and that's fine, but if you are working class, it is like: oh, look at the freak. I had a lot of that in the Guardian, too."
But she is middle-class herself now, isn't she? Here she sits in a chi-chi Brighton hotel knocking back cocktails in the middle of the afternoon. What happened to the girl who was teased by the NME hacks for drinking Tizer?
"I'm too rich now to be middle-class," she laughs. "What I am is a pools winner. I went straight from white trash to super-rich without passing through middle-class."
For somebody addicted to the art of opposition, the rock world of the late 1970s must have been an ideal environment. It is hard to explain to anyone who was not a record buyer during that era quite how furious the antagonism was between the Peace and Love cavaliers, many of whom were, after all, still in their 20s, and the punk roundheads with their Year Zero approach to rock.
"Tony and I did take speed in editorial meetings, but that was only because the filthy hippies were all smoking dope. The minute Tony - he was great fun back then - poured this white stuff on the table they all reacted like they'd never seen anything like it in their lives."
Hold on a minute. Suggesting that Tony Parsons may have been, however briefly, "great fun" is just about the nicest thing I have heard her say in 20 years about her ex-husband. The two writers have been carrying on a long-distance feud ever since Burchill walked out on Tony and their young son in 1984.
"Why is she so interested?" Parsons once said when asked about the latest brickbat she had hurled his way. "Has nothing happened to her since 1984? I think it's her way of having some kind of relationship with me. Hell hath no fury like a first wife run to fat."
Will she ever make peace with him?
"I have never thought of it as a vendetta," she says. "He is, to be polite, not a very humorous man, and he sees things as a Sicilian macho fest, where I have always seen it as a Joan Crawford/Bette Davis thing. It's not like I see him as Saddam Hussein or [wait for it] the Pope."
Has she ever bumped into him since?
"No, but I wouldn't be scared if I did. He's only five foot ten."
Burchill's love life has been a source of great media attention over the decades. After she left Tony, she married the journalist Cosmo Landesman, with whom she had set up the now-defunct journal The Modern Review. Once again, it was she who moved on, leaving another son behind. Do she and Cosmo still get on?
"What? He's my ex-husband!" she says, astonished.
Well, people do get on with their ex-husbands.
"I keep hearing about this," she deadpans.
Next there was a brief Sapphic dalliance with the unsmiling columnist Charlotte Raven. Burchill wrote euphorically about the joys of the lesbian lifestyle at the time, but the romance only lasted a few months and, a year or so later, Julie copped off with Charlotte's younger brother, Daniel. Surprisingly, their relationship has remained stable, and earlier this year they were married.
"It was great," she says. "We played S-Club 7 while we signed the register and then all went off to Pizza Express and argued about theology."
While all these bedroom farces were playing themselves out, her career continued to ebb and flow. After leaving the NME she wrote for such diverse publications as The Face and The Daily Mail, before delivering the delightfully vulgar shopping-and-shagging novel, Ambition, in 1990.
The early 1990s were lean years, however, and the offer from journalist Deborah Orr (currently, following a spat about the rights and wrongs of recreational drug use, another deadly enemy) to write for the Guardian was greatly welcomed.
"Oh, I was well down on my luck," she says. "I had even been sacked from Punch. Imagine that. I had been sacked from the local Brighton listings magazine, The Punter. Even the punters didn't want me, Donald. But I have always lived beyond my means, so I didn't really notice that I was down on my luck."
Leafing through her columns for the Guardian - Israel is brilliant, Ireland is hopeless, bring back hanging - I can't shake the idea that this Burchill, the writer she herself has christened "Evil Julie", is an invention, efficiently designed to antagonise those people who can get through Polly Toynbee articles without gagging. Presumably, now she is with the Times, she will have to revert to her former Communism.
"I just say what I have to say," she says. "You get in so much trouble for the things you do believe in, why would you make up things you don't believe in? I am not an aggressive person. I always say that I just want a quiet life. But when they come for me, I will be ready."
But she can't deny that she enjoys causing a scene. Consider the hugely enjoyable, if slightly ramshackle, Sugar Rush. She could have written about any aspect of teenage life, but she chose to tell the story of a middle-class girl who, in between smoking dope and knocking back vodka, has a lesbian fling with a divinely blonde tearaway from the local Comprehensive.
"I just thought boy meets girl had been done too many times."
She pauses and has a swig of her Martini. "Oh look, I knew people would jump up and down and get their knickers in a twist about it. I knew the Evil Julie part of me would get them in a twist. They need it. So, here is."
Does she mean that they would enjoy trawling through her own foray into same-sexing?
"Yeah. Of course. I am 45 years old and I was a lesbian for six months and if people want to talk about that and write about that, well, fine."
Julie Burchill is a formidable piece of work. Like a robot from a Japanese cartoon, she sucks up the energy of her enemies' assaults and uses it to bolster her own counter attacks. Once called the Worst Mother in Britain by the Daily Mail, she delights in rubbishing that paper's moralist-in-chief Melanie Phillips: "If she writes that I am trying to turn teenagers into lesbians I will just say: 'You're jealous, because you want to do it'."
Comments about her dramatic weight gain over the 1980s have never seemed to trouble her (though she has slimmed down dramatically for her wedding). The poisonous remarks of ex-husbands are chewed up and spat back with increased velocity. Thankfully, for those of us who consider her one of the world's treasures, she seems invincible.
But, disappointingly, she does claim that she is at least trying to be less antagonistic. Earlier, as we were discussing comments she had made about the relative sizes of her first two husbands' penises (like you do), she seemed to feel a pang of guilt.
"That was ungodly. I won't be writing that sort of thing again."
Oh, but she will.
"Well, thank you, Gypsy Rose," she says with an acquiescent titter.
Sugar Rush is published by Picador at £9.99 in UK