Max Porter

I had this sense in this moment of what I wanted to be flickering through his mind.

From a kind of Freudian point of view, I wanted this democracy of inclusion.

I wanted there to be no high art, low art, present, past.

I wanted it all to be sort of flickering in there.

And one of the things I thought would be in there for Bacon and for people of that generation would be some of the kind of stuff that you're made to learn at school.

Children had to stand and learn these strange poems.

But also there was this sort of sense of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.

And Bacon is very literary.

He read a lot, sometimes quite secretly.

More than secretly.

Well, I never read it.

And then they all found these books by his bed after he died.

You know, he was sort of a guilty late night reader, you know.

But also he was pompous and he liked to quote things at great lengths and could quote things.

You know, he could read great chunks of Nietzsche out and misquote it.

And then he could speak French and he'd do some Baudelaire and all this.

Part of the kind of showmanship of being Bacon was a literary aspect.

But there is also, and there's this incredible new biography that I reckon to any of your readers that have got a taste for Bacon, there's this brilliant new biography called Revelations, which is, as far as I'm concerned, really definitive, but very interesting on his childhood and his early career as an interior designer, building these beautiful modernist interiors and not doing well, his painting and stuff.

So anyway, I wanted these sort of

I guess like almost that's why I made them up that one of them is based at that one about the cat rough tongue is based loosely at least its rhyming structure is based on a Ukrainian poem I found in a book of sort of heroic Ukrainian poems translated into English that I found like actually in a junk shop in Dublin so I wanted it this sense of things that you stumble across