Travis Elborough remembers Geoff Nicholson — writer, walker, gourmand, theremin player and friend — who died earlier this month, aged 71.
Geoff Nicholson, photographed by Travis Elborough
My friend, the writer, walker, gourmand, Acid Mothers Temple fan and mean theremin player, Geoff Nicholson had been living with illness for a while, having been diagnosed with a rare and incurable type of bone marrow cancer some years ago. “Not rare enough, obviously” was his own caustic comment on his condition. And it was something he addressed head-on and with typical gallows humour in his last book, Walking on Thin Air, a quite profound meditation on the pleasures of putting one foot in front of the other, and human mortality, and a work whose final pages reduced me to tears when I read it in proof. I had cause to cry again when I opened the email from his partner Caroline Gannon the other week telling me he’d died. For all I knew of his illness, it was so utterly unexpected. I had gone for drinks with them both just days earlier at an absinthe bar in Hackney they’d both been keen to check out. Geoff was ever the seeker of new places promising out-of-the-ordinary experiences, culinary and otherwise. And our venue, a taxidermy cabinet-lined parlour, all dark woods and stuffed dead things, gloomily lit by candles and soundtracked by doom metal and goth anthems, and its highly intoxicating drinks, more than met with the approval of this native son of Sheffield, South Yorkshire. It was not a late one by any means, as he had a lunch meeting the next day with another writer friend, but a full one with plenty of talk and lots of putting the world to wrongs. At the end of night, Geoff picked up the tab. Those highly intoxicating drinks were not cheap and I promised to return the favour next time. Only there can be no next time now.
I first met Geoff in the late 1990s at a launch for some issue or other of now defunct literary magazine Ambit, at Waterstone’s in Islington where I was the events manager. A job that came with the added perk that it was tacitly understood that we could take any unopened bottles of wine home with us afterwards. There was never ever any wine leftover after an Ambit event. Its contributors, largely but not exclusively poets (there were fiction writers and artists as well), and its readers, largely but not exclusively would-be poets, were a thirsty lot. Ambit had been founded back in 1959 by the paediatrician and novelist Dr Martin Bax, who was still at the helm nearly forty years on.
The magazine, where an old (or young at the time) university friend of mine from Birmingham, Kate Pemberton also worked, was run out of the front room of Bax’s ramshackle house in Priory Gardens, Highgate. An upper floor box room, I was to discover, served as the store cupboard for back issues, and the depository for wilting folders of illustration artwork from the likes of Peter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi. Ambit’s original art editor Michael Foreman, a contemporary and one-time flatmate of David Hockney at the Royal College of Art, remained in post too. J G Ballard had been its ‘prose’ editor. But he’d stepped down following some never explained and never healed rift between himself and Martin. The unlikely trigger of this falling out was long rumoured to be an off-hand remark about the state of Ballard’s carpets. Something a guest, quite possibly a poet in their cups, had said at an Ambit-related party at the author’s Shepperton home. Though I never did find out if that was true or even where the rumour itself originated from, it was just part of Ambit-lore. I later interviewed Ballard but felt unable to ask him about it or even to mention Ambit. We spoke over the phone, so I didn’t get to see the carpets either.
In any case, Geoff, whose stories had first been published by Ballard in Ambit, ended up succeeding him. No small thing in itself, and during his tenure prose from the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Toby Litt, Nick Sweeney, Eley Williams, Deborah Levy and Kirsty Allison, a future (and Ambit’s final) editor, along with countless others, appeared in the magazine.
At the time of that launch, I had recently moved to London and was both enchanted and overwhelmed by the place. To help orient myself in the metropolis I was reading practically every book on the capital I could lay my hands on. And my hands naturally soon found their way to Geoff’s then only recently published novel Bleeding London, a brilliantly, darkly hilarious book that was nominated for the Whitbread Prize. It featured Mick, not unlike Geoff — a laconic Sheffielder down in the smoke, though with vengeance rather than literary success on his mind — and Stuart, a walking tour guide attempting to cover the whole London A-Z. The latter a goal in keeping with Geoff’s lifelong preoccupations with maps and pavement-pounding.
Well over a decade later, the novel was to provide the basis for a mammoth community art project masterminded by Del Barrett of the Royal Photographic Society, with photographers, amateur and pro, encouraged to follow in the characters’ footsteps, snapping the capital’s 58,000 streets. The results, some 52,000 plus of them, were then whittled down to a 1,200-strong public exhibition at City Hall. One of its many happy outcomes was that it resulted in Geoff meeting the wonderful Caroline, a talented photographer and RPS member, who, perhaps not insignificantly for the success of their subsequent romance, had previously worked as a wrangler of comic performers and stage magicians. Geoff himself a bit of both, if not quite literally, or professionally.
Bleeding London remains perhaps, for many reasons — some sentimental and to do with the period when I first read it, and the fun had during the run up to the exhibition — my favourite of his novels. And I can clearly remember speaking to him about it at great length at that Ambit launch. Though, of course, I have no memory of what I actually said. Nor how he dealt with my torrent of gauche praise. This was probably because there was also tacit understanding at the shop that once attendees’ glasses were filled, event staff could avail themselves of the open bottles of wine. In moderation, of course. Geoff, as an ex-bookseller himself, would have understood the drill.
Several similarly convivial Ambit-adjacent encounters followed over the next year or so. Although around then he relocated to the USA. First to New York and then to Los Angeles with his wife at that time, the unfeasibly glamorous-seeming American Dian Hanson, a statuesque one-time model and former editor of soft-core and fetish magazines who’d moved into book publishing at Taschen in California. I recall a party for Geoff (possibly a 50th birthday bash, was it?) in the early ‘00s, in the upstairs room of the Princess Louise pub in Holborn. There was a series of readings by Dian and other friends and fellow authors from his writings — mostly about Volkswagen Beetles, with autobahn-style sound effects thrown in for good measure. Among the attendees and further adding to the ritz of the occasion, was the actor Emily Lloyd whose stepmother, the poet Jehane Markham, was an Ambit stalwart.
VW Beetles, along with walking, deserts, ruins, food and drink, music, and sex and sexual obsession and fetishism, were among the interests that Geoff wrote about repeatedly with such erudition and originality, and fearlessly, and funnily too. But his beloved VW bugs were to enjoy starring turns and appeared prominently in the titles of such novels as Still Life with Volkswagens and Gravity’s Volkswagen. The second, a book from 2009 that playfully satirised the indie film world, was partially inspired by the experience of seeing one of his earlier novels, What We Did On Our Holidays, turned into a movie, Permanent Vacation. An adaptation in which, to his enormous pride and delight, David Carradine had a supporting role. Though when we screened the film a year or so ago, at The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, he told me, it had been a toss up between the Kung Fu actor and Adam West of Batman fame. Carradine, nevertheless, he maintained, had always been his preferred candidate.
It was around the time of Gravity’s Volkswagen that we really became friends. I’d taken a day a week job at Ambit, which as a quarterly print publication was by then suffering the ill-winds of the far more instantaneous and free internet. (The closure of Borders Bookshops with their substantial magazine sections hadn’t helped either.) I was tasked with increasing overseas subscriptions and jazzing up the events. Tasks that I completely failed at. Chinese universities, one particular Arts Council-sanctioned target, seemed curiously immune to Ambit’s charms. And there were several depressing evenings in the draughty upstairs room of a long since shuttered pub on the King’s Cross Road where the readers frequently outnumbered the audience. But at least it brought me into regular contact with Geoff, both over email (at which he excelled, responding to the most basic messages with ice-pick-sharp sentences that floored you with their dry wit) and in person, even better and always good company, on the occasions he came over to the UK and stayed at Martin’s in Highgate.
By this point we were both also at work on books of non-fiction and ploughing not-dissimilar paths in what might be termed psychogeography. Though in my own case it was probably more psycho geography teacher, sartorially and stylistically. Geoff, however, produced two of the liveliest books in the field with The Lost Art of Walking and Walking in Ruins, ruminations both on the joys of being a pedestrian and celebrations of the overlooked and undervalued in the landscape.
While I was researching one of my own efforts on the west coast of America, I was fortunate to be able to visit Geoff in his stateside home, a geodesic dome in the Hollywood Hills. Where else would this champion of faded post-war dreamscapes live, after all? We went, obviously, as two Englishmen in Los Angeles, for fish and chips at H Salt on Santa Monica Boulevard. With Geoff, and especially on his return to the UK soon afterwards — where he settled in Manningtree in Essex, a town on the Stour Estuary and the borders of Suffolk, whose liminality and macabre history of puritan witch trials suited him perfectly — there were to be many more meals together and drinks, and lots and lots of walking. On one occasion we got quite seriously lost in East Ham trying to find the model for the Small Faces’ ‘Itchycoo Park’. There were launches too, and joint events and talks for his books, The London Complaint and The Suburbanist and Walking on Thin Air.
When we met last, he presented me with a flyer for a forthcoming pamphlet, Burn During Reading, and he and Caroline talked animatedly about their plans for another trip together to America later this year. Geoff had been in hospital with flu in December. He was noticeably frailer and almost more shockingly, beard-less, having shaved off his near-trademark goatee. But in conversation he was just as lively as ever, quipping mordantly that his hospitalisation had thankfully saved him from the notoriously fiendish music quiz at The Wire magazine’s annual Christmas party this year.
As we left the bar and headed to Cambridge Heath station, however, I noticed that walking was more of an effort for him than usual, and he had to stop more than once to catch his breath, which gave me pause for thought. Yet we exchanged cheery emails the next morning and his last post on Instagram was of one of the two absinthe-laced cocktails he drank that night.
And that’s the image I’ll choose to take with me of him, as it sums up his sense of adventure: in booze, as in life, and in his writing, all of which was genuinely and astoundingly unlike anyone else’s. I am going to miss him and his unique mind but I will go out walking with an A-Z in hand, and remember him with every step that I take from hereon in.
Geoff Nicholson, 4 March 1953 – 18 January 2025