The Ex Files

Sam Hobson chats with the beat-poet cabaret-author-performer alter ego of the long-lost David Stavanger, Ghostboy, about his new show We chatted via email, Ghostboy and I. One enigma to another. My questions were perfunctory, unassuming, and perhaps a little uptight, and his responses were wild, tangential, and bug-eyed. Like a lost letter from the Zodiac killer, or a tape of found footage, what you're about to read is an artefact; a mysterious, unearthed document.

“David is a persona,” Ghostboy begins. “He just makes the deals that need to be made. I am the real thing, like ice in the tropics and the romance of skin cancer. Skin is restrictive. People are just flesh puppets to hide some words away in. Look to the person to your left, the one with the small chin and the hungry eyes. They have a beast inside them that is running the show. I came before this interview. While David was tapping these plastic keys.”

I felt like I'd found my own House Of Leaves. Intent on talking in shadowy figures, Stavanger ran my ensuing questions through a similar churn of twisted madness. But I was still interested in getting to the heart of Ghostboy: where had he come from?

“Ghostboy is a Girl Guide disguised as a satanic priest,” Ghostboy leers. “All Brownies, and how to sacrifice the things you love to get to some lower place. Ghostboy is a show. He is also the interval and the matinee; the failed liver and the tortured goat. He is the BBQ no-one comes to and later everyone claims they were there, best sausages yet.”

This was like having a conversation with Cronenberg. With Stavanger's new show We Love You! coming up, I figured could perhaps shed some light onto the performance function of Ghostboy. I tried.

“[The show's] words. Music. More words,” he lists, revelling in his persona. “[There's] dark comedy. Improvised silence. Cabaret-noir side trails. The occasional audience. Tim Ferguson [from the Doug Anthony All-Stars] recently told me, 'Get rid of the beat poetry or you will die poor'. I will prove him right.”

But not all oil-soaked metaphors and dark, howling corners, Ghostboy's show is actually a lot about something very messy; something very human.

“[The show] came about as I was winding up some of the bigger sprawling shows with Ghostboy With Golden Virtues. I was dating Sir Lady Grantham at the time, and our break-up had a profound effect on him. He kept following me round, so I decided: 'Let's do a loose narrative arc around dark love and where it won't get you.' It is really my chance to name and shame my ex while discussing related threads such as mouths, dentistry and Joe Cocker.”

As to how comfortably We Love You! sits upon the grander throne of Ghostboy's work, Stavanger's no less cryptic, or dense.

“Ghostboy With Golden Virtues was definitely a combination of myself falling out of love with the world, with my heart trying to act as chaperone. My solo spoken word is my head and feet playing bingo, and David himself is just an armpit who cries when the lights go out.”