THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF BRILBURN LOGUE

The sleeve notes for the Bauhaus album Masks (1981) includes the following poem, credited to Brilburn Logue:

This is for when the radio is broken and crackles like uranium orchids
This is for when the fohn-wind rattles the telegraph wires like a handful of bones
This is for when dream ambulances skitter through the streets at midnight
This is for when you get caught in a sleep-riot and the sky is out of order
This is for when your sex is full of voodoo
This is for when your clothes are imaginary
This is for when your flesh creeps and never comes back.

The poem appears on the cover of the album This is For When Live.

And this is a ‘clean’ copy of that cover:

You can hear it recited on the version of Double Dare on the live album Press The Eject and Give me the Tape. It’s not read by the author, and starts with ‘-graphy, doubled up’ and ends with the line ‘when your flesh creeps and never comes back’. You can download the track from Amazon.

This is the only work I know of credited to Brilburn Logue, but there’s no great mystery. ‘Brilburn Logue’ is a pseudonym for Alan Moore, at this point very, very early in his comics writing career – he’d just turned down the chance to write the main strip for Doctor Who Monthly (having written a number of back up strips for the magazine) and started preliminary work on Marvelman and V for Vendetta.

The only other ‘Brilburn’ I’ve been able to find is Conrad Veidt’s character in Abend-Nacht-Morgen (a lost 1920 silent film – “Brilburn, her brother, is a ne’er-do-well who bums money from his sister. He influences his sister to have Chester buy her an expensive pearl necklace, so he can steal it”, according to imdb user Arne Andersen). Moore might have picked ‘Logue’ simply because the suffix ‘-logue’ is used to denote forms of speech and writing – prologue, monologue and so on. It’s an amusing coincidence that that speech therapist Geoffrey Rush plays in The King’s Speech is ‘Lionel Logue’.