Stewart Home

Kevin Llewellyn Callan (born 24 March 1962), better known as Stewart Home, is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love (2005), and earlier parodistic pulp fictions Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt, and Defiant Pose that pastiche the work of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art.

Home was born in South London. His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a model who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he exhibited art and also wrote a number of non-fiction pamphlets, magazines, and books, and edited anthologies. They chiefly reflected the politics of the radical left, punk culture, the occult, the history and influence of the Situationists – of whom he is a severe critic – and other radical left-wing 20th century anti-art avant-garde movements. In Home's earlier work, the focus of these reflections was often Neoism, a subcultural network of which he had been a member, and from which he derived various splinter projects. Typical characteristics of his activism in the 1980s and 1990s included use of group identities (such as Monty Cantsin) and collective monikers (e.g. "Karen Eliot"); overt employment of plagiarism; pranks and publicity stunts.

As a youth Home was drawn first to music and bohemianism, and then to radicalism. He attended meetings of many different leftist groups including several organised by the Trotskyist Socialist Youth League and even two editorial meetings of Anarchy Magazine. He refused to join any of these organisations and later repudiated them as reactionary, instead professing autonomous communist political positions after going to London Workers Group. In the late seventies Home produced his first punk (music) fanzines including early issues of "Down in the Street" which had run to seven numbers by the time he stopped publishing it in 1980. At the end of the seventies Home also made his first public appearances as a musician most notably as bassist with revolutionary ska band The Molotovs. The latter group mixed covers of classic reggae numbers like 'Johnny Too Bad' with original tunes such as "Notting Hill Carnival" (about rioting) and 'Don't Envy The Boss' (the juvenile irony of the chorus ran to: "don't envy the boss, I know he's got a lot, but he really really earned the money to pay for his yacht”).

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