“I used to be an Ionic tower, I had so many columns,” announced Will Self, striding around the stage to a chorus of chuckles. “Now I write for the New Statesman, and that only gets read by a couple of socialists in the Potteries.”

The rock star of overblown verbosity’s reflection on the current state of his career rang more than a little hollow, not least because he was there to promote the follow-up tome to Psychogeography, his ingenious collaboration with abstract cartoonist Ralph Steadman, which was inexplicably dropped by The Independent last year.

Psycho Too’s writings consider voyages of the soul as much as the feet, and Self’s deadpan readings – a chest infection kept Steadman from his scheduled accompaniment, but his partner in crime is a nonchalant crowd-pleaser – took in topics as characteristic as vomit and an array of dystopian decay.

The supposedly shy artist’s absence was a shame, because his rich, devilish visions provide the perfect embellishment for Self’s subversive world view, surmised in a project that saved the writer from “lying around in a pile of my own dead skin”.

The end of the English gonzo’s spiritual travel diary is his former newspaper’s loss.