The Faber Social: It Lives, and Shall Live Again...

A late word for the inaugural Faber Social which took place on Monday June 6: a really good night, auguring well for many more top-drawer monthly literary-musical evenings ahead. (The proceedings had a nice write-up from Max Liu here). The audience were savvy and engaged, both for myself and David Peace in our discussion of gothic themes, and for Simon Reynolds and Bob Stanley on pop's endless fixation upon recycling. The Social as a venue is both suitably intimate for dialogue and good and lively for the purpose of spinning a few tunes. (Highlight for me having retired to the bar was hearing Simon Reynolds drop John Martyn's 'Big Muff'). But the overall top moment was hearing David Peace's incantatory reading of the 'Battle of Orgreave' chapter from GB84. I must admit that when I headed down the steps into the Social basement for the start of the night's proceedings I was feeling roughly twice my age, yet seeing my face on the promotional posters alongside the DJs was a kind of anti-ageing serum for the soul...

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest: News/Reviews/Events Round-Up

How've I been keeping? Busy, thank you very much. Here's the current report card on me and my Doctor Forrest:
- A couple of pleasing reviews, from Louise Welsh in the Financial Times ("Richard T Kelly has put his own original stamp on the gothic horror genre") and Ben Felsenberg in Metro ("Richard T Kelly's new novel is a rattlingly good yarn that wears a bloody Gothic heart on its sleeve")
- Last weekend I had the pleasure of writing about The Brothers Karamazov for The Independent's 'Book of a Lifetime' and on Yukio Mishima's The Sea of Fertility for The Guardian's 'Re-Readings'.
- I am interviewed here by Professor Glennis Byron at the University of Stirling's excellent Gothic Imagination website.
- An extract from the opening of the novel is online here at Writers' Hub.
- And I am in conversation tonight with David Peace on matters of the gothic and occult and Northern, at the first 'Faber Social' event in central London. Come ye all, ye be welcome...

David Peace, Mike Hodges, Newcastle, & Me

The Story Engine is an annual forum (founded by filmmaker Ian Fenton in collaboration with New Writing North) where British screenwriters and filmmakers convene in Newcastle to discuss their work and working methods. This year’s focus is on crime fiction – genre’s conventions, creative choices within those, adaptation from book to film. Story Engine: Scene Of The Crime takes place at the Tyneside Cinema on Friday 11th and Saturday 12th of March. Scheduled for the Saturday at 11am is a session entitled THE BLOODY NORTH, where the brochure promises that Mike Hodges and David Peace will “explore the importance of place within the genre and discuss the problems of mixing fact and fiction.” (It further proposes that Peace’s celebrated Red Riding Quartet “lies squarely in the shadow of Hodges’ Get Carter.”)
I tell you all this because I’ll be the chairperson of this Peace-Hodges symposium, which will be a considerable pleasure for me as well as an interesting listen, I expect. There’s little I need say myself about Get Carter (though I do always like to remind people that it marked the memorable screen debut of the Pelaw Hussars Juvenile Jazz Band.) But I can’t wait to hear what Mike Hodges will say of it, looking back nearly 40 years to his masterpiece. I’m extremely keen to know what David Peace will think of it too. And then what will Hodges make of the TV version of Peace’s Red Riding, which was widely felt to be as strong a piece of British ‘cinema’ as these shores have produced in years? (I remember Nicolas Roeg marvelling to me about the James Marsh-directed 1980 episode in particular, wondering also why we’re not allowed to be so stylistically bold in movies anymore. I remember Paddy Considine enthusing to me, not long after 1980 was in the can, about the joyous experience he’d had on the production. I drop these names really because Considine and Roeg are, I think, the last two people I interviewed on stage, in November 2008 and August 2009 respectively. I used to do more of this stuff, actually, but I’m always happy to turn my hand to it, and am also available for children’s parties.
Two clips: Red Riding in US trailer form because it shows just how forcefully this package was assembled from a modern genre perspective. And the ageless , glorious beginning of Get Carter – because that’ll be me in a week’s time, see – on the train from London to Newcastle, the finest of all journeys, and one to which I paid homage in the opening chapter of Crusaders...

Gordon Burn on Gordon Brown

The other day I had occasion to revisit the original transcript of the long interview I did with Gordon Burn and David Peace back in April 2008, set up by and written up for Esquire. Gordon died 18 months ago, not long before my younger daughter was born, and he's still very much missed, but I believe there are plans in the works to make a considered tribute/memorial to him later this year. Meantime, reading again his fascinating reflections on his work, in particular those grimly essential studies of murderers, I was relieved to be reminded of some simpler musings he had to offer on the then-Prime Minister, which to me show once again his great adeptness at seeing the story behind 'The Story':

"[Brown's] ineptitude in terms of being naïve about how the real world works is amazing, really. I think his lack of adeptness with the media and 'spin' - all the stuff he was supposed to stand for, and which for three or four months looked like a good thing - has just become an embarrassment. It indicates his lack of connection with the world, with people. He’s been living in Westminster since 1983, even before then when he was living in the manse and into student politics, he just seems like a total f***-up as a person. When he says he likes the Arctic Monkeys or his favourite programme is Strictly Come Dancing... you know it’s utter crap."

Gordon Burn - Final: Sex & Violence, Death & Silence

In a few weeks' time Faber will publish this collection of Gordon's writings on art - posthumously, sad to say (indeed is there a sadder word in the language?), rather than as the latest entry in what was becoming an ever more phenomenal body of work. I see that The List have flagged up the publication here, and his four northern obituarists - David Peace, Val McDermid, Lee Brackstone and myself - are cited one more time.

Gordon Burn 1948-2009

It’s a very hard thing to think that Gordon Burn is no longer with us. One of England’s foremost prose stylists, Gordon wrote so finely and insightfully on so many diverse subjects – the reader never quite sure on what topic his plenary mind would next alight - that one feels a sharp and singular sorrow knowing that we’ll not get any more of his brilliant books. So consummately did he tell the stories of two appalling serial murderers (Peter Sutcliffe and Fred West) that he was sometimes labelled a True Crime specialist. ‘I slightly bridle’, he told me, ‘because the implication is that you’re some nutter who’s obsessed with violence. I’m not at all.’ Indeed he wasn't.

When I spoke to Gordon last summer for an essay I was writing about the literature of the North East, he offered me an amused and amusing list of ‘the qualities – good and bad – that we have come to associate with the N.E.: hard-grafting, plain-spoken, open, canny, dogged, leftish, laddish, nostalgic, sentimental, chippy, suffering fools not at all, happy to appear dafter / less genned-up than one is, built-in bullshit-detector on permanent full alert…’ Needless to say, I think that was not a bad summary of Gordon’s own personal qualities, aside from his writerly gifts. I will always remember interviewing him and David Peace for Esquire in April 2008, beneath the pearl-strung chandeliers of an incongruously posh restaurant serving a French menu devised by a Japanese chef. Within minutes of our being seated, Gordon, looking just a bit twinkly, let it be known he would have much preferred a pie and a pint in the pub down the road.

Gordon was born and grew up in the west of Newcastle, only a short hop from St James’s Park and the brewery. His adolescent imagination was fired by the famous mid-1960s ‘scene’ created by poet Tom Pickard at Morden Towers (where Basil Bunting’s career began its second life.) But Gordon’s chief inspiration has been America (first Capote and Mailer; later Ford and Carver), and he felt the pull down to London. So he left Newcastle aged 18, and only renewed his tie to the place in recent years, with the passing of his mother and father. Around this same time he wrote his first overtly ‘north-east’ book, The North of England Home Service, a reflection on the changing face of Tyneside, and also a sort of homage to the Northern Novel – John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow – that he had belatedly begun to read with pleasure: ‘this’, he said, ‘after 25 years of loving American writing.’

Reviewing it for the Independent, Sean O’Brien felt that Gordon had captured ‘exactly the mixture of pride and insecurity which characterises this most resilient and fiercely defended of English working-class cultures at the moment when its coherence and integrity may be truly under threat.’Gordon was a prize-winning novelist who openly disdained the usual staidness of the ‘literary novel.’ Certainly he was not a man given to magic realism. ‘I can see the point in reading Dickens and Jane Austen’, he told me. ‘But ‘literary fiction’ seems to be me increasingly pointless… Until I wrote a novel I’d had no interest in novels whatsoever. I’ve no interest in the imagination. I would always fall asleep within two pages of a novel, or ten minutes at the pictures… I still do.’

He was being mischievous, of course, for he simply had his own definition of imagination and its uses, loaned from an esteemed literary source: ‘There was a quote by John Berger that I had in mind all the time I was writing Born Yesterday – that imagination is not, as most people think, the ability to invent, it’s the ability to disclose what already exists.’

Gordon’s lodestar in writing terms was the New Journalism of the 1960s, as exemplified in the pages of American Esquire: home to Mailer and Tom Wolfe and such seminal pieces as Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’ where the writer-as-participant-observer would write the story as it actually appeared to them, rather than as a gig preordained by journalistic and narrative conventions. As Gordon described it, ‘it was taking real life and writing about it in a kind of poetic way or a way that had the resonance of fiction. There was a thrill to having real life written about with some art involved in it. All the techniques I learned about the novel were through reading Wolfe, Talese, Mailer. And it was through them talking about their techniques that I realised what novelistic techniques were, without reading any novels...’

His last major deployment of these techniques was 2007’s Born Yesterday, a New Journalism ‘novel’ in which he both recorded and subtly transformed his responses to the dismal British summer of 2007 and its appropriately lousy lead news stories – of floods, failed bombings, and a lost little girl with a flawed eye, a condition she happened to share with the new Prime Minister. With a novelist’s eye he inhabited and explored and articulated these stories more powerfully than any 24-hour rolling news camera; and he had a modest theory as to why, one he had learned on the job while getting to know the close relatives of the 'Yorkshire Ripper': ‘You get these huge news stories, and basically nobody knows anything that’s really happening because the news agenda is so tiny and narrow, set by two or three people or media organisations, and everybody goes along that line. I always like to come at things from some kind of oblique angle, or to find a person or a situation that’s been ignored that you’ve got a good feeling is important to the story, so you just chase that down or try to find if your gut interest is true or not...'

Gordon liked to enlist V.S. Naipaul to his argument that non-fiction is more interesting than the novel, fiction a distortion of reality: ‘Naipaul says that people who write stuff that is, basically, the material for TV drama – they’re assuming they know the world already, there’s no need to investigate it any further, so they make up a story and stick it on top of the real world. Whereas he, Naipaul, finds the real narrative of life so endlessly enthralling that it’s arrogant to say ‘I know the world now.’ And that’s where I stand. Life is poetic in ways that are never covered by the word ‘poetry.’ Everybody rubs up against things in passing that touch them profoundly in a second – in a railway station or a pub, wherever.’

Gordon's particular brand of poetry is all over the extraordinary body of work he's left us, which I trust is about to be re-examined and enjoyed afresh by readers old and new. His personality, which I think he deftly managed to conceal a lot of the time, is in there too - writing can't hide that stuff - and I trust readers will also discern all those Great North Eastern qualities of his in spades.

Red Riding: Do you take it black?

The other week I was talking to a Great British Filmmaker who, inter alia, was madly enthused about the previous evening’s transmission of 1980, the second of three instalments in Channel 4’s production of David Peace’s Red Riding novels (this one directed by the esteemed James Marsh, he of Man On Wire and others.) So, yes, Great Filmmaker was blown away, thought it was all wonderful, etc. I don’t think he’d had as much pleasure in front of a television set since they cancelled Twin Peaks.
At the same time he was a tad puzzled and frustrated as to why such ostensibly ‘dark’ dramatic material could be made in such a ‘bold’ stylistic manner for television, without any apparent qualms, whereas any commensurate attempts to be ‘dark’ and ‘bold’ with a feature film project are struggling more than ever to get off the ground right now. Great Filmmaker was speaking from rueful recent experience: the demands and expectations of ‘genre’ have become the bane of his life. (Moreover I’m aware of what a hard fight it was for Revolution Films and Channel 4 to get Red Riding into production and onto screens, for all the talent that was assembled in front of the camera as well as behind it.)
But as one film executive recently put it to me, the only movies getting made right now are ones that have ‘a very clear idea of their target audience.’ On that level it will be interesting to see how the feature version of David’s The Damned United fares upon its UK release next Friday. Certainly it’s being offered to the public as a far friendlier, more approachable work than Red Riding, which was unabashed about its aura of suffocating bleakness and virulent Yorkshire-born evil.

Esquire (April 2009) now on stands: includes Clint, + RTK on The Damned United

They say Clint Eastwood has retired from movie acting, though I don't have to believe it, any more than do the many newspaper scribes (some of the same vintage as Clint) who have been penning nostalgic can-this-really-be-the-end? pieces in the wake of Gran Torino. (Peter Preston, for instance, former Guardian editor and film buff, who must quietly fancy himself as a bit of a veteran gunslinger.)

In any event, Clint the Director marches on. The Cannes Festival just gave him an honorary lifetime-achievement Palme d'Or, something they only bestowed once before, on Ingmar Bergman no less. Whatever you think of Clint the auteur, it's a fact that had he not existed then French film critics would have had to invent him, so closely does he resemble what they require American Cinema to be, or to mean.

Anyhow, here's Clint on the cover of another excellent issue of Esquire, just out. My contribution this ish is a piece about the new film version of David Peace's The Damned United. Among the more digestible things I say therein, this gobbet, after describing the picture as 'a typically English love story':

"[The film] shouldn’t be judged against Peace’s novel, but nor should it be forgotten that the novel is essentially a hate story – specifically the demoniac hatred Peace’s Clough feels for Revie and Leeds, worsened by other baneful spirits (including booze.)

David Peace: Cometh the Hour

If you want to feel a bit sick before bedtime, take a look at this skimpy nonsense that the BBC News site has posted up to mark the 25th anniversary of the walkouts that began the last Miners' Strike. Maybe one wouldn't feel so scornful if they hadn't decided to pour a skipload of rubbishy period pop music over the still images; but the effect of same is trivialising at best, and actively loathesome at worst - after all, somebody picked and sequenced that execrable music, just as they picked and sequenced the still photos and the newsreel soundbites, which culminate ('Everything Must Change') in Margaret Thatcher's characteristically deranged, myopic and evil comments on the subject of industrial relations.
But if you turn the sound off and just look at the photos, I daresay one visual element, one creeping stain across all things, will strike you hardest, and that's Uniformed Police, legion upon legion, outnumbering striking miners, any hour of day or night, yes sir. What can one think, but that these officers must have been sorely committed to that cause, or else were being handsomely paid for their pains?
Tonight I was originally minded to pen a few words about the TV adaptation of David Peace's Red Riding which has just begun its run on Channel 4; but thankfully there's plenty more to come on that score. I imagine anyone who watched Episode 1 this evening has come away with somewhat charged feelings about the 'thin blue line' and where it cuts through our body politic. And since all those writers who are truly worth the candle are plugged into currents that run deep and fierce under the endless banalised surface of our society, so it seems fitting that Red Riding is airing to coincide with the miners' unhappy anniversary, since David's novel GB84 is also lying out there in wait for anyone who fancies an account of the Strike that is free of the customary image repertoire (or the strains of the Style Council) and who cares to give some serious thought to the question of who or what is our nation's Enemy Within.

December Esquire on sale. Includes David Peace, Gordon Burn, Lewis Hamilton, your humble servant

This month's Esquire is now available, and includes the long interview that I did earlier this year with David Peace and Gordon Burn, to which I have alluded previously, and in which I ask these two great English writers whether or not they believe in evil. (Can you anticipate what were their - markedly different - responses?) Elsewhere, my monthly film column is about La Silence de Lorna by the Dardenne brothers, Julia by Erick Zonca, and the previously mentioned Better Things by Duane Hopkins - three pictures that are worth anyone's time.

David Peace's The Damned United: coming to a theatre near you, young man

Gordon Burn & David Peace

Yesterday I had the privilege of a sit-down discussion with two of the most formidable English writers working today: Gordon Burn and David Peace, who share some obvious affinities in subject matter (Peter Sutcliffe for one - the subject of Burn's Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son and the shadow-stimulus for David's 'Red Riding Quartet' of 1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983. Football, for another - 2006 was a red-letter year for writing in this field thanks to Gordon's Best and Edwards and David's The Damned United.) But by the time your estimation factors in the further range of Gordon's four novels (Alma Cogan, Fullalove, North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday) alongside his studies of the art world that include a book with Damien Hirst - and then you think about David's GB84, that occult history of the 84-85 Miners Strike, and then the fictional accounting of post-war Japan that he has now embarked upon, beginning with Tokyo Year Zero - and you have to consider it a blazing miracle that England can boast writers such as these. The symposium I had with them was arranged by Esquire magazine and was concerned primarily with crime and other forms of aberrant true-life behaviour, and the extent to which they make fitting inspiration for books. The resultant article should appear in the August issue (i.e. late July). But if you're stuck for reading beforehand, get yourself into some Burn and some Peace. If you've already read one or two do yourself a favour and read the lot.