[Ed note - this interview was conducted before Abby Lee's real identity was revealed by a "quality" Sunday newspaper days after the publication of GWAOTM. You can read about Abby being stalked by journalists and the subsequent fallout on her blog. More happily, you can find out about the Girl's Top 10 Sex Toys on Lovehoney, plus her recommendations of sex toys for men and sex toys for couples.]

Getting the book published must be a real buzz. Do you plan to keep going with the blog and write more books (ie go pro), or will working in film remain your priority?

It has been a real buzz, yeah: I’m very excited about it all. I really hope the book will reach more people that would otherwise not have read the blog, and that that will get them reading about sex too. It would be wonderful if a debate about sex could ensue – it’s about time we talked openly about it, I think. As for continuing the blog, well, I’ve been writing it for over two and a half years and I have no plans to stop yet: I enjoy it too much. I think as long as it gives me pleasure and I have the time, I will keep going with it. I am currently working on another couple of book ideas which I hope to develop further; it would be wonderful if I got to pursue even more of my writing now.

You get a lot of comments on your blog and you interact a lot with your readers. How much time does it take up? Do you generally like your readers – do you think they get where you’re coming from?

I do try to reply to comments on the blog as best I can, because the interactivity between my readers and myself is an important part of the blogging experience. I don’t get a lot of time to do this though, so my input can be a bit sporadic at times. That doesn’t seem to matter though: often my readers will be having a debate with each other in the comments box and I really enjoy reading their opinions and views.

Overall my readers are a pretty clued-up lot and I feel hugely complimented that they enjoy reading my words – and come back for more. Occasionally I get the odd troll – who really doesn’t get what I am about, or who feels they need to make a moral statement about women/sex/sexuality – but my regular readers will challenge their views and often, come to my defence too. When I started the blog, I never thought that complete strangers would be arguing my perspective on sex; I am honoured that they do.

There also seems to be a burgeoning community of other sex bloggers (for want of a better phrase) – has that let you meet new friends online or off?

I’ve met quite a few bloggers actually, both sex writers, and non-sex writers. I’m not sure if we’re a ‘community’ as such, but there does seem to be a kind of ‘blogger’s code’ which we all uphold: respecting privacy and anonymity, regardless of the subject matter we write about. It has been very refreshing to meet other sex bloggers – to know that I am not alone in my thoughts – and I count a few of them as good friends. Ironically, the bloggers I’ve met are the only people that know ‘me’ as well as know my blogging persona; none of my offline friends know I write the blog.

Can you talk as frankly to your real life friends about your feelings as you can write them down for the blog?

Sadly, no. I am reasonably open with my friends generally, but the explicitness of my thoughts – both sexual and emotional – are hidden from them. I’d love to tell them all about the blog and book, but it would really be like them reading my personal diary, which is not something I want to happen!

What’s your best / worst experiences to come out of writing the blog and being a minor Net celeb (albeit anonymous)?

The best thing to come out of writing the blog, is to know that I have, in some way, touched some people. Receiving emails from both women and men telling me I have struck a chord with them, or that they empathise with me, or that they have learned from my experiences, makes what I do seem so worthwhile. I never thought that there would be so many people who connected to my writing; with the thousands of emails sent to me, saying exactly that, I guess I was wrong.

The worst thing to come out of writing the blog, is, I suppose, the fact that I – and my life – still have to remain so hidden, and that I can’t enjoy the success my writing has achieved. I’m in no rush to lose my anonymity – I really do need to uphold my, and others’ privacy – but it’s frustrating that I can’t proudly state out in the open, that the blog and book are my doing. So, sadly, there’ll be no book signings, or meeting my readers, or anything like that. It’s a shame, but I’ve made this bed now, so to speak, so I’ll just have to lie in it…

With the blog to book angle and the witty explicit sex discussions angle, there will be inevitable comparisons to Belle De Jour’s debut. Did you read and/or rate her book?

I’ve been reading Belle’s blog since she began writing it; it was what inspired me to start my own. I haven’t read her book, so couldn’t comment, though I would say from her blog, that I think she’s a superb writer and although her writing is a bit emotionally distant, I love her style. I have no idea what she’s like as a person, but I’d definitely meet up with her for a beer: I think we’d have a few laughs. And perhaps exchange some sex tips too.

Do you think there’s more room for more women to write sex blogs? Is it good education for men to be reading this stuff so they can get more of a clue about what women are really after?

I think there’s room for everyone to write sex blogs, not just women. I am overjoyed that there seem to be so many female voices out there though: it’s about time that a different – non-sexist, non-passive, progressive female – perspective on sexuality broke though into the mainstream, so the more of us doing it, the better.

As for men reading and learning, well, from the amount of emails I get from men, it does appear that this is the case; that they really DO want to know what women want, not just so they can please women, but so they can enjoy sex more themselves. If just one couple have better sex as a result of a guy reading my blog, then I think that’s an achievement and something to be applauded.

If a girl wanted to start out writing her own thing or getting involved with talking to others on their own blog, what would you advise?

Would it sound corny if I said ‘just do it’? Because really, that’s all she’d need to do: just start up a blog and write – that’s all I did. I wrote for myself, from the heart; I have always been honest and open about my thoughts, and somehow, picked up readers along the way who wanted to read what I wrote about. And whilst doing it, I learned of others doing the same, and have made some good online friends as a result. It’s worth doing – if you have something to say, and the time and dedication to say it.

Given your anonymity, how peculiar did it feel to meet up with Lex from Naked Loft Party when he’s already familiar with your entire sexual gamut? Is there something liberating about that? Does it create new taboos? Or does it just make everything exceedingly polite?

It was brilliant fun meeting up with Lex from Naked Loft Party [NSFW, unsurprisingly]. It was a bit odd, with both of us having pseudonyms and not knowing what each other looked like – it felt like a blind date when we met – but it was wonderful to finally meet in the flesh, so to speak, the man whose writing I had admired.

It wasn’t odd at all that he knew of my entire sexual history, because firstly, I also knew of his, and secondly, I knew from his writing that he was very open-minded person and would think nothing of any of my sexual escapades. So when we met, I felt relaxed in his presence; it was a meeting of minds – of like-minded minds – and the connection we had online, translated into a face-to-face one immediately.

It actually did feel very liberating meeting him, because I could be myself completely and not maintain a facade – it felt like a huge weight was lifted from me, very refreshing.

A lot of your posts recognise that women should be able to be wholly uninhibited in bed without being chastised for doing so by men, other women or society in general. Do you think things are getting better for women in that sense?

I think, and hope, that we are moving in the right direction with this. I do, of course, support the view that women are not passive creatures who have sex ‘done’ to them: we have wants and needs and desires, just as men do. However, I don’t want to preach that women ‘should’ have to be some kind of ‘tiger’ in the bedroom, because I think that gives off the wrong message to young women and men: sex should be about equality, about two people sharing something, about having fun, not about one person fulfilling a fantasy representation of what their sexuality ‘should’ be.

Saying that, whilst I do seriously question the view of female sexuality in the media (given that women are almost exclusively either ‘pure virginial’ types, or ‘naughty slutty’ types), I also think that women do need to get more active in bed and take charge of their sexuality – regardless of how society views them. We need to move beyond the stereotypes and create a new version of our sexuality; one that will encompass our desires and wants – from our viewpoint.

Hopefully by doing this, more women will be able to state their needs; will be able to express their wants; will be able to take a more active role in their own enjoyment; and as a result, both women and men will have better sex. That’s what I reckon, anyway, and from the emails I’ve been sent, I suspect many others think this way too. My fingers are crossed that this happens: having a more open dialogue about sex can only be a good thing.

And finally – do you have any words of advice for young people?

First, have oral sex, and by this, I mean TALK about it. People need to be able to have an open dialogue about sex before doing it, then they’ll be able to discuss what they want and how they feel. And, as a bonus, talking about it can be like foreplay – it can be very erotic to discuss what you might like to do – so having a dialogue is an important part of the sex act.

Second, I would always advise having safe sex. I always have condoms on me, and think anyone thinking of having sex, should do so too: there is no excuse. Boys need to practise putting them on when alone, so they become familiar with them; girls can practise putting them (with their hands or mouth) on a sex toy or even a cucumber, for that matter. The point is to get familiar with them, so it becomes part of the sex act: it can be very erotic doing so. If someone refuses to use a condom, then refuse to have sex with them: it’s just not worth the risk – to either person. Saying ‘no’ to sex should be just as acceptable as saying ‘yes’, in my opinion.

Lastly, having an open mind, a willingness to learn, being giving, and being considerate, are much more important qualities to have in bed, than attempting to be the world’s greatest lover. Talking about what you want with your lover, expressing how you feel, being safe in what you do, will all contribute to a good time – so have fun!

See the Girl’s Top 10 Sex Toys on Lovehoney

Psychoraag – Suhayl Saadi

See all books by Suhayl Saadi at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

NM: First of all, congratulations on Psychoraag, a wonderfully ambitious and enjoyable novel. What was your inspiration for telling the story of Zaf?

SS: Thanks very much, Nick. It’s great to be talking with you. The inspiration for writing Psychoraag primarily was music and song, both in the sense of songs and in the sense of the musics of people’s lives/ life stories, etc. In this respect, the author is a kind of griot and shaman, combined. Also, a feeling for of history and place – Glasgow/ Scotland and Pakistan/ India – something I’ve wanted to write about in full-length fictional form for a long time. Plus, states of altered consciousness, overlappings of the self, this kind of thing. An efflorescence of liminality.

NM: To my mind, this is the first significant literary expression of Scottish-Asian culture. Did you find the role of ‘trailblazer’ especially challenging, or was this of little consequence to you in the writing process?

SS: Psychoraag was the first ‘Scottish Asian’ novel. However, it wasn’t my first novel. In the early 1990s, I had tried to write a novel around some kind of ‘Scots Asian’ nexus, but I didn’t have the craft then to be able to do that. I became interested in other areas and wrote around those for a while and honed my craft. Then, in 1995-96, I wrote The Snake under the pseudonym, ‘Melanie Desmoulins’. ‘Melanie’ means ‘black’ and Desmoulins was after Camille Desmoulins, the C18th French Jacobin poet and revolutionary, so: ‘Black Desmoulins’. The novel was a literary erotic fiction and was influenced by Bataille, Nin, Aragon, Appollinaire, Reyes, De Sade, Kosinski and others, as well as by classic erotic texts like The Perfumed Garden, the Kama Sutra, etc., except I tried to turn it around (physically as well as metaphorically!) so that it would be from the woman protagonist, Lucy’s point-of-view and with her being able to influence events. It was published by Creation Books in 1997 and is still widely available second-hand on the web. I’d also begun a much longer novel around the late 1990s, which I’ve only recently completed and so Psychoraag was penned in fits and starts within that scenario, between 1999 and 2003. I try to do something new with everything that I write. I find this fun!! That’s why I write, basically because it’s fun, although it’s damned difficult and complex and yet like love perhaps it doesn’t feel like work. So I am a trailblazer to myself, always. Whether or not society views me as that doesn’t bother me overly. However, I see little point in attempting to mimic what’s already been done very well by others. But I mean, I didn’t write Psychoraag thinking, “Halleluia! Now I’m going to write the first Asian Scottish novel!” No, it was an exploration as it always is. I was conscious that I wanted to evince viewpoints that perhaps had not been put onto the page before. Discomfiting things about which polite society avoids talking, or even thinking. It’s something I’ve thought about, that another Scottish writer, Alexander Trocchi also wrote erotic fiction – although he went to France to do it! But back in the mid-1990s, I wasn’t aware of this – or of him.

NM: Psychoraag is a roller-coaster of moods and sensations, veering from euphoria to dejection and soul-searching. One of the most powerful scenes, I thought, was Zaf’s encounter with junkie ex Zilla. Were you wary of the novel being labelled ‘cult’ or ‘alternative’ because of the drug references?

SS: Yes, I was wary of that. This kind of creative tension has as much to do with tone as with actual narrative and tends to come up particularly during the editing process, I mean both while I’m writing it and simultaneously thinking about what I’m writing and also when I’m actually editing various drafts of a text before anyone else has seen it. I wanted to avoid a kind of hip approach. There was also the ‘Trainspotting’ ambience, especially around the late 1990s, which was quite different from the one I was trying to conjure and I was conscious of this, too. I wanted something emotionally and intellectually engaged, not distanced, but right there, in the flesh and blood and brain. I wanted to push things to their logical (and illogical) conclusions, into the realms of paradox and to see what emerged. Maybe some kind of truth, who knows? I didn’t want to have this ‘cool’ attitude. I wanted a wild poetry. Without glorifying the whole thing, to use a jazz parallel, I was aiming at a late-Coltrane feel, or a Bitches Brew vibe, or an Albert Ayler solo duende and not at a polished, Kind of Blue package. There are drug abusers in all communities and sometimes in South Asian communities the problems tend to be swept under the wall-to-wall carpets. There are many reasons why someone might abuse and degrade themselves and I wanted to explore that desperation through a character. Of course, Coltrane destroyed himself, didn’t he? So did/ do many black artists. Self-destruction and creativity, what swings this see-saw? The answers lie in society/ history/ the economy/ spirituality and also deep within in the human brain. I wanted to deal with the unspoken things. For example: the long dynamics behind some mixed-race relationships; racism in Asian society; self-hate; the Indo-Pak thing; the Muslim thing; the class thing. I also wanted to voyage through the links between various musical cultures and evince some of the exciting historical and contemporary diversity within South Asian music and song. On another level, the psychedelic references allow another route to exploring states of altered consciousness through fiction. Pushing realism to its limits and almost – but not quite – bursting the seams can be a powerful way of delivering fictional prose. I wanted to puncture pre-conceptions. I set Zilla’s entry to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

I understand you were born in England but call Glasgow home, and the Glaswegian accent featured in Psychoraag is both convincing and unrestrained. In this respect, the most obvious influence on your work would seem to be James Kelman. How important has he been for you in freeing the use of the vernacular in literature?

SS: Kelman is very significant in this regard, as have been other writers like Alan Spence, Raymond Soltysek, Margaret Fulton-Cook, Graeme Fulton, Jim Ferguson, Duncan McLean, Brian Whittingham, Jeff Torrington, Marion Sinclair, Agnes Owens, Janet Paisley, Stephen Mulrine, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and many others, for example, countless live performers whose names I cannot recall, shame on me; Scotland has had a very vibrant and ‘unrestrained’ literary scene, what I call a ‘stand up’ scene and I don’t mean comedy; writers here often stand up to do their readings or at least project their voices as though they standing up; one cannot underestimate the effects of live (breathing, singing) voices, pouring into one’s head.

It’s always struck me as a very egalitarian scene – there are fewer barriers than perhaps exist elsewhere in this field. And I think that may arise from the nature of literate discourse in Scotland going right back to C18th and the Enlightenment as well as from strong (past) trade union and other radical political streams. I mean, you just sit and listen to someone like Alasdair Gray talk (a joy in itself, by the way), and you could be right back there, in Tom Paine’s kitchen (that’s a good title: In Tom Paine’s Kitchen). In this respect, I think Scottish literary discourse comes closer to the certain mainland European literary discourses of ideas (French, Italian or Spanish, for example) than perhaps to the post-nineteenth century, mainstream English version. And many of these writers were, and are, intensely political in their overt lives as well as in their literature.

Right through the 1990s, I was privileged to have been able to listen, watch and read many of these artists in Glasgow especially and this must have had an influence on the development of my abilities in the use of the vernacular in fiction. Of course, people like Kelman, Lochhead and Leonard pioneered the field from the 1970s onwards. And I don’t know it’s at all connected, but during the 1970s I had some very enlightened and exciting teachers of English and History at school, I mean we studied contemporary Scottish texts like work by George Mackay-Brown, for example, and also some left-field stuff, as I recall.

We also studied revolutionary, trade union and industrial history and Scottish history – I mean the colonial Highland Clearances as well as the older stuff, and all of that was invaluable in expanding my mind and also helping it take root. This was important, partly in developing my sense of an infinite canon. There was also a sense of societal change, which actually by that time, we rather took for granted – foolishly, as it turned out, because it all got rolled back during the succeeding decade. I’ve worked with, gone to school with and lived among all social classes in Scotland and am familiar with various West of Scotland accents and this helped, too. I have a broad and deep lake of human life on which to draw. Yet in some senses, I have always felt on the outside and this is probably good for the development of an artistic sensibility, a kind of hyper-awareness. To quote John Lennon: “Your inside is out and your outside is in!”.

In fact, when I started writing, I was partly reacting to the accents all around me, not wanting to just ‘parrot’ the machismo urban style which even then was becoming a little hackneyed in places; I mean, at readings sometimes it was like a fuck, fuck here and a fuck, fuck there, here a fuck, there a fuck, everywhere a fuck, fuck…!!; to some extent it just seemed adolescent and gratuitous and ultimately denuded of any power it might have had, whereas I was exploring more mystical areas and trans-continental stuff, stuff that would take me out of my head. I mean, I was reading people like Gustav Meyrink, Julio Cortazar, Herman Hesse, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Yukio Mishima, Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levi, Juan Rulfo, Ben Okri, Naguib Mahfouz, Italo Calvino, Juan Goytisolo and Thomas Mann as well as Sufi and other mystical/ wisdom literature (Hafez Shirazi, Sheikh Saadi, Jalaluddin Rumi, etc.) and old, old stuff from Arab Andalusia. Also, some experimental and political writing from the USA and elsewhere.

This lot also played well with my love of psychedelic music, which goes back quarter of a century to the Winter of Hate: 1979. I then came back (as it were) to urban Scotland and used some of this mental experience when I wrote Psychoraag and the fiction which preceded it, e.g. some of the stories in The Burning Mirror – you just have to look at very different stories like ‘The Queens of Govan’, ‘The Dancers’ and ‘Solomon’s Jar’ to appreciate this. I once delivered a Burns Immortal Memory speech in which I drew comparisons between themes in ‘The Dancers’ and ‘Tam o’Shanter’. So there you go, whether or not Kilroy was up here, on the Devil’s Bridge, Robert Burns – or at least Nannie the Witch – certainly was, along with all these other people I’ve mentioned and lots more!

NM: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari once wrote (in reference to Kafka) that a ‘minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language’, and that, in a minor literature ‘everything is political’. I think this is very relevant to a writer like Kelman, a working-class Glaswegian writing in English, but in your case there is the additional factor of your Asian identity. Would you say that your use of Glaswegian demotic and Urdu subverts the values of ‘literary’ English to an even greater extent?

SS: I agree. It’s called ‘neologistic thought’, well that’s what I’ve called it just now anyway. Every tongue is a universe, so allowing them to dance with one another is like travelling through worm-holes: a raag of lunacy. As Barthes tells us, all language and text is unstable. I’m very aware that writers like Rushdie (not just Rushdie, I mean most mainstream Anglophone writers) cannot seem really to meld languages very well, cannot seem really to grasp that jouissance that is the instability of language, seem incapable, really, of engaging in the dance! I mean, you look at Rushdie, he’s a good writer, no question. Midnight’s Children was ground-breaking in Anglophonia and I really respect some of his other work, including his non-fictional work, but he can’t do dialogue! Especially not demotic dialogue. I reviewed his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown for The Independent (by the way, I’m very grateful to Boyd Tonkin, the literary editor, for asking me to do this and for publishing my review, uncut; Boyd is a very erudite and also a very affable guy) and it’s a good novel, I enjoyed it and it makes some very powerful points, politically – I gave it a good review – but one of its weaknesses resides in Rushdie’s very obviously ineffectual use of demotic. I mean this is a guy who was brought up in India, for God’s sake! As far as I know, he can speak Urdu, though I’ve never heard him actually speak it, or Kashmiri for that matter. I mean, my French is probably better than my Urdu, in terms of speaking – and that’s not very good. My comprehension of Urdu, while better than my speaking, remains very limited. So Rushdie is more multilingual than I am, but tragically he seems unable really to draw on it. It limits his writing. You see, language is everywhere political, but in Britain we have the added ontological nuance that language is very much a mediator of social class. And the dominant groupings, anthropologically speaking, are the white southern English upper and upper-middle classes, what I call the über-class. This class was the driver of empire and across the spectrum it remains in the driving seat. This is what ‘Big Brother’ means, as a concept on the subliminal level. So you start playing around with that and in some sense, you’re playing around with the class and imperial systems. I have never seen a class analysis of Rushdie’s work. There probably is one, somewhere in a literary journal on a dusty shelf in a high tower of academe, but I’ve never seen one in the mass quality press. Nowadays, it’s class, class everywhere, but not a word to read! Of course, as David Crystal, John Stotesbury, Melvyn Bragg and other linguistic and literary luminaries make clear, the burgeoning varieties of English around the globe, various almost musical syncretisations of language, represent hugely exciting developments in the evolution of consciousness. Every language is a set of peculiar takes on the universe. So broadening the range of the sextant enlarges its possible horizons. People like Kelman are like captains of ships – not imperial ships, mind you, more like pirate submarines – they’re always charting new courses. Then maybe, in this ocean of words, I’m a wee bathyscaphe, trying to go ever deeper! Ships? I see no ships!

NM: Why did you choose to include a glossary of non-Standard-English words? Might this not undo some of the equalitarian work of the language?

I know, I know. It’s a long story: I put in a glossary, then I took it out, then I put it in, then I took it out. Then I put it in. Various editors (due to mergers and other gremlins, the book passed through a variety of hands over the several years of its gestation) had opposing views on the matter. In the end, I figured that as most readers would be likely to be unfamiliar with at least some of the non-Standard English words in the text, the glossary would be there if they needed it. At the same time, I’ve written the novel to minimise the need for use of the glossary. But the other point is that the glossary was a fun way – for me, at least – of expounding a little, both etymologically and on the various multilingual expletives as well as it acting as a kind of hypertext. Right, so you’ve got ‘hijaab’, the Arabic word for a Muslim woman’s headscarf (but more correctly, the word for a protective spiritual ‘veil’), next to ‘hijerah’, the Urdu word for ‘transvestite’, or ‘khotay ka lun’ (‘you’re a donkey’s prick’ in Punjabi) nestling up alongside ‘Khuda hafez’ (Farsi and Urdu for, ‘God go with you’) next to ‘khuserah’ (‘an effeminate homosexual’ in Urdu). These juxtapositions are not deliberate, simply alphabetical and I’ve just picked these examples at random – but you see what I mean. Furthermore, there are little digressions and things in the glossary which can be fun to write and to read, little outlets from the psychotic intensity of the narrative itself. It’s not quite Borgesian though, that would be for a different sort of book. Also, I did not want non-Standard English words to be italicised, I felt very strongly about that, but when my publisher sent the book round various booksellers, etc., they all wanted the words italicised, said it would help them understand the text better (as well as being just a formality). So I figured, well, it’s a challenging text already and if they’re representative of readers who, unlike me, are not familiar with many of the words then I’ll go with that – reluctantly though, I have to say!

NM: Moving onto Psychoraag’s reception in the media. I thought it was remarkable how little attention it received in the English broadsheets, given its numerous literary awards and recommendations. Can you fathom as to why this might have been?

SS: Methinks I hear a hobby-horse a’comin…! My kingdom, my kingdom, for a hobby-horse! The crucial thing to remember, Nick, is that colonial hierarchies of power – linguistic, racialist, class-oriented, geographical – remain operative, indeed, remain definitive, even though they are far less obvious than in the past and are seldom acknowledged as existing. Because of this, they are commensurately more difficult to fight. Censorship in the UK today is not monolithic, okay, there’s no wee man with a blue pencil, a group of guys ‘n’ gals doesn’t sit down somewhere and decide: Right, we’re gonna block out this book! Remember, I’m talking only about fiction here, not non-fiction books by, for example, Official Secrets whistleblowers, where there really is a wee man with a blue pencil-and-rubber sitting in Whitehall. Just as, in the internal world of world of fiction, one is constantly shadow-boxing, so it is on the outside as well. I tend to think of it as a series of filters and these are reflective of and intrinsic to the nodes and flows of power in our society. I don’t think there’s any real deliberation involved, it’s just how society is. And that’s depressing, because not only is it far trickier to get a handle on, it’s also much more difficult to change. With the ‘wee man in Whitehall’, once you get access to power (!) and want to change things, you just re-assign him to parking tickets. I guess, in the current climate, being a Muslim male from what statistically is one of the most despised, uneducated and excluded minorities in the UK, that is, the Pakistani minority, living in what is seen (from the point-of-view of the Thamesian elites) as a ‘peripheral’ region of Britain, who writes narratives which sometimes challenge both liberal imperial and multicultural metropolitan received wisdoms and who is neither foreign enough to be deemed exotic nor tamed enough to be seen as ‘one of us’, is pretty close to being at the bottom of the neo-colonial slushpile. Out of sight, out of mind, the British way. It’s like with the bogeyman: “If we ignore him enough, he might just go away”. Well, sorry folks! Don’t fall asleep just yet – Freddie’s baaaack!

And it’s true, the Managing Director at my publisher’s described the process of trying to get the English broadsheets interested in Psychoraag like “bashing one’s head against a brick wall”. This went on right through the trade chain: from pre-publicity, through uncorrected proof copies for reviewers, to hardback and then paperback editions. The situation in Scotland was the diametric opposite; the broadsheets and other print media outlets here were very interested indeed. One might expect that large, corporate publishers would have cosy relationships with large, corporate media outlets. But some of the Scottish broadsheets are also owned by large corporations – The Scotsman, for example, is a Murdoch paper. And some of the English Asian web and print media covered it, too. The Times of India reviewed it, even though it’s not available in bookshops in India, while The Times of London did not, even though it is available in England. So there are other filters at work here. It’s multivalent, complex. But rather than me rambling on, I would strongly advise you to read the following articles, all on the web:

1) M. K. Chakrabarti, Marketplace Multiculturalism, Boston Review, Dec 2003/ Jan 2004. www.bostonreview.net

2) Ali Smith, Life Beyond the M25, The Guardian, Dec 18th 2004. www.guardian.co.uk

3) Chris Dolan, Book Launches – the closest Scotland Gets to Café Society, The Herald, 1st May 2004. www.theherald.co.uk

I’ve pulled out some quotes from these articles, because readers might need to pay to access the entire pieces on the web (additions in square brackets are mine): “That writers as – at the very least – interesting as [Saadi] have to wait so long to get their novels published, despite success in short stories, poetry, articles, is worrying. Have we categorized ourselves into such tight little boxes – ‘Beat’, ‘Political Realist’, ‘Thriller’, ‘Scots’ – that those whose natural element is fusion, synthesis, or something entirely new, no longer have a slot on bookshop shelves? Or, more worrying still, that the name Saadi might be hard to market; or ‘Psychoraag’ too challenging, unconventional, for a literary scene that has become a little staid and predictable?” Chris Dolan, The Herald, 1/5/04.

“How many thousands of books get published a year? How few make it to the top of the publicity slushpile and into the national broadsheet reviewing pages, which all tend to review pretty much the same books. And does the old charge hold true after all these years, that the London papers are naturally metrocentred, or at least England-centric, with little regard for what’s happening in the rest of the United Kingdom when it comes to what gets reviewed? Maybe the new quarterly Scottish Review of Books will even up the score a little, or at least indicate in a loud voice how uneven things still are. Its first edition has a good variety of features and reviews by and about writers who tend to be overlooked in the south, like Kenneth White, Peter Burnett or Suhayl Saadi, whose ambitious first novel, Psychoraag, an intimate 400-page sprawl covering six early-morning graveyard-shift hours in the life of an on-air Asian-Glaswegian DJ, came out earlier this year and, apart from the TLS, received no reviews south of Scotland. ‘Salaam alaikum, namaste ji, good evenin oan this hoat, hoat summer’s night! Fae the peaks ae Kirkintilloch tae the dips ae Cambuslang!’ Psychoraag ‘s back-of-the-book glossary has the definitions for Gaidhealtachd and Ganga Jumna side by side; and the critical silence that met it down south is an interesting reaction in itself to a book about race and invisibility, voice and silence, whose central theme is the question of whether anyone out there is actually listening. Ali Smith, Life beyond the M25, The Guardian, Saturday December 18, 2004.

“This same publishing industry has turned a cold shoulder to other, less marketable writers. Very little has been told about Suhayl Saadi’s challenging short story collection, The Burning Mirror. Seventeen major publishing companies rejected The White Family, a frank, disturbing portrait of British racists by white author Maggie Gee, before it was taken up by Saqi Books, a small, specialist [Arab] UK publisher. (Gee was named to the 1983 Granta list and The White Family was later shortlisted for the Orange Prize. However, Gee’s Granta accolade wasn’t enough to prevent 17 rejections by the industry, and the Orange Prize nomination would have never happened if Saqi hadn’t put the book on the shelves.) Above all, neither of these books achieved a fraction of Brick Lane’s sales. Even the means by which Monica Ali’s British publisher, Doubleday, marketed Brick Lane sought to obscure the multiculturalism of her own life. Doubleday granted first interview rights in a national newspaper to the Guardian, but when the paper decided to assign its respected literary critic, the South Asian Maya Jaggi, to the story, Doubleday requested a different journalist, preferably a non-South Asian one, because Monica Ali preferred to be seen as a writer first and a ‘coloured person’ second. The Jaggi byline, it seems, might have ghettoized the review. Jaggi protested and Doubleday promptly issued an apology for the ‘misunderstanding’, but the point had already been made. Another writer did the interview for the Guardian. This, then, is the publishing industry that brings us today’s supposedly multicultural authors. And it is this industry’s efforts and enthusiasm that shape the overall commercial presence and success of today’s ‘multicultural’ books.” M. K. Chakrabarti, Review of ‘Brick Lane’, Boston Review, Dec 2003/ January 2004 [Please also see my response to the question-one-after-the-next.]

NM: When Kelman won the Booker Prize in 1994, Simon Jenkins referred to him as an ‘illiterate savage’ (The Times, 15th October 1994). Why do you think the mainstream media is so scared of books written in the demotic?

SS: God! I didn’t know that. That’s disgraceful! And Simon Jenkins, having been editor of The Times and a long-time columnist for that paper, now writes for The Guardian, supposedly a left-of-centre rag. Well, if that’s left-of-centre… You see, this is the problem. Jenkins’s comment is racist, imperialist, vicious, it’s like something from the nineteenth century. If he’d said it of a black person, he’d have had to resign. Yet I’m a writer and I hadn’t even heard of what he’d said. Actually, someone who says that kind of thing is themselves the ‘illiterate (and ignoble) savage’, an ‘attack-dog’ of the English über-class. But obviously that idea still holds sway, if he felt able to write that in a mainstream newspaper so very recently, if the southern English elite think of Jim Kelman, a British white man who hails from, and generally writes about, the working classes, in that way, then what would they think of me and my work? People like this govern the discourse, what they write – and the way in which they write it – millions read and are influenced by. Is it any wonder they are resistant to giving a novel like Psychoraag any coverage? Kelman and his work represent the epitomy of civilisation and are a glimpse of what real democracy in literature could be like. However, at least Jenkins was being honest. This is the class system in the raw. And it’s not a pretty sight. But it’s the quiet savages you have to watch, the polite ones, the dissemblers. The ones who think they have clothes on. All of this illustrates the attitudes which emanate from and contribute towards the war economy, the dehumanising and killing of other peoples throughout the world and the dispatching of British working-class young men and women to die like, well, like the ‘savages’ which the ruling class thinks they are. Fiction is politics, but politics is not fiction. Every letter is a bullet, every word, a bomb.

NM: How do you explain the huge success of ethnic minority writers such as Monica Ali, Hanif Kureishi or Zadie Smith? Do you think their novels adhere to certain value systems that yours doesn’t?

SS: Like most things in a complex society, this is likely to be multi-factorial. Actually, as a kind of chimaera between Job, Jacob and Methuselah, I’ve been rabitting on about this for many years, even back when many of these authors were just twinkles in their editors’ eyes. I remember being interviewed by Sanjeev Kohli (later of Chewing the Fat, Goodness Gracious Me! and Still Game) live on BBC Radio Scotland, yeah in early 1998 it was, and even then I was talking about the same sorts of things. Perhaps this just means that I’m hopelessly obsessed and somewhat deluded: Sisyphus and Don Quixote. But much blood and ice has flowed beneath the bridge since that time. I’ve have much more concrete experience of the whole scene, so my perceptions now are probably based on better authority.

1) The writing has to be of a certain standard and I congratulate any writer who manages to get a novel published and especially black writers. It’s super when black, oppositional or wildly imaginative writers win prizes, etc. – and I’ve won or been short-listed for some myself, so I can only say that I’m glad this kind of thing is happening. Good on them!! I mean, us.

2) Individuals: Most people are fine as individuals, when you meet them and get to know them. I always believe in seeking out the good in people, the common humanity, that is my personality and that is how I deal with people. So this is not an attack on people. My comments below represent an assault on institutions, imperial and economic structures and the power manifested thereby. There are many wonderful people working in these structures and yet still, little changes where it really matters. It’s really a plea. Free your mind and your books will follow! Or maybe it’s the other way around.

3) London: Many of these writers have set their fictions (at least their initial ones) in London. London is iconic in the world; it has a big, very multicultural population, is central to the economy, politics and culture of the UK and the potential readership is more obviously already formed and is enormous. To target this is very sensible of the writers (not like me!). I mean, publishers are into money, of course, they’re big businesses, it’s their raison d’être. So a London novel is a safer bet for a good rollover than a Glasgow one. Also, as with the various US accents, with which through film, popular music and television most of us are familiar internally, in our brains, so it is with London-speak. In spite of all the Scots in London (ah yes, that old chestnut!), it is not so, with Scotland-speak. Stainds ta reason, dannit? The publishing industry and media are situated largely in London. As is the case with New York City, it’s actually a very small world within these circles. As with all walks of life, networking is important.

4) Oxbridge: many of the black and Asian writers who’ve made it big went to Oxbridge (or Ivy League). Check it out yourselves. I mean, again, good on them. Many of the elite, the movers and shakers, in the literary/ cultural/ political/ publishing/ media worlds did, too. More networking is therefore possible. Also, a good education, which is what you get at Oxbridge, really does help, assuming someone is already talented. Plus, I do think that there is a danger that people can emerge from such august institutions holding similar sets of preconceptions and that they may not even realise it. It’s not unlike the process that occurs in private schools. Incubators of imperium. I’m not saying it’s inevitable, but it happens sufficiently frequently for it to be a major dynamic in society. For a black/ Asian person, especially, in whatever field you’re in, a bit of privilege can help you up that greasy pole. It’s not a guarantor of success, of course, but it all adds up. I’ve written about this in Ninety-Nine Kiss-o-Grams, a story from my book, The Burning Mirror, where one of the thoughts of the (dysfunctional) protagonist could be paraphrased as: Study white, marry white, act white – become white. Ever seen the film, Crash? I’m thinking particularly of the scene where the black TV drama director is pressurised by the white producer to make the black actor sound more ‘black’. Well, that’s about the USA in general and LA in particular, but not dissimilar dynamics are at work in the UK, too. This is very risky ground, I know, but it’s the kind of thing my fiction grapples with. The world over, personal contacts are not everything, but they go a hell of a long way. I speak from experience, not prejudice. There are no chips on my shoulders, only one-eyed djinns, and these can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.

5) Standard English: Well, we’ve covered that one already, right? Linguistic Decorum rules OK. Hail Caesar! Well, too bad, Spartacus is here! We’ll come back, and we’ll be millions!

6) Basic Liberal Assumptions: Most novels do not question these. Elites like to think of themselves and their views as being epitomes of tolerance, objectivity and truth, when really, they are simply paragons of power. I say to them: Please, if only for a moment, turn and look into the (burning) mirror!

7) Risk Aversion: a pathological condition, this, requiring Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (e.g. reading Psychoraag backwards in Aramaic). The cartelisation of the publishing industry and of retail bookselling means that innovation (= risk) tends to be avoided, unless of course one has other advantages going for one, in which case it is likely that one will be allowed to write almost anything and be published. It is highly unlikely that the previously unknown groundbreaking equivalents of, say, Kelman and Gray would be published today by ‘major’ publishing houses in the UK.

8) Demographics: A Chinese literary figure told me recently and probably very sensibly: “You know, Suhayl, you have to appeal to white, middle-aged, middle-class Englishwomen as, in the UK, these are the people who buy books”. Well of course, it’s not true that all people in a particularly constructed demographic cohort will think and read the same way, but marketeers tend to behave as though it were an iron law of the universe, and in a kind of quantum mechanical way the thing then tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Interesting though that the overwhelming majority of the people in positions of power in the publishing, bookselling and national print media are drawn from a single social class and a single ethnic group.

9) It’s like this, see: Let’s cut to the uncomfortable quick. Assuming that you have the talent and the craft of writing and that you’ve written something of a certain basic standard, the five essentialist totems/ rate-limiting steps seem to be: Class, politics, ethnicity-faith group, language and location. If you and/ or your work have three or more of these on your side, then you’re in with a chance. If you have none (and aren’t, say, married to the commissioning editor, in which case, given the demographics of commissioning editors, you’re likely to have most of them in any case), then regardless of the quality of the writing and the potential saleability of the book, you’re fucked. I’m fucked.

10) In spite of all this: In spite of not having the muscle of a major corporation behind them, Psychoraag and The Burning Mirror have been widely reviewed in Scotland, Pakistan, India, in a couple of literary magazines in England and on the web, and Scottish book groups, schools and universities have studied them and much else good has happened. I’m very grateful to have been invited to so many literary events in Scotland (including the Edinburgh International Book Festival) and also to some far beyond the shores of Albion (Singapore, Ukraine, Pakistan, NYC, Canada, Germany, France, Portugal). Well done, the Lancaster Litfest for being the first ever England-based literary festival to have invited me to read (note to other festival programmers in the Land of the Raven: the world as we know it and ‘our way of life’ did not come to an end as a result). And to Saqi Books (an Arabic publisher) and the British Pakistani Psychiatrists Association for hosting readings in London and Coventry, respectively. And to Brendan McPartlin, of the Leeds-based Wicked Words for kindly agreeing to me reading there, to Sunny Hundal of Asians in the Media, Asjad Nazir of Eastern Eye and to Will Buckingham, editor of Birmingham Words magazine, for writing reviews of Psychoraag. Also, the various London-based specialist medical magazines, who did the same. I have only praise for my small but dynamic publisher and my energetic agent, both of whom are Edinburgh-based and who do take risks, thank goodness. Interestingly, the state, via accountable (and this point is key, they are at least on some level, publicly accountable) bodies like the BBC, the British Council, various Scottish local councils and libraries, the Scottish Arts Council and the Scottish Poetry Library, has been very helpful to me over the years. This is beginning to sound like an Oscars’ acceptance speech! In a sense, and at the risk of drawing a even more ludicrous parallel, it’s a little like the micro-credit given to small, cottage industries run by women in the economic south. The social payback is enormous. But it goes to show that if there’s the will on the part of agents, publishers, librarians, festival programmers, arts officers, booksellers, etc., a book – even a challenging book by a challenging author like Psychoraag (‘n’ me, haa-haa-haa, hee-hee-hee) – can do things out there with readers, with people, can even turn some sort of tiny wheel, and this again proves that too often corporate entities have their heads screwed on the wrong way, their mouths wide open and their minds tightly shut, waiting for the latest Bollywood dream vindaloo sensation to come along and spice up their taste-buds. What this demonstrates on their part is a lack of knowledge, ambition and imagination, a deep-seated political regressiveness and a tendency to patronise writers and readers alike. Nonetheless, incremental (yawn!) progress does occur. I mean, now at least some black and Asian writers are being published and are making it big. After all, beggars and whores, which even after Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nawal el Saadawi, Che Chevara, Angela Davis and Jim Kelman is still what most of us are at the end of the day, can’t be choosers. So let’s keep on pushing, sisters and brothers! One day, we may even be able to kick out the jams!

NM: Does the lack of publicity surrounding Psychoraag dampen your spirits as a writer, or does it make you more determined to make your voice heard?

SS: Every time I hit this particular brick wall, I get angrier and more determined to kick it in. Trouble is, this cultural war impacts damagingly on all aspects of one’s life. I’m no longer twenty years old and I have a family to support. I can’t just go off to a monastery or sleep on friends’ floors for seven years, or help the natives in some exotic locale, or live in a garret while I pen the masterpiece, or do any of those things about writers put out by romantic publicity departments. You know how much work – blood, sweat and tears – goes into writing a novel in all its drafts? A hell of a lot! No wonder, historically, so many black (and other) artists have self-destructed. I know some of them and have watched them implode, mentally, physically, artistically. But I mean, in many countries today, writers lose their jobs, are poisoned, go to jail, are tortured, get executed. I am hugely privileged to personally know some of these writers, too, people who’ve been locked up three, four times by different regimes. My little travails are nothing compared to all that, absolutely nothing. I try to put it all in perspective. It’s just words, right? Well, then, never have so few done so much with so little for so many. And I shall fight them on the beaches, I shall fight them at the wine parties, I shall fight them on the web, I shall fight them on the bookshelves… now, where did I put my blasted cigar? The (spikey!) point is, as I indicated in my Foreword to a recent anthology which I co-edited of South African and Scottish writing, Freedom Spring: Ten Years On, you have to struggle, and keep struggling, for freedom. It is never just given to you on a plate. Paine, Desmoulins, Fanon, Du Bois, Abbie Hoffman and the rest all knew this. And once the freedoms are achieved, you have to fight on all fronts to keep them, use them and extend them! This is happening, right now, in the UK, with the struggle being waged both outside and within the establishment (I mean, the judiciary and The House of Lords, for goodness sake!) against the current government’s attempt to roll back historic liberties in the name of (that old, hoary chestnut) security (for which, read the war economy and the engendered state of permanent war).

NM: Finally, what are you up to at the moment, and what are your plans or ambitions for the future?

SS: As I say, working 100 hours a week at non-writing stuff, just to make ends meet. If I get a chance to write again, I will try and finish a novel I’d begun in 2002. Quite different from Psychoraag, it aims (among other things) to re-define what we think of as fictional narrative. Before I sank into incipient financial ruin, I penned two new stage performances. One, a pro-peace song-and-dance extravaganza for all the family, draws on folk tales from many cultures and will be staged by Peace Arts in Glasgow in September 2006, and the other, a very dark and potentially extremely controversial, anti-war, expletive-laden, sex-riddled, God-mocking, four-handed black box production, may or may not be staged in (initially) Glasgow in either late 2006 or (more likely) early 2007. Some Pauses for Thought for the Sarah Kennedy Programme on BBC Radio Two and a book review or three. Plus some other miscellaneous stuff like co-organising the Pakistani Film, Media and Arts Festival (www.pakistanifilmfest.com). Thing is, right now I’m listening to acid rock from Turkey, Brazil, Japan, Cambodia, Greece… so hold onto your hats, people, we’re going for a ride!!

Feel free to check out my website: www.suhaylsaadi.com for more information.

It’s been my pleasure, Nick, Spike and everyone! Peace and love be upon you all.

Suicide: No Compromise – David Nobakht

See all music by Suicide at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Just finished the top notch hardback edition of David Nobakht’s biography of synth-rock pioneers Suicide. I would have loved to have written this book. Very much a band biography rather than a personal history of Suicide’s two members, Alan Vega and Martin Rev, Nobakht assembles a wealth of material that traces Suicide’s genesis. From the first tinkerings with primitive electronics in the early 1970s, endless confrontational, blood-smeared gigs, through to the release of their seminal self-titled debut album – "up there with the first Stooges or Velvet Underground album" – the extreme reaction they provoked touring with The Clash at the height of punk in the UK (one night someone threw an axe at the stage. A fucking axe!), the involvement of Ric Osacek from The Cars who spent a good chunk of his own popstar earnings on them, through to their gradual acceptance during the 1990s and their triumphant string of gigs that they’ve been playing since 1997 to an increasingly enamoured audience – Nobakht covers it all, and it’s one of the strangest and most fascinating pop history stories I’ve read.

Over 30 years, Suicide have not simply survived, they’ve thrived, and now they are getting as much acclaim as they used to get abuse. It’s just as well, given that both Rev and Vega must be getting on towards 60 now – and having seen them live twice at London’s Garage, it’s evident that age won’t stop them from generating some of the most beautiful and vicious noise you can ever hope to hear. For all their supposed influence on industrial music, Suicide have an intense warmth and humanity to their music – even when they’re sonically scaring the crap out of you – which is wholly absent from the more po-faced knobtwiddlers that came after them. Suicide are still as vital as ever within an increasingly moribund music scene, still outside it even as they become accepted and assimilated into it.

What’s interesting from Nobakht’s book is how aware of their own position in pop history Vega and Rev are – much of the book is written in their own words, and they are reluctant rock stars. Clearly they’re quite thrilled at finally getting some recognition and earning some money to support themselves – because despite being hugely influential, no one actually bought their records – but equally, after 30 years of scraping together enough money to get on to the next album, their new success only comes from doggedly sticking to what they wanted to do. At one point, Vega talks quite poignantly about his 1980s solo career, where he became huge in France of all places, had a major label deal with Elektra – and then suddenly got dropped. He admits it felt really painful to be kicked off the label after struggling so long to get paid anything for making music – but also reckons it was for the best. It’s not often you hear a musician openly admit he misses the money that a major label brings.

Nobakht does a sterling job of chronicling Suicide’s rise over 30 years with a cast of thousands describing what a huge impact listening to or seeing the band had on them – Marc Almond, Henry Rollins, Moby, Michael Stipe, Bono (eh?) – among many others. You’re left in no doubt about the huge impact they had. There’s the received wisdom that the first Velvets album sold very badly, but that everyone who bought a copy started a band – and Jim Reid from The Jesus And Mary Chain says as much about the first Suicide album. People like Marc Almond say it was the second, more heavily produced and disco-tinged Suicide album that actually laid the blueprint for many of the one keyboardist, one singer synth bands that were to follow – either way, neither album had much success at the time of their release. Either way, while Suicide’s records are great, they simply don’t capture the sheer euphoria of what they do live.

Beyond Suicide themselves, No Compromise provides an evocative description of decaying Seventies New York and the emerging punk scene around Max’s and CBGB’s, mixed up with the artist lofts where Vega and Rev first hung out and played their first tentative gigs alongside the likes of the New York Dolls. If Vega and Rev seem like New York cliches at times – summoning up death, darkness, lust and disgust, all the usual motifs of that city’s music – it’s because they were the ones helping create that now-overused vocabulary to begin with. And, as several people point out in the course of the book, others may throw the same shapes or try to adopt the same postures, but very few get near the intelligence that radiates from Suicide’s own sardonic, sonic howl.

Nobakht himself stays pretty much out of the text – he doesn’t really talk about Suicide’s own impact on his own life or the process of writing the book – it would have been interesting to see a more personal slant at times and some "behind the scenes" comments on talking to so many pop stars about Suicide’s influence on themselves. Likewise, the personal lives of Alan Vega and Martin Rev remain firmly out of the spotlight, which is both good and bad – reading the book, you do develop a certain affection for them both and it naturally leads you to want to know more of their traditional biographical details. On the other hand, maybe it’s just better to preserve the mystique. On a pedantic note, I bristled at the one word mention of The Sisterhood, a side project from The Sisters Of Mercy on which Vega guested, as I would have loved to have heard more about how that was recorded. The Sisters were huge fans of Suicide, regularly covering "Ghost Rider" as a set closer when they played live.

Nobakht’s book is definitely an essential for Suicide fans – it’s perhaps a little too reverential, but then, Suicide deserve a bit of reverence after all the shit they’ve been through. (Although there is a hilarious moment when one person describes seeing Suicide as "One guy playing a crappy Farfisa badly and another guy hitting himself with a microphone and falling down a lot"). Vega and Rev prove to be fascinating interviewees, unafraid to try and grasp for the big ideas when talking about their sound but not taking themselves too seriously either. Their self-awareness of their place in musical history, and their depictions of what came before them and after them, makes for a unique perspective on how music has changed from doo-wop to rock’n'roll to punk.

More importantly, though, No Compromise is not an eulogy for a band that was great once but is now just playing the circuit cashing in on their reputation – what’s life affirming about Suicide is that they are a band who are still going strong, still experimenting, still playing. (See a Suicide gig and the only time you might actually recognise a song is during the encore). While the audience has changed and become a lot less hostile, Suicide themselves continue doing just what they want. True, they still don’t sell many albums, but royalties for covers of their songs appearing on soundtracks for The Crow and The Sopranos have apparently earned them more cash than their entire 30 year career of record sales. That such unexpected luck should befall Suicide is a skewed vindication of both their influence and their sound – 30 years old, rooted in the past, playing in the present, still sounding like the future.

4 Play – Irvine Welsh
[collected scripts of plays based on Welsh's work]

See all books by Irvine Welsh at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com



[Note: this is the complete text of a syndicated interview with Harry Gibson provided to the press to promote the 10th anniversary production of Trainspotting, the play based on Irvine Welsh's novel of the same name.

Gibson wrote the script for the stage adaptation of Trainspotting and directed both the original production and the new production which begins in 2006. See the Trainspotting - The Play site for full details.

Spike also interviewed Gibson at the time of the original production in 1996: Harry Gibson: Trainspotting: Expletives Repeated]

So 10 years on, why the revival?

HG: Love, I think. I mean, audiences love seeing it, actors love performing it, and I love directing it. I’ve done Glasgow, Toronto, New York, the Australia tour and I reworked it for the Edinburgh Festival, so it felt like stand up comedy in a tent, and for the West End so it could fill a big old fashioned theatre; so this is my seventh time. And I know it’s a special show for the producers because it was ten years ago when they fell in love with it except that Mark Goucher had to look away when the needles came out. Well, they picked it up and put it on the road and got a smash hit and a shelf full of awards, so for them it’s pure nostalgia. So here we go trainspotting again.

How did it go down in New York did they get it?

HG: It upset them. Sympathy for junkies isn’t big on Broadway. And the language is way too bad for uptown folks. But for eight weeks it was a must see for Soho artists and Greenwich Village actors. The movie actor Brian Denehey said to me, “That is the darkest show I have ever seen.” And he’s been to some very dark places. Australia though was the opposite. One guy said to me, “That’s the funniest first ten minutes of a show I ever saw”. They just sat there eating popcorn and laughing like mad. The thing is, the play has a personality like all good plays which changes from cast to cast. Sometimes it’s a black comedy, like the movie, sometimes it goes deeper, really tragic.

Yes, what about the film? I mean, this isn’t the play of the film is it?

HG: This is the play of Irvine Welsh’s original book. I read a first edition and we had it onstage (at The Glasgow Citz’s) nine months later. We thought it would be good for four weeks in the small studio, but on the first night we had queues wrapped around the building and by noon the next day the whole run was sold out. We revived it six months later in a bigger studio and it sold out again. That was the one which Danny Boyle (the movie’s director) and his team came to see, but naturally a play and a film are two different animals. I love the movie. It’s a brilliant caper-film. It reminded me of those Beatles & Monkees films with lads leaping around to music like ‘Hey, hey we’re the Junkees, and we just junky around’. One big difference between the play and the film apart from the fact that the play just uses one set and four actors and you can smell it happening in front of you is that the movie ends up being the hero’s getaway, while the play stays with the trainspotters, left standing in the ruined old Leith railway station waiting for trains that will never come to get them a away from it all. Irvine liked that ending. Truer to life.

So Trainspotting entered the language?

HG: Spotting is everywhere now. In fact language is a big part of Trainspotting’s appeal. People write dissertations about it. The play has 147 cunts. In Edinburgh housing schemes, I explain to people, cunt is a laddish term of endearment. You can say “Y’cunt-ye” to a mate and it’s quite cuddly. You would not call a vagina a cunt; a vagina is (excuse my language) a f*n*y. Translators have some difficulties; I think the play’s been translated into 17 languages now, and I am waiting for the Japanese version because I’m told the Japanese don’t have dirty swearwords; mind you it might be the maddest version ever.

The culture of the production transforms the show; the Icelandic version which I saw in Reykjavik looked like a saga; our hero’s mother appeared out of a mist like a troll, with a giant wooden spoon. In Paris, it was “La Haine” type streetkids, playing around mostly on scaffolding. The Dresden director must have done a lot of very special workshops games on because I don’t remember writing parts for four blue eyed blonde boys or asking them to do a buggery dance; this went on for three hours – but still, it got 17 curtain calls. Trainspotting gets done all over the world: Canada down to Mexico across to New Zealand and up to Hong Kong – every country has its trainspotters. At the moment the National Theatre of Romania is doing it in Cluj.

So you’re not short of a bob or two?

HG: Well, let me put it this way. I wish I’d made is a full-scale musical. I might be rich. As it is, it’s just a small show for studios, so cheques do drop on the doormat from time to time but only small ones. We’re talking the price of dinner. So I have not given up my day job. Which is theatre anyway. People ask me, “What made you do this?”, and the boring answer is that it’s my job.

I do plays and I turn Irvine’s books into plays because he is a writer of foul genius. I’ve done the play versions of five of his novels. The latest one is Porno, the sequel to Trainspotting about Sick Boy’s attempt to become a porn baron, but for the first time, I’ve got a play which no one will touch. I think they think it might be pornographic, and it isn’t….very. I think it’s beautiful. But then I think every show I do is beautiful, however wild and in your face it is. It’s got to be beautiful theatre. Otherwise it’s a mess. I saw some Oxford students do it last year, and they fucked it up so bad I wanted to walk out and weep. I needed much vodka comfort.

Isn’t “in-yer-face” a whole style of theatre now?

HG: So they say. Actually, theatre’s been doing in-yer-face for years. It isn’t about outrageous acts, it really means your actors address the audience directly, they don’t pretend they are being spied on through a glass wall. Audiences really like that. It makes a play more like rock’n'roll. Well, like The Fall’s idea of rock’n'roll – they’re Irv’s favourite band. So it feels rough, but actually its cunning and beautiful, it draws you into a dream just like Shakespeare where a Prologue tells the punters what’s going to happen and the hero opens his heart in soliloquies, and you’re drawn into a Midsummer Night’s Dream, or King Lear’s nightmare; now that’s pretty “in yer-face” – “Out Vile Jelly!”

Defining the arts into movements and schools is an intellectual’s pastime. Like Irvine’s use of language it’s interesting to philologists but to many ordinary punters Trainspotting is just a great dirty book like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Naked Lunch. And language makes a great paint stripper. Used like a tool and my actors know exactly when to say “fuck” – it can cut through walls of pretension and prejudice. Scholars have called Irvine’s style “dirty realism” and my style “in-yer- face” but we’re just following our literary and theatrical ancestors to reach people’s hearts and minds, And people keep coming back for more.

On tour, Trainspotting keeps bringing new people into theatres; theatre managers cry out happily, “We’ve never sold so much lager”. Of course, theatres have to make a special arrangements; at the end of the interval at the Citzs we used to send a usher out to ring a bell in the car park, where customers had popped out for a spliff. And staff do find customers in odd places, let’s just say couples have been known to get carried away, round the back of the stalls. Occasionally someone gets carried out by the paramedics or policemen, but this is rare, There have been no riots yet!

How does all this affect the actors?

HG: One or two of the actors did take their research a bit too far. There was some scraping -up off the ground. But we’ve never lost anyone. The competition to act in Trainspotting is fierce, so we can cast people who are not only fine actors but know the lifestyle, We don’t cast innocents.

Have you ever cast anyone famous?

HG: We’ve cast actors who became famous afterwards. Our first Mark Renton was Ewen Bremner who went on to play Spud in the film an is now a wealthy movie star. In the West End our Alison was played by the amazing Michelle Gomez, who you now see on TV a lot she’s the HEAT magazine girl. And when I saw Lord of The Rings, there was one of my Tommies – Billy Boyd! This kind of starspotting makes watching films and TV a bit weird for me me- well everyone in The Business, you want to get into the drama, but then an old friend pops up and punctures the illusion. I mean, Gollum you look into his eyes and you know it’s Andy Serkis! And you go “he was in a show of mine!” Which no one wants to know and you get shushed.

The Sexual Life Of The Camel?

HG: Ah. Yes

Didn’t you bet someone that you could write a play about masturbation?

HG: It was the first night party of Trainspotting and I did get into a conversation about writing a play about anything, and wanking did come up, and I did write and won a bet, which I think was a bottle of malt whisky, or maybe a case, but I can’t remember who I made it with, so I never collected! And the play was given a reading at The Royal Court which Andy “Gollum” Serkis was in, but it’s never been professionally staged, which may be because people think it pornographic, which it sort of is…

In a beautiful way?

HG: Exactly! Next question.

How have things changed since 1995, in terms of the drugs scene. Will this new production still strike a chord?

HG: It was 1995, but Irvine was going back to the 80s, when heroin-use surged in Edinburgh and it was Thatcher’s Britain and getting messed up and wasted was like defiant and political. And then getting on an E was the way to love. For a century every different drug-craze was hailed as the way to paradise, or the doors of paradise or the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom, or just a great way to celebrate being rich or escape being poor hashish, acid, speed, coke, E, and you can go back to champagne cocktails for toffs, absinthe for poets, opium for factory workers, laudanum for stressed gentle folk, mother’s ruin gin for ruined mothers and urchins.

In Trainspotting, the book and play, we’re clear about the thrills and the buzz of defiance, but it’s like William Burroughs, the American junky novelist who tried everything and especially enjoyed morphine, he realised something was wrong; he said, “I spent two years gazing at my foot”. He got tunnel vision, and was disappearing, but then he started to see the light, the bigger picture what he saw as a great conspiracy. Well, in Trainspotting, you see that the light at the end of the tunnel is the light of an oncoming train. You can’t leave the theatre unshocked. Now I think that the whole Trainspotting phenomenon has been part of a gradual turnaround of opinion, at least ( and maybe most important because we write the copy for society) among intellectuals and the mediafolk

We are more grown up about drugs. We’re less inclined to idealise or demonise drugs. Society as a whole is not less inclined to TAKE them because humans have always taken drugs, we might even have become human by doing so but we hear less bullshit about drugs being either instant death or the road to excess leading to the palace of wisdom. In truth, the road of witless excess normally leads to the A & E room and the grave. Our realism is good.

Drugs are something you probably should try so long as you don’t have to. If you have to take drugs, it’s time for a reality check. As a drug worker in The Gorbals in Glasgow told me “If you have a life, you can do some drugs; if you don’t have a life, drugs will fill the vacuum”. As the careers of Irvine Welsh and Harry Gibson show, the palace is reached by getting education. My experience says, “Don’t do drugs till you’ve learned the Latin”.

Much more about Irvine Welsh is at irvinewelsh.com

The Underdog: How I Survived The World’s Most Outlandish Competitions – Joshua Davis

See all books by Joshua Davis at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Joshua Davis set out to win. At anything. Living in a crappy apartment with a crappy job and a loving but long suffering wife, Davis set out to prove himself. So runs the premise of his book, which is one of those hard-to-classify mixes of travelogue, biography, meditation and jokes about dwarves.

The Underdog starts off weakly and doesn’t really hit its stride til the third chapter. The lead-in time is worth it though, because the outlandish competitions Davis takes part in not only take him all over the world but also bring him into contact with some truly remarkable people. As Davis’ confidence grows in between becoming a pro arm wrestler, a matador, a sumo wrestler, a backwards runner and a sauna endurance competitor, so his prose manages to capture the euphoria, absurdity and the despair of the training process of each challenge. Davis continually grapples with the vertigo of impossibility that opens up in front of him and lays it wide open for the reader to understand his own feelings as he goes through each training regimen. Where Davis really succeeds here is in his lightness of touch – he’s serious about what he’s doing, but he’s not earnest. Similarly, he avoids the tedious “isn’t this oh-so-wacky” route too – although, admittedly, he does have a page about midget matadors.

It’s the people he meets that are the real stars of this book – Maru the Hawaiian Sumo Grand Master, at the end of his career at 32 and treated like a near-diety in Japan, which makes for a somewhat lonely existence; Mr Veerabadran in Chennai, India, the world backward running champion who focuses on the face of his wife to cut through the excruciating pain; and, of course, the midget matadors. There’s a host of other characters that Davis manages to describe concisely and eloquently, cutting to the heart of what they are about within a few pages and connecting their seemingly odd pursuits to the importance it holds within their lives. Veerabadran is my favourite person here, utterly resistant to his life being defined by others, nuts about his wife, contemptuous of money and the person who articulates what lies at the core of this book: “Everyone make meaning. That is what you must do. You make your own meaning”.

Davis never uses that byline of parents everywhere – “It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part” – but this book provides a hugely entertaining and quite moving affirmation of exactly that. By doing something that’s important to you (provided it’s not illegal), you still win indirectly even if you fail, just through the people you meet and what you experience along the way. Certainly, for Davis, his competition quest opened the door to writing for Wired magazine, where he remains a contributing editor, including recently spending time in Iraq. It beats sitting in front of the telly anyway. [See joshuadavis.net for more details]

Davis lost every single competition he took part in but it would be dimwitted to say that somehow invalidates the value of what happened along the way. Davis is refreshingly unanalytic in that sense – he doesn’t try to extrapolate self help theories for his readers to follow – instead, we get to see him helping himself, moving from competition to competition realising he can do anything with some help and good will from others. The reason why we think these things are funny is because they make no sense on the surface. How can a tiny guy like Josh Davis becomes a sumo wrestler? The answer seems to be: simply by deciding to do so. Like PJ O’Rourke says, “You learn to work around huge areas of inability”.

What I enjoyed most about this book is that Davis covers a lot of ground here very concisely. His prose is amusingly self-deprecating but full of confidence; he runs the usual humour of American abroad culture shock while showing huge respect for those he meets; he shows a curiosity about the world from the vantage point of someone who knows nothing and is not afraid to admit it. He captures the wonder of learning something new – and the frustration and self-doubt that inevitably goes with it – and the way that such learning is never wasted. Even if you don’t win.

The Lost Executioner is my Book of the Year. Like my pick for last year, Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in A Burmese Teashop, The Lost Executioner is a personal travelogue into a country that tries to understand its recent, disastrous politics.

Where Secret Histories documents Burma’s slide into a real-life Orwellian nightmare, The Lost Executioner chronicles photographer Nic Dunlop’s obsessive hunt for Comrade Duch, the man who presided over the deaths of thousands as the commandant of Tuol Sleng, Cambodia’s notorious interrogation centre, during the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge.

Between 1975 when the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia until 1979 when they were displaced by the invading Vietnamese, the ultra-leftist party instituted a Year Zero policy which was even more extreme than China’s Cultural Revolution and resulted in the murder of an estimated two million people – a quarter of the country’s population.

Duch, like every other major figure in the Khmer Rouge regime, successfully disappeared into Cambodia’s jungles when the Vietnamese arrived and, like the rest of the regime’s leaders, successfully avoided prosecution. To date, twenty five years after Cambodia’s auto-genocide, none of the key proponents have been brought to trial. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge’s leader, died of old age in 1998.

For Dunlop, seeing a photo of Comrade Duch set something off inside him that made him want to find the former commandant. This search provides the engine for his book, fusing the detective work necessary to finding Duch with the travelogue of exploring modern day Cambodia. Dunlop interweaves details of Cambodia’s awful recent history within his journey, providing a powerful narrative that avoids the dryness of traditional historical analysis but does not hold back on dealing with the vast complexities of how the Khmer Rouge came to power and the fallout of their overthrow. Both John Pilger and David Chandler, Cambodia’s pre-eminent Western historian, are given major credit in the Acknowledgements for helping Dunlop refine the historical accuracy of his text and this, for me, is vital as a demonstration of Dunlop’s attempt to write more than a simple, observational travel book.

Instead, Dunlop gives an account of his own, personal journey, not just through the cities and countryside of Cambodia but through the country’s history and how his own history has intertwined with it. The reader, then, accompanies Dunlop as he tries to come to grips with understanding Cambodia as a foreigner, as his learning and perceptions of the country he is fascinated by shift and change over time – and as he questions his own opinions and perspectives about prosecuting the Khmer Rouge commanders, and the very nature of how justice can be achieved and carried out. Integral to this journey – and a vital part of this book – are the personal testimonies of those Dunlop meets who were both victim and perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.

It is these conversations that transform the historical narrative by placing those momentous events in the context of their impact on individuals, where they stop being lost in history, if only for a moment, and become real people again. For all the citing of numbers and statistics to measure and somehow quantify the vastness of Cambodia’s nightmare, reading these accounts are what provide the true expression of the murderous insanity that befell the country.

The Lost Executioner, then, is a complex book, both in its attempt to avoid simplifying the recent history of Cambodia and in Dunlop’s own acknowledgement of the flux of his own thoughts about it. But, perhaps because Dunlop’s profession is as a photographer, there is never a sense of getting lost within his narrative. His prose has a real composure to it – it’s extremely simple without being simplistic, and there is not one verbose word or overwrought sentence here. The understated tone of Dunlop’s journalism allows the appalling facts of his narrative to speak for themselves far more clearly.

Without wanting to sound flippant, the search for Comrade Duch does also have a bit of Boy’s Own adventure to it – and, to be frank, a somewhat suicidal one too. Dunlop has worked in South East Asia for several years and is well versed in Asian protocol to be sure, but to decide to go looking for one of the Khmer Rouge’s key figures would seem to be asking for trouble. Cambodia is safe for tourists these days, but outside of the cities it is still easy for people to disappear. I’ll refrain from writing anymore about the outcome of his search for fear of creating a spoiler; I’ll only say that it is a truly remarkable story.

A section in the middle of The Lost Executioner is the abiding – and troubling – memory I retain of reading it. Within the rarefied confines of New York’s Museum Of Modern Art, an exhibition of photos taken at Tuol Sleng was commissioned, with an accompanying coffee table book. The photos have become iconic – black and white, each individual in the black loose clothes of the Khmer Rouge against a white wall. They are the photos that were taken on admission at Tuol Sleng – and the taking of those photos were effectively the signing of their death warrant. Only seven people survived their admission to Tuol Sleng.

During its exhibition, MOMA provided no captions with the photographs, no names, no details of who each individual was, no mention of how or why they’d died. For MOMA’s purposes, these photos had stopped being individual records of genocide but had become mere portraiture. They were nice photos, nothing more. There were no indications that each of these people had died at the hands of torturers. There were no calls for justice.

Dunlop writes movingly of his own frustration with the limits of photography – that without words, images are lost without context, turned into disinterested aesthetic objects, mere decoration. The Lost Executioner is clearly the product of Dunlop’s frustration with his own profession, and photography’s loss is writing’s gain. In telling his story of going in search of Comrade Duch, Dunlop also tells the story of Cambodia going in search of answers to its own auto-genocide and the still-ongoing quest for some sort of justice. For all the grimness of its subject matter, The Lost Executioner is a vital book and one that deserves to reach a huge audience.

A collection of essays from women working in the US porn industry and women consuming porn outside it, Naked Ambition is an intelligent and provocative survey of pro-porn female opinions. There’s little in the way of gushing praise about the industry itself – most of the writers agree that newcomers get eaten alive if they don’t know what they’re doing. Tera Patrick’s essay is a good illustration of the pitfalls involved and her own fall and rise on the back of her initial calamities. But where these pieces take off is in praise of porn as something liberating, both in its production and its consumption.

Many women involved in porn are not porn stars – they are businesswomen and entrepreneurs too, or they are pro-porn journalists, marketers and writers, who have turned porn on its head and are using it to create their own independence, whether or not they appear in front of the camera. For some, like Wired sex and tech columnist Regina Lynn, innovations like cybersex have been crucial in helping her overcome chronic shyness to enjoy real relationships. For others, like Emily Dubberley and Violet Blue, setting up their own websites and blogs have been how they’ve created their own burgeoning careers writing about all aspects of sex. In other words, women in porn is not just about some blonde girl humping in front of a camera.

Naked Ambition showcases a variety of attitudes of women in how they think about sex and how they think porn can help make people’s sex lives – and so their lives – better. The adult industry is two-faced in this sense, in that some of what it does – sex toys, better sex guides, erotica etc – is genuinely helpful, and some of it is irredeemably nasty -see Tera Patrick’s essay again for examples. What "nasty" is, and who should decide what it is, and how it is regulated, remains the eternal question. What many of the women do in Naked Ambition is define what their own idea of sex is, which flies in the face of the norms of what women are supposed to like. Some of those opinions may seem distinctly distasteful, like Mason’s descriptions of the extreme videos she directed and shot, but the fact she’s discussing why she likes this kind of porn – and why the girls shooting it like making it – brings it out into the open. As such, the perspectives they bring to the porn industry and its product are genuinely illuminating, if disconcerting.

This is in no small part to the tight editing of Carly Milne, who put together the anthology (and who, a long time ago, gave me free lance work for now-defunct Canadian magazine Can Say). Carly ran the Pornblography blog for a couple of years and worked as a porn industry publicist while she was researching the book, so she has first hand experience of its machinations. What’s best about Naked Ambition is that it feels like thirty one shots of mind tequila – thirty one great essays and arguments and experiences that engage with you bluntly and directly, and that are laced with the greatest aphrodisiac – intelligence.

These days I’m reduced to randomly choosing new music at the bootleg CD stalls on Bangkok’s streets. I don’t bother with the music press anymore so I have no idea who’s up and coming, who to find out about, who to watch – these days I just pick albums on whether I like the sleeve or not. (I found Damien Rice that way, which was nice). It’s an interesting but fraught way to pick music. With a film the DVD cover at least corresponds to what’s inside – with a band, the album cover and even the band name gives little indication of what lurks beyond..

Case in point is Magnus. Straight off the bat, I knew I wasn’t going to like them. The name alone made me think of gawky boys with big record bags and bigger glasses. A band called Magnus must automatically be anaemic student music, REM wannabes devoid of Stipe’s charisma. (And not to be confused with, as I’ve subsequently discovered, the dance duo Magnus featuring CJ Bolland).

Imagine, then, my undisguised glee when I realised after the first five seconds that Magnus are nothing to do to with their name. Magnus for me now means white noise melodies and sonic intelligence, a band whose music oozes the supreme self-assurance of knowing their own path and following it.

There’s a definite sort of melancholy to Magnus, but not in an effete, consumptive poet confined to his bed kind of way. There’s a sense of seriousness that runs throughout the album. There is something deeper and darker conveyed here, a sadness borne of experience and loss in the world, rather than mere unattempted and unrequited longing. The colours blue and grey seem to come to mind a lot with Magnus.

This isn’t apathetic musical miserablism, however. Every track on Magnus’ album is alive and artfully put together, full of twists and surprise melodies cropping up amongst dissonant noisenik bits (hello “Transmitting”, “Behind The Eyes”). Musically, Magnus manage to cram about four song ideas into one track most times. For the inevitable comparisons, I’d have to say Slanted And Enchanted-era Pavement with Red House Painters-esque baritone vocals – Magnus manage to sound grave and playful all at once, like Blur’s moody teenage brother, a restless sensibility that’s still disciplined enough to produce actual, memorable songs. The overall effect is that thing all bands hanker after – an album that effortlessly experiments with different elements, but still hangs together as an unmistakable collective sound.

Magnus don’t quite connect everytime: “Next To Nothing”, the opener, is easily the weakest track on the album and a poor guide to what lies beyond it. Here Magnus stumble, not quite managing to keep all their ideas welded into a coherent whole. Worse, there’s a trumpet in there that just shouldn’t be. If this had been the first track of theirs I’d ever heard, I’m not sure I would have wanted to hear anymore. But that would mean missing out on the sombre delights of “Broken’s” slowburn buildup and “Inside Out”, which rocks out in a barely constrained way, pulling back and then flipping out, using the stop/start schtick to great effect.

For all the great controlled noise experiments, it’s the slow ones I love the best about Magnus. I must be getting old. Title track “Sleepwalker” has a volume-twiddlingly quiet beginning that rises to a thoroughly epic white noise fest and then abruptly metamorphosises into a completely different song whilst still being the same one. Glorious. And then it gets better. With the track “Awake”, driven by gorgeously understated piano and strings, Magnus have created a bona fide Great Song. Within seconds it pulls you into a quietly brooding atmosphere that is intoxicating and simply holds you there for the next four minutes. Michael Stipe would have been proud to have written this one. It’s the sort of song I imagine I’d be drunkenly singing along to or weeping quietly behind my hand if I saw them live. It’s that good.

Magnus, then, have created a debut album that sounds not only accomplished but driven; these are clearly people who want to be in a band for reasons beyond just getting laid and getting on TV. This makes Magnus’ music deeply rewarding – it not only grabs you on initial listening, it stands up to repeat listening too. Coupled with the brilliant stab at grasping perfection that is “Awake”, you have plenty of reasons to hunt this album down and ruthlessly beat to death anyone who gets in your way.

The Search: How Google And Its Rivals Rewrote The Rules Of Business And Transformed Our Culture – John Battelle

See all books by John Battelle at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

John Battelle’s The Search is more than just a potted history of Google, although that company looms large throughout his book; rather, it’s a book which takes stock of Google’s giddy rise, the search engine wars between Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and the arrival of online contextual advertising which has irrevocably changed the nature of advertising itself. Battelle recognises that the real story about the search engines is actually outside the admittedly fascinating geek arms race between the big players: what’s important is what the very act of searching for information on the Internet means for business and consumer alike. The simple act of keying in a phrase to a search engine is carried out billions of times a day and in totality provides an unprecedented map of human desires. The commercial ramifications are obvious, but our culture and our access to information are also being transformed by the nature of search. Put it this way – once the Net becomes a daily part of your life, it’s hard to imagine doing without it.

It’s difficult not to sink into hyperbole when discussing search engines, given the frankly insane stats generated by Google’s meteoric rise (from zero to $1.3 billion annual revenue in five years, biggest IPO in Silicon Valley, shares at $300 a pop, trimester profits of $300+ million, and so on). But Battelle points out in his introduction that he didn’t want to write a straightforward business biography of Google for the good reason that business biographies don’t get read. There is a lot of coverage in here about the rise and fall of different search engines, to be sure, and Battelle has conducted hundreds of interviews with every key player in the industry to piece together an excellent overview of the industry’s audacious growth. But Battelle is primarily interested in the implications of what the massive leaps in search engine indexing and intelligence mean for the future. The Search, then, isn’t simply a business book or a geek book, although it will be marketed as such: it’s actually tackling one of the most profound but almost invisible cultural influences on our daily lives: how search engines organise and present information in response to our queries. As more and more of our lives moves to being managed through the Net, the companies who can correctly analyse what we are looking for and give it to us in the most hassle free way are the ones who will prosper. And, as a by-product of that, the more users they have, the more they can analyse what’s been asked for before to anticipate what will be asked for in the future. Battelle calls it the Database of Intentions, and mastering the analysis of all those billions of queries is where the money lies.

The most obvious example of the commercial gold in search queries is contextual advertising, those text ads that turn up next to your search results that are related to your query. Still in its infancy, contextual advertising has revolutionised online advertising and had a huge knock-on effect on old media. The targetted nature of contextual ads – they only get served to someone who’s interested in that subject; the ad buyer only pays when someone clicks the link – has meant thousands of businesses that couldn’t afford to advertise can now do so and, crucially, get results of real money-in-the-bank business driven by those ads. Shoestring businesses have enjoyed massive sales boosts as a result of this approach, without having to spend vast sums on marketing. The joy here is that everyone wins – the customer finds what they want, the business gets business, and the search engine makes money for connecting the two together. Advertising becomes – shock, horror – useful and even valued, rather than an irritant. That’s the ideal scenario, anyway, and Battelle provides case studies showing both the up and potentially disastrous downside of relying on search engines to drive business your way.

Contextual ads have not only helped advertisers but also website owners too. The Net’s free culture has always meant that paying for content has been a thorny issue – surfers loathe registering for access to newspaper archives online, much less paying for it. Google’s Adsense program provided a way for sites to have relevant ads to their content appear on the page and in doing so, allowed site owners to earn some handy pocket change too. (Of course, I’m biased here: in the two years I’ve been running Google Adsense on Spike, its monthly revenue has steadily increased as Google tweak the system to display more relevant ads).

As Battelle has pointed out on his Searchblog, now is a great time to be a publisher on the Net, because there are more and more easy ways of earning cash from content. Blog networks like Weblogs, Inc which earn over $2000 a day from Adsense, or probloggers like Darren Rowse who recently earned $15000 in one month from Adsense, show that there’s real money to be made from providing top quality, regular content. Indeed, Battelle has recently launched Federated Media Publishing, which will be teaming up with selected sites to manage matching ads to their content. Battelle, a former editor of Wired and founder of the Industry Standard, is already “band manager” for leading blog BoingBoing, and has considerably increased that site’s revenues since coming aboard.

As founder of the Industry Standard magazine and a co-founder of Wired, Battelle has been round the block in both old and new media, and much of The Search’s vitality stems from his own hands-on involvement in the industry. There’s little of the usual business pomposity about Battelle’s prose. Instead, Battelle writes in a lucid and informal style, clearly in command of his material but confident enough to not deluge the reader with extraneous info to demonstrate his research. The Search is, in short, refreshingly bullshit free.

The same can’t be said for the future of search engines. With the realisation that the potential of search has only just begun, there are real dangers ahead too. Ownership of personal information is the major concern, with some beginning to see the likes of Google not as a benign info provider but a Big Brother like monitor of all online movements. Criticism of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” moral code has also begun, with the company’s current leadership of the search field making it walk point for the whole industry. Gaming contextual advertising is also an increasing problem, with clickfraud and spam blogs on the rise, clogging search results with poor quality websites. Each of the engines is working flat out to find ways to counter these emergent problems, and no doubt as they deliver solutions a whole new set of crises will arise; given the industry’s flux and mutability, it’s hard to imagine a point at which there will be no clouds on the horizon.

For now, though, search remains a huge success story – Google may well be about to have its own stock bubble popped, but the company is profitable and unlikely to be knocked off its leadership perch by Wall Street alone. Yahoo and MSN are moving into the contextual ad field, each looking to get the competitive edge to make advertisers and publishers alike use their particular system. Most importantly, all three are continually trying to find better ways to slice and dice the Database of Intentions to give you what you want quicker, simpler and faster. Google, to my mind, still remains out in front for innovation, constantly testing business boundaries and received wisdom, putting the user experience first and working backwards. In the last five years, it has continually gone its own way and managed to take the industry with it. But Yahoo and MSN and, indeed, people and companies we’ve never even heard of yet, are not to be underestimated. John Battelle’s The Search provides a brilliant illustration that within five years everything in the search world can change absolutely. It has done so already once – it probably will do again.

Recently I met up with Christopher G. Moore, a Canadian novelist who’s been living in Bangkok for almost 20 years and writing pretty much a book a year ever since he got here. Previously a tenured professor of law, Chris gave up the prestige and security of his position to come and live in Thailand and pursue his dream of writing once his first book was published. This is obviously not the sanest of ideas if you value financial stability, but as Moore points out with a grin, “Bangkok is the Far East Village. It’s a place with cheap rent that lets you create”. There’s still very much a professional sensibility behind Moore’s work though, not least in the ferocious discipline that has led him to write 19 books since 1985. He alternates between writing literary fiction and crime thrillers centering around his private investigator character Vincent Calvino, the latest of which, Zero Hour In Phnom Penh, won the 2004 German Critics Award for Crime Fiction. While you’ll find Moore’s books prominently stocked in any English-language bookstore in Thailand, Moore’s readership is international, in part thanks to his savvy use of the Internet to promote his work and find new readers through his own site cgmoore.com and his publisher heavenlakepress.com. His books are now managed by 6 different agents, and Moore isn’t dazzled by the supposed legitimacy of mainstream publishers. “I just sold the Norwegian rights to a book for more than what New York publishers offered,” he notes, indicating that the big markets are not necessarily the most lucrative. Moore appears to have found his niche and to be living a fulfilled life from it.

I was at a bit of a disadvantage during our caffienated conversation as I have yet to read any of Moore’s books. He kindly gave me copies of the aforementioned Zero Hour, along with the Burma-set Waiting For The Lady and Tokyo Joe, two of his literary novels. I recently complained on my travel blog scattered that most fiction about Thailand is the stuff of caricature, obsessed with the Thai girly bars and the whole sexpat scene and little else – and are, unsurprisingly, brain-numbingly badly written. There’s clearly a market for this stuff, but reading the equivalent of Jim Davidson jokes transplanted to Bangkok is not my idea of fun. Moore reckons it’s the wide eyed shock of encountering Thailand’s bar scene that continues to inspire these accounts: “The bar scene is the easiest way for foreigners to actually meet and get talking to Thai people, and wherever you come from, there will be nothing like this, so you think you should tell the world about it. Except, of course, the world already knows”.

Chris Moore, however, seems to be writing the books that go some way to try and convey some of the real joy, fascination and complexity of Thai life, culture and history. If that sounds a bit worthy, don’t worry – there’s still plenty of sex, guns and violence in his work, but tethered to bigger themes. The Land Of Smiles trilogy, for example, weaves a suicide mystery around recent historical events in Thailand, culminating in the Black May massacre of 1992, when students and workers were killed by the military on the streets of Bangkok. Reading through the press blurbs, comparisons to Graham Greene come up again and again, both with Greene’s method of writing “entertainments” and “serious books” just like Moore, and also the possibly over-used epithet “Our Man In Bangkok”. In short, Moore provides an easy and engrossing way into the whole smorgasbord of Thai life by using it as the backdrop for many of his books. Or at least, that how it seems to be before I’ve actually read any of his books…

Moore’s prestigious output is in part due to the same lifeview that prompted him to pack in his career as a professor of law. He realised he wanted to be a writer and nothing else – and so simply decided to do it. “You take risks, and you start with yourself. Don’t wait to write. Life will pass you by.” Moore says these things in a completely matter-of-fact tone, which belies the sense of risk he himself must have felt when he first to Thailand nearly two decades ago. Thailand now is considered “too Westernised” by some travel snobs, and certainly life for tourists has become very easy, while the country is enjoying a newfound, if controversial, political stability. I imagine 20 years ago when Moore first arrived it would have been a lot different. But, as he says, “there is so much material here. But If you don’t learn Thai within the first 18 months of getting here, then you’ll probably stay in an English-speaking bubble”. It’s Moore’s immersion into Thai language and culture, and the sheer length of time he’s been here, that help inform his books. Moore has also spent time travelling and note-taking in Burma, Laos and Cambodia too. He spends six months researching and six months writing for each of his titles: “You have to be disciplined, otherwise it never gets done”. Currently he’s researching the human trafficking trade that still flows from Burma through Thailand, which should emerge in one of his future books, while there is another, Gambling On Magic, scheduled for publication later this year.

During our conversation, Moore asked me almost as many questions as I asked him, wanting to know more about spikemagazine.com and what I’m up to. It’s obviously flattering when your interviewee turns the meeting into a proper conversation, but it’s also indicative of Moore’s natural curiosity, applying a lawyer’s mind to taking in huge amounts of information and stashing it away for later use. For me, I came away wanting to sit down and plough through as much of Moore’s back catalogue as I can manage to help me fathom out the country in which I live now. More importantly, I came away with a sense of exhilaration at meeting someone who lived wholly on their own terms, who had eschewed all the trappings of success, money and so on that his law tenure could have provided and simply realised what he wanted and decided to do it without thought of what others might think of him. As he said to me before he left, “You have to live life without regrets. And wishing, ‘Oh, I wish I’d had that kind of microwave’ is the wrong kind of regret.”

—-

Epilogue: A pre-emptive mea culpa: this piece is from memory as I jotted down a few notes after our conversation but didn’t record it. Therefore I may have made some minor factual errors. Hopefully nothing so bad that Chris Moore will sue… We’ll be doing a “proper” interview once I’ve read some of his books and come up with some vaguely intelligent questions, plus I hope to ask him for more tips on using the Net to promote your books.