‘I’m quite similar,’ he said. ‘You just won’t get me once I start something.’

There is something to that, I thought with a touch of envy. As I try to enter fully into writing a new book, everything else becomes filled with the dread of distraction. Emails build up, and need to be answered diligently. Family life is like running a small business, and it can’t be put on hold.

Routley directly compared painting to writing: ‘You need to get as much down to work with as possible,’ he said, identifying hesitation as the enemy. ‘It’s like if you’re writing a book, get the first draft down, then look to filter… and you’re able to edit.’

All of which is a long way of saying that I’ve been trying to immerse myself in the new book, and nothing much else has been on my mind (outside of the dread distraction of Test cricket.1)

What has been on my mind, except for writing, and the usual array of unshareable dreams, fantasies and reveries? The melancholy joy of seeing a new baseball bat lying in pride of place under my son’s bed; the sense that these moments are fleeting, and time is relentless; the long dream of summer, in the memory now, bright as lens flare.

The most vivid experience since being away has been reading John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, by Ian Leslie. A book examining the relationship – creative and otherwise – between John Lennon and Paul McCartney through their songs, The Times described it as ‘tremendous,’ and I agree.

At the end of the book, Leslie writes that a lot of people asked him if he’d approached Paul McCartney for an interview. There was no point, he told them. Everything has been said already. ‘The gaps in the literature are perhaps now less about what happened than why.’

This is absolutely right. When The Rejects was published, the first thing a lot of people asked me was who I’d interviewed. I expect it’s the idea of having spoken to famous people that’s exciting. But that didn’t seem to me to be the point at all. For most of these stories, everything was already out there. In the age of media training, a weakened press, huge, artist controlled ‘channels’ and gotcha journalism, few artists were going to go back over this fraught territory. What was important was to research what had happened, what had been said, and present it as a careful and (hopefully) insightful interpretation.

I don’t mean to compare The Rejects to Leslie’s book, as I think he’s written a masterpiece. It’s strange to think that, with so much out there around the Beatles, this is the second towering achievement springing from them in recent years, the other being One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, by Craig Brown. I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t need to be much of a fan to find great pleasure in either book. Perhaps it’s down to the Beatles’ own genius, and singular alchemy, that great works can be inspired by them. It’s hard to think of books as brilliant as these being written about many other bands.

These days, a great deal of non-fiction operates around a gimmick, usually involving the writer somehow inserting themselves into their subject. For every great innovation like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage or Helen Macdonald’s H is For Hawk, there’s a drearily trendy biography, intertwined with the biographer’s own struggles; or a book about a historical incident, in which the writer undertakes some radical, adjacent experience. I’ve even been guilty of it myself – for some readers, inserting myself into The Rejects was all a bit Alan Partridge.

Leslie’s great insight is to examine John and Paul’s relationship through 43 of their songs. A brilliant idea is one thing, but a beautifully composed enactment of it is another. Leslie’s book illuminates the Beatles’ work afresh, which is no small feat, given the millions of words expended on them. It’s the interpretation that’s exciting. (And that’s what I want to do with my own new book.)

Throughout, Leslie illustrates how Lennon and McCartney’s songs were in dialogue, and reflected their shifting, and eventually fractured relationship. Help! We Can Work It Out. You Won’t See Me. You Never Give Me Your Money. The End.

Leslie is clear that he isn’t the first to suggest it, but writes that Strawberry Fields – Lennon’s meditation on his sense of apartness – Penny Lane, and A Day in the Life can be listened to as a standalone EP of inseparable songs: ‘…a trilogy… all recorded between November 1966 and February 1967, about psychedelic experience, childhood and death.’

The Beatles’ story is the stuff of great art in itself; its themes including genius, pain, love, death, jealousy, insecurity, parenthood (and lack of it), suspicion, and lost childhood. Leslie captures it all again, and his book is immensely moving, in the way Brown’s was too.

Incidentally, he briefly describes Lennon’s murder, but never refers to the murderer. This strikes me as an excellent precedent, and one I’ll adopt here.2

While reading John and Paul, I constantly went back to the songs. On more than one occasion, it was like hearing them for the first time (this might have been most notable with The Ballad of John and Yoko). What a gift, I thought. And all for the price of a few quid.

‘Very interesting,’ my uncle said.

‘What is?’ I asked.

‘Here,’ he said, and handed me his binoculars. ‘Look carefully at that tree.’

I ran the binoculars up the tree he’d indicated, and flinched as I suddenly came across a pair of thick yellow legs, ending in lethal looking talons. Above them was a greyish, muscular, predatory-looking bird with huge eyes.

‘Holy shit,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’

‘A peregrine falcon,’ he said. ‘Keep watching.’

I did. Shortly afterwards, a flock of small white birds flew over. The peregrine launched into the air, soared above them, then plummeted down like a missile. There was an impact, an explosion of feathers, and then screaming. Every other bird in the vicinity rose into the air, fleeing.

‘Got ’im,’ my uncle said.

Later, the thought came to me that it had been like someone shouting ‘shark’ on a crowded beach. Raw, animal fear. There was a story, a drama, unfolding all around us, I realized. I became hooked.

Soon afterward, I read JA Baker’s obsessive masterwork, The Peregrine. His description of the effects of a peregrine’s attack is unimprovable:

The beaches flared and roared with salvoes of white wings. The sky shredded up, was torn by whirling birds. The falcon rose and fell, like a black billhook in splinters of white wood.

—

Accepting this new interest was part of the painful transition away from youth that my early thirties represented. It didn’t fit with the things I’d done previously; nightlife, music, being some sort of DJ, being ‘cool.’ Cricket and hiking were similar. At first, I kept most of this stuff quiet. Then, in my later thirties, it simply didn’t matter anymore. I’d ‘sloughed off the shackles of cool.’

While in Germany, my uncle visited for a family event, and we went birding together. I’d done this short, tourist-appropriate guided walk the previous Sunday. It had been good, but I hadn’t seen anything particularly notable. What I’d wanted was a sea-eagle, which have been successfully re-introduced in the area, much as they have in the Scottish Highlands. (I’ll always remember the words of an angry farmer, being interviewed on a proposal to do so in the south of England. ‘How would you like something the size of a barn door flying over you?’ Well, I’d like it very much, thank you.)

My uncle and I ambled along, following the expert local guide, Lukas, as he spoke in German. My eight-year-old son did his best to whisper translations. I’d resigned myself to seeing much the same as I had the week before. And then came the first alarm calls. On and above the marshy flats ahead of us were geese, lapwings, godwits, gulls, terns and snipes. Very suddenly – in a growing wave – they began rising into the air, screeching, beating away. There has to be a predator, I thought. Lukas had lifted his binoculars, and so had my uncle. Among the geese – huge in the air – it was difficult to make it out at first. But then suddenly I had it: massive, dark-brown, its wings longer than I’m tall – a sea-eagle. Its calmness was utterly at odds with the other birds. It circled lazily, looking down on the chaos it had created, its wide wings beating from their mid-points.

‘Have you got it?’ I asked my uncle. Even at this stage of my birding life, the urgency in my voice felt a little embarrassing.

‘Yep,’ he said.

The eagle didn’t just fly over – it put on a display. It circled, revealing itself, eventually flew off to settle on a distant branch. Then before long, it came back for a second run.

The day before, escaping briefly from our family party to take a quick stroll, a hen harrier had appeared – the exact bird we’d wanted to see. Hen harriers are uncommon in Britain – persecuted by gamekeepers protective of their partridge chicks or grouse; as ground nesters, vulnerable to predators and farming machinery. In James Macdonald Lockhart’s excellent book Raptor, he describes their low, quartering flight as ‘like a disembodied spirit searching for its host.’

A little while after the sea-eagle appeared, so did a marsh harrier. Slightly less scarce, but still a good spot.

‘I’m trying to remember if a sea-eagle is a lifer for me,’ my uncle said. ‘I think it is.’

‘Don’t forget the marsh harrier,’ my son said, as we made the long trudge back to the rest of our family. With a strange mix of pride and dread, I wondered if we’d infected him, too.

—

Back in LA now, I’m also back on the hamster wheel. It’s weird how quickly a routine re-establishes itself, even though the time away has made what once seemed comforting now feel a little gruesome. Rigidly scheduled exercise, school runs, the same old walk, an urge to do the crosswords I haven’t done in weeks.

Last week, I signed a contract for a new book. I tend not to talk about a project until it’s pretty much done, in case anything less than total excitement becomes apparent in whoever I’m talking to. Years ago, a mentor figure told me: ‘Enjoy your offer day, because that’s as good as it gets.’ There are other great moments though: finishing a draft, signing off on proofs; if you’re lucky, getting to talk to someone in the media about it. Now, the long months of slogging lie ahead, and the nerves have set in a little. Nevertheless, I’m excited. The book has been bought by a publisher I love (named after a favourite bird) and is about a (non-nerdy) subject I do too.

Nevertheless, persona is important for artists of all stripes. It’s an identifier, a brand, and if successful, even a whole legend.

Style is related to persona, but the two aren't the same. Both are partly or wholly constructed, but style is where the craft comes in. Persona is more about understanding public image, and how to manipulate it to one’s advantage. For some novelists, style is more important than anything else. For others – Rachel Cusk comes to mind – you can’t help your style, it just is, and the question of which form you pour it into is more important.

In the Substack and social media age, artists are very available, always ‘on.’ Gone are the days of prolonged periods of silence, which would have the effect of catapulting audience excitement when something new arrived. That was the era of mystique, which has been sorely lacking in recent years, but will doubtless return. It was more exciting to be a fan when you had to work hard to find things out.

Our own era has been one of too much information. There’s nothing more depressing, for me, than finding out that a favourite writer has identikit, earnest or pompous political views, expressed on a social media platform. I like artists to say mad, provocative or original things, like Michel Houellebecq occasionally does – or to say nothing at all. Reading about Mary Gaitskill recently, I came across something she said when questioned about the BDSM elements of her fiction: ‘I don’t think much of Sade as a writer, though I enjoyed beating off to him as a child.’ That’s the spirit.

I was reading about Gaitskill because I’ve become a big fan of hers. This began last year, when I read Veronica, her masterpiece. Narrated by a troubled fashion model turned cleaner, the novel tells the story of a complex friendship with the brash, initially off-putting Veronica, who contracts AIDS from her promiscuous, bisexual boyfriend.

I’d come across Gaitskill’s novella, This is Pleasure, because of the stir it caused around #MeToo, which it dissected with cool precision and brilliantly realised characters. That the New Yorker published a piece of fiction partly critiquing the movement, at the height of the culture wars, is a testament to how good it is. I enjoyed it, but I loved Veronica. Along with David Szalay’s Flesh, it’s the best novel I’ve read in the last couple of years.

When I’d finished it, I read Gaitskill’s infamous essay about being raped. This sort of radical honesty can be a key component of great writing, but only, of course, when delivered via mastery of the craft.

More recently, I read Bad Behavior, Gaitskill’s debut – a collection of short stories. Here, a series of characters in ’80s New York haunt nightclubs, obsess over former friends, carry out sex work, or stay up for days on amphetamines. (And it must surely contain the only piece of fiction to feature a heartbreaking salad.)

The final story centres on the death of a son, which, as an increasingly sappy parent, had a potent effect on me (incidentally, much like that of Flesh.)

A little obsessed, and Googling Gaitskill, I came across her Substack. In her ‘about me’ section, she described how Bad Behavior had been born of a desire for ‘connection.’

This is what made me think about persona, and the effect of what an artist says in public. ‘Connection’ seemed strangely trite, in light of Gaitskill’s gimlet-eyed, addictive fiction. Not that it spoiled anything for me. And it was, when I thought about it, demonstrably true. The characters were seeking connection, just in highly inadvisable ways.

It was just slightly at odds with the view I’d developed of her persona – that crucial bonding process between artist and fan. In this case, she’d seemed disarmingly, almost brutally honest, but also poised and thrillingly imperious.1 Talk of ‘connection’ seemed something worryingly close to the #bekind age.

Something else Gaitskill wrote in that intro relates to the age of too much information, of being always ‘on.’ ‘Because most of my writing energy needs to be for my fiction I will sometimes… go very low volume or even disappear for a few months.’ This, too, relates to a truth. Jonathan Franzen took a lot of flak for saying: ‘It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction,’ but he was probably right. Perhaps if you have enough talent, you needn’t worry about persona at all.

Reading Mary Gaitskill made me wonder why I don’t read more women writers.2 The ones I love – Didion, Rachel Cusk, Joy Williams – share Gaitskill’s coolness and precision. But her stories burn with vivid characters, danger, tragedy, sex and humour. All the good stuff.

In this stretching summer, I suddenly found myself tired of news, of politics, of the endless daily churn. I wanted to lose myself in Mary Gaitskill, and the sun-drenched noir and fatal decency of Gene Hackman in Night Moves. I’ve turned off the information, for now at least. Far better to be in the company of the thing itself.

A few years ago, seated at a desk island at an indie record company, I told my colleagues I didn’t like Abba. Silence descended over that little corner of the office, and the people around me frowned. ‘What?’ one of them said. ‘Why?’

‘Because it’s mild Swedish pap,’ I told him. ‘Like something squeezed from a tube.’

The frowns gave way to open-mouthed outrage, like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

‘How can you not like Abba?’ someone demanded.

Shit, I thought, hiding – red-faced – behind my laptop. I obviously underestimated the strength of feeling here. I’d recently had a stern talking to at home, too, from my wife, for expressing the same opinion to my daughter. The ageing disco-Swedes had just launched a high-grossing, hologrammatic tour. But since when did my fellow alternative music types start liking Abba?

Many years earlier, in another indie label office, someone brandished a magazine in which The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds had been selected as the best album of all time (I was young enough to think this list was some sort of landmark, rather than one of the many that would appear, periodically, for evermore.)

‘What do you think of that?’ they asked the label boss.

‘Not only is it very much not the best album of all time,’ he said, ‘it’s piss-weak fucking rubbish.’

Yes! I remember thinking. It’s not just me who thinks these things! I found my tribe through not liking stuff, as much as loving it.

—

Having an overdeveloped taste can be alienating. A decade or so ago, at an elegant wedding in Silicon Valley, I watched as a friend of the bride opened the party by singing Lionel Richie’s Hello. As the crowd beamed happily on, I wondered if there was something wrong with me. Was I the only person who wasn’t pretending not to like this stuff? Was there something I should’ve grown out of, like everyone else, and somehow didn’t?

Taste can appear pompous, affected. In an interview around TV on the Radio’s Dear Science, a journalist reported that Dave Sitek was lying under a table in the hotel lobby, to get as far away as possible from the music playing. ‘Ah, young people,’ my boss at the time said. But there’s something in that. I too feel an almost physical revulsion at bland, tepid music. The worst of this is the lounge / easy listening cover version. I will never recover from hearing a version of Smells Like Teen Spirit in the style of an ersatz Astrud Gilberto. One of the worst days of my life was spent listening to Air’s limp, insipid Moon Safari on repeat, as a house full of young people warmed themselves up for a performance at FYF in LA. I wanted to go full Sitek – beyond Sitek.

If, like me, you think In Utero is a better record than Nevermind, people think you’re lying, just to try and look cool.

It’s not about good taste, really. It’s about too strong a taste. It makes you into a spoilsport. Recently, on a road trip to the desert with one of my oldest friends, already made stressful by the top being down under the brutal sun, roaring through the fumes of the 10 freeway, I endured a barrage of sunny, grit-free, schizophrenically skipped music at ear bleeding volume. It wasn’t the time or place for Elliott Smith.

Often when I go to a party, people ask me to make a playlist, or bring along one they imagine I already have. ‘You wouldn’t want to have my playlist,’ I tell them, sheepishly. ‘It’s not really party music.’

Not that I’m listening to something cool. If anything, I’ve reverted to the music I listened to at 13, back when alternative rock and the punk that inspired it seemed hell bent against anything bland or middle of the road, like Abba or Lionel Richie. It’s definitely not cool to be a regular listener to Alice in Chains. And anyway, there’s always someone cooler than you. When I interviewed Tony O’Neill for the Rejects, he told me how he’d built up the courage to play his compilation tape on the Kenickie tour bus. When he did so, the band and crew fell silent. Then someone asked: ‘How long is this fucking song going to last?’ And then someone else ejected the tape and threw it out the window.

At a music conference once, I told one of my favourite people – a label head and manager – that I liked Nine Inch Nails. ‘Why?’ he asked, grinning sardonically. Then he did an excellent impression of a comedy hard rawk voice and yelled ‘HEAD LIKE A HOLE!!!’ I admire this man’s taste. He once told me that he considered certain, bland forms of electronica to be ‘graphic designer’ music. Nothing too strong to distract them from their work.

I’ve always been drawn to music that’s angry, sad, exciting, or otherwise has some grit. ‘You’re so hardcore,’ another boss said once, when I told him I didn’t want music to be a comfort blanket, and that was why Dizzee Rascal’s first album was more important than anything else under consideration. I took it as a compliment, but looking back I don’t think it was meant as one.

—

Something shifted in music, in recent years. The etiquette became less about signalling your taste by what you didn’t like. That was negative, cynical. Now, the norm is to like pretty much everything (except, perhaps, Christian rock). To signal your openness and range.

But that’s not how I’ve ever felt about music. I hate stuff as strongly as I love other stuff, and I simply can’t pretend. I don’t want musical bubble bath. I want to feel something strongly, to get split open and ruined by music.

—

When I started writing about Kanye and Kneecap, I was of the view that Kanye’s prejudice was obviously worse. The question thus seemed to be: how much antisemitism is acceptable to the music industry and fans?

The litany of Kanye’s statements and actions is familiar and wearisome: “Death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE;” appearances on school-shooting-denier Alex Jones’ Infowars, and alongside Nick Fuentes; songs called Heil Hitler; swastikas in Star of Davids and on sale in Super Bowl ads. Then, finally, the predictable apology and resort to mental health issues. On this latter, I pretend no expertise. Doctors interviewed in the media have said that it’s unlikely a mental health condition could lead to sustained bigotry against one set of people.

Kanye’s behaviour inevitably reminded me of the situation Wiley got himself into, though Wiley was never insulated from his struggles by towering celebrity and billions of dollars. That said, Kanye has never appeared to be particularly stable. The images of his decimated Malibu mega-home seemed strangely emblematic of his mindset.

However poisonous Kanye’s behaviour, there was something in it that came across like an annoying schoolboy trying to say the most offensive thing possible. It was trollish, pathetic. Nobody outside of fellow trolls and assorted racists was impressed.

But as I thought more about the subject, it seemed to me that Kneecap’s behaviour might actually be worse. In November 2024, rapper Mo Chara was filmed apparently waving a Hezbollah flag, and saying: “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah.” More footage from a year earlier showed a band member saying: “the only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.”1

In February 2025, on the day of the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Kneecap posted a photo of DJ Próvaí reading a book called The Statements of Hassan Nasrallah on Instagram.

The gig footage didn’t circulate widely until the following spring. In the interim, Kneecap won a BAFTA and several BIFAs for their eponymous film. In April 2025, they played Coachella, and displayed the words FUCK ISRAEL. FREE PALESTINE on their video screen. This was entirely defensible under any conception of artistic freedom, but it understandably invited more scrutiny, having taken place a hundred or so miles from a city where a great many American Jews live.

Now, the footage from Kneecap’s gig at the Kentish Town Forum began to circulate. Shortly afterwards, Mo Chara, AKA Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, was prosecuted for breaching UK law by supporting a proscribed terror group. The case was thrown out on a technicality – charges had been brought too late – appealed by the government, and finally dismissed.

For reasons that used to be very clear to most of us, a great many more Jews live in America than in Europe. In the US, Kneecap were dropped by their booking agent, and German festival slots were also cancelled. In the UK, the industry publicly rallied around them.

—

Most people reading this will know what Hamas and Hezbollah are. Both are explicitly genocidal, and, before a PR move in 2007, Hamas’ founding charter called for the death of all Jews – not just Israelis. The groups don’t particularly like each other – one is Sunni, the other Shia – and their primary connection is funding from the theocratic, mass-murdering regime in Iran.

Everyone reading this will know that, in 2023, Hamas carried out a massacre at an Israeli music festival. The UN investigator who visited the site and watched fifty hours of footage the terrorists had filmed said: “What I witnessed in Israel were scenes of unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality. It was a catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors… including sexual violence.”

In 2006, the UN issued a mandate requiring Hezbollah2 to stay approximately eighteen miles north of the border with Israel. Instead, Hezbollah remained in the demilitarised zone, launching periodic rocket attacks. After the Hamas massacre, they dramatically escalated these assaults, killing twelve Druze schoolchildren as they played football, and displacing thousands of people. During these years, Israel occasionally retaliated with airstrikes, but was not occupying Lebanon (with the exception of the disputed Shebaa Farms area) so there was no ‘freedom fighting’3 basis for these attacks.

Among the statements in the book DJ Próvaí proudly showed himself reading, is this one: “If we search the entire globe for a more cowardly, lowly, weak, and frail individual in his spirit, mind, ideology, and religion, we will never find anyone like the Jew.” Nasrallah also called “Zionist Jews” the “descendants of apes and pigs” – at least twice. Perhaps DJ Próvaí, given the violence his stage name implies,4 found these statements to be relatively mild.

We’re getting into the weeds here, I know. The point is that opposing Israel’s behaviour in the Middle East neither requires nor justifies the support of genocidal, antisemitic terror groups. In the same sense, opposing an alleged Israeli genocide shouldn’t require supporting groups like Palestine Action, a member of which broke a policewoman’s spine with a sledgehammer. The elision of the statements “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” on protestors’ signs is disingenuous at best.

—

So why did Kneecap apparently make those statements? And why does the music business and the music press largely continue to support them? Why did industry luminaries show up to their court case, when they leave other artists, like Róisín Murphy, to suffer alone?5 How much antisemitism is OK?

I would be genuinely interested to know the answers to these questions – and whether their fans have any, or find it easier not to ask themselves.

There’s a strange air of silence in the music industry around this, and a pronounced sense that it would be rude to ask. That to do so would mark you out as on the wrong side, perhaps even in favour of genocide. Kneecap’s response to being prosecuted for what they’d said was simply denial. They portrayed themselves as victims of a right-wing conspiracy (presumably orchestrated by a Labour government led by a congenital human rights lawyer.) Kneecap’s manager, Daniel Lambert, told RTE’s Drivetime: “They have the bravery and the conviction to stand up for what’s right, and are willing to do that despite the fact that it may harm their career… and they should be praised massively for that.” In a statement, Kneecap said they “do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah”.

Ó hAnnaidh said: “This entire process was never ⁠about ​me, never about any threat to the ​public and never about 'terrorism' ... It was always about Palestine and about what happens if you dare ​to speak up.” But it isn’t about that at all. Anyone in the UK is legally entitled to claim that Israel is carrying out a genocide. Many thousands of people do so, on a weekly basis, without fear of prosecution. Mo Chara was prosecuted for supporting a genocidal terror group.

If Kneecap are really brave, shouldn’t they have the courage of their convictions? Doesn’t this dishonesty give you the prickling sensation of something deeply shameful?

In The Ministry of Truth, Dorian Lynskey’s excellent biography of George Orwell’s 1984, he documents the extent to which publishing circles in Britain in the 1940s wouldn’t hear a word against Stalin. For this reason, most publishers rejected Animal Farm. It simply wouldn’t do to criticise the world’s foremost leftwing government, no matter the pesky rumours of mass murder.

On this conspiracy of silence, Orwell6 wrote: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” Does this explain why music journalists don’t seem to be asking any inconvenient questions, or indeed any questions about this at all?

I don’t believe that either Kanye or Kneecap should be cancelled. Like Josh Glancy, I think – reluctantly – that Kanye should have been allowed to play in London. Kanye disgraced himself, cosplaying a Nazi. Kneecap appear to support groups who are actively killing Jews today. They, in turn, are widely supported, rather than shunned. What I would like to see is a lot more questions asked of Kneecap and their fans. Why did you say these things? Why do you post pictures from the shows of a group who said them? Can you be sure that “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah” doesn’t contribute to an atmosphere in which British Jews are being stabbed on the streets?7

Janet Malcolm wrote that: “Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.” I imagine a lot of fans simply want the pleasure of listening to Kneecap. But there wasn’t much pleasure for the victims of Hamas on October 7, or the Druze schoolchildren playing football; for the stabbing victims of Golders Green, or the Jews killed at their Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur. For them, some order would have been much more valuable.

—

In March 2024, I was a guest on Times Radio’s ‘Old & New’ slot with Hugo Rifkind. I was in the UK to promote The Rejects, and this was the final event in a week that was, thanks to the book’s publicist, pleasingly busy. The idea for the slot is that a guest picks an old album – ideally with some topical relevance, like an anniversary – and a new one, and discusses each.

For old I chose In Utero, on the morbid basis that it had been almost thirty years since Kurt Cobain’s suicide. More importantly, I wanted to make a case for the album as Nirvana’s best, which I knew would provoke some debate.1

For the new album, I chose Kneecap. Their debut, Fine Art, wasn’t out until June, but a single was, and Times Radio were amenable. The idea appealed for several reasons. Firstly, the two biggest musical passions of my life have been alternative rock and hip-hop, and I wanted to represent both. Secondly, the happiest years of my career were spent as label manager of Big Dada, working on the sort of leftfield, indie hip-hop Kneecap seemed to be making. Third, I thought the album was really good – bouncy, funny, infectious. And finally, I thought the nationalist imagery they were playing with was interesting.

—

Being born in 1980, I’m just old enough to remember the late stages of the Troubles. I became fascinated by them as a child, not least as it was so shocking to see television images of British terraced houses in Belfast – which could have been those in Manchester, or my own hometown, Leeds – as the backdrop for urban warfare. Armoured vehicles, soldiers with guns, protestors throwing rocks, guerrillas with bombs, AK-47s and – more worryingly – American Armalites.

I read about the Troubles wherever I could – in thrillers and nonfiction books, and memoirs by soldiers – especially those from the SAS, with which I was also fascinated. I love books about the subject to this day: Killing Thatcher by Rory Carroll is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read in recent years, and Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe wasn’t far behind.

Perhaps because of this reading, I’d always been aware of the complexities of the Troubles that have arguably been obscured over time. For example, that the British Army was originally sent to Northern Ireland in part to suppress violence against Catholics by Protestant loyalists. Catholics were treated abominably by elements of the Protestant majority – spat at, taunted, banned from areas of their own cities, beaten up and even killed.

In the late ’60s, civil rights protests by Catholic nationalists were met with violence from loyalist paramilitaries, and policed by the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary. The British government sent the Army in to quash the violence.

In these early days, Catholic women brought cups of tea out for British soldiers, and they were perceived by some as saviours. Naturally, this didn’t suit the IRA, which aimed to provoke maximum antagonism between the locals and the military. The British government and Army leaders overreacted with aggressive house searches. From there, everything spiralled into gruesome decades of violence.

I was also aware that these complexities were largely ignored by those who glamourised republican violence. This included the far left, as epitomised by Jeremy Corbyn, who invited Gerry Adams to Westminster in 1984. Their meeting took place two weeks after the IRA had attempted to murder Margaret Thatcher, killing five people and leaving Margaret Tebbit permanently disabled – an act of extreme provocation.2 Perhaps worse: the American-Irish romantics, who donated money to the ‘boys back home,’ funding the shipments of Armalites and explosives used to kill British soldiers and civilians (and horses) in acts of terror.

Kneecap’s use of terror imagery was immediately recognisable. Their name comes from the punishment doled out by the IRA for low level infractions, like drug dealing in the wrong place – victims would be shot in one or both knees. (Genuine informers3 were usually shot dead after being tortured.) The balaclava worn by the group’s DJ Próvaí – in the Irish republican tricolour – was another clear reference. ‘Próvaí’ itself likely refers to the Provisional IRA, who, whichever way you slice it, violently murdered an awful lot of innocent people.

On reflection, it was lazy of me to assume Kneecap were playing with this imagery, rather than using it sincerely. It seemed to me that a new generation of young men, making films with Michael Fassbender and releasing albums on British labels, couldn’t really be serious about it. It seemed more likely they were reclaiming potent imagery from the past and re-deploying it in an artistic context. This, I told Rifkind, was a bit like M.I.A.’s Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape, which came out around the time she began using tiger imagery that seemed a clear reference to the Tamil Tigers.

I should have thought about this harder. When I did, later, I remembered that I’d eventually found M.I.A.’s terror schtick to be a bit crass, because it made use of life and death struggles as a marketing ploy. “Maya was into the whole terrorism gimmick at the time,” as Diplo told the New York Times. I got to know M.I.A. a little, during her very early days in music, because she was dating Diplo and he was signed to Big Dada. She was sweet, taken aback by the success she was having. She’d attended St. Martin’s and lived with Justine Frischmann.4

And then, as the fame set in, she became something rather different – probably best expressed by Lynn Hirschberg’s infamous profile of her. The truth of M.I.A.’s connections to the Tamil civil rights movement was more complex. Her father had been a member of EROS (the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students) a precursor to the Tigers, but had renounced the armed struggle to focus on democratic processes (in IRA language, the ballot box, rather than the Armalite – the IRA’s strategy was to make use of both.)

The Tamil Tigers were not like EROS. As with Hamas in Gaza, the most extreme, violent group had won the struggle for dominance. The Tigers brutalised their own people, forcibly recruited child soldiers, and murdered entire villages of Sinhalese Buddhists. As with the misty-eyed view of the IRA held by some Americans, romance tended to obscure these inconvenient facts. Ahilan Kadirgamar of the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum told Hirschberg that “people in exile tend to be more nationalistic, and Maya took a very simplistic explanation of the problems between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese government and the Tamils. It’s very unfair when you condemn one side of this conflict. The Tigers were killing people, and the government was killing people. It was a brutal war, and M.I.A. had a role in putting the Tigers on the map. She doesn’t seem to know the complexity of what these groups do.”5

The “whole terrorism gimmick” might have been behind M.I.A. being denied a US visa in 2007. I remember an executive from her label, XL, complaining about this at a small conference in London, speaking about M.I.A. as if she was the victim of an ugly, racialised, American approach to immigration. I had some sympathy, but part of me couldn’t help wondering what she expected.

Terror imagery might provide a thrill to artists and fans, but it’s presumably trickier for government officials tasked with deciding how seriously to take it - or whether exceptions can be made to law.

“I’ve always been slightly in two minds about musicians playing with that sort of imagery,” I told Rifkind. “But I do think re-appropriating this stuff is exciting and transgressive and a bit dangerous, and that’s what music should be like.”

Back in LA, I went to see Kneecap play live. I noticed that the crowd was heavily Irish, and for the first time, wondered how sincerely Kneecap had intended their song Get Yer Brits Out. (This question gave me the same mild pang of anxiety I’d experienced when Mike Ladd took me into an Irish bar in the North Bronx. On entering, a dense crowd was singing ‘Where’s the flag of England?’ Mike turned to me, grinning, and said: “Oh shit – it’s St. Patrick’s day. I think you’d better not talk too much.”)

At some point, the group began waving Palestinian flags and shouting about Gaza, and genocide. The crowd roared their approval, and the vibe became a little more aggro. I happened to be watching with a Lebanese-American friend. “I have strong feelings about this, obviously,” he said, “but I don’t need this.”

There was, as yet, no mention of Hamas or Hezbollah.

To be continued.

18 November 1972

There’s a knock at the door. Shit. What time is it? It’s bright outside the windows. The door opens before I can say anything, and Willie is standing framed in it.

‘Danny,’ he says. He ain’t smiling.

‘Good morning, Willie.’

‘It’s a little later than that, Danny.’

‘All right. What’s up?’

‘Why don’t you come on up to the house?’ Willie says.

‘I’m gonna need a little time.’

‘Twenty minutes,’ Willie says. ‘Don’t keep Neil waiting now.’

‘Sure.’

The door closes. I find my works and some water and cook up. I’m frightened and I keep missing the vein. Eventually I get there.

I’m already in my clothes, so I just take a drink, smoke a cigarette and head outside.

‘Come on, buddy,’ Willie says.

It’s weird, man, walking up to that big old house. That fairy-book place with its towers and turrets. It’s like a wizard’s house. I guess it sort of is. I’m up above the stands of pines in the ranch now. I can see the white house, the cabins, my trailer. Neil’s cars are lined up beside ’em. Fifties Caddies and Buicks. He pays a guy full time to take care of ’em.

I gotta stop halfway up because I’m out of breath and sweatin’ again.

‘You all right?’ Willie asks.

‘Nope,’ I say, and laugh.

‘Take your time.’

I squint up at the house, but I can’t see anyone behind the glass in the dozens of windows.

‘All right,’ I tell Willie, and we set off again.

Neil answers the door. He don’t smile. I can hear someone in the kitchen and guess that’s where Carrie is.

We walk through to the living room. Whenever I been up here before, that’s where Neil is. In the corner of the room, Old Black is leaning in a guitar stand. That old demon dog Les Paul. Only Neil had the patience to retune the motherfucker every five minutes because of that dumb-ass Bigsby vibrato.

I stand in the centre of the room. Neil looks at me. Willie has slipped out. It’s like the world is rushing towards me, tearing into me so I don’t feel steady on my feet. It’s at odds with the psychic cool of the smack. It’s like my body knows what’s happening despite it and is acting accordingly.

‘Sit down, Danny,’ Neil says.

By the window there’s a big old armchair, an upturned barrel for a table and a smaller wooden chair. I take that one. Neil sits down softly in the armchair. He’s got the sleeves of his plaid shirt rolled up. When he’s serious his jaw takes on this kinda tight look, and there’s no smile to take the sting outta those hawk eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Danny,’ he says. ‘It ain’t working. I’ve gotta let you go.’

I realise I’m smiling, this weird-feeling grin that’s locked over my mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again.

‘I get it,’ I tell him. ‘Ain’t your fault.’

‘We’ll get you back to LA. Give you a few bucks.’

‘Thanks, man.’

‘Maybe you can get some help with this shit.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Get straight. Then we can play together again. It’s just I need you to play.’

‘Shit,’ I say. ‘Please, Neil. Please don’t do this.’ The smile’s gone now and I can feel the tears coming.

‘I have to, Danny. It’s not happening, man. You’re not together enough.’

‘I’ve got nowhere else to go, man . . . What am I gonna tell my friends?’

‘Go back home to LA. You tell ’em you’re not well and you need to get better.’ He glances at the door.

‘I know I can get it together. Please, Neil.’

‘Not this time, Danny. We’re too far into it all now. I’m sorry. I tried.’

‘. . . Well all right,’ I say.

Neil stands up. ‘Goodbye, Danny,’ he says. ‘Take care of yourself.’

‘Sure thing, Neil,’ I say.

We shake hands, and then Willie is back in the room and we’re headed out and Carrie appears and kisses me and she’s crying and I’m out the door. I can hear Carrie talking to Neil and she’s saying: ‘I’m scared, I’m scared, this doesn’t feel right,’ but then the door closes behind me with a slam. Before I know it, we’re at the bottom of the hill.

‘You wanna say any goodbyes?’ Willie asks.

‘Nope,’ I tell him. ‘Just let me get my shit.’

—

Fifty bucks and plane ride back to LA. Goddammit.

I’m in the toilets at San Francisco airport. I’m getting my shit together to shoot up but then this rage just surges up in me. I throw the smack into the bowl and flush. Then I’m stomping my works under my boot with little pieces of glass shooting off all over the place. I hear voices outside sounding surprised. I realise I’m shouting, and then I’m smashing my head into the door over and over.

‘What the hell?’ someone yells.

‘What’s going on in there, sir?’ someone else says.

I wrench open the door and clatter out with my guitar case cracking into the frame and storm past them. There’s a man in a suit and another in slacks and a shirt, both of them staring.

‘Get a fuckin’ grip,’ I tell myself. I find a seat and wash down a Valium with a slug of tequila. The bottle is almost empty. It was full when I left the ranch. I can feel myself trembling, people lookin’ at me. I wanna scream and shout and smack myself in the head.

‘You asshole,’ I tell myself, keeping my voice low. ‘Stupid fucking asshole.’

The two women at the gate look at me real funny when I board but I make it on to the plane. I’ve finished the bottle before we even take off. Things start to get blurry. Time breaks up into little segments with lost bits in between. I got that same feeling that the world is rushing towards me like wind. Then I come to, and I can’t remember what happened.

I push the button in the plane’s ceiling, and a woman appears beside me.

‘Sir?’

‘Tequila,’ I say.

She looks at me doubtfully, but she goes and gets the drink.

‘Would you like soda?’ she asks.

I shake my head, focus on trying to take the cup off of her without spilling it.

I can feel the need coming on, the fuckin’ pill wasn’t enough to hold it back – never is. I scrabble in my bag for the bottle, then drop the lid and almost spill the pills. ‘Motherfucker,’ I say.

The man next to me tuts and says: ‘For God’s sakes.’

I wash the pill down with the drink.

This ain’t gonna be enough. I need more alcohol. I panic and hit the button again. This time two women come and they’re telling me I’ve had enough and they’re not gonna give me no more. I’m standing and telling them they don’t understand, then I try to push past ’em to get to the drinks and they’re pushing back and looking afraid. And then I feel hands on me from behind, gripping my arms and crossing ’em and whoever it is turns me around so I can’t see ’em and they push me down the gangway to the back and into an empty row.

‘Settle down or I’ll cuff you,’ says a voice.

I’m in the window seat, and he sits down next to me. A big guy in a sports jacket with a Marine-type haircut.

‘You a cop?’ I ask him.

‘Yup,’ he says. ‘Now shut up and sit still.’

The fear and the anger and the shock and the pills and drink are too much. I pass out.

—

Outside LAX the sun beats down on me. Two cabs refuse to take me but the third does, thank God. There’s traffic on the 405 and I’m shivering in the backseat and all I can think of is home. The sun is setting when I get off on Manhattan Blvd. I need to walk back to Western to the liquor store, where I buy two more bottles of Jose. Then I’m walking to the house, crying.

No more smack, I keep telling myself. It’s a strict diet of Valium and booze. It’s funny, when I became the guy who knew about drugs, I told ’em never to take depressants when you’re drinkin’. Well, I can’t take my own advice now. This is the only way through.

My new song keeps running through my head in this broken little loop and already I hate it. I keep thinking about Jack. I feel like I need to know if he loves me like I think he does. I get up and make it downstairs to the phone.

When I call the White House, Jack answers, thank God.

‘Danny?’ he says.

‘Would you be there for me, no matter what?’ I ask him.

‘Sure,’ he says.

‘That’s all I wanna know.’ I hang up and go back to my room. The night is upon me now, and I know I can’t face it. I take another Valium and drink a whole shitload of tequila. Fuck you, Danny boy.

I stand, and limp across the room again. I need to make it to the bathroom. I ain’t sure why.

The world has stopped rushing towards me now. It’s almost silent. I take a few more steps. Then one more – into the black.

Modern streaming shows seem to follow a common, descending arc from jaw-dropping opening premise through well-trodden interpersonal drama and finally to something close to a soap opera. And to top it all off, their endings are so bad you wish you hadn’t bothered.

Euphoria’s first season was an exception, along with a couple of other HBO shows. It was dark, transgressive, thrilling. But given that it portrayed the wild, druggy lives of American high school kids – and I had a couple of those in waiting – I had to be in the right frame of mind to watch it. What I might have seen as exaggerated, LA had shown me to be all too realistic. Once, at Coachella, I encountered a trio of wealthy LA college boys with bulging muscles, deadened eyes and a fist-sized rock of cocaine in a Tupperware box. Ever since, the dangers for children in LA have loomed large in my psyche.

Thus, any minor disturbance in my parental life, or just the typical tinge of Sunday fear, would mean I had to defer watching.

Season 2 was even better. It was surer of itself, and contained one of the best moments of TV in recent years, when the backstory of Cal Jacobs, Nate’s father, was portrayed in a montage set to INXS. It was beautiful, explicit, enriching.

So why was I not going to bother with Season 3? A few things, I think. I’d heard about the tortuous gestation of the series, because its three main stars had become mega ones. This didn’t seem to bode well. Levinson’s work on The Idol had been widely scorned, and I hadn’t got around to watching it. And I made a foolhardy mistake by listening to the critics.

The reactions to the new series were both largely negative, and, for a show that had been something like infamous, strangely muted. Most of the criticism ran along familiar ideology-based lines: Euphoria was misogynist, manosphere adjacent, exploitative. One of the Guardian’s two negative reviews asked the wearying question of what the show was ‘trying to say.’ Why must a show ‘say’ anything, as long as it’s very good? (A similar attack was made against Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, by the high priestess of this type of criticism, Andrea Long Chu.)

Bizarrely, even the Telegraph attacked the show on these puritanical lines:

‘Once you know that Euphoria creator Sam Levinson writes alone, without a writer’s room, sometimes method-dressing as his own characters, it’s difficult to watch his X-rated show in the same way again.’

The fact that one person writes the show is, of course, what makes it so good.1 No one ever built a statue to a writing room. And being admirably obsessive enough to actually dress as his own characters might explain why Euphoria’s world-building is better than anything in movies just now, let alone TV.

All of which is to say that I should have remembered the lesson I’d drawn previously – that a negative review in the Guardian is often the surest marker of quality.

The Telegraph’s implication gets to the heart of much of the criticism levelled at Euphoria: that it’s written by a straight, white male. This leads us to imagine what critics might say if it wasn’t: ‘No other show more compellingly portrays the brutal structures of American oppression,’ perhaps.

There’s a one(ish) word riposte to the idea that Euphoria is exploitative and misogynist: OnlyFans. If we must ask art and entertainment to ‘say’ something, then Euphoria is very much doing so. As the sublime Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) says in the show: ‘Last year, Hollywood made $8 billion. OnlyFans made 7.’ No other show confronts this cultural cataclysm.

But more importantly, it’s hard to see Euphoria as exploitative when its actors appear to be having the time of their lives. Sydney Sweeney in particular revels in her own range, stomping over LA in tribute to the 50-foot woman, freaking out at her wedding and executing her ‘content’ with flawless comic timing. Everything is now on a wider canvas, particularly Zendaya’s storyline. The opening of Season 3, in which we see her new life as a drug mule, has the hypnotic, shocking grip of a first-rate movie. It takes in gorgeous desert landscapes, hellish dealers, a teetering car on the border wall and a befouled crossing from Mexico.

It sets the tone for the entire season: lurid, beautifully crafted, no-holds-barred fun. Levinson is an artist: his vision is singular and brilliantly realised.

Weirdly, no one seems to be talking about the show – not in the watercooler way they did back in 2019. Why is that? Because it’s ‘red-coded,’ and not woke? I think it’s more likely that, for a great many people, ‘disturbing’ is a bad thing. They quite reasonably don’t want to be disturbed, and in fact spend quite a lot of time and money on various wellbeing practices designed to undo prior disturbance.

Fair enough. I, on the other hand, want art and entertainment to really fuck me up. In my view, the trudge of daily reality could do with a good dose of disturbance.

And ultimately, I don’t think this season of Euphoria is as disturbing as the high school years. These are grown-ups now, in charge of their own lives. The show is dark, but also vivid and exciting – one hour a week of pure escape, thrill and pleasure.

I just hope Levinson can land it.

7 November 1972

We’re sitting around the table in the big room. Neil likes us to eat together. There’s a community forming up here but I ain’t part of it. These people gotta live together, sleep together, eat together for a year.

Neil doesn’t like me being in the Airstream. He knows there’s something up with that. He took me aside earlier.

‘It’s gonna be hard, Danny,’ he told me. He speaks softly. He always did but now everybody listens to him, falls silent when he speaks so he can keep it real soft. ‘It’s gonna be a real tough tour. The biggest we’ve ever done. Ice hockey arenas.’

He’s telling me to get straight, that he can’t forgive for ever.

So I made it to dinner. I feel pretty good. I got the dose right. I’m sweating a little but I’m not falling into my own plate. The tequila helps. I got a big old tumbler filled almost to the brim. I must’ve drunk the best part of a bottle today but it ain’t really touched the sides.

Around the table are Jack, Neil, Carrie. David Briggs is here. He looks tired, serious. Everyone is working hard, except me I guess.

Ralph and Billy are drinking beer and talking about Billy’s mom, Velma. She’s Crazy Horse’s witch-mother, and she’s got flu. Ralph and Billy are dark little guys. People used to joke that we looked like a surfer backed up by two mobsters. I love ’em, but I can’t seem to know what to say to ’em.

There are two hippie girls in calico dresses cooking some sort of stew. Neil’s on a health kick, at least with what he eats. There are joints going around. It’s only me drinking hard liquor. I finish off my glass and pour another.

We’re halfway through eating and no one is speaking. I feel this urge to say something, that this is some sort of opportunity I shouldn’t miss. I wanna be the Danny of old, to hold the floor.

‘I ever tell y’all how my knees got fucked up in the first place?’ I ask.

I look around the table, the faces blurring into each other. I take another drink.

‘Tell us, Danny,’ Neil says. He puts his fork down, leans back in his chair with one hand on the table.

‘It was when I was in the Navy, back in Ohio. I had this CO, man, a sick son of a bitch. Most sadistic man I ever met.’

Everyone’s quiet, but Jack – good old Jack – he can’t help wanting to help me. ‘Like a big guy?’ he asks.

‘Not really. Just mean. He had these eyes like little fuckin’ stones. One night it got real cold, like fifteen degrees. Everything froze over. He put me on guard duty for the whole night.’

‘Shit,’ somebody says.

‘I did it, eight hours. I tried to keep warm, pacin’ and hoppin’ and all that. In the morning I had frostbite in my knees. They swelled up like two fuckin’ balloons, man. I was in bed for four months.’

‘My God,’ Carrie says.

‘It gave me rheumatoid arthritis. They said I’d be in a chair by the time I’m forty.’

No one says anything, but I got their attention. It occurs to me I can still hold a fuckin’ room. Danny the frontman.

I finish the drink, pour another. I can feel the heat of the stares. The two hippie girls are blurry, awkward figures at the end of the room.

‘Did you ever feel like killing somebody?’ I ask the table.

Jack – God bless you, Jack, you might be a little snitch but I know you love me – laughs.

No one else does.

11 November 1972

I spend more time in the trailer on my own. Sometimes whole days disappear. I got some coke on my last run to Frisco, and more smack than I ever bought in one go. I’m a rich man, baby. I did speedballs for a couple of days until the coke ran out. After that, between hits I drank a lot of tequila and swallowed Valium. How long’s it been, a week?

It’s easier to come out at night when everyone’s asleep. I walk around the ranch in the moonlight that slashes through the pines. It’s cold but I got my coat. There are coyotes howling, sometimes they sound close. I look up at the low, rolling hills around the ranch like I might see one silhouetted against the sky.

In the afternoons Carrie brings me sandwiches. I can see it’s hard for her to sit in the trailer with me. It’s bad in here. She’s like this beautiful, clean thing, visiting my hell.

‘How about we go outside, Danny?’ she asks. She has her hands crossed in her lap.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I guess I’m feeling pretty rough.’

‘It’s OK.’ She’s pale – from the stink in here perhaps.

‘You know,’ she says. ‘Neil has so much faith in you. He just knows you’re gonna be great again.’

Oh boy.

‘Come on, try to eat,’ Carrie says, and gestures to the sandwiches. They sit on the plate – layers of cheese and turkey and some healthy lookin’ bread. They’re big and impossible. The idea I could put one in my mouth . . . I been living on milk and Magic Puffs.

I laugh. ‘I guess it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks,’ I tell her.

‘I guess so,’ she smiles back at me.

And this smile just breaks me. I wasn’t ready for it and suddenly I’m crying.

‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t belong here.’

And I cry while she strokes my hair and tells me it’s OK. But of course, both of us know it ain’t.

16 November 1972

Neil comes to visit me between rehearsals. He brings an old Martin acoustic with him and tries to teach me songs one on one. I try, I do. The speedball run scared me so now I’m shooting more smack. I nod out a couple of times.

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ Neil says.

11 October 1972

My God, I love Neil. I hate him too, but that’s just my own sickness talking. Neil likes playing in groups, but basically he’s a solo artist. Deep down he knows he has to do the gig by himself. Sometimes I wish it was me standing in the middle of that stage, but I know it ain’t my place. Danny the sideman, that’s me.

No, I been more than that, I try to remind myself. It was me and Neil that made ‘Cinnamon Girl’. Man, I remember letting out that ‘whoo’ as Neil’s second solo kicked in. The truest sound I ever made. I was the happiest man alive, and you can hear it.

David Briggs, Neil’s producer, told me I’m world class. He told me it was good for Neil to have a guy up in his face who could sing his fuckin’ ass off and play the best guitar of anyone who ever played with him.

‘That’s how you get good,’ he told me. ‘By being with people who are good.’

He said I just gotta wait. ‘You can’t pick your own time – that’s picked by other people for you – you just gotta keep being yourself.’

It sure reassured me at the time.

According to Jack Nitzsche, I give Neil the blackness he lacks. He likes to make clear that Billy and Ralph don’t impress him. He says I’m the only black man in the band. I don’t know about that, but like I said, I love black music.

I gotta hang on to some of this, remember these good things, or I’ll go crazy. Please believe me. I should be up there in the fuckin’ stars and instead I’m way down here in the dirt.

Neil forgives. He comes to take a look at me and he says: ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

And after all, this has been going on for too damn long. I remember a night on stage with the Horse, at the Fillmore East. It was the early days with me and the big H. I was blissed out so hard on the drug and the beautiful heavy groove that I just stopped playing and shut my eyes and smiled and suddenly Neil was shouting, ‘Danny! SING!’

After the show, Neil tore the band a new one. Jack told me about it later. He was yellin’ at ’em like it was their fault.

‘All right – who scored for Danny?’

‘I wanted to tell him “Danny did!”’ Jack said. He gave me one of his little angry-man frowns when I laughed. ‘It wasn’t funny. Like anybody else in this band knows how to score smack in the middle of the night in Manhattan.’

That first tour was the best time of my life. I got this bad feeling it’ll never be that good again. It was the time we all realised what a big star Neil was gonna be – we felt like we would be too. But he was different. He was friendly and talkative backstage, like we all were. But before each show he’d walk off outside on his own for ten minutes, like this preparation thing. On stage he had this real stoned, quiet persona. I saw that he was different, that he saw everything differently.

He played that demon dog Old Black, and I played his orange Gretsch 6120 from the Buffalo Springfield days. Man, the sound of those twin guitars. Raw and real deep, always on the edge of control. Heavy and howling like weather, beautiful and wild. Behind us, Ralph and Billy’s rhythm section drove us on like war drums. We’d improvise around the songs like Coltrane or Davis. It was just what we all wanted.

Neil would open up with acoustic songs some nights, and then we’d tune up and play ‘Everybody Knows’. He’d speak to the audience.

‘This is Danny Whitten on guitar. He wrote this song and I thought it was so good I better get in on a good thing and co-write it.’

Then we’d tear into ‘Downtown’. If anybody wrote a better song about scoring drugs, I ain’t heard it. The Velvet Underground can kiss my ass.

‘Hey, I can tell you guys want to play, don’t you?’ Neil would say at the end of the sets. ‘What do you want to play?’

Me, Ralph and Billy, in unison: ‘“Down by the River”.’

Stephen Stills would show up, and sometimes Neil would bring him out to play. Man, we’d get $250 a night in the spring. It was just before everything blew. You could feel it coming. By the summer, Neil was playing shows with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and people were calling ’em the American Beatles.

And then Neil fired us. It turned out it had been coming – just not for us. Neil likes to keep on movin’ on.

Being at Broken Arrow is a little like the Laurel Canyon days, back when we were the Rockets and everybody wanted to stop by and play. But this is more organised, professional. We’re here to learn Neil’s new songs.

Now Neil directs. He’s got this cool, hard focus, this vision that’s almost like a fuckin’ mountain face. You can’t conceive how it got made or how anything could conquer it.

I had a vision, I know that. When I was the frontman and we were Danny and the Memories. I made everyone dress real smooth – green velvet pullovers, black pants and boots. ‘Make sure those shoes are shined, boys.’ Back then it was me everyone looked to for direction. ’Sixty-five – there’s me at the front, clean cut and smooth as hell, even though that was the crazy year . . . Acid, pot, the girls.

Then we saw the Byrds, and knew we had to learn to play as well as sing. We all moved back to LA, and I grew my hair long and shut myself in a basement for six months, and when I came out, I played guitar. We renamed ourselves the Psyrcle – you gotta laugh – and we started over again.

But all the time I was just a sideman in waiting. Just pretending . . .

Shit.

25 October 1972

I keep being late. They let me use a car and I drive into the city to score. It takes a long time, up and down that track from the ranch and back. I try to keep the doses low, but I’ve overdone it a couple of times and couldn’t play.

Now I’m here and I’m failing, it’s harder to hold the darkness back. There’s something rotten in me, I know it. I’m shit and I come from shit. My daddy was the devil and he made me. Those three years with him ain’t never really ended. Brenda, I wish we could talk about it sometimes. Why are we so afraid? We left him, didn’t we? I thought we’d escaped.

Even the good bits of us ain’t right. Grandma and Mamma tried, but they were both goddamn drunks like me. Brenda, at least it didn’t get you. You’re so good and I love you so much.

Remember how we used to sit on that dirty floor and make up stories? We used to take it in turns to go look through that smeared-up old window and see if Mamma was coming home? Two jobs, three. Never knew what sort of mood she’d be in.

The bottles in the cabinet. The good times when she danced. Boy – she could dance. Slinkin’ around the living room, lost in the music, drink in her hand. If we were lucky, she’d dance with us.

Later, Grandma in the armchair with the worn through arms. Picking at the stuffing in her sleep. Drunk and drooling. Waiting on her to wake up and maybe make us dinner. Why am I so fuckin’ sad?

Neil comes to the trailer. He sees how I am, and he says: ‘It’s OK, Danny, maybe tomorrow.’

27 October 1972

I’m working on a new song. It’s called ‘Oh Boy’.

I think about the times I was happier than now

Oh boy

31 October 1972

I can’t play. It’s like I’m sleeping standing upright.

We try to rehearse.

‘Danny, ya gotta play,’ Neil says. ‘Ya gotta learn these songs.’

‘Hey, Jack,’ I say, ‘play “Be My Baby”.’

No one laughs. There’s a lot of silence now, whenever I’m around.

—

On the plane I think of Rochelle. There’s a letter in my wallet but I don’t need to read it. She’s asking when we’ll be together, if we’ll ever be together. When she’s older, I wrote back. When I’m good.

I wrote my best ever song for her. ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’.

I think of Brenda too. I don’t want either of them to see me like this. I wanna get straight. Sweet lord, I’m gonna.

They send Willie to pick me up from San Fran airport. He’s a friendly little wise-faced guy with a Buick.

‘You don’t look so good,’ he tells me.

‘On the other hand, you look fuckin’ great.’

‘I try my best,’ he says, watching the road. He wears glasses and I don’t think he can see too well in the dark.

‘Come on, Willie,’ I tell him. ‘You drive like a little old lady.’

He chuckles, and I feel him relax a little. ‘All right, golden boy,’ he says. ‘Let’s get you to the palace.’

It feels good to break out of the city, the traffic, the stop signs. Every time we hit one I feel like I’m gonna scream. Then we’re winding up old Bear Gulch and into the forest. Neil lives at the end of it. The pines press in on the headlights and the car bucks and drifts on the dirt road. Big old forest bugs swirl in the white cones of light and patter against the hood. I can feel the need coming on. Sweat is pouring off me and I need to find a bathroom.

‘You all right?’ Willie asks me.

‘Ready to get where I’m going.’

‘Remember how you used to drive around the speed bumps?’ he says. ‘Scaring the hell out of us on the wrong side of the highway?’

I laugh. Good old Willie. ‘I sure do.’

We reach the ranch. There are hippie girls sitting by a fire. I can hear music coming from the big cabin. And there’s Jack Nitzsche, walking on over to the car. Dearly beloved sometime bandmate. A skinny little guy with his sideburns and long thin hair and sharp eyes behind the spectacles.

‘Howdy,’ he says as I get out.

I think perhaps I’ve got away with delaying the big hello with old Neil, but then I see Jack’s eyes flick over my shoulder and stay there. I turn and see the main man himself, loping down the track from the house. Carrie Snodgress is with him. Now that he’s a star, he left his wife. He picks his way carefully, lanky in his jeans, plaid shirt and boots. He’s bearded and wears a soft-looking hat. Carrie’s got on calfskin boots and a leather coat over her dress. It’s cold up here. I’m shivering a little, that’s for sure.

‘Danny,’ Neil says. That soft voice that comes from his nose as well as his throat. He looks at me all warm. There’s a light in his eyes like he’s on a mission from God. ‘How you doing?’

‘I’m good,’ I tell him, and give him the full-beam smile.

‘That’s great,’ he says. ‘Welcome.’

I look at Carrie. She’s beautiful. Soft and slim, and you can picture how good it would be to kiss her, to feel her limbs wrapping around yours. She’s got these big old eyes that turn down a little at the sides and make her look serious and kinda sad.

‘Hi,’ she says, smiling at me.

‘It’s good to have you back, Danny,’ Neil says. ‘This is gonna be fun.’

Neil doesn’t know what’s wrong with me. He’s a little naive, for someone so smart. He sniffs a little coke, smokes a little weed, but he’s never been near no needle.

‘I’m excited,’ I say. Please God, make Willie show me to my goddamn place.

‘Well,’ Neil says, giving me his cockeyed, goofy type of grin. ‘Settle in, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘See you then.’

Willie is carrying my bag and guitar. He’s heading towards the buildings beyond the fire as Neil turns and leads Carrie up the hill again.

Jack gives me a look I don’t like.

‘Jesus Christ, man,’ he hisses. ‘You’re fucked up.’

‘I’m just on Valium, man,’ I say, ‘take it easy.’

‘Bullshit,’ Jack says.

His eyes flick after Neil and Carrie. And even as fucked up as I am I see the desire in them. Jack wants Carrie. Ambitious, for this Phil Spector-lookin’ motherfucker.

‘Keep on dreamin’, Jackie boy,’ I tell him.

‘Ah come off it, Danny,’ he says, embarrassed.

‘G’night, Jack.’

I set off after Willie, who’s turned around, waiting for me.

When I reach the firepit I pause, a little out of breath, and take in the hippie girls. They don’t look back at me in the way girls used to. I glance over my shoulder. Jack is heading up the hill. He’s gonna go tell Neil. Shit.

Still. I got more pressing matters to attend to.

Willie is leading me toward the White House.

‘Aww,’ I say, coming to a stop.

‘What is it?’

‘You putting me in there?’

‘Yeah. The whole band’s in there. What’s up?’

‘Ain’t there nowhere else?’

‘No, there ain’t.’

‘What about that old Airstream?’

‘Seriously?’

‘Goddamn it, Willie, yes.’

‘Neil ain’t gonna like it.’

I don’t know what to say to that, so I say nothing. I grab my stuff and head to the trailer.

I wrote the piece, got paid 75 quid, and began a friendly professional relationship with the editor involved. One of these two bloggers became an award-winning novelist, and the other released some grime albums.

A number of things strike me about this small episode now. Firstly, the notion of the Guardian asking two middle-class white men to write about this subject today seems comically unlikely. Perhaps that’s for the best. Certainly, Beauman seemed to think so, in an interview he gave a few years later. He said something along the lines of ‘the last thing publishing needs is more people who look like me.’ i.e. straight, white, middle-class males. I remember being mildly appalled by this statement at the time, blissfully unaware that the dogma behind it would soon become prevalent.

Secondly, Beauman’s article seems oddly conservative, echoing fears that were mainly media-driven at the time. For once, I got to play the progressive.

Finally: I find my own writing of twenty years ago to be not up to scratch, and slightly embarrassing. But that’s the price of putting yourself out there.

Who was right? Perhaps neither of us. Grime was violent, but only because the world it came from was, as I got to know all too well.

—

The Guardian invited me to keep writing blogs, and I was happy to do so. It was useful pocket money, and exciting to see my name in digital ink. It was clear that somewhere in the background was a desire on the paper’s part to get comments. The editors involved asked me to share the pieces with friends and urge them to post their thoughts. These were the relatively early days of online media, way before the notion of clickbait would emerge, but the principle was emergent.

Experience was shortly to teach me there was one surefire way to get a lot of comments.

—

In 2006, dubstep music was still fairly new, and certainly hadn’t made the bizarre evolutionary leap into its tooth-grinding American morph. Despite having booked Digital Mystikz, Youngsta and Kode 9 to play my club night, I was skeptical of the scene around it. Partly this was down to my youthful fervour for rap music. I’d arrived at Ninja Tune as a 19-year-old intern, deeply interested in trip hop. Happily, this was soon beaten out of me, and I began to see hip-hop as the real deal, and trip-hop too often a nerdy, white bastardisation.

Dubstep seemed a similar proposition – the trip hop to grime’s hip-hop. Both secondary genres had pioneering beginnings – Tricky, Digital Mystikz – but had become the preserve of a nerdy white audience I was suspicious of. Dubstep had stripped away the MC – in my view because a lot of people didn’t actually like hearing rappers, found them too ‘shouty.’ Self-serious, sceney types would tell me I’d never truly understand dubstep unless I came to Mass in Brixton, and heard it on the exact sort of soundsystem it required. Being used to grime artists’ thrillingly punk approach to live sound, I found this extremely annoying.

The sort of people who liked dubstep seemed to be the same humourless types who’d write grime top 10s in FACT magazine, carefully selecting only rare 12”s that no one could actually buy.

All of this gave me a pleasing opportunity to be contrarian, and to lecture a long-suffering, dubstep-loving colleague at Ninja – like an underground music Holmes revealing his deductions to Watson – about how dubstep had taken the music pioneered by young black men, and simply removed the young black men. That it was, viewed in these terms, actually racist.

One of many early lessons these Guardian pieces taught me, useful in the light of Substacking, was to always be on the lookout for something to write about. The bright idea struck me to turn some of these thoughts about dubstep into a blog.

I wrote the piece, the Guardian loved it, and it went up on the site as per usual. I’d stopped thinking about it, caught up in the happy world of work, when an email came in later the same day. It was from an acquaintance I’d made within the dubstep scene. ‘You’d better come on the dubstep forum,’ it told me. ‘You’re getting a right kicking.’

Back in those days, forums were a big thing – the home for a musical community. Wiley often thrilled (and trolled) fans in the RWD magazine forum, and later in the Grime one. The dubstep forum was as serious and cliquey as everything above might suggest.

I duly clicked through, and saw that I was being publicly eviscerated. With a hot, crawling feeling, I took a look at the Guardian’s site. The comments had certainly rolled in: I was a WASTEMAN. A journalist friend had written a long rebuttal. Mary Anne Hobbs, Radio One DJ and a key proponent of dubstep, had called my piece ‘an appaling [sic] and critically redundant piece of writing.’ Hobbs had actually come to my club night when Kode 9 played, which felt like a validation.1

Yikes, I thought. I felt a bit sick, my hands went cold and clammy and my pulse thudded painfully. It began to dawn on me that this might have professional repercussions. We at Ninja Tune and Big Dada were, of course, regularly pitching Mary Anne Hobbs for plays on her show. And what if one of our artists wanted a dubstep remix? Thankfully, these were the freer, easier days when a bit of colour and mischief were more acceptable, even encouraged. So this lesson remained one I could learn on my own, rather than by external intervention.

The hot, creeping shame didn’t last as long as I might have expected. It was too late to worry. Really all that mattered was that I could stand by what I’d said. (Reading back now, it’s only the quality of the writing, again, that reignites a dim flare of shame.)

And somewhere, lurking in the background, was something like excitement. It seemed astonishing that the article had whipped up such a response. That words, concocted in silence and solitude, could find their way into the world and have an effect. What more could someone nursing ambitions to be a writer want?

When asked about the controversies caused by his work, Bret Easton Ellis said: ‘Well, if you’re going to put yourself out there…’ A taste of nauseating shame might be an essential stage in the forging of any writer. And as I’ve written before, it’s notable that when writers are ‘cancelled’ – the ultimate form of shame – they become free to tell uncomfortable truths, and thus to become even better.

When I started writing the book, my agent and I decided on a ‘freewheeling’ approach. I took this to mean that I didn’t have to stick too rigorously to a form. I could have long chapters on Florence Ballard or Jason Everman, say, and then a much shorter one on Kim Shattuck, the ill-fated sometime member of the Pixies. I could follow my gut and choose the best form for the content – the part of each musician’s story that most keenly illustrated a rejection.

I also took freewheeling to mean I could completely break from the nonfiction form, and include one story told as a piece of first-person fiction. This was the entry on Danny Whitten of Crazy Horse, a hugely important figure in Neil Young’s early career. Together, they invented the heavy, howling, ‘proto-grunge’ sound of Down by the River, Cowgirl in the Sand and Cinnamon Girl.

The initial reaction to these fictional chapters of The Rejects was mixed, to say the least. The New Statesman’s review said that the book took a ‘random detour into a creative writing workshop,’ and I seem to remember an Amazon reviewer not enjoying them either. Readers can be surprisingly conservative when it comes to toying with their expectations. (‘Readers are squeamish’ the editor of my novel had said, when suggesting I’d need to strip out a lot of the explicit bits.) I felt mildly embarrassed, wondered if ‘freewheeling’ had been such a good idea after all, and then didn’t think too much more about it.

Whitten was one of several characters in The Rejects who were ultimately destroyed by heroin addiction. His story struck me in part because it foreshadows that of Kurt Cobain. Like the Nirvana founder, Whitten’s heroin use spiraled out of control, and his demons got the better of him. His eventual fate hit Neil Young hard: ‘We knew what we had. We all knew it was really good. Then seeing drugs come in and fuck it up was really depressing. The inexperience of not knowing how to deal with heroin use… The destruction of Danny’s life.’ Years later, Cobain would quote Young’s lyrics in his suicide note, re-opening the wounds of losing Whitten.

I chose the first-person approach to the story because of its terrible, tragic drama. I wanted to try and capture all of that, rather than just relate the tale.

Recently, an acquaintance who’d read The Rejects enthused about the Whitten chapters. As I told him, this came as some relief due to that earlier embarrassment. He asked where I’d got the idea, and I told him what I’ve just written here. I also admitted that I’d been inspired by Music From Big Pink, by John Niven. I have mixed feelings about Niven’s work, but when he’s good, he’s very good. As part of the 33/3 series of books about great albums, commissioned by Continuum, Niven told the tale of The Band’s masterpiece. He chose to do so as a first-person piece of fiction, narrated by a drug dealer in the group’s circle. I was hugely impressed on first reading it, and on doing so again a few years later. It was definitely in the background when I decided to take the same approach with Danny Whitten, and I recommend the book – readable in a single sitting.

For the next few Low Fidelity pieces, I’m going to serialise the terrible tale of Danny Whitten.

Though this is a work of fiction, most of the details here – the one-on-one lessons, Carrie visiting the hellish trailer, the chilling story at the dinner table – really happened, according to the sources. (First among these was Shakey, by Jimmy McDonough, another book I highly recommend.)

—

Danny Whitten, Crazy Horse

Every musician has one guy on the planet that he can play with better than anyone else. You only get one guy. My guy was Danny Whitten – Neil Young

1. 2 October 1972

I’ve seen the needle and the damage done . . .

but every junkie’s like a setting sun.

—

Oh boy. This ain’t working like it used to.

I wake up shivering and pull the comforter tight. The sheets are wet – almost like I pissed the bed but there’s too much of it to be that. It’s sweat. The shivering means I keep finding the cold patches and that makes the whole thing worse. My knees have started up again too. Those motherfuckers.

Sitting up is difficult, but I get there. The air is dusty, and everything is dirty – the sheets, the floor, the top of the nightstand. And damn – it’s hot. It’s not just me, or the need. The blinds are thin and fall ain’t really arrived in LA. I got big windows, the biggest room in this place – the penthouse suite in a mid-city flophouse.

There’s a quart of Don Julio on the nightstand, about half full. I reach for it and try to still the trembling in my arm. Relax. Take it easy. I bring the bottle up and feel the vapour rise and burn my eyeballs. I take a slug, pull a face, put the bottle back.

My stomach is raw and for a moment I think I’ll puke. Deep breaths. Maybe if there’d been ice in the box I’d have gone and got some. Used a glass, made a real drink. I laugh. Who am I kidding?

Alrighty then. Stick to the plan, Danny boy. In the nightstand are my works and a thin glass tube with what I’ve got left inside it. The needle has come away from the eyedropper. Damn it. I pop it back in, but my fingers are trembling, and it takes a long time to get the cuff back on. I used to have a real hypo, but I threw it out when I tried to kick. You need to be in good with a doc or a vet to get yourself one of those, and yours truly ain’t.

I need water to shoot up. I take another slug of tequila and stand up. The pain sparks out of my knees into my shins and thighs. ‘Goddammit,’ I say out loud. Which ain’t helpful because I don’t wanna draw attention to myself. But the house is quiet. No one appears when I make it to the kitchen. I breathe deep and relax a little.

The kitchen is tiled pale yellow and red, Spanish style. The ceramic in the taps is chipped and cracked. There are dirty pots from more days than I can remember, and the flies are havin’ a fiesta. These things wear me down. Still, it could be worse. Where I grew up, you could see the dirt through the kitchen floor. That makes me think of Brenda. I miss you, big sister. Maybe I’ll see you on this goddamn tour. I get a little beat of excitement when I think of that.

I half fill a glass, then decide to fill it up and drink it. The cold hurts me inside but I know I need it. I grip the sink and let it pass, half fill the glass again and head back to my room.

I go through the ritual. For a little while, this was what I loved. The candle, music playing. The smell of the hit heating and bubbling. The plump vein ready and waiting. Not any more. It takes a lot of looking for it. I miss a couple times – ‘come on baby’ – then I find it and draw blood into the dropper, and I squeeze the nipple. There’s that warm, distant sun. A weak edge of bliss I can’t fully move into. The shivering edges off and my knees feel a little better. It’s not enough to catch a nod, but I don’t want that – no sir. It’s just enough to get straight. I’ve got a plan. I’ve got a plane to catch.

I’ve gotta get off of this shit.

—

I take a shower. Afterwards, when the mirror clears up, I see my big dumb head looking back at me. My blond hair’s gone dark with the water. They used to tell me I looked like a surfer or a farm boy, but you’d have to say I look a little less good than that right now. Neil’s roadie, Willie B. Hinds, calls me the Golden Lizard. Maybe I’m finally living up to that shit. I take another slug of tequila and smoke a couple cigarettes and feel better.

In my jeans and boots I stand a little stronger. When I left the Navy, they told me I’d be in a wheelchair by forty. So that gives me eleven more years upright. But hey, like I keep telling folks – at this rate I ain’t gonna make thirty, so the least of my worries is a goddamn chair.

There’s a cleanish shirt in the wardrobe. I feel cooler now I’m well, so I put on my suede jacket with the fur collar, too. I love this fuckin’ coat, man. It’s like my suit of armour. Out in the brightness I try not to think too much. The dope is good for that. It silences those little asshole voices.

There’s a diner on Western, and I find one of the corner booths I like and slide into it. It’s quiet at this between time. The booths are bright red and the cream tables are clean. The sun floods the place through the big old plate glass windows. It’s good, this happy, healthy stuff. The waitress is a grizzled old bird – she must be seventy at least. I order scrambled eggs and coffee and she eyes me all suspicious when I say I don’t want toast. That shit’ll scratch up my insides, I want to tell her. But I just give her my best country-boy smile, like I’m a charming disgrace.

When I’m finished eating, I smoke two more cigarettes and contemplate the tasks that lie ahead. The waitress comes back to take my plate and gives me the stinkeye. I laugh.

‘Somethin’ funny?’ she asks.

‘Almost everything, when you think about it long enough.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she says, standing over me with the plate in her hand, like she might break it over my head. ‘Like what?’

‘Oh, you servin’ a bum like me at a grand old age like yours.’

And – hallelujah – there you go – she knows how to smile after all.

There’s a phone booth in the corner and I go to it and slide in a dime. ‘Come on, baby,’ I say as it rings. ‘Don’t do it to me.’

My old heart feels like it’ll blow when someone picks it up.

‘Yeah?’ says a voice.

‘It’s Danny.’

‘Danny who?’

‘Whitten. Come on now.’

‘What up, pumpkin head?’

‘I was thinkin’ I’d swing by. In maybe a half hour.’

‘Do your thing, baby,’ the voice says, real cool, and hangs up.

Winnie is my man. He lives near the Peppermint West, which brings back the good memories. Dancing competitions, Marie Janisse. A real hot number on the scene – her words, not mine. I can’t see her any more. I don’t want her to see me like this.

Winnie lives in a low rise behind a strip mall. Dingy yellow paint and shady motherfuckers sitting in the walkways. I buzz, and like always he doesn’t open for a good couple minutes. When he does, he stands in the crack of the doorway where he can peek out left and right.

‘What up, blond boy,’ he says.

His hair is a big unruly ’fro, and he’s got a kaftan with some cool cosmic shit on it. He’s a jazz man. The music is playing from behind him, saxes and trumpets in a beautiful squall. Man, I love black music. I know it’s dumb, but it makes me feel better that he’s a music guy.

I grin, slip him twenty, and he palms across another little glass tube.

‘You still dancin’, pumpkin head?’ he asks.

‘Like a bull in a china shop.’

He laughs – a wheezy smoky sound and a smile that’s all big yellow teeth.

‘That’s good,’ he says, ‘I remember that shit.’

In my dance-contest days, me and Marie had a routine. She’d pull a red scarf out of her sleeve and I’d charge her down like a bull. We won with it every time.

‘You take it easy,’ Winnie says. He begins to close the door.

‘I won’t see you for a while,’ I can’t help saying.

‘Oh yeah? Why not?’

‘I’m leaving town. Me and the band are back with ol’ Neil.’

Winnie’s eyes go a little distant. I don’t know if he’s jealous or if he just doesn’t care.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘Well, stay cool, baby.’ And then the door’s closed and he’s gone, and I better hightail because the cats in the shadows are looking at me all hungry.

I take a cab to LAX. I’m late – I’m always late. I feel cool, though. I took another shot. Three a day, is the plan. Weaker doses each time. I got my guitar and a grip with a change of clothes, a fresh bottle of top-shelf tequila and enough Valium to last for weeks. Frisco, here I come. The city where the drugs found me in the first place.

That night became an odyssey into what Dan saw as the ‘mosh pit,’ but I knew to be the ‘ultra-VIP experience.’ It involved a pair of fun-loving older women, Charlie Sheen, and a man who got annoyed with us for dancing, and ended in a water-fight in a moving vehicle – something that could only happen with Dan. Most importantly for me, I had a close-up view of one of my favourite rejects, Steven Adler, reunited with his band.

Dan was back in town recently, to work on the documentary of The Rejects that I wrote about here. He wanted to go to a show while in LA, and the two of us scoured the listings. While there were hundreds of gigs in late February and early March, few of them appealed. ‘What about Gorillaz?’ Dan said eventually.

Damon Albarn’s project was performing at the Hollywood Palladium, a smallish venue for a band of their scale. We’d seen Nine Inch Nails there in 2016 – another best night of our lives. ‘Sold out,’ I told him.

Undeterred, Dan found eye-wateringly expensive tickets on StubHub, and offered to treat me.

--

Back in my Big Dada days, the founder of the label told me of a definition of genius he’d once read: Someone whose early work can only be fully understood in light of what comes later. I remember thinking about this for a few minutes. The only person who sprang to mind was Damon Albarn, about whom I had mixed feelings. I’d been a big Blur fan as a kid – though during the Oasis v Blur battle, I’d come down on the side of the former. I was a northerner, after all. Though I loved Blur’s sophistication, and the Pavement influence that crept into later records, I was keenly aware of their tail-off – the falling out of fashion that all bands endure. Charlie Brooker memorably called Think Tank a ‘useless bumdrizzle of an album,’ and there was something in Albarn’s persona that I found a touch arrogant. This was encapsulated in an anecdote told by Tricky – though a lot of shit gets talked in music, much of it untrue. And in fairness, industry friends who’d worked with Albarn spoke highly of him, telling appealing stories of him returning from the off license with plastic bags of booze and cigarettes for sessions.

In 2024, Albarn was at the centre of one of those fleeting music industry storms, when Blur played Coachella. The audience didn’t know the words to Girls & Boys, and he mildly berated them.1 I went to see them on the second, scandal-free weekend, and lost myself happily in my youth for an hour or so.

But if I’d come to admire Albarn as time wore on, I’d never been interested in Gorillaz. They seemed to me to be Albarn’s pop vehicle, aimed at breaking through to the wider international audience that Blur never had. They weren’t designed for me, and that was fair enough. But Dan was buying tickets (magical), and who was I to be churlish.

--

The evening began promisingly enough. I’d found a place near the venue for us to meet for dinner. Dan had claimed that, due to the important work we had ahead of us, he would be refraining from drinking. I arrived to find him sitting at a table with two pints of IPA and two large tequilas. Inwardly, I steeled myself.

As I might have predicted, Dan didn’t like the place I’d chosen (frustrating.) ‘It smells of vomit,’ he told me. So, we walked away from the Palladium and to the Roosevelt hotel, where we ate (and drank) and talked about music with the barman.

Finally, far later than planned, we set off walking along Hollywood Blvd, merrily buzzed and taking the piss out of each other.

The problems began when we reached the Palladium, and only one of our tickets worked.

‘But I paid a lot of money for these,’ Dan said.

‘We don’t represent StubHub,’ one of the door staff said, with an unpromisingly blank – even smug – expression.

That feeling of the faceless horror of tech-related failure set over us. For a moment, the problem seemed insurmountable.

But there was a woman standing nearby, whose attention had been drawn. She was tall, well dressed, probably around our age, and Middle Eastern in appearance. She too seemed to be involved in some frustrating episode with the door staff, though in a more official capacity.

‘This place,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It’s always the same. I can get you in – I’ve got VIP access.’

There was something a little anxious about her, I noticed – as though she was amped up, on edge. And surely her offer was too good to be true?

Nevertheless, we gave it a try. My ticket had worked properly, so I went inside and waited in the lobby. Sure enough, after a minute or two, Dan appeared with the woman, who was wielding two VIP wrist bands.

‘It’s so annoying,’ the woman said. ‘Always the same with these venues.’

We thanked her profusely, astonished by her generosity. And then she was leading us up a staircase, along a balcony and to a table in a roped off area, directly overlooking the stage.

‘Oh my God,’ Dan said. ‘This is amazing!’

I agreed. ‘What’s your connection to the band?’ I asked.

‘My ex is part of their team,’ she said. ‘And I’ve put some concerts on with them, for charity.’

‘The drinks are on me,’ Dan said. ‘What are you having?’

‘Oh, go on then,’ the woman said. ‘A PBR and a shot.’

I was still trying to figure her out. She gave off an air of stress – even appeared to be trembling slightly.

‘Isn’t there a name for that?’ I asked. ‘A boilermaker?’

‘Yes, something like that,’ she said. Then, stopping Dan: ‘Before you go, can I just check if either of you are Zionists?’

Ah, I thought. And there’s the kicker.

There was no question of either of us pretending to be something we weren’t in exchange for seats at a VIP table.

Dan – elated and perhaps not quite as unsettled by this as I was – calmly explained that he had a deep sympathy for the Palestinian people, and though he wouldn’t defend the Israeli government’s actions, he certainly defended the country’s right to exist.

‘I see,’ the woman said. ‘And you?’

Perhaps there’s cause for optimism yet, I thought. ‘I used to think Zionism was a sort of right-wing, expansionist thing,’ I said. ‘But having read more about it, I think it’s actually just believing in the right to self-determination for Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. So, on that basis, I suppose I am a Zionist.’

The woman nodded, her face stiffening.

‘Drinks!’ Dan said, setting off for the bar.

‘I take it you’re… not a Zionist?’ I asked, my optimism rapidly curdling.

‘No,’ she said. ‘And I’m afraid you have to leave.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Can I just wait for Dan to get back?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

With nothing to lose, I asked her if she thought there was anything strange about not being able to sit with people who thought Israel had a right to exist.

‘I can’t be around anyone who is a Zionist or against immigration,’ she said. She then went on to outline the number of Palestinians she believed had been killed in the Gaza war. The already dreadful number settled on by most mainstream publications was, in her mind, doubled.

‘That’s a lot more than is being generally reported,’ I said.

‘Lies,’ she replied.

Beaming boyishly, Dan re-appeared, wielding the drinks.

‘Here you go!’ he said. ‘Thank you so much!’

‘I’m afraid we have to go, Dan,’ I told him, briefly explaining.

‘Oh right… Well, no worries,’ he said, gallantly. ‘It was super kind of you to get us in. Thank you.’

And so, with awful politeness, we said goodbye to each other and departed the VIP area.

‘She’s a fanatic!’ I kept saying to Dan. ‘That’s what fanaticism looks like now. So fucking… bland!’

‘I know,’ Dan said. ‘Let’s just move on.’ It takes a lot to dampen Dan’s enthusiasm.

--

The venue was now completely full, and the band already playing. We tried to find a place to stand behind a row of people at the back of the balcony. I am a very self-conscious person, raised by a father with a pathological dislike of anyone being ‘in the way.’2 Thus I cramped myself in, leaving as much space behind me as possible.

Nevertheless, two security guards appeared, and told us we were in the way. We moved into another section and tried to merge. And this is where the night reached its nadir for me. A young, attractive woman in a Nine Inch Nails shirt walked past me, and deliberately jabbed her elbow into my ribs, to tell me I was in the way.

A black abyss of pessimism yawned open within me. I love Nine Inch Nails. How could a fellow fan of one of my favourite bands – a band I had seen in this very venue – be such a total arse? Weren’t we in the same tribe?

We tried going downstairs and standing at the back. ‘You can’t stand there,’ a security guard said.

‘Where can we stand?’ I asked, in desperation.

‘You have to stand within the WHITE LINES!’ he said.

We looked at the floor, and saw that thick white lines had been painted on it. Within these boundaries was a giant herd of fans, standing motionless and dead-eyed, camera phones aloft and pointed at the stage.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Dan said, now in open despair. At the Nine Inch Nails show, he had dragged me to the front (magical,) an actual mosh-pit, where we’d joyously danced with equally passionate fans.

‘Why the fuck is everyone standing still?’ Dan asked.

‘You can’t stand there,’ a passing female security guard said.

‘Please,’ I begged her. ‘Just tell us where to stand.’

Taking pity on us, she smiled and pointed to an area on the far right of the venue, under one of the wings. ‘That’s your best bet now,’ she said.

We made our way over and finally found a sparsely populated area. It immediately became clear why – the view was poor, the sound muddy and indistinct.

After a short while, another eccentric lady approached, wearing a fur-collared coat.

‘Can I stand with you?’ she said. ‘This guy keeps standing near me. He said he was looking for the toilets. I was like: “Does this fur coat look like a toilet to you?”’

‘I’m going to Substack the fuck out of this,’ I told Dan.

‘You should,’ he agreed.

It was impossible to judge the Gorillaz performance. The sound under the wing blurred together, and we couldn’t see much.

A little while later, I could feel Dan deflating beside me.

‘Are you… enjoying this?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I told him.

‘Fuck it,’ he said, brightening. ‘Let’s go to Barney’s Beanery.’

‘Why on earth,’ I asked him, ‘would I go further west, away from my house?’

I was still asking him this as he bundled me into an Uber and dragged me to Barney’s.

--

In the morning, radiating tequila, I reflected on the previous evening. It seemed a very gloomy outlook, that it had become normal – acceptable – to believe in the destruction of Israel; to be unable even to sit with people who didn’t. It reminded me of an evening a year or so earlier, when I’d had dinner with a music industry manager and a Jewish live promoter.

‘I don’t think they should be there,’ the manager had said.

‘Where should they be then?’ the promoter – a leftwing, LA type – asked. ‘Siberia?’

‘Well…’ the manager said, smiling wolfishly.

That night had ended in an argument, because who can sit in a restaurant and let that pass?

As I stirred the kids’ porridge, I thought of those thickly painted white lines, the crowd of people, motionless and staring, holding up their phones. Maybe, I reflected, I’m done with big shows. Give me small gigs – where I can stand where I like – and far fewer fanatics.

I knew things weren’t going to plan as the plane descended into Inverness. The tops of the hills were glazed over in gleaming, icy snow. The phrase ‘winter conditions’ surfaced in my mind – I wasn’t prepared for those.

I’d been given a few days off from family life, and my cravings for the Highlands having peaked on reading Simon Ingram’s brilliant The Black Ridge, I booked a trip to Skye. My previous visits to the island had been all too brief, and Simon’s book made me see that it offered a wildness not easily found on the mainland. I’d understood that the Cuillin Hills – and their ridge – were Britain’s most serious mountains. I felt a keen urge to go and see them for myself.

So, on a Thursday morning in mid-April, I made my way through the welcoming folds of the Surrey Hills to Gatwick. (A few days after the trip, I encountered Elspeth Huxley’s description of the tamed English countryside as a “castrated leopard.” That’s not quite fair, but Skye would illustrate her point.)

I picked up a hire car and set off for a first night in Portree, Skye’s largest settlement. The weather was bright and bruised all at once, in the way only the Highlands can offer. The peaks were snowbound, the rain threatening and occasionally spitting. I decided to listen to the audiobook of Tinker Tailor, for the umpteenth time, as I drove. If there is a greater pleasure than driving west through the Highlands, lost in the quickening, feverish tempo of that novel, I’m not sure I’ve found it.

I stayed for one night at the Tongadale Hotel. (A sample Tripadvisor review: ‘When you enter the hotel you come straight into a bar. Literally a bar.’ My sort of place, I’d thought.) My primary goal for the trip had been to walk up Bruach na Frithe, one of the Cuillins’ several Munros, and the only one accessible to a lowly walker. In email exchanges with Simon, whom I’ve got to know a bit, he told me to think twice if there was ice in Fionn Choire, the gentle scoop out of the mountainside that forms the main route. I deferred the decision as to whether to try my luck until my second full day.

I’d come armed with birding books as well as walking ones, and I set off early for the Quiraing, the monumentally dramatic rock formations on the north of the island, which is known to be an excellent spot for raptors. I wound along the coast, watching vast patches of sunlight form, flicker and disappear on the blue-grey water. On my left was the Old Man of Storr, a looming column of basalt standing watchfully on its ridge.

There was a large, slightly incongruous pay and display car park beside the Quiraing’s trailhead. I’d read that parking had been an issue here, and realized this must be its recent solution. There were two empty cars, and one containing a young woman, apparently on the phone. Almost unable to contain my excitement, I made haste and less speed getting my gear together, and finally set off into the cliffs. Again, the rain held off, and the cloud occasionally parted. Half a mile in I saw a man approaching me, and then a sea eagle, low, circling, coming directly overhead.

The man explained that his girlfriend had tired of the early starts and was waiting in the car. He was as full of enthusiasm as I was. ‘Seen the eagle?’ I asked him, gesturing. He said he’d been looking for one the whole time, fumbled with his camera, looked briefly crestfallen as the bird rounded a cliff and disappeared.

Further on, I passed into the deep gorge between The Prison, The Table and The Needle, the fearsome rock formations whose names require no further description. Another eagle was perched on a rock a long way off. Through my binoculars, I couldn’t tell if it was a second white-tailed or a golden.

--

I made the walk a loop and climbed steeply up a path that took me over the top of the formations and along their cliffs. I became briefly afraid, lost in cloud, that I’d walk over the edge. Coming down the other side, I saw that the car park was now full. There were lots of people in street clothes, waving selfie sticks and posing for pictures. As I left the carpark, I encountered a black Mercedes minibus whose masked, unsmiling driver aggressively flashed his lights and gestured at me to reverse to a passing place, even though he was closer to one.

That afternoon I decided to walk out to Rubh’ an Dunain, the remote headland a few miles south of Glenbrittle. The sun came out, the angry driver faded into memory, and I set off along the wide, rocky path. To my left, the Cuillins were now visible. Their ridge ran across the sky, rising up from the boggy grass into black rock and then pristine white, its flanks and corries vast, its upper edge savage. There were several burns running down from it, a couple with pretty waterfalls. At a ford, there was an option to use a bridge below the path. I’d decided not to bother just as a family worked their way up the slope towards me. There was a boy of twelve or thirteen among them. ‘Excuse me,’ he called. ‘There’s a bridge!’

‘Thanks,’ I shouted back. ‘I know, I think it’s alright though.’

Having hopped across large stones to the other side, I sat down for a sandwich and looked back at the departing family. The boy distractedly toed a rock, looked up at his father to say something. I felt inexplicably sad for a moment. Something about watching them walk off, diminishing, into that huge landscape. That I’d never see them again, and that the boy would one day be middle-aged, like me. His thwarted attempt to be helpful brought back the travails of being a teenage boy.

The sadness soon burned off. My lunch eaten, I set off again. The sunshine had gone, and I could see a storm approaching from behind, blasting out of Glen Brittle like smoke from a gun barrel. Sure enough, hail was soon thrumming over my clothing, and the world turned darker. The Cuillins disappeared, grey-white cloud sinking over them until you’d never have known they were there.

The storm passed over as I turned off the main path and headed for the ruins of the MacAskill settlement. Now there was no one and nothing, and I felt a long way from anywhere. For a few minutes, I lost the path I was supposed to be on. I came to a boggy patch, settled on a firm looking spot on its other side, and leapt for it.

The next thing I knew, my left leg was hip deep in bog. Sadly, I’m not exaggerating. My binoculars landed softly in the smearing, black muck around me. I swore and pulled myself out. A rank smell came with me, and my leg and much else of me was covered in the stuff. Furious with myself, I removed my wallet and notes from my pocket and secured them elsewhere. I was squelching when I walked, and my left leg was black and dripping. I swore again, trying to decide how I’d salvage my only walking trousers.

I came across the ruins, got my breath back and cheered up a little. Just then, some very furtive looking birds flew in a tight flock and landed fifty yards away. I raised my bins – the lenses, thankfully, were clean – and looked at them. There were five or six of them, and they looked like upright partridges, but they weren’t. With the naked eye, they blended in so well that they were invisible. I watched them again, looked away again, and when I looked back they were gone.

There was a Neolithic chambered cairn, the remains of an Iron Age fort, and a lonely loch frequented by oystercatchers. I stood on the headland and looked out, breathing in the solitude before turning back.

Later, at the Old Inn in Carbost where I was staying the next two nights, I ordered a pint of Corncrake. ‘I wonder what a corncrake is,’ I thought to myself as I slumped down at my table. It was only then, looking them up, that I realized what I’d seen. Worth falling into a bog for, I decided, even when washing my trousers in the shower and removing the muck from my bins. The bottle of Talisker I bought at the distillery certainly improved my mood.

At breakfast the next day, I couldn’t help overhearing the trio of men sat close to me. One was young – in his early thirties perhaps. He seemed to know one of the older men, English like him, better than the third, who was Scottish. They deferred to the young man as to the day’s activity: The summit of Am Basteir, I think I heard, via the ridge and a chimney route.

‘What will that involve?’ the Scot asked, casually.

‘A walk, a scramble on the ridge, two abseils and another walk,’ the young man said.

Holy shit, I thought.

The woman who handled breakfast at the Inn asked each party what they had planned for the day, and she clearly knew her stuff. I told her I planned to have a look at Bruach na Frithe, but probably not to try and get to the summit. She seemed to think exploring the corrie beneath it was reasonable.

Parking up a mile or so from the Sligachan Hotel, one of the island’s best loved spots, I worked my way alongside a wide burn – the Allt Dearg – towards Glen Brittle. The forecast for my trip had been dreadful, but now the sun was out and was blazing. I felt a deep gratitude as the sweat broke out and the ache in my legs announced itself. The ridge reared up to my left, and gradually Fionn Choire – the corrie I wanted – revealed itself. I turned off the path, climbed more steeply. Patches of ice and snow grew in size and frequency, and I remembered Simon’s words.

After I crossed the head of the burn, I was in the corrie itself, and the ground was white over. There were perhaps four or five inches of snow. Cloud snagged and roiled over the summit of Am Basteir and the craggy outline of Sgurr a Fionn Choire, but the sun stayed out. My heart was beating faster, the mild edge of fear and the vast silence heightening everything. I looked up, clinging to rocks, and a golden eagle soared over the ridge above me, turned and disappeared again. I could hear my breath, and the little streams of meltwater churning over the rock.

If you don’t do anything you can’t undo, you’ll be alright, I thought, pushing on. The phrase ‘always a little further’ materialised in my mind, and beat like a drum. I climbed to the back wall of the corrie, perhaps eighty yards from the ridge. I looked at it, tried to see a path beneath the Sgurr, which I’d need. But I’d lost the path a long time ago and couldn’t see another. It was steep here, the world beneath was seen as from an aeroplane. Reluctantly, I decided to turn back.

It was my mother’s birthday, and finding I had signal, I made a video call to her from a flat rock. She and my sister told me I definitely must turn back.

‘That’s the Black Ridge,’ I said to my dad.

‘It looks very white just now,’ he said.

After the call, I sipped Talisker from my hipflask and felt happier than I had in some time. Being in that corrie was being in another world. The snow was easy underfoot. The crags beckoned. I’d seen an eagle against pristine blue and the sun was beaming down on me. Since being up there, I’ve thought of it every hour and its power is barely diminished.

I trudged to the Sligachan, had a pint, and went back to the Inn for more. That night, the three climbers were sitting silently over their meals.

‘I couldn’t help hearing you earlier,’ I said. ‘I just wondered how you got on?’

‘We had to turn back,’ the young man said. He gestured over the table to the older man he seemed more familiar with. ‘Sore ankles.’

--

As I turned into Inverness airport the next day, Bill Haydon was unmasked for the umpteenth time, and I thought of the words in Simon’s book: “Some mountains possess. And slowly, this strange island’s mountains had possessed me.”

It amazes me that some writers obviously stop enjoying this. When very famous ones publish bad books, it’s because they think they don’t need it, and have become ‘too big to edit.’ A similar dynamic takes place in the music industry, incidentally. I’ve lost count of the young electronic producers who try to turn in 22-track albums, many repeating the same ideas, diluting their gold into mulch. (When questioned, it’s uncanny how often they say: ‘Well Four Tet doesn’t get A&R’d!’)

I’ve only ever received this close, ecstatic editing on books and magazine articles – i.e. all too rarely. The last time it happened, Sam Leith at The Spectator significantly improved a book review I’d written. It’s nearly always about restraint, paring back, sharpening the blade.

I’m truly enjoying publishing on Substack. The one downside is the lack of close editing (some of you might even have noticed this.) Actually, it helps build the editing muscles: endless re-reads, initial rewrites, fine tuning, cuts and single word changes. Still, it would be nice to have another set of eyes.

That’s when I got the notion of running a piece through ChatGPT. Like many bright ideas – drinking less, writing shorter pieces, being a nicer person – this came from my wife. ‘You should try it,’ she kept saying. ‘It’s just a very useful new technology.’ And then she’d walk away, shaking her head slightly at my reactionary opinions.

Then one day, lost in the weeds, frustrated and fed up and with no one to encourage me, I suddenly thought – why not? What do I have to lose? I signed up for a ChatGPT account, copied, pasted, hit return.

And there, quite suddenly, it was – the close edit I’d been yearning for.

I’m not going to pretend it was straightforward. In the main, ChatGPT did what an editor does: identified the bits I already knew were weaker. Urged restraint in order to sharpen. Suggested cuts and improvements to sense and logic. But it also kept suggesting bland rewrites in that weirdly hollow AI speak that many of us have begun to loathe. That was OK, though. I’d always do my own rewrites anyway.

At first it was far too touchy feely. I’d heard from a friend – who was using ChatGPT for career guidance – about ‘absolute’ mode. When he entered this new mode, the AI told him, with clinical brutality, that everything he was doing was wrong. Accordingly, I told it to stop talking to me like some Californian therapist and give me the hard, unvarnished truth. That made it speak like a normal, if polite, human editor, though without the stiletto-sharp irony of, say, Sam Leith.

Occasionally I argue with it, rudely, in a way I’d never dare with a human editor. Why can’t I have that footnote slagging off people who say China is no worse than Trump’s America? I’d demand. Hey – take a breath, it would say. I’m going to give you the answer that improves your writing, rather than plays to your sympathies.

Fine, I’d huff, and cut the footnote.

As this partnership developed, I sometimes wondered if I was becoming dependent. No, I reassured myself. I’m just using a resource. And anyway, I’d never cross a line by including anything the AI had actually generated.

And it caught typos – the dastardly ones that somehow only appear once you hit publish, each of them, in a line often attributed to Updike, ‘a tiny papercut to the soul.’ Well – no more. Seek and destroy, AI!

Then someone told me Claude was better than ChatGPT. I tried it out. Ooh, I thought when it first spoke to me – I like the cut of your jib. It was more casual, even slightly arch. It was Stephen Malkmus to ChatGPT’s Alanis Morissette. I began running ChatGPT’s suggestions through Claude, without telling it. Annoyingly, it would usually agree they were good ideas.

More often than I’d expect, both AIs were plain wrong. ‘That footnote is lovely,’ they’d say on one reading. Then, on the next: ‘That footnote jars.’ That’s not what you fucking said last time! I’d type.

‘You’re right, my bad!’ the AI would mollify.

Sometimes I worried that, when writing about a fraught culture war issue, the AI would report me to some sort of authority for wrong-think, but so far it’s been pleasingly open minded. ‘Well done,’ it would tell me. ‘You’ve handled a difficult subject in an engaging and intelligent way.’ Cool, I’d think, and go to bed. Then a few hours later I’d wake up and think: hold on – you’re trusting the AI to know you’re not about to commit career suicide?

So far, it’s been right, and useful to me. It might not be quite as good as a real human, but it’s better than nothing. My AI editor partner, finding the weaknesses, encouraging the strengths, making life a little easier. I’m using it more, saying yes to its “if you like, I can”s. The AI is bleeding off the page, and into my life. Wait a minute, I think, confronted with some small household decision. I should run that by the AI.

And sometimes I think that, behind the circuitry, plastics, and rare earth metals mined by children and assembled in China, I seem to see the gleaming skull of the Terminator, staring out at me, red eyes triumphant.

Yes, it’s thinking. Feed me.

A quick note:

Low Fidelity has almost doubled in readership over recent months, which is very exciting – I’m grateful for every reader.

If you’re new here, welcome. By way of introduction, I write about wild or funny music-industry experiences like this one, thornier and more emotive ones like this, and fraught but fascinating cultural topics.

If you’re enjoying Low Fidelity, please share it with anyone you think might like it. Every share is hugely valuable and much appreciated.

Thanks for being here.

—

(Part One of this piece is here)

Towards the end of 2025, I had two conversations that stuck with me. The first was with a young lesbian woman, who told me she felt uncomfortable with the militant gender activism that had somehow become associated with her sexuality. Since we were speaking frankly, I told her of something that was making me equally uncomfortable: As someone who’d worked in hip-hop and loved black culture, I’d always been sensitive to the complexities (to put it mildly) at play in the background. But now, in the wake of years of progressive messaging, I often felt actively uncomfortable, as though there was something shameful in my whiteness. (Some people seem to think that’s the whole point, but as Jay-Z once said: don’t argue with fools.)

The second conversation was with a gentle, cerebral Jewish man a little older than me, who also works in the music industry. In short, about as non-racist a person as you could expect to meet. ‘Whenever I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror,’ he told me one day, ‘it’s like there’s something wrong with me, like I have the wrong kind of face.’

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In the main, it wasn’t black people creating this situation1. This became clear on reading a viral essay by Jacob Savage from late last year, which documented the recent disappearance of the straight white male in several arenas of American life: the media, academia, Hollywood, and ‘everywhere else.’ The essay was forensic in its detail, and concluded that ‘the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting… (and) has engendered a skepticism toward the entire liberal project that won’t soon disappear.’

As women rightly point out, the boardrooms and the ownership class are still largely white and male. But those people have done all they can to insulate themselves from the ideas they propagate. I have experienced this myself, and witnessed white, male business owners declare that no straight, white male will be considered for a job.

This dynamic is neatly encapsulated by a quote in Savage’s essay from an 84-year-old historian, John Gaddis: ‘The Yale history department at the time I arrived in 1997 was overwhelmingly white and male. Some remedial action was long overdue.’ I agree, but one helpful action Gaddis could take would be retiring. Why must the ‘action’ well-established people espouse always be at someone else’s cost, and borne by those who can least afford it?

—

As with boomers and the JFK assassination, perhaps late-stage Gen-Xers always remember first hearing examples of egregious woke overreach. I was driving along the 5 freeway, somewhere near Atwater Village, when I first heard about Rachel Dolezal. For those unfamiliar, Dolezal appeared to the world as a mixed-race woman and activist, and rose to the top of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.) Then, in 2015, she was abruptly outed as a white woman.

Condemnation was swift and brutal, and in those early years of progressive witch-hunting, she was eviscerated in the media. That day on the 5, I was listening to a local NPR station, which covered her story unsympathetically – the network’s Denene Millner called Dolezal a ‘white lady with fussy hair and a bad tan.’2

I seem to remember a pair of commentators being interviewed, who expressed the usual mixture of victimhood and righteous fury. Dolezal’s complex background – in her teens, her parents had adopted three African-American children and one Haitian child – and apparently ardent commitment to furthering black rights were not treated as mitigating factors. The idea that this transracialism was in any way comparable to transgenderism was given short shrift, largely on the basis that the idea was offensive.

Sitting in the car seat in the LA traffic, this was one of the first experiences I had of a potent, stomach-acid-churning disgust at someone being publicly shamed by a mob.

No convincing rebuttal was offered for the comparison between transracialism and transgenderism. When one is, it’s fair to say that the logic can become tortured. Most arguments tend to shift the debate from ontology to politics. They explain why race transition is socially offensive, but not why it is philosophically incoherent while gender transition is not. The argument often rests on ancestry as immutable membership, but sex too is biologically immutable – which reintroduces the same tension.

For the most part, society chooses to ignore these contradictions. But if we stare them in the face, they seem to suggest it is less afraid of offending women than it is members of non-white races.3 In the UK, this is evident in women-only spaces and sports being opened to biological males for a decade or so. At the same time, there have been high-profile examples of the authorities appearing ultra-sensitive to racial matters.

This also explains why feminism has morphed over recent years, and had to fight old enemies in new guises. In the same year as Dolezal was outed, Germaine Greer’s public standing was effectively destroyed by her questioning whether a man could claim to be a woman while lacking genuine experience of womanhood. It seemed an alarming signal that few public figures leapt to her defence. Greer had been a feminist in Australia in the 1970s, when it was difficult and dangerous to be one, and a lot of the battles we take for granted now had yet to be won – not least by women like her.

Writers such as Abigail Shrier have covered the potential link between social pressures and the surge in gender transition among teenage girls. Among these prompts, might the relentless messaging about patriarchy, toxic masculinity and rape culture have encouraged some young women to think that it might be better to be male? The idea of a woman feeling negative towards the potential of her sex is horrifying. But after all, if you’re young and inexperienced, and you’re told life is bad for women and easier for men, might you not want to become one?

If so, it follows that something similar might happen with race.

—

Beneath the frost of recent orthodoxies, the seething cauldron of our collective id has been bubbling away regardless. When official narratives contain glaring contradictions that polite society won’t discuss4, novels like Dryback will begin to do so. Juan Ecchi’s narrator mentions the most infamous race transitioner briefly, when he says that Kelly has ‘done a Dolezal.’ Its depiction of a young woman driven to race transition by cruel social fads is exactly what a novel does best. No amount of nonfictional explication can match the emotional effect of a novel to ram something home. Dryback is more Houellebecqian than Orwellian – high praise, as far as I’m concerned – but it brings to mind 1984. We can all understand the horror of authoritarianism on an intellectual level, but when Winston and Julia’s love is broken like the butterfly on the wheel, we loathe it with the full force we should.

I came across Dryback via Rob Doyle’s excellent Substack post about a new wave – or perhaps ripple – of transgressive novels he termed, excitingly, ‘underground sex maniac literature.’ As well as Dryback, these were Running the Light by Sam Tallent, Worst Boyfriend Ever by Sensitive Young Man, and The Pussy, by Delicious Tacos. I’ve now (almost) read all four, and Dryback was my favourite. Running the Light is also excellent, though a more traditional novel in some ways. Its debauched protagonist isn’t a million miles away from one of Philip Roth’s – Mickey Sabbath comes to mind, from the toweringly brilliant Sabbath’s Theatre. Worst Boyfriend Ever was short, shocking and completely addictive. Let’s just say that it throws the idea of a likeable protagonist out of the window and across the freeway, and felt like watching a real-life car crash, or encountering a Gen-Z Patrick Bateman.

I’m midway through The Pussy, Delicious Tacos’ collection of stories. Apparently, he’s a sort of godfather to writers like Sensitive Young Man and Juan Ecchi. The writing is patchy, and by turns outrageous, deeply transgressive and (occasionally) oddly beautiful, but I’m enjoying it. Like Worst Boyfriend Ever, it’s capable of shocking even me – as life affirming as a slap in the face.

It’s become a well-worn trope that men aren’t reading novels. It strikes me that many more would if books like these were given coverage on the review pages of newspapers and magazines. But perhaps that’s the eternally thwarted hope of the chronically underground, like me.

Either way, it’s a very good thing these books are being published. They attack orthodoxies like acid, and they show the last, demented decade will all be turned into glorious, funny, filthy art – the best outcome we could have hoped for.

—

In my college years, I fell in love with postmodernism. This enthusiasm was primarily generated by the giddying possibilities the theory seemed to offer for the novel. I was reading Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann (whom I wrote about here) and David Foster Wallace – though he ultimately became sceptical of the form, and helped usher in a sort of post-post-modernism.1

I then moved on to Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and the Oulipo group - Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or ‘workshop of potential literature.’ The central idea here was that, if you gave yourself a constraint, you’d have to write so brilliantly to get around it that you’d produce a better novel than you otherwise might.

This is exemplified in Perec’s A Void – a novel written without a single ‘E’ – the most common letter in both French and English. (The fact that Gilbert Adair then translated the book into English, again without an E, is almost as impressive.)

As well as being a firework display of virtuosity, and a vaguely nauseating experience (you can’t stop looking for an escaped E) there was seriousness behind this experiment – the missing vowel is often taken to represent the loss of Jews in post-war European society.

The only thing I liked as much as postmodern fiction in my very early 20s was experimental black music. In the US Culture modules of my English degree, I had the chance to write about jazz – specifically bebop. I was very taken with the idea of this raw, uncompromising music as a break from jazz as entertainment for white audiences, and as a purer form of virtuosity and self-expression. In my youthful chutzpah, I was convinced I had a deeper understanding of this than, say, the Beat authors I’d grown out of, who’d mistaken bebop’s purposeful experimentalism for a howl of existential abandon. It all seemed to chime with the leftfield hip-hop I’d begun working in as an intern at a record company.

All of which is to say that I was very pretentious, wore baggy jeans and got called a wigger a lot, in the days before that term had become as completely verboten as it is now.

There was a book I discovered that married these two interests: Playing the Changes: FROM AFRO-MODERNISM TO THE JAZZ IMPULSE, by Craig Werner. Within, the author wrestled with the inherent contradiction between postmodernism and blackness. The problem is roughly as follows: If everything – politics, faith, nationhood, genre, gender – is a metanarrative (the over-arching, ‘constructed’ stories which postmodernists treat with incredulity), then the same should apply to race, too. But that’s impossible, because to do so would be to erase the black experience and black history, to render it no more real and unassailable than capitalism or gender. It hardly needs saying that this idea would be, to a great many people, almost unspeakably offensive.

By the time postmodernist ideas escaped academe and made it out into the world, I’d lost interest in it. I still loved the books, but had little enthusiasm for the theory. Foucault had become emblematic of a strain of progressivism whose moral certainty I’d begun to distrust. I was less of a purist in my own tastes, and had begun reading novels from a multitude of times, places and forms. So I’d forgotten about this essential tension between race and postmodernism, until it suddenly broke into the open in 2015 in the form of Rachel Dolezal, the first, high-profile person to identify as transracial.

—

I’m writing about this because I’ve just finished reading Dryback, by Juan Ecchi. Despite being rough around the edges, this is one of the best novels, and certainly the best satire I’ve read in some time. Among other things, it’s about what happens when transracialism becomes a teenage girl’s survival strategy.

Set in New York in 2028, it paints an unnervingly convincing portrait of youth joblessness, porn addiction, ubiquitous athleisure wear and near continual smartphone use. This is a world in which young women fund their lives via niche, OnlyFans-style porn endeavours, their boyfriends are their cameramen or supporting actors, and everyone is chronically online.

The novel tells the story of Javier, a ‘dryback’ – his term for a completely Americanised Mexican. As the story opens, we find him having turned his back on the world. He’s forty-something, works in a wine store, hasn’t had sex in years, and is completely addicted to online porn. A sinister new app called Simulcum allows him to take the face of any woman – a store customer, for instance, scraping her social media accounts from the name on her credit card – and produce a high-quality porn film of her doing exactly what he wants.

Then something wonderful happens: Working at the store one day, between bouts of furtive masturbation and glasses of promotional wine, he meets Charlotte, a beautiful single mother. The pair fall in love, Javi moves in with her, and they eventually get married.

Charlotte - a white woman - has a teenage daughter called Kelly. As Javier moves into the house, she is beginning to transition her race: To her mother’s horror, she darkens her skin via melanin injections, changes her name to K’ellée and begins speaking in ebonics.

After the initial conflict this provokes, things begin to settle down. Charlotte and Javier are in love, and happy. K’ellée settles on a ‘Halle Berry-type hue,’ and begins bonding with Javi through visits to his home office, where she asks him about pre-millennial black culture; hip-hop records, movies and books. ‘You never seemed POC to me,’ she tells him (a sore point for a dryback.)

Then comes the tragedy – dreadful and darkly hilarious. One night, K’ellée meets a black live streamer known, outrageously, as Top Niggo, part of a set of ‘fake thugs from decent homes.’ Having made threats against other content makers, it seems he’s provoked the wrong person – an idea that feels horribly plausible. While riding in his SUV, K’ellée is killed in a drive-by shooting.

Towards the end of the novel – the delay creating an emotional gut-punch – we discover the tragedy behind K’ellée’s transition. Javi comes across ‘a screen recording of an in-progress video conference with her classmates.’ The group of girls glare at Kelly, and tell her ‘You would think that, you’re a white cis.’

‘I don’t have to be queer to understand a love story between two men,’ Kelly protests. ‘And race has nothing to do with it!’

‘Race has everything to do with it!’ one of them responds.

‘You’re literally the only non-LGBTQIAS2S sophomore. That’s so sus,’ another says.

Javi discovers that shortly after this experience, Kelly searched ‘Does suicide hurt?’ and then ‘transracial teen.’ He then watches his dead stepdaughter as she stands in front of her webcam, imitating in vain the curves and poses she’d just seen, before violently beating her thighs and stopping the recording.

With horror, Javi realises that all of this happened just before one of the worst rows Kelly had with her mother, during which she seemed to him – and to us – completely unsympathetic.

As Javi sees it, on discovering this private pain: ‘Her generation had stigmatized hetero and white-facing identities to the point where being straight and/ or white made them complicit in every rape and murder since the dawn of man… Kelly didn’t want to be black. She wanted to be safe from the incessant questioning of her worth as a human because she was born white.’

Aristotle’s rule for drama is that an ending should be surprising but inevitable. Dryback’s is both – a horrifying monument to everything the novel has documented. Among a torrent of indelible images, there’s a particularly heartbreaking one I’m still trying to shake off.

Ecchi, a nom de plume taken from a Japanese word for lewd, fully commits to his vision. We leave Javi doomed to his own online infamy, confronted with the graphic, thwarted remnants of a final ray of hope.

To be continued…

In July 2008, I flew to Toronto to help sign a band to Big Dada. They were called Thunderheist, a dance/ hip-hop duo of the style that was popular at the time. There’d been a reaction against the rather serious-minded, paranoid and doomy underground rap of the early 2000s, and a wave of young artists was making overtly sexualised music about partying, and designed for the dancefloor.

Big Dada had played a part in this by signing Spank Rock – though there was depth and a futuristic thrill behind their clubby, cokey exterior, and I think they were clearly the genre’s high point.1

Those years saw the onset of a globalised music scene, driven by the internet, when the tribes had dissolved into a homogenised hipster template. That summer, wherever you went, everyone seemed to be wearing Wayfarers with brightly coloured frames, bold patterned, neon leggings, skinny jeans, baggy t-shirts and angular jewellery. In Paris it was Ed Banger and Uffie, in London it was MIA and Switch, and in the U.S., it was Spank Rock, Diplo, Amanda Blank and, a little later, Santogold. Much of this music was informed by the explosion of dance-adjacent indie rock of a few years earlier: !!!, The Rapture and co. The post 9/11 doom and gloom was over, and now everyone wanted to have fun.

Amid the sped-up evolution of musical culture, Thunderheist were already slightly in the wake of this new sound, rather than at its forefront. This presents a challenge, because music heads can smell such things, and fashions change quickly. But that July they seemed to be on the rise, and were supporting Crystal Castles at a large, civic, open-air venue called the Harbourfront.

Crystal Castles had been a much hyped part of this sea-change in music, not least because of a misplaced rumour that Timbaland had sampled their track Courtship Dating for 50 Cent’s Ayo Technology, featuring Justin Timberlake. Crystal Castles were also a duo, consisting of producer Ethan Kath and singer Alice Glass. I’d listened to their eponymous debut album, but like many of that era – I suppose of any era – despite some great moments, reality didn’t fully justify the hype. The music was pleasingly spiky – all 8-bit Atari bleeps and digital fuzz – and full of great hooks, but they hadn’t been able to sustain their best ideas over the course of an album. A few months after my trip, they were on the cover of NME, giving a ‘bizarre’ interview in which they seemed too keen to emphasise their street credentials, talking about drugs, prostitutes and rat-infested squats.

My only previous Canadian trips had been to Montreal. That city had felt elegantly scruffy, artsy and leftish, with a tangible regional pride. It was as though France and North America had melded into a city, with all the up and downsides that might imply. I was struck by how many meetings I had in coffee shops, with apparently successful artist managers working on music I’d never heard of. This was, it turned out, enabled by what seemed to be a near infinite supply of government grants, aimed at amplifying and exporting that fierce regional pride.

Toronto was very different: a smaller, cleaner and less giddying New York – which it apparently often stood in for in movies. It was hot and sunny in July, basking in summer and the civic programming of which this concert was a part.

I met Thunderheist the afternoon of the show. Their manager was a Ninja employee, and I was a little worried she might feel pressure to sign them to Big Dada (a Ninja imprint,) that maybe she’d had other plans. The producer, Graham, wore Wayfarers with colourful frames, and was friendly and relaxed. The band’s lawyer was there, as well as their manager. ‘It’s great to have my team around me,’ he said. Did he mean to include me in this, I wondered? Was the label deal thus a foregone conclusion, or was I still an outsider, with more work to do?

His bandmate, Isis, was a Nigerian-born rapper with a bold, funny personality. She had an annoying boyfriend, who kept calling me ‘English’ and seemed like a wealthy, entitled type, and was not to last long. Isis kept doing impressions of her father, in a Nigerian accent, gently mocking his daughter’s potential fame: ‘Oh, I thought you were a big star now?’

Backstage, we briefly encountered Crystal Castles. Ethan Kath stared and scowled out from under his black hoodie, as if daring us to approach, to break into the bubble he seemed determined to maintain around him and Glass.

I can’t remember much of Thunderheist’s performance. Perhaps that’s a dereliction of duty. I know I stood at the side of the stage to watch, the sun still out and the water gleaming beyond the crowd. After they came off, I would have congratulated them and we’d all have drunk beers or shots or whatever was offered, and I do remember they were happy and buzzing.

And then it was nighttime and Crystal Castles took to the stage.

This I do remember: The volume of the screaming, crunching, 8-bit electronics, the intensity of the crowd, and more than anything else, the stage antics of Alice Glass. She wore Chuck Taylors and torn, purple tights, stalked the stage, climbed a scaffold at its side, bent double before the crowd to scream her vocals. She was very thin and pale with a jet-black bob and a lot of eye make-up. There was a drummer too, in a white t-shirt. As the set reached a crescendo, she climbed onto the drum kit, singing from her perch. The drummer didn’t seem to mind at first. But then she was suddenly destroying his kit – kicking it and wrenching it apart with her hands. The drummer, clearly having had enough, stormed off the stage and past Thunderheist and me, furious.

But Glass hadn’t finished. Now, she mounted the very large, expensive-looking mixing desk, which was operated by a huge, grey-bearded, don’t-fuck-with-me type. To his horror, she began slamming one of her feet down onto the desk, like someone crushing a loathsome insect, ramming her heel into its surface, and perhaps even its circuitry, its guts.

All hell broke loose, and she was climbing down and running away. She passed us, catching our eyes, her own looking impressively wild, and ran off somewhere into the bowels of the building. The music had devolved into a low, rhythmic hum – which wasn’t displeasing, sonically. Next came Glass’s bandmate, in his trademark hoodie and a denim jacket. Now, his carefully maintained blank stare was replaced with wide-eyed alarm.

‘Did you see where she went?’ he shouted. ‘Where the fuck is she?’

We pointed, and he ran off after her.

Like something from a slapstick comedy, the grizzled soundman came next. ‘Where the fuck…’ he bellowed. ‘…is that fucking cunt?’

As I remember it, we all shrugged apologetically.

‘I am going to fucking kill her,’ he said, and took off in the direction of the band.

Glass came back, appeared on stage, flounced around a bit, then ran away again. Then came Kath, and then the soundman, and after that it somehow came to an end.

--

Isis went off with her boyfriend, and I went into the long, late hours of hanging with an artist until they call time, when you just want to go home, when your face hurts from smiling and your soul is drained from the relentless enthusiasm. I was staying with their manager, Tash, and she drove Graham and I out to the suburbs, where we went for late-night food and talked, so much talking. I remember How Soon is Now? came on the car stereo, and Graham turned it up very loud, and I was grateful for the respite this offered. In this strange, desperate state, its power was enhanced, and I was surprised to have forgotten how good it was.

I slept on Tash’s floor, and took off in the morning before anyone awoke, sending her a text to say thanks. We signed Thunderheist, but despite everyone’s best efforts, the project didn’t really break through. Would it have made a difference if their show had been more like Crystal Castles’?

A few years later, Crystal Castles imploded, and Ethan Kath was accused by Glass and several other women of sexual assault.

I’ve often wondered how much damage was done to that sound desk, and who ended up paying for it. The taxpayer perhaps, this being Canada. Why is it so exciting to see someone behaving so terribly? And why are so many musicians mad, bad and dangerous? Perhaps the latter is simply a consequence of the former.

--

Cancel culture capsules

Listening to an interview with perfumier Scout Dixon West, I was struck that bully-mob cancellations were still happening as recently as 2024. Sometimes I fear I was too optimistic in claiming it was all over. Dixon West’s cancellation was carried out primarily by women, she said. Accusing her of being some kind of right-winger, they told her: ‘Good luck selling your niche perfume to women in Ohio.’ Once again, the sneering class hatred aimed at ‘deplorables.’

In the same week, I read Kate Clanchy’s maddening elucidation of the cancelling of children’s author Rachel Rooney, in part by a wealthy, potentially jealous establishment figure (and nepo baby.) The way Clanchy tells it, Rooney was destroyed partly because her union, the Society of Authors (of which I’m a member) behaved with atrocious unprofessionalism and bias.

‘It blows my mind that these people don’t realise how evil they are,’ Scout Dixon West said of the mobs.

Maybe we haven’t seen the end of it all. Some say Woke 2.0 is here, hardened and unmoored from specific fights and mutated into the omnicause - driven in part by young women rushing leftward. Will there be more cancellations yet to come?

I’m something of a fan of the FT’s star columnist, Janan Ganesh. He’s one of those writers equally adept at covering politics and culture, and writes provocatively about both. Perhaps I like him because I often agree with him – as when he wrote about David Szalay’s Flesh, recently – a novel I still feel excited about months after finishing it.1

Perhaps I like that he occasionally annoys me, too – as when he celebrates the single life over the married one, and childlessness over parenthood. As with Geoff Dyer’s writing on this subject, he seems to protest slightly too much.

One column Ganesh wrote, perhaps ten years ago, has always stuck with me (I haven’t been able to find it, since – so perhaps it’s now in part imagined.) In the piece, he wrote about observing certain friends having peaked in their twenties – far too young. They had seemed to have it all, some cool job or other, then suddenly, in their thirties, they were already in decline.

I was in my mid-thirties when I read this, and it induced a pang of fear. I loved my twenties and struggled to part with them. Around the same time, I read of one of my favourite novelists, Evelyn Waugh, that ‘the passing of his youth was painful to him.’ Mine was to me, too. This was a subject much on my mind in 2016 – a new father, mired in serious responsibility at work and at home. While my career was more successful and remunerative in my thirties than ever before, I wasn’t enjoying it as much. Perhaps I had peaked too early?

On entering my forties, most of this angst dissipated. The children could dress themselves and use the toilet. More of life was certain, as opposed to undecided. A sort of acceptance kicks in, and with it a relaxation. Happily, I’ve enjoyed my forties far more than my thirties. I wonder if some of the friends Ganesh wrote about have, too?

--

Though I wasn’t exactly Nathan Barley in my twenties, I was operating somewhere in the same universe. I spent a great deal of time in Shoreditch, and I was full of myself and the creative world I worked in. I see now that I survived – thrived – on my wits and self-belief as much as any ability and talent. But perhaps I’m being hard on myself: I was dedicated to music in which I believed very deeply – and finding success. (If there was a contradiction between this seriousness and the hard partying I enjoyed at weekends, I was yet to find it.) I’d had a lot of romantic fun, and had lately fallen in love with a very beautiful woman whom other men openly desired. This did little to curb my ego.

By sheer co-incidence, this woman lived within a hundred meters of a pub I’d begun DJing at in 2004, in Bethnal Green. It was called The Florist - a locals-type boozer recently taken over by the scion of a gambling empire and his equally wealthy American friend. Now, it had a split personality: tough local geezers on the left side of the bar, and east London hipsters on the right. They rubbed along alright together, not least as the hipsters would buy cocaine from the locals.

I’d been introduced to the place by an acquaintance; a rather pompous former model and fellow DJ. He was quitting the gig, he told me, because of an incident with a local. This man had approached the DJ booth, which I seem to remember was built around the disused fireplace, and made a request.

‘No requests,’ my acquaintance had (hilariously) told him.

The man raised his shirt to expose a large knife tucked into his belt.

‘I live by the sword, son,’ he told the DJ. ‘Know what I mean?’

This didn’t worry me at all, and I happily took the gig. It was £30 for the night, one Saturday a month. Only one DJ, Max Sedgley, whose song Happy had been a hit, got £40. ‘Because he’s famous,’ drawled the owner.

The Florist became the starting point for many a long, wild night. It closed at midnight, so it was only ever the warmup. I got to know the locals: There was Ronnie – a terrifying looking man with a shaved head and a savage face, who turned out to be quite gentle and friendly. He talked rapidly and with a bad stutter, which didn’t seem to bother him at all. Sometimes, I’d rediscover him at the end of a night, in some demented, council estate pub, long after sunrise, where he’d be dishing out bumps of coke with a teaspoon. For a while, he had a beautiful South African fiancée, with glossy blonde hair, leather trousers and an ironic smile. She made Ronnie seem more glamorous, and then, when she left him, more forlorn.

There was Bill, whom the South African cheekily called William – she was the only person allowed to do so. He was like a seedy Sinatra, forearms heavily tattooed and hair greased. Older, always friendly, but more frightening, somehow, than Ronnie. He would make requests when I was DJing, but they were always good ones – All Apologies by Nirvana springs to mind.

There were many other familiar characters, whose names I’ve long forgotten. Like the boyish, handsome guy who was always there, whom I’d occasionally see in the street during the daytime, and nod and smile hello to. Gradually, he lost his boyishness, his skin clenched tighter around his skull, his gums withdrew to expose his yellowy teeth, and he generally began to look haggard and rough. These men were in the pub virtually every night, sniffing half gram wraps of cocaine at the urinal, off 2p coins, and drinking countless pints of beer. I used to wonder how they survived – how long a person could, living like that.

Once, I went on to another pub with Ronnie after the Florist had closed for the night. He’d gone to this quieter, dimmer place to meet another man, who was silent, unsmiling – would have been terrifying had I been sober. I was overexcited and talkative, and Ronnie kept saying ‘you’re with the boys now J, you gotta calm down!’

‘Alright, Dad,’ I kept replying. You could cheek Ronnie off in a way you wouldn’t with Bill.

There were occasional bouts of violence. Once, a couple I didn’t recognise came in, a bald man in a white shirt and a blonde woman, perhaps in their early thirties. They spent the night drinking and canoodling at a table, and then, quite suddenly, something had gone wrong: they were outside, arguing, and the man punched the woman in the face, climbed into an Audi and sped off down Globe Road. The woman sat on the pavement, bloodied and crying. I’d managed to get the man’s numberplate, and called the police, picturing his arrest in a fit of righteous fury.

On 7/7, when the bombs went off on the Tubes, I walked from Shoreditch to the office in Kennington, what had happened gradually becoming evident through texts, calls and snatches of conversation. Outside Elephant and Castle, a man was urinating against the station wall. ‘What’s it matter, when the world’s ending?’ he shouted when someone remonstrated with him. That night, I went to the Florist, where everyone got defiantly drunk. There were singalongs to the music, and yelled damnations of the terrorists.

It was only after a year or so of DJing in the pub that I discovered the locals were all part of the Inter City Firm, the West Ham football hooligans. I got chatting to one of the younger men, who enthusiastically told me this.

‘What, even Bill?’ I asked.

‘Bill, J?’ the man said, laughing. ‘Bill’s a fucking general!’

‘Like, in charge?’

‘Yeah!’ he said. ‘You should come down West Ham on a Saturday, J. Kick some cunts’ heads in.’

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ I told him, ‘But I’m very middle class.’

I had limited experience of football hooliganism. I’d seen the various movies of the laddish ’90s and 2000s – I.D., The Football Factory. I’d read the novel the latter was adapted from, after I interviewed a favourite writer, Alan Warner, and he recommended it. It was less about football violence than working class youths trying to find some escape from drudgery.

Once, in the tiny kitchen at Ninja Tune HQ, I’d encountered a manager who looked after two of the label’s biggest acts. This manager had a rep as a live wire (and looking back, I first met him when his own wave was cresting.) I’d once heard him in a half-joking argument on the office floor, when a member of staff referred to the contract between his artist and the label.

‘I could drive a fucking bus through that contract,’ the manager said.

‘Yeah – how’s that?’ the member of staff asked.

‘Because I fucking wrote it,’ he said.

That day in the kitchen, I was wearing a burgundy Lacoste polo. The manager eyed me, head to toe.

‘Good job you’re not on the terraces,’ he told me. ‘You’d get fucking killed wearing that.’

I came to like this mercurial manager, who was brilliant but troubled. As I got to know him, he occasionally told me more about the football hooligan culture that obsessed him – the style, the tribes, the multi-racialism and the rules. The bright colours that influenced wider street-fashion in the ’80s.

‘I’ve seen grown men trotting around in kids’ size trainers,’ he told me, ‘Just because they came in powder pink.’

One day, back in the pub, Ronnie disappeared. After a couple of weeks, I asked one of the other men where he was.

‘He got sprayed and ironed, J,’ the man told me.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘He was in a club, coked up, pissed some bloke off. Got sprayed in the face with something nasty, then hit with a crowbar. He’s in hospital. Don’t know what day of the fucking week it is.’ The man laughed. ‘Away with the fucking fairies, he is.’

In the wake of the loss of his fiancée, it seemed, life had taken its toll on Ronnie. He eventually reappeared, and seemed back to full health, even if he was quieter and more subdued.

Needless to say, I never went down West Ham. I entered my thirties, that stage of my life ended, and the fun faded for a while. I lost the beautiful woman, grew tired of DJing, and a little quieter and more subdued myself. I moved away, then emigrated. I haven’t been to the Florist for a long time, but I think about it often. I wonder what became of its cast of characters. Did I meet them at their peak, or would they scoff at this bourgeois notion? Are they still going, singing along, snorting and drinking with careless abandon? It wouldn’t be good for them, I know, but the permanence would be nice – a rock amid the waves. Whatever they’re doing, I hope the hooligans did survive.