... well, not really, but I've been reading Scarlet West's I Want To Thank Manchester Air Rifles, a book about DJing (among many other things, not least drinking) and possibly one of the most compulsive books I've ever read. "Compulsive, you say, that sounds a bit back-cover-blurb fake to me." Which it does. But ... whatever. This book worked for me on numerous levels - not least because of the many references to music - and er, I'm about to hit you over the head with a few of my reactions.
So yeah, I want to thank I Want To Thank Manchester Air Rifles for these reasons:
*It's funny and moving about the perils (and pleasures) of extreme alcoholism. The daughter of a man from Oldham who steadily drinks himself to a sordid death, West is knowingly following in his "well-trodden footsteps". The only difference between his alcoholism and mine, she says, is that she writes hers down in the form of an online diary. Her "memoir" (which is what she calls it), spans 2006-2015, and was evidently written largely in internet cafes or places like Leytonstone Library. It seems she self-published it in chunks as she wrote it, with the resulting book coming later.
*Drinking isn't just a big part of her lifestyle, it's almost a philosophical outlook. And this takes the reader into some pretty interesting areas - life choices, individualism versus responsibility, the self-knowledge of the addict, and so on. Here's an entry for 16 October 2008 (Just Me And The Drink):
"I just don't know what else to do. I'm so bored every day, I wake up and no matter what I do everything bores me. I like the drink though and that keeps me entertained for six hours at least. Just wandering through Holborn to Leicester Square, drinking half pints in every pub I come across. Not speaking to anyone. Just the silence of the afternoon and the clanking of the glasses. It seems to give me immediate satisfaction."
"The party never ends until I'm unconscious", she says, and the chaos-inducing nature of her endless drinking is - for sure - partly played for laughs. It's not just the determinedly anti-social daytime drinking experience but also the wildly-out-of-control two-day benders when she goes off in search of further alcohol after her DJing in Soho until 3am. Here's an entry for 16 February 2009:
"For all of you out there that went on about how sad it was about the Astoria getting knocked down, I lay down in front of one of the pneumatic drills on Wednesday 4th February. I stopped the whole road. I was pissed out of my mind, think it was 9:30am. I could be dead. But here I am ... I'm barred from Carphone Warehouse opposite the casino. Apparently I went in there just before the Astoria incident and wrecked a display of phones. Then I shouted, 'Try and sell me something! Go on sell me something now!' I know I'm definitely barred cos I had a go at going in there the other morning but was stopped by security and so I ran."
Er, right. In another entry (11 April 2012) she says she "awoke sober on a Wednesday for the first time in ages, perhaps even over a year". At this time Wednesdays were apparently the morning after her regular Tuesday DJ slots at the Arts Club in Soho. This same morning she mentions how the last time she drank cocktails (she normally seems to drink beer, "my pint of boyfriend called Kronenbourg") she ended up "taking a piss in a gated community garden in Notting Hill. Next thing I know I'm in the Royal Albert Hall at the Proms". Yeah, all this is pretty funny and West's entire book is like this: the comedy of alcoholic chaos, but also (though to a lesser extent I think) the misery and shame of alcoholic chaos.
*West's particular strand of bleak humour is a major component to Air Rifles. For a start-off - that title. Like a Fall-influenced fever dream, you'd expect such a great title to be played out in the book itself in some way. Nope. There's not a single reference to it. All the better, I reckon. West's brand of dark humour works (or at least is fun to read) because so much of it is either hyper-personal and inscrutable, or so dark as to shade into something else. Something close to a deathwish or a morbid enjoyment of failure and hopelessness. She calls one of her diary entries Win A Night Out In Soho with Scarlet West - full title "Kicking For Killing And Stabbing For Fun - One Night In Soho With Scarlet West" - which I guess would at least be a change from those tiresome heritage walking tours. Another entry's called: Wetherspoon's Is Not A Pub You'd Spend A Day In But It's OK For Four Or Five Pints In The Morning. Or what about this for is-this-a-joke-or-not humour:
"My room's become a magpie's next of all these things that I've got, I'm selling a Pentax MZ-32 camera. Is anyone interested? I found it under a tree and handed it into Chingford Police Station but no-one claimed it. It's worth around £200. It has a variety of different lenses to go with it. I also have a wooden statue of Madonna and Child, I mean the Blessed Virgin Mary, not the pop icon. I'm selling that for £500 as it's by Henry Moore and worth about £10,000. I'm not familiar with the underground art black market."
Given her drink-driven roving around different parts of London (especially central and north-east London) and given her range of contacts (she appears to be on the fringe of showbiz friendship groups, people like Lisa Stansfield) who's to say any of this is a joke? Anyway, she has plenty of other available witticisms for her world: the "dancing desperate" who she presumes would frequent the pop-rave nights in a dire-sounding place in Ilford; the fact she's only too familiar with the notion that as a DJ you should play "what you want even if it clears the dancefloor" (er, me too); and the feedback she apparently gets from readers of her online journal who evidently write to her to say "it's getting worse and that it's not as good as previous entries". "More good news then", she notes.
*Her comments about DJing are often pretty interesting/entertaining. The fact that West's book is partly about the ups and downs of DJing is, I must admit, one of things that made me snap it up in a charity shop in Dalston (just around the corner from where it was published by - now-defunct? - Grey Tiger Books). Actually, not so much the ups and downs, more the comedy of DJing from someone who clearly enjoys it (sometimes even treasures it) but ultimately doesn't take it - or themselves - too seriously. "I remember when I first starting DJing", she says in an early entry (16 November 2006), "and all I had was three CDs". She also seems to have DJed with CDs borrowed (and never returned) from Leytonstone Library. "The Arts Club never tell me when I'm DJing", she says, "so I just turn up there every weekday night just in case". Er, right. This means she was continually trekking into Soho from Leytonstone - about an hour-and-a-quarter each way (on the 55 bus?) - on the off-chance of having the dubious pleasure of playing records to a party crowd until three in the morning. She's fairly sparse on the detail of what and how she plays her stuff (which is fine with me), though she does at one point mention how she likes to do things like "finding new mixes to incorporate The Fall and Hawkwind into my set while keeping the floor dancing" (ah, I can only dream of such heights of DJ sophistication in relation to my own miserable efforts behind the wheels of steel). But no, West is a non-superstar DJ, and all the more interesting because of it. For example, she mentions people's negative reactions to her DJing, including one punter who "kept posing shooting himself in the head when I was playing the Clash". And there's this:
"They all expect me to be dancing behind the booth and lifting my hands up to inaugurate them in some soft sense of the word. I refuse to do all that and so they keep coming up to me calling me miserable and bored. But I'm neither miserable or bored. But once they've said that to me I'm both cos I know what kind of people they are."
Yeah, the misery and boredom. She describes what she's doing as "party DJing" and I guess that can cover an awful lot of ... emptiness.
*She apparently has music taste that I (sort of) approve of. Aha, yes, it helps. OK, I could easily have enjoyed this book even if she hadn't said she dislikes the Beatles ("they're just so obvious"), Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Prince, while hating Motown ("You might as well be into Luther fucking Vandross") and - hurrah - professing an interest in "the music that John Peel used to play". True, she seems to equate John Peel with "Mogwai or something", which is suspiciously vague, but ... well, it'll do. And she regularly namechecks the Fall and Hawkwind, plus - ahem - Roxy Music's not-very-good Avalon album. So all in all, I'm prepared to (very generously) overlook her casual put-down of "Rolling Stones and Ska" as I think her basic musical attitudes are ... OK. Meanwhile, one of her journal entries has the distinctly Magazine lyrics-like title I Am An Insect And I'm A Poet. I Must Admit I'm Very Proud Of It, for which I'm more than happy to award bonus music-appreciation points.
*This is a book about how to live. Yep, Air Rifles isn't a book about anything as trite as "how to stop drinking". It's basically a book about how to cope with living, including when you apparently need to get wasted to get through the tedium of it all. Or something like that. For instance, in an entry on 16 February 2009, she says:
"I don't think my life is going downhill or that alcohol is dragging me into oblivion. I'm just doing the things that unconsciously you all want to do. If I did it without alcohol it would be deemed as madness immediately, but the alcohol covers my real intentions and so I'm saved but led to sudden death. I enjoyed it. I very much loved it."
"If this was 1956", she says, "I would have been taken away and put in an asylum", and she's surely right. It's not just the drinking, it's also her underlying attitude. She's a self-described "sociopath", whose daytime-drinking credo is "Hang around on your own and do what the fuck you like". She contrasts this with people she knows from her hometown of Oldham - "Every sentence they string together is secondhand. The art of independent thought never happened for them". She's often unsparingly harsh like this about Oldham and the people who live there - contrasting it with London - though she also frequently swings around and praises Oldham and complains about London. Similarly, she rails against her drunken, irresponsible father, says how she despises the word "family" and the cloying sentimentality of "family food supermarket adverts", but nevertheless she continues to persevere with her lost-cause dad while more or less idolising her long-suffering mother. She might (her words) be someone defined by her "lies and menace" and self-hating/self-aggrandising alcoholism, but there's still a desperate humanity struggling away at the centre of this memoir.
So yes, these are a few of the things I liked about Scarlet West's very compulsive book. What I may or may not have got across in this post is the simple fact that West is a good writer, with her plain bare-all style, deathless comic timing and original way of thinking. I guess reading about other people's addictions and degradations can be a kind of cheap entertainment, and I freely admit that this topic does interest me (I immediately started reading Charles Bukowski's Factotum after finishing Air Rifles). But that's not really the essence of it. In one entry West talks about how she's more than an online journal writer who's frequently-mentioned desire to kill herself might act as a form of titillation for her readers. "I don't exist just for your petty entertainment", she says. "Sometimes my feelings are real." Yeah, this book feels pretty real to me.
Anyway, to conclude. One of the other things I liked about West's book was the almost mysterious sense of it just dropping from the sky (as it were). There are no back-cover blurbs (not even "Compulsive" - Niluccio), just some unattributed writing that might well be from West herself. Inside it's the same. There's no "supporting apparatus", no About the author or other bits and bobs supposedly designed to sell it to you. To adopt West's own phraseology, it's like the books is meant to sink without trace and I'm grateful for that. I Want To Thank Manchester Air Rifles is like a band you've stumbled upon who are extremely good but seem to have no PR machine or fanbase around them whatsover. A band playing in a void. Hmm, now I've said that West will probably end up doing another book (I think this is her only one), become suddenly semi-famous and will start doing awful confessional pieces for the Guardian - "How I kicked my toxic affair with alcohol and fell back in love with DJing". Anyway, I wouldn't say reading West's tale of (mis-)adventures at the frontline of indie-cum-party DJing and excessive drinking saved my life exactly. But it did enrich it a little. And what could be a better back-cover blurb than that?
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