Riots And Rebels - Nick Rennison

RIOTS AND REBELS - FROM THE PEASANTS' REVOLT TO EXTINCTION REBELLION - NICK RENNISON

We can protest to death they won't listen, as Colin Jerwood of Anarcho-punk rock masters Conflict once said. And it's true. Change only typically comes when we force the hand that bleeds us. Protest can bring about concessions, for sure, but always leaving the fundamental structures of power in place. And this, comrades, is a problem.

The act of riot (or 'the art of riot', perhaps?) has always been with us and it's this that Nick Rennison in his book Riots And Rebels - From The Peasants' Revolt To Extinction Rebellion sets out to show. France, it could be argued, has always been deemed to be a nation of rioters all set for insurrection at the drop of a hat, whilst England has always supposedly done things differently. The English are meant to be be more restrained and less temperamental though where this idea comes from is anyone's guess because rioting is in actual fact as English as a Sunday roast. It's in our lifeblood. It's engrained. It's in our history and without a shadow of doubt so too in our future.

Rioting is a form of power that once unleashed is uncontrollable and there are no peoples of any particular country that has a monopoly on it. It is there for the taking but not for the making, as in it's nigh-on impossible to plan or instigate a riot. There are white riots, race riots, food riots, Rebecca riots, Swing riots, Bawdy House riots, Poll Tax riots, Old Price riots, full-scale riots, Gordon riots, Brixton riots and of course, Bristol riots. Even police riots. If war is politics by other means then riot is politics inverted. A riot is a ticket to ride but to where is contestable. From riot to insurrection? To revolution? Who knows? Who can say? But wherever it is, it's a place that those in authority wish to prevent people from reaching.

Nick Rennison's book is essentially a romp through British history using riots and rebellions as markers, and unusually for a book such as this, it's not an academic study. There's a bibliography at the back but you'll find no footnotes, which is fine but I'm not sure if it's all the better for it? What if you're new to the subject of the Merthyr Rising of 1831 and you're curious to know which historian called it 'the first true rising of the industrial working class'? There's no footnote pointing to the source so you continue reading straight onto the next historical riot, that being the Bristol Riots of 1831, described by someone as being 'the worst outbreak of urban rioting since the Gordon Riots'. But it doesn't say who that 'someone' is.

'Riots And Rebels is intended very much as popular rather than academic history,' Nick Rennison writes. It's 'an attempt to provide a brief survey of such actions'. In this light it should be said that Rennison very much succeeds and along the way highlights a lot of interesting stuff.

In regard to the Gordon Riots, Rennison writes 'Why so many Londoners rioted in June 1780 remains a matter of scholarly debate. Was it largely because of strong antipathy to Catholicism? For many of the desperate, suffering from the effects of poverty and deprivation, the chance to express their rage and frustration with a society that condemned them to occupy its lowest rung was welcome. As the historian Christopher Hibbert wrote, 'Popery was as good an excuse as any other.'

This rings very true, and I would argue the same applies to a vast number of riots throughout history, right up to those that took place over the summer of 1981, during August of 2011, and even some of the post-Southport riots of 2024.

On the other hand, the Luddite riots of the early 1800s were very specific as Rennison notes: 'Workers were already suffering the consequences of new machinery replacing work once done by hand and of the building of new and even larger factories to house that machinery. Often they had no other means of defending themselves against unemployment or impoverishment than violence and riot.'

Likewise for the Swing Riots of 1830 where the rioters' main targets were the new threshing machines that threatened their livelihoods, with the destruction of these often being accompanied by arson attacks on property. Rennison highlights a very good quote from a 'follower' of Captain Swing by the name of William Oakley who informs a magistrate: 'We will have £5 before we go out of the place or be damned if we don't smash it. You and the gentlemen have been living upon all the good things for the last ten years. We have suffered enough, and now's our time, and we will now have it.'

Is that not a good quote? Right there. Class hatred and resentment served on a plate.

The largest number of pages are devoted to the Suffragettes whose calls for votes for women though not involving any riots as such, involved plenty of direct action. 'So long as we have not votes we must be disorderly', as one of the Pankhurst daughters declared and so followed acts of vandalism, window smashing, attempted invasions of the House of Commons, physical attacks upon MPs, arson attacks, and letter bombs. 'Suffragette Terrorism' as the newspaper headlines at that time put it.

With the declaration of war against Germany in 1914, the suffragette's activities came to a standstill as women took over jobs that would previously have been done by men. After the armistice in 1918 it was difficult to argue that women should remain disenfranchised and so an Act was passed to give women over the age of 30 the vote. 'It's reasonable to argue' as another unnamed historian is quoted as saying 'that militancy played little part in securing women the votes' but arguably that's not strictly true.

Militancy (or 'terrorism' as the newspapers called it) alone didn't get women the vote but it certainly helped, if only by forcing the subject firmly onto the agenda. Likewise, the Trafalgar Square Poll Tax riot of 1990 alone didn't get rid of the tax but it certainly helped.

The comparisons here to the proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization are glaring.

In comparison again, the absolutely massive Stop The War march in London in 2003 didn't stop or didn't even help to stop anything. As Tariq Ali later said: 'It was a huge show of anger, but that's about it'. Maybe if a riot had ensued it would have been different?

Riots And Rebels by Nick Rennison is a book of lessons to be learned. It's the story of how riot and rebellion is our birthright. Riot for the hell of it and riot as a means to an end. It's our heritage. Our past. Our present. And it's our future.

John Serpico

Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kaysen

  GIRL, INTERRUPTED - SUSANNA KAYSEN

It's not until the end of Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen that we learn the title is taken from the painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer called Girl Interrupted At Her Music. Kaysen first saw the painting just prior to her being put into a psychiatric hospital and it was the eyes of the girl in the painting that she was drawn to.

'I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled. She was warning me of something - she had looked up from her work to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn breath in order to say to me, "Don't!" I moved backward, trying to get beyond the range of her urgency. But her urgency filled the corridor. "Wait," she was saying "Wait! Don't go!"'

It was the eyes of the girl in the painting that were talking to her. Warning her. The girl's eyes were a forewarning, just as they were in the closing scene of the Roman Polanski film 'Repulsion' when the camera slowly zooms in on a photograph and the eyes of Catherine Deneuve as a child.

There are a slew of difference between Repulsion and Girl, Interrupted, of course, the main one being that whilst Repulsion is fiction and fantasy, Girl, Interrupted is non-fiction and actually based on real life events. The obvious comparison to make is with Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar' and in fact both stories take place in the same hospital although by the time Kaysen gets there, Plath has been and gone.

The other obvious comparison to make is with Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' that apart from also being set in a psychiatric hospital, both portray a number of different characters at their respective hospitals - or rather, should that be 'patients'?

In regard to Girl, Interrupted, the subject of being a 'patient' at the psychiatric hospital is one of its main planks. Was Susanna Kaysen a 'patient' as such or a prisoner? It's a question that is wrestled with though come the end there's no clear answer. Apparently, Kaysen was advised to submit herself into the hospital by her doctor after just a twenty-minute consultation. You could do with a rest, he told her, just for a couple of weeks. So she waited in her doctor's office for a taxi that promptly came and took her away. Kaysen, essentially, went of her own volition. She was eighteen years-old and she stayed - or was held - at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts for almost two years.

The overarching question, however, is who is and what exactly is 'crazy'? For sure, some of the girls who Kaysen writes about have problems and Kaysen herself is open about her own issues too but when they're all sat together watching television and they see on the screen the horror of the Vietnam War, students beaten to a pulp by police on University campus sites, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale bound and gagged in a courtroom, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated, and poor people, black people and young people everywhere being killed... it puts 'crazy' into perspective.

Was sanity simply a question of following the rules and being like everybody else? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? Was having trouble with the rules a mark of madness? Having thoughts is fine but is thinking about thoughts like throwing a stone into a pool and watching how far the ripples go? Do the ripples ever even stop? And where does the stone go? If the pool isn't clear, then how do we know when or even if it will reach the bottom?

Whilst not quite as brilliant as Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted is really good, particularly when it comes to the dialogue. And in particular, the dialogue of one of the girls in the hospital called Daisy, who ends up as a suicide. Susanna Kaysen, of course, eventually left the hospital and became a writer - and a very good one at that as evidenced here.

John Serpico

Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile - Adelle Stripe

BLACK TEETH AND A BRILLIANT SMILE -

ADELLE STRIPE

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, we're told, but I say be even more wary of middle class people talking and writing about the working class because invariably they're going to misrepresent everything and all for their own ends. A middle class interpretation of working class life is never going to be genuine, and vice versa. It will only ever be an approximation at best. Jarvis Cocker in his lyrics to Common People came close to explaining this when he told the girl from Greece who had a thirst for knowledge how she will never understand. And that's the nub of it. To understand common people you have to be of and in among them. The voice of the working class can only be and come from the working class itself.

Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile, by Adelle Stripe, is the story of playwright Andrea Dunbar, most widely known as the writer behind the film Rita, Sue And Bob Too. It's a novelized biography, written through a combination of fact and fiction or as it's put in the introduction: 'This is an alternative version of historic events. It has been manipulated, re-structured and embellished. It is not the truth and exists purely within the realm of speculation.'

In itself, this is an important declaration to have at the start of the book that makes absolute sense come the end of the book. The insertion of it reflects well upon Adelle Stripe and shows she has an understanding of her subject matter.  Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile is excellent. It's quite brilliant, in fact, in that it allows the true voice of Andrea Dunbar to come through between the lines without any judgement or manipulation of it.

To understand who Andrea was (she died in 1990 at the age of 29 from a brain haemorrhage) you need to have watched Rita, Sue And Bob Too, and to have an even better understanding you need to know that Andrea wasn't actually happy with the film. You need to know she wasn't happy with the London-centric metropolitan life it brought her into contact with. You need to know that she hated all the well-healed, middle class people her writing attracted; who pushed their business cards into her palm, who bought her drinks and told her how delightful she was. You need to know she thought all these people were cunts. You need to know what she meant by her use of the word 'cunt'. You need to know where she was coming from.

'Careers advice said I could be a shop assistant, mill worker, nanny or hairdresser. All of those sounded shit. I asked them can I be a writer and they laughed at me. What someone from here, a writer? You're living in cloud-cuckoo-land they said. Only the brightest get to do jobs like that. And there's no jobs for writers in Bradford. Don't get your hopes up lass. But I like writing I said. It's the only thing I'm good at. If you study hard you might become a primary school teacher or work in the bank. But that means no messing about they said. You have to be realistic. 

At least I knew where I stood.'

Career opportunities the ones that never knock, as The Clash once sang, every job they offer is to keep you out the dock. So Andrea went to work at the local cotton mill before moving in and having a baby with a local Pakistani taxi driver whose abuse of her extended to him tying her to a kitchen chair to stop her going out. On escaping and ending up in a women's refuge house, it was there that Andrea met a social worker who happened to also work as part of a local theatre group.

'I write plays.' Andrea told her.

'Really?' the social worker replied. 'You might be the first person I've met in a refuge who has ever said that.'

The play that Andrea showed the social worker was called The Arbor and it ended up being staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London. 'She's like Alfred Wallis,' director Max Stafford-Clark declared. 'Primitive energy. This play is the dramatic equivalent of Wallis' paintings nailed to the wall of a fisherman's cottage. Her words are the leftover yacht paint. A world that many try to imitate, but few can convincingly portray...'

And so they were. Andrea's words captured the essence of working class life on an impoverished estate outside Bradford during the 1970s and 80s. A life battered by Thatcherite economics. A life out of view and out of mind. A life that amazed many in the middle class for not only existing but for burning so bright.

Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile is anger-inducing, it's laughter-inducing, and it's tear-inducing. It's not a depiction of 'Thatcher's Britain with her knickers down' as the strapline for Rita, Sue And Bob Too put it, but rather it's more like lifting the skirts of Thatcher's Britain and finding she's not actually wearing any knickers in the first place. 

Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile is brilliant.

John Serpico

When The Kissing Had To Stop - Constantine Fitz Gibbon

 WHEN THE KISSING HAD TO STOP -

CONSTANTINE FITZ GIBBON

Pulp fiction frenzy! Pulp fiction frenzy! Reveling in the tawdry! Reveling in the cheap!

And with that opening gambit I'm half-way to writing a song by The Fall, unpicking the lock to the secret of Mark E Smith's songwriting technique. That's not why I'm here, however. Rather, it's to lay down my thoughts on the latest book I've happened to read so as to save anyone else the bother of having to read it themselves.

On picking this one up, it struck me that isn't British politics and all that we see in the news also pulp fiction? Boris Jonson was the opening chapter and now we're getting into the stride of the story having been introduced to the likes of Farage, Starmer and Kemi fucking Badenoch. But I digress.

Written and set in 1960, When The Kissing Had To Stop, by Constantine Fitz Gibbon is the stuff of Right-wing media fantasy, nightmare, and secret desire. It's the sentiment behind every 'What is the world coming to?' editorial comment you have ever read. It's the constipated howl at midnight from the Tory Old Guard. It's the mindset of the public school education system, on its knees but still begging for one more lash of the whip.

It opens with England in the throes of societal and moral collapse. London in particular seems to be going to the dogs with open prostitution everywhere, rampant knife-crime, race riots, and unchecked police violence. Moreover, there is a growing anti-nuclear Bomb movement hand-in-hand with escalating antipathy to American missiles being based on the mainland. All of this under a Conservative government who advocate for an Increased Powers Bill under which all police would be armed and their pay doubled. The Bill, however, is rejected by Parliament whose demand for closer parliamentary supervision of the police is denied. In a bid to gain a mandate, Parliament is dissolved and a snap general election is called.

Watching at the sidelines - or even actually pulling puppet strings - is Russia who suddenly advocate unilateral nuclear disarmament beginning with the dismantling of their rockets in Poland. On the coat-tails of this historic decision the Labourite Anti-Nuclear Bomb committee sweep to victory and with this all American missile bases within the UK are closed.

It's all a communist plot, of course, and from thereon Russia is free to subvert, manipulate and through connivance and stealth take over British politics for its own ends, leading ultimately to the complete take-over of England as whole. Though not before the Royal Family manage to flee to Canada, so suggesting not quite everything is lost in the end...

The thing about When The Kissing Had To Stop is that actually it's a very well-written book and clearly written with serious intent. Russian interference in British politics is a serious issue and obviously of great concern to the author. It's a serious message he's conveying and he wants it to be taken seriously.

The problem with the book, however, is in its politics in that it is the politics of the Tory Old Guard where 'British traditions' and 'British values' are always to their advantage and the crumbs are for the masses. It is the politics of The Daily Telegraph newspaper and the Daily Mail where fear of an egalitarian society reigns supreme. It is the politics of the ladder pulled-up and the drawbridge closed. The politics of stranglehold on power. The politics of death grip.

For all that, When The Kissing Had To Stop is weirdly fascinating but in the same way that watching a slow motion car-crash can be. It's like the revealing of a Tory firebrand's sexual proclivities with prostitutes at the back of King's Cross railway station, where you nod along sagely because it comes as no surprise. When The Kissing Had To Stop is weird but weird well-written. And of course, you don't have to be weird to be wired, as Mark E Smith would say, but it's totally wired and totally biased. Rather like The Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in fact.

John Serpico

Mama - Peter Cave

 MAMA - PETER CAVE

Yet more pulp fiction dredged up from second-hand bookshops on the East Devon coast, this time from the mean and dark backstreets of a place called Dawlish. I keep getting writers Peter Cave and Richard Allen mixed-up as they both during the 1970s knocked out very similar, gratuitously violent types of books about Hells Angels and Skinheads that sold in surprisingly large numbers. It's an easy mistake to make as anyone aware of this genre might acknowledge. Mama, by Peter Cave, is the sequel to Chopper, the story of England's King of the Angels, and as the blurb on the back cover explains: 'Chopper may be dead but his girl lives on. Mama. A motorcycle groupie becomes Queen of the Hell's Angels'.

So what might be here for us to learn on perusal of this now classic cult book? Well, firstly, Peter Cave had a knack for giving his characters interesting names. For example: Danny the Deathlover. Can you imagine having that as a moniker?

We're also informed about how Hell's Angels can apparently at times be 'a force to reckon with, an army without fear or favour, a crusading band of renegades dedicated to the violence of revolution and social disruption'. And who am I to argue with that? Especially when at the wrong end of a bike chain wielded by some geezer in black leathers and steel-capped boots, sporting a swastika tattooed on his forehead. Self-preservation is my wont.

We also learn something of the alleged initiation process into the the Angels, involving vomit, urine, and phlegm, that could quite easily double-up as a video from under the counter of a 'specialist' shop in Amsterdam's Red Light district. And on that same subject, we also discover what 'pulling a train' means in regard to one girl and up to seventeen Angels in a row. Moreover, we learn of the Angel's code in regard to never running away from a fight, be it a physical one or a more metaphorical one as in achieving the dream of escaping to America where an Angel can ride easy upon its endless highways.

Mama is (as are all of Peter Cave's and Richard Allen's New English Library books from the Seventies) pulp fiction for the social anthropologist. It's the kind of book that Stewart Home has always wanted to write but has never quite managed to do so. At the time of its publication it was a gateway drug for disenfranchised children everywhere to start taking an interest in reading something other than Marvel comics. It's an insight into what scared anyone involved in the education system of the 1970s, fearing the influence it might have upon their young charges. Mama is an example of what is deemed 'low culture' by the self-appointed regulators and arbiters of what is passed as 'mainstream' culture.

Mama is also of course, rubbish, but it's cool rubbish given the seal of approval by your typical, home-grown kid on the street of any council estate or tower block of any dirty old town or city in England. Mama not only rocks but it rolls.

John Serpico

I, The Machine - Paul W Fairman

I, THE MACHINE - PAUL W FAIRMAN

Another sci-fi book that I've bought and read based solely on its cover. If only life could be as simple. Published in 1968 in larger print than usual for this kind of book, and 'printed on scientifically tinted non-glare paper for better contrast and less eyestrain'. Again, if only life could be as simple.

It's pretty obvious just from the cover that there's something odd about I, The Machine. It's Pop Art, isn't it? A mixture of collage, cut-up, and psychedelia. Story-wise, it's science fiction of the weird kind. It's science fiction on drugs.

I wonder if anyone has mentioned this drug aspect in any past reviews? I suspect not, so let's take one for the team and just consider it for a moment, shall we? If you were ever to indulge in a drug of the psychedelic kind, a non-user might be inclined to ask you what it's like? But actually, that's not the right question. Instead, what should be asked is 'What's it about?'. There's a bit of a difference between the two and it's an important enough difference to solicit the right answer. But how to explain that answer? How to put it into words?

There are echoes in I, The Machine of The Matrix, Zardoz, Logan's Run, The Time Machine, Forbidden Planet, and even One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in the way that a mental asylum can be a metaphor for America. Set in the far-distant future where the earth has been devastated by war, what is left of civilization is now under a protective shield in a man-made world called Midamerica, where every conceivable need is catered for. It's the ultimate, fully-realized technocracy where no-one works, no-one struggles, and no-one is deprived. A world where every whim can be resolved at the touch of a button; maintained by robots and managed by an all-seeing eye of providence, not unlike The Orb's 'Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld'. Not unlike that which is symbolized and can be found on the Great Seal of the United States and on the back of a dollar bill.

From this world emerges one man - one citizen - by the name of Penway whose thoughts become troubling: 'An axiom shaped for him: There is no such thing as unreality. All things, from the most indestructible plastic to the vaguest of hallucinatory dreams, are real, and must be dealt with as such. Reality is nothing more than effect. Everything that impinges upon the human consciousness leaves a greater or lesser effect. Therefore, everything of which consciousness can become aware is real'.

Without even taking any drugs, they're the kind of thoughts that could easily fit into a Bill Hick's 'It's just a ride'-type monologue.

Things don't just stay at this level, however, for it's when the same citizen discovers a community of naked people living 'underground' who call themselves the Aliens that the shark is jumped, as they say.

'Penway felt electricity running through his nerves, sparking at his nerve ends as he saw her standing there. She had sprayed off her suit and was nude. This revealed a surprising thing. Jenka had a thick, darkly gold pubic growth. It was the first one Penway had ever seen. Few females allowed hirsute disfigurement of any description on their lower bodies. But instead of being shocked, Penway found himself erotically stirred. He had never seen anything so attractive. Noting the direction of his eye, Jenka lowered her own. "It is our badge," she said. "A symbol of the Aliens."'

From there on, revolution and the destruction of the eye of providence is in the offing.

I, The Machine is pulp fiction of the science fiction variety but as I maintain: the medium is not the message and it's yet more proof if needed that pulp fiction-type books are not to be belittled or viewed dimly; and that old, paperback pulp fiction books can often wield hidden treasures. That's not to say this particular one is some sort of long-buried, hidden gem but it's certainly a weirdly rarefied one.

John Serpico

The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise - Brix Smith Start

 THE RISE, THE FALL, AND THE RISE -

BRIX SMITH START

It's no reflection on Brix Smith Start but in an autobiography of 461 pages it's not until page 147 when Mark E Smith enters the story that things start to get interesting but then understandably so given him being the stuff of such cantankerous legend. Before this, it's all about Brix growing up in Los Angeles where she lived on some sort of ranch with her dysfunctional, psychiatrist father. Do we really need to know about the pet tortoise Brix had as a child? Well, no, not really but it's forgivable because such attention to detail bodes well for when she starts writing about her time in The Fall. And that's why we're all here, right? That's what we've come for?

Does The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise warrant our attention? Is it worth the effort of ploughing through what is a near-tome of a book? I would have to say yes but you need to have an interest in The Fall to act as a motivator as without that you might just as well read Viv Albertine's autobiography which if not better, is definitely shorter.

As I said, it's not until Mark E Smith enters the story that things start to get interesting but the high comedy starts when Brix leaves America in May of 1983 and flies to England to live with Mark in Manchester. 'I never expected Manchester to be so grim,' she writes 'Nobody smiled. Everybody looked so poor. All their clothes were drab. Where was the colour?'

In the taxi from Piccadilly train station to where Mark lives in Preston, Mark points out all the must-see sights of his beloved city: 'Look, Brixie, there's the Boddingtons Brewery! There's Strangeways Prison!' All Brix can see, however, are squat little buildings with the words 'Cash and Carry' spray-painted on their front windows. 'I didn't know what Cash and Carry meant,' she writes 'but I had a feeling it wasn't glamorous. It was a long way from Bloomingdale's, that's for sure.'

It's on arriving at Mark's flat for the first time, however, that the comedy goes from observational to full-on Monty Python:

'Shall I make you a cuppa?' Mark asks. 'Yes, please,' say Brix 'I'll get the milk. Where do you keep it?'

'Out the window,' Mark tells her .

'What do you mean, 'out the window'?'

Mark pushes open a sooty window at the back of the kitchen to reveal a cement ledge where perched precariously is a small bottle of milk, a pack of Danish back bacon, a carton of eggs and a loaf of Hovis white bread. Brix is incredulous. Perhaps this is a traditional resourceful British custom, she wonders?

'Where is your washing machine and dryer?' she asks.

'I wash me clothes in the bathtub,' Mark replies.

'Mark, there's no hot water!'

'You have to turn on the immersion heater, love.'

'What's an immersion heater?'

'Do you have a shower?'

'Of course.' Mark then proceeds to show Brix a bizarre hose-like contraption that you attach to the mouth of a tap.

Brix is aghast.

It must be said, this is first-class, top-notch comedy. Things get even more hilarious later on in the book, however, when Brix recites an anecdote about her sex escapade with Micky Mouse at Disneyland. I won't reveal the details but it's genuinely bizarre. And if Brix thought Manchester was a culture shock, she was in for a surprise on her first visit to Blackpool. Her mother and stepfather are coming over from America to visit so Brix asks Mark where they could take them? 

'Let's take them to Blackpool, it's great,' Mark says 'You'll like it, it's like Disneyland and it's by the seaside.'

'My family loves the beach,' Brix writes 'so we rented a car and drove to the most heinous place I've ever been to in my life. It was grim and freezing. They call the amusement park area Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The rides were like the rides of doom, rickety and old. Along the promenade they hang lights, grandiosely called 'illuminations'. They do this in lots of seaside towns. They looked like crude crappy candy canes in black and white. I've seen backwoods country carnivals with better lighting decoration. My mother turned to me and said 'This is the night of the living dead'.'

Brix's book isn't a constant stream of funny anecdotes, by any means. Mark E Smith, for example, is revealed as being a very naughty boy that leads to divorce between Brix and him. There's a lot of airing of dirty washing going on here but then that's the thing about autobiographies in that they allow this. It's probably the only place to do it, really. It's also the place, of course, to settle scores and on that point, Morrissey of The Smiths is but one of the targets. Did Morrissey name The Smiths after Mark E Smith? It's feasible. And what's worse: being fired from The Smiths crew for eating meat whilst on tour, or being fired from The Fall crew for eating a salad? It's obvious which one is the funniest and this also makes it obvious that without Mark E Smith having a central role in Brix's life, her story wouldn't be half as good and would certainly not be half as entertaining. And entertaining it most certainly is.

John Serpico