Yes We Have No - Nik Cohn

 YES WE HAVE NO - NIK COHN

Maybe it's just me but I often get Nick Cohen and Nik Cohn mixed-up. It's obvious why, of course. Nick Cohen, whilst full of insights and cutting political cynicism is ultimately pretty depressing. I wonder if anyone has ever told him that? You shouldn't shoot the messenger but the thing with Cohen is that not only is he the messenger but he's also the message. Nik Cohn, on the other hand, has a knack for enthusing because Cohn himself is enthused. He's keen, and it comes across in his writing. I'm baffled, however, how his first book he wrote was such a success that from the proceeds he bought a seventeenth-century cottage in Hertfordshire. I'm jealous, really, because I think: why can't I do that?

Yes We Have No, by Nik Cohn is one of those 'in search of England' books where the author travels around from city to city meeting all kinds of disparate people and recording the conversations in a bid to discover Albion - or at least something similar. Books such as these can often be entertaining at the very least as skirts are lifted, stones upturned, and windows into peoples' lives opened. The conclusions, however - if any are ever reached - are usually debatable and whether they're positive or negative ones, often seem to rest on a flick of a coin.

Is Englishness a moveable feast? It's a moot point. Is England built on shifting sands or sinking sands? This is the more pertinent question. These men of old England on a raft with sharks circling, as someone once sang. But who are these old men nowadays, and who or what are the sharks? We all have our own opinions about all of this but as it's Nik Cohn's book it's for him to discover and for him to divulge.

With his dissecting eye and his way with words, Cohn cuts a picaresque swathe through the wreckage of England circa 1999 and discovers a nation within a nation populated by the jobless, the homeless, and the fucked. A nation full of trouble. Violent and dispossessed. Many millions strong, holed-up in tower blocks, housing estates and inner cities. In places such as Bristol, which just happens to be my hometown. And where in Bristol does Cohn first venture? Why, Stokes Croft of course, taking in Montpelier and St Paul's. If Cohn is after stories then these are areas he's going to find them and amusingly (in fact, highly amusingly) one of the stories he picks up on is that of Bristol's very own black transvestite legend, Sapphire. 

Everyone in Bristol knew Sapphire - or at least knew of him - so to have him mentioned in a book is worth the price of admission alone. 'Sapphire got away with murder,' Cohn is told 'but he had style'. And then comes tales of how Sapphire would pull straight white kids off the dancefloor and give them blow jobs in the toilets. 'Buttocks wouldn't melt in his mouth,' another says, and the thing is - it's all true. Nowadays his antics would probably get him on a register but back in the day, Sapphire was a clubland legend. In fact he should probably have a blue plaque with his name on it somewhere - such as outside the Lakota, saying something like 'Sapphire played here. If you know you know.' 

From Bristol, Cohn heads down to Cornwall and a travellers camp called Fraggle Rock, populated by remnants of the Peace Convoy and others who seem to have no choice but to live this lifestyle. The camp is a last refuge - until the occupants are moved-on and another muddy field at the end of another side road takes its place. It's like an Indian reservation for New Age Travellers in a done-by alternative reality where the Battle of the Beanfield was the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the travellers were the massacred U.S Army's 7th Cavalry.

From Cornwall he's off to Blackpool and when describing the nightlife there, it's like Hunter S Thompson's Las Vegas on acid as described in Fear And Loathing:

'Crowds descend on the pubs like packs of Visigoths, knocking back two or three drinks for every round, then rushing on again. We are accosted by a dwarf on stilts selling peppermint-flavoured condoms. Then we're in a transvestite cabaret called Funny Girls. A heart-stopping boygirl in black leather thigh boots and a black leather tunic cut just below the crotch is singing 'Send In The Clowns'. A papier-mâché  dragon with two heads asks me for a light. Past the arcades and strip joints, the barkers and tattooed love boys, the musclemen flexing, the jailbait pouting, the draw and E and bad cocaine, till we reach Pleasure Beach, the amusement park, where all things are biggest and best.'

Cohn's Blackpool makes today's annual Rebellion punk festival held there at the Blackpool Winter Gardens look restrained, conservative and positively quaint.

And then to Liverpool where Cohn is educated on the Toxteth Riots. The London press, he is told, called them race riots but in reality it was actually people versus police. The same with the St Paul's riot in Bristol. 'It was never black against white; it was a political statement. Toxteth just said "We're not having this. We're tired of being treated like crap." All of us were on that. But blacks, of course, they were treated worst of us all, so their protest was the most extreme.'

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, as L P Hartley once said. And so too is the North of England but in the plural: the North is foreign countries, they do things differently to the South. The North also has things done to it by the South. Industrial genocide, for a start. We're talking; of course, about the Thatcher government's decimation and wholesale destruction of the coal industry along with the closure of the shipyards and steelworks. 

Everywhere Cohn goes in the North; every town, every city, every village, it's all the same picture. No jobs, no money, no future. Yet bewilderingly there is still hard cash being spent at night in the pubs and clubs but no-one seems to know where it comes from. The closest answer Cohn gets is from a builder who says somewhat mysteriously 'Other people's pockets', and by this he can only mean from the black market. From cash in hand - and no questions asked.

Down South, to the detriment of future generations people may have been able to buy their council house but up North, Cohn is hard pressed to find anything of benefit from all the years of Conservative rule, with Tony Blair's New Labour government being no better. Aye, it's grim up North.

So come the end, does Cohn discover the spirit of England? Does he find Albion? The answer is both yes and no. What he finds is an England turned-in on itself. An England that may like to think of itself as being a republic but has in actual fact been thrown to the wolves. An England under the yoke of the free market where everything has a price and anything that doesn't is surplus to requirement. Cohn finds an England Disneyfied, under a free market Disneyfied tyranny.

It's complicated, for sure, but only in the sense of when 'It's complicated' is used to describe a person's relationship status on Facebook. What you see is what you get and what you see - is what you are.

John Serpico

Riotous Victorians - Donald C Richter

 RIOTOUS VICTORIANS - DONALD C RICHTER

It was Thatcher who advocated for Victorian values, seeing in them the path to a better Britain. Hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and sexual propriety were the cornerstones of her vision but you have to wonder: how did Thatcher ever come to such a mindset? It was chemistry she studied at Oxford, not history, so where did she come by this perception that Victorian times were some sort of golden age of higher morality? 

And whilst we're on the subject, what is it with those on the Right and their harking back to 'better days', as if better days ever were? Conservative Prime Minister John Major was the same with his 'back to basics' campaign, calling for a return to so-called 'traditional values', before his government being drowned in an infinity pool of sexual and financial scandals. 

The 'We want our country back' advocates are the modern-day equivalents, but back to what exactly? When were these supposed harmonious times when everyone was happy and the streets so free of crime you could leave your front door open for the Kray Twins to pop in and borrow a cup of sugar?

Riotous Victorians, by Donald C Richter, makes the case that Thatcher's ideal Victorian society was in actual fact rife with lawlessness, violence and riot. And a pretty convincing case it makes too. Published in 1981 by Ohio University Press, which means it's an academic book full of footnotes citing sources, but then when it comes to history and debunking revisionism this is no bad thing. Unusually for an academic book, the language is accessible and the style of writing is free-flowing which makes for a far easier read.

The sheer amount of episodes of rioting during the Victorian age that the book chronicles is actually quite bewildering, proving that Britain during this period was an extremely disorderly society and that any other version of it is a misconception.

Policing at that time was in its embryonic stage and the powers of those recruited for the work were vague and undefined, one of their major tasks being to prove they could uphold the law without military aid. In particular, that they could control crowds and combat rioting through the use of truncheons instead of guns and cutlasses. The military was always in waiting of course but even more so were the threats of prison, hanging, and being transported to Australia.

Unintentionally, some of the outbreaks of rioting of which Donald Richter writes are actually quite amusing, especially when quoting the politicians and newspapers of the day. For example, describing mobs as 'a great lot of roughs', 'frivolous elements', and 'riot-for-the-fun-of-it types'.

One riot where a labourer was urging a crowd of one thousand to kill the constables trying to restore order is described as 'Never was there such a hurly burly'. And what better phrase to describe a riot than 'a hurly burly'?

Another great turn of phrase is in regard to the proscribing of public meetings at Hyde Park, where placards on the gates of the park declared 'Meetings for the purpose of delivering or hearing speeches, or for the public discussion of popular and exciting topics' were banned. Exciting topics?

Not to be outdone, certain rabble rousers had a way with words also. For example, Protestant lecturer William Murphy, who would taunt Catholics by telling them their wives and daughters were being 'exposed to debauchery in the confessional, and are betrayed and kidnapped into convent prisons, and there kept the dupes or slaves of priestly lust'. Moreover, he would advise that 'all the convents in England ought to be burnt' and that 'if ever there was a rag and bone gatherer in the universe it was the Pope himself'.  

These were obviously not the Victorian values that Thatcher had in mind, but in the scheme of things were probably a lot more appreciated at that time than sexual propriety and thrift. And rightly so. Thatcher was dreaming a lie. As was Major and as is Farage and co today. The past is a foreign country, as they say, where you visit for a cheap holiday in other people's misery only to find it's not as it's depicted in the brochure at all but you send home a postcard saying 'wish you were here' anyway.

'History is written by the victors' as Hermann Goring said at the Nuremberg trials. And as George Orwell said: 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' The urge to rewrite the past is the urge to rewrite reality and is the foundation stone of totalitarian-type control. And in this light, how Thatcher, Major, Farage, Trump and all the others try to rewrite history starts to make sense for why should they even bother if there was nothing from it for them to gain?

John Serpico

The Squeeze - David Craig

 THE SQUEEZE - DAVID CRAIG

Yes, that's right. That's Freddie Starr on the cover, as featured in the film of the book. And yes, as well as being an unpredictable comedian he could also act and surprisingly well too. And yes, that's Stacy Keach on the cover as well, playing the part of the main protagonist in the film alongside such notables as David Hemmings, Edward Fox, Carol White, and blink-and-you'll- miss-him, a young Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols.

The film is a cult classic, notable for its depiction of a pre-gentrified, rundown London in the 1970s when parts of it was still bombed-out wastelands from the Blitz and World War Two. There's also its cast of dislikeable characters and general downbeat feel that's very 1970s/The Sweeney/get-your-trousers-on-you're-nicked/Men-in-stocking-masks-armed-with-sawn-off-shotguns-and-baseball-bats robbing Securicor vans. All good stuff, of course. London hard stuff, basically.

Before being turned into a film, the book on which it is based was originally published under the title 'Whose Little Girl Are You?' before being published again with its new title, The Squeeze. The book is a breathless affair with no let-up or deviation from the plot involving hardcore London gangsters, a kidnapping, a heist, and an alcoholic ex-detective.

'All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun', as Jean Luc-Godard once said. And that's true. When the main character is also an alcoholic, however, it adds a whole other twist to the story. It's the alcoholism in fact, that is a major theme along with how the main character attempts to redeem himself. The other major theme is 'humiliation', either self-inflicted via the ravages of alcoholism or inflicted upon others by the gangsters, demonstrated on two occasions by them forcing people to strip naked.

Is there any point in reading The Squeeze, you might ask? Well, it's not great literature by any means, and it's not quite pulp fiction of the classic kind either. It's a companion-piece to the film, essentially. An example of a cheap novel inspiring a half-decent cult movie, but that's more than a lot of other books and is more than enough to merit it being read. As for the eternal question over which is better - the book or the film? - on this occasion, it must be said, the film wins out.

John Serpico

Sex Pistols - The Inside Story - Fred & Judy Vermorel

SEX PISTOLS - THE INSIDE STORY -

FRED & JUDY VERMOREL

It's still my contention that the best book ever written on the subject of 'punk' is Jon Savage's England's Dreaming. It's in the way that Savage is so thorough, leaving (practically) no stone left unturned. His writing style is like that of a shark hunting down prey, with the scent of blood in the nostrils driving it forward. Sniffing after every entrail, every speck of blood but when sensing the prey might be too large to easily digest (like the subject of Crass), backing off to allow for further consideration.

For all that, I still wouldn't say Savage's book is definitive, and that to get an even wider and more complete understanding of punk, you really need to read other books on the subject by other writers - Sex Pistols - The Inside Story by Fred and Judy Vermorel being but one of them.

'But what exactly is there to understand about punk?' some might say, and 'Why even bother?' If you have to ask, of course, you'll never know, for as Neil Young once advised in his ode to Johnny Rotten: There's more to the picture - than meets the eye. And if there has ever been a band that this applied to then it's the Sex Pistols.

The backbone of the Vermorel's book is the diary kept by Sophie Richmond, who as well as living with Pistols' art designer Jamie Reid, was the secretary and office manager to Malcolm McLaren and the Pistols up until the end of 1977. Sophie had previously worked with Jamie Reid on the radical anti-commerce newspaper Suburban Press so her politics were already in place. Indeed, in one of her diary entries she alludes to being a non-affiliated Marxist.

Sophie is very conscious of the political nature of the Sex Pistols though also acknowledging that it's a double-edged sword. 'What worries me is fascism,' she writes 'That rebellious stance (of the Pistols) at this point of political time could equally lead rightwards as leftwards'.

Possibly of more interest is her awareness of situationism, shown in one of her diary entries when she attributes to the situationists the quote about all men and women living lives of quiet desperation. Even though she's mistaken in citing the quote to them (it was actually said by Henry Thoreau) at least it's an indication that she's aware of the situationists - which is probably more than could be said about Johnny Rotten.

On the other hand, Jamie Reid and Malcolm McLaren were well versed in them as was Fred Vermorel, so this obviously explains why it's a theme that runs through the whole book. It's funny nowadays, actually, how a significant number of people are of the view that the Pistols were just a 'boy band' and mere puppets of McLaren. It's patently not true. It is, however, true to say that McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, and Reid dressed them up in symbols and slogans. Moreover, it was situationist slogans - or versions of them, at least - and a chapter in the book on the subject of the situationists lists a number of them that in 1968 were sprayed all over the buildings and metros of Paris:

'Live Without Restrictions Or Dead Time. Never Work. Scream, Steal, Ejaculate Your Desires. The More You Consume the Less You Live.' Etc, etc. There is also mention given to the situationist idea of making retreat impossible and 'global proletarian revolution in the name of 'perpetual orgasm''.

No matter how much John Lydon might wish to deny it, the links between the Sex Pistols and situationism are obvious. Right down, even, to the situationists' concept of recuperation whereby radical ideas are defused, neutralized and commodified into mainstream consumer culture.

It's interesting also that the agent of mainstream consumer culture in the case of the Sex Pistols wasn't so much the big, established record companies EMI or A&M but the supposedly more hip (at the time) Virgin Records and in particular Richard Branson. As Julien Temple in the book puts it: Branson was a businessman pretending not to be a businessman. In fact, whilst McLaren was doing his utmost to present himself as the great rock'n'roll swindler, it was Branson who actually out-swindled everyone, going into overdrive in the end come the death of Sid Vicious and the over-the-top exploitation of the whole sad and sorry affair.

And talking of Sid Vicious, Julien Temple in the book makes another good observation in regard to when viewing the film footage of the Pistols in America, it's Sid who's keeping the craziness going and making the Pistols more than just a rock and roll group. According to Temple, Sid knew by that stage that he'd inherited Rotten's place and importance so based on that alone, the subsequent splitting up of the band was inevitable.

The Vermorel's book is full of observations such as this and full of insights from those behind the scenes, making it an important and somewhat special book when it comes to the story of the Sex Pistols. Unexpectedly and very amusingly, one of the highlights is actually Paul Cook's mum and the interview with her. For example, on Paul Cook as a baby she says: 'I couldn't believe it when he was born. I said to the doctor - he said it was a boy, and I said: 'No, it ain't,' and he said: 'Yes, it is.' And there he was, his little white nob!' And then on being asked about Johnny Rotten, she says: 'He sat on my back step in the garden and he looked so depressed. So I said: 'Well, we are all depressed, Johnny,' and he started to laugh.'

Paul Cook's mum is brilliant, and if as Malcolm McLaren once said that 'Anyone can be a Sex Pistol' then she was an undisclosed star member.

John Serpico

The Shit Of God - Diamanda Galas

 THE SHIT OF GOD - DIAMANDA GALAS

'Is it safe?' as Lawrence Olivier's Josef Mengele character keeps asking Dustin Hoffman's character in the film Marathon Man, as he drills a hole into his tooth without the use of anesthetic.

Is it safe? In this instance to read a book by Diamanda Galas with the somewhat alarming title of The Shit Of God. Is it safe?

Well, I always say you should never be intimidated by a book be it by its size, its girth, its complexity or anything, really - particularly its title. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky? It's only a book. Ulysses by James Joyce? It's only a book. The Shit Of God by Diamanda Galas? It's only a book. And unfortunately in the case of Galas's book, not a very good one.

Writer and filmmaker Clive Barker gets it right in his introduction when he says of Galas: 'Her voice carries her audience on a journey into primal regions, where intellectual analysis and even aesthetic judgements become redundant. All you can do is listen and feel.'

And that's the thing. The work of Diamanda Galas is something to be heard and experienced, preferably in a live setting. Her words aren't meant to be laid down on paper and presented as poetry. It just doesn't work. In doing so they lose all their power and are rendered redundant. Rendered useless.

Galas is a musician, a vocalist/singer extraordinaire, composer, performance artist and a visual artist/painter. She's a legend. The printed word, however, just isn't her medium.

Obviously, The Shit Of God isn't completely without worth as I imagine if you're a fan then you're going to view it as a little birthday present but as Joe Strummer once sang: 'Nembutal numbs it all but I prefer alcohol', whilst I say: Diamanda Gala is possessed of genius but give me Peaches any day.

John Serpico

A Fistful Of Dollars - Frank Chandler

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS - FRANK CHANDLER

'Get three coffins ready.' And with that we are formally introduced to the Man With No Name. Everyone makes mistakes, however, even a gunslinger who has death as a constant companion because it ends up as actually being four coffins that are required after him shooting down a gang of gunmen in a blur of movement before twirling his two pistols around his index fingers and then sliding them back into their holsters with a slow, gentle movement that's almost like a caress... 

It's impossible to read Frank Chandler's A Fistful Of Dollars without picturing Clint Eastwood as the stranger who rides into town leaving a trail of bodies behind when he departs. And so it should be because Clint Eastwood owns the Man With No Name character even though there have been many subsequent imitations. It's the character that made Clint Eastwood into the iconic actor that he is today, and the character that has become the template for the silent killer/studied cool/avenging angel trope in movies ever since.

Based on the screenplay of the film, Chandler's book stays close to the script and doesn't deviate from the crux of the original at all, but again - that's how it should be. You don't read a book like this for it to go off at tangents. Flesh it out a bit, for sure, but don't go changing it for the sake of being clever. Don't go trying to fix something that's working fine already, or trying to improve something that doesn't need improving. Just present in a different medium what is there already and everyone will be happy.

It's this policy that Chandler abides by and his book is all the better for it. The film of A Fistful Of Dollars is still better than the book but then the book isn't trying to be better. It's an accompaniment. It's a movie tie-in. It's a joy to read. It's a pleasure. A small pleasure maybe, in the scheme of things, but a pleasure all the same.

John Serpico

The Spear - James Herbert

 THE SPEAR - JAMES HERBERT

From the cover, you wouldn't really know what The Spear by James Herbert is about. 'Instrument of terror, symbol of evil...' says the tagline, but again that doesn't really give much away. Even the main protagonist when asked 'Have you ever heard of the Heilige Lance?' has to say 'no' before the person asking the question waves the subject away with a dismissive 'it's an ancient spearhead that a certain arms dealer seemed to have an interest in'.

In fact, for the first half of the book, arms trading and the subterfuge around the whole industry is what it seems to be about, taking in Israel, Mossad, global terrorism, and a private detective agency. It's not until the protagonist - private detective Steadman - and the arms dealer finally get to properly meet that the story takes a sudden turn to the esoteric with the arms dealer asking 'Have you heard of the Thule Gesellschaft, Mr Steadman?'

The Thule Gesellschaft - in English the 'Thule Society' - the German occult group founded shortly after World War I that sponsored the German Workers' Party, that was later reorganized by Hitler into the National Socialist Workers' Party - probably more commonly known as the Nazi Party.

So, rather than arms dealing, the core of the story is about the establishment of the Fourth Reich. This time round, however, taking control of the Western World through stealth. Spreading fear, confusion and mistrust on a universal scale through worldwide terrorist attacks and the gradual breaking-down of the world's economic structure. Boiling everything down to one simple but major conflict: Right against Left.

'It would be the only choice for the people of Britain.' Steadman is informed 'No in-betweens, no fence-sitting. The public would be forced to choose. Civil war would be balanced in favour of the Right, for the majority would be the wealthy, those whose sympathy lay towards nationalistic pride; and the middle classes who had suffered so much between the elite of the country and the working classes, would choose to join them rather than be ruled by the economy-wrecking socialists. The choice would be made very easy for them. New leaders would emerge and their ideals would be uncompromising, just as Hitler's had been in the 1930s.'

And those ideals if not broken why try fixing them as in the eyes of the Far Right there's nothing so perfect and normal than racial purity and racial segregation, along with the dissolution if not extermination of marxists, communists, trade unionists, anarchists, gypsies, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, and anyone else deemed to be 'untermensch' - or in other words, 'subhuman'.

This being a James Herbert book, the supernatural is not too far away and is represented by the Heilige Lance, otherwise known as the Spear of Longinus the Centurion. The Spear of Destiny. The spear that was believed to be the weapon that pierced the side of Christ as he died on the cross. And just for good measure there's also the resurrection of Heinrich Himmler - the Reichsfuhrer himself - the head of Hitler's notorious SS and the architect of the Holocaust.

Whilst The Spear isn't Herbert's best book (and it certainly isn't as good as The Rats) it's still a well-written story told by a master storyteller, with Herbert obviously having done a lot of research into the subject of Himmler and his interest in the occult. And like it or not, the occult side of Nazi Germany is an interesting subject if only for the fact that its place in World War II is always downplayed to the point of hardly ever being mentioned at all.

The unsettling thing about The Spear, however, is that there are elements of it that still echo to this day, particularly around the subject of Fascism and how those who knowingly or even unwitingly advocate for its rule along with the methods utilised to bring it about. 

As the saying goes: Fascism doesn't start with concentration camps - that's where it ends.

John Serpico