Go Now - Richard Hell

 GO NOW - RICHARD HELL

He was a punk rock originator, or so they say and so he claims. Not of the musical style but the look as in the spiky hair and the ragged clothes held together by safety pins. Malcolm McLaren had seen him in New York and wanted to bring him over to England to lead a band he was thinking of putting together. He declined, so McLaren simply stole or 'borrowed' his image and the rest is history. To have invented punk rock should be enough for any man and guarantees a legacy of sorts but if you're possessed of a creative urge then you've got to do something with it, hence Richard Hell and The Voidoids and his career as a poet and writer. A man's got to eat and pay his bills at the end of the day as well, of course. Not that I imagine he's actually made much money from his legacy, his music and his books, if any at all in fact. Which brings us to Go Now, written by Richard Hell and published in 1996, and though its reach is global as evidenced by a copy falling into my hands down here at the edge of the world it's very doubtful it's been much of a money spinner for the author.

The blurb on the back cover describes the book as a 'tragi-comic road novel. A walk, ride and fall on the wild side' and in one sense it is; like a cross between Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, On The Road, and any number of books by Charles Bukowski. The plotline - or what there is of one - is very simple: A fading punk rock star and his ex-girlfriend are commissioned to drive a car from California to New York and to write a book about the experience, him doing the writing and the ex-girlfriend taking photographs. What it entails, however, is her taking photographs and him doing a lot of navel gazing.

'How are you supposed to spend your damned life?' he ponders at one point 'What is there to aspire to? Fame and money. Sex and drugs. What else is there to do with freedom?' And on it goes, which is fair enough though it doesn't make for the most riveting of reading it must be said. The problem is that there's too much self-loathing and pitifulness going on. Too much wondering where he's going to get his next bag of heroin from whilst at the same time juggling with the question as to whether he's an addict or not and if so why so? Too much junky business, as Johnny Thunders would say. The America he's describing being almost a desolate one, punctuated by cheap motels, diners and people pre-occupied with their own problems. Like an echo of the inside of the author's head, America is not a happy place.

A curious aspect of the book is when it comes to the question of how autobiographical it is? The narrator goes by the name of Billy Mud and this is clearly Richard Hell himself. The ex-girlfriend is called Chrissa and is French which suggests this is meant to be a representation of Lizzy Mercier Descloux, who was once Hell's girlfriend. The funder of the road trip and the person who wants to produce the book based on it is British and is called Jake. I was thinking Jake Riviera, the co-founder of Stiff Records, the label on which Richard Hell's debut Blank Generation EP was first released.

This all then begs the question did any of the events in the book actually take place? Did Hell ever take a road trip with Mercier Descloux and if so did they stop off at Hell's aunt's house where he ended up having sex with his aunt and being caught in flagrante delicto by Mercier Descloux, who then took photos of them in the act? Having read Hell's actual autobiography, I Dreamt I Was A Very Clean Tramp, it's entirely feasible from what he revealed in it in regard to his sexual peccadillos and his somewhat ungentlemanly disregard for discretion. 

Though does any of it matter? Of course not. Does any of it make for a great book? Well, no, not a great book as such but certainly not a bad one.

John Serpico