I Knew I Was Right - Julie Burchill

 I KNEW I WAS RIGHT - JULIE BURCHILL

The immediately striking thing about I Knew I Was Right, 'the controversial autobiography' of Julie Burchill is how short it is, clocking in at just 193 pages. All things considered, however, perhaps this might not be too much of a bad thing? I say this in the context of a lot of autobiographies being sprawling, bloated tomes recording every non-event in the writer's life elevated to preposterous heights, where a fall from a tricycle as a toddler for example apparently nudges them toward their sexual orientation in later life. Or how their Great Grandfather's penchant for dressing up in women's clothes in the trenches at Flanders is obviously a genetic thing, thus explaining a career in the theatre for the Great Grandchild. Burchill's autobiography on the other hand, if not exactly rushed, is dictated in a breathless manner, almost as if she's got an eye on it being made into a film one day and she's narrating over an introductory sequence of home movie clips before getting to the main storyline.

Where do you start with Julie Burchill? Well, in her hometown of birth in Bristol, I guess? Being a fellow Bristolian I recognise, of course, the places she talks of such as Southmead Hospital, Barton Hill (pronounced 'Bart Nil' in Bristolian), and Brislington (the area where she's from) although I don't recognise all her descriptions of these places.

'West Country life was so slow, so very, very slow' she writes, and she's half right but also half wrong, depending on your interpretation and perception of 'slow'. Compared to London, for example, Bristol can be argued to be slow but then I'd say London can be frantic. Personally, I think Bristol can be more favourably compared to Jamaica where life in the Mild West as Banksy coined it isn't so much 'slow' but 'easy going'. Bristolian life can be rudely interrupted at times by spasmodic bursts of violence but then even many of the fights I've witnessed appeared to be in slow motion and almost ballet-like, reminiscent of scenes from Sam Peckinpah films when people get shot.

One thing I do recognise is her class consciousness that in a place such as Bristol is pretty pronounced if you but care to look. 'We were thrilled the day the telephone arrived,' Burchill writes 'This was in the Sixties and we were profoundly working class, so it was like a yacht, say, would be to you people out there, whom, just between you, me and the doorpost I'll always, deep down, despise unless you started from prole position too, because that's just the way things are. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and the smart money says that if you're not from where I'm from I'll never respect you.' And I concur.

There's also her realisation as a child that the life laid out before her was not the one she wanted: 'I knew as surely as I knew my own name that if I stayed (in Bristol) I would get fucked, pregnant, married. And after that I wouldn't get anything but old.' Not that there's anything wrong with such a life if you so choose it, but to the errant working class child it's a problem if like Oliver Twist you want more, or at least something 'other'. Because there is no 'other' presented to you. There is no alternative apart from the vague notion of 'bettering yourself' by moving into the environs of middle class concerns and status symbols. Implying, of course, that working class concerns and even a working class identity is somehow less than that held by the middle class. Which, of course, is nonsense if not insulting.

And then there's the subject of books, of which Burchill says: 'It kills me when middle class kids see Not Reading as some sort of rebellion. If you don't read books, you really have been fucked over in a major way. You have been castrated and conned. To read, voluntarily, is the first step to asserting the fact that you know that there is somewhere else.' That's not necessarily so, of course, but it's pretty close.

Books (and music) saved Burchill's life and led her at the age of 17 to getting a job with the NME and her moving to London. This is where her story moves up a notch but only because it was 1976 and the Nineteen Seventies were about to officially begin with the release of Anarchy In The UK by the Sex Pistols. The NME, though not quite being at the heart of the zeitgeist was still an important and very influential place to be at that time as it latched on to the coattails of Punk Rock and went spinning into the firmament like some mad dust devil. And Burchill was there. Fencing off her NME compartment with barbed wire to keep the 'ippies out, telling Johnny Rotten that at the age of 19 he was too old, spiking Country Joe McDonald's tea with speed so as to get him talking, having sado-masochistic sex with Mick Farren, being stalked by Jane Suck, ligging with The Clash, and being propositioned by Iggy Pop for a bit of anal - and that's just for starters.

So what happened? What went wrong? With all due respect, Burchill very successfully made the leap from the NME to the national newspapers but in the process lost something along the way, or rather, something within her was brought to the fore and nurtured to the point of it being all-consuming. And that 'something' was? Conservatism. Parochial, provincial, small-town conservatism blended with a healthy dose of Stalinism, fermenting into a pretty abstract if not toxic cocktail. What does it profit a man to gain the world but to lose his soul, as they said about Elvis.

On following Burchill's timeline it was on marrying Tony Parsons and moving into a maisonette in Billericay, Essex, that it all started going Pete Tong. Her productivity may have started going up but there was a price to pay and Burchill slowly but surely mutated into the brittle monster we all know and love/loathe in equal proportions to this day. Fueled, tempered and nurtured on a steady diet of speed and snakebites progressing to cocaine binges at the Groucho Club.

'Punk was about a break with consensus', Burchill tells us and that's probably very true as is her modus operandi that she declares at the very start of her book: 'If it ain't broke, break it would seem to be my design for living'. Which just about explains everything about her.

I tend to think that had I ever met Julie Burchill, particularly in her younger days that we'd have got along quite well. Who knows? She instead, however, fell into the clutches of the Tony Parsons and Toby Youngs of this world. Then again perhaps not, maybe we wouldn't have got along at all, especially after reading this bit in her book: 'My gran lives in a modern block of flats in Barton Hill, which sounds posh but actually has a reputation of being extremely rough. Well, like the Shangri-La song said about a boy, it's good but not evil, not like Easton. We Brislington babes lived in fear of Easton; a mean sprawl of council estates and sex pests (allegedly; none of us had ever been there), it was our definite no go area. Even as I grew to be a woman of the world, the word Easton could still strike fear into my sharply shod soul.'

I've got to laugh because even though I didn't actually grow up in Easton, I lived a good number of years there (I'm actually a Meader, from an area called Southmead, renowned for being one of the genuinely most roughest and toughest areas in Bristol). Which means I'm the kind of person Burchill would have done her utmost to avoid. In fact, the combination of my roots in Southmead and my life in Easton would probably have been the stuff of her nightmares. 

What can I say? Que sera, sera. C'est la vie. For the record, however, if Julie Burchill ever does decide to venture into Easton one day I'm quite happy to put in a good word for her. Just so long as she remembers to wipe her feet before entering.

John Serpico