Mr Nasty

Mr Nasty
Cameron White
(HarperCollins)

"Let me tell you what a good deal is. You enter into an arrangement whereby you fuck over everybody concerned and screw the last dollar out of the situation." These words could well have been Cameron White's mission statement over the tenure of his drug dealing days. Actually, they were the words of a colleague at the talent agency he worked for in Los Angeles. Somehow White managed to maintain a veneer of respectability throughout his primary career.

Born into poverty in East London, White resolved at a young age to do what it took to get out. These ambitions led to ten years using and dealing whatever recreational drugs were available. His trail of narcotic (and personal) devastation took him from London to New York, LA, Bangkok, Berlin, and finally Sydney.

Often White's motivation for moving on was that he would likely be the victim of ‘ultra violence’ if he stuck around. The reference to A Clockwork Orange is not coincidental, as White and his cronies are a close fit with the brutal Droogs of Anthony Burgess' fictional book. But of course, Mr Nasty documents social realities of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Part biography, part first person account of the international drug trade, Mr Nasty takes the reader on a wired journey through London clubland, the streets of Alphabet City, Hollywood mansions, and drug flooded Sydney. There are insights into the histories of such drugs as ecstasy and cocaine, casual descriptions of gangland justice, and ridiculous hedonism.

White's London wise guy matter-of-factness is the most compelling trait of this book. The authenticity of his experience is aided by frequent admissions of his own fallibility. The rhythm of the book is marked, like a drug user’s life, by highs and lows. As a dealer, White views himself as a kingpin at one juncture, and as a pathetic loser at the bottom of the chain the next. He discovers time and again that no matter how high he climbs, there's always smarter – and nastier -people above him. And chronic sampling of the product doesn't terribly help his cause.

For all that, Mr Nasty also acts as a thesis into how hard drugs have been so casually assimilated into a broad cross section of society. And if there are more with White's rat cunning out there, you can bet they're screwing the last dollar out of the situation.

Gavin Bertram.



Fury Cross the Mersey

Wreckage
Niall Griffiths
(Jonathan Cape)

It's grim up north suggested English pop ironists the KLF in 1990. Although they omitted Liverpool from the interminable list of towns that formed the lyrics, on the strength of Wreckage it deserved a mention. Devastated by economic decline, the once thriving city suffered through the 1980s from extreme unemployment, rampant crime, and the most notorious football hooligans. Niall Griffith's fifth novel evokes the decaying city as a place populated by wannabe gangsta Scousers in fuchsia shell suits. Aimlessly they lurch from one ultra-violent episode to the next, with Stanley knife in hand. 

Always with the Stanley knife. Darren Taylor is a particular aficionado of this arcane tool. "Ee, yew an that Stanley knife. Like a kiddie with a toy yew are, see. Favourite teddy bear, like." So says Lenny the Welshman, one of the few with leverage enough to talk to Darren in such tones without having his face sliced open. He's a bit too keen Darren is, with improvised weapons like Stanley knives, pint glasses, and lump hammers. It's the lump hammer that's got him into real bother, due to its unnecessary deployment to the head of an elderly Welsh postmistress. 

Griffith's unravels this gloomy diary of desolation in a vernacular style resonant of Irvine Welsh. He goes further though, tracing a thread through the ages, creating a genealogy for this endemic violence. Further still, the consequences of it. On victim, victim's family, nurse, priest. Peeling away the strata to reveal both cause and effect of this perpetual cycle of affliction.

And nowhere redemption. Through the syntax of misery and desperation shines no light, only more of the same. Any dull illumination of Darren's wretched soul comes from the thought of future slashings. And how to spend the four thousand pounds the postmistress handed over before he whacked her. No conscience or thought of consequence here. Just "All this fuckin money, lar! We're rich Alastair!" 

And so the wreckage piles up. Grim though it is, Griffith's wildly creative language is majestic. This is the articulation of experience, the characters composites of people he has known. While that's not a reassuring thought, and may put one off holidaying Merseyside, perhaps it offers some hope. If a voice this vital can arise from such a malignant environment, there’s some dim inkling of salvation.


Gavin Bertram.

AC/DC

AC/DC
Family Jewels
(FMR)

AC/DC are like masturbation. A guilty pleasure, but perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of. Or so I'm told. Actually, they're more like the soundtrack to your life, the show band that played the anthems at those seminal moments of your glorious, misspent youth. Or maybe... I should stop stretching metaphors until they break. But what can you say about AC/DC that's useful and illuminating? What can you say about a brick that's useful and illuminating? And AC/DC are like a brick - solid, prosaic, useful, unfussy, and having a long term effect on your cranium. Not so much in common with onanism or an OST to your adolescence then, more like a slab of baked clay. And that's saying something. And there are forty such bricks here, all neatly stacked on 2 discs, covering the lengthy tenure of these little Aussie battlers. Well, 1975 to 1990 anyways. No extras, just that classic high voltage rock'n'roll. It's all here - 'T.N.T'., 'Let There Be Rock', 'Highway To Hell', 'Back In Black', 'For Those About to Rock', 'Shake Your Foundations', 'Thunderstruck', you know how the riff goes. But did you know that the boys had some of the worst, most badly aged videos in existence? Well you do now, and they're all here in their hideous splendour, including the unfortunate Fly On The Wall home video - five themed clips that are irredeemably cringe worthy. But who cares, when there's a whole disc of Bon Scott treasures, and the early stuff with Brian Johnson. And if the visuals get too much to take, just turn the fuckin' telly off and listen to the music.

Gavin Bertram.



This Is Serbia Calling

This Is Serbia Calling
Matthew Collins
(Serpent's Tail)

"It is a national interest to love President Milosevic." This was the decree in 1999 from the bullyboys who did the dirty work for the erstwhile dictator of Serbia. They were laying out the doctrine to one of the last bastions of free speech in the renegade, pariah Balkan state. Radio station B92 broadcast throughout the decade of turmoil in their country, always believing in the redemptive properties of the rock music they aired to their repressed and culturally starved peers. Of course during the 1990's their contemporaries in the free world in the west were indulging in a ten-year party fuelled by various musical revolutions.

While blood was spilt around them, B92 made sure that young Serbian's knew which direction the prevailing winds of popular music were blowing, inspiring them to keep the faith. "This is Serbia Calling" was the call sign, and Nirvana, REM, Sonic Youth, Rage Against the Machine, Tricky, Radiohead and Primal Scream the soundtrack. Collin, who previously wrote the rave history Altered State, captures this voice of resistance as a metaphor of rock music’s primal energy.

Over those ten years B92 was under constant threat - of closure, of censorship, of violence - but they persevered regardless. "Now is the worst time in Serbia this decade," said presenter Srdjan Andjelic in 1999. "This repression, people being killed, people disappearing. We have gone from Germany in the thirties to South America in the eighties...what a trip!" This period of NATO bombing, virtual siege conditions and immensely difficult living conditions almost finished B92, but their resolve is testament to the power of radio. In this age of music television and digital file sharing, the ability of a single radio transmitter to draw a community together, to communicate to the ragged masses with an all-seeing benevolence, has been all but forgotten. This Is Serbia Calling is an inspiring and moving story of what will probably be one of the last occasions when this is the case.

Originally published in 2001, the year after Milosevic's final fall from grace, this new Serpent's Tail Five Star edition features a new postscript covering these years since the conflict ceased. As Collin's discovers, the new Serbia is as fraught with tension as it was in the middle of hostilities. "A lot of people say that if this is what we were fighting for, we should have given up a long time ago," says Sasa Mirkovic. "We're living in a state of uncertainty. Chaos is all around us. We're doing things and thinking there is a light at the end of the tunnel. But how long is this tunnel and where does it go to?"

Gavin Bertram.

Fornication: The Red Hot Chilli Peppers Story

Fornication: The Red Hot Chilli Peppers Story
Jeff Apter
(Omnibus Press)

Just as in any great story, there's a critical point in Jeff Apter's Chilli Peppers biography, Fornication. A juncture that is crucial in sewing together where the story has come from and where it's going. In the case of the Chilli Peppers it happens to be one of the most shrewdly prescient moves made in the history of the music industry. Having become disillusioned with the ineptitude of EMI in selling 1989's Mother's Milk, the Chilli's were courted by all the other major labels. Just as the pen was about to touch the paper of a contract with Sony, music legend Mo Ostin stepped in and hijacked the party. The head of Warner Music, he rang all four members of the band and said "Congratulations and good luck with your career, and we're sad you didn't go with us, but I wish you the best." Suitably swayed by this benign gesture, they duly signed with Warners. This was a serendipitous moment, as they became one of the biggest acts of the next decade. Ostin's genius is that he poached the band just as they were preparing to record the career defining BloodSugarSexMagik, one of the best rock albums of the 1990s. Apter's book relates the whole crazy Red Hot Chilli Peppers caper in detail over 350 odd pages. There are numerous moments of serendipity, and just as many of abject misery, such as guitarist Hillel Slovak's heroin related death in 1988. Apter deals with the highs and lows of this quintessential Californian act with an even and sensitive hand, and it's a compelling read. Of modern rock'n'roll decadence stories there would be few more exhilarating or cautionary as this. It's just a shame that the whole berserk roller-coaster ride is related through a composite of historic interviews -at least when it comes to the band. While Apter has interviewed a lot of people associated with them, there have been no new interviews with Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Chad Smith or John Frusciante specifically for this book. From time to time it reads like one of those nasty 'Unauthorised' type of things, cobbled together for a quick buck. I guess it could be argued that what the band said at the time is likely to be more interesting than recollections, but some historical perspective would be useful. Mostly though, Fornication is constructed in such a way that you can forget this oversight and indulge in the Chilli's twenty years of exuberant mayhem.

Gavin Bertram.

The Contortionists Handbook

The Contortionist's Handbook
Craig Clevenger
(Fourth Estate)

Generally it's not worth paying much attention to those celebrity proclamations made on the covers of books. Every now and then, though, they're impossible to ignore. In the case of Craig Clevenger's debut novel The Contortionist's Handbook, Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk, and Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly aren't wrong. The effusive praise they dole out is warranted.

Over the last few years there've been numerous books dealing with the psychological factors that contribute to drug addiction - Rick Moody's The Black Veil and James Frey's A Million Little Pieces amongst them. Although its protagonist is fictional, Handbook reflects Frey's shuddering memoir, John Dolan Vincent sharing the same nihilistic tendencies.

Vincent is a master forger, who like a chameleon changes his identity to escape some phantom of his existence. We find him in the wake of his sixth overdose in two years, detained for psychiatric assessment. Without giving too many of his manifold secrets away, he's engaged in a long-term game of snakes and ladders with the Department of Mental Health. This is purely a consequence of his ongoing problems, and his increasingly futile attempts to emasculate himself from them.

The multiple personalities Vincent has created are interwoven through The Contortionist's Handbook, gradually explaining the necessity of his predicament. His parries with the County Psychiatrist offer a perfect springboard for this, while also accounting for Richard Kelly's interest in making this book into a movie. Clevenger has woven an immensely intelligent - and sad - narrative around a premise that is deceptively simple.

Gavin Bertram

Deep Beyond the Reef

Owen Scott
Deep Beyond the Reef
(Penguin)

What would your reaction be if a close member of your family were murdered? And if the authorities and the media then spread what amounted to malicious rumour about their lifestyle? Owen Scott dealt with it by writing Deep Beyond the Reef, an extremely personal and moving account not only of the murder of his brother John in Fiji, but of his experiences growing up in that South Pacific colonial outpost.

John Scott was a headliner internationally in 2000, when as director of Red Cross in Fiji he negotiated on behalf of hostages during the coup. The following year he and his partner, Greg Scrivener were viciously murdered by a young paranoid schizophrenic Fijian, Apete Kaisau. Subsequent media reports mentioned murky stories of drugs and pornography, as if the couple's sexuality made them fair game.

"Here were two people who died pretty nasty deaths they didn't deserve to die, and I just wondered what they would have said if they'd been given the chance to say it," says Owen Scott.

Like Martin Amis' incredible memoir Experience, this book is a multilayered tale of loss, family, memory and redemption. It uncovers how all these dimensions are irrevocably linked, how one strand cannot be pulled without something else being revealed.

Having lived in Europe for years, and following a period in Fiji at the trial of Kaisau and working on this book, Scott is now back in New Zealand. "Living out of my car," he laughs. Deep Beyond the Reef encompasses three books he explains. Written separately, these were a diary of the six weeks he spent in Fiji directly after the murders with John's son Piers, the story of the brothers upbringing under their despotic, alcoholic lawyer father Maurice, and an account of Kaisau's trial.

"Then I sewed it all together," he explains. "There were different reasons for writing each part of the book. I realised that everything in life is so circular, and so many things in the past mirror what is happening in the present. There were parallels everywhere."

While the portion dealing with the murders makes emotional reading, the story of familial troubles is equally compelling. "The stuff on my father was the hardest to write. He was a very complex character, he reads like fiction. It's unfortunate that my perception of him was arrested really at the age of 17. So he's an historical character to me really."

The trial also makes for extraordinary reading, and is particularly revealing of Fijian culture. "We had an extraordinary meeting between the families," says Scott. "They brought Apete Kaisau into our midst and we were holding his hand and talking to him. The prosecutor, Gregor Allan, who became a good friend of mine, said 'Mate, I've never seen the like of this in my life'. That says something good about Fiji, it's a very forgiving society."

Gavin Bertram.

David Toop

Haunted Weather

When Spaniard Francisco Lopez played at Auckland's Kenneth Myers Centre in July this year, attendees were issued blindfolds upon entry. For the unwitting, this was the first clue that Lopez' performance at the Alt.Music.3 festival would be a unique experience. Inside the darkened venue, concentric seating faced outwards, fully immersing the audience in a surround sound experience enhanced by the removal of any visual information. At the centre of the circle Lopez proceeded to sonically savage those gathered with layers of decontextualized field recordings, derived from both the natural and man made realms. The result was an astonishingly pure aural experience, spanning broad spectrums of frequency, volume, and dynamics.

This brave new world of sound for sound's sake, removed from traditional modes of performance, has burgeoned in experimental music circles over the past decade. English writer, musician and sound curator David Toop delves into an essentially hidden world of sound in his fourth book Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory (Serpent's Tail). By Toop's telling it is a truly global phenomenon, with enclaves firmly established in such far flung destinations as Glasgow, Mexico City, and in particular Tokyo. Haunted Weather is a different sort of travelogue, an intrepid journey into sound that takes in the author's experiences performing in these locales, his dreams and memories, and his sheer enthusiasm for music.

It was this enthusiasm that spurred Toop to pen Rap Attack in 1984. Now regarded as the bible of hip-hop history, Rap Attack uncovered the roots of the genre in other African American musical forms. Toop assiduously interviewed all the main players at a time when hip-hop was maligned at best. "It was a timely move really," he reflects. "People said to me 'Why are you writing this book about music that's kind of finished?' But by 1985 hip-hop had really taken off. I didn't know that was going to happen, but it just so happened that I had written the book at the right time, and that led to me getting offers, in particular from The Face magazine."

Prior to this Toop worked as a musician, and on several specialist music publications. Fed up with the paucity of income from these endeavours, he seized the opportunities Rap Attack afforded him. For a long period he was music columnist for The Face, while also contributing to Elle, Vogue, and broadsheet newspapers such as The Times. However, he was something of a reluctant journalist, constrained by conservative values and the crushing monotony of delivering stories about uninspiring subjects to deadline. "It took over my life," Toop sighs. "I was getting very frustrated because I had this totally alien background in free improvisation experimental music. After a while I just got tired of it."

1995's Ocean of Sound provided a handy escape valve from the journalistic treadmill. Sewing together Toop's multifarious musical loves, from early avant-garde electronics to Miles Davis' jazz-fusion of the 1970s, the book succeeded in defining the pulse behind the nascent ambient music of the 1990s. It was also where the impressionistic and vaguely psychotropic style that's imbued his writing since was refined. "The breakthrough for me was the idea of writing something as the thought came up," he explains. "It wasn't like a continuous narrative sequence. I'd write a short passage about something, and if an idea came up related to that, I could drop it in, like samples into a piece of music. From that point I felt absolutely liberated, it became a much looser, more poetic way of writing, more to do with making connections sideways."

Ocean of Sound plugged into a submerged world of music that was just breaching the surface of popular culture. Although bracketed with commercial electronic club music, these new ambient sounds were often resolutely experimental, both in conception and in the implementation of emerging technologies. Where avant-garde music making had previously been stunted by technological limitations, this was no longer the case. And after the cultural scorched earth of the eighties, there was a renewed interest in things contemporary. "Nobody was really interested in any kind of experimental music during the eighties," says Toop. "And suddenly there was a more open, younger, bigger audience, and there were a lot of crossovers happening between certain sorts of music that had been marginal up till then. I found that very exciting."

The opportunity to write about subjects that had long been of interest, and connect them to current cultural happenings "was a gift to me as a writer" admits Toop. Yet it was also a gift to David Toop the decommissioned musician. Because for the better part of ten years he had not actively pursued music, and since Ocean of Sound he has released seven solo albums, including Pink Noir, Screen Ceremonies and Spirit World. Performing around the world at experimental music festivals has fed back into Haunted Weather and 1999's Exotica. "There's a constant reciprocal feedback between one activity and the other," explains Toop. "In practical terms it's not always a good situation, but on the whole it is, because I kind of have two careers which are interconnected."

This hasn't always been the case though. As Toop details in Haunted Weather, for a time his attempts to take in every aural stimulus almost destroyed his desire to listen to anything. He overcame this by becoming more ruthless in his listening, and says his most recent book has reawakened a desire and excitement in him. This is evident on the pages, as Toop guides the reader through a dizzying array of ideas, drawing connections between movements separated by both geography and history. While initially it is a dense, impenetrable world, Toop’s luminescent prose makes the trip worthwhile. But he is careful to point out that he’s never wanted to evangelise to others about music. “This is what interests me and I hope it might interest other people. I try and be very clear that it's my subjective view, and I'm simply making a case for these ideas and this particular emphasis.”

Now his fourteen-year old daughter is absorbing these ideas, as she reads Rap Attack to learn the history of the hip-hop she’s listening to. “It’s funny,” laughs Toop. “Most parents go through this whole crisis about their kids listening to Eminem, and I'm one of the people who wrote about him.”

Gavin Bertram.