Backlisted - Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes

Episode Date: August 22, 2016

Slang lexicographer extraordinaire Jonathon Green joins John and Andy in this episode to discuss Absolute Beginners, the classic novel of London teenage life set around Soho and Notting Hill.Timings: (may differ due to adverts)13'25 - Beast by Paul Kingsnorth19'06 - Absolute Beginners by Colin Macinnes* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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$49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Thank you. Why would you? I've got a ten. I've got a ten. Did you hear that little higher pitch in my voice? Oh, come on. Come on, everyone. Come on, everyone, let's go glamping. Glamping, it's got to be the ugliest word. Glamping. Oh, Jonathan, surely.

It's not... They don't do it in Northampton. I'm sorry, I was going to say, we don't go outside London for our slang. Well, unless we jump to New York. Well, I'm hoping we've got a bit of slang-tastic kind of stuff. I've got some slang-tastic info, but we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. On that note, hello and welcome to Backlisted,

the podcast that gives new life to old books. As usual, we're gathered around the kitchen table in the luxurious Islington Canal side office of Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to make great books. You might hear ducks quack, you might hear kettles boil, but that's the joy of a rich audio environment. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. We're joined, as we always are, by the writer and expert, Matthew Clayton. Campologist. The public have had enough of experts, Matthew, but really have.

Kind words, Andy, kind words. And joining us today is Jonathan Green. Jonathan is a writer, historian, survivor and chronicler of the London 60s hippie underground and he is the English language's very own slang lexicographer. You can find him on Twitter at Mr Underscore Slang. Is that correct, Jonathan? That sounds good to me. All right, good. And for the last four decades, Jonathan has been cataloguing, codifying and communicating the joys of the fruitier side of the English language, leading no less person than former backlisted subjects. The person who coined the term Mr. Slang was?

Martin Amos. It's a very, very, very small footnote. Yeah. Okay. We must take what we can. We should say that, you know, just to amplify that, Jonathan is absolutely the sole proprietor, owner, compiler, editor of what I,

back when we worked together in my castle days, called the OED of the streets. But Green's Dictionary of Slang is one of the great edifices of modern reference publishing. And if you out there haven't got a copy, you should get one. And I will add to that that if, like me, you are a 60s obsessive and you read, as I did in 1989, I think I read it. 88, maybe.

I had to wait for the paperback. I got a read it. 88, maybe. I had to wait for the paperback. I got a free one. A book called Days in the Life, Voices from the English Underground, which is a magnificent, important, classic book. It's superb. Absolutely superb. You did a few oral histories as well. The oral history of... I did six.

And I did Immigrants, which I would love to do again now. Cannabis, was that an oral history? No, no, no, that was more a sort of personal journey. Also, we should mention and distinguish it in passing, Chasing the Sun, a history of lexicography. Yes, I mean, I did move on from the 60s. As much as I loved the 60s. Also, Jonathan, I met Jonathan when I interviewed him about his book Odd Job Man.

Odd Job Man is a category we're very fond of here on Batlist. It'd be a memoir. It's a biblio memoir, yes. I think it, yes, it is. Didn't you cut your teeth, Jonathan, writing erotica for Fiesta magazine? I don't think Fiesta really jibes with the word erotica. Fiesta is a top shelf title. It was wonderful. I mean, I was the letters editor of Fiesta really jibes with the word erotic. It was a top-shelf title. It was wonderful.

I mean, I was the letters editor of Fiesta for four glorious weeks. I'd broken up with a woman who'd just started the first feminist magazine in the country, Rosie Boycott, and I thought, what can I do? I know, I'll go and work for Fiesta. And we used to get these wonderful... Take that. We're not really here talking about this fiesta and we used to get these we're not really here talking about this but but we did used to get the most amazing letters i mean they say everything's made up i'm sure the letters were made up but the letters as letters written in

green ink on line paper both sides of the paper were i fear very true and i could if you like expatiate on this but perhaps i shouldn't well let's see where we get to we're moving on yeah you're here to talk to us about absolute beginners by colin mckinnis great london novel cult novel i'm gonna stay in interest here as well i consider the whole purpose of backlisted to have been to get to this point so so watch out everyone so perhaps briefly then and yes it's a time-honored fashion what else have you been reading uh so i have been reading actually to be to tell you the truth i have mostly been reading books by colin mckinnis this week but have you not read them already yes but i hadn't there's a there's well we'll come on to it i i had read them several

times when i was a teenager uh and i'd read absolute beginners i guess on average every three or four years for the last 30 years but i haven't i hadn't read the other two the novels in his london trilogy since the 80s so i went back and read those again but we'll talk about that in a minute what i want to talk about is that I was in Paris last weekend. Oh, wait. Yes, we took my niece to Paris. She's going back to Australia. She's been living here for a year. So we went to Paris for the day, and I was allowed special dispensation while my family went on the bateau mouche to leg it to the Palais de Tokyo

to go and see the Michel Welbeck exhibition. Reste vivant, to stay alive. That's quite a corgi. I'm going to explain all about it. On the front of the catalogue, which I brought with me, there's a picture of his late dog, a corgi called Clément. I bet you're sad you laugh now, aren't you? It's got a wonderful moody face.

But this exhibition, anyone who knows the things I write about will know that I'm a big fan of Welbeck. He is my favourite living writer, for better or worse, which means I spend my life telling people that Michel Welbeck is my favourite living writer, and they

go, but he's no he's awful and I say no no that's interesting because you don't understand him and we go from there but I really love his work I think he is very funny and very pessimistic in a kind of Eeyore-ish way which I really like and. And so anyway, at the Palais de Tokyo, which is, I suppose, the Parisian equivalent of the ICA, isn't it, Jonathan, really? Something of those. Yeah.

There's an exhibition that he's curated, I suppose you'd say, about the things that inform his work or things that he loves. So you pass through a series of rooms that contain, as you would expect from Welbeck, little... There's a brilliant of rooms that contain as you would expect from well bet little there's a brilliant computer screen that says against a black and white background you have no chance you have no chance continue and then a button that says okay like the like the spaghetti and i can't go on you'll go on okay and there's a room because

he's fascinated by for instance trap the the travel industry which is one of the things that he wrote about in a novel called platform there's a room where the floor is entirely made of postcards you walk across this horrible selection of postcards that have been laid out to create this awful sense of an infinity of terrible choices available to you as holiday destinations. And then there's another room which you go into where an office has been built in the middle of it. And inside the office is just the most horrible slag heap of books and records and a keyboard and a computer and some playmobil and a book of erotica and um i see that looks like my office so that's brilliant and then you go into a room of his of his pornographic photographs but then you come out into a room devoted to his late dog clemell and brilliantly

it's laid out like he lived in ireland while clemell was alive he was living in ireland it's laid out like an irish funeral parlor it has it has laminated wooden walls and a tartan carpet. It has photos of Clement on the wall. It has a piece of music by Iggy Pop playing about what is a dog. A dog is a machine for love. And in the middle is a vitrine full of, in chronological order, all Clement's toys from the time he was a puppy until he died. And it is, given in the true Welbeckian fashion, you've been through this series of terrible, filthy, alienated environments,

and suddenly you're in this room of actual love. It's incredibly moving. Incredibly moving. And so I thought it was wonderful. Clearly it won't come to the UK. But clearly it won't. Why? Well, first of all, I think it's difficult to move.

But also it's clearly been funded by those crazy French. But I was thinking what British, I can think of other British cultural figures who might do it. But I was trying to think of a British author who would do the same thing, who would have an aesthetic that you could represent in different media and people wouldn't think they were... Meads might be somewhere, you know.

Meads, yeah. Jonathan Meads. I cannot imagine an equivalent in the UK. I just cannot imagine it. No, that's kind of... He also... I want to say a run-in, but I was once, five or ten years ago,

brought in by the radio, and he was supposed to be talking about his attitude to the 60s, which, of course, is that I don't like it. Because I'd done Days in the Life, I was dragged in. And we were there, and it was 8am. And I went in, and I was looking around, and I thought, hmm, who's the tramp sitting over? And he was

sort of there, shut down in the green room. Obviously, well, it seemed to me that he was pissed as a fart at 8 in the morning. And what I realise now, and I, in my stupid naivety, and he wouldn't, he would not speak English, although I'm sure he can

because he was living in Ireland. And he was giving them a hard, hard time. And I, in my naivety, was trying to help. He must have thought I was mind-numbingly stupid, as indeed I was. You could see that I can't remember. I mean, it wasn't the start of the week. I can't remember what it was. It was something quite major on BBC

and he just could see the interviewers sweat running down their faces why can't we get something out of him he's famous, say something to us but he said nothing he gave an interview a couple of weeks ago to the FT where he said

what I sort of think is an emblematically brilliant bit of Welbeck, I simply don't care. He said, well, I'm the best novelist in the world. I bring certain problems. And the interviewer said, I'm flabbergasted. And I think, I say, but what about Philip Roth?

And Welbeck looks at me and says, no, he's repetitive. But what does he mean to people who the French adore, like David Lodge and Ian McEwan and so on, who they worship? I can't imagine he'd have a huge amount of time for Ian McEwan. Or David Lodge even less. But you know what? time for McEwan. Or David Lodge even less. But you know what? We like McEwan and we like Lodge, but we can't imagine David Lodge curating an exhibition

himself at the ICA, can we? You know, so... Can I ask a question? Yes. What percentage of the audience who went to see this exhibition is aware of what an Irish funeral parlour looks like? Presumably very few. But also it's worth saying that the audience there

were incredibly mixed in terms of ages and genders, that it wasn't, you know, furtive misogynists such as myself. There were people of all colours, creeds and genders uh there i spent a certain amount of time in paris corgis are not big in france i don't think so it's interesting that he should choose a corgi as his love object so that's what i don't see many of them i was sort of reading the exhibition that's what i'm doing. I don't see many of them. I was sort of reading the exhibition. That's what I'm saying. But, Sean, what have you been reading? Well, I've been reading The Beast, the second in a trilogy of novels by Paul Kingsnorth.

You know, should disclaimer alert and all that, that we published The Wake, which was long listed for the Booker and won the Gordon Byrne Prize and shortlisted for various others. And it is an extraordinary book, which everybody remembers because it was written in a kind of invented language

that was not modern English and not Anglo-Saxon, but a kind of an amalgam of the two, and was remarkable. This is completely different. This is set now. And it's a very, very, it's a shorter, much more, in a way, there is a sensibility that it shares with the wake. It's a very uncompromising book, more like a prose poem, really, than a work of fiction.

There's only one character, and you meet this character in a farmhouse or a half-derelict farmhouse on what one imagines is Dartmoor, being pelted by rain. It's very unclear exactly what happens except that there is a terrible accident and he's injured and he kind of manages to heal himself sufficiently to walk into the edge of the local town.

He becomes, he sees a beast, an animal, sort of beast of, you know, large, what turns out to be a large cat, you think, and becomes obsessed with hunting it and finding it and that is essentially the plot of the novel is he goes into town and he comes back again um and i'm not going to tell you whether he finds the beast or not because insofar as there is a uh a plot in this book it's it's that but it is i have to say and the character is called edward buttmaster and those who read the wake will know that buttmaster was that was the main character in

in the way it's it's very very intense in it and it's totally in that sort of almost kafka way of you know he just takes this scenario and totally milks it for as much as it can get in the landscape insofar again as there are characters the landscape is a character, the sense of Is it set in the same place? No, it's definitely different. You learn more about him through the book. You learn that he's obviously left his wife and

child to come and do this. It's not clear what he's doing or why he's doing it. But there is a sort of a sense that he's in some sense a kind of you know, he's like a hermit. You know, he's gone it but there is a sort of a sense that he's in some sense a kind of you know he's like a hermit you know he's he's gone yeah he's gone into the wilderness to fast and he doesn't eat uh he drinks a lot of water he would as i say he could manage to heal himself i'll give you go just i'll read one small passage from it how does sorry how does it relate to the wake in besides

only in a kind of you'd have to really know to call it a in a way to call it a sequel to the wake would be yeah misleading for a lot of people who might be expecting but he's referring to it as a trilogy yeah and he's doing well the idea is thousand years ago now a thousand years hence that's the plan for the trilogy and the the only the only real crossover is the name but there is a kind of a sense of a man dislocated not feeling part of the modern world not feeling able to

in a way impotent not able to but gains in power and the presentation of the beast in the book and you know the beast is kind of the landscape and is the weather and is his and it's as good as anything i've ever read on that you know that thing of that the landscape is a is a is an outward manifestation of our inner kind of state he

writes he writes i mean it's brilliant it's kind of compelling i mean you can't i'd be you know if you don't like long very long kind of sentences without much punctuation it might not be for you but if you kind of like that sort of slightly messianic strain in literature it's good but I just read you this bit because I think it um yes sorry it would be impossible for me to guess even how much time passed in this way this is when he's you know he's injured every day was the same and this was simply how it had always been every day in the stone room with the table and chair with the cupboard and the window with the white heat outside and around me i was here and perhaps had always been here or perhaps had never been here before but i didn't think much

about it i had my body to think about i had to rebuild it i was being born again in the world retraining my muscles understanding my pain so intense and and i think pretty remarkable i had very good reviews already isn't it i've read a review by um m john harrison in the gold yeah which is a terrific review i mean you know he's writing in that in that kind of tradition of sort of, it's that sort of almost Blakey and kind of visionary prose, I suppose. And I, which I'm, you know. I saw a comparison.

It wasn't in Mike's review. It was somewhere else. It's a Cormac McCarthy. Yeah. Is that? Yeah, I think there are elements. There are definitely elements. The kind of the road kind of end of Cormac McCarthy's over, maybe.

It's not really much, he's not, I mean, he's certainly ploughing his own interesting furrow in English fiction. Do you know whether he's written all three of them? No, he hasn't written the third one yet. I do know that. Right. But I have to say, you know, the Wake has been so intimately bound up with Unbound.

I was kind of slightly trepidatious reading. This is published by Faber and very well published as well. It's beautifully done. But I have to say it more than exceeded my expectations. So definitely one for that kind of person who likes that kind of book. Okay, it's time now for an advert. That kind of person who likes that kind of book. Okay, it's time now for an advert.

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Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. But now. But now. Come on. Come on, let's go. I didn't read this book 54 years ago. I finished reading it 20 minutes ago for the first time which is a bit a huge embarrassment because you know it is one of those books which i even i know everybody really should

have read particularly people who have spent as much time in soho and love london and jazz and fashion and music as much as i do but anyway hadn't read it and now i've read it and guess what two thumbs up it's really good it's brilliant it's a you know it is um but i i love that thing when you haven't read something and you read it for the first time and the language is just more it's just better than you imagine you know we we are a lot of the jonathan the last episode of batlister we we recorded was with selena goddard and was about last exits of brooklyn by hubert selby and we were saying last time this episode is almost like part two in a way because of the they're nothing like one another books but

they have cult status and yet their cult status kind of diminishes them as books because what john is saying is what we were saying about hubert selby last time that actually reading last exits of brooklyn which I never had done, I was thinking, well, this is great. This isn't good for a cult book. This is the real thing. So, Jonathan, when did you first encounter Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes?

I reckon I was 16 because it says 1964, so it's not 54 years. Actually, it's only 52. But I would give anything. I really mean it. And Andy and I have discussed this. Reading it at 16, and I've read it over the years for one reason or another, to gut it for its slang, whatever it might be for my dictionaries. But reading it again at sour old 68 i'd love to recreate the the excitement that that book brought me the the knowledge it brought me now because i'm sour old 68 i can see i can compare it with other work he did and say well he's being a bit didactic here he's recycling a few pieces he

wrote for encounter but at the time it was it was just eye-opening it was fantastic and and to cut from the book to my first visit which would have been a year or so later to notting hill and walking down into notting hill portobello particularly ladbroke grove and thinking he calls that area napoli and walking through there and suddenly going fuck fuck me, I'm in Napoli. It's heaven. I'm absolutely loving it. And it's just one of those, I mean, when you're that age, you're like a sponge.

Well, I think you are. I don't know. Now I'm just dried up, oh, God knows what. At that age, one's like a sponge and this amazing input. Ironically, because he never touches touches them there were things like the Beatles Bob Dylan so on for me Brecht whatever whatever whatever yeah but at the time 64 these things were all flooding into my life and one of the things that was flooding into my life was Colin McInnes and in particular Absolute Beginners again it was that age when you educated yourself

through Penguin Books. And although Tony Godwin, who was the great editor of the time, had changed things and put, God help us, pictures on the cover, nonetheless, I think for me, I was still of a generation which had been started off in the 30s, aggrandized in the 40s in the war, because you could put your Penguin Book into your battle dress pocket and so on and so forth we were still educating ourselves very much through penguins i was a snotty little bastard i wouldn't read pam funnily enough that's something i just bought a copy of this book called no novel reader by mckinnis which was published in 74 or 5 near the end of his life and he talks

exactly about that he talks about the effect of penguin paperbacks on generations of people who had not been able to reach books you know as you say they're kind of autodidactic element to it was suddenly you could do that if you wanted to in a way that perhaps hadn't been possible before the interesting thing with penguins also were not like their american equivalents from albeit i think Alan Lane took the idea from America. But I mean, in the specific area of writing about the young, writing about teenagers, I mean, most of the stuff that you'd get in the States in those days was written maybe by Harlan Ellison or by Hal Ellison, who was a different person, or by Wendell Brown or by a load of people.

But they would always be called things like jail bait and switchblade they were pulp they're great i love them i yeah but nonetheless mckinnis was completely different i i will echo what you're saying jonathan in as much as again i've written about this at length but i read absolute beginners as many people my age would have done in the 80s i read it in 1984 when i was on holiday in the western isles of scotland with my parents when i was 16 i love that i thought that was 1974 i don't know well i know absolutely but i read i remember reading the bit i just watched mitch read just now those last 30 pages i remember reading those on the deck of a caledonian mcbrain ferry on the way back from iona to open and the thing is

there's a phrase that i really dislike in the publishing world and in the book the world which is that you know this book changed my life and what that normally means is I really like this book but in the case of Absolute Beginners this is probably the one one or two or three maybe books that changed changed my life I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you about books now had I not read this book and also in terms of what I felt about politics and what I felt about other races and difference and the potential of being young, all those things which sound a bit like cliches, and yet they were totally true.

And so when I come back to this book now, I always come back to it. It probably is my favourite book for sentimental reasons, but I always come back to it with a slight fear that it might the magic would have gone and i have to say reading it last week i i first 30 pages i was thinking i don't know i don't know but then it got me like it always gets me i think it's there's it's unique it's a unique book it's but what it has, the spirit of it, is probably not found anywhere else. I don't think it changed my life,

but I think it broadened it enormously. And maybe that's the same as change. I'm not sure. Going back to the sponge thing, you're looking all, you're just so open, or you should be, and I know I was, to, as it were, suggestion. And for me me perhaps the biggest

suggestion was books although rock and roll and songs were also enormously suggestive as it were mckinnis just taught you a lot of stuff that i mean i'd i'd been alive i'd known that you know i was obviously a little bit younger or maybe a a lot younger, when Oswald Mosley was basically winding people up for race riots. And you could still go, when I went to Napoli, as it were, it still said KBW on the walls, keep Britain white. All that shit was still there. It was a very different place, Notting Hill, as everybody knows. I always expect when I go there now, which is not very often,

that I will be walking down streets paved with gold, but it's still the same old gate, basically. nodding hill as as everybody knows i always expect when i go there now which is not very often that i will be walking down streets paved with gold but still the same old gate basically but i don't know i mean it's it's it's just hard to say wait it had an enormous effect it was just educational i suppose and there is that element that runs through the whole of of mckinnis's work which is very didactic and the trouble i think is that it well the wonderful thing is that it's invisible it's invisible like like with dickens you don't notice i'm talking as a slang lexicographer you don't notice that he's actually written he's actually read a book about a dictionary of criminal slang but he puts it into all of the twist and you don't see the seams as again obviously mckinnis

particularly with the with the um race riot stuff had done his research had had taken it on board so on and so forth but you don't see the seams um by the time you get to his later the later books in the trilogy you do see them too much and and that's why if anybody's seen um there's a couple of films that um if you want to know sort of what notting hill was was like or the new or napoli was like no i was going to mention there's two films one of which is one of them is 10 rillington place yeah if you if you walk if you look at 10 rillington place and you see what what that area looked like then. But also there's a film.

Do you remember a film, Jonathan, called Leo the Last? I do. A John Norman film. When I was around. But even more, if you want to. I've always wanted to run a night of London geographical films. And one of them, of course, would be The Blue Lamp. Because the last five or ten minutes of The Blue Lamp, when when they have the huge chase or maybe it's not the last five anyway

there is a 10 minute chunk of the blue lamp and you and it which goes as far as i recall from westbourne park to ladbroke grove and so on i think all the way through to shepherd's bush and virtually none of that is there certainly westbourne park when you realize that the church that's in the middle of the middle of westbourne park it was not isolated but was surrounded by terraces and those things are wonderful i mean and mckinnis does that i mean i think one of the things about mckinnis that's incredibly important because people talk about the teenagers and and pop and so on and so forth which we should which we should get around but he is a london novelist i think major london yes i think that's what i and that's in perhaps is a London novelist, he's a major London novelist, and that's

perhaps why he laughs because he's he just, the bits I love, as I say, the idea I am in Napoli, this is he's portrayed it to me, he's shown it to me, and here it is in three dimensions was so exciting. I think that's

the thing, the two things that struck me, one was I'm very, very pleased I hadn't seen the film, the Julian Temple film. I didn't want to be carrying around the style in my head. You have an idea that it is a kind of a it's a sort of Tommy Steele movie.

I would rather die than see the film. Well, that was one thing. The second thing was I was much more interested what really interested me was um the londonness for sure it does make you want to go to notting hill and wander it doesn't make you want to go to soho but the the language that the dialogue in particular i think is is really it's a rest and and and not in a kind of hey, daddy-o kind of way. I mean, there's a really, it's just really,

I found myself reading and rereading passages from it and marking them and just thinking, you know, that's a, this is, it's a proper, proper literary novel. Shall I just give the synopsis before you read a bit? So I'm going to read the, this is the, this is the blurb. I'm going to read the blurb on the back of the yeah the penguin edition from 1965 with the peter blake cover it says our guide on this conducted tour of london's teenage subgroups in an astonishingly sparklingly articulate 18 year old photography he's actually 19 everyone

uh street holiday park studio artistic poses and when i can find a client pornographic with a riotous line in espresso patter from belgravia to shepherd's bush we drift with him among a colorful set of contacts and cronies crepe suzette his spade-crazy 17-year-old chick, Edward the Ted, the homosexual hoplite, zesty boy Sift, the pop song writer, in a hilarious round of the jazz dives, drinking clubs and parties of all kinds where this under-20 underworld hangs out.

Climax of this modern Mayhew comes when our likeable guide gets involved in the Notting Hill's race riots with an unexpected result. That's not a very good blurb, is it? That doesn't do justice to this book at all. What strikes me, though, is that, of course, that I would have read aged 16, because I

obviously, I'm sure you've gone through that, I'm sure everybody has, why did I pick this book up? Why did I go up to the counter of wherever it was and offer three and sixpence, which would have been a lot to me in those days, still is, and read this. I mean, it's so bad, and they cannot even sixpence, which would have been a lot to me in those days. Still is. And read this. I mean, it's so bad.

They cannot even get Ed the Ted right. He has to be Edward the Ted. And you wonder if it was some nice young boy who'd just come down from Oxford and it was, you know, you do this. I don't know. I don't know. The word John...

And Paul Sotts' review is embarrassing as well. He talks about it. Boy, it's a real gasser. The thing about the language, if I may tout my slang hat for a while, is that it's very good. He makes up, is that he,

you look at, no, no, no, I'm talking about the slang. And the slang he uses, which is, he uses about 200 words in it, is, it's right that's the point it's right he makes up a few things i think i mean i don't i've never found he right at

the beginning he uses the word felix to mean penis which and he talks about in the context of of skyscrapers and tower well tower blocks i think he's talking about and he talks about felix's rise into the clouds cloud kisses and so on. And I think that was him having fun, maybe, you know. But most of what he uses is very much from what he says. See, I think that's on the first page, right? Yeah, it is. And the line says...

Prove me wrong. No, no, I'm just... Yeah, yeah. Like Cinerama, you can see clean new concrete cloud kisses rising up like felixes from the old Englishy squares. See, I thought what I read that as, and what I've always read that as, is he's getting the word phoenix wrong. But he thinks he knows it all,

which is a big part of the character of the narrator. When your life is dedicated to collecting 1,400 symptoms of the word penis and many other things, I'm afraid it becomes very narrow. But I think that's how I saw it in 1964. And it's interesting. Maybe it's a combo. I don't know. And when he, I think, Zip, when he uses that Zips, when I think he's talking about drugs or's a combo. I don't know. And when he, I think, zip,

when he uses about zips, when I think he's talking about drugs or is it drink, I can't remember, he talks about zips and he's talking about by which he means sips, small quantities. As far as I know, that doesn't exist anywhere else. There's a few like that. And there's one or two things I can't, there's one word that he puts

in there, and this is me being so pedantic. He uses the word wrought to mean upset which is hugely common in australia and completely non-existent as far as i'm aware in the uk at the time and we should say that he had he was brought up in australia yes that seems very he's well he's a voyeur is he not and that's an enormous and not only is he didactic he's also i think teaching himself and he's he's telling us what he's learning and and that the the excerpt from horus over that i quite like yeah yeah we'll get to that yeah is is is saying that just on the felix thing it just made me think because i just read the last right there's a

great little paper he gets a lift at the end by Mickey Ponderosa. And Mickey didn't seem to approve of this, although I thought the cat might be flattered. He said, I thought the cat might be flattered, meaning him. He said once, a Roman always a Roman. And in every country there were horrors as well as felicities. That was the word he used. I just thought that sort of Felix.

Felicity is not a word you get. John and Jonathan were both talking about London, this is a book about London I just want to read one paragraph which I think illustrates how McInnes writes about London but they also illustrate something else that I just want to

bring attention to because I love it so much in this book this is like in the first section so I went out of the dubious, which is a drinking club. I'm just about to go. I had exactly the same passage. There you go. So I went out of the dubious to catch the summer evening breeze.

The night was glorious out there. The air was sweet as a cool bath. The stars were peeping nosily beyond the neons, and the citizens of the queendom in their jeans and separates were floating down the shaftsbury avenue canals like gondolas everyone had loot to spend everyone a bath with the bean assaults behind them and nobody had broken hearts because they were all right for the easy summer evening the rubber plants in the espressos have been dusted and the smooth white lights of the new style chinese restaurant

not the old mar jong categories but the latest thing with broad glass fronts and daycron curtainings and a beige carpet over the interiors were shining a dazzle like some monster telly screens even those horrible old anglo-saxon public, all potato crisps and flat stale ale and puddles on the counter bar and spittle, look quite alluring, provided you didn't push those two-ton doors that pinch your arse and wander in. In fact, the capital was a night horse dream. And I thought, my lord, one thing is certain, and that's that they'll make musicals one day about the glamour studied 1950s and i thought my heaven one thing is certain too i'm miserable i mean first of all so that's beautiful right but the second thing to say about it and the thing that the thing that johnson and i were

talking about this week for me the reason why this book still so why it spoke to me then and it still works now is it captures uh that adolescent mixture of front and vulnerability better than any other book i can think of bar none bar none that there's some that sense of the guy who's got all the answers but at some level saying please someone hug me is is so powerful the only the analogy that i i mean it's coincidentally it's a mod thing but the analogy the thing it most reminds me of is quadrophenia yeah because it's a similar kind of jimmy and quadrophenia in whichever version you care to take but jimmy and quadrophenia is is that fantastic mixture of street fighter and kid kid having a nervous breakdown incredibly vulnerable but with all the chat and that to me seems to be the thing

that in absolute beginners you know jonathan we were saying mckinnnes is probably not a great novelist though this is a great novel and I almost feel with Absolute Beginners that there's some happy almost accidental coming together of his talents, vernacular timing that lead him

to produce this amazing book which is not quite you know conscious. I don't think that because he's he's he's born in 1914 so we're talking about somebody who's no longer a baby almost as old as me but it's not but he's and there's there's certain elements in which as we say he's a voyeur he's he wants to teach us stuff but But somehow it all comes together in Absolute Beginners. And as you say, it worked for you in the 80s. It works for John now.

And it certainly worked for me back then. But I don't think he knew quite what he was doing. Because you can be very cynical and say, well, he did the bits, as I said before. He did the bits on pop stars and so on and so forth. And teenagers. And there's one called Sharp Schmutter about clothes. i said before he did the bits on pop stars and so on and so forth and on the way and teenagers and on there's one called sharp schmutter about clothes all for encounter in the late 50s very early 60s and you can see they're being brought together in certain ways not but again not obviously to create certain areas of absolute beginners to create the atmosphere not the dialogue but the atmosphere and and but he transcends it he manages to transcend it and the fact that the three of us

reading it at different times initially still find it a fascinating book is a huge tick as it were i should have a better word but it's an enormous encomium to go to the other end of the vocabulary that he managed to do this and he doesn't do it in the others unfortunately he doesn't and when you move outside the trilogy i i tried to read other stuff and i didn't enjoy that so the thing about mckinnis as a novelist to his credit is that even within these three london novels city of spades absolute beginners mr love and justice he's not trying to write the same book every time he's he's trying to write a different kind of novel every time unfortunately with mixed results because either he doesn't have this kind of lucky thing to to access or else the the setting doesn't quite match the subject.

He's trying too hard, dare I say. The other book I think is worth mentioning is Crust on its Uppers. By Derek Rayner. By Derek Rayner, in fact, by Robin Cook. And the interesting, the Crust on its Uppers, I mean, there are very few, dare I, I'd almost say no books about the 60s. And I raised my fingers at that point in quotes, because one of the things weups were doing it. Evelyn Moore was still knocking stuff out. Kingsley Amos was still knocking out whoever it might be. The likes of me look to America anyway. But the two books that actually,

they're both really late 50s books, but they segue into the 60s. And the one is Absolute Beginners and the other is the Chelsea set book, is is some the chelsea set book which is crust on its others and there's a character in absolute beginners called the ex-deb of last year and you can see that's the world she comes from and it's a very different world but there's no way that i as a 16 year old could have related to that at all jonathan needs to turn me on to it but much much later and it's a fascinating book. It's a wonderful book.

But it hasn't got the feel for the world in the same way at all. I just wanted to say something, though, about the narrator in the book, that English Holden Caulfield type of narrator. But he's very, it's incredibly honest. It's very difficult with cult books because it's so connected in most people's minds this book with the with the coffee bar culture with i guess the proto mod you know he's brilliant on on clothes on dress sizes on fashion you know very very detailed accounts of the clothes that people are wearing but there's one passage i like took this

this very same this deb of last year says i mean about being honest about the teenage experience i really like this but he said she held my arm and said tell me a secret about you teenagers do you have a very active sex existence which is a pretty good question and then they can't keep off it no i replied we don't and as a matter of fact what i said was true because although you often see teenagers boxed up together in a free and easy intimate sort of way it doesn't very often reach the point of no return but in the kingdom we reside in the firm belief of the venerable seems to be that if you see kids out and about enjoying themselves then fleshy vices

must be at the bottom of it all somewhere not just as it often is frisking and frolicking and having a carefree ball which is i felt was an authentic insight and that's what i remember what teenagers are always assumed to be you know shagging each other senses actually the truth is that they're dressing up having fun and not doing the best hoping for the best i'm just gonna i'm just before we say anything more i just want to do the the little potted biography of mckinnis because then we can talk a bit about how he came to write this particular book so he was born in 1914 died age 61 on the 22nd of april 1976 he was the son of the singer james campInnes and the novelist Angela Thirkle.

He was the great-grandson of the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Byrne-Jones. Was he? Yeah. That's quite a tenuous link that you missed there. He was the cousin of Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. Yeah. It's a collection of literature. When he was a boy, the family decamped from...

They lived in Kensington, then they moved to Australia. He grew up in Melbourne, only returned to England in in his teens so he's like a really interesting mixture of this is what tony gould says in the biography he's like a mixture of edwardian intelligentsia australia in the 1920s and london's post-war bohemia and he habitually described himself mckinnis habitually described himself as quote an english london-born, Australian-reared Scot. And fundamentally, he was a journalist and a radio pundit. He used to appear on Today, or the equivalent thereof, he used to appear on a programme called The Critics regularly.

He wrote 1,500 radio scripts for the BBC. He hacked them out. So how old was he when The Critent McKinna's came out? Mid-40s. And he's the author of seven novels, the first of which is To the Victor the Spoils, which was published in 1950, the last of which is Out of the Garden in 1974. And he also wrote a very successful book of essays called England Half English, which was published in 1961. book of essays called England Half English, which was published in 1961. I found a wonderful phrase to describe McInnes. This biography is called Inside Outsider. And McInnes never, never really fit, never really fitted anywhere. And he's described in the biography by several

people as, quote, the rudest man I have ever met. Did he like a drink? He very much enjoyed a drink. But also there's a wonderful description of someone who knew him for a long time and was friendly with him, who said that McInnes was, he was someone who had been borrowed from death. That he was the saddest and loneliest man that i ever met he's always had his face pressed up to the window was always looking to belong while at the simultaneously telling everybody to piss i mean it is quite a sad novel yeah well we the i don't want to give

the ending away but the ending is very bittersweet jonathan you were gonna say i was just thinking there but and it takes you know the counterculture I was just thinking, though, and it takes, you know, the counterculture, when you start going back to it, and it's a little bit later than all of this, obviously, a decade later, maybe one little less, but eight, seven or eight years,

but it was actually powered by not exactly people like McInnes, but it was powered by Australians and by Americans. It was powered by outsiders. And in a way, he fits in that because they want to know. They want to know in a way much more than those of us who already think we know. And that was very much true.

And it was one of the things I noticed when I was doing Days in the Life, the oral history of all this stuff, is how many people, the real movers and shakers, and the obvious one being someone like richard neville or jermaine greer people of that nature they they had they'd not started off in the uk and they were telling us about what we were doing richard was certainly that he was a very good editor an oz magazine which he ran which i think mckinnis might have written a couple of pieces he did yeah he did and and he did. And McInnes was of that type.

There's also obviously a strong streak of George Orwell there, particularly in essays like The Daily Express Families. Yes, which he says, doesn't he? Yes, he does. He fronts up. He doesn't pretend it's not the case. Not, dare I say, I mean, because it's sub Orwell, it's really in the end rather thin. But that's by the by.

It's when he's telling us stuff that we haven't noticed. It's when he's explaining stuff. Well, I say we, this is for 16-year-old people. One of the things I'm wondering, though, I've been trying to look up what the reviews were like back then. And I must admit, having looked through newspaper databases i can't find well i must say somebody on somebody on twitter told me to go and look at you never had it so good never had it so good by dominic sandbrook because first of all it contains some of the reviews of the book and they are they are mixed but mixed in the true sense yeah rather than

mixed meaning bad they They are genuinely... Some good, some bad. But also Dominic Sandbrook really gives Absolute Beginners a pasting. And he describes it as like a pale copy of Catcher in the Rye. And you know what? Dominic Sandbrook, I hope you hear this. It doesn't lie to me either. Because you didn't get it. You didn't get don't because you don't you didn't get it

you didn't get it no no you didn't get it but you still had to write something I mean I know I did mention Holden Caulfield earlier

but it's not like Catcher in the Rye at all you know what Catcher in the Rye the thing about Catcher in the Rye is Catcher in the Rye

is a great book I'm not going to start going with no good it's a great book but the things that make it a great book are for the most a great book. But the things that make it a great book are, for the most part, orthodox and literary. The things that make Absolute Beginners a great book is that it plugs into all these other traditions which Salinger could never get within a million miles of because it's not his world.

Jonathan, you brought something with you, which I'm keen to get in. What is that? Well, you brought a little thing about McInnes, which you had interviewed Horace Ove. Yeah, Horace Ove was in, I suppose, Michael De Freitas, later Michael X's entourage, and part of the English Black Power movement. And he, as this piece explains,

was the person who took the photos for the cover of absolute beginners and indeed on your on your i'd never seen that picture before it's wonderful much better dare i say than the cover of absolute beginners which is a strange edition which was published in 69 called visions of london the great mcg and T. I mean, this was an interview I did with Horace, who was by then, I think, teaching at Goldsmiths in 1987. And it goes like this. Colin McInnes was an angry white man, angry with his world, his own class,

angry about the way the white working class were treated in this country, angry about the way blacks were treated in this country. And he wanted to do something and he wanted to expose himself to it. Actually, he was one of the only writers I can think, I can't think of any others even today, that wanted to write about black people, live among black people, get beaten up by black people, sleep with black people, eat with them and wrote about them. And he understood them because he exposed himself in the most dangerous situations to find out. And as a parenthesis, Horace is obviously talking more about City of Spades than he in the context

of the absolute beginners. And he did understand black people, but his only fault that he was pushing too hard. He was angrier than the black people he talked to. So although black people got involved with Colin and understood him and he helped a lot, they were a bit scared of him in a way. Because he would get very upset if he didn't understand what was going on and what you should do with it. He was the only person who wrote an interesting article about Michael X after everybody else had condemned him. I found him very interesting because I got very friendly with Colin. I first met him in a room with several other people and I didn't know who the hell he was. And he was talking about cannibalism in the Caribbean and how the Caribs ate people. And I

didn't know who he was. And I said, you're talking bullshit, man. There's no cannibalism in the Caribbean. And he said, don't you tell me that. What do you know about it? I'm telling you there is. And I said, no. And we had a heated argument. What he didn't realize was that before coming to the UK, I'd been working with a paleontologist, working with a very old German anthropologist who'd spent 30 something years trying to find out whether there was any cannibalism in the Caribbean. And he discovered that there wasn't any fucking cannibalism and it was some kind of folklore they could have been just eating monkeys but colin had this naive attitude he couldn't believe this and he wouldn't believe it and after the argument he said well i like that i like it when someone attacks me and that's what he loved

he wanted someone to fight back and i got to know him and he took me into mcgibbon and key and demanded that i did some of his book covers so I did Absolute Beginners and the others I mean that's a great I feel I feel I should I should also add that in terms of certainly in City of Spades some of the language that's used probably hasn't worn very well very of its time yeah but also being on this road, which I've never found in any other context. But also, you know, that criticism that we were talking about, about, you know, his attitudes are colonial is probably one way

of putting it. And yet he's trying to do something in an era where there was no language for it. This is what it comes down to. This is what we discussed.

This is, in the end, you can say, this wasn't quite right and that wasn't quite right and it's too didactic and it's too voyeuristic and so on but he did it and what the one thing i did experience which with respect to you all and no one else would have been there was that it was the first time anybody had done it for us in the uk in london at the time and that was remarkable yeah for that i i'm in his debt forever and i'm in his i'm in

his debt forever for writing a book that apparently i in my state of arrested adolescence i can never quite get away from i'm going to give it to my 19 year old 18 year old when i get home because i think he'd absolutely love it and i you know i sort of think it is a good good book for teenagers to read i wish i'd read it when i was a teenager. The number of people, fascinatingly, obviously I've been talking about my book, and people will often ask me, what's your favourite book, or what's a book that would get people reading?

I often mention Absolute Beginners, and fascinatingly, John, you said it when we started, well, everybody knows this book. You know what? This book is being forgotten. Yeah. It is in the process of passing into history that how few people have heard of it it's partly because of the film because the film killed the book but also i guess and the number of people who've read it not everyone has

read it and loved it i won't you know make a false claim there, but many have. And many people have said to me, this should be on the curriculum. This is a book that's dealing with things, albeit in ways that are worth discussing from a historical perspective, but things that are happening in the UK now. I wonder if it's falling on the wrong side of the political correctness divide. I wonder if that's slightly that it just is a little bit too kind of lively to um i i i don't know i don't do pc slang doesn't do pc um but i i can't i don't know i mean as i say i just well it wasn't a problem i had to come up against at the time whether it would now be consigned to the grim ranks of young adults, I hate to think. I know.

I hope not. It's too good for that. I hope not. Hey, Matthew. Yeah? Hey, Andy. Do you have any yet more tenuous links to this book? Yes, I've got one to finish this up.

Or tenebrous links. Tenebrous links. So I've got a link, in fact, to a previous podcast of ours. Wow. Which is a bit meta. That is self-referential. So in a previous podcast we did

Andrew Melkin and talked about Raymond Chung. High Window, yes. That's right, High Window. High Window. And I was delighted that there was a line

in High Window about Pink Headed Bug that the Leeds art punk band Three Johns had turned into a single. And I was delighted to read Absolute Beginners because on about page 10,

Colin talks about teenagers going to record shops and he uses the phrase teenage nightingales to wax, which remarkably the Three Johns also stole and turned into a song. Well, having now got my taste for McInnes, should I read the trilogy? Should I read City of Spades next? City of Spades, yes.

Whether you read Mr. Love and Justice, you should read it because you're a completist, I'm sure. And it's necessary. But you'll get, I fear, more and more cross. Right. They're fascinating. Yeah. You know so much you you know

i mean there's stuff in for instance mr love and justice which at the time was fascinating because forget the pink whore relationship just talking about places in the east end which were only black sailors were going there and so on and so forth that doesn't exist anymore back to the london thing and on the london level those books are very good they are not absolute beginners they're they're for me they're too didactic yeah i'm gonna say i agree with jonathan i mean i think city of spades is well worth reading and england uh england half english is actually worth reading in terms of his essay just some not all but some of them are absolutely terrific. I was, you know, you were talking about

the three Johns, Matthew. This book has given me so much, right? And I read it because I like the jam. And the jam had a single called Absolute Beginners. Right?

That's why I read it. It's 1981. And there's a lyric in Absolute Beginners. Again, when I was like, you know, 13, didn't mean so much to me. It's got the lyric lyric it's like Weller

is trying to find the essence of the book this is from Wellbeck to Weller that's my next book, and the other way around Weller to Weller he's trying to find the essence of the book, it's just these two brilliant lines, I need the strength to go and get what I want

I lost a lifetime thinking of it yeah it's that brilliant mixture of front and regret i think that's the thing that's so powerful in the in this book for me can i ask you one last question jonathan did you was it was it one of the books that i mean you know your later career as a slang lexicographer did you that when you were reading it as a 16 year old was it the language that kind of stayed with you? I don't think, not in this particular book, no. I would love to think that I was this sort of micro, micro slang lexicographer, but actually I wasn't that bad. Well, I think on that brilliant note, shall we end it?

Thanks to Jonathan, to Matthew Clayton, as ever, to producer Matt Hall, and thanks once again to our sponsors, Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at BacklistedPod, on Facebook, facebook.com forward slash backlistedpod, and on our page on the Unbound site at unbound.co.uk forward slash backlisted. dot co dot uk forward slash backlisted um and if you if you use the if you use the uh extraordinary uh antiquated system known as itunes yes to listen to backlisted uh we'd be grateful if you could rate us or leave a review or you know it all helps us spread the word so humble yeah thanks for listening we'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then,

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