BRUTE! by Malcolm Bennett and Aidan Hughes

Promising Sheath-busting romance!!! Two-fisted action!!! and Hard-boiled adventure!!! this is a compendium of ‘pulp nasties’ from the cult BRUTE! comic book of the 1980s. The stories were highly stylised pulp fiction, loosely based on films and observations of contemporary British life, all illustrated by Hughes’s distinctive artwork and driven by hard talking dialogue.


An admirer of Hughe's work with rock band KMFDM, I first discovered BRUTE! through his website, then somehow tracked down this collectors’ edition second hand. I’ve never seen a copy since, so I’d rather this one didn’t get left in the pub... As it happens, the public house features regularly in the comics. This excerpt comes from the episode PAC-MEN!:

WANTED! P.A.C. – MEN! The Pub Action Committee NEEDS YOU! Enrol Today!

Unemployed Noska sees the ad in the job centre window. And applies!

“We are the Pub Action Committee and we are looking for good, war-waging commandos for our squad. We’re brutal messy cruel and vengeful. But we’re fair. We have to be. We’re talking ALCOHOL!”

Job taken! His mission? Recently people have been staying at home, not drinking:

“We must get these people away from the TV and BACK INTO THE PUBS!!!”

On his first night, Noska is sent out with the platoon:

“Right men!” barked the Squad Commander, resplendent in his Kronenbourg Combat Kit. “Let’s get out there! If anyone resists, subdue him and administer this!” He lifted a half-gallon flagon. “This is pure spirit, Gold Label and Scrumpy!”

But Noska’s squad find two old folk who won’t drink! His parents!!!

“Mum! Dad!” he croaked. “OH NO!” Noska’s parents were later committed to a new anti-TV. wing at the centre, while he was jailed for conspiring with known health freaks.

Now that’s a lesson to us all. OFFICIAL!!!

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

Starting, in my mind, with one of the best opening lines in contemporary literature - It was the day my Grandmother exploded - Iain Banks’ The Crow Road is the story of the McHoan family, mainly viewed through the eyes of youngest scion Prentice.


Tragedy and untimely death seem to stalk the McHoan clan; the exploding grandmother falls off a ladder in the beginning of the book, and the central story concerns the mystery of Prentice’s Uncle Rory, missing for many years.

There are glorious descriptions of alcohol throughout, and being a Scottish writer, Banks includes copious references to whisky. Flicking through the book I was spoilt for choice: In the end, I decided to pick a scene I recall very clearly from when I first read it back in 1996. Prentice has gone to a family party the day after Hogmanay, only to discover the his elder brother Lewis is now going out with Verity, the woman Prentice has lusted after from afar for years. Distinctly put out, he gets stuck into the booze:

I went through to the dining-room and helped myself to a pint of the neuron-friendly punch that Uncle Hamish always made for the event... We sipped - or in my case gulped - the weak but tasty punch, nibbled on Aunt Tone’s buffet-bits, and played Alternative Charades; an invention of my father’s in which one first has to guess the category of the thing one is being asked to decipher.

No easy task for a man who has rather rapidly got through a skinful of punch.

My last memory is of trying to mime Rare Gynaecological Disorders, preparatory to attempting Toxic Shock Syndrome. But apparently people insisted that one stand up to do one’s piece, and I - successfully acclimatised to the horizontal by this time - refused to pander to this sort of nit picking, and so passed my turn on to my Cousin Josh with as much good grace as I could muster.

Outrage is only moments away. Prentice, oblivious to the world by now, only finds out exactly what he said to his brother and his girlfriend, in front of everyone in the room, when his mother speaks to him the next day. She lets him have it chapter and verse:

I felt the blood draining from my neck like somebody had opened a valve in my ankle... “And I think we all successfully worked out what ‘doing the Delta Foxtrot’ was, as well, before you became totally incoherent.”

Prentice spends the rest of the day apologising and trying to recover with Irn Bru and spring water...

Never a Normal Man by Daniel Farson

Daniel Farson has been dead over a decade now and was long off British Television screens by the time I was watching regularly, so it was by chance that I happened upon a reference to him online. After discovering that he used to drink (a lot) in Soho in the fifties, I decided to inquire further and got this weighty autobiography out of the library.


Written when he knew he was dying, it is incredibly frank and self deprecating, sometimes to the point of distraction, but never for too long; Never a Normal Man is a most entertaining read. It begins while he is travelling in Istanbul, wandering around looking for rough trade and getting soused on raki, the clouded silver poison which propels you into the vicious circle where you need another raki to start the day and continue to oblivion and obliteration.

Not long after his national service he started as a photographer for Picture Post. Finding himself in Soho one morning, he had his first encounter with portrait photographer and artist, John Deakin:

As I waited for the pubs to open, a new experience for me which was to be repeated for the rest of my life, I was sure that something wonderful might happen. Soho exuded optimism; it was a land of anticipation sometimes realized. A man in dark glasses tried the door of the York Minster... Following him inside as the pub opened, I watched as ordered his first drink, downed it, shivered, and sighed with heartfelt relief. “That’s better.” As the York Minster, better known as The French Pub, began to fill up, I was startled to hear friends asking each other if they need to apologize for their behaviour on the night before...

This is his introduction to a man of whom, when he arrives on a visit, Farson says:

The phrase ‘fell out of a train’ is used lightly, but Deakin did so literally.

Soho in this period was full of such characters and he made lifelong friendships with Deakin and the painter Francis Bacon. Farson became a household name from his documentary television programmes, before giving it up to run a pub, which of course, lost him a stack of money. He finished up broke and living in Devon, away from the fading lights of the West End.

I have always been a lousy drunk, wild, euphoric and abusive after that beautiful preamble, and the terrifying thing is that I have not improved in forty years. If anything it has got worse with age, he writes, describing how his career was compromised by several court appearances for being drunk and disorderly. Nevertheless, it’s a remarkable autobiography by a remarkable man, now sadly vanishing from the pubic eye; the book appears to be out of print and my copy hadn’t been out of the library for a year.

Bodies by Jed Mercurio

I first came across Bodies a few years back when I was doing a stint as a judge on the first novel award panel for the Guildford Book Festival. It turned up as one of the debuts and I was impressed by the pace and the writing. It also has a rather gruesome passage about a street drinker which is one for the ‘pains’ and ‘perils’ of the 120 Units ethos.


The anonymous narrator is a junior doctor a hospital working in A+E. It’s hard edged stuff; mistakes are made, people die, a consultant’s competence is severely questioned although nobody wants to blow the whistle. The doctor’s affair with a nurse is written in the same visceral prose as the hospital episodes to disconcerting effect. Underneath it all is a pitch black gallows humour which seems at some points to be the only thing keeping the narrator going.

The book’s footnotes offer an opportunity for light relief, explaining various medical and non medical terms. One of the arrivals in A+E is described as an alky:

Alky: alcoholic (traditionally defined as a person who drinks more than their doctor).

The drunks in A+E are put into three categories:

PFO: pissed, fell over. PGT: pissed, got thumped. PDE, pissed, denies everything.

Amongst all of this, the street drinker comes in having vomited blood:

Maybe he once had a beer belly but it’s gone the way of the house and the wife and the clean clothes. His skin is white, his arms and legs bone thin. His abdomen creases in rolls, rolls of skin, not fat. A beard tangles over the lower half of his face streaked grey and clumped with debris. He can’t shave because of the tremors. I’m asking questions. Vomit breath stinks out the cubicle. “What colour was it? Was it food or liquid you’d taken down earlier? Was it dark green? was it red with blood? Was it very dark brown like coffee grounds?”... “Coffee grounds*,” he says as if he’s said it before. [*Coffee Grounds: the standard description of blood from an old gastric bleed (fresh blood is, of course, red).]

The man won’t make the end of the book, and neither will the narrator as a doctor. The jury still seems to be out as whether it’s a brave exposé of hospital practice or whether Mercurio is a jaded and bitter man who should never have gone into the profession on the first place. The novel ended up as second fiddle to a successful TV series, so criticism seems a little pointless now...

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

This entry came about after a discussion with my cousin about our mutual antipathy to Thomas Hardy which doesn’t exactly sound like a recommendation... However, I then remembered that the Mayor of Casterbridge opens with the infamous scene where a man sells his wife at auction while drunk, so I reckoned that for the purposes of 120 Units it was worth another look.


Field labourer Michael Henchard arrives at a country fair with his wife and daughter. Spotting the refreshments tent, is about to slip under the sign Good Home-brewed Beer, Ale, and Cyder when his wife insists that they go for a pot of furmity instead. In retrospect this might have been a mistake... Furmity is wholesome stuff; a mixture of corn in the grain, flour, milk, raisins, currants, and what not, but it’s a little dull on its own. Henchard turns back to the woman serving the slop and catches her eye:

He winked to her, and passed up his basin in reply to her nod; when she took a bottle from under the table, slily measured out a quantity of its contents, and tipped the same into the man's furmity. The liquor poured in was rum... The man finished his basin, and called for another, the rum being signalled for in yet stronger proportion. The effect of it was soon apparent in his manner, and his wife but too sadly perceived that in strenuously steering off the rocks of the licensed liquor-tent she had only got into maelstrom depths here amongst the smugglers.

Before long, Henchard is royally Brahmsed and starts to get argumentative with his wife. There’s a blazing row and he sets up an auction, finally selling her to a sailor for five guineas. Silence descends as the transaction is completed:

He rose and walked to the entrance with the careful tread of one conscious of his alcoholic load.

In the way of Nineteenth Century literature, Michael becomes hugely successful and eventually attains the title of Mayor of Casterbridge, but his shameful past comes back to haunt him. Finally ruined and reduced to vagrancy, Henchard leaves Casterbridge and dies in a hovel, leaving a brief will:

…no murners walk behind me at my funeral, & that no flours be planted on my grave, & that no man remember me. To this I put my name, Michael Henchard.

And one day I suppose I ought to read the rest of the book...

The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten

Rosten describes his book on language as a relaxed lexicon of Yiddish, Hebrew and Yinglish words often encountered in English, plus dozens that ought to be... An entertaining foray into Jewish culture, it’s filled with jokes, anecdotes and wit; a perfect book for bedside reading.


This is however a blog on booze, not linguistics, so I’m only quoting from one entry in the book: shikker.

1. A drunk. ‘He’s a shikker.’
2. (Adjective) Drunk. ‘She got a wee bit shikker.’

Rosten points out that in Jewish folklore and literature the souse is almost unknown but he does go on to say that the goodness of wine is frequently mentioned in the bible.

The rabbis also believed that wine possessed splendid curative properties: ‘Wine is the greatest of all medicines.’ ‘Where wine is lacking, drugs are necessary,’ Rabbi Huna said. “Wine helps to open the heart to reasoning.’

I’ll drink to that. Although Rosten then quotes an old saw:

When one man tells you you’re shikker, hesitate; when two tell you, slow up; when three men tell you – lie down!

I’ll leave with the obligatory joke at the end:

In the lounge of a Catskill resort, an hour before the dinner hour, Mrs Meckler asked Mrs Smelkin, ‘How about a cocktail before dinner?’ ‘No, thanks. I never drink.’ ‘No, why not?’ ‘Well in front of my children, I don’t believe in taking a drink. And when I’m away from my children, who needs it?’

The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall

The closest I have ever come to getting a tattoo was while reading Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo, a novel written with such beauty and detail of the art of tattooing that it’s almost persuasive.


Cyril Parks grows up in Morecambe in the early part of the twentieth century. With his natural gift for drawing, he is soon taken under the wing of the local tattooist (or ‘scraper’), Eliot Riley. Riley is a fantastic literary creation, and if I have any fault with the book it’s that he’s killed off too soon. A smooth tongued charmer, a brilliant tattoo artist, and a raging drunk, he agrees to take Cyril on as an apprentice, then proceeds to get him pissed at his local pub:

Four drinks into the afternoon Riley’s lessons were expanding, philosophically, and Cy was feeling a very dull and blurrish head on him, trying to keep up with his employer’s pace... As stout gave way to spirit, Riley proceeded onto personal matters.

Riley teaches Cyril his trade, and covers him in tattoos as well, but as Riley’s hell raising and drinking worsen, Cyril Parks becomes his guardian angel, the antidote to all the venom. It’s Cyril who gets him out of fights, rescues him from the outraged and the violent, takes him home when he’s collapsed drunk in a gutter. One night the pier catches fire and the looters move in before it finally burns to the ground:

...Riley and six other men sat drinking beer as fast as their oesophagus tunnels could convey it to their stomachs in the Pier Bar. Then just Riley, daft with alcohol and alone, pouring another glass of ale as the fire crept past him on the counter, singeing his jacket sleeve, until, hearing that some skinflint idiot was left inside the now-prodigal inferno, Cy ran in and screamed murder at Riley and called him Eliot and hit him for the first time in his jaw to get him to follow him out.

Riley, of course, pushes his luck too far, and one morning his working hand is mutilated by his enemies, and he is lost to his trade, and then to his life. He drinks himself to death, finally succumbing to a bottle of bleach he has stolen from a doorstep.

Cyril ups sticks across the Atlantic and moves to Coney Island, plying his trade as the Electric Michelangelo. And in the end, I never got that tattoo.

The Take by Martina Cole

Returning to a gangland theme, I recently picked up a copy of Martina Cole’s The Take, a story of organised crime and family betrayal from Britain’s best selling author. I was drawn to Cole by this fantastic interview in The Guardian ('The Booker prize money wouldn't even keep me in cigarettes') and finally got about to taking one of her novels out of the library.


The Take follows the life of career criminal Freddie Jackson, East End ‘face’ and drink and drug fuelled nutter. Freddie puts away the sauce, but not quite to the same degree as his long suffering wife, Jackie, who is slipping into alcohol dependency. Finally, it looks like Freddie has gone too far, even for Jackie. At eleven in the morning, self-destruction beckons:

She burped, and tasted the tannic cheapness of the wine, then she topped up the glass and drank once more. She need oblivion and she knew that today of all days it was not to be hers. This was far too serious to anaesthetise with wine or vodka. This needed brandy or even whisky.

There are some great descriptions of the ravages of booze throughout the book: A copper with the beer gut and the weather beaten look of a man who had drunk too much too soon, the electric pain of a hangover. Speaking of hangovers, there’s a cracking one when Freddy’s best friend wakes up after his stag night:

The night before was a complete blank, and he know that was how this was meant to be. He had been drinking brandy and port, a lethal combination, and he felt as if someone had hit him over the head with a billiard ball in a sock.

For all the heavy drinking and drug taking, the swearing and the ultraviolence, The Take is at heart a morality tale about hubris and nemesis. And I’m enjoying every minute of it.

Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson

A most glorious farce, James Hamilton-Paterson’s Cooking With Fernet Branca introduces Gerald Samper, (one of the Shropshire Sampers), biographer to the stars, dreadful singer, poisonous cook and all round ninny.


The dialogue is shared between Gerry and his ghastly neighbour Marta, an East European film composer. They have both opted for the seclusion of a mountain top in Italy and are none too impressed to find themselves living next door to each other. A minor war erupts in the Tuscan countryside, generously lubricated by Fernet Branca, of which Gerry says:

...a drink whose charm is discreeter even than that of the bourgeoisie, being black and bitter. I’d always thought people only drank it for hangovers.

That said, his initial antipathy soon dissolves and is replaced by references to the Branca brothers’ nectar. Marta is more cautious and refers to it as a rather insipid version of that galisya our hunters drink.

Fernet aside, I am grateful to Hamilton-Paterson for enlightening me as to the truth behind the champagne wasted on the podium at sporting fixtures:

Had you ever wondered why one of those famous houses like Möet et Chandon would permit what looks like a jeroboam of its Premier Cru Brut des Bruts to be shaken up and squirted to waste from a podium by spotty boys who clearly prefer Coke? Well I have... My great discovery was that nowadays there is a small concrete bunker by the entrance, an annexe labelled Dernier Cru Grands Prix Réserves containing specially large bottles kept exclusively for sporting events. Carefully guarded to ensure that none gets out onto the open market and into the hands of serious champagne drinkers, they contain very sweet Asti spumante imported from Peidmont with further addition of carbon dioxide and chemicals to produce the right explosive gush of bubbles for the cameras.

I’m rather glad that’s cleared up...