Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

Reading Renegade is a bit like being locked in a bar with its subject, a man described on the fly leaf as equal parts Johnny Cash, Brian Clough and the classic British pub contrarian with rather too much on his mind. It starts with a good old fashioned rant about former members of his band, The Fall, pauses for biographical notes about Smith and his life in Manchester and Salford, before carrying on in a stream of cantankerous grumbling about the state of the nation, the North, issues about drinking and a potted history of his music. Rambling yes, but never dull.

Smith, known for liking a drink or too, describes getting into LSD as a teenager in an attempt to avoid the drink of choice of his young contemporaries; bottles of booze purloined from parental sideboards:

If anything, I was doing acid to get away from the cider clubs and the sherry clubs. Kids of about fourteen used to nick their mam’s ‘British Sherry’ and be sick all over the house. You could tell where they lived by the drink and vomit stains on the carpet.

After leaving school and working at the docks in Salford, Smith formed The Fall, one of Britain’s most exciting and unpredictable avante garde rock groups, or a noisy racket, depending on your point of view. Smith’s song writing is a combination of distinctive wordplay and characterisation built from the experience of his native North West. Drink plays its part:

The problems started soon after Totale’s Turns, when I began thinking of albums more in the way of documents; elongated newspapers, so to speak. ‘Fiery Jack’ was a turning point; I guess in hindsight you could look at it as the beginning of Grotesque. I’ve always written from different perspectives, but that one seemed to have more weight to it. I still see ‘Fiery Jack’ types like that. They’re quite heartening in a way. Manchester has always had men like that, hard livers with hard livers; faces like unmade beds. Even though they’re clearly doing themselves damage, there’s a zest for life there. And that’s a rarity. They’re not as oblivious as you might think. They’re not all boring cunts. Drinkers have a good sense of the absurd. I like that.

The Fall are one of the more prolific bands in the country and have toured and recorded relentlessly since the 70s. Smith’s trip to Iceland where they record Hex Enduction Hour included a gig where about a third of the island’s youth came to see them (he apologises for almost certainly having brought about Björk and the Sugarcubes) and copious amounts of the local hooch:

We recorded parts of it in Iceland, which was a very inaccessible place at the time, totally unlike what it is now. Beer was against the law. You could only drink shit like pints of peach schnapps. I remember firing into it one day and night. I thought my legs had been stolen afterwards.

Continually messed around by hopeless record labels and enjoying a strained relationship with other band members (Smith has sacked over forty musicians over the years) things take a turn for the worse when he divorces his wife (and fellow band member...) Brix. He moves to Edinburgh, which introduces him to whisky:

I think that’s where the problems started. I got a real taste for it. There’s nothing quite like being drunk on whisky. Things can get mental on that stuff; and things did get mental years later; but while in Edinburgh I handled it well.

As the 90s progressed, the already uncompromising Smith started getting a reputation as a drunk who should keep of the sauce before the gig:

What gets me is when I get daft promoters like Alan Wise saying, “Don’t give Mark the whisky before he goes on.” It’s written into the contract – “Do not give Mark whisky before he goes on stage.” I’d rather have it upfront... To a certain extent I understand where they’re coming from. I did happen to lose it a bit when I was drinking too much whisky in the mid 90s, but I checked myself. I knew I had to curb it. And I did. I stand by Whyte and Mackay though, it’s a lovely drink. The worst thing I could do now is completely stop. You look at the amount of people who have died because they’ve just stopped drinking or doing whatever. The list is endless. The thing is with me, I don’t get hangovers. I’ve never been bothered by them. Red wine gets to me; it makes me very violent. I think it’s bad for you. Women who are into red wine are always manic-depressives.

He remarks that a lot of people who complain about his drinking are taking copious amounts of other substances as well. Stick to drink, he says:

At least you know where you are with booze. You drink two bottles of whisky and wake up in the morning, you know you’ve done something wrong, you know you won’t be doing that again. But experience tells you it’ll lift soon. And with liquor, if you drink any more you’ll be dead. You can’t move. But with E you start seeing chickens on the road – I know I was.

The boozy nadir is a fight with the band in New York when he is convicted of a drunken assault:

The bottom end of it was that the New York court said I had to go on this alcohol programme, twice a week for six weeks in Bury. But the staff there seemed to have more problems than I had. I didn’t have any problems, to be quite honest. I don’t think I did.

It’s a self justification, but it works for him. Anyway, there’s a method in the madness:

It’s sort of good for me, though, this idea that I’m a mad drunk. It makes people frightened of me.

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

A truly disturbing novel about the eponymous alcoholic, sexually incontinent beauty product salesman, The Death of Bunny Munro is also gloriously funny, usually in the most inappropriate ways. At the heart of the novel is a demented road trip along England’s south coast, taken with his son, Bunny Junior. He sets out with the vague intention of showing the boy the tricks of the salesman’s trade, but the true goal of their quest is Bunny’s corrupted soul.

The novel starts with Bunny in a shabby hotel room in Brighton, pissed on the contents of the mini-bar and awaiting a prostitute. He is also on the phone to his wife, Libby:

“I am damned,” thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die. He feels that somewhere down the line he has made a grave mistake, but this realisation passes in a dreadful heartbeat, and is gone – leaving him in a room at the Grenville Hotel, in his underwear, with nothing but himself and his appetites. He closes his eyes and pictures a random vagina, then sits on the edge of the hotel bed and, in slow motion, leans back against the quilted headboard. He clamps the mobile phone under his chin and with his teeth breaks the seal on a miniature bottle of brandy. He empties the bottle down his throat, lobs it across the room, then shudders and gags and says into the phone, “Don’t worry, love, everything’s going to be all right.”

It’s clear that he’s in a bad way, even more obvious when he wakes in the small hours, the booze wearing off;

Bunny stumbles in the dark, groping along the bathroom wall for the light switch. It is somewhere in those dead hours, the threes and fours, and the prostitute has been paid and packed off. Bunny is alone and awake and a mammoth hangover finds him on a terrifying mission for the sleeping pills. He thinks he may have left the in the bathroom and hopes the hooker didn’t find them. He locates the switch and fluorescent tubes buzz and hum awake. Bunny moves towards the mirror and its merciless light and despite the hot, toxic throb of his hangover – the dry, foul mouth, the boiled skin, blood-brown eyes and his demolished quiff – he is not displeased with what greets him.

Complaining that his head feels like someone actually dropped the mini-bar on it, Bunny heads home the next day to discover that ten years of philandering and sexual misdemeanour on his part have finally driven poor Libby over the edge and she’s committed suicide.

Left alone with Bunny Junior, Bunny hits the bottle:

Then without warning Bunny leaps to his feet, and as if he has been girding himself for this moment all evening, moves to the sideboard (procured by Libby from a garage sale in Lewes) and opens its frosted glass front. Bunny reaches inside and returns to the sofa with a bottle of malt whisky and a short, heavy glass. He pours himself a drink, and then up-ends it down his throat. He gags and throws his body forward, shakes his head and repeats the action with the bottle and the glass again.

...and the satellite porn...

Unable to palm his son off on his in-laws he takes him on the road. Bunny’s death is inevitable, but will the boy be able to help his dad find redemption before it’s too late? By the looks of things so far, he’ll have his work cut out.

Abandoned by Anya Peters

Peters’s disturbing memoir is easy to pigeonhole, and I confess that it isn’t the sort of book that I would normally read. It’s an account of a spectacularly miserable childhood of a little girl adopted by her aunt, a woman she always sees as her Mummy, into the violent household she shares with an unpredictable, drunken bully.

Alcohol, predictably, plays a part in the sorry saga. ‘Daddy’, her uncle, is frequently intoxicated, and drunkenly berates Anya, shouting that she doesn’t belong in the house with the rest of the children:

It’s what Daddy is always saying, screaming it out week after week in drunken arguments. “She’s not wanted here, right! She doesn’t belong here... They dumped her over here with you because they didn’t want her over there and she’s not wanted here either. I want her out,” he says snapping open another beer, “She doesn’t belong here.”

Mummy does her best to stick up for Anya, but succumbs to the bottle as well:

“Don’t worry about me,” she’d whisper to us those nights when we’d all tiptoed back down after he had staggered off to bed. “I’m as tough as old boots, me.” But she wasn’t; thought neither was she quite ready for the monster my uncle turned into after swallowing beer and vodka all night. She just wasn’t willing to be a victim. Soon she was fighting fire with fire, matching him vodka for vodka as they tried to scream an pummel one another into the kind of partner they wanted each other to be.

The constant abuse, often physical, progresses into sexual abuse. Anya’s uncle is eventually arrested for his crimes and sent to prison. Anya and her aunt temporarily move to the home of another daughter, but the effect on both of them has been terrible. Anya’s mother is nearly catatonic and drinking heavily again:

During the day, indoors, she sat in the front room with the curtains drawn watching TV, living on Silk Cut and milky tea and her nerves. When she passed me to go to the bathroom one morning after getting a postcard from the boys asking when she was coming home, I smelt drink on her breath.

Despite all these terrible events, Anya manages to pass her A-Levels and qualifies as a lawyer. Unfortunately, her self esteem is badly damaged by her past, and she finds herself in another abusive relationship. She ends up sleeping in her car in Brighton and London, finally breaking away from the spiral of despair by writing her story in a blog which eventually became this book.

Even after all the horrible things that happened to her, Peters shows a lack of rancour and a forgiveness that is humbling. I’m glad I read it for that, but I don’t think it’s an area I’ll investigate again.

Picnics and Other Outdoor Feasts by Claudia Roden

I believe that food writing, when done well, can be just as emotive and inspiring as any other form of literature. I have already covered Elizabeth David, although I am much better acquinted with Claudia Roden’s recipes (her red lentil soup is a favourite) and this recent acquisition on picnics is a gem.

Picnics are as much an excuse for a few drinks as they are for unwrapping sandwiches out of acres of Bacofoil and peeling hardboiled eggs. The natural choice is wine:

One tries to simplify things outdoors and I am quite happy to wash down pies and cold meats, vegetables and desserts with one wine only. But for the dedicated drinkers who believe like Brillat-Savarin that ‘the palate becomes cloyed and after three or four glasses, it is but a deadened sensation that even the best wine provokes’, it is right to offer two. Have a light refreshing white, commended by Savarin as ‘less affected by movement and heat and more pleasantly exhilarating’, which you can carry chilled in a refrigerated box or keep cool in the river, and a hearty stout red wine which cannot be unduly harmed by the journey, or a rosé, which is said to be particularly delicious by the sea. Serve straight-forward and relatively inexpensive wines. They will taste better on a picnic, while the fine aged ones are too delicate for rough outdoor handling and will be overpowered by all the competing perfumes of nature.

Not everyone drinks wine though:

If you are not having wine, it is well known that Englishmen are happy with good beer and women with good cider and that beer mixed with Stone’s ginger wine makes Shandy Gaff. And, of course, there is nothing as grand as a champagne picnic.

Which leads us to her champagne menu for Glyndebourne:

Indeed there can be few delights to compare with the pleasures of an elegantly chosen meal taken by one of the lakes, while watching the sun go down with the second half of Mozart still to come. People travel in evening dress... They leave their hampers in a favourite spot in the gardens, sometimes with the champagne bottle left to cool in the lake, tethered to a tree, until the interval.

I feel stirred to dig out the dinner jacket and go along myself, if I could actually afford the ticket. Nevermind, the next picnic will be enjoyed with a bottle of something chilled in the River Wey and with a couple of sonatas brought along for playing on the Victrola.

In The Woods by Tana French

I seem to be reading more crime fiction lately; not necessarily a bad thing. The genre relies heavily on strong plot and characterisation, tools of writing that always bear further study. There’s often a lot of booze as well...

French’s debut is written through the eyes of Dublin DI Rob Ryan, a man who admits at the start of the book that he tells lies, a man who is also falling apart under the weight of his own past. More than partial to drinking solitary vodka, he keeps a private stash in his room:

I poured myself a drink – I keep a bottle of vodka and one of tonic behind my books...

Working on a case involving a murdered child, Ryan is getting too close for comfort to his detective partner, Cassie Maddox, and when it transpires that the body has been found in the same wood where two of his childhood friends disappeared over twenty years before, he finally loses his grip on reality. After nearly punching a suspect during an interview, he decides that the best thing to do is get drunk.

I got drunk that night, banjoed drunk, drunker than I’d been in about fifteen years. I spent half the night sitting on the bathroom floor, staring glassily at the toilet and wishing I could just throw up and get it over with. The edges of my vision pulsed sickeningly with every heartbeat, and the shadows in the corners flicked and throbbed and contorted themselves into spiky, nasty little crawling things that were gone in the next blink. Finally I realised that, while the nausea showed now signs of getting better, it probably wasn’t going to get any worse. I staggered into my room and fell asleep on the covers without taking off my clothes.

It goes downhill from here for Ryan and his subsequent flashback in the woods brings about a near breakdown. He finishes the book in professional and personal torment and the bottle seems to be his only friend:

I....locked myself in my room and drank vodka, slowly and purposefully, until four in the morning.

French’s characters are the strongest part of the book, and in Rob Ryan she gives us a palpable examination of a troubled soul.