Backlisted - Absolute Beginners - Rerun

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Slang lexicographer extraordinaire Jonathon Green joins John and Andy in this episode originally recorded in 2016 to discuss Absolute Beginners, the classic novel of London teenage life set around Soho and Notting Hill. *Tickets are now on sale for our LIVE show in London on Wednesday Sep 25th where we will be discussing The Parable of The Sower by Octavia Butler, with guests Salena Golden and Una McCormack * 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 and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Backlisted. This episode is one of those where we go back into the past, in fact quite a long way past. We're going all the way back to 2016. This is episode 20, which was recorded back when we were recording in real life in Wharf Road in Islington in London with our original producer, Matt Hall, Andy and I, and the guest, the great slang lexicographer, man who's produced, I think the greatest work of linguistic reference on his own over the last 30 years, Jonathan Green's Dictionary of Slang.

It's an episode that we haven't listened to for a long time, but it comes out of the traps and feels, I think, incredibly relevant. This is an episode about the novel Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes. And this is notable for several reasons. One is it's my favourite novel ever written by anyone. And it's one of John's favourites. And it was a great pleasure to be able to rig things so that we were able to do a show about this novel. It changed my life. I say that very carefully because I'm not a great believer in that cliche,

but this book did change my life when I read it when I was 15 in the early 1980s. And it was an absolute delight to talk about it with John and with Jonathan Green, who he won't mind me saying I'm sure is a generation ahead of me, and had his life changed in turn when he first read it in the 1950s and 60s. the summer of 1958 in the Notting Hill area of London. Across four months, in the period of the race riots that took place there, where in August of that summer, gangs of Teds, as they were roamed West London looking to cause harm to immigrants. And we're recording this in summer 2024 where unfortunately in the UK similar scenes have been played out. And I tweeted during the recent disturbances, the recent and the recent racist riots, which took the pretext of anti-immigrant protests feeling as their basis. And I tweeted to say, you know what? Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes should have been on the UK schools curriculum years ago, because it is

like no other British novel about this topic. And had it been on the curriculum, there might now be fewer racists roaming the streets looking to cause trouble. I loved this novel when I was 15 and I love it now I'm 56 and it'll be a sad day when I don't love it anymore. So I hope you enjoy this episode. I hope you not enjoy its relevance. We recorded this eight years ago about a book that was written nearly 60 years ago, but it still feels topical in a way that we could all learn from. John? Yeah, absolutely. It also, another kind of coincidence, when we recorded an episode with the great publisher Margaret Busby, she came on to talk about the British Caribbean writer Andrew Solky with Roman Antrobus a couple of years ago. This book came up in conversation then because Alison and Busby reissued Absolute Beginners. That was in 1980, another period when there were riots on the streets of London.

This book is extraordinary in the way that it keeps coming back. Its relevance has never really ebbed, and certainly its literary quality, I think, sets it apart for cult you know, cult, cult novels enjoyed by teenagers. It's a genuine work of art. And for those of you who remember the musical from the mid 80s, I advise you to try and forget it, please. So, so join us now, join Jump in Our Time Machine back to 2016 for our discussion of Now join Jump in our Time Machine back to 2016 for our discussion of Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnis with our guest, Jonathan Green. What does possible sound like for your business? It's more cash on hand to grow with up to 55 interest free days.

Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and commissions apply. Visit mx.ca slash business platinum. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Do you want to do a check? Not anymore. Not anymore. No, I'm with you on that. Why would you? No, the cycle. I've got a ten. I've got a ten. Did you hear that little higher pitch in my voice?

Oh, come on. I didn't have a wish of you. Come on everyone. Come on everyone, let's go camping. Glamping, it's got to be the ugliest word. It's nasty. Yeah. Oh, Jonathan, surely it's not slang. 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.

I want a minute. Well, I'm hoping we've got a bit of a slant, slangtastic kind of... I've got some slangtastic info but it's some 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 math people 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 Lepticographer you can find him on Twitter at Mr Underscore Slang. Is that correct Jonathan?

That sounds good to me. Alright 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 blacklisted subjects. The person who coined the term Mr Slang was? Marcy Namus. In a very, very, very small footnote.

Yeah. We must take what we can. We should say that, you know, just to amplify that, Jonathan is the, absolutely is the sole proprietor, owner, compiler, editor of what I, back when we worked together in my castle days, called the OED of the street. 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. No, I had to get my paper back.

I got a three on. 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 for the oral history of... I did six. Immigrants, which I would love to do again now.

Cannabis, was that an oral history? No, no, no, that was more of a sort of personal journey. Also, I'll say we should mention and distinguish it in passing, Chasing the Sun, the history of lexicography. Yes, I mean, that's what I i mean i did move on from the 60s um also also i love the 60s also jonathan i 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 backlist if he maybe i remember it is a biblio memoir yes i think it

yes it is uh you can you cut your teeth jon Jonathan, writing Erotica for Fiesta magazine. I don't think Fiesta really jibes with the word erotic. It was what was known as a top shelf title. It was wonderful. I mean, I was the legislative 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 one- Take that. We're not really here talking about this, 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, on 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, we'll see where we get to.

But moving on. You're here to talk to us about Addison McGuinness by Colin McGuinness. Great London novel, cold novel. I'm going to stay in interest here as well. I consider the whole purpose of Backlisted to have been to get to this point. So, watch out everyone. So perhaps briefly then, Andy, as a time-honoured fashion,

what else have you been reading? So I have been reading, actually to tell you the truth, I have mostly been reading books by Colin McInnes this week. But have you not read them all already? Yes, but I hadn't there's a good there's well, we'll come on to it I I had read them several times when I was a teenager 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. We took my niece to Paris, but 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 Baton Mouche to leg it to the Palais de Tokyo to go and see the Michelle Welbet exhibition. Restez vivant to stay alive. That's a bit corky.

I'm going to explain all about on the front of the catalog, which I brought with me There's a picture of his late Dog a corgi called Clemore I bet you're sad you're lapped now. I'm gonna Got a wonderful moody face. Yeah, but this exhibition anyone who knows the things I write about will know that I'm a big fan of Welbeck he is my favorite living writer for Betrel works, which means I spend my life telling people that Michelle Welbeck is my favorite 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 Eorish way, which I really like. And so anyway, at the Palais de Tokyo, which is I suppose the Parisian equivalent of the ICA, isn't it Jonathan? Really? Something like that. Yeah. There's an exhibition that he's curated, I suppose you'd say about his, 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 well bet little, there's a brilliant computer screen that says against a black and white

background, you know, they, oh, good and shots. You have no chance. Continue. And then a button that says, oh, good chance. You have no chance. Continue. And then a button that says, okay. Like the baguette and I can't go on, you'll go on. Okay. And there's a room because he's fascinated by, for instance, 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 See that looks like my office So that's pretty 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 Clemence and brilliantly it's laid out like he lived in Ireland while Clemence 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 Clemence on the wall. It has a piece of music by Iggy Pop playing about how what is a dog? A dog is a machine for love and in the middle is a vitrine full of in chronological order all Clemence toys from the time he was a puppy until he died. And it is given in the true Huelbeckian fashion you've been through this series of terrible filthy alienated environments and suddenly you're in 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. Also, it's clearly been funded by those crazy friends those crazy French But I was thinking what British I can think about the British cultural figures who might do it But I was trying to think of a British author who would 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 a These might be some way, you know, it's me. It's and people wouldn't think they were a... Meads might be somewhere, you know, fiction.

Jonathan Meads. I cannot imagine this an equivalent in the UK. I just cannot imagine it. No, I think you can't imagine. He also, I won't 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've 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, Mr Tramp sitting over, and he was sort of there, sat 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 realize 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. Ha!

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, they could see that the interviewers sweat running down their faces. Why can't we get something out of him? He's famous, 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, and why I sort of think is an emblematically brilliant bit of a well-bet, I simply don't care. He said,

they said, is it well, I'm the, I'm the best, the best novelist in the world. That brings certain problems. The interviewer said, I'm flabbergasted. I say, but what about Philip Roth? Well, they look at me and say, no, he's repetitive. What do you think about people who the French adore adore like David Lodge and Ian McEwan and some of them, they worship. I personally don't like Ian McEwan. I can't imagine he'd have a huge amount of time for Ian McEwan. Or David Lodge even.

You know, we like McEwan and we like Lodge, but we can't imagine David Lodge curating an exhibition himself at the ICA. Can I ask a question? Yes. What percentage of the audience who went to see this exhibition is aware of what the Irish funeral parlour looks like? Presumably very few. Also it's worth saying that the audience there were incredibly mixed in terms of ages and genders, incredibly mixed in terms of ages and genders that it wasn't you know furtive misogynists such as myself. There were people of all colors creeds and genders there. As a bookmode I spent a certain amount of time in Paris. Corgis are not big in France I don't think so it so interesting that he should choose a corgi as his stuff object. So that's what I was doing. I was sort of reading the

exhibition that's what I'm saying. But John 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. And it is an extraordinary book, which everybody remembers because it was written in a kind of a 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, you know, half derelict farmhouse on what one imagines is Dartmoor being pelted by rain. It's very unclear exactly what happens and 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. And I'm not going to tell you whether he finds the beast or not. Because in so far 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 Buckmaster and those who read the Wake will know that Buckmaster was the, 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 melts it for as much as it can get and the landscape in so far again as there are characters that the landscape is it is a character the the sense of it's set in the same place no it's definitely different he's and you 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, he's gone into the wilderness to fast and he doesn't eat, he drinks a lot of water, he, as I say,

he could manage to heal himself. I'll give you just I read one little small passage. How does, sorry, how does it relate to the wake and besides? Only in a kind of you'd have to really know to call it 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. Right. And 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 the... and it's as good as anything I've ever read on that thing of that the landscape is an outward manifestation of our inner kind of state. He writes, I mean, he'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'll just read you this bit because I think it's... Even naked in sped up. strain in literature. It's good. But I just read you this bit because I think it's... Even making a spare joke. Yes, sorry. It would be impossible for me to guess even how much time passed in this way. This is when 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 guess very good reviews already Yeah, I've read a review by um, and John Harrison in the gulping which is very free 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 I'm which I'm you know, I saw a comparison. It wasn't in Mike's review. It was somewhere else It's a cool Matt McCarthy. Yeah, is's review, it was somewhere else. It's a Cormac McCarthy. 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 plowing his own interesting furrow in English. Do you know whether he's written all three of them? Mary hasn't written the third one yet. I do know that. Right.

But I have to say, you know, it's always, 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 foot that kind of person who likes that kind of book. 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 it you know, it is one of those books which I even I know that 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 anyone hadn't read it and now I've read it and guess what? Two thumbs up. It's really good. It's brilliant. But I love that thing where 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 it to be. You know, we are a lot, the last episode of Batlister we recorded with Selena Godinam was about

Last Exit to 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 exit to Brooklyn which I never had done I was thinking wow, wow, this is, but this is great. This isn't good for a cult book. This is, 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 excitement that that book brought me, the knowledge it brought me. Now, because I'm Sauerold68, 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, da-da-da-da. But at the time, it was just eye-opening, it was fantastic.

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 me, I'm in Napoli, it's heaven. And 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, I don't know,

now I'm sort of dried up, old god knows what. But at that age, one's like a sponge and they were, this amazing input. Ironically, because he never touches them, there were the things like The Beatles, Bob Dylan, so on, still for me, Bre Brett, whatever, whatever, whatever. 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 McInnis, 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 smotty little bastard. I wouldn't read Pam. Funny enough, that's something I just bought a copy of this book called No Novel Reader by McKinness, 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, their 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. 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 get in the States in those days was written maybe by Harlan Ellison or by Hal Ellison or by Wendell Brown or by a load of people. But they would always be called things like J.L. on bait and switchblade and lots they were pulp they're great i love them but nonetheless mckinness 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

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. Oh, I love that. So that was 1974. I don't know. Well, I meant absolutely. But I read, I remember reading the bit that I just watched Mitch read just now, those last 30 pages. I remember reading those on the deck of a Caledonian McBrain story on the way back from Iona to Oban and the thing is there's a phrase that I really dislike in the publishing world and in the book the world which is the 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 of two or three maybe books that changed changed my life and 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 favorite book for sentimental reasons, but I always come back to it with a slight fear that the magic was gone. And I have to say,

reading it last week, I had the first 30 pages, I was thinking, oh no, I don't know, I don't know, but then it got me. Like it always gets me. I think it's unique. It's a unique book. It's flawed, 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,

well, you should be, and I know I was, to, as it were, suggestion. And for me, perhaps the biggest suggestion was books, although rock and roll and songs were also enormously suggestive as it were. McKinney's just taught you a lot of stuff that I mean I'd been alive I'd known that you know I was obviously a little bit younger or maybe a lot young you know when when Oswald Mosley was 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. But I don't know, I mean it's just hard to say what, it had an enormous effect, it was just educational I suppose, and there is that element that runs through the whole of McKinness's work which is very didactic. And the trouble I think is that, well the wonderful thing he did is that it's invisible. It's invisible. 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 slag that he puts it into all of a twist and you don't see the seams. Again, obviously, McIn particularly with the with the race riot stuff had done his research had taken it on board so on and so forth but you don't see the seams by the time you get to his later the later books in the trilogy you do see them too much and that's if anybody's seen there's a couple of films that if you want to know sort of what Notting Hill was like or what Napoli was like.

I was going to mention there's two films for this convention, one of them is Ten Rillings in Place. If you look at Ten Rillings in Place and you see what that area looked like then. But also there's a film, do you remember a film Jonathan called Leo the last? I do. The John Borman film. But even more if you want to go, I've always wanted to run a night of London geographical films and one of them of course it would be the blue lamp because the last five or ten minutes of the blue lamp 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 the shepherds

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 west Park, it was not isolated but was surrounded by terraces and those things are wonderful. And the McKenness does that. I mean I think one of the things about McKenness that's incredibly important was people talk about the teenagers and pop and so on and so forth which we should get around it but he is a London novelist, he's a major Londonist. Yes I think that's what I... And that that's perhaps why he laughs, because he's... He just... the bits I love, as I say, the idea, I am in Napoli, 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 was very, very pleased I hadn't seen the film, Julian Temple film, so I didn't want to be carrying around the style in my head. You know, 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. Yeah, well, that was one thing. The second thing was I was much more interested, what really interested me was the Londonness for sure. It does make me want to go to Notting Hill and wander. It does make me want to go to Soho. But the language, the dialogue in particular, I think is really, it's arresting 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 re-reading passages from it and marking them and I'm just thinking you know that's on the back of the Penguin edition from 1965 with the Peter Blake cover.

It says, our guide on this conducted tour of London's teenage subgroups is an astonishingly, sparklingly articulate 18 year old photography. It's actually 19 everyone. Street, holiday, park 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.

Crepes Suzette, his spade crazy 17 year old chick, Edward the Ted, the homosexual hoplite, Zesty Boy Sift, the pop songwriter, 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 likable guide gets involved with them in the Notting Hills race riots with an unexpected result. That's not very good, is it? That doesn't do justice to this book at all. Well, that would have been me though, because that I would have read at age 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. 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 just come down from Oxford. It was, you know, you do this. I don't know. The word John... And Paul Solst's review is embarrassing as well, but he talks about it's a boy it's a real gasp. The thing about the language if I may you know tout my my slang hat for a while is that it's very good. He makes up is that he you look at me you know that I'm talking about the slang and the slang he uses which is he uses about 200 words in it is it's also 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 used the word Felix to mean penis which and he talks about it in the context of skyscrapers and tab or tower blocks I think he's talking about and he talks about Felix's rising to 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 Richard Dupree says. See, I think that's on the first page. Yeah, it is.

And the line says... Prove me wrong. No, no, I just, you know, I'm just like these, yeah, yeah. Like Cinerama, you can see clean new concrete cloud kisses rising up like Felix's 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 I thought that he thinks he knows it all which is a big part the character of the narrator when your life is dedicated to collecting 1400

simidips, sometimes I have the word penis on many other things, I'm afraid it becomes very narrow once. I would like to, 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 used about zips, when I think he's talking about drugs or is it drink I can't remember took their zips and he's talking about which he by which he means sips small quantities far as I know that doesn't exist anywhere else there's a few like that this isn't to put and there's one or two things I can't there's one word that he puts in there 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. And we, in the UK all the time, and we have to say that he had, he was brought up in Australia. Yes, that seems very, well he's a voyeur, is he not? And that's enormous, not only is he didactic, he's also I think teaching himself and he's telling us what he's learning and the excerpt from Horus Ophi that I quite like is saying that. Just on the Felix thing, it just made me think because I just read the last, there's a great little paper, he gets a lift at the end by Mickey Poglerosa 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 of felicity is not a word you get. John, you, 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 McKinney's 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...

I'm just about to club. I had exactly the same capacity. There you go. It's such a good... 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 Shaftesbury Avenue canals like gondolas. Everyone had loot to spend, everyone a bath with verbena salts behind them, and nobody had broken hearts because they were all ripe for the easy summer evening. The rubber plants in the espressos had been dusted, and the smooth white lights of the new-style Chinese restaurant, not the old mah-yong categories, mah-jong categories, but the latest thing, with broad glass fronts and daikon curtainings, and a beige carpet over the interiors, were shining a dazzle like some monster telescreens. Even those horrible old Anglo-Saxon public houses, 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 tundores 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

nineteen fifties and i thought my heaven one thing is certain to 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 spoke to me then and it still works now is it captures 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 so powerful. The only analogy that I mean it's coincidentally it's a mod thing but the analogy the thing it most reminds me of is Quadrophenia because it's a similar kind of Jimmy and Quadrophenia in whichever version you care to take but Jimmy and in Quadrophilia is that fantastic mixture of street fighter and 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, McKinness 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... On conscious? Yeah. I don't think that because he's he's born in 1914

So we're talking about somebody who is no longer a baby almost as old as me But you know, but he's and there's there's certain elements in which as we say, he's a wire He's he wants to teach us stuff But somehow it all comes together in absolute beginners and 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 yes 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 that the atmosphere and and 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 gallery 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 tried to read other stuff

and I didn't enjoy that. Also the thing about McKinness 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 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 access or else 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 Rayman. By Derek Rayman, in fact by Robin Cook. And the interesting, the

Crust on its Uppers, I mean there are very few, dare I say, I'd almost say no books about the 60s and I raised my fingers at that point in quotes because one of the things we didn't do that I mean what people wrote was manifestos or newspapers or rock and roll lyrics or films that never got made or whatever it might be but actual novels well the way you waited for a while for well the grown-ups were doing it Evelyn Moore was still knocking stuff out Kingsley Amis 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 move, they segue into the 60s. And the one is Absolute Beginners, and the other is the Chelsea set book, which is crossed on its others. And there's a character in Absolute Beginners called the Ex-Deb of last year. is some the Chelsea set book which is Jonathan Mead's turned me on to it but much much later. 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 coffee bar culture, with I guess the proto-mod. He's brilliant on clothes, on dress sizes, on fashion, very, very detailed accounts of the clothes that people are wearing. But there's one passage I like, this very same, this Deb of last year, says, I mean, about being honest about the teenage experience, I really like this, but 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 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 I felt was an authentic insight and that's what I remember. Teenagers are always assumed to be, you know, shanging each other's senses. Actually the truth is that they're dressing up having fun and not hoping for the best. I'm just gonna, I'm just, before we say anything more, I just want to do the little potted biography of McKinness 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 Campbell McKinness and the novelist Angela Thirkle. He was the great grandson of the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Byrne Jones. He was the- Yeah, he was quite- He was the cousin-

The tenuous link that you missed there. He was the cousin of Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. Yeah. That's the same. 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 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 bohemian he habitually described himself McKinness habitually described himself as quote an English London born Australian reared Scott and if fundamentally he was a journalist and a radio pundit he used to appear on today or the equipment there or used to appear on a program called the critics regularly he wrote 1500 radio scripts for the BBC he hacked them out so how old was he? Mid 40s. He's the author of seven novels,

the first of which is To the Victors of 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. I found a wonderful phrase to describe McInnis. This biography is called Inside Outsider and McInnis 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 McInnis was, he was someone who had been borrowed from death. That he was the saddest and loneliest man that I ever met. They was 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. I know the ending is very bittersweet I was just thinking there but and it takes me there 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 McKinness, but it was powered by Australians and by Americans it was powered by outsiders and In a way it 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 that 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 at Oz magazine which he ran which I think the Kinnis might have written a couple of pieces. He did yeah he did and and and McKinness 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. 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 them. I must say somebody on Twitter told me to go and look at You Never Had It So Good, Never

Had It So Good by Dominic Sandbrough 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 rather than mixed meaning bad. They are genuinely good, some good, some bad. But also Dominic Sandbrough really gives that gives the absolute beginners a pasting and he says um He say describes it as a like a pale copy of catcher in the run And you know what don't want to sound rude. I hope you hear this doesn't lie me I don't because you don't you didn't get it. You didn't get it No, no, but I didn't get it. We still had to write something you were it's a rice

I mean, I know I did mention Holt and Fulfield earlier, but it's not like catcher in the right at all I don't you know what? All right, the thing about catching rice catching the rise a great book. I'm not gonna start going with no good It's a great book But the things that make it a great book are for the most part 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 Challenger 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 something. You said you had a little thing about McKinness, which you had interviewed Horace Ove. Yeah, Horace Ove was in, I suppose, Michael De Freitas, later Mike Lex'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, I'd never seen that picture before, it's wonderful, much better dare I say than the cover of Absolute Beginners. It's an omnibus edition which was published in 69 called Visions of London and Great MacGibbon. 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'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. 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 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 now

and 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 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 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 jungle yeah but also I've never found 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 this is what it comes down to. This is what we discussed.

This is in the end. You can you can say this wasn't quite right. And that wasn't quite right. And it's too didactic and it's too viristic and so on. But he did it. And 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 am in his debt forever and I'm in his I'm in his debt forever for writing a book that apparently in my state of arrested adolescence I can never quite get away from. I'm going to give it to my 18 year old when I get home because I think he'd absolutely love it. And I sort of think it is a 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 or people

will often ask you what's your favourite book or what's a book that will 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. That it is in the process of passing into history. How few people have heard of it. It's hardly 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 on the wrong side of the political correctness divide. I wonder if that's likely that it just is a little bit too lively to... I don't know. I don't do PC. Slang doesn't do PC. But 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 hope not. Hey Matthew, do you have any yet more tenuous links? Yes I've got one to finish this up. Or tenor brus links. So I've got a link in fact to a previous podcast of ours. It's self-referential. Yeah so in a previous podcast we did Andrew Malkin and talked about Raymond Charnwell. High is self-referential. Yeah. So in a previous podcast we did, Andrew Malkin talked about Raymond Charles. 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, the 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 nights and girls to wax, which remarkably the Three Johns also stole and turned into a song. Wow. I was just going to ask, having now got my taste for the Mekinis, should I go, shall I read the trilogy, should I read City of Spades next? City of Spades, yes.

When you read Mr. Love and Justice, you should read it because you're a competist, I'm sure. And it's necessary. But you'll get, I fear, more and more cross. Right. They're fascinating. Yeah. But you know so much. 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. We're back to the London thing. And on the London level, those books are very good. They are not absolute beginners. For me, they're too didactic. Yeah. I agree with Jonathan. I mean, I think Sissue Spades is well worth reading and England Half English is actually worth reading.

Oh, yes. His essays, not all, but some of them are absolutely terrific. Right. half English is actually worth reading. Oh yes, that's true. His essays are 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. That's why I read it. And that'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. It's like Weller is trying to find the essence of the book. This is from Wellbeck to Weller. Wellbeck to Weller, that's my next book. So the other way around, Weller to Weller. And he's trying to find the essence of the book.

This just is two brilliant lines. I need the strength to go and get what I want. I lost a lifetime thinking of it. It's that brilliant mixture of front and regret. I think that's the thing that's so powerful in this book for me. Can I ask you one last question, Jonathan? Was it one of the books that, I mean, you know, your later career as a slang lexicographer, when you were you were reading it as a 16 year old was it the language that kind of that stayed with you? I don't it not in this particular no no I would love to think that I was this sort of micro micro slang lexicographer but actually I

wasn't that bad. I think on that brilliant note should we should 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 if you use the extraordinary antiquated system known as iTunes to listen to backlisted, we'd be grateful if you could rate us or leave a review or... It all helps. No, it all helps us spread the word.

Ever so humble. Ever so humble, yeah. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a full night. Until then, good night. Thanks everyone. Fortnite until then, good night.