THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.91 - MARLON JAMES

Episode Date: May 4, 2019

Adam talks with Jamaican writer Marlon James about the 80s, bad writing habits, heavy metal, why you should always consult Peter Gabriel about cultural appropriation, and the controversy that surrounded the 2019 Oscar winner for best film, 'Green Book'.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Matt Lamont for additional editing.RELATED LINKSMARLON JAMES 'IMAGINE' DOCUMENTARY (2016)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj10m_J5kJYTHE DAILY - WHAT HOLLYWOOD KEEPS WRONG ABOUT RACE (GREEN BOOK AND THE OSCARS)https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/podcasts/the-daily/oscars-green-book-interracial-friendship.htmlMARLON JAMES ON 'BLACK LEOPARD RED WOLF'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1vRIwnqxcw'HEARTS BEAT LOUD' TRAILERhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXNOg_SK7Vs'CATCHER IN THE RYE' (REVIEWS, SUMMARY & LINKS TO BUY)https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5107.The_Catcher_in_the_RyeTHE ADAM BUXTON APPhttps://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/the-adam-buxton-app/id1264624915?mt=8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this. That's the plan. Shall we go for a walk?

It's quite rainy out there, Rosie. At the moment, Rosie is lying on her back in her scratch-scratch receiving pose. I love you. Come on. Oh, it's rainy. It's so grim. The thing is that it's not going to stop raining, I don't think, so... It's now or never for this walk and this podcast intro.

Hey, how you doing listeners? There we go. It's very cold today. After it looked as if it was going to get all summery for a while. Summer's been cancelled. I love to say the word cancelled. I say it about everything. I'm not quite sure why I'm saying it. It just seems like a fun thing to say and everyone's saying it. Those nettles are cancelled. The rain's cancelled. I'm not going to cancel you, Rosie, don't worry.

Rosie's more likely to cancel me. Anyway, look, let me get out my notes. So I can tell you about my guest on episode number 91 of the podcast, Marlon James. Here's some Marlon facts for you. Marlon was born in Jamaica in 1970. He is, to date, the author of four books. John Crow's Devil from 2005, which tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. The Book of Night Women, from 2009, written from the point of view of a slave woman on a Jamaican

plantation in the early 19th century. A Brief History of Seven Killings, from 2015, a novel about the characters and circumstances surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976. And Marlon's latest is called Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first volume in what he has called the Dark Star Trilogy, a saga that pays homage to African history and mythology in which a band of mercenaries including a witch a talking buffalo, a giant, a shapeshifter and a bounty hunter named Tracker are hired by a king to find a lost boy my introduction to Marlon's work

was a brief history of seven killings for which he won the Man Booker Prize in 2015. It's not brief. It's nearly 700 pages. And it features a huge cast that includes ultra-violent gangsters, groupies, journalists, CIA agents and politicians, all speaking with very distinct voices and dialects as their lives intersect and intertwine throughout a complex narrative that unfolds over a couple of decades. It is an epic. It took me a while to get through it, but it really stayed with me.

You know, it haunted my thoughts. And it took a while for my internal monologue to stop sounding like a Jamaican gangster, which was quite offensive of my internal monologue and not, strictly speaking, cool. But, well, I challenge you to read A Brief History of Seven Killings and not be infected by it in that way. I got to meet Marlon earlier this year in February 2019 in the basement of the hotel where Marlon was staying just off Whitehall in central London. We talked about the practical value of myths and fantasy which have always fascinated Marlon as well as shared cultural reference points from the 80s. We were both children of the 80s. And we talked about writing habits that annoy Marlon, who has taught English and creative writing at Macalester College in Minnesota since 2007.

You will also hear why, if you're worried about cultural appropriation, you should consult Peter Gabriel. And we ended up discussing the controversy that surrounded the Oscar for Best Film this year, going to Peter Farrelly's Green Book, in which, if you haven't seen Green Book, it's about a working class Italian-American bouncer, played by Viggo Mortensen, who becomes the driver of an African-American classical pianist, someone who really existed, Don Shirley, an African-American classical pianist, someone who really existed, Don Shirley, who is played by Mahershala Ali. And it's about a time when Don Shirley went on a tour of venues through the American South in the 1960s, a journey on which they encounter much racism and homophobia. Don Shirley was gay. And in the process, the odd couple learn to understand each other a little better. And I mentioned when I spoke to Marlon

about it that I'd been listening to a podcast about Green Book and the Oscars from the New York Times called What Hollywood Keeps Getting Wrong About about race and i've put a link to that podcast in the description of this one along with a few good interviews with marlon including alan yentob's very interesting imagined documentary about marlon from 2016 i'll be back at the end of the podcast with more very important whiffling but right now here we go Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. La, la, la, la, la, la. Go, go, go, go, go. Marlon, could you set the scene for us?

Where are we exactly? I actually have no idea where we are. We're in a cellar of the Royal Horse Guards Hotel, and I'm staring at the fire exit. And a lot of bottles of wine. Yeah, this is a weird sort of subterranean well, obviously it was a cellar at some point for this big old hotel in

Whitehall near Charing Cross. The Horse Guards. It looks like a place where you send the servants when you're punishing them. Very feudal. Yes, but it's feudal and then painted all white and jazzed up a little bit with some recessed lighting,

and now they can record podcasts down here. How do you enjoy these kinds of periods when you're promoting your books? It depends on what part of it I'm in. Like, this may be, what now, maybe day 20 or day 24. Actually, more than that. This is around day 22. I'm trying to remember where I was last night. I think I was at Oxford last night. I gave a lecture, actually, more than that. This is around day 22. I'm trying to remember where I was last night.

I think I was at Oxford last night. I gave a lecture, actually, the Tolkien lecture. Oh, wow. And what were you talking about there? I was talking about myths and how cultures take myths for granted because they don't realize just how much myths shape their civilization

and what happens when you don't have them. Because as a black person in diaspora who grew up in a former slave colony, you know, one of the things that was taken away from us was the myths. And without them, not having them, I don't think people realize how much of how your personal and your national identity is shaped in your myths.

The very idea of British civilization is shaped by King Arthur. Still, you know, the sophisticated and gentleman-ness of Britishness comes from Arthur's court and chivalry. Take that out of the way, what do you have? A bunch of barbarians worshipping at Stonehenge. So it's still an essential part of a people. But what happens when you don't have one? And that was kind of what the talk was exploring

and why I ended up writing a fantasy novel that was drawing from myths. Yeah. What does happen when you don't have one? I think what happens when you don't have one is that you don't have a way of looking at and answering the big questions. One of the things I realized is as advanced and as sophisticated as we are, every time we're faced with something really huge, the writers at least look to the past or they look at the myths.

It was a Tolkien lecture, so Lord of the Rings, in a lot of ways, was a response to World War I. If you were a Roman, if you fought in World War I, you've never seen anything like it. You never heard of deaths in the millions, you know. Battle of the Somme, I think nearly 60,000 people died the very first day. So if you're in a war where you come back and all your friends are dead, like everybody's dead, there's nothing in the present that you can use to process it. There's nothing in literary realism you can use to process that.

Of course you're going to end up back in fantasy, because how is he going to explain massive destruction other than the eye of Sauron and so on? If you're coming back from seeing somebody you've always known head explode right in front of you, realism is the one thing that can explain it. So of course you're going to retreat to fantasy. If you're going to retreat to fantasy, you're going to draw from the myths to do it.

Yes. And that's distinct to religion, of course. I mean, there's obviously religion is bound up with so many myths of its own. Yeah. Do you think that it's not an either or thing? People sort of can read Tolkien and be very religious at the same time? Well, lots of people, well, Tolkien himself was very religious. I think he can because ultimately they're both kind of mythologies. There's a mythology you

believe, a mythology you don't. But he could have easily just written a biblical parable. could have easily just written a biblical parable. And people who are trying to look at things that speak to them, speak to them culturally, could easily have gone to religion, but they don't. And not all these myths are positive. Not all this myth-making is a good thing. Racism comes out of mythologies too. Nazism comes out of mythologies. The whole idea of superior races and inferior races come out of mythologies as well. So it's not always a good thing, but it's still people reaching back for something. It may have been Canada when that neo-Nazi guy murdered those two boys who was defending those two Islamic girls,

and the guy started just shouting, Hail to Vinland. That's a mythology. It's a mythology, and it's a false mythology of this sort of grand white territory. But it's a necessary mythology for them to fuel their hate. But it's, again, they're going back to an imagined past. They're not going back to any facts. They're not even going back to religion. They're going back to myth-making.

A lot of those mythologies seem to have their roots, as do a lot of religions, in things that define us as human beings, very fundamental fears of death, otherness, anything that we don't understand, anything strange or foreign. And it sort of goes against the idea that we're advancing and progressing as human beings in some ways, do you think? I think it reminds us that we're not as progressive as we like to think.

Yeah. And that regardless of what we learn and know, in a lot of ways, learning is just accumulating of content. For such a progressive time, we have flat earthers. I know. And we have flat earthers that seem to be making a sort of resurgence. Yeah. We have anti-vaxxers. And all the other conspiracy theorists, etc. Yeah.

You know, measles was eliminated in 2000. Conspiracy theorists, et cetera. Yeah, you know, measles was eliminated in 2000. It's roared back because you have a whole bunch of people who, despite knowing better and having access to better information, still think that vaccination is some plot to turn their kids autistic. The internet was supposed to promise us this whole lot of unbridled access to information and awareness, and we end up being this profoundly

smarter people and to an extent we are but we're also profoundly dumber information spreads at a lightning speed but rumor also spreads at a lightning speed and fear also spreads at a lightning speed it has a way of ultimately revealing the best of us and the worst of us at the same time and it's tempting i suppose, when you see very vocal conspiracy theorists, anti-factors, et cetera, flat earthers, I wonder if it's related to people being more skeptical about religion. I wonder. Like they're looking for, as you say, people sort of gravitate towards myths one way or another. And in the absence of formal religion, maybe they're sort of clinging on to these kinds of conspiracy theories to make sense of the world. I wonder because they're very much in the presence of formal religion.

And I don't know if religion just doesn't scratch that kind of itch we sometimes have. Something that goes beyond knowledge or maybe even faith, I guess. I also think it's a weird kind of invented nostalgia for things that just didn't exist. One of the things that was interesting about Tolkien, for example, is how much he rejected this idea that he was drawing on Norse and Nordic mythology as a way of reinforcing whiteness, which is what people routinely do.

All the black metal bands who worship Odin, all these far-right guys who are like Odin worshippers, it's like, you know, Norse mythology was not like that. Sometimes I wonder if it's the other way around, where we don't, it's not the mythologies and the conspiracy theories that lead to the hate, it's not the mythologies and the conspiracy theories that lead to the hate. It's the hate that leads to the conspiracy theories and the mythologies we create to sort of keep it going.

What was your first experience with Tolkien? What was the thing that really got its hooks into you with his stories? Honestly, the first, my first experience with Tolkien was actually that animated version of the Hobbit. Oh yeah. The Ralph Bashki.

I had the book of that film. I used to pour over it. That book is incredible. Yeah. That really was it. Other than that, I didn't come to Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit until I was an adult. Growing up in Jamaica, a lot of those books,

whether it's The Hobbit or Robert Jordan, any of these guys, they just weren't available in the average bookstore. A lot of the people who had those books were the rich kids. People like me, you took whatever you could get. Usually it's whatever was being sold in a drugstore or whatever friends' tasks were done with. And if it's in a drugstore it's stuff like star trek tie-ins or or star wars movie times or lots of comics alan dean foster's novelization

of alien yes alan dean is one of my heroes yeah yeah or loads and loads and loads of comics because comics were cheaper they were they were great but there's also the fact that they were cheaper it's also why i just do not have a snobbish attitude to any literary genre because i was just reading i was just glad to read anything So So can you tell me what it was like for you growing up in Jamaica? Whereabouts were you and what sort of family were you growing up in? Well, I mean, I grew up in a suburb outside Kingston called Portmore. And both of my parents were working at one point. Both of my parents were police. My dad quit to become a lawyer.

So our upbringing was very almost disappointing the middle class. It was two working parents, two cars, raised by Sesame Street, and going to school and going into school drama and going home and into home drama and being the nerd. Or the nerd and the sissy and going through all the type of stuff that, honestly, children all over the world went through. I remember reading Carlo of Nazgars, the first volume of My Struggle, and him talking about growing up. And I'm like, wow, i also listen to sonic cute goo yeah i have this theory that if you grew up in the 80s anywhere in the world you had the very

same 80s really that's interesting i've been looking back over my we're sort of a similar age i think i think you're a couple of years younger than i am but yeah my adolescence was squarely in the 80s and i've been looking back trying to write about it making a kind of as comprehensive a list of all my cultural influences throughout the 80s as I'm able to. Because I find it just looking at lists of like what movies came out in a year sparks off so many very specific memories of what you were doing and who you were hanging out with, what you were wearing, everything. But my cultural influences were fairly narrow like looking back through the lens of like where we are today culturally speaking in a slightly more diverse world looking back at the stuff i was it was it's all sort of american movies directed by white blokes and all the music i was listening to was more white blokes until sort of a bit later on prince

no until prince sort of sign of the times that starts changing everything and then you know public enemy and do the right thing and then gradually towards the end of the 80s i'm suddenly getting different signals you know the end of the 80s is still the 80s yeah and i think the the sort of evolution that happened just from 81 to 89 is really really interesting you know we all of us had to reckon with madonna uh whether you liked her or not yeah what did you reckon i loved madonna oh yeah instantly yeah i mean madonna you know always broke it in jamaica a good two years before america because even from the first album people were into Madonna. We thought she was a black woman. Really?

Yeah, because she was singing disco. Who sings disco in 1981? Okay, yeah. But it's the raised by TV. You're right, it's the overpowering cultural influence of America, which became even more pronounced then because of MTV and cable and so on. I mean, America became the ultimate cultural colonizer. This is pre-internet, but things are happening still pretty instant.

It's also grown up in a shadow of the Cold War. There was a time I really didn't think we were going to make it to 1992. I thought nuclear war was going to get rid of us soon. I mean, everyone I know who's a similar age has that same memory of just sort of being in a weird fugue of just thinking, why isn't everyone panicking? Why isn't everyone running around freaking out? Because we're all going to die. And we've seen on TV what it's going to be like.

What if it was a fatalism? Because I knew that and I didn't panic. But also, I remember my, what was I, 11 or 12, and a teacher was asking, where do you see yourselves? What's your career? And I'm like, what do you mean career? We'll all be dead in six years. And I was like, I really don't see why we're talking about the future.

We don't have one. But it wasn't like a panic. It was kind of like Prince's 1999. It's just party you know 2000 zero party over oops all the time right that's what you were thinking i was in a corner weeping were you not a frightened child no actually i think because my parents were never frightened and they were cops okay i also think growing up in in the 70s and to a less extent the 80s where violence was just a fact of life i've never seen any of it the first time i heard a

gunshot was when i saw martin mcdonald play right doesn't mean i wasn't still in the shadow of it especially when your mom's a cop because you know she's a target yeah yeah did they ever run into life-threatening situations presumably um you know my mom's you know my mom's police department was in central kingston election night there was a shootout the gunmen just basically shot up the whole headquarters of the police and they shot it up just to prove they could right and killed people no i don't think they killed anybody it wouldn't It still would be a big mistake to try to kill people at the headquarters of the Jamaica Police Force. But I think that because she was so nonchalant and so over it, that I think we also were kind of over it. I mean, from a Brit's perspective, living in a country where it rains a great deal, the idea of living in Jamaica seems

rather attractive because all we have is the kind of tourist image of what it would be like out there. What is it like? Are there any times where it's like living in a holiday village? Of course it is. And when I go back to Jamaica, I go back as a tourist and I love it. Then after three days, I have to be, remember, I'm a brother and a son

and a neighbor and I slip back into my suburban upbringing and I'm like crap this is what I flew back for you know my mom reminds me to clean up the gutters and the roof and all of that the thing about Jamaica which I think is really really strange and I think different people over there you have to be in a certain kind of country to understand it is that despite the fact that Jamaica is so much smaller than say here there are like 10 different Jamaicas and those Jamaicas don't actually mix. I always say that in Jamaica this is how you have an affair. You can cheat on people very near each other just make sure they're two different social classes because they will never mix and a lot of men in

Jamaica do that. They'll have a wife and a mistress, but they're two different economic brackets and two different social classes, even though they live in the same neighborhood. They'll never know. I think that's one of the things we got from the Brits, the whole idea of social classes and exclusivity in the different classes. Although I think we had a more extreme and a more cartoonish version being a former colony. So they just decided that part of those social divisions was actually just to keep them divided. Yeah, but I also think we in Jamaica make too big a deal of class. I think we always say in Jamaica, we don't have a race problem,

we have a class problem. And we go, well, of course you think that. That's what colonialism taught you. Colonialism taught you that it's class, not race, and you can aspire. And then what happens is the Jamaican immigrant then comes to the UK and wonder what that no Irish, no blacks sign means. And I'm like, surely that doesn't mean me. I'm not black, I'm Jamaican.

If I'm Windrush, I fought for this country in two world wars. That sign could never mean me. And then it turns out that it did. But we wouldn't have known that because being raised in a British colony is very different from being raised in Britain. Right down to the language. It took me a while to realize that the English language I spoke makes me sound like a butler here. Uh-huh. Of course, I was taught.

We were taught a very, it's not just me. I was talking to Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje about this. And we're talking about why is our English so verbose and servile? And that we have to fight against it when we write our fiction. It's like, because that's English we were taught. We were taught butler English. What aspects of it in particular? I mean, it sounds...

The needless verbosity. That's just having fun with words, though, isn't it? Not necessarily. Like, I've been to... I remember once when I was in Jaipur, and I knew I could skip people asking me for autographs. I knew I could skip people searching for, asking me for autographs. I knew I could skip that line because the number of, the

total time it will take that person to ask me that question, I could be a mile away. Because I knew it was like, he was going to come in and say, wonderful, it was a wonderful day, blah, blah, blah, such and such and I don't want to trouble you, but it would be wonderful, blah, blah, blah, if you could such and such and such

and it took them a good minute to get to the point of, can you send my book? Send, I could just walk off. Right, okay. But I realized that, and that was something that, man, I was like, thank God for the Irish and the Americans, or I couldn't do it. Even though when I start a novel, one of the reasons why my novels aren't in pure, whatever that means, standard English, is that I can't write it. My standard English is incredibly stilted. And that's one of the reasons why I don't have novels in straight up standard English, because I speak colonial English and I write colonial English.

And it shows there's a over formality. There's a stiltedness. There's a kind of a standing on ceremony. Is that, do you think that's part of that genre as well? Or I'm thinking now of the, of the fantasy genre and the Tolkien's and the people like that, that's sort of myth language in a way, isn't it? Yeah, but myth language has fun though. And one of the things that brings fun to myth languages is different languages. It's fun when you know etymology as well,

so you can play around and you can make language bones. Also, Tolkien knew poetry, and he also knew a lot of the, he knew Middle English and all of that. I think that even with that sort of pompousness there's still there's a difference between speaking english from a from a position of authority and speaking it from a position that you're assuming it like what we what i see sometimes is whether this is turning into a linguistic conversation, is like overcorrection. Like a Jamaican would say like future.

It's future. Uh-huh. It's like people who say what. Yeah. Yeah. And my English, my first English teacher always said what. Yeah. It's like there's no H there.

I quite like people who do that though. You'll love my English, my very first English teacher, Miss Chen. Yeah. But for me, I still get a sense, a certain thrill of defiance when I'm doing it. The first people to really have objections to how I use the language was Jamaicans. Particularly when I wrote a second novel all in dialect, all in Jamaican patwa. And I remember one person going,

aren't you an English teacher? Why are you writing like this? Why was that? Because they felt that it was less. It was less. It was backward. It was broken English as if it needs to be repaired. I remember it was a big deal when Huckleberry Finn was taught

in my class. Or how late it was how late. And that book, Book of Nightwing, came out in 2009. So I wrote it like 2007. And it said something in 2007, there was still this concern that I am pushing forward an embarrassment to English in a novel. But I mean, you know, when I won the Booker Prize, one of the most hilarious letters, one of the most hilarious hostile letters I got, and I wish I kept it or they gave it to me, was somebody, must be the last person in the UK,

who to know that when they said the best novel written in English, they didn't mean the best novel written in English, they didn't mean the best usage of English grammar and pronunciation. And she was appalled. She was like, I thought this won a prize for the best use of the English language. It's not even English. I was like, you sure you're not Jamaican? So for people who haven't read Brief History of Seven Killings, which is the novel that won you the Booker It is written from the perspective

Of 70 plus characters Who are in some way Revolving around The attempted assassination Of Bob Marley I just wanted to point out as a grammar stickler I'm very impressed that you said revolving around

Because centering around Enrages me I just wanted to point out, as a grammar stickler, I'm very impressed that you said revolving around. Okay. Because centering around enrages me. And Americans keep doing it. And I've stopped a person in a live TV interview. It's like, I think it's revolve around. Anyway, you were saying. No, I like that.

Can we just pursue that tangent for a second? What are your other pet peeves? Language-wise? Yeah. Oh, my God. So I have this banned list, words students are not allowed to use. One is literally, which don't make cripples an American because they have to say literally every five seconds. It's like like, which they also have to say every five seconds.

Waft. Waft. It's a perfectly fine word, also have to say every five seconds. Waft. Waft. It's a perfectly fine word, but it still sounds like a fart. Yes, I think you should only use waft when you're talking about waving your hand. Precisely. To disperse a fart. I allow one exclamation point for every 300,000 words, which is usually the entire lifespan of my students' work. So they better think.

They'll be very judicious in how they use it. For the most part, I ban adverbs, which the British find very, very strange. It's a very American thing, anti-adverb. I ban it because at their age, we're talking 19-year-olds, they're not using adverbs to modify a sentence they're using adverbs to get out of being evocative and basically being lazy you can say

the big muscular horse ran quickly or you can just say the stallion galloped i think i i only eased up my rule with no adverbs with this new book and i'm still very conflicted about it. Yeah. It is, when you're trying to write, most people who don't write for a living tend to think that good writing means using more words, more complicated words, and, of course, usually the art is to strip everything back as much as possible. Precisely. That's why academic writing is so terrible.

Yeah. I remember as revenge, defiance, because I couldn't stand academic language, I refused to learn the meaning of the word rubric. Because they kept using it in every academic meeting. And to this day, I can't actually tell you what that means. But literally is the one I absolutely can't stand. I literally sweat my ass off i'm like no sweetheart your fat ass is still here you did not sweat it off i you know i'm a

stickler for grammar even though i break it all the time in my books but to be a real stickler for grammar is to be a real stickler for simplicity because overstating a sentence is just as bad yeah exactly it's just a question of making yourself understood at the end of the day. Who are the writers that you admire for a style that is different to your own, what you characterize as verbosity? Writers who zoom in for economy. Yeah. The very first person to do it may have been Mark Twain.

Right. Second person probably was James Joyce. Margaret Duras. The French writers in general. Which is funny because French is a really verbose language. Toni Morrison. I only just started reading my first Toni Morrison book recently, Sula.

But which is the one that you like best of hers? The one I like best of hers is Song of Solomon. It's a tie. Song of Solomon and Sula, for very, very different reasons. I could argue Song of Solomon is their greatest book, but I could easily argue Sula is their greatest novel. And a lot of people think Sula may be. It's such a perfect novel. And the thing is, Sula, I think my love for Song of Solomon

is very much as a lover of literature. I still want to meet her and ask her, how the hell did you write that? Sula, on the other hand, is important to me because it changed the way I saw the world. It changed the way I saw myself. And it was the shortest sentence,

the shortest line ever. It was just three words. When Sula said to Nell, show to who? Back up. Hold on, you haven't gotten there yet. No. I'm spoiling it for you.

I'm about halfway through. Okay, I'm not going to spoil it for you. I'm just going to say when you get to it, you'll understand why me giving you... After reading that line, it was the first time it ever occurred to me that I didn't have to live my life to please other people. Can you sort of give a praise of Sula for those who haven't read it? Can I ruin it? Spoil it for you? No, not the whole thing, but like... Yeah, well, I mean, Sula ultimately is about the friendship between two women, Nell and Sula, who have been friends since they were children.

And it's a friendship that in our today's terms would have called incredibly toxic there's something of that relationship that i felt in the relationship between nina and her sister in your seven killings yeah that sisterhood that friendship played out so many times in 70s jamaica you know you'd have the upper middle class kid who became militant and it filters down into their relationship as sisters, which are pretty toxic. But after Nina's gone through one hell of an epic, sad, unbelievable life, the first thing she can think of when she thinks she's finally free

is to call her sister. Yeah, yeah. It's very touching. There's an amazing scene in Brief History of Seven Killings when they're having just an epic row on the phone. And Kimmy, her sister, is just giving her a total tongue lashing. And it's like there's no holds barred. They're both just saying absolutely everything that they feel about the other one that they really shouldn't say the line has just been crossed and being trampled over but actually nina is holding herself back from saying the worst things she could and just taking this abuse from her sister and she says um or she thinks i hate people like that she says of her sister people you have to protect while they hurt you i hadn't heard that exact thing identified before that way. I thought it was brilliant.

And it is absolutely maddening, isn't it? When you feel as if like, I could say way worse things than you're saying right now. Yeah. But I'm not going to. Yeah, and you know that what you could say would destroy them in a way is what they say couldn't. But then eventually those people still end up eating you away.

That may be one of those scenes that echoes some of the relationships I had with some family members who could say things that I'm thinking, if I were to say something like that to you, you'd never recover from it. But somewhere you think I'm the one who you can say those things to. Still I'm fascinated by the ways in which those things to it's it's I am all I'm still I'm fascinated by the ways in which people who love each other hate each other I always ask people if your family weren't your family would you be friends with them and generally what do you think I would say generally the answer is no isn't it my answer no would be at this point in our lives Yeah Yeah exactly

It changes Ten years ago Absolutely not Right When I was growing up And I wasn't friends with them No When I was growing up

I was one of those Kinds of children That thought Your parents And your other family members Were the most boring people In the world And why it would be

Torture to spend time with them I just didn't think Anybody in my family Understood me I was the only person In my family who liked rock, other than my youngest sister. But I basically got a hold of her and inductioned her from a very young age.

What were you listening to? So for a long time, my idea of loud rock music would have been a Bon Jovi record. Okay. And I remember this religious group in high school, and I went to an all-boys high school, we were very posh and proper. Some of these Christians managed to infiltrate the school campus

and managed to take over a lot of time. And they invited all the sixth form students to watch this documentary called Highway to Hell, which was about the satanic influence on rock and roll and how you need to break from the spell. So another one bites the dust is start smoking marijuana when you backmasked it. Oh, yes. It's fun to smoke marijuana. Yeah.

And Stairway to Heaven was Oh, Sweet Satan and so on. And I remember. Judas Priest. Yeah. And I remember everybody in the room losing their shit. I mean, people who were the jocks were like bawling. It was this huge come to Jesus moment for so many people in that room. I was taking notes.

I was like, I had no idea ACDC sounded like that. I had no idea. I i mean it blew my mind everybody else is freaking out i'm like i'm gonna buy wasp i'm gonna buy slayer i'm gonna buy judas priest i'm gonna i mean thank god for the devil i guess because i left that thing a lifelong fan of heavy metal black sabbath oh my god. Everybody was like, I can't believe a Black Sabbath is in my house. I need to get rid of it. I'm like, I know a place you can dump it.

Of course, to this day, I still love metal quite a bit. The louder and slower, the better. Do you ever like a band called Accept? Balls to the Wall. See, I like Accept, Balls to the Wall's cover, which is early proof that I was gay. But they were kind of cheesy, though.

No, I like Judas Priest. Not as much as I like Slayer. But also, again, I'm an 80s kid. I like Faster Pussycat. I like Bango Tango, who nobody likes. I don't even know them. You don't need to know them. Those are the endo at the time.

Oh, my God. I actually listened to Whitesnake quite a bit. Oh, you liked even hair metal and stuff. I didn't even hear metal, of course. Poison, what? Whoa. The band that made me give up a lot at was Guns N' Roses. Right, okay.

And Guns N' Roses were a very huge and very important band for me. Yeah. I think because when Guns N' Roses came about, they sounded like a loud band for the rest of us. So if you were a freak, if people called you fag, if you were the junkie, if you were people that nobody cared about, and you smelled bad and you wore the wrong clothes, Guns N' Roses was your band.

And for a good two three years there were until they became the very same person who made your life hell i was gonna say like isn't there quite a motif of homophobia throughout oh yeah a lot of metal yeah which is why there's so many gay men in every metal and hip-hop but it's it's i think because the first album it sounded like people almost on the verge of collapse you know they're the sort of forgotten kids on the streets of la they could have easily turned into stuff like prostitution and drug abuse that if you were also sort of a drifting kid and i was drifting pretty far by the late 80s they They just spoke to you. So when they turned around and became the very type of person that caused kids like me to feel alienated,

I was considered one of the big betrayals of my life. You know, Guns N' Roses selling out and becoming the very same racist, homophobic, just nasty, dumb jock. At what point was that? I'm not a G&R. One, when they came up, that's when I wanted a million, homophobic, just nasty, dumb jock. At what point was that? I'm not a G&R. One,

when they came up with that song, One in a Million, when they talked about immigrants and faggots and niggers. What was that one? I don't remember that one. It was, it's actually not a bad song, but they claim it was always funny

and it was taking a joke. But that's also, you know, that brings up the whole idea of political correctness and political incorrectness. Uh-huh. Like, nobody's trying to censor them, but at the same time, it's also your default position. That brings up the whole idea of political correctness and political incorrectness. Nobody's trying to sense something, but at the same time,

it's asshole your default position. That's the best you can do. But then they just became a big, bloated, corporate rock monster. And there are bands who became big who didn't become monsters. U2 didn't become monsters. Bruce Springsteen didn't become a monster. Bands that were big before them didn't become monsters. Bruce Springsteen didn't become a monster. You know, bands that were big before them didn't become total monsters. They reminded me, funny enough, of being a rejected kid in high school and the new kid shows up and the new kid is your friend.

And neither of you know that he's only your friend until somebody points out to him you're with the wrong crowd. It's like, I call it the new friend who in a year will find better people. Right, you're just a stopgap to... You're just a stopgap because they don't know any better. And I sometimes feel that way with Guns N' Roses. Like, yeah, they were hanging out with us, the freaks, but it's because they were always looking for wherever, you know,

poison was playing. Yeah, they were waiting to get invited to the better party. Precisely, and they did. And the first people they attack are the people like us. Right, okay. God, I didn't know anything about that music. I mean, didn't you feel alienated by it before? That's the thing.

I felt alienated by reggae. Oh, really? I felt alienated by my own country's music What was your problem with reggae? I didn't have a problem with it I just sort of wanted to hear something different And I also didn't like the fact that Because I was drinking I was supposed to listen to it all day

And I was supposed to be It's funny because in the 70s reggae rallied against the system And that's what it's famous for But in the 80s reggae was the system So if you're a teenager in the 80s reggae was the system so if you're a teenager in the 80s what what are you going to rebel against you're going to rebel against what you know i mean you're going to rebel against what's not a system i mean which is funny because i actually quite like dancehall reggae by the time i'm a teenager reggae is no longer anti-establishment

yeah yeah reggae is no longer rebellious music reggae is no longer the type of music that my parents would scream at us and almost threaten to beat us if we're playing the house. Reggae now was the house. Which is not to take away from it. It was still, you know, especially in the early 80s, reggae was still, you know, making its best music. But I didn't want to hear that.

I'm 13 years old. I want to hear Eurythmics. I want to hear Michael Jackson. I want to hear Prince. I want to hear The Police. And then I want to hear things that, you know, my rich friends who travel would hear, like Dex's Midnight Runners or The Alarm. Nobody listens to it. 68 guns.

Or U2 when they were coming up. Right, okay, yeah. So you weren't shaking your head at the police's cultural appropriation. So this is a good question. I like this. This is a good question. I like this. This is a good point because Jamaicans loved police. Right. I think the way we looked at it is we were just impressed

where anybody was doing reggae. And I think the writer Greg Tate said this only a couple years ago. He says the least offensive part of cultural appropriation is the appropriation part. The most offensive part is when people borrow from cultures and pretend they created it yeah that if if you want a stock lesson on how to do taking from cultures right just look at the career of peter gabriel uh-huh now peter gabriel just did it right he did an album called passion which is calling from all sorts of music then he did an album called passion which is calling from all sorts of music then he did an album

called passion sources here's what i drew from peter gabriel was always always very vocal about the cultures he's playing around with and the cultures he's drawing from and a lot of people in those cultures became stars because he supported them we didn't know if you're so endure before peter gabriel he did right For those of you who are still arguing about cultural appropriation and don't know what we mean and so on, just tattoo on your hand, what would Peter Gabriel do? Thank you. Are you sort of encouraged by the conversations about race that are being had these days, or do you feel a sense that we're sort of moving backwards in some ways?

I think it's a combination of both. I am pleased by comfortable conversations. I'm pleased by uncomfortable conversations. I think we're in a process of growing, and growing is never painless. What I have a problem with are conversations that set out to shut down conversations. For example, I talk about cultural appropriation,

and people try to shut it down by saying you're arguing for censorship. It's like, no, you're not even arguing. You're trying to shut down the conversation. If you think, am I talking about Black Lives Matter's reactionary, you're not arguing. You're trying to shut down the argument. And I think a lot of people don't realize that's what they're doing. That, no, what you're doing is you're closing discussion. You're not opening it.

If you're going to open discussion, you have to allow for discussions to get heated. You have to allow for people to say offensive things. I mean, if you're going to talk about freedom, then be free. And freedom also means freedom to allow people to sometimes hurt you with what they're saying. There are discussions that we're having now that wouldn't have happened in the 1960s. And even the sheer unpleasantness of them ignores the fact that they're happening.

One of the things that always blows my mind as a foreigner in America, and it blows the mind of, say, an Arab American, somebody who comes from any of these countries in America. Americans are so caught up with, why are we having this conversation about race? We shouldn't be talking about race or blah, blah, blah,

that they don't realize that the very fact that you're talking is remarkable. You guys talking about Me Too, and there is a push back and there's a push forward. The fact that it's even happening is remarkable. And I think we can't lose sight of that. Regardless of how toxic the discussions get, and they frequently get toxic,

and they frequently don't end well, the fact that they happen at all is pretty incredible. Yes, I suppose the thing is that people feel that the battle lines and the trenches are now being dug so deep, will we ever get beyond them? And it was tempting to feel, especially towards the end of the 80s, watching American movies, that we were living in some sort of post-racial society where a lot of those lessons had been learned. And everything was fine now.

It was all fine. And then to discover, oh, actually, that's not the way that people of color feel, actually, a lot of the time. It's sort of. I mean, public enemy was the 80s. Yeah. Tracy Chapman as well. Right, right. And I was reminded about going to see Do the Right Thing

when it came out because I was listening to a podcast where a journalist was talking about Green Book and the fact that Green Book had won the Oscar and how it was a strange parallel in lots of ways with 1990 when Driving Miss Daisy won the Oscar for Best Picture. Right, and Do the Right Thing wasn't even nominated. And Do the Right Thing wasn't even nominated. And I think Kim Basinger, do you say Basinger or Basinger?

I said Basinger, but I was raised by British people. There you go. Kim Basinger, but I was raised by British people. There you go. Kim Basinger. She said, you know, there's five great pictures nominated this year for the Oscar, but one hasn't been nominated and it tells the most truth and that's Do the Right Thing. And, yeah, I was reminded of going to see that film when I was quite young. So what's that? Well, no, I was nearly 20, I suppose.

film when I was quite young. So what's that? Well, no, I was nearly 20, I suppose. But walking out of that kind of film and feeling very confused and conflicted because it wasn't the narrative about race relations that I was used to. I won from a sort of white liberal perspective that I suppose you could describe as a kind of liberal wank fantasy, that I suppose you could describe as a kind of liberal wank fantasy, which Green Book, for some people, seems to be again. Absolutely. But The Help also seems to be. Right, okay.

And that was only 2011? It's a story that Hollywood and America through Hollywood needs to believe. It's the whole story of racial repair that we all need to believe, especially when the bulk of the work of repairing is done by the white person. Right. You know, we're just talking about mythologies. There is one. That's a myth we create continually and continue

to spin. You know, Green Book, I haven't seen it, so I can't make a critical statement. It's a delight. Really? Is it as lovely as Crash? Yeah. I mean, I watched it, and I did think, okay, it's one of these wank fantasy films. But, I mean, it's sort of enjoyable, and I really like Mahershala Ali,

and I didn't know about Don Shirley, the character that he plays. Sure, the people who made the film didn't either. The family hated it. Oh, really? Okay. So they ignored a bunch of things. I don't know if it was the family or people who knew the story, so at no point did it say, you know that Don Shirley is gay. Oh, they say you don't know that if you watch the film? Mm-hmm.

Oh, no, you do. Okay. Because I'm probably never going to gonna see it you should see it it's quite i mean it's interesting it's interesting that that kind of film is still being made and it was it was jarring i mean you know i watched it sort of thinking well here's a well-meaning film you watch anything this is well-meaning right that's a problem though well-meaning yeah so much crap is done under the guise of being well-meaning. And a lot of times these guys are so hurt and appalled and people dislike those films.

But I did the work. I'm like, ooh, gee, thanks, white liberal. It's one of these sort of without my effort, the struggle is doomed kind of attitude that white liberals tend to have. You know, it's like whenever they talk about whatever work they've done in Africa. And I'll just respond, Africa isn't a country, sweetheart. You know, it's sort of, without my effort,

they were doomed kind of thing. And it's still, it plays out in a different way in the former colonies. It's always a sort of selfless white savior who's saving us from the black people or the Indian people from their worst natures. It's the kind of stories that keep getting made. So somebody clearly keeps wanting to watch this. Like Green Book, there's clearly a person out there that needs this mythology. Well, what about, so if I take Peter Farrelly, the director's

position, I don't know what his position would actually be, because I don't know. But I'm imagining that advocates of that film and others like it would say, well, this is a small step to changing the minds of a wider group of people outside the sort of liberal intelligentsia, for whom maybe racist attitudes are deeply entrenched. And rather than alienate them by being too radical, we're going to go soft on them and give them this sort of... Yeah, but that ties into the myth of progress. How do you mean? What do you mean by that? Meaning, if I have a son who's sucking his thumb on the bus, I'm probably going to leave him alone. He's going to evolve out. He's going to progress out of it. If I have a son who's dropping his pants and

masturbating on the bus, I'm going to say, cut that crap out now. Racism is the latter. It's not something to progress out of. It's an illegitimate position and it has always been illegitimate and they know it's illegitimate. So for me to encourage you to evolve your attitudes is me implying that you're moving from some sort of legit state to a next. Racism is not legit. It's an illegitimate state. It has always been illegitimate. You're doing something wrong. Stop it. As opposed to this is your culture. Let us progress out of it. If your culture is murdering little children, I'm not going to go, okay, murder four today, murder three tomorrow, murder two. I'm not going

to say stop murdering children. It's like rape culture that we also think men need to evolve out of. No, you need to stop raping women. And that's my problem with how racism has been treated by liberals. It's something that they think people should evolve out of you're not supposed to evolve out of a crime to not doing a crime you're supposed to stop committing crime and I think it's a narrative that

the south for example in America forced on to the north and the north just took it talk about myths, one of the things the myths that people have about America is that reconstruction wasn't working, which is, of course, utter bullshit. Reconstruction was working, but Rutherford Hayes wanted American presidency more than he wanted equal rights. So he left the southern part of America to Jim Crow. Jim Crow. So no,

I just do not believe in that whole idea in even how we approach racism and bigotry. That it's a step in the right direction. Again, if you're teaching people to not be wrong, I guess it's progress. But it don't seem progress from the other side

of it. And I also don't think it's progress because then why do we keep having these movies if they're working? If this is doing good, why didn't The Help fix it? Why didn't Driving Miss Daisy fix it? Why didn't Cry Freedom fix it? Why didn't Mississippi Burning fix it?

We keep hearing these are the type of films that will heal America and why isn't it healed yet? Well, I suppose it could be argued that these, you know, humans tend towards prejudices of one kind or another, and they need, like a child, to be constantly reminded, no, no, no, no, that's wrong, that's wrong. You know what I mean? But my argument is that it's not a prejudice, it's a crime. My argument is it's not a prejudice, it's a perversion. Right, but it comes from, don't you think,

some of these things come from fundamental fears. I think it comes from a fundamental cultural, a type of social cultural upbringing. If you grew up in a house where incest is happening all the time, you might probably think incest is normal. Am I going to then make you evolve out of that view? Now when I say stop the family sex, again, it's a mass illegitimacy that was allowed to fester. It didn't have to.

That's one of the things that people keep forgetting about the story about racism. Racism didn't have to happen. There were other choices. have to happen there were other choices it is kind of rich i think and rich in the most sarcastic american sarcastic way of saying it that now we jump forward and we look at these things as these sort of fundamental institutions need to help overturn when they're fundamental perversions that we chose so is that two stars for green book? I haven't seen it yet. I still feel I should have an informed opinion of the things I attack. So I technically can't attack Green Book because I haven't seen it.

I can attack Driving Miss Daisy, though. I haven't seen Driving Miss Daisy. I saw it, so you wouldn't have to. Okay. Have you seen If Beale Street Could Talk? I have seen If Beale Street Could Talk. That's good. It's good.

There are parts I like more than other parts. He's got such a mastery of tone don't you think as a as a film he's a master of tone and color and he's a master of scene almost as a set piece that's why moonlight works so well because moonlight is a literally a series of set pieces i think beale Street probably is a more conventional story. More of a sort of whodunit at some point. What were the films that you were most enthusiastic about when you were in your adolescence? Star Wars. Okay. Empire Strikes Back.

Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yeah. I'm in the suburbs. I'm going to love escapism. Sure. But I also started to watch i guess back then we call it art house so stuff like blue velvet um which i did not understand the first time i saw it i think i might have walked out of it because i was so i just sort of thought this is

too much and it didn't feel right and then it again recently, it still doesn't really feel right. But there's so much amazing, interesting stuff in there as well. Did you see Dune when it came out? Yeah. God, what a mess. Yeah, it was a mess. But didn't you think there was quite a lot of very haunting, memorable, strange stuff in there as well? I remember it was like Sting wore a bikini.

Sting's bikini and his hair were haunting strange and i ever thought the the blue in the eyes are so cheap yes the special effects yeah when the sandworms came out that was a very sad time but oh made a real impression on me it was so strange yeah what else um heathers heathers right okay as a major major especially again as a disaffected teen in school heathers really spoke to me yeah no i was going to kill anybody you didn't have violent fantasies then no of course i did as a teenager of course i had violent sure yeah because you still have those in your books now of course course and you've but you're becoming quite a master at a fairly no holds barred approach to writing about violence like did you watch sort of gory movies and things like that um not really because i don't really write gore um and i think gore is a totally different thing i think gore is a pornography right okay it's it's the responses to gore is essentially you're disgusted but then you just numb and i write really explicit

violence and really explicit sex but um i'm not writing them to numb the viewer no they're deeply shocking yeah and they should be shocking because violence is shocking we don't go around where i mean even me growing up in the flipp 70s, didn't go around expecting violence. It's like, I don't go around expecting any of the negative things. I don't go around expecting racism. Even though I've said lots about racism, the first time somebody says something racist to me, I giggled, then went home and cried. And I always thought that I would be ready to just, you know, I think I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm pretty sharp. I'll just fire back something equally or even more witty and ferocious

and just wither that person. And instead I went, and I went home and cried. I don't expect it. And I think to bring it right back to about violence, violence should be unexpected and it should leave a mark. about violence, violence should be unexpected, and it should leave a mark. It's funny, you know, an 80s film, an 80s action film,

the actor will kill, even if you count it, the actor probably kills around 120 to 200 men. I'll have four scenes in my book, and I'm the violent guy. Yeah, yeah. And I think the reason, the difference is, there is tons of violence in the average action flick, but there's no suffering. Like, how many people who get shot actually scream in pain for two hours and then die?

If you're shot in the belly, that's going to be a very long and very painful and nasty death. Nobody suffers. They just instantly do the riddled bullet, full of bullet dance. You don't hear one person crying out because you shot him somewhere where you're going to die slow. That's what happens in war.

That's what happens in real violence. I think violence reverberates. If you've ever had the horrible misfortune of suffering violence, that stuff echoes. That trauma stays with you. It really does. And it doesn't have to be even that violent.

No. If you've ever been punched, it's traumatic. You remember being slapped. Yeah. It really hurts. It takes ages to get over. You're shaken. You're upset.

You don't just sit and carry on and do a wisecrack. No, it cuts a hole in your day. We're not even talking about the long-term things, even the short-term. It cuts a hole in your day. It just does. In the brief history of seven killings, you're describing acts of violence where there are kind of professional hoodlums involved a lot of the time. And so they are inured to it to some degree. There's a really upsetting traumatic scene, spoiler alert.

There is someone who gets buried alive as a punishment. And you sort of go inside his mind and describe right up until the last moment the thoughts running through his head what was it like to write that scene um god that's a good question i don't know i guess somebody would call me a sort of literary masochist but um i've always been interested in the extremes of human experience including death and including suffering, and so on. And I've always found something a little offensive about shying away and people shying away from those things.

It's like when every time somebody says to me, I couldn't read your novel about slavery because it was so bad and I don't think I could handle it. And my response is usually, I'm sure you think reading a novel about slavery is unbearable. It may be just a tad more bearable than actually being a slave. So shut the fuck up. To come back to this, part of it is I'm curious about the things we don't know about and the things we don't write about, including near death and stuff like that but i also think to get the story you kind of have to become a journalist

for imagined people and a journalist for unimaginable stuff so it's it's i'm at the point of where do things like that cause me emotionally no because to me i am basically a reporter and i have to go in and get a story. And I think even a scene like that still has to be written with a kind of objectivity. Or I'm not going to get it. So when you write a scene like that, you're not consciously picking away at your own anxieties and fears of death. Or are you? Well, I think yes to the extent that I think you give your characters power when you give them your stakes. So I'm not sure if that's one of the things where, because I can't imagine myself being in that situation.

And when you're creating characters for your new trilogy, so far, I mean, the book that's just come out is Black Leopard, Red Wolf. And that is part one of a three-part trilogy that you're planning. The Dark Star trilogy. No reference to the John Carpenter film, presumably. No. Probably closer to the Ghanians football team. Yeah. When you're creating characters for that, because, I mean, you're wrangling, as I said before,

70- plus characters for brief history of seven killings a lot of characters in this book as well but it's a totally different world fantastical mythical world and what approach do you take to those what are you drawing on when you create a character that has to be to some degree relatable well I, especially when you're dealing with fantasy, especially when you're dealing with fantastical and supernatural and all of that, that you do have to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. So it's one thing that I am writing a fantastical universe. It's one thing that I'm writing stuff that's magical and make-believe.

But I have to remember that the characters in the world don't think so it's magical to me it's real to them so what what the first thing that makes tracker real and relatable is that he's responding to his world the way we respond to ours with a sort of sometimes fascination at something new, but for the most part, familiar and also almost kind of bored with the world, certainly to the point where he takes it for granted. So he rarely stops and admires something like a tourist, which I think is one of the problems with sci-fi and even historical novels sometimes, that novelists write them as if they're tourists.

You can't stop and admire that those flowers look a certain way. You wouldn't. Some people are reading early drafts of this, and a lot of the criticism was, I wish we knew more about this place, and I wish he spoke more about it. I said, but why would he? It's something he's seen all his life. would he stop and to tell you about it yes and so instead you sort of

gradually accumulate a sense of place and and that's one of the things that draws you in i suppose seven killings was similar in a way that you know it was like the the way that people talked about the wire the tv show oh it's amazing but you've got to stick with it for however many episodes and then it repays your patience in that way yeah but I write that way I also believe in writing that way I think it does demand and pretty much all the stuff I've written has demands your time and demands your patience and demands your patience. And you can't read it in a half-assed way. You really do have to commit.

It can't be you're going to keep one leg in this world and another leg, another foot in the world of the book. I want both feet. But I do think it is rewarded when you disappear into the world of story. My favorite novels, at least a lot of my favorite novels, demanded that I disappear into the world of story. What sort of things?

Like 100 Years of Solitude, I have to sort of disappear into a world where people are so pure they fly to heaven. But that's my favorite kind of book. What are you reading at the moment? I'm reading Jane Eyre. Are you? Yeah. I don't think i've read jane eyre since i was like 14 yeah i'm not quite sure why i picked it up maybe because i tried and failed wuthering heights for the fourth time last year i can't stand that book i keep trying i keep trying it's the fourth time i've tried to read it and it's the fourth time i'm like, I can't do this.

Is it a compulsion that leads you to explore that leading edge of all of that? Yeah. I'm still a curiosity seeker. Looking at the idiosyncrasies of things. A mountain or a tree is the manifestation of forces that we are not capable of dealing with. I'm very drunk in this. I saw a picture of you wearing a David Bowie Let's Dance T-shirt. Yes. Were you a Bowie fan? I'm presuming so. I'm a huge Bowie fan.

When did you get into him? Was that sort of alongside all the metal and stuff? Well, I mean, in the 80s, I was into 80s Bowie, so there wasn't a lot of Bowie to be into, because a lot of 80s Bowie is quite bad. It is quite bad. Yeah. Did you go and see Labyrinth?

I'd see that. See, I'd see Labyrinth at the perfect time to see Labyrinth, in a movie theater at 12 midnight, where everybody's kind of drunk. Yeah. Then it's the greatest film ever made. That is the ideal state for Labyrinth. Precisely.

When did I really get into Bowie? Probably in the 90s when record disc reissued all those cds and it's still the best reissue campaign of bowie ever because they all had bonus tracks yeah amazing you've got yeah sort of four brilliant new songs per album the record is version i also if you're gonna buy cds hunt those down it's also the best sounding boy but yeah and i remember very quickly my favorite album was not the album everybody told me would be my favorite. Everybody always said, greatest Bowie is Ziggy.

I was like, nah. It turns out my favorite Bowie is Station to Station. Oh yeah, well that is a peach. The one he says he has no memory of making. Right. Giant holes in his head. Yeah. Station to Station is my favorite lois my second favorite yeah yeah my third favorite boy is probably um um hunky dory oh i was just gonna

say yeah um i bought you a gift oh i like gifts this is a a rare uh yellow vinyl of let's dance that single that you're holding was given to me by a listener to this program called Mike Gordon. He lives in Australia and he sent it to me very kindly. Thanks very much, Mike. And I hope you don't mind that I'm now passing it on to Marlon. It's just me to have to find a worthy person at some point in my life and pass this on to. It's an option. Or you could do what I did, which is just prop it up on your shelf and admire it i just thought it was a nice thing when did he give it

to you he sent it to me a year or two ago so you're saying like two years i might have to pass this on to a worthy person i don't know maybe Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics, and I don't want to stop and I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop these are the kinds

of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial and when We'll see you next time. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. Hey, welcome back, podcats. That was Marlon James there. Great pleasure to meet him. And as I said before, there's a few links to bits and pieces that we talked about in the description of this podcast.

Anyway, I'm very grateful to him for making the time. Ah, it's cold out here. Why is it so cold? I'm going to head back to the warmth of Castle Buckles. But before I go, a couple of things. Don't forget that there is an episode of the Adam Buxton podcast coming up in a few weeks. Not sure exactly when.

But it will feature a conversation between myself Richard Ayawade and Sarah Pascoe about J.D. Salinger's novel A Catcher in the Rye and I talked about this briefly a couple of podcasts ago but just wanted to remind you or tell you if you didn't listen to that podcast that um it's kind of a book club situation so if you would like to uh read catcher in the rye before listening to that podcast then now's your chance it's pretty short it's great it's one of richard's favorite books he was kind of obsessed by it as a young man. And it made a big impression on me too. And Sarah, she re-read it for our conversation.

So that's coming up in a few weeks. Twitter. I've cancelled Twitter. I've got to say cancelled again. Yay. Cancelled. I'm off Twitter for a bit. Just while I try and finish the book, and then I'll probably

plod back in with my dazzling tweets. But, you know, I didn't want people to think I'd stormed off in high or even medium dudgeon, because that wasn't the case. A couple of people said, because that wasn't the case. A couple of people said, oh, why are you going off Twitter? Have you been getting abuse? No, no more than usual. But people are nice to me on Twitter,

partly because I don't really say anything. It's really just exercise in trying to minimize my pool of distractions when I'm at the computer. Free up a bit of time, concentrate on the important things, like gazing at my navel and playing Mario Party with my children. That's been quite fun recently. We have a Nintendo Switch. I gave it to myself for Christmas. I didn't give it to the children. This is my tactic, right? I said, this is my present.

I knew that if I gave it to one of them, then there would be arguments. And whoever I'd given it to, I would never see them again because they'd just be off playing it. So I gave it to myself and we're only allowed to play it communally and recently we've been playing Mario Party it's working out quite well for the time being and also I downloaded some retro games I downloaded this thing uh I think it's a Namco museum maybe and it's got Pac-Man and stuff like that but it's got this game called rolling thunder that we used to play a kind of scrolling shoot them up back at school uh we used to go to the arcade me and joe and louis and people of an afternoon in our a-level year i think and just play rolling Thunder I was looking at my diary the other day

and most of the entries for around that time they're only short entries but a lot of them just say went out and well we used to call it bass I don't know why we called it bass I think it was because there was a song out at the time called Boops by Sly and Robbie and there was a bit that went base the final frontier

and i think there's a voice of a character in rolling thunder that sounded a bit like that so we used to refer to rolling thunder as base and my diary just says i went to the arcade and got really far on base. Oh dear. But yeah, it's been quite cool playing that. Hearing those sounds again, it's so evocative. And I got a pack of old Atari games as well for the Switch. And that was quite a trip.

This game called Surround that I used to play on the Atari 2600, which is just two blocks, green block, orange block, and they go around the screen going beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, leaving a solid trail behind them and you have to box in the other person and make them crash into your trail.

Simpler times. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Okay, my hands are freezing off. Rosie, come on. Let's head back. Here she comes. She's approaching. Cantering past. A soggy doggy all right let's get back it's friday night what are we gonna watch i'll tell you we watched a

film the other day it's called hearts beat loud and it starred Nick Offerman, a beardy man, the guy from Parks and Recreation. It's this bloke and his wife's no longer alive and their daughter's about to go off to college. And he has these jam sessions with his daughter and she's really talented and she's a great singer. And they end up writing a song together and he puts it on spotify and it starts getting a lot of traction and people get interested in him and so he's like yes i can form a band and go on tour with my daughter it's like the ultimate

sad muso dad fantasy it's quite good though And the actual song they write is quite decent and they perform it in the guy's record shop. It's a kind of Nick Hornby-esque, middle-aged muso man fantasy. And it was also enjoyed very much by my wife. So it's not just guys, I think will appreciate it anyway little recommendation for you there but hey that's it for this week thanks for listening hope you enjoyed it thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support as ever thanks Seamus thanks to Matt Lamont for doing a great job editing on this episode. Cheers, Matt. Much appreciated.

Thanks to ACAST. OK, that's enough waffle for you, buckles. Listen, take care, will you? I love you. Bye! Thank you. Bye. Thank you.