Cathi Unsworth The Singer by Cathi Unsworth
Music journalist turned crime writer Cathi Unsworth’s
first novel, The Not Knowing was published in 2005. A dark, noir expose
of the psychopaths of the London media world with a female protagonist more
ballsy and brilliant than most male writers could come up with, it was a
calling card announcing a major new talent in crime fiction. Her new novel, The
Singer, is a quantum leap on from that. Starting in the late Seventies, it
charts the rise and eventual crash of punk group Blood Truth. The band begins
to dissolve when Vincent Smith, the charismatic and psychotic lead singer,
marries Sylvana, singer for the ethereal Mood Violet. Six months later Sylvana
has committed suicide and Vincent has disappeared. Twenty years later
journalist Eddie Bracknell is trying to find out just what happened to Vincent
Smith. He should be careful what he wishes for . . .
I caught
up with Cathi at her bijou West London apartment where, over an indoor picnic
and much red wine, we chatted. There was loads more, but I don’t think the
world is ready (or even remotely interested) to hear our Alan Bennett and Thora
Hird join the Buzzcocks impressions . . .
Right. Music journalist background. Tell us about
that.
I had an interview with the
inimitable Tony Stewart the editor of Sounds, otherwise known as the
Brummie Bruiser, in which he went, ‘That’s a good line of bullshit you’ve got
there, which book d’you learn that from?’ (Laughing) I said, ‘I’m talking from
the heart’. He gave me two weeks trial and at the end of it he was satisfied
that I wasn’t full of shit so he let me carry on. And that was in 1987.
And he gave me a very good training in journalism, ’cos he really wouldn’t
tolerate that ‘me me me’ journalism that infected a lot of the music press. You
know, he wanted you to write not about yourself but about to convey your
enthusiasm for the music, why it’s brilliant. He just wanted you to be out
there finding new bands the whole time.
Sounds was a fucking good crew and I’m still friends with all of them. It
was like a little mafia.
I always preferred Sounds to the NME. And they had a
better sense of humour.
Yeah, it’s true. It was kind of like
. . . this is one thing that I’m quite pleased I put into The Singer. You
know history is always written by the victors, as they say, every time they get
someone on TV talking about the time of punk it’s always someone from the NME
talking about it and no one ever says, actually, the NME and Melody
Maker were lagging behind with ELP on the front cover when Sounds had the
Pistols. And when I worked at Melody Maker they were totally paranoid
about that ever happening again. So they seized on anything after that that
seemed remotely . . . they were so scared from missing out on punk.
I did write the first interview with Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins in
that era. ’Cos no one was really interested in them, apart from myself and Ann
Scanlan who’d also come over from Sounds. They weren’t particularly
interested until it became really popular. But y’know, Melody Maker
preferred the stuff like Blur which they thought was more intelligent and I
don’t agree with that at all. I’d rather listen to Kurt Cobain screaming . . .
Than Alex James wanking . . .
(Laughs)
And then Bizarre.
Bizarre was brilliant. I’d had this attempt at a
magazine which was fairly like Bizarre called Purr. That’s why I
left Melody Maker. I got some funding to do it with my friend Billy
Chainsaw but unfortunately it didn’t pan out. For reasons you probably
shouldn’t print for fear of the law of libel.
And that ended up in your first novel.
Mmm . . . a version of it, shall we
say.
Fictionalised.
Yeah. With a redemptive ending that
didn’t happen in real life, sadly. Anyway, I had this idea of a magazine. There
wasn’t much music press left by then because Melody Maker
had shut down as well as Sounds and NME had turned into fucking Smash
Hits and having grown up with this fairly literate music press I thought,
what would you want to read next? And it wasn’t just about music but about film
and books and current events going on in the world . . . fetishistic things,
cult things . . . a sort of lifestyle for the modern freak, all in one place. (laughs).
And I saw Bizarre when I was working at Mute Records and it had Betty Page on
the front cover and it had a feature on black magic in New Orleans and all
these brilliant things I was interested in. And then luckily enough I saw an ad
in the Guardian. And I am living proof it’s possible to get a job from
the Guardian. No one believes it’s possible.
I’ve done it.
Have you?
Yeah. That’s how I ended up in prison.
(Laughs) Good old Guardian, they
saw you coming . . .
And of course Bizarre was a kind of, well, I
can say this now because I worked for it along with you, it was kind of a high
point for counter culture contemporary British journalism, I think, before
James Brown got a hold of it . . .
And destroyed everything. Turned it
into Nazi Reader’s Wives. We had a very high calibre of contributors. We had
some of the finest minds of our generation . . .
(Both laugh)
Well we fucking did have . . . you
were working for us, Stewart Home was doing stuff, David Peace was doing stuff.
I think I worked up this collection of fantastic writers that he was totally
unappreciative of and he just wanted meaningless shite. Unfortunately my time
ended as horribly as my time at Purr did. After that happened, I didn’t want to
be at the mercy of a magazine publisher. One minute I was having a fantastic
job and the next minute you’ve been sold to someone who just doesn’t get it. Or
appreciate anything you’ve done. And everything you’ve worked on. I was so
close to Bizarre, it was like having my child taken away
from me. Really. And my freak family. And I just didn’t want to put myself in
that position again so with the help of yourself and Mr Bruen encouraging me, I
thought I’ll write a fucking book, ’cos I can’t get fired from myself.
And the result was The Not Knowing, which, in
my humble opinion, was one of the finest debuts of at least the last ten years.
I absolutely loved it. So what made you choose crime fiction?
Because of Derek Raymond. Rewinding
back to the Melody Maker years, my favourite band was Gallon
Drunk and they made a record with Derek Raymond who I hadn’t heard of until
then and I got hold of the book Dora Suarez that they were going to do and I
thought, fucking hell . . . I didn’t think crime fiction could be like that,
actually. I really hadn’t read much since I was young. You know, I always liked
Sherlock Holmes more for the atmosphere of olde London town than for the actual
plots.
I agree.
I just thought that crime novels
were crap, you know like Colin Dexter, like crossword puzzles, that I found
quite pompous and suddenly there was this book . . . the first thing that hit
me was it was so compassionate for this woman who was killed. You know, they’re
not normally like that, and such a brilliant description of the fucking
bleakness of London and such a strong voice, I was amazed and had had loads of
weird nightmares.
And I just never met such a brilliant person before. Derek Raymond. He
was so fantastic. So intelligent and, for a man in his sixties, so young. Such
an enquiring mind. Raged up . . . almost like Johnny Rotten, actually, that
rage that fuelled him and the way articulated it. Almost exactly. They almost used the
same phrase, the mistreatment of peoples, what made them fucking angry.
You know, we’re such an old and supposedly sophisticated race now and we
still haven’t the eternal dilemmas that afflicted the Greeks and the Romans. Things
we can’t resolve, like why are there still evil people out there, why people
enjoy causing damage and hurt and pain. Why we can’t live happily. Why can’t
we? Derek Raymond’s idea, which I agree with, is that for every five normal
people, say, there’s one psycho in our midst. Stirring up shit and making
people behave in a manner they wouldn’t normally but they almost feel obliged
to do so to be nice to the person telling them to do it. And that’s how whole
country’s get in worlds of shit.
Look at reality TV, like The Apprentice or Big
Brother. One in five. That’s a good theory.
It is. I think there’s this theory .
. . I think Julian Barnes has used it. He used this data that this scientist
had been working about how what blessed us with speech afflicted us with mental
illness. That’s how there’s always going to be a certain amount of psychos.
In my books I use the entertainment industry as the place where psychos
thrive and I think that is a fucking good environment for them. Because you
have to be such a ruthless bastard to get through it unscathed. It’s
interesting, isn’t it, all these stories about Charlie Manson wanting to be a
rock star, if he had done no one would have died. Because there are quite a few
rock stars that I’ve met, who if they hadn’t have become rock stars . . .
So you didn’t fancy chick lit, then? Obviously because
you’re a girl . . .
Yeah, that’s right. If I have five
cigarettes a day and two cups of Twinings, I feel really awful . . . I did
actually want Diana in The Not Knowing to be a big ‘fuck you’ to Brigit
Jones because she doesn’t count her fags or her beers. She just never stops
drinking and smoking and fucking up. She’s more brave and has more soul than
fucking stupid Brigit, who’s always bitching about her mates being married and
being a fat lazy cunt and expecting things to just turn up on her lap without
having to work for it. And that’s a fucking good role model for women? I think
not. ‘You know, if I’m really lucky, I might get fucked at the weekend by Hugh
Grant . . .’ No thanks.
And The Not Knowing was published by Serpent’s
Tail.
Thank God. After being turned down
by every publisher out there. Because they all said, we’re not really sure what
this is or where it fits in. And Serpent’s Tail is just a publisher for all
that shit that just doesn’t fit in. That’s what I love about Pete Ayrton
[publisher at Serpent’s Tail]. He’s like Daniel Miller [head honcho of Mute
Records]. He likes stuff because it’s fucking good quality, that’s saying
something powerful and different and interesting and he supports you and lets
you become a good artist. Not like the major label way, get someone, throw
loads of money at them and if you don’t recoup it instantly you’re dropped.
Serpent’s Tail took my book, two blokes, Pete and John Williams, my
editor, and all the people who turned me down in the majors were all women. John
said if I had submitted The Not Knowing with a bloke’s name I would have
got a deal for it. He actually reckons that they don’t want women to do pop
culture ’cos that’s a bloke’s thing. I should have done forensic psychology,
shouldn’t I? Because that’s what girls are allowed to do.
But John’s the best editor on Earth, I’m sure. And the only editor who
could have possibly done The Singer because he was in a punk band himself in
the Seventies. So I didn’t have to explain anything, in fact he had to explain
a few things to me. I almost freaked John out by changing things round and
making my band live in Queensgate Gardens in South Ken where he actually
fucking lived. Three doors down from Ari Up, from The Slits. Our ley lines were
connecting . . .
Now, The Singer. An absolute rock ‘n’ roll
opus. Possibly there’s no point now in anybody else writing a punk rock crime
novel.
Well I’d hate there not to be. I was
thinking about this. Dave Peace gave me this quote saying he could wipe it off
his list of things to do and I thought, please don’t. Because there’s more than
one fucking brilliant post-punk album, isn’t there? I think maybe I’ve done The Scream,
someone else could do Metal Box or Unknown Pleasures. There were
quite a lot of different voices in post-punk which is what I liked about it as
well.
Without being libellous, who’s who? Oh go on, be
libellous. I’ll take it out later.
None of them are really directly
based on anyone. They’re inspired by a collection of types that you get over
and over again in the music business, I think. Part of the idea was to mess
around with those stereotypes as well. My first band, Blood Truth, are a bunch
of schoolboys from Hull who form their band at school. Steve starts the band
off. He’s the archetype. Every band needs to have someone like Steve. He’s the
thuggish big brother who makes everything happen but who looks after everyone
else. He does owe quite a debt to Steve Jones who I think is
fan-fucking-tastic. There is a kind of Steve Jones in every band. Captain
Sensible is quite a similar type. They’ve all got to have that one brawny older
brother who’s got a heart of gold but comes across as a bit of a yob. And without
Steve they wouldn’t have had that band in the first place. They’re all misfits
in their own little ways. Steve is born into this mad family, his dad’s a
trawlerman who fought in the cod wars. But Steve doesn’t want to end up on a
trawler in the North Sea. He sees the Sex Pistols on TV, hears this sound, this
music, and Steve Jones has got the same name as him and he thinks, I want to be
him, I want to be a guitarist in a band.
Then we’ve got Lynton the bass player and he’s an adopted black guy
transferred to Hull at a very sensitive fucking age. I think it’s very
important to have a black character in that time because race relations were so
fucking bad at that time. 1977 wasn’t that far away from Enoch Powell and his
rivers of blood speech. Mike, my boyfriend, comes from Hull and he said there
was one black guy at school and he was the best musician there and everyone
wanted to be in a band with him. Imagine the most horrible thing in the world
being the only black person in a school full of fucking thugs. And those two
bond because they’re really into music. And I think it’s really necessary for
every brilliant band to have a black person. (She laughs) Preferably more than
one, actually. Look at the ratio of good music played by black people to good
music played by white people. Bit of a higher tower on one side only.
Then we’ve got Kevin. And at the start every fucking cliché about
drummers comes out. He’s a little twat, no one wants to speak to him, he’s
bullied into being in the band by Steve in the first place because he’s too
scared to say no. And Kevin’s being bullied at school and he doesn’t want to be
trapped in Hull being a docker, working the trawlers . . . there aren’t many
opportunities in Hull and there were even less in the Seventies and he’s a
quite sensitive little flower and music was his way out too.
So
unlikely though they are, I was talking to a friend of mine who was slightly
older who did form a punk band and that was exactly the sort of little ensemble
of people. And that to me was the positive thing about punk. If not for that
they wouldn’t have had anything. This sudden surge of ‘you can do it yourself’.
Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto put their own record out and got it into the
shops for five hundred quid and they made their money back immediately. That
was the basis for my character Tony borrowing a hundred quid off his dad,
setting up his record label and paying his dad back almost immediately.
I just wanted them to come from a really hard city in the North, not a
cool Northern city like Liverpool or Manchester.
And then they just bump into this Sid Vicious-lookalike psycho at a Sex
Pistols gig. One of the things I wanted Vince to be is if Lord Byron the
original mad, bad, dangerous to know motherfucker, was reborn in a punk body .
. . I do allude to Lord Byron all the way through and he would have been reborn
in the body of Lux Interior, or Nick Cave . . .
Not Pete Shelley . . .
No. (adopts camp Manchester accent) ‘Oh
no, please don’t spit on me . . .’ No, one of those scary motherfuckers. And
Vince plays a trick on them all along. He’s from a very privileged background
but they don’t realise. He does all the really mad, far out things. I think
that’s born of a self-confidence that only people born in the upper classes
have. As Derek Raymond said about Eton, that’s what it’s there for. To make you
into a future bastard. A future business leader, a good all-rounder, a bastard.
And I think Vince has got that. But early on he does something bloody brilliant
it unites the band. He’s bloody charming. I hate using that American
expression, kiss up, kick down.
One of the characters you clearly love writing about
was Donna, goth hanger on turned record industry entrepreneur.
I love Donna. She was my favourite
character in the whole book because I didn’t think of her when I started
writing. I thought I’ll make the first bit where the boys get their punk band
together and then because Vince has to marry Silvana I thought I had to get her
band in, so what were they going to be like? I knew vaguely what Silvana was
going to be about, which was nothing at all like she was painted by the blokes.
And I’d worked out her flatmate Helen who she’d been to college with and I
started writing this scene of them getting ready to go and see The Damned and
then Donna just walked into this scene and overtook it. She just appeared. And
honestly, it sounds a bit mad. I don’t think I invented Donna I just channelled
her from somewhere. I think there might be some dead goth who never got her due
in life. Who channelled me . . .(she laughs) She’s very complex and plays a key
part without anyone noticing.
I liked her a lot. It felt like she just muscled her
way in.
She did.
If this had been written by a bloke, it could have so
easily been like a copy of Word or Uncut or Mojo. Heritage
rock.
It would have had no interesting
female characters.
It would have been about pressings and set lists . . .
I agree. And it would have been
trying to say, ‘I know more about this than you’, that sneering tone . . . I
always think of myself down in the mosh pit. When I worked for Sounds and Bizarre
I never thought there was any difference between me and the people I was
writing for. I thought they were me.
I think one of the great strengths of your writing is
that you can write well for men. Because there’s so many male writers who can’t
write well for women. Or they can write a male version of a woman.
What does that tell you about them,
though? The main point of the Singer was to stick up for women who get treated
like shit in the music business. To show how casually it is that women are
treated so mysoginistically. And that’s why the lead had to be a bloke. I
couldn’t have another Diana character. She wouldn’t have got through the door
with those guys, into their little world. And not only that, she wouldn’t have
got to hear them discuss women the way they do in the book. At the end of the
day, what are women there for in this book? Just to have money made off them.
Sylvana and Donna are polar opposites. Sylvana’s vulnerable and fragile
from the get go because she’s got no defence mechanism. She’s from a world of
rarified privilege but she hasn’t fitted in to that world, poor cow, ’cos her
mum wanted her to be this perfect little Jewish princess. She already feels
that she’s failed and she’s brimming over with this talent. I’ve seen this so
many times in the music industry, people who are really talented like that are
really vulnerable because somehow they don’t seem to think they deserve any
success that comes their way and they’re never any good at business and they’re
never any good at protecting themselves.
I felt so sorry for her.
I know. There are actually bits of
this book I don’t want to read again. It made me feel sick.
So who is Sylvana based on? I got a bit of All About
Eve or . . .
She does have that ethereal Cocteau
Twins thing . . . or the March Violets had a red-haired female singer who was a
bit dreamy. Where did she come from? I don’t know. I wanted her to be American
because it would give them an excuse to say she was just like Nancy Spungeon. Some
bloody groupie who came over. I wanted her to come from a different world to
everyone else because she wasn’t as savvy and streetwise as everyone else in
this book.
The difference between Donna and Sylvana is that Donna is hard as nails
and takes precautions all the way through not to let herself become used and
fucked over and in the end she gets just as hurt, really.
But this was the first time that women were able to do this stuff and
that’s very important to me, that’s why I wanted to put that in. Not only the
first time that these little working class boys could escape the docks, but the
first time these women could do anything. And the other brilliant thing is, and
Donna exemplifies this, that she looks so fucking scary, you wouldn’t want to
start on her. I used to find when I was young that beer boys would leave me
alone for having spiky hair. And that was such a beautiful thing.
So, bearing in mind your music biz background, I’m going
to come over all fanzine boy now. So, what are your influences?
We’ve done this already . . .
(laughing) . . . Derek Raymond, his brilliant third album I Was Dora Suarez,
this punk called Martyn Waites, he’s like The Clash . . . David Peace. He’s like
Public Image Ltd . . . I do think of people as being like certain kinds of
music I like.
So who are you then?
I’d like to think Siouxie and the
Banshees.
Thank God you didn’t say Bow Wow Wow. Right. Big
question. US versus UK crime. Fight! Who would win?
At the moment, the UK would win. ’Cos
all the best writers are here. But they’re all influenced by the best American
writers. You know, it’s like a generation thing, like the Beatles and the
Stones selling the blues back to America. I think that we’ve all devoured James
Ellroy and he’s been massively influential, Charles Willeford, James Lee Burke,
Daniel Woodrell, James Sallis, all these fan-fucking-tastic American writers
have shown us a different way to write and we’ve basically taken their lead. I
think on both sides of the Atlantic and everywhere else in the world, the best
writers are the ones writing because they need to. Not purely looking at it as
a career. And by the way, if you are looking at it as a career, good fucking
luck. Hope you’ve got a trust fund . . . (laughing)
Where d’you see yourself fitting in in British crime
fiction?
I think I’m not that far away from
what you’re doing. There’s a little circle of us with an affinity. And Joolz
[Denby] as well, and David [Peace] and Jake [Arnott] and Nick Stone who I’ve
just met. I knew he would be cool because he called his book after a Birthday
Party song. And it’s interesting, I think there’s quite a lot of us that have
come up being obsessed with music. And it’s made a difference to our writing
because we’ve been growing up in that time of punk where the whole idea was to
question everything, look into the ills of society, write about it.
Are you happy being considered a crime writer? Or
would you rather be known as a writer who writes crime?
No, because I agree with you that
crime writing stops fiction from being self-indulgent because you have to have
fucking good plots to keep people interested. And I’ve never seen crime as a
dirty word or as a minority thing. But even if it was a minority thing that
would be good ’cos I’m a goth and we’re elitist bastards . . .
I think the whole of our society is one big fucking crime, anyway. For
the last thirty years we’ve been on our backs getting fucked by Thatcher, Major
and Blair in succession, eager pimps who’ve raped this country for anything
they can get out of it. That’s another thing I like about what you do and what
David does and what Derek Raymond did, the biggest criminals in our society are
at the top of it. It’s frankly depressing but it’s true.
In crime fiction you can give a voice to people who’ve been mistreated
and marginalised and brutalised and make people think about them as human
beings which I guess is the opposite of what mainstream crime books do which
are all either about this fantastic serial killer, what a genius he is, and
this detective after him with no fucking insight into the human condition or
anything. Sitting in their lonely garret in Cambridge, listening to jazz . . .
And why is always the cool jazz they listen to? It’s
always Charlie Parker, Miles Davis. Never Kenny Ball . . .
Mister Acker Bilk, where is he on
their playlist? I bet he’s fucking there. I bet when someone comes round they
shove Charlie Parker on top of this stack of Acker Bilk. (laughing)
Let’s face it, Martyn, we are
punk at a time of very fucking prog crime writing. There’s the Rick Wakeman of
the crime writing world standing before us in the shape of Dan Brown . . . The
Da Vinci Code is King Arthur On Ice . . . (laughing) That’s what we’ve got to destroy . . .
