The Butt review
Posted by Chris H on May 14th, 2008Michael Bywater reviews The Butt in The Independent.
Boomtown stats
Posted by Chris H on May 14th, 2008Last time I was in Dublin, Vivian drove me round in a big black Merc; this time it’s a still bigger and blacker Chrysler. “I should’ve bought a cement truck,” he observes, as we ooze past the Point, a massive new shopping-cum-entertainment complex that’s sprouting a small forest of large cranes. “I’d be coining it now.” Last time I was in Dublin, the old city seemed teetering on the edge of being metropolitan – now it’s fallen over. Last time I was in Dublin, the joke was the group of three pyramidical office blocks on the bank of the Liffey that were known locally as “Canary Dwarf”; now it’s them that have been dwarfed – or, at any rate, flanked by acre upon acre of plate glass and steel.
Guardian ‘Why I write’
Posted by Chris H on May 14th, 2008An interview from May 9 2007
An Amazon reader review
Posted by Chris H on May 14th, 2008of The Butt can be found here
The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of Aids by Elizabeth Pisani
Posted by Chris H on May 14th, 2008Back in 1985 I was an inpatient at a drug rehab in the West Country and had genital warts that required regular and painful treatments.
Each week I went to the STD clinic at the nearby hospital, where a middle-aged consultant applied an acidic preparation to the glans of my penis. One day, while he was actually holding the afflicted portion, he remarked — quite casually — that the best way to rid the country of HIV/Aids would be to “castrate all you junkies — and the queers, too”.
Olympic hurdles
Posted by Chris H on May 11th, 2008Read Will’s latest Psychogeography column here
10.05.08
Book panel with Simon Mayo
Posted by Chris H on May 9th, 2008To listen to Will talking about The Butt on Simon Mayo’s Radio 5 Live programme on April 24 2008, sign up to the podcast.
Foreword to Nick Cave: The complete lyrics
Posted by Chris H on April 29th, 2008Some 20 years ago, I had a long wrangle with the music writer Barney Hoskyns about the relative virtues of rock lyricists. Barney’s view was (and I hope I’m not traducing him in any way) that simplicity was the key. The structure of pop songs - most of which derive from the holy miscegenation of the English ballad form and the eight-bar blues - the importance to them of melody and their fairly short duration: all of these factors meant that facile rhymes, basic narratives and straightforward sentiments made for the best lyrics.
‘I used to love driving … ‘
Posted by Chris H on April 29th, 2008This week, Will writes about how he overcame his motoring addiction
29.04.08
Dammit, Thanet!
Posted by Chris H on April 28th, 2008To Broadstairs, not to bathe – it being April – but merely take the air. The Isle of Thanet has always been a little problematic for me; I can’t even say it without recalling Ian Dury’s lines: ‘I rendezvoused with Janet / Quite near the Isle of Thanet / She looked just like a gannet … ‘ &c. Somehow the great bard of the Kilburn High Road perfectly summed up this, the very coccyx of Britain, with its seafowl and its foul maidens.
