Will Self

I’m seriously considering making a late bid for rock stardom and reforming my student band, The Abusers. We split sometime in 1981 – or possibly 82 – over differences concerning nomenclature. I favoured changing the band’s name to Will Self and the Abusers, but understandably the others were against it. Pete Miller, the bassist, and a black kid called Chris, who played the drums and came from the Rosehill estate outside Oxford, split to form their own, more reggae-centric outfit dubbed Dub Vendor (like the celebrated platter shack in Notting Hill). Apart from me, they were the best musicians, and without them the Abusers were the empty chassis of a car with its rhythmic engine torn out.

Not that we’d ever been the tightest band around. Tight, mmm… as I recall this was always the purest approbation: standing in the sweaty, beery, fag-saturated crowds at the Marquee, the Electric Ballroom and the Roundhouse, watching bands with names such as the Pink Fairies, and Alien Sex Fiend, nodding sagely, then turning to your companion and uttering the shibboleth: “They’re really tight, man.” The Abusers, by contrast, were really loose – baggy, even.

Sometimes as many as 12 of us would mount the stage and crash into our legendary 25-minute cover of The Crystals’ “Da Do Ron Ron”. The line-up included: a 6ft 6in Rastafarian poet called Rocky, who spouted performance poetry, a lesbian-separatist guitarist with an extra-long lead on her double-headed axe so that she didn’t have to associate with the rest of us and, in the early stages at least, Geoff Mulgan who went on to head Demos, and then the Policy Unit at No 10. It was said of Robert Johnson, the legendary “King of the Delta Blues singers”, that he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the ability to play anything he wanted on the guitar. This took place at midnight, sometime in the 1920s, at a crossroads near Dockery’s plantation in the rural fastness of Mississippi. Johnson is credited with being the father of rock’n’roll, and indeed his hard-driving, percussive style of guitar-playing, and his ability to belt out misery with such cogency, had an immeasurable influence on generations of middle-class English white boys.

In the States, where the blues and country music are twined together into the DNA of an authentic tradition – a true folk music – movement has always been key. The experience of black sharecroppers, pushed off the land during the Depression, and forced into the northern urban ghettos, contains within it all the propulsion that has kept American rock’n’roll continuously evolving. The US is also a huge country, one in which the mythopoeic road, married to the insistent rhythm of the four-stroke internal combustion engine, has generated a thousand thousand songs.

Of course, in this tea-towel-sized island, the idea of a “road song” is just as much of a solecism as a “road movie”. English rock music has, instead, always had a distinctly performative feel to it – music hall rather than Motown. The quintessential songs of place are concerned with creating proscenium arches, then populating the stage with characters. From “Waterloo Sunset” to “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” to “Parklife”, these are static-romantic contrivances. Not that they should be condemned for it, there is the continuation of a tradition here, but it ain’t rock n’ roll so far as I’m concerned. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? There wasn’t much comparison between Oxfordshire in the early 1980s and Mississippi in the 1920s, but the Mephistophelean remained surprisingly constant. Despite being entirely self-taught, I was by the age of 19 undoubtedly the finest rock’n’roll guitarist in England. My lightning riffs, ceaseless invention, and note-perfect picking were the envy of such giants as Eric “Slow Hand” Clapton, and Keith Richards. The latter often used to run little errands for me – such as popping up to the corner shop to get a pint of milk – so in awe of my playing was he. Then, one night, coming back from a gig, I met the Devil at the crossroads of Carfax and the High Street. He appeared to me in the guise of a Human Resources manager for ICI, and offered me a decent career in industry with job security. Instead of dieing an early death, I would live long enough to raise a family, receive a decent pension, and become a Tory councillor. In sum: I would receive the very soul of Englishness in exchange for my ability to play the guitar.

How could I refuse? With Pete and Chris already gone from the Abusers the band was limping along, and besides, I already intuitively grasped the limits of Anglo rock, and foresaw the arid classicism that would lead to Coldplay. I signed the contract in blood and never regretted it. Until now, after all, rock’n’roll will never die – and besides, my pension is woefully underperforming.

01.03.08

Feeling like the protagonist of Kafka’s fragment Before the Law, I cycled across town on a windy February evening to the Royal Courts of Justice. They’re Gothic, certainly, but the Gothic is so entrenched in British architecture – as style, recursive style, fakery and mockery – that to call the Courts this is a mere allusion. They are bulbous stupid Gothic, Gothic as an elaboration on High Victorian delusions of mightiness and rightiness, with finials of lumpy complacency buttressed by hefty hypocrisy. It’s no surprise to discover that George Edward Street, the criminal architect responsible for designing them, originally qualified as a solicitor.

Who but a solicitor would conceive of decorating the gates of the Law with the carved heads of celebrated judges and lawyers? Who but a solicitor would have the plodding nerve to surmount them with Jesus, Moses and Solomon, while the poor litigants are immortalised as a fighting dog and cat. And who but the Ministry of Justice – crazy Kafkaesque name, crazy Kafkaesque institution – would dream of hiring out the Great Hall by the hour, so that City types can trough down in splendour, and applaud their own huge feats of avarice, and tiny ones of beneficence.

I was here almost a year ago, called upon by a charity called War Child. Having been offered the opportunity to fundraise at a bond traders’ dinner, they were desperate for a speaker and asked me to step into the breech. On that occasion, things went reasonably well – if begging is ever OK. I doffed my rhetorical cap, and the rich guys listened respectfully to my spiel, before tossing a 10p coin into it. In fact, they divvied up a couple of hundred grand, but proportionally – given there were trillions in the Great Hall – I was a Big Issue seller in a suit.

This year, War Child came knocking again, and I didn’t have the gall to give them knock-back. True, I do believe in the work they’re doing – helping kids in war zones, feeding them, clothing them, building them schools – it’s just I’m not sure it’s them that should be doing it. Charities and other NGOs follow in the wake of our Government’s foreign adventuring like vultures with sociology degrees, feeding off the carrion left behind on the battlefield. They alight for a few months or years, putting out celebrity-endorsed pop CDs back home to fund their endeavours, and then flap away again to feed on more Humanism.

Still, any good is better than no good, and so it was that I found myself, within the gates of the law, watching the black ties getting spattered with red wine, and admiring the multicoloured up lights playing upon the pillars of the great hall. It transpired that this lot were different: not as grand as last year’s mob who were mostly CEOs, these poor cousins were responsible for leveraged finance and syndicated loans. Hmm, and the dread credit crunch was squeezing them until the Faberge pips popped out. Why, some of them would only be getting six-figure bonuses this year. Nevertheless, the dinner was an opportunity for these nabobs of debt creation to give themselves glitzy awards with snappy names like Best Arranger of Project Finance Loans and Best Arranger of Turkish Loans.

Now, I like to come into an environment and try to understand it, even one as bizarrely unwholesome as this. So, I dutifully asked the studious young man seated next to me what exactly a “mezzanine loan” was, and he explained that it was a loan where the borrowers’ failure to repay would result in the loaners acquiring equity in their business. Simple, really: banking as a kind of invasion of the body snatchers.

On they went, to the grossly amplified strains of pop hits, sashaying up to the lectern and booming out such rousing speeches as “We did the Imperial Tobacco loan!” It felt like aeons – yet it was only an hour or so. Finally, it was my turn to approach the gatekeeper of the Law. I spoke for 20 minutes or so, giving a run-down on War Child’s work, exhorting the assembled extremely wealthy people to divvy up for building toilets and schools in Iraq, and retraining traumatised child soldiers in the Congo, before ending up with a description of one case history: a 12-year-old Afghani girl raped by her uncle and then imprisoned for – you guessed it – adultery.

It was then that I began to hear a distinct susurration spreading through the Great Hall and lapping against the pretentious pillars: they were talking. And not just one or two of them, exchanging the odd remark – but entire tables chatting away while they slugged back the Rioja. I stopped, and boomed at them over the PA: “I’m wondering what exactly it is that you’re discussing that can possibly be more important than a child being raped?” But it was a stupid question, because I knew already: it was money – and there was certain justice in that, oh yes.

23.02.08

At the time of writing, the fishing trawler Spinningdale is still caught on the rocks near to Village Bay, the only landfall on the Hebridean island of St Kilda. The National Trust of Scotland, which owns the island, has launched an “emergency procedure” to deal with the consequences of the shipwreck: baiting traps. Yes, you read me right: baiting traps. The 14-strong Spanish crew were speedily rescued from the stricken vessel, which ran aground during the storms on February 2, but there’s considerable anxiety that some of the Spinningdale’s probable stowaways may get ashore, and if even one pregnant Rattus norvegicus does take the plunge successfully, the outlook for St Kilda’s half million seabirds is pretty grim.

In theory, an incestuous ratty mummy and daddy can produce as many as 15,000 living descendants within a year. And on St Kilda, these frantic gnawers will have a veritable smorgasbord laid out for them on the springy turf – albeit one heavy on the raw egg. For the St Kildan petrels, fulmars, puffins and guillemots have no resident predators, the only native mammal being a subspecies of mouse. As Susan Bain, the trust’s manager affectingly put it, after four bad breeding seasons, the birds “really don’t need another stress”.

Of course, there is an irony cruising even these remote waters, 50 miles due west from the Isle of Lewis. St Kilda supported a human population from the Neolithic era until the 1930s, when the final remnant were evacuated to the Scots mainland at their own request. The St Kildans, unmolested by rats, lived in a strange and communistic Arcadia, where, for generation after generation, they harvested the seabirds from the island’s spectacular cliffs. So, as one land-based predator has quit St Kilda, now, after a 70-year moratorium, another one may be about to pitch up.

That Rattus norvegicus is itself parasitic on human populations adds another twist to the double spiralling of eco and system. I well recall, somewhere in the feverish slumber of a childhood illness, listening to an apocalyptic piece of afternoon theatre on Radio 4. In this play, a mad multi-millionaire fearing the coming Armageddon, retreated to a nuclear shelter on his private island, only to discover that he had brought rats with him, and that they were intent on devouring his carefully selected breeding pairs of humans.

Rats, islands, humans. In Konrad Lorenz’s masterly book On Aggression, the maverick ethologist writes of a Danish island where two rival “tribes” of brown rats had fought themselves to a standstill, occupying exact halves of the available territory, complete with a “front line” of burrows and runs. The possible fate of St Kilda is further illustrated by the incursion of rats to the even more distant Campbell Island, a New Zealand possession near the Antarctic Circle. Brought by 19th-century whalers, the little bastards did for all the native bird-life, including a rare flightless teal. In 2002, the Kiwis struck back, sending 120 tons of rat poison to the island, and killing an estimated 200,000.

The 200,000 figure is interesting, because 250,000 was the number of rats estimated to live in New York in 1949 by the charmingly named Dave Davis, who dedicated his life to their demography. Davis was intent, in part, on debunking the – in his view – preposterous, and oft-quoted, “statistic” that there was one rat per person in urban environments. This shibboleth – which in our own day has morphed into the often stated “you’re never more than 10 feet away from a rat” – in fact derives from a 1909 English study, The Rat Problem by WR Boelter. Boelter based it on the “reasonable assumption” that there was one rat per cultivated acre – he thought it absurd to factor in urban environments.

Forty million acres – 40 million rats and coincidentally 40 million people, a nice parity, and ever since, the idea that we all have a toothy little doppelganger has gnawed away at us relentlessly. The intimacy with rats implied by saying that you’re never more than 10 feet away from one is a kind of Mockney machismo: a tough-guy act in the pointy face of a creature certainly less prevalent – because constantly poisoned – and definitely wholly unaware of our bravado.

Which leads us, messily enough, to Ralph Steadman, who baited me with this rat [see the Independent February 16 2008 issue], together with the following observations: “It’s a picture of rampant hope beneath the boards … and if you’re asking, yes, the rat came from under the boards of the lounge, and had practically fossilised in the balletic pose as though it were defiant in death. It probably died in 1887 when the Old Loose Court was restored. I imagine the house surrounded by hop fields and begging peasants who would empty your cesspit with a shovel and wheelbarrow for sixpence and a clout round the ear. Now look at us! Consumed by living greed and cargos of rats …”

No man is an island – but Ralph gets close.

16.02.08

You could’ve knocked me down with a semi-transparent pop-up ident of a feather when I got an email from Bill Gates. To begin with I thought the scrambled syntax, banjaxed grammar, and dubious content was yet another spammer: “C’mon Big Boy see my lake glistens 4 U. All Xs pays bi me if U cum kwik.” But later I was called by an assistant who informed me that the multi-billionaire software tycoon wasn’t trying to sell me Viagra, but rather wanted me and Ralph Steadman to join him at his $97m lakeside eco-mansion for what Gates terms a “Think Week”.

“It’ll be blue-sky stuff,” the MicroWonk said. “How you and Ralph view the future of space – and time – that kinda thing.”

“I’ll tell you that for nothing,” I snapped. “Time will go on, space will get bigger.”

“That’s great, just great.” The WindowsWimp was not to be dissuaded. “First-class tickets to Seattle will be delivered by courier later today.”

“But what if I don’t want to come?” I became querulous.

“Try Viagra,” the MiniMonopolist said and hung up on me.

The trouble was that Ralph adores a freebie of this kind, and even though he was just back from Davos, where he’d been advising the head of the World Bank on corporate re-imaging, he insisted on going. Well, I couldn’t let him set out alone – Ralph may be brilliant at taking a line for a walk, but off the page he lacks basic orientation skills.

Arriving at the serried concrete bobbins of Sea-Tac airport on a brilliant winter’s morning, I couldn’t face climbing into a cab. Instead, I put Ralph in one and told him to break the ice over at Bill’s place, while I stretched my legs. “For Christ’s sake, Will,” Ralph bridled, “what am I going to talk to him about?”

“You both dig Da Vinci – ask to see his Leonardo stuff. He has the Codex Leicester, cast your eye over it, then get out your pen and begin flicking ink – I’m sure he’ll see the funny side.”

I slogged through the suburb of McMicken Heights and Crystal Springs Park, down to the deliriously named Interurban Avenue. Picking up the Green River Trail I trod on beside the rows of poplars screening off the Boeing Plant. The Pacific North West always invigorates me, with its soft, temperate climate and its boundless woodiness. All those trees, photosynthesising like Billy-o – it’s a tonic to the air sacks.

The long tramp into town on 4th Avenue would’ve been dull, but I had work to do. Bill had set up a SharePoint website for the three of us, where we could post sketches, notes, and supplementary information relating to the space/time think week. I had my Tablet PC with me, so using invaluable OneNote and OneWord software I was able to post stuff as I went, such as musings on Bill’s brilliant coinage “Creative Capitalism”, and how it might possibly relate to the man walking ahead of me, pushing a supermarket cart piled with old tin cans and festooned with plastic bags, who couldn’t seem to keep his trousers up.

Past the Qwest Field and on into downtown as darkness was falling, and if it hadn’t been for the unearthly up-light of the computer screen, making of me an ambulatory ghoul, I’m sure some of the shambling homeless might’ve clubbed together to mug me. As it was, I took Madison Street to Washington Park then the long, scuzzy tongue of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge across Lake Washington to the lakeside community of Medina.

It had been a 25-mile walk, and it was now past midnight. I was cold, hungry, and thought the very least I could expect from a man with a net personal worth of $56bn was a cheese toastie and a cup of tea – but not a bit of it. The familiar goofy boy scout’s visage peered through the security louvres, then Gates admitted me to a nerdish bedlam: piles of old Marvel comics and empty Yakult cartons were scattered everywhere, an Atari games console was pinging in the sink. Ralph was in the conversation pit, making paper darts out of pages from the Codex, and I don’t think he can possibly object if I tell you, gentle reader, that he was a little tipsy.

“You tossers!” I cried. “While you’ve been behaving like overgrown teenagers, I’ve been sorting out the whole space-time continuum.”

“Gee,” Bill said. “I’m sorry – I guess. Melinda’s vacationing at the moment, and I kinda let things go. Please tell me your thoughts – I’m sure they’re real inneresting.”

“The shift key – get rid of it!”

“But why?”

“So no one will ever again, anywhere in the world be able to conceive of typing the words ‘SharePoint’ or ‘OneNote’.”

“Or SpaceTime!” Ralph yelled from the pit.

09.02.08

… You take my impotence for example. Up until a few years ago, the old todger was as big as a bloody battering ram: I used to fear my erections. Since then, well, I blame Nigerian traffic wardens. They come over here, can’t speak the lingo and strut about the place slapping tickets on anything that moves – it’s intimidating.

I was coming out of the Cross Keys in Wilmslow and there was one of the bastards skulking under the moot hall having plastered a big yellow sticky one right across the Range Rover’s windscreen. Well, I went to have it out with the blackguard – I wasn’t about to be intimidated! I fought in eight world wars and put down the bloody Mau-Mau, man, armed only with a Martini-Henry! Anyway, to begin with he’s cringing and scraping, but then he pulls some ghastly little fetish out of his tunic. Looks like a cat’s paw wrapped in a hairball all tied round with kidney stones – fair gave me the willies, ha! If you’ll forgive the pun – or rather, anti-pun – because it didn’t give me the willies, it took mine away! Ever since I gave that illegal immigrant chappie a rollicking I haven’t even caught sight of poor John Thomas, seems he’s completely hidden away inside me. Saw the same thing in Malaya during the Emergency in the Fifties, native wallahs would get the damn-fool idea their meat’n’veg were sort of retreatin’ inside their bodies – latah they call it – thing is, in their case it was a bloody fantasy; in mine it’s a reality. My missus, well, she may be getting on but she has certain perfectly reasonable expectations: a Tory government, no one frightening the horses, no redevelopment in Hungerford High Street, Sunday afternoon rumpy-pumpy right after matins – you get the photo. When I realised I wouldn’t be able to service the old mare I got pretty antsy, I can tell you. Went to see the quack sharpish. Well, she’s only some junior harridan sporting a Harriet Harman horror mask, ain’t she. Has the bloody nerve to tell me I ought to be cutting out the sleepy Ribena and the fags at my age. My age! I explored the Lost-bloody-World and climbed the Empire State Building with my mits up Fay Wray’s jacksie so the likes of her could have free school milk. The chit wouldn’t even write me a prescription for Viagra, told me it was “contra-indicated” for a man of my age. That wasn’t going to stop me, oh no. Jimmie Wemyss, mine host at the Bald Eagle in Netheridge told me about this interweb thing, and how a chap can get anything he needs with a push of a button, so I ordered the contraption from little Freddie Dixon, and when it pitched up, he came up and got me started. Turns out you don’t even need to go looking for the stuff, there are all sorts of obliging fellows out there who send jolly emails offering Viagra, Cialis, and even this sleepy Ribena in pill form called Ambien. But before I could even divvy up the old Diners’ Club I got rather sucked into correspondence with them. I mean, I’m not lonely or anything, but the trouble and strife spends an awful amount of time with her committee work, and early February … well, the time before opening can lay heavy on a chap’s hands. Besides, when you get a tinkle out of the blue yonder headed FuckStickAmpleFloyd, or GargantuanPenisBeau, well, it’s a tonic in itself. I began writing back to Karen Knutsin, Stanislaw Baczmonski, Kumar Senthil, and all the other obliging souls out there in hyperworld. Nothing too personal, just stuff about the village, who’s breaching planning regs with his fucking dreadful conservatory, and who’s dipping his sheep in liquid MDMA then rogering ’em – harmless gossip, really. Back they come – my emails – with more exciting headings: BodyPartEnlargedShawn and BarneySchlongBroad, well, I mean, who are they when they’re at home?! If they ever are at home. I imagine they’re “hanging out” on some Thai beach or other, with a whole tribe of itty-bitty little fillies to satisfy their every urge. Natural Manhood Enhancement, Watch it bigger day by day! – that’s what they were offering me, but I preferred to keep ’em at arm’s length. I said to Giles Woode at the Cock and Bull in Bent Parva: Y’know, I’m almost grateful to that bloody Nigerian for opening up a whole new realm of experience for me – it’s something you don’t expect at my age. Turns out Giles is no stranger to PenisPlumpingCarla himself. I’d no idea that – to coin a phrase – he needed “easily to get male package”. Always assumed he’d lost it all together during the Suez Crisis. Ho-hum, another bottle of Ribena, or are you riding?

02.02.08