INTERVIEW WITH FEAR AND LOATHING VOL 25 JULY 1994

Friday, things to be done, I’m feeling really shitty with a sore throat and a cold, but never do I allow such things to come between myself and my God-given task... in this instance, an interview with the writer, Stewart Home. For the uninitiated, Stewart has made a name for himself most notably from a series of books that parody the style of Skinhead author Richard Allen, bringing the subjects right up to date with tales of Class War and Riot Grrrls. He has also written several books conderning, for want of a better phrase, Art theory, and regularly writes articles for numerous magazines, both mainstream and underground. On top of all this, he also has a strong punk-background, and is currently winding up audiences with a sporadic series of spoken word performances... I decided an interview was appropriate, so a meeting at the fine Indian Veg establishment was arranged, and after finishing the first round from the buffet, the tape-recorder whirred into life, and I began by asking about one comment I’d read about Stewart, namely, that it was difficult to tell where Stewart himself ended and his performance took over?

Home: Well, that's not really for me to say, that's for other people to deal with! I mean, the whole thing about laying everything out for people is kinda tedious. You should have to work somethings out for yourself... and I don't think you should be able to pin down the exact meaning in all of the work. You’ll be able to see certain directions in the work, you can’t avoid that, but, I really think that one of the problems people have with my work is that they try to read it too simplistically. Like, the whole political stuff, some people will just read that and say, oh, of course, he’s an anarchist. But if you actually look at the way my stuff is set up, it deals with ideaology as a form of discourse, and the way that idealolgies are set up as discourse, for example, the way that, in the end, facism and anti-facism are just mirror-images of each other... all sorts of supposedly opposing groups actually only mirror each other. Even with anarchism, if you think even that escapes the discourse and that it’s only about pure liberation, then you’ve got some complete problem. And you can see examples of all of this right across the spectrum... if you take someone like Ian Reed, who edits Chaos International...he will talk about wanting to get rid of Victorian prudery, but at the same time preserving good ideas from the past, like ‘honour’... now, he is one of a whole group of people who supposedly despise Christianity, but doesn’t he realise that to have ‘honour’ you have to have ‘shame’, you can’t just have one without the other, which is a Christian principle. That is the sort of thing I’m getting at. And, the same sorta people will try to proclaim themselves as experts of the Occult, but this chaos-magic thing is just unbelievable shit... he can’t really understand anything about the Occult because he hasn’t realised that the real experts of the Occult in this country are the establishment. It’s not some wanky little cult. The real experts are the people running the show, I mean, what do people think ceremonies like the State Opening of Parliament really are? But the whole thing is, you can’t have one thing without the other, like, going back, you can’t have honour without shame... and the whole other problem with that is, honour is about other people’s opinion of you, rather than something that comes from yourself... but you just get so many people like that who just don’t think about what they are saying... but, yeah, I mean, I only picked on that subject just to get away from the anarchist thing, but if people read my stuff and think, oh, it’s just pro-anarchist, then that’s far too simplistic... I mean, I haven’t got an answer for everything, it’s just the way I think is, I look at something and say, what’s going on here?

Fear: A lot of people do seem to have a problem with material that remains ambiguous, tho...

Home: Yeah... it’s the same thing with bands like Current 93, people will say that David Tibet is some kinda evil Satanist, but that’s a complete joke, he doesn’t take that seriously at all. He’s very humourous in what he’s doing and yet people will still try to accuse Current 93 of being something they’re obviously not... the whole thing just gets misinterpreted by people who don’t understand it at all.

Fear: When did you first become interested in the Richard Allen style of writing?

Home: Well I’d read a lot of them when I was at school, around 1974, but for years I’d completely forgotten about them, and gone on to read other things... but then, one day around 1984, I’d just gone into a Charity Shop because I wanted a book to read, and I found a copy of Boot Boys and thought, oh yeah, I remember this, I’ll read this again for 10 pence! So I sat down and read it and thought, this is great! But it was like, I’d read Richard Allen books when I was a teenager, but then moved on, as a lot of teenagers do, to reading things like Burroughs or Crowley or JG Ballard... but then, after all that time, when I read Richard Allen again, I kinda thought, why have I been wasting my time reading all of this boring literature, and, like, now if I want to read a more difficult book, I tend to read a philosophy book. So, I ended up going around looking for copies of Richard Allen’s books, and I got a few of them, but then ended up going to the British Library and I’d be able to read like, six or seven of those novels a day, not just Richard Allens but Peter Cave and all those others. So, there’d be everyone else sitting in the British Library with their big pile of serious books, and I’d be there with my pile of NEL pulp books... I’d just go in there on the days when they were open late and read a ridiculous amount of books by the same author, which would mean that I’d really get familiar with their styles... it wasn’t a case of just reading all of them for myself, but also really getting to see what he was doing. Then, I thought, I could really write something like this, but sorta taking the piss. That’s where I got the idea for all the repetition, but I was more influenced by seeing how certain pulp writers will have particular phrases that they will repeat...’

Fear: There’s a lot of name-dropping going on in your novels...

Home: I like the idea of mixing supposedly low-brow material with a lot of more intellectual references, which is why the characters are often discussing philosophy or whatever. And there’s also a lot of references to punk songs... you could say I was obsessed with intertextuality. I mean, I happen to like all sorts of things. so I don’t see why I shouldn’t refer to all of them as and when I please... there’s nothing wrong with liking a song like Chirpie Chirpie Cheep Cheep and liking Laibach as well. I just like the idea of covering all sorts of things... everything from Schopenhauer, Marx or whatever thru to really obscure punk records or really obscure pulp fiction... I mean, even if it wasn’t the same choice of combinations, I’d definitely want the same sorta ridiculous wide-range.

Fear: I’ve always thought that strong ideas are always the combination of the best information...

Home: Yeah... culture is developed by different styles or ideas intermixing or overlapping with each other, putting things together in new ways or in new contexts. You don’t have some sorta platonic ideals that exist somewhere until someone pulls them out of the air to create a new idea. Nothing is like that...

Fear: You particularly seem to attack the literary establishment, and the conservative trends it is fond of promoting...

Home: Well, I think that literature as far as what the establishment promotes is just so narrow. They can’t even recognise what I’m doing, because they don’t know the references, it’s too difficult for them... I use a lot of Continental referances, which don’t get recognised even tho’ I wouldn’t have thought there was anything particularly obscure about Dada, Futurism or Surrealism, I would have thought people would know about this stuff, but it seems the literary establishment haven’t read them. They just draw on such a narrow band of experience, and create such a narrow range of literary expression... I mean, who really wants to read about dinner parties in Islington? Nothing happens in those books, they’re badly written. The people who hold up that stuff are either ignorant or complete liars... it’s like, at the moment, you’ve got Will Self getting all the hype. Now, I haven’t even been able to read a whole book by him because they’re so tedious, and because his prose has no sense of rhythm... I mean, it might be grammatically correct, but it isn’t good writing because it doesn’t flow well... You can even see it in the titles - The Quantity Theory Of Insanity - I mean, where the fuck is the rhythm in that? And then he comes out with all this crap that 20 years ago, he’d have been part of the underground, but the mainstream press will publish anything now, so there can’t be an underground anymore... what a load of shit! Commercial publishers will hardly publish anything, they’re so narrow in what they do... there’s just so much you can’t say... it’s the same with the libel laws in this country. It’s ridiculous when you look at the way it let Maxwell get away with everything for years. Even in fiction, everybody seems to say, oh, we can’t print that, we might get sued... there’s so many things, like, I’ll write in my books, ‘she had curves in all the right places’, and people will automatically say, ‘sexist!’ But, you know, that’s the kinda thing that people really say... not that that justifies it... but then right next to it, I’ll write ‘he had bulges in all the right places’, which completely undercuts the first statement. But people still get upset and say I’m sexist, even tho’ all that I’m doing is holding one up to the other to show the ridiculousness of it. I don’t use it to reproduce that mode of thought, it’s just there to show how it operates. The literary establishment is all about hypocrisy, using this notion of ‘good taste’ to exclude anything that they don’t like. And they have to continue to promote mediocrity, because if they actually put out something good, it would just show up all the rest of their stuff. That’s why they perpetrate the whole mediocre culture. They don’t want exciting, innovative new work because it would just show up everything they’ve been putting out for years’

Fear: When did you first become interested in writing?

Home: Well, originally, I wasn’t interested in writing at all, I was interested in rock’n’roll, and Kung Fu films! T-Rex were the first band I was into, then when the punk thing happened, I started going to a lot of gigs. That was when I really got into music, and from there I started doing a fanzine... at the same time, I’d bought my first guitar, sorta learned to play, and was in some shitty bands, but when I started doing the fanzine, people started to notice, started telling me I could write! But at that time, I thought, I’m not into writing, I just do a fanzine... but gradually I got involved with other things, I started to have a look at the art world in the early Eighties, became involved in a group called the Neoists, and I did a few installations... I didn’t want to be confined to just one thing. But overall, it seems that writing is something that I seem to be best at. Although I wouldn’t say it was the main thing I do... I mean, even the thing with the Richard Allen style, I had just said to some people I knew that maybe someone ought to write books like that about the anarchist scene or whatever... at that time, I didn’t really care whether or not it was me that wrote the story, and it wasn’t for a year or two that I decided to write the story, Anarchist, which was the first thing I wrote in that style... It just went down really well, some people really loved it and others hated it, so I just started to write more, and eventually I wrote the first novel length story. But, you know, at 16 or 17 it never occurred to me to write my own stuff. But I found it really interesting, just looking at those old Skinhead books to see how they were constructed... it’s like when you’re first playing guitar, and you copy bits from different songs until you’ve got enough to make a whole song of your own... But once you’ve worked out how to do it, you end up not having to rely on other people’s ideas, it’s all a matter of working out how the stucture is formed... For me, it just seemed like a good idea to take the piss out of all these people, especially Class War, using the Richard Allen style. That’s why I did it... a lot of the things I do are just taking the piss out of people. At one point I stated writing piss-take poetry, the whole idea of it being to be just banal... I mean, at one point, you were getting all of these poets doing all this stuff about how life was so depressing, so I’d just get up and go, like, ‘I walked past the fruit dish, smiling at the bananas - they were yellow and black’... that was just my response because I really hated what all these other people were doing!’

Fear: You had already written several books on modern art movements before you started your novels...

Home: Well, The Assualt on Culture, The Neoist Manifestos were written before the novels, whilst The Art Strike Papers is a compilation of things different people’ve written... The Assuault on Culture I wrote because I had been interested in all the Situationist stuff, because when I’d first become interested in the Situationist thing, I found that no-one was willing to actually tell me what it was all about... so I took a lot of time finding out what it was all about, and I found it quite interesting in the end, but I got really pissed off that I’d ask people what it was all about, and they just wouldn’t tell you. I always had the feeling that these people didn’t really know what it was all about themselves, they just knew that it was supposed to be good. So, I just wanted to write a kinda bluff-your-way guide to a lot of that sorta stuff... it was just so that people couldn’t pull on other people the kinda attitude that was pulled on me when I was a teenager...’

Fear: Do you think that a lot of the movements you covered in that book tend to asume a greater importance for themselves than is actually due?

Home: Yes, they do in a lot of ways. It’s like the whole absurd notion that the Situationist International had any influence on May ‘68... they just didn’t! At that time, virtually no-one had heard of them, but now a lot of people will try to tell you it was the S.I. that were behind May ‘68... a lot of what happened was far more spontaneous, it certainly wasn’t the Situationists that caused it... and the whole idea that Punk was a Situationist movement, that’s complete crap. People will try to connect it back, saying that Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid were in King Mob, but, like, that group never had any kind of formal membership structure, and I’m not sure about McLaren, but Jamie Reid says that he was never in King Mob. It’s the same with Class War, they don’t have any real membership structure, so how can you say someone is in that group? And even if you are gonna believe the connections between Punk and King Mob, well, King Mob were actually expelled from the S.I. because of their connections with the Motherfuckers group in New York... King Mob basically took most of their ideas from the Motherfuckers, who were more Dadaist or anarchist, they certainly weren’t Situationist. Even the S.I. journals say that King Mob was nothing to do with Situationism. But that’s how people will try to make the connection with Punk, and it’s completely absurd. What has happened is that people now ssume the title of Situationism for all of these weird things that went on in the Sixties, but they weren’t really Situationism, they were just, for the most part unconnected, wacky things that went on...

Fear: You’ve been in bands before now... is that something you’ve lost interest in?

Home: Oh no, I wouldn’t mind doing that again, it’s just that it does take a lot of effort. The last band I was in formed in ‘85 and we didn’t gig that much, but we went thru to about ‘89, off and on...

Fear: You’ve established a definite style with the Richard Allen parofies you’ve written... are you wary of just becoming stuck in that style?

Home: Well, in a lot of ways, if you’ve worked out how to write a book in a certain style, then it’s relatively easy for you because you know what you’re doing. I mean, some people say my books are all the same, and the people who like the books don’t care about that. In fact, I would say they weren’t all the same, because I always do things to change every one. I mean, I don’t know at the moment whether I’ll always want to continue in that style, but at the moment I just enjoy being able to carry on adding new things just to keep myself amused, to keep it all different for me. I like the idea of imposing rules upon myself to make each of the books different... In actual fact, at the moment I kinda want to write a book in the first-person, because that would be such a change... and, I mean, I’ve actually written two more novels at this point which are still to be published, but the next one I write will probably be in the first-person...

Fear: Do you think the way that you discipline your writing is important?

Home: Well, you’re going to structure it some way, even the simplest sentence is structured in some way. To communicate with language is structure - you can’t escape structure. I mean, sometimes with music or whatever it can be quite enjoyable to hear something that is totally improvised, but most things that people can enjoy are structured... I just play around with the actual structures of my books just to keep myself amused. To the readers, I’m sure the amount of chapters I use in a novel is really of no interest. But to me, it just gives me something to play with, because I have to keep my interest in what I’m doing, so I just make little rules and changes in how I do it.

Fear: You’ve performed several readings from your novels, recently... why did you decide to get involved in spoken-word performances?

Home: Well, I’d actually started doing that kinda thing early on, even when I was in bands... I’d start to get up on stage in between bands and do little, strange performances, like, made-up sound poetry, Dada-inspired things, and throwing things out at the audience... I think the first thing I tried was carrots, but I soon realised the fatal mistake in that strategy, in that carrots could be picked-up and thrown back! And they were, let me assure you!!! So, the next time I did that kinda thing, I used dried peas, so that I had a big bucket of them, but the people in the audience could only pick them up one at a time, whcih was completely ineffectual for throwing back at me! But, yeah, I like the idea of presenting these things live, and making it as intimidating as possible, but you know, if I really was as aggressive as some people think, then I obviously wouldn’t be going on stage and ranting away at people, I’d be waiting somewhere in a dark alley for them! I don’t go out onstage wanting to beat people up... I know that some people get shocked and upset by what I do , but really, that’s their problem, not mine... It’s like, people will complain that there’s so much violence in my books, but that’s the fundamental thing about fiction - there’s so much difference between writing or reading about violence, and actually going out and beating someone up on the streets. And that’s the same thing with getting up on stage and doing an aggressive performance... it’s quite removed from real life. But, also, this whole thing gets tied up with all the notions of ‘violence’ itself. I don’t agree with the notion that all violence is terrible, tho to me random violence is totally stupid. But you really have to get into the whole issue of, what is violence? The whole point is, the people in a position of political power define acts directed against them as violent, but when they maintain their power by not disimilar acts, they justify it as legitimate force... you get into all these problems of definition, so you can’t just hold up your hands in horror and say, All Violence is Bad... that’s a completely naive attitude. Violence plays a productive role in the unfolding of social processes... violence can be productive, and it can lead to new things, it can lead to the over-throwing of old, ineffective social orders. Things are always more complicated than ‘this is good, this is bad’, and I’m afraid I’m not here to give people easy answers, because there aren’t any easy answers...

Andy signs off: Well, with things to be doing for both of us, we ended our meals and conversation, and headed off in our respective directions thru Islington. Just to remind you quickly, tho, Stewart Home’s books are quite easily available, and are thoroughly recommended by all of the FNL staff (err, that’s just me, actually...) Catch them soon, cos there’s few books that can be both as enjoyable and thought-provoking...

Note added by Stewart Home 2006. This was trascribed and edited from a tape, there were a few obvious errors (such as the word anarchist appearing when it should have said situationist) which I've corrected. However, beyond a few small corrections of that type I've left this as it stands because transribed interviews are always partially a matter of interpretation, so this ends up being Andy of Fear & Laothing's work as much of mine, he's ventriloquising me when 'I' speak. I could completely re-edit and clean this up so it reads how I'd like it to read niow, but then you'd loose the 'flaws' and they are productive. Actually I found this really funny, like hearing a parody of myself by talking up (or down) in a way I imagined made me sound like I came out of the punk sccene; but then again, maybe that's 'really' what 'I' was like 12 years ago. I'm so totally schizoid there are many versions of 'me'.

Stewart Home interviewed by Jussi Ahokas

Interviews