Dedication
To Georgia—not only the greatest agent and friend, but also the best font. We’ve been very brave.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Part I 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10: Ten Things I Have Noticed in Two Years of Interacting with Famous People
11
12
Part II 13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Part III 20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Part IV 29
30: Letter to John Kite, March 7th, 1995
31
32
33
34
35
About the Author
Also by Caitlin Moran
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Real musicians and real places appear from time to time, but everything else, the characters, what they do and what they say, are the products of my imagination. Like Johanna, I come from a large family, grew up in a council house in Wolverhampton, and started my career as a music journalist as a teenager. But Johanna is not me. Her family, colleagues, the people she meets, and her experiences are not my family, my colleagues, the people I met, or my experiences. This is a novel and it is all fictitious.
Part I
1
When I was eleven, I formally resigned from the family dream.
From the earliest moment I can recall, the family dream was simple: that, one day, we would get money from somewhere—win the pools, discover a medieval chalice at a jumble sale, or, least likely of all, earn the money—and leave Wolverhampton.
“When the bomb drops, we want to be on the other side of those,” Dadda would say, at the end of our street—pointing across the flat fields of Shropshire, to the distant Black Mountains, on our left. We practically lived in the country.
“If they nuke Birmingham, the fallout won’t reach Wales—those mountains are like a wall,” he would add, nodding. “We’ll be safe there. If we get in the van and drive like fuckers, we’d be over the border in two hours.”
It was the mid-eighties, when we knew, for a fact, that the Russians would launch a nuclear war against the West Midlands at some point—the threat was so visceral that Sting even had written a song about it, warning that it would, by and large, be bad—so we were absolutely braced for it.
And so we made our plans for escape. Our dream house was a survivalist bolt-hole, with its own water supply—a spring, or a well. We’d need enough land to be self-sufficient—“Get some polytunnels up, get your fruit in,” Dadda would say—and we’d have a cellar full of dried grains, and guns—“To shoot the looters, when they come. Or commit suicide,” he added, still cheerfully. “If it gets too much.”
The dream house was talked about so much that we all presumed it was real. We would have passionate, hour-long arguments about whether to keep goats or cows—“Goats. Cows are fussy fuckers”—and possible names for the property. My mother, who had been made simple by many pregnancies, favored a ghastly option: “The Happy House.” My father didn’t want to give it a name—“I don’t want any bastard to be able to find us in the phone book. Come the apocalypse, I’m not going to be feeling sociable.”
We were poor—which was a normal thing; everyone we knew was poor—so we all made each other Christmas presents, and that Christmas—Christmas 1986—I had drawn a picture of the Dream Survivalist House, as a present to my parents.
Because it was just a drawing, I had spared no expense on this house: there was a swimming pool in the garden and an orchard at the back. The front room was painted the color of a peacock’s wing, all the children had their own bedroom and Krissi’s had a slide in it, that went out of the window, and straight into his own fairground. The house was magnificent.
My mother and father looked at it with tears in their eyes.
“This is beautiful, Johanna!” my mother said.
“This must have taken you ages!” Dadda marveled. And it had. The roof was covered in fairies. Their wings had taken hours. I’d drawn veins on them. Wings, I reasoned, must have veins. There must be a vascular system.
Then my mother looked at it again.
“But where’s your bedroom, Johanna?” she asked. “Have you forgotten to draw it?”
“Oh, no,” I said, eating my breakfast mince pie. The pastry was very tough. My mother was not a gifted chef. I was glad I had topped it with a slice of Cheddar cheese, by way of precaution. “I’m not going to live there. I’m going to live in London.”
My mother cried. Krissi shrugged: “More room for me.” My father lectured me. “It’s absolute certain death to live in a city!” he said, at one point. “If the Russians don’t get you, the IRA will. Civilization is a trap that will blow your knickers off!”
But I didn’t care if the Russians, or the IRA, did drop a bomb. They could drop a million billion, and I still wouldn’t want to live on the side of a mountain, with goats, and rain. Even if it was radioactive and full of mutants, and would lead to my certain death, London was still the place for me. London was where things happened, and I wanted—with utmost urgency—to happen.
And so at nineteen, here I am in London—and London, it turns out, is the place for me. I was right. I was right that this was the place to go.
I moved down here a year ago, to a flat in Camden, to pursue my career as a music journalist. I brought three bin bags full of clothes, a TV, a laptop, a dog, an ashtray, a lighter in the shape of a gun, and a top hat. That was the sum total of my possessions. I didn’t need anything else.
London provides everything else—even things you’d never dreamed of. For instance, I’m so near Regent’s Park Zoo that I can hear the lions at night, fucking. They roar like they are trying to let the whole city know how sexual they are. I know that feeling. I want to let this whole city know how sexual I am. I see them as another one of those unexpected London bonuses—en suite sexy lions. This is something Wolverhampton would never give you. Although the downside is that the sexy lions drive the dog crazy. She barks until I order a Meat Feast pizza, and I give her the meatballs whilst I eat the crusts, and cheese. We are a good team. She is my pal.
If I imagine the dog is a horse—which is easy, as she’s very large—I live a life that could largely be described as “that of Pippi Longstocking, but with whisky, and rock music.” To live in a city at eighteen, alone but for a pet, is to engage in adult pursuits, but with the vision of a child.
I spent three days painting my flat electric blue, because, in Sound & Vision, that is what David Bowie did, and there is no better person to take interior decorating tips from than David Bowie.
I then tried to paint white clouds on the wall—to make it celestial—but it’s surprisingly hard to paint clouds with a big paintbrush and some white emulsion. The clouds look like empty speech bubbles—the walls look full of spaces where things should be said, but I don’t know what those things are yet. That’s part of being eighteen. You don’t yet know what your memorable speeches are. You haven’t said them yet.
When I have money, I have takeaway spaghetti bolognese for breakfast, every day, because that is the most treat-y meal, and children buy themselves meals that are treats. When I don’t have money, I live on baked potatoes—because they are treat-y, too.
/> I wake at noon, and stay out until 3:00 a.m., and then I have a bath, when I come home—because I can. It doesn’t wake anyone up. Every single one of those baths makes me happy. You leave home to have baths in the middle of the night. That is true independence.
My phone is regularly cut off, because I forget to pay the bills—they come so often! Who opens their post in the month it arrives? Only the dull—and, when the phone is cut off, people ring my local pub, the Good Mixer, and leave messages there for me. The landlord complains about this often.
“I’m not your fucking secretary,” he will say, handing over a pile of multicolored Post-it notes, when I come in, with the dog, for a pint.
“I know, Keith. I know. Can I borrow your phone?” I will reply. “I just need to get back to the most urgent ones. They want me to interview the Beastie Boys in Madrid!”
And Keith will hand over the phone, from behind the bar, with a sigh, because it is the responsible thing to do, when a lone teenager needs to make a call. It takes an inner-city village to raise a child!
I keep all my dirty clothes on the floor—because who would waste their money on a washing basket, when you could spend it on roast chicken, and cigarettes?
Once a month, when all the clothes have made it to the floor, I put them in my rucksack, and take them to the laundrette. One of Blur uses the same laundrette. It’s nice to use the same laundrette as a pop star. We nod at each other, silently, and then read the music press, whilst popping out every so often for a cigarette. I once watched him read a bad review of Blur, as he was doing a whites wash. I have never seen anyone transfer their underwear from a washer into a dryer so sadly. It’s hard to combine being a public icon with your day-to-day domestica. The disjuncture is jarring. Grace Kelly never had to unclog lint from a tumble-dryer filter while Pauline Kael shouted abuse at her.
And what this makes me aware of is that London isn’t just a place you live. London is a game; a machine; a magnifying glass; an alchemist’s crucible. Britain is a table, tilted so all its loose change rolls toward London, and we are the loose change. I am the loose change. London is a fruit machine, and you are the coin you put in—with the prospect of it coming up all cherries, and bells.
You don’t live in London. You play London—to win. That’s why we’re all here. It is a city full of contestants, each chasing one of a million possible prizes: wealth, love, fame. Inspiration.
I have the pages of the A-Z stuck to my wall—so I can stare at the entire of London, trying to learn every mews, alley, and byway. And when you take four paces back from the wall—so you’re pressed up against your chest of drawers, staring at it—what that network of streets most closely resembles is a computer circuit board. The people are the electricity jumping through it—where we meet, and collide, is where ideas are hatched, problems solved, things created. Where things explode. Me, and the sad man from Blur, and six million others—we’re trying to rewire things. We’re trying, in whatever, tiny way we can, to make new connections between things. That is the job of a capital city: to invent possible futures, and then offer them up to the rest of the world: “We could be like this? Or this? We could say these words, or wear these clothes—we could have people like this, if we wanted?”
We are Henceforth-mongers, trying to make our Henceforth the most enticing. Because the secret of everyone who comes to London—who comes to any big city—is that they came here because they did not feel normal, back at home. The only way they will ever feel normal is if they hijack popular culture with their weirdness; inject themselves into the circuitry; and—using the euphoric stimulants of music, and pictures, and words, and fashion—make the rest of the world suddenly wish to become as weird as them. To find a way to be a better rock star, or writer. To make the rest of the world want to paint their walls electric blue, too. Because a beautiful song told them to. I want to make things happen.
2
I am trying to explain all this to Krissi, as he sits on the sofa of my flat, in Camden, in August 1994. It is difficult, for the following reasons: (1) Krissi viscerally hates London, because (2) Krissi loves Manchester, where he is currently at university, and (3) Krissi is very, very stoned, because (4) he and my father have spent the last two hours smoking a massive Sunblest bag full of weed.
Krissi and my father are visiting me, in London, because tonight, Oasis are playing the Astoria, and they want to see them.
At any other time, I would be surprised by both of them wanting to see a band like Oasis—they’re not jazz enough for my father, who so regularly refers to Charlie Parker that, until I was twelve, I presumed he was someone he knew from down the pub—his name really does sound like someone who works in the warehouse at B&Q—and Krissi is currently so deeply into dance music that he regularly shouts “Bring the BASS BACK!” in the middle of conversations he finds boring.
But in the autumn of 1994, Britain is in the middle of a collective, homoerotic love swoon over Oasis. They’re like the rough, cool boys at school you fancy, even though they’re beating you up—because they look so handsome while they’re kicking you. There’s nothing more intoxicating than a swaggering gang coming into town, who have a plan, and Oasis have a plan—“To be the best rock ’n’ roll band in the world.”
The last greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world, Nirvana, ended when Kurt Cobain became so unhappy with the pressures of fame that he shot himself, which put the world on a massive downer, to be honest.
By way of contrast, Oasis are loved because it’s understood that they will not put the world through that kind of trauma again. No more rainy vigils, no more turning the radio off at sad news.
This upswell of Britpop—gathering speed in late-summer 1994—is all about bands whose unspoken vow is to be as alive as it’s possible to be. In reaction to the cold rains and angry songs of American Northwest grunge, they are about the simple brilliance of life in Britain: football in the park, booze in the sun, riding a bike, smoking a fag, fry-ups in a café, dancing at a wedding reception in a workingman’s club, playing a new record over and over again, getting pissed on a Friday, getting loaded on a Saturday, hugging your friends as the sun comes up on Sunday morning. They have turned everyday life into a jubilee. They have reminded us that life is—above everything else—a party. They have rewired the circuit board.
And Britain has fallen in love with this simple promise. To celebrate the everyday glorious. There is a sudden, tremendous hopefulness. All the news is good—the Berlin Wall comes down, Mandela is free, and Eastern Europe has walked out of the Cold War, and into the sunshine. There is a lot of sunshine. When I think back to that time, it feels like it was always sunny—like you were always walking out of the house without a coat, and with nothing more than keys, money, and fags. Every week, the radio pumped out more treasure. Every weekend, there was some new, big anthem to sing.
You could rent a flat in London for £70 a week, at a push; coffee was 20p a cup, in a café, and fags were £2.52 for twenty. It was cheap to live. It was cheap to slowly kill yourself. What better time to be a nineteen-year-old girl?
“Parklife!” my father says, rolling another joint, and then leaning back on the sofa.
And, unexpectedly, what better time to be a forty-five-year-old man? For my father has taken to Britpop with the startling glee of a child waking in the middle of the night, and wanting to play.
“It’s like the sixties, all over again,” he said, approvingly, watching Top of the Pops. “Same hair, same trousers, same chords. They’re all ripping off Bowie, the Beatles, The Kinks, The Who. The best shit. It’s Mods vs. Rockers, all over again. I, of course,” he said, taking a drag on the joint, “was always a Mocker.”
He wasn’t. I’ve seen the pictures. He was a classic hippy. He had an Afro like a sunflower, and wore bell-bottoms that would have been hazardous in strong winds.
And, just like a child waking in the middle of the night, he has become a problem. For this sudden cultural shock wave, rolling out across
Britain, has unleashed his dormant tendencies. Like King Arthur being roused from his sleep by a blast on a magical trumpet, my father’s rock ’n’ roll tendencies have resurrected. Always a regular and chaotic drinker, my father has now stepped things up a level by reverting to his teenage habits: he’s started smoking weed again. He’s started buying the music press again, and getting angry about certain things: “The Wonder Stuff—what a bunch of fucking jesters,” he would shout, rattling the paper around. “I thought we got rid of this shit with Jethro Tull.” Or: “The Lemonheads—nice tunes but fuck me, that bloke fancies himself. He needs to piss off and surf for a bit.” He’s asked me if I can get him some E: “That Ecstasy—is it good stuff?” he inquired. “The name suggests so,” even as I tried to explain I had never done it, didn’t have any in the house, and would always be unwilling to procure some for a parent with such rampant genes for addiction.
Most crucially, however, my father has started rebelling against authority again. In 1994, the biggest authority figure in his life is my mother, and he has rebelled against her by taking out a huge bank loan, and buying himself a secondhand MG sports car, for “nipping around.”
The rows about this have lasted months—my mother screaming about the repayments, versus my father’s disingenuous claims that it’s “improved” their credit rating—and have resulted in the inevitable: my father getting in the car, and driving down here to see Oasis.
He is, in short, having a midlife crisis, prompted by Britpop.
“Hey derrr Rasss-mon,” my father says, in an appalling Jamaican accent, whilst dragging on the joint. “Smoke de ’erb.”
“Krissi!” I say, brightly. “Ptarmigan!”
“Ptarmigan” is our code word, for “we need to have a crisis meeting right now.”