Interview #28: Simon A. Morrison

Beats on the dancefloor?

THE AMERICAN Beat Generation froze a moment when new literary voices tapped into the inspiration of jazz and the mind-changing effects of illicit stimulants such as marijuana. That community of artists also expressed a personal politics, resisting the conformity of mid-century US life not to mention the establishment’s frequent threats that such divergence from the norm would not be tolerated.

Some 40 years after the Beats left their mark, the so-called Chemical Generation in the UK sired a group of writers driven by the beats of the dancefloor, a rampant club culture and new drugs like ecstasy. They, too, as the century neared its close faced a backlash from the British forces of law and order, as many of the celebrations – in warehouses and abandoned mills, on open ground and in distant fields – were targeted because these largely peaceful transgressions were unregulated and unlicensed.

Simon A. Morrison is a journalist and academic who was written about the novelists and short story writers who attached themselves to that 1990s club scene, sometimes dubbed rave, later identified as EDMC – electronic dance music culture. He is also a commentator who has taken an interest in that earlier Beat Generation phenomenon and explores overlapping threads between two worlds, the two periods.

In his 2020 book, Morrison focused squarely on Irvine Welsh, Nicholas Blincoe, Jeff Noon, Sarah Champion and others who tapped into the power of DJ soundtracks and the massed gatherings of rhythm-hungry hordes to pen tales of love and sex, gangs, politics and narcotics, all set to a thumping backdrop of house and techno, forms born in early 1980s Chicago and Detroit but which migrated and were adapted on these shores over the next 20 years, spreading from London and Manchester to the Balearics and Berlin.

Morrison dubbed the fiction sub-genre that arose dancefloor-driven literature – he actually titled his Bloomsbury overview of this particular intersection Dancefloor Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction – and argued that there were evident lines of connection – for instance, an unholy triumvirate of words, sounds and toxic substance – which linked the Beats and the ravers, not to mention othet tribes from mods to hippies and punks over several decades.

He claims that similar influences, overlapping tropes, can be teased from each of those areas of subcultural activity, tribal practice, on the page, on record and in terms of the poisons of choice which often become associated with these dangerous episodes, these risky experiments, in the adolescent experience.

We spoke to Morrison, a long-time columnist for DJ magazine and now a lecturer in Music Journalism at the University of Chester, in the UK, who responded to R&BG’s questions…

Simon Warner: Although you were originally from London, you studied English at the University of Manchester as the 1980s turned into the 1990s. How did an Eng Lit degree and the seminal dance scene in the city at the time, with the celebrated Haçienda a globally famous venue of that era at its core, affect your young adult life?

Simon Moriision: The short story is that I went to the Haçienda at some hazy stage of the late 1980s and I never went home.

That’s the short story, There is a longer story of course (always is!) My exposure to MADchester was compounded by the fact I had been on a gap year, travelling Australia in a beaten-up VW Kombi van. I think I had been back in the UK for something like a week, when I moved to Manchester for the first time, in 1989.

This left me with something of a cultural handicap. I remember saying to someone, ‘What are Stone Roses?’ I recall how they looked back at me, incredulous, not sure what I even meant. So I carried on probing…’Everyone has these T-shirts that say “Stone Roses”.’  So green. And then, by the end of that first term, my fringe was down over my eyes (I had a fringe then) and the width of my jeans was expanding seemingly on its own. I became baggy.

And then at some stage my uni flatmate then said we should go and have a look at this club called the Haçienda. It was apparently owned by New Order and that sounded cool. When I stepped inside it was like no club I had ever seen before. Up until that point my experience of nightclubs were places like Ritzys in Tottenham and Paradise Lost in Watford… all verdant carpets and metal handlebars by the stairs that gave you a static shock and made your hair stand on end (even more than it was already doing in the 80s).

Pictured above: Simon Morrison’s 2019 Bloomsbury book

You needed to wear shoes and a tie to get in those places. But this…this was something else: industrial, open, high ceilinged…all concrete and metal…only this was metal that didn’t give you an electric shock.

I was studying English and American Literature and also writing for the student newspaper The Mancunian, which I did as soon as I could find their office. And it occurred to me that what I wanted to write about most…was music, and the music I was starting to see and hear all around me, as Manchester transmogrified into MADchester (it has since transmogrified again, into MANHATTANchester).

My English teacher always told me to write about ‘what I know’ so I put two and two together and concluded…I go out a lot, I could write about that. My two greatest loves have been music and literature, so I figured that if I could weave those strands together it was a win/win.

So I really put all the crazy stuff that followed in my life and career down to that precise time and place…my studies helped direct my thinking about the language and writing; the environment for that writing was evidently the cultural terrain of the city I was now in. And that – Manchester in the late 80s and 90s – was nothing but pure luck for me. I had never been in the middle of the action before. Now I was.

SW: In what ways do subcultures, music and literature intersect: what is the commonality? How would you define, describe, the alchemy that occurs?

SM: That is the sweet spot. The crossroads. Ground Zero. However you want to define it. In the research for my book Dancefloor Driven Literature I actually added a third ingredient to that mix - intoxicants – to create what I called an Unholy Trinity of effects.

So all through history we find these three strands interweaving at various points in cultural history – people have always wanted to use a music subculture as the basis for their fiction – whether jazz and the Lost Generation; bebop and the Beat Generation; rock music and the counterculture … and indeed the words and music of my scene: house music and the dancefloor-driven literature that feasted upon it for content, that told its stories. And, in each scene, that cultural energy is further activated by an intoxicant, that acts as the agent, as the accelerant, whether tea (marijuana), Benzedrine or MDMA, driving each scene.

Because if you can do that – write about the cultural basement - it can be incredibly powerful, and important. After all, how do we dig into past societies, and understand their culture? Yes we have the music but what we also have are the words, both archived journalism but also the fiction.

And the writers who wrote about the music and the clubs of their times – Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson through to my own interest in authors like Irvine Welsh, Jeff Noon and Nicholas Blincoe – they all locked those magical moments in literary amber. And now, as cultural archaeologists, we can open up the pages of their books, and dig out that amber. Tap it open and release fossilised butterflies.

SW: You have expressed a long interest in the Beats, as reader and also adventurer across the dance centres of Western Europe. Did Kerouac and co impact you as a club writer and activist on scene? Do you think they affected the Chemical Generation writers? Did any of them cite the spirit of their forebears – like the Beats – as catalysts for their own work?

SM: Absolutely. During my PhD research I directly asked each of my three case study authors – Irvine Welsh, Nicholas Blincoe and Jeff Noon - if the Beats had been an influence. And in different ways, they were.

For some this have been a matter of influence – the subcutaneous, subterranean, subcultural subject matter that engaged them, and the intoxicants that enabled them to burrow down. I’m thinking here principally of Welsh and the way he used the acid house scene as the terrain for works like Ecstasy and, indeed, The Acid House. Nicholas Blincoe said Kerouac had been something of an early stylistic interest. For Jeff Noon, the inspiration came more from William S. Burroughs and related more, I think, to the mechanics of making fiction.

Pictured above: Author and journalist Simon Morrison

I find Jeff Noon fascinating for that stylistic inventiveness. In a sense, he took what Burroughs and Brion Gysin were doing with their cut-up technique (later adopted by David Bowie, in constructing lyrics), but further used technology to assist that process, along with what he had seen with electronic dance music production techniques.

Interestingly, just as Kerouac had his manifesto – ‘The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’– Noon also penned a guide for how to ‘remix’ text – ‘The Ghost on the B-Side’. Kerouac aimed to write musically. Inspired by DJs and producers, Noon carried that on with electronic music, working the actual techniques of electronic dance music production and performance into his writing, including remixing, scratching and beat-matching language, and even creating dubs of his own stories.

He also allows for the role of the ‘glitch’… the magic in the machine, also keeping things spontaneous. Kerouac might not have loved the machines, but he would have loved that desire and that drive.

Another way music and words connect with both generations is very much more mechanical. Kerouac often read to jazz backdrops, perhaps Steve Allen’s piano. The Chemical Generation writers also used music in a very practical way. Jeff Noon’s work Needle in the Groove came with an accompanying soundtrack, on CD, that he produced with David Toop.

Irvine Welsh told me he always writes playlists for his characters and, however much he hates them and their music tastes, would have that music playing as he writes to that character. He also published a book with a CD soundtrack.

Then we have two ur-texts for dancefloor-driven literature. Sarah Champion’s wonderful short story collection Disco Biscuits from 1997 also had an accompanying CD release. And a perhaps-lost work is the first genuine example I could find of dancefloor-driven literature – Trevor Miller’s 1989 novel Trip City. This piece of fiction had an original soundtrack penned by producer A Guy Called Gerald (which actually came with the novel on cassette) with the attendant suggestion you could play the music as you read the book. It was a pleasure to chair an event with Gerald and Trevor, when the book celebrated with a 25th Anniversary edition.

In terms of an influence on myself – well, certainly the Beat spirit drove me to explore, to travel. As well as travelling Australia, I lived in Sydney, and also Los Angeles, Ibiza and Amsterdam, perennially driven towards new experiences. My travels took me all over the world and when I was given columns to write for DJ magazine – ‘Around the World in 80 Clubs’ and ‘Dispatches from the Wrong Side’ – it seemed to make sense to bring that Beat energy (as much as my abilities would allow) to writing about global dancefloors.

Writing assignments took me everywhere from Moscow to Marrakech; Beijing to Brazil; Antigua to New York. Where I was allowed, I would loosen the stylistic belt and write a little looser. Baggy, once again. Certainly, we took a very immersive approach to our obit for Hunter S. Thompson, for instance. I would always try and track down Beat landmarks. I sought out Jack Kerouac Street in San Francisco. I found it, and at the end was a book store. I asked inside where City Lights bookstore was and was slightly embarrassed when the assistan said I was standing in it.

So the influence was there, especially when I could blend writing with travelling. My version of Beat was ‘The Wrong Side’ which, as a conceptual habitat could mean … the wrong side of the tracks, or propriety, or verticality. I had some glorious adventures in the finest nightclubs and gutters of the planet – both in Western Europe but also beyond. Eastern Europe was notably ripe for adventure back then – Serbia, Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Macedonia, even into Kosovo. Every place had a nightclub and a dancefloor. And every dancefloor was always populated with the same people, looking for the same things…looking for the beat.

I am very happy that some of these adventures were captured in the collection Discombobulated, published by Headpress in the UK and US in 2010.

Pictured above: Morrison in hero Hunter S. Thompson mode

SW: You teach music journalism now, having been a long time critic and reviewer yourself. Can you establish any line historically between Beat approaches, the New Journalism of the 1960s, the rise of the controversial new voices like gonzo and the sort of popular music writing – the output of key rock scribes like Lester Bangs and Charles Shaar Murray has been cited – that found a home magazines like Rolling Stone and NME in the 1970s and beyond?

SM: There is absolutely a firm line between Beat and Gonzo, and between fiction and journalism; that edge…the friction between fact and fiction. Remember that Truman Capote accused Kerouac of being a typist rather than a writer. And Kerouac was indeed a reporter, only working with fiction as his platform. I’m sure most of what he wrote (beyond the Doctor Sax-type fantasy content) was pretty much true.

And, if Kerouac was a reporter working with fiction, the New Journalists who followed were non-fiction novelists. Norman Mailer wrote just that, in the front matter of Armies of the Night, that his reporting of the of ’67 march on the Pentagon was ‘History as a Novel/The Novel as History’ (As an aside, I was lucky enough to talk to Norman Mailer at a book reading, and being a Kerouac nut, just asked him about Jack. All he said was he recalled Kerouac dating his roommate…or maybe his girlfriend, with that rueful grandpa smile he had).

Nor is this is just my own hypothesis. Hunter S. Thompson was accused of aping Kerouac, which is probably true to an extent – certainly the energy was there, like an electric charge that can never go out, but just continues to find its way round a cultural circuit.

Only now, as Tom Wolfe correctly pointed out, the best writing in America wasn’t in fiction at all, but in journalism. Any pretence of masking this stuff as fiction had gone – it was now presented as journalism. But if you read pieces by Joan Didion or Gay Talese, you can still feel a very novelistic, literary swing to the prose of the journalism. Remember, also, that Thompson’s seminal Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas was just two stories in consecutive editions of Rolling Stone magazine, later bolted together to form the book.

And we can trace the line very easily from there. Lester Bangs had that same loose, baggy style of writing (although always with the residual potential for righteous anger and uncapped energy). He was fired from Rolling Stone for being a bit ‘too much’ but found his home at Creem. And, in the 1970s, that spirit drifted across the pond and touched Nick Kent, who travelled to Detroit to seek out and prostrate himself before Bangs, as though he were some kind of barroom Bodhisattva. So we can very easily see how that spirit then got back to the offices of the NME, in that same decade.

SW: So, how does the music interact with these groundbreaking modes of expression? Are the writers adopting radical voices to distil or reflect the excitements of the music or is it merely about individuals forging their own narrative methods? Some insist that writing about music is impossible; is forging a literature inspired by subcultural life equally challenging?

SM: There is something very special at play when music and words intertwine: it’s a courtship, a love affair between music and the written word. I currently run a first-year module at the University of Chester called ‘Dancing About Architecture’, based on the famous aphorism ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’. In other words, it’s a strange, Byzantine thing to even attempt.

Music is an aural medium – constructed in order to be heard. In a sense it resists any attempt to capture it, and to fix it in words, like a butterfly on a pin, in a display case. How do you, then, describe sound in fixed symbols, little black connected lines, that are intended, somehow, to turn up the volume for the people reading about, say, a particular dancefloor in Kosovo, without having actually stepped on it?

That’s the difficult, but delicious, job at hand, in both my own writing and also that of the students I now teach… we’ve all got to push back the desks, hold hands, and dance about architecture.

And that desire, and process, of writing about music is not going anywhere, whether in journalism or subcultural fiction. I see it in the eyes of the 18-year-olds I meet every September – the passion for music that we pretty much all have, yes, but also that added step… the need to put down on paper why this band is important or that artist not worth the hype or the cash or the love. And then not only that, but to then communicate those opinions because we need other people to know what we think (and to appreciate, of course, that we are right!)

So I do – of course – think that that seemingly impossible challenge of capturing music in words is, indeed, entirely possible. Even if it is a sort of intermedial alchemy. And not only possible… but necessary, and important, for reasons outlined above. In the arts and humanities we have been absolutely under attack by previous governments who don’t understand the importance of culture, and the creative industries. That, when we write about music we are writing about it as text, yes, but within a context … the context being the society in which the music is produced and consumed, with all of its discourses that run like seams of coal beneath the streets of quotidian society.

Music isn’t just about boy meets girl (although some fabulous songs are about just that dynamic). Music is about everything happening around us – politics, culture, identity, race, ethnicity, sexuality… society. It’s all there in the music. But sometimes it takes the writers, the critics, to extract that essence, and maybe explain it.

That essential function is not going away, then, but it is threatened – from above, as I say, but also from a shifting media and technology landscape. I don’t believe print media is dying… although it is inarguably unwell (I have written about this exact dynamic in a just-released Bloomsbury title, Ink on the Tracks: Rock and Roll Writing).

However, beyond what lies in print we also have the unlimited digital horizon and not only that… but broadcast media: YouTube, Tik Tok, podcasting, video. Music journalism is no longer only about writing things down … all of these platforms allow for the expression of ideas and opinion, in new and compelling ways.

So, the radical remains but might maybe be located more in these areas. Print, being unwell, is compromised. The free reign given to Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs or Nick Kent has been curtailed. Publishers, on the whole, don’t want that anymore in terms of that anarchy of tone nor also length of article (no one has the attention span anymore, I was told, when my column went from 1500 words to 1200, although I was unaware that they’d actually asked anyone).

In short, I don’t think we will see half a Fear & Loathing in a magazine any time soon. In terms of that first person subjective, edgy reporting, then, you’re more likely to find it in immersive documentaries or in the digital realm.

Magazine editors are very likely going to smooth off those edges when they sub, to somehow make the work more palatable. But! I will always teach my students about the Beats, and about Gonzo Journalism and New Journalism techniques. I will always encourage them to let loose and have a go. And I will always smile, and feel satisfied, when they do just that. Because we still need the baggy… to dance about architecture… we still need to release the butterflies.

See also: ‘Beat Soundtrack #33: Simon A. Morrison’, May 2nd, 2024