Beat Soundtrack #31: Ben Graham

Chemical Generation survivor surveys

In the 1990s, British club culture spawned not only a national network of places to socialise and dance and a musical backing track shaped to stimulate the raving youth hordes of the day but also a connected literary movement producing novels and short stories celebrating this electric mix of DJ sets and ecstasy-driven elation in groundbreaking prose.

The most celebrated, and certainly bestselling, publication of this period was a 1997 gathering of short fiction entitled Disco Biscuits, edited by rock journalist and one-time teen prodigy Sarah Champion and featuring, among others, the writing talents of Irvine Welsh, Nicholas Blincoe, Jeff Noon, Alex Garland and the man who today provides us with the latest contribution to our widely read ‘Beat Soundtrack’ series.

Ben Graham is an author, poet and music journalist who has just published the first section of his novel cycle American Underground, a psychedelic odyssey through the twentieth century's magical counterculture in five novellas, the first of which, Electric Tibet, is an occult reimagining of the San Francisco Human Be-In in January 1967 that kicked off the Summer of Love, and features Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder as characters.

Work by Graham, who lives in Brighton. has appeared on the Quietus website and in Shindig magazine. He is the author of A Gathering Of Promises: The Battle for Texas's Psychedelic Music, from The 13th Floor Elevators to The Black Angels and Beyond (Zero Books 2015), Scatological Alchemy: A Gnostic Biography of The Butthole Surfers (Eleusinian Press 2018) and Pink Floyd are Fogbound in Paris: The Story of the 1970 Krumlin Festival (Bleeding Cheek Press 2020), as well as several novels.

Pictured above: Ben Graham reading at the ‘Blame Blake’ festival in 2021, image Helen Darby

His marvellous long poem, 'For Everyone', was first performed at Still Howling, the Ginsberg anniversary event in Manchester in 2015, and he is the co-host of a monthly poetry open mic night Horseplay. He is also a director of Notwork 23, the Discordian events collective that has promoted countercultural events around the country since 2016, including Festival 23, inspired by the work of Robert Anton Wilson.

Rock and the Beat Generation caught up with Graham as his ambitious novella Electric Tibet emerges in print…

What attracted you to the Beats?

I was always a reader, and by my mid-teens I wanted something more literary and real than the fantasy and science fiction that I’d been devouring up to that point, but still with a sense of wonder and adventure. By that age, you want to live in the world, not just in your head. The Beats seemed to offer a guide to living an authentic, interesting life, an alternative to a mainstream consumer existence.

Obviously, they were writing from a different era and a world away, but the ’50s didn’t seem that distant from ’80s Yorkshire, and I could certainly identify with their desire for escape and transcendence. It's easy to forget how hungry for culture we were back then, before the internet, with only three TV channels in a small town with a limited library service. You’d skive off school just to watch a daytime telly rerun of The Munsters with a bad parody of a Beat poet and be talking about it for weeks!

When did you first encounter the Beats? Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?

I found a second-hand anthology called The Beat Generation & The Angry Young Men, which was where I first encountered ‘Howl’ among other key texts. Then Penguin Modern Poets 5 with Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti. But mainly it was Kerouac. On The Road was my bible for many years. His writing is so direct and open, like a friend talking to you. A flawed human being, certainly, but that’s one of the things I love about Kerouac, that he’s so open about his failings and his search for redemption.

It’s not just gonzo hedonism; my favourite books of his are sad and spiritual, like Big Sur. But the balance of freewheeling adventure, sex, drugs and a constant amorphous quest for some kind of spirituality and deeper meaning is perfect for a mixed-up teenager. It’s still pretty perfect for me now.

Maybe Kerouac’s flaws, and those of Neal Cassady/Dean Moriarty, stand out more prominently to a modern reader, but I don’t think recognising those flaws takes anything away from the books. Jack was always an honest writer, even when he was trying to fool himself.

What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connected?

The Beat writers tried to translate the rhythms of popular music into written poetry and prose. In their case, the music was jazz, but there’s no reason why you can’t attempt the same thing with rock or rave or any other musical genre. My first published story was in an anthology called Disco Biscuits, described as ‘New Fiction from the Chemical Generation’. I always hoped that this Chemical Generation might be to rave what the Beat Generation was to jazz, but it didn’t really happen.

Pictured above: The 1997 short story collection Disco Biscuits

I experimented a little with trying to translate musical rhythms from different genres into my writing. It’s interesting too to think about applying studio techniques like sampling, dub, distortion and feedback to literature, or remixing the text. Jeff Noon, who was also in Disco Biscuits, explored these ideas in a book called Cobralingus, published by the sadly defunct Brighton indie imprint Codex. I’ve described my new book project, American Underground, as being a new story based on samples of real history, remixed, stretched or otherwise twisted into new shapes and styles.

As a writer, reader or activist on the poetry scene, have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?

The Beats were my main influence as a writer from my late teens throughout my twenties. After that, I made a conscious decision to broaden my horizons and read more widely, but I certainly never rejected them. They’re always percolating away in the background. Eventually I rediscovered science fiction, but the SF I love now I see as an extension of the earlier Beat sensibility: experimental, transgressive or psychedelic writers like Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Michael Moorcock and JG Ballard, who are all about wild ideas and wonder.

Meeting Lawrence Ferlinghetti and seeing him read in Manchester when I was still at school was a big deal for me. The Beats weren’t the kind of literature and poetry they taught you about at school back then, you had to find it for yourself, which made it more exciting and important. They influenced me to find my own way in life. For better or worse, they influenced me not to settle down into a proper job or family responsibilities.

They made me see myself as a writer and to always put that first: to write my own life, really. To realise that you don’t need money, that you can live in the moment, digging life, whatever it brings: kicks, joy, sex, darkness. To look at life with a poet’s eye. To look out for synchronicities, little moments of grace and meaning, and to build your life around them. Nowadays I might call that magic, but I learnt it from Kerouac.

My love of the Beats contributed to my taking a degree in American Studies. In those days of full grants, it seemed like the most feasible way to get to New York to see it all for myself. My four months in America were spent reading poetry under the bleachers of the college football ground, hiking in the mountains, and travelling into NYC for adventures, sleeping on the floor of an unfurnished Greenwich Village apartment and exploring all the fun you could have aged 20 with no money. It was 1991, and New York was still recognisable as the city Kerouac wrote about. It felt like a very Beat experience.

But, apart from maybe Burroughs, the Beats weren’t particularly credible at the time. My American Literature professor at university in London dismissed all of the Beat writers as worthless, which even then seemed astonishingly ignorant and probably contributed to my not paying as much attention to my degree as I should have. Kerouac was seen as a writer you should have grown out of in your teens. He wasn’t someone you cited as an influence if you wanted to start a literary career.

I wrote a long autobiographical novel in my twenties called We Are The Bad Rabbits And We Shall Overcome that was heavily influenced by Kerouac, even though it was set in the north of England’s Calder Valley in the post-punk period. It was the Great Northern English Beat Novel! But no-one was interested in publishing it, so I put it out myself when print-on-demand became a thing.

I wrote a second shorter novel called Nowhere To Go that was even more Beat-influenced, being an account of a drug-fuelled road trip to Eastern Europe. The novel I’m currently working on is partly an attempt to write directly about the original Beat era but putting it in a wider context and hopefully finding a fresh perspective.

Pictured above: The first part of Ben Graham’s novel cycle American Underground, just published

I’ve been writing and performing poetry for over 25 years now. I don’t think I belong to any particular tradition, but Corso, Ferlinghetti and the rest are all still in there. Recently, Diane di Prima and Lenore Kandel have been very inspiring. I think it’s important to not just be an imitator or act out some kind of cosplay pastiche of 1950s Americana. But if the Beat sensibility is about staying true to your own unique vision and valuing spiritual truths and immediate experience over material comfort and security, even when it takes you close to madness, then I’ve remained firmly in the Beat milieu.

My long poem, ‘For Everyone’ was written specifically for a ‘Howl’ anniversary event, but, rather than copy or homage that poem, I used Ginsberg’s long line technique to do what he did in my own way, which was to write about friends and what they were going through at that time. It was very contemporary but also very much a Beat poem, and it became one of my most popular pieces.

I wish I’d taken the opportunity to meet the original Beat writers while they were still alive, especially when I was in the States, but I was very shy at the time and, like Kerouac, I used alcohol as a social crutch. Maybe it’s as well that I didn’t meet them as it could’ve been embarrassing.

I suppose really my formative beat experiences were reading, writing, hitchhiking, friendships, poverty (ten years on the dole), visions, kicks, etc. I kept a constant journal from age 15 to my early thirties. I still do, but it’s more functional and less descriptive now. The Beats kept me going and kept my spirits up in situations that might otherwise seem unbearably desperate, squalid or miserable. They gave me faith that it’s all okay and that even these were moments worth experiencing, savouring, and writing down.

Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links to the Beat Generation – and how? Who are your favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?

The relationship of the Beats with post-war jazz and then ’60s and ’70s rock is well-documented, but it’s harder to find connections with the ’80s and ’90s post-punk music I grew up listening to. I’ve always loved Sonic Youth, who seemed very Beat-influenced in their lyrics and their musical mix of punk rock, free jazz and the avant-garde. They came out of the New York bohemian art scene so seemed to have a direct connection to that world and definitely felt to me like standard bearers for the Beat cause.

William Burroughs was the Beat figure who was most often referred to in alternative music scenes in the ’80s. His cut-up techniques fed into the experimental end of early hip-hop and sample-based electronic music, and the industrial music scene worshipped him, really. Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV befriended Burroughs and Gysin and introduced a new generation to their work. Later, Burroughs recorded with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy.

I loved early cut-up electronic music like Coldcut, Steinski & Mass Media and the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, who later became the KLF. They took their name and mythology from Robert Anton Wilson, who was Beat-adjacent, at least. I know for a fact that Bill Drummond from the KLF is a Kerouac fan. Their Chill Out album is a widescreen American road trip that could be an alternative soundtrack to On The Road. And doesn’t ‘3AM Eternal’ sound like a phrase from Kerouac or Ginsberg?

But before all that, those early electronic cutups were like our punk in that all you needed were a couple of tape recorders and you could chop up bits of your record collection with snippets of radio, TV, whatever. Burroughs definitely anticipated that with his tape recorder experiments decades earlier.  

There was a lot of hitchhiking around the country following bands in the post-punk era and my memories of that time are quite Beat: hitching around with no money, sleeping on people’s floors, similar drug preferences. I think the Liverpool post-punk scene had a romantic sensibility that meant they always retained an affection for the Beats and Kerouac in particular.

You can hear it in Echo & The Bunnymen, and Julian Cope embodies Beat ideas and attitudes, especially as he’s got older and become a writer of books as well as a musician. His memoir, Head-On, reads like a Beat novel. He’s a big hero of mine and he has that transcendent yearning and spirituality that the Beats have, as well as a commitment to being absolutely in the moment.

Among my other favourites, I’d add the Jesus & Mary Chain for lyrics like ‘my rubber holy baked bean tin’ on Psychocandy, and Mark E Smith of the Fall, a very well-read writer with an individual poetic vision the Beats would’ve recognised. The Manic Street Preachers specifically said that Beat poets like Michael McClure influenced their early (and best) work, when Richie Edwards was still in the band.

The poet, artist, and musician Billy Childish would probably dismiss the Beats as old farts, but he shares a lot of their sensibility: spontaneous, uncensored self-expression, staying outside of the mainstream, following your own vision. A younger singer who started out as a Billy Childish protégé, Pete Molinari, specifically cites Jack Kerouac as an influence and released a great soul album, Wondrous Afternoon, last year.

I also love a lot of older artists who have a direct connection to the Beats: Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Iggy Pop, the Doors, David Bowie and the Velvet Underground are all hugely important to me. These days, I spend a lot of my time listening to and writing about ’60s music, and the Beats are never far away.

See also: ‘The scores are in: Every “Beat Soundtrack” so far’, January 30th, 2024