Work In Progress Novel Extract 2

“This book is a piece of one man fiction. It is an examination of the counterculture in an individualised society. Other characters besides the narrator are tertiary to the story. Partly, this is because I didn’t want to objectify people in my life in the pursuit of an arbitrary kind of success. The title is a mislead, implying some kind of hatchet job on an old partner – which isn’t the intention at all. I want friends, family and old partners to be able to read this, and see black humour at worst – rather than subjective retellings of old arguments. I’m bored of standups who think they’re funnier than anything and everything. I accept that art is always misinterpreted, and the wrong messages are taken out of it. As a pitch, this is Fight Club for people who hate Fight Club.”

“What’s the ugliest part of your body? I think it’s your mind” Frank Zappa

I never liked Zappa, finding him snide and cruel.

I believed Mojo features on his exploitation of the Beefheart Sound

O When Will I learn

He bailed the Magic Band out of jail

For Shoplifting Food

Locked In The Mojave Desert

Don Had Signed The Rights Away

Shouting at bandmates

PLAY IT MY WAY!

I bully too

Is it bullying without power?

Shouting at partner (or with?)

Shouting at kitchen withholding petty invoice through accountant

Shouting at family and friends

Shouting at Estate Agent Customer Service Representative

No one was listening before

They all say the same thing

Shouting makes me happy and them leave

Without Don Van Vliet threatening teenagers with brooms

They’d never have got anything done

And Frank was right

America had been sold off to the highest bidder

Or the lowest?

Deliveroo lost £128m last year!

Section 1

Inbetween Spells of Madness

i

He had a social condition. He could only see things in a positive manner, but once he expressed any point of view it became negative the moment the words hit the air. “It’s amazing nobody died”, he thought. For every comedian that had made it onto the telly, he knew five victims. Alcoholics, gambling addicts, female bar staff who had been plied with drinks and passed around as sex objects. His generation’s definition of success were a pyramid scheme, where the PR and Marketing teams lived like showbiz types and the comedians lived like industry types, scrambling round to manage their own diary bookings while their agent was off rinsing the free bar at cocktail night. The pyramid was:

Fame

Panel Shows

Broadsheet Supplement interview

Being paid in alcohol and spare change (years 2-4)

Performing to audiences of performers plus a smattering of 5-10 people

Somehow the club owners, agencies and executives had all bankrupted their businesses, far outstripping the personal debt levels of their acts. They had stuck to the old model, watching Friday nights in Soho perish slowly. The strong survived, and 30 clubs were now down to 5, and everyone was infinitely happier (he couldn’t go back to club gigs, but he was happy he didn’t have to serve as a subsidiary to the alcohol industry as the audience had too much fun to laugh in the right places).

The condition had been mislabelled by a psychiatrist in his last year of university, with the inevitable results (he kidded himself, knowing that he was still too in denial to admit he was like a prisoner who still claimed he’d been framed). Delayed graduation, short spells of employment and independent living followed by a return to the family home, where he could hear their pseudo psychiatric thoughts on his anxiety, his mood and how they all coincided with any negative views he had towards them. At the same time, if a stranger asked about his parents he would explain how they were the best parents in the world. That was the beauty of his condition, it only affected people that mattered. To the wider world he had developed the tools to reverse it. It wasn’t duplicitous or malicious, everyone agreed his parents were the best parents in the world. His siblings, cousins, and friends of the family were united. He had learnt to accept that if the world was right, he must be wrong. He kept talking to himself in his head, overanalysing everything as per usual.

“You know what it is, nobody had far to fall. The acts that made it were nice, easy to work with, and in it for themselves. The arts have learnt to reward the sane. That’s why so many comedians were in the Cambridge Footlights. They come up in sketch groups with one funny act; the likes of David Mitchell, Stephen Fry, Stewart Lee. That way anyone who was in a sketch group with them has every door open to them; the likes of Robert Webb, Hugh Laurie, Richard Herring. Cambridge University has worked out the best way through the arts is the buddy system. Find one person who is funny and overwrought and one who is charming and relaxed. Before you know it the first gets labelled as a tortured genius and the second as a brilliant, zany comedic mind.”

He was obsessed with American comedy, and had only ever really paid lip service to Alan Partridge or Peep Show or whatever else was the show of the day. He became a stand up comedian after consuming thousands of hours of American podcasts, featuring road warriors. Men in their fifties who’d scrambled out a career by going from town to town and gig to gig in the hope of fooling a casting agent into letting them be a sitcom extra in order to start putting money into the pension fund at 41. The problem was, he’d listened to so many podcasts that he’d decided to make his thirties as tortured as possible. He stopped gigging years ago in order to concentrate on being as miserable as possible, writing material (well thinking of it and saying it to friends and shop assistants) and wait for the world to catch up once he was middle aged.