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Good Intro to New Talent, 11 April 2001
The eighteen original stories here represent a decent cross-section of youngish, hip writers from England, Ireland, the U.S., Scotland, and Canada. Although the title suggests that the stories are thematically linked to music, it is actually the name of a literary night held several times a week at Filthy McNasty's pub in North London since 1996. The idea is that authors alternate 10 minutes of reading their work with 10 minutes of music they select, to make it a little more homey and personal than your average reading. These stories haven't been published elsewhere, and are intended to be representative of what you might find at one of the "Vox n' Roll" nights. Of the eighteen writers, I've read books by seven, and heard of all except four, so I knew what I was getting. The stories by Nick Blincoe, Paul Charles, Patrick McCabe, Ben Richards, Kevin Sampson, Irvine Welsh, and John Williams, were all more or less in keeping with the novels of theirs I've read, bearing the same signature flourishes. Welsh, Williams, and Sampson all deliver solid stories per usual. Welsh's is an increasingly uncomfortable story about an angry man at his family Christmas dinner. Williams provides another Cardiff tale, this one about a loser trying to create a new Spice Girls clone. Sampson's is a nice riff on a sex-obsessed youth making his first date. Richards, Blincoe and McCabe's are all fine, if not as interesting to me. Charles provides a "Detective Christy Kennedy" story that is the only true throwaway story of the bunch, it's clear from the beginning what happened and how. Will Self, I keep trying to get into, but his story did nothing to encourage me to try any harder, although the premise is kind of neat. As for writers I'd not yet dipped into, the stories by Sparkle Hayter, Tanya Glide, Lynn Tillman, Selena Saliva Godden, Jim Dodge, and Stella Duffy didn't do anything to encourage me to pick up their work. On the plus side, Matt Thorne intrigued me with his delicate, almost old-fashioned, touch in "Bridge Class," a story about marriage. Lana Citron's "Changing" is a simple, but charmingly effective tale of hitting puberty. Vicki Hendricks caught my attention with "Rebecca," a bizarre story about siamese twins with a happy ending. And finally, Christopher Fowler takes the prize for best story with the creepy "At Home in the Pubs of Old London." All in all, a fairly satisfying sampler of writers and stories. If you like this, check out the Disco Biscuits, Disco 2000, or Shenanigans collections, all edited by Sarah Champion.
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