I am answering the following questions on my writing, having been handed the baton by scholar and poet Alex Niven, a man currently poised to rescue Oasis from the enormous condescension of posterity.

I now pass the baton to the eminent Victorianist Dr Sophie Duncan, and to Ireland’s foremost political satirist.
 

• What am I working on?

Officially, I am working on a new cultural history of the Rebecca riots, as detailed in this post.

Unofficially – having gained the nichest of niche acclaim with Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender, I am making life difficult for myself by changing tack from ~cultural ~studies to fiction, and currently have three novels on the go. Here follows, in brief, Not My Elevator Pitches:

Book A – Dystopian satire on this country’s likely future under Tory government. NB this book is full of things that I made up in order to illustrate the horrific and ludicrous nature of a near-future Britain. Roughly one third of these things are now actual government policy.

Book B – Much less pointed satire set in present-day and Old Weird London, centred on the mutually reluctant attraction between a girl on the disillusioned fringes of the anticapitalist left and a boy who is a Shoreditch twat. (If you know me, laughably autobiographical.)

Book C – Historical fiction set during the aforementioned Rebecca Riots. Not satire but an exploration of class struggle, sexual identity, and tremendous outfits.

I write things like this secure in the knowledge that commercial mainstream publishing is being ever more relentlessly filleted and focused on the search for the next 50 Shades of Grey or other soon-to-be phenomena that the online world under forty in fact got bored with weeks ago.

My only previously published fiction is of course the smash-hit satirical mash-up P G Wodehouse’s American Pyscho.

If I write anything more in the vein of Clampdown it will probably be a self-indulgent comic 90s memoir tentatively titled I Was a Teenage Manics Fan.

 

• How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’m not sure that there are others of its genre – or indeed what its genre is to start with. Clampdown is a book that no publisher other than the small and heroic Zer0 Books would have taken a punt on, being as it is a blend of cultural criticism, class war, “angry” feminist intervention, incidental autobiography, excuse to fashion my aesthetic taste into socio-political critique, and love-letter to great but forgotten aspects of ’90s and ’00s music and culture. (Or ‘Chavs for girls’ as I think one review termed it. It’s not Chavs for girls.) It was mostly written as a caprice and I’m still surprised when it strikes a chord with people. If there are others like it, do send them my way.

 

• Why do I write what I do?

I write what I do primarily because I do not see myself, my interests or my history adequately represented anywhere in current popular culture, politics, journalism or art. This doesn’t mean that I personally am a special snowflake, rather it means that these channels are increasingly closed-off in terms of influence and interest to whole swathes of this country.

Secondly, I write because political satire is currently noticeable by its absence. I think this is both a consequence of the complacency and lack of political engagement now prevalent in arts and media – which, again, may be related to their class composition – and because this government is so outrageously, casually, gleefully accelerationist that it manages to easily outpace anything satire can conjure up. When you have Cameron sitting on a golden throne while making a speech on how there’s no money left and we all need to tighten our belts, there’s little room left for satire to breathe.

Finally, I write because I was and am heavily influenced by the kind of cultural criticism in which the 90s music press often engaged, which talked about music (and film, and tv, and other objects of consumption) both on its own terms but also with one eye on its social, political and historical context, and which brought theory and critique to bear on pop culture in a way often derived from book-learning but accessibly and enlighteningly applied. It’s the main reason I began to write about music in the first place, but, aside from the occasional diamond, this kind of thing now seems to be a dying art.

 

• How does my writing process work?

Like everyone else without independent wealth, I have been working for the past decade in high-street retail, admin, reception, customer service and similar jobs, and writing and studying around them. So I think of myself less as a writer and more as a worker who writes in their spare time.

Currently I work two jobs. In between, I co-edit New Left Project; write stuff I’d hesitate to call journalism for various print and online publications; research/write/edit the Rebecca riots manuscript due in December; and work on other arbitrary stuff, both fiction and non-fiction, whenever inspiration strikes. Ideally this would necessitate working on each thing in a methodical and disciplined manner in pre-planned, focused bursts of activity, but instead I have very little process or method other than to write when I feel I have something to write, and – more crucially – when I can find the time to write.

I start every week yearning for some free time – for more free time, to be exact – and at the end of every week I languish unfulfilled. I get ideas at inconvenient moments like on the shopfloor, or during the commute, which I find to be good times for thinking but not for writing down an idea in depth, as you lack the time to adequately put your thoughts into words. Then by the time you get the chance to do that, your initial inspiration’s dissipated and the idea sounds shite so you decide to forget about it – or worse, you’re sure the idea was pretty good but you can’t remember exactly what it was, and you’re too knackered to think straight and write well anyway.

I could pretend that all this plate-spinning and theft of time concentrates the mind marvellously, and encourages motivation and discipline in the free time I do have. I could pretend that having working hours and contracts that are unpredictable from one week or one month to the next makes life terribly exciting and lends a dusting of raffish bohemian glamour to the task of earning a living. But of course it doesn’t. Working to support oneself and trying to produce something creative in the cracks between is – as you’ll know if you do it yourself – exhausting and exasperating. (Or maybe I’m just making excuses for myself, eh, and should do the artistic equivalent of getting on my bike.)

On rereading, I see this answer got away from me somewhat. Oh – I tend to write drunk and edit hungover. Maybe that’s a better answer.