In the anthem A Design For Life, the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers declared, “Libraries gave us power”. It seemed calculatedly uncool amid the expansionist Britpop swagger of 1996. But it tapped a forgotten vein of municipal selfsufficiency that coursed through the music scene in the wake of punk.
That very spirit lies at the heart of Mark Hodkinson’s The Last Mad Surge of Youth, a yearningly nostalgic self-published first novel tracing the rise and fall of a visionary Eighties rock star, John Barrett - a post-punk equivalent of Daniel “Weird” Weir from Espedair Street by Iain Banks.
Hodkinson is best known for decoding the grassroots devotion of football fans in the nonfiction chronicles Life at the Top and Life Sentence (both compiled from columns written for The Times), and the 2007 William Hill Sports Book of the Year nominee Believe in the Sign. The terrace faithful and mosh-pit hardcore share a similar dedication, and Hodkinson - who has also written rock biographies and now runs the independent Pomona imprint - toggles easily between the two.
The story begins not with a precipitous amphetamine collapse onstage at Wembley, but a visit to the local library, where, in 1980 - the UK indie music scene’s year zero - Dave Carey is photocopying the artwork for his bedroom industrial duo’s debut Aiwa-recorded cassette: a grainy mill chimney with tracklisting “done on a typewriter ... stuck down with glue”. In this economically written vignette, the author transports readers of a certain age to an epoch long before desktop publishing, blogs and MySpace, when “doing it yourself” meant a queue for the photocopying machine.
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We spool forward from the unnamed northern English city (presumably Manchester) to Marbella 2009, where Barrett - the other half of Group Hex, latterly leader of the crossover outfit Killing Stars - is a “folded-in drunk ... a failing career piled on top of him”.
His appeal, to quote Spinal Tap, has become more selective. He’s “crabby, running red, mad at the heat”, preparing to answer a website questionnaire more interested in his early Eighties’ past than his latest solo album Godspace.
The Last Mad Surge of Youth draws these two poles together: a drunken rant on daytime TV ups Barrett’s stock; Carey, trapped in the print cycle of a local newspaper, ends up ghostwriting his ex-cohort’s autobiography; their two worlds gently collide.
If you’re looking for the sex and drugs that drive comparable rock’n’roll novels such as Kevin Sampson’s Powder or Kill your Friends by John Niven, you’ve come to the wrong place. Hodkinson, echoing Barrett’s questionnaire, is more animated by the idealistic past than the prosaic present, and his book really sings when Carey revisits the band’s old haunts in nostalgic reverie. This book is not about fame or fortune but friendship, observed through the rock-biz prism.
Fifteen years in the writing and untainted by the “sexing up” that a major publisher might have imposed upon its low-speed narrative, you feel that had Hodkinson needed to photocopy each page at the library he would have done so.
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The Last Mad Surge of Youth by Mark Hodkinson; Pomona, £8.99; 346pp Buy this book