The Lonely Planet Boy by Barney Hoskyns # 1 Country Joe & The Fish

 

'Kip Wilson came comparitively late to Pop.

Friends had already been into Bowie and Bolan for a year when he attached himself to the little gaggle of Glam Rockers at his prep school.But it was only with the move to Dunstanwood College that he began to live for records,posters, facts about bands.'

I've always liked  Barney Hoskyns snd his writing. One of my strongest music memories is reading his interview and article on The Smiths in the NME on Richmond Green in 1984. Hoskyns was so fired with enthusiasm for the band and Morrissey in particular that he mentioned Nietszche, Barthes and Jean Genet as reference points for his ardour. It all seemed to make sense somehow.  We were all in the process of constructing ourselves.

It's why the music press was such a wonderful thing to cut your teeth to and educate yourself from in the early Eighties. It was pseudy and gauche in some ways. But those were the same qualities which made it so essential at one and the same time. We're all only seventeen once. 1980 - 1984 was a wonderful time to experience youth and for me music and the music press was at the heart of the journey.

Hoskyns came of age as an NME staffer during these years. A public school boy like more of these journalists than you would realise, he's had a notable career since and written many great books down the years, several of which line my bookshelves. Americana is generally his chosen subject matter. Tom Waits, Neil Young, The Band, Dylan.

I imagine The Lonely Planet Boy, his Rock & Roll novel which came out in 1995, is probably not the thing he's proudest of. It's a slim book and not a particularly good one. It's clichéd in the way much of Hoskyn's evident hero Nick Kent's writing is hackneyed when removed from its natural habitat, a Seventies issue of the NME. It reads like a rushed job. Punched out from the corner table of a smoke fugged office full of journalists late one afternoon in the NME office  with the deadline looming. It needs an editor and characters with genuine psychology and soul. Still, I love this stuff. It's a fun, trashy read.

The characters are the kind of slightly desperate types who gravitate towards the inner city in search of meaning and personal fulfilment. If a  a band is not going to materialise to save you from a life of 9 to 5 perhaps you can make it as a music journalist. The way women are written about is pretty shabby really. They are of objects of shag lust and little more.

We meet Kip Wilson, .The Lonely Planet Boy at Dunstinwood College in page 1. He's a fairly transparent younger version of Hoskyns himself. The first few pages are a fevered rush through his record taste as it develops throughout the decade. Starting off with West Coast Rock. Moby Grape and Country Joe & the Fish. As the decade proceeds Punk intervenes and he moves on to Ramones and Television. By page 25 he's making his way in the capital in journalism and is desperately in need of love interest.