On Monday night tQ is joining up with our friends at Faber Social to bring you an event called Whisky & Cigarettes, which will involve a gathering of a number of writers for readings, discussions and musings on all manner of subjects.
Our very own John Doran is involved coming, of course, off the black of Jolly Lad from which he will be reading on the night and treating the audience to a "hypnotism ritual" – you’ll have to go along to find out exactly what that involves.
John Niven, author of Kill Your Friends, is also taking part, reading from his new book The Sunshine Cruise Company, published today, while Man Booker Prize-winning DBC Pierre is also lined up to join proceeedings. He’ll be offering up a world premier reading from his new novel.
Completing the list of writers is tQ writer Wyndham Wallace whose first book Lee, Myself & I charts his time spent with singer-songwriter Lee Hazlewood. Of his contribution to the night, Wallace says “I’ll be reading from Lee, Myself & I, my memoir about the eight years I spent working with, and befriending, the Chivas Regal swilling, Marlboro Reds chain-smoking Lee Hazlewood, the man behind ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’, and so, so much more. I’m pretty certain he would have thoroughly approved of the night’s entertainment. Aside from the smoking ban.”
There will be live music on the evening too from Keeley Forsyth described by co-collaborators the Eccentronic Research Council as “the bastard love child of Peggy Lee and Nico”. Among the ranks in her band is Dom of Chrononautz too so expect tQ family representation in the room. Of her set, Forsyth says "I am collaborating with Demonic Glare on an as yet unnamed project so I decided to ask him to join me for this show. It will be my usual summoning of Lancashire drones plus his heavy beats." Check a recent demo track from Keeley Forsyth below.
It’s all happening on Monday (August 17) at The Social and advance tickets can be purchased here. Doors open at 7pm with the show starting 30 minutes later.
Praise for John Doran’s Jolly Lad:
“A wonderful tale… very funny.” The Independent
“Beautifully wrought… the work of a real writer propelled by that most vital of properties, self-doubt.” Jonathan Meades
“Jolly Lad details [Doran’s] journey with unflinching honesty: the masking of fear, the circuitous thinking, the physicality of withdrawal. It’s a startling guide to self-destruction… hilarious yet insightful.” Cian Traynor, The Irish Times
“Every page is studded with bluntly brilliant prose… Can’t recommend it highly enough.” David Stubbs, author of Future Days and Fear Of Music
“Upon finishing Jolly Lad, a lyrical, endlessly compelling memoir by the music journalist John Doran, you will probably wonder how he is still alive. You will not be alone. The co-editor and co-founder of acclaimed music website The Quietus apparently has organs that could endure a nuclear firestorm… At times, this book feels more like an film than anything else: at vital moments, the prose is so vivid as to be cinematic… This is a stirring, moving tale, carved out of a cruelly formless world.” Musa Okwonga, The Huff Post
“Even if [Jolly Lad] is a bit traumatic [or] sometimes a lot traumatic, and there were certain chapters where I was getting a contact-hangover from touching the page and feeling like I needed a spell in rehab myself for even thinking what he’d been drinking (or otherwise ingesting). It’s completely unlike most other addiction memoirs you’ll read, in that it’s bloody funny, self-aware, and doesn’t try to humblebraggingly paint the survivor as some kind of saint just for surviving. It’s also staggeringly poetic at times and steeped in deep truth about what it was, and is, to be a music nut in the 80s, 90s and the now… Sometimes a writer known for magazine/internet journalism gets stage fright when they attempt a long-form book. Other times they rise to the occasion and seize the opportunity to really show their chops. Jolly Lad is resoundingly the latter. It’s the best thing he’s ever written.” Simon Price author of Everything
“Rock & roll is overflowing with tales of debauchery, both celebratory and cautionary, but this memoir of a life lived through a haze of booze and chemicals is something else: funny, dismal, honest (especially when addressing his own self-deception), moving, infuriating, sensitive, enlightening and, ultimately, cathartic. Quite apart from his ability to turn sound into vivid words when faced by the often-impossible task of describing the music that helped him through, it’s a wonderfully sober vision of insobriety and depression, a magical depiction of the redemptive force of love and fatherhood, and a tremendously touching expression of the conflicted reawakening one must feel when abandoning the crutches upon which one has leant for many, many years. It’s also packed with tales of extraordinarily reprehensible, irresponsible behaviour, framed by a wry sense of hindsight. You want a soundbite? It’s the best book I’ve read about recovery since John Healy’s magnificently scalding The Grass Arena. Order it now.” Wyndham Wallace author of Lee, Myself & I
"John Doran’s remarkable Jolly Lad channels the vitality of Down And Out In Paris And London. It strikes the same timeless chimes. Politicised documentary as rich and pithy as Orwell’s own gives way to a deeper probe until we feel we are being given a guided tour of the inner world through the eyes of one surviving evangelist… This is a brave and vital voice, emerging." Rick Holland, poet
“This book is one of the great first person narratives of recent times – funny, bruising and with an eye for the detail of horror (or, to annexe Lovecraft, ‘The Physiology of Fear’) – and combines the best of the New Journalism style with the Northern Literary tradition… Doran’s honest and blunt writing never feels gratuitous or self-important, nor is it ever self-pitying – its selflessness is the key to its intrigue, as well as to his psychological make-up… I hope invoking the spectres of Winterson, Joyce and Hunter S. Thompson is to offer fairly high praise. This is not the work of a Bright Young Thing – even by Doran’s own admission – but of a true maverick. Jolly Lad is utterly captivating and engrossing, with a unique helmsman who is magnetic and endlessly interesting, even if we are only with him long enough to cross the River Styx.” Alexander Holbrook, Louder Than War
“[Jolly Lad] finds expression not in what [Doran] recounts but in the wit and style of his delivery… It’s a bravura story and there is no Disneyesque ending to the tale of an individual who is difficult to like but who has the honesty to admit there is little that could be liked about his past life.” Irish Left Review
“A pugnacious account of the descent into addiction.” Colm McCauliffe, The New Statesman
“An anti-misery memoir and alternative music celebration, Jolly Lad – the title’s a pun on jolie laide: “beautifully ugly” – is full of rock star encounters and hilarious one-liners as memorably droll as you’d expect from a Fall fan. With brutal honesty it also reminds that often it’s still the writers who lead lives larger and more interesting than many of their media-managed musician subjects.” Ben Myers, MOJO
“The key to the book’s power and incision is Doran’s calm, reflective, procedural account of the alcohol addiction that comes close to killing him.” Roy Wilkinson, Caught By The River
“A music journalist’s tales of alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness? Surely the stuff of self-absorbed drudgery. In lesser hands Jolly Lad could have been a dull redemption story but Doran’s writing is anything but prosaic. In reality this addiction memoir is as compelling as it is poetic. Drawing on his various obsessions, from extreme music to hard liquor, to the promotional tour for this book, he weaves a story of deeply observed and brilliantly conveyed self-doubting reflection.” Martin James, Times Higher Education
“For such a solid, Johnsonian figure, John Doran has a mysterious presence in his own story. Even though places and times are inked in in some detail, they still seem to be backdrops for a series of existential soliloquies that often lead to nowhere in particular. The more you read the book, with its tales of squat madness in Hull, Odyssean spirits, spice and powder stock ups in the Great Wen, or tales of subterranean Tubesick blues, the more you feel he is seen and not seen. I suppose that’s a fitting reflection for a book that chronicles a number of out of body experiences, dreams, nightmares. So; John Doran is here and not here in his book. This hallucinatory quality often leads the reader astray; only for Doran to return to his point his devastating effectiveness. The last chapter, "Slaughter in the Air (2013)", can be seen as a brilliant exercise in suggestion. Who is this "she" Doran talks about at the beginning? We can guess, but somehow Doran lets us drop the thread, and we imagine this reference to be just a casual, introductory aside. Doran then leads us away like some skillful wedding master of ceremonies at a wedding; discussing his family history and roofing jobs with weed smoking ex-squaddies, only to return, almost in the style of a Grande Masque, to revealing the social change/destruction that that particular "she" initiated in his neck of the woods. It’s akin to some MR James ghost story; the lulls, the reasoning, the relief before the unveiling; all the while the reader being slowly marinated on a spit.” Richard Foster, Incendiary Magazine
“Jolly Lad is an addiction memoir, but one which deconstructs the macho bullshit, the self-pity and the outright lying that surrounds the literature of addiction. There are no platitudes here, no lost years, and although there is a struggle to be clean, Doran makes it clear that he enjoyed much of what he did… a fucked-up, horrible, brilliant, hilarious tale.” C D Rose, 3AM Magazine
"Makes Withnail & I look like Little House On The Prairie." Caitlin Moran
