Steven Wells, Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty (Attack! Books, 1999)Avant-Pulp & Social Surrealism:
Novel writing isn’t an "art form". It’s typing on drugs.
«He sets out his stall in the opening pages, describing an England where Princess Diana is exhumed, re-animated and killed again on a weekly basis in order to keep the public docile with grief. He then overturns his stall by revealing this to be merely the drug-induced fantasy of Jello Cobain, publisher of a whole string of hyper-pulp novels such as the one we're about to read. From that point on there's a vague semblance of a plot, involving assorted revolutionary acts perpetrated by the members of Karen Skull's Anti-Crap Jihad: but it's established fairly quickly that this is just an excuse for Wells to line up everything and everyone he hates, so that he can kick, blast and sodomise the shit out of it.
If you're familiar with Wells' journalism, then TTTT is the same only more so, without the requirement in journalism to have some sort of coherent point at the end of it. The result is, frankly, a bitch to read. The style is great for a couple of pages, but as you get further in it becomes more and more exhausting. Everything's played at warp speed as lists of crap things, huge clusters of adjectives and endless usages of the formula "x is like y on drugs" all pile up in a heap of hugely over-extended sentences (one of which goes on for six bastard pages without a full stop). However, if you take it in small doses, with a break for fresh air and exercise every hour like you're supposed to with video games, it's a hoot. Even if you don't agree with all the opinions Wells forces down your throat (and he has a curiously big problem with vegetarianism), the sheer manic pace and endless bag of invective tricks make all other literature look like the watery dribblings of a vindaloo-force-fed diarrhoetic's prolapsed arse. On Ex-Lax. OFFICIAL!!!» - www.gleeson0.demon.co.uk/attack.htm
«This book is unreadable. It also boasts that it has a higher death count than the Bible. I wasn’t going to count up both tallies to see if Swells was right, but I can hazard a guess that it is a close call. I can also guesstimate that this novel has more sex in it than the whole of the Swedish porn industry.
Let me ask you, what kind of twisted mind can alliterate whole pages, write descriptions without putting in spaces, make 2000 word stories rhyme, add the odd KABOOM and put in a 24 point AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGH that lasts for 13 pages?
The action is set 10 years after you’ve heard of this book, the setting is England, Heaven, Hell, the odd planet in a galaxy far far away and a satanic transit van.
The plot is splattered across the wall like a comedy custard tart and you get the feeling that the book consists of a series of strung together NME Banging On pieces. Then again Tits Out is the work of a fictional semi-lobotmised, drugged up, artificial orgasm powered rock hack working in a literary sweat shop in slavery to a mean piggy publisher.
It does have its clever bits though. The manuscript of Tits-out appearing in the plot written on the palm top of Bobo the incredibly intelligent Chimpanzee. The Story of Chog, Spog and the chemical bog. And the Yin-Yang ping-pong cosmik-feedback loop cum Mobius strip cum daemonic domino effect created by Helen Keller’s Iron Lung the satanic rock band.
It’s the sort of book your mum wouldn’t touch with a rusty barge pole. The day this gets put on the A-level English Literature List is the day the pundits should start tearing their hair out and asking for changes in the education system. But then that’s what it aims to do.
5 bubbles at times, but it’s the literary equivalent of listening to music masochists Atari Teenage Riot in a cupboard at 3 squillion decibels which leaves us with a: » - Rachelle Ansell
«Aieee! Completely bug-eyed rant-athon which makes your eyeballs bleed! Princess Di resurrected and zombified by a blood-crazed tabloid-reading public! "The insance christian god, 'God'"! Really weird quotes from anti-disco campaigners and Joseph Stalin! An entire chapter set aside to taking the piss out of Oasis! "Jimi Hendrix smiled that famous supercool smile that made him look like a cat that had just drunk a pint of brandy laced cream and was now having its little ginger cock sucked by an expert cock gobbler with a PHD in making cats come slowly."! Completely implausible plot developments involving time travel! Aleister Crowley! Plus the usual array of drug-fulled violence, violence-fuelled drugs, shagging, swearing and cop-hating. That will do nicely.» - www.uncarved.org/archive/reviews230900.html
«Thus, like Austen, Wells has seen the need for a new kind of literature, a new kind of English novel. His target, those spunk-smelly, yob/youff, Viz/Sun scanning, ‘Page 3’ drooling, Eminem/Puff Daddy imitating, Robot War/Match of the Day obsessing, mental Play station game playing young men - form a constituency that has been neglected or wilfully left out of the remit of the English novel. What novels are available for this group?
Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty was published with a cartoon cover illustration depicting a gun toting Lara Croftish sex babe on its vivid green,black and red cover. It carries an endorsement quoted from Trainspotting best seller drug/clubbing Scots author Irvine Welsh in stacked up upper case letters: “Fucking brilliant”.
Its iconclastic, eye catching title and cover is equalled by a cranked-up prose of cartoon violence and sex that would please anyone looking for a paperback thrill. It is using the very devices that make The Sun such a spectacularly successful organ of propaganda for the right but using them to very different, radical, dissenting ends.
If the tabloid journalism of the political right is the context out of which Wells has written as well as being a target for his splenetic satire - both as a novelist as well as in his other activities as a star journalist for the New Musical Express and script writer for numerous tv shows - it is the failure of the so-called quality British novel to address the young male reader and the right-wing agenda that also draws his fire.
Running through the mission statements for Attack! Books and the Wells novel itself is a sustained scorn for the New Parnassian style of top English writer Martin Amiss. Amiss by name and nature, this writer represents all that is amiss in the world of English novel writing for Wells. Martinamiss is the generic name which heads up chapter 14 of the Wells novel. The high art cred of Martinamiss and all would-be Martinamiss writing is called into question because it fails to engage with what in the end seems to be a very class-driven issue.
Whereas for Wells writing a novel today is a relevant and serious critical project, where the aim of any author should be to do to literature what punk did to rock , what Dirty Harry did to cop cinema and Judge Dredd did to Dan Dare - that is, test it out to a state of completion that looks and feels like destruction - the Martinamiss writers have withdrawn from the battle.
They look down with anguish and disgust at the rest of us from elegant, posh, privately-educated, Oxbridge Ivory Towers. In a strange language they produce novels about elegant, posh, privately-educated, Oxbridge sensibilities anguished by the terrible state of the world or their own febrile, tremulous lives. When they do reach out to the rest of us they do it just to show how clever they are - real experience and politics are used as materials upon which they can work their spells and nothing more. It is an utterly trivial, politically conservative and deeply unworthy approach to a genre that in the past has coughed up Defoe, Swift and Jane Austen.
As an example of the High Triviality of this New Parnassianism, we can note how all Martin Amiss seemed to be doing in his book Times Arrow was to utilise a little bit of reading about the Nazi holocaust and some popular science to cook up a minor exercise of astonishingly ugly taste. The hopeless moral failure of the book was that it was about investigating the nature of the Martinamiss style rather than investigating the nature of the nazi crimes. It’s this sort of precious, solipsistic and disengaged writing that Wells hates.
Wells’s hard alliterative rhythm of his bomb-lobbing prose comes from his Bradford Old and Middle English speech but his assault is more than merely a style thing. Or if it is a style thing, it’s because style is not just about style. After all, Amiss himself doesn’t footle around with mere Gielgudian Smooth. He doesn’t touch the elocutionary velvet tone of drained-out lifeless prose; his bag has ever been the invention of low-life demotic, a “Conradian urgency”, to quote Jason Cowley’s recent description, that closes in on the atmospherics and pyrotechnics of laddish banter, laddish cool.
For Wells, it’s this “invention” of a working-class vernacular hipness that stuffs Amiss. There is a mediocrity that comes from the banality of its target because in the end all Martinamiss wants to do is have us admire the mannerisms, the flash surfaces, the mastery and ownership of the game. It avoids the crackling bite, the violence of thinking and engagement, the eroticism of taking a point of prejudice for a long and bracing walk, which is what a novel can do. By not caring a fuck, it cannot fuck, is what Wells might argue.
Martinamiss adopts voices in his novels like a rich posh guy imitating and ridiculing the lower classes he despises, fears and envies. “I don’t want to write a sentence that any guy could have written,” the real Martin Amiss is quoted as having once said. Fair enough you might say. Nothing wrong with ambition. We all want to be winners. But for what end? What purpose? Which readers?
These are the real questions that Wells addresses. His novel has sentences no one else could have written, but they have a focus that goes beyond the delivery. They have a reachy slap that smacks into the complacent cheeks of the Martinamiss writers and enlarges the space for eloquence, discursiveness and the imagination.
In an essay on Saul Bellow from his collection of critical essays The Moronic Inferno Amiss writes of what he calls The High Style: “To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century has been the self-imposed challenge of his [Bellows’] work. The High Style attempts to speak for the whole of mankind, to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten.” It has also been Amiss’s self-imposed challenge.
That nostalgic elegiac tick, looking back to times past when things were done better – “… to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten ...” - is the mark of the true conservative. No wonder he has become the name given to all that the dissenting Wells attacks. He sounds like the dull old Tory Wordsworth rather than the youthful enlightened radical one.
For Wells all Amiss and his type have done is produce boring and self-regarding empty prose whilst at the same time making sure they remain aloof of the arguments of the hack, the journalist, the pulp and genre writers who have managed to keep up with the century. Amiss is in that line of writing which Wells sees as emerging out of Bloomsbury’s Virginia Woolf school of novelists where the self absorbed angst of well-off middle-class people are written about at length in forbidding and boring prose to the exclusion of anything else and to the exclusion of anyone else except other middle-class members of this Club Ennui. For Wells this is intolerable and a disaster.
When one of Wells’s characters says that “...the Modern English Novel is so boring, dull, self-referential and wonderfully utterly up its own arse that very few people want to read it and instead turn in their unwashed, stinking, non Oxbridge and non-public school educated millions to the flash, glamorous, fast, moronic and typhonically titillating trashy joys of American ‘genre’ fiction…” we hear Wells’s own position expounded in the wild comic routine of the performance poet he once was.
He continues though by explaining why the Martinamiss school are happy about this exclusive state of affairs, “…a state of affairs to be warmly applauded because the last thing that we literary types want is for our books to be read by an audience of stinking prole scum who aren’t dead from the neck downwards no-nob stiffs sunk in the 19th Century.” The class basis of the literary argument is clarified with rude satirical abruptness.
The Attack! Book project in its essential thrust ventriloquises in maniac tongues the organising idea of John Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses. The idea in Carey’s book is that modern literature, as opposed to other types of writing such as pulp and genre fiction, is a strategic response to mass literacy by an intellectual elite wanting to keep out the great unwashed and thus maintain what Bourdieu would call their cultural capital.
Stylistic failure is a moral failure for Wells; no amount of stylistic felicity and cleverness can excuse the Martinamiss writers from taking an essentially exclusive and mandarin class perspective on language and writing. Those journalists, hacks, genre and pulp writers mentioned above are heroes because they have the qualities of real engagement, the ‘to the moment’ feel of actual argument with and about the world that Martinamiss‘s approach refuses.
So Wells, a journalist himself, gives it large to Amiss because of the self regard of the writing coupled, crucially, with its lack of moral resonance. It is disengaged stuff, working Arnoldian disinterestedness rather than Hazlitt’s. This is a rooted aristocratic pose for the New Parnassians. Where Arnold believed that the critic should not take sides but look on neutrally like an old-style Civil Servant, Hazlitt in using the term “disinterested” was saying that the critic should respect her opponent but of course have a perspective.
The Attack! Book project is therefore an attempt to throw into relief the massive failings of the Martinamiss school of literature as well as redirect the tabloid journalism of he Sun. His own book, Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty is its massy, foundational core, a hot stew of messages, possibilities, gags, rants and splenetic knock-about that is the opposite of the Martinamiss cool and controlling audit of the language as High Art literature routine. The five other books out on the Attack! Book imprint follow up and develop the agenda with iconoclastic fervour reflecting the dissenting comic genius of their rancorous general editor.
Against Martinamiss’s New Parnassus Wells launches a tanked-up anti-literature that belches, farts and roars itself into a demented lunacy of extremist, secularist hywl, a word that describes the kind of impassioned almost supra-linguistic delivery usually found in raving mighty Welsh Evangelical preachers. Again and again the dissenting author creates a moment where language breaks down into nothing more (nothing less) than a roar of possessing anger, a monumental crash of barmy noise that signifies, like Lucky’s speech in Godot signifies, the monstrousness of traditional power , its language and conditions.
There is no neutral ground. And it is humour, the cocky stand-up routine humour of the club/rock live act that surfaces, the vernacular pulse of lived in, throat sore speech language rather than the miserabilist prose of the tight-arsed attic ghosts of the Martinamiss school boys and girls. When Wells connects his writing to Joyce – “… a book that makes James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake look like Janet and John dumbed down for dyslexics. On Crack. OFFICIAL!” - he is seriously reminding us of that republican, dissenting and cosmopolitan tradition that will not equivocate or dissemble even as he does this to get a laugh.
So there you have it; what he’s up to is writing brilliant prose just like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice!!! But whereas Austen, as noted earlier, did not announce her dissenting project -- being as she was the ever decorous, divinely so, Jane!- Wells has no such qualms. He’s Jane Austen popping out of the bodice of that decorum. Jane Austen with her tits out! On Crack. OFFICIAL!» - Richard Marshall
«Why is it that the people with the most profound stuff to say are also those who are the least capable of being able to express that profundity?
I am talking about us. The mutoids. The abyss starers. The already organ-bagged cancer boys. While we are in some mere state of deterioration, our ability to comment is still possible. It might even be occasionally interesting. Certainly every writer who has ever contracted cancer has thought so. We can make cancer jokes. Existentialist jokes, even. The world is ours!
But then as one nudges closer to the edge, in the eye of the tiger storm (Tiger Storm, quite possibly the worst line and the best band name ever written), one is more inclined to shit oneself (literally and figuratively) than to throw shit at the system. Which is wrong and weak and lazy but kind of understandable. As is my wife’s fury this morning upon her discovery that a pair of pre-adolescent oiks destroyed a 95 percent-completed jigsaw puzzle (of cats) in the family waiting room. Even as her own dear husband was having his savagely jigsawed abdomen dressed in a hospital room but two doors away.
But life isn’t that banal or that stupid. Life isn’t about grit and grime and squalor. Life is getting angry at destroyed cat jigsaws. Life is the amazement at seeing the Vanity Fair title erupt as a scarlet mohawk-cum-quiff across a dainty Johnny Depp’s forehead, and the drooling anticipation of watching a Brian McManus-recommended terror-comedy on my computer later tonight. And of course the sight of tireless, tie-less and tire-burning liberal rioters taking to the streets of Tehran.
I speak as someone whose greatest craving at this exact moment is not world peace and universal democracy or a rational and global redistribution of wealth, but a can of ice cold ginger ale.
And of course all this bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity -- the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans -- the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks. (Check out the AMA logos, those smiling beasts are not snakes.)
You could blame this fallacy on poor education, cultural deterioration, or simple moral decline.
Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.» - Steven Wells [his last column]
«This morning I received several emails about the death from cancer of Steven Wells. Swells was best known as a music hack and was the dominant figure at the New Musical Express for much of the eighties and nineties. While he was at the NME, Swells was always prepared to go out on a limb with an opinion to support off-beat bands and writers. It was Swells who penned the infamous quote about Will Self and me that both AK and Do-Not Press used as a blurb on my books:
“Stewart Home’s sperm’n'blood-sodden scribblings make Will Self’s writings read like the self-indulgent dribblings of a sad Oxford junkie trying to sound hard.”
This quote really rattled and angered Self. Swells knew exactly what he was doing; he wanted to help me find a larger audience and this soundbite created a big stir. And I wasn’t the only person Swells pushed in this way, he did it for a legion of people. He was very loyal and if he though what you did was worthwhile, extremely vocal in his attempts to create space for you in an overcrowded cultural arena. Swells wanted to make things happen, he wasn’t interested in passively reporting cultural and other news.
Swells was a laugh to be around and you could always count on him for a good argument too! His essentially Trotskyist stance rubbed up against my left-communist positions with at times explosive results. Nonetheless, the biggest blow-up we ever had occurred when I said I didn’t like the film Apocalypse Now, and Swells insisted it was impossible for me not to like Apocalypse Now. What followed was a good humoured and thoroughly enjoyable ding-dong; we were sitting in a cafe on Beak Street and some of the other customers seemed worried our disagreement would end in fisticuffs, they didn’t understand we were friends with passionate but opposed opinions. Such differences never stopped us working together. Swells brought me in as an extra on some of his GobTV/Pig Productions pop videos, and also put out ‘my’ novel Whips & Furs: My life as a bon-vivant, gambler and love rat ‘by’ Jesus H. Christ on his short lived Attack! Books (co-run with Tommy Udo).
Although Swells initially made his name as a poet, his real strength was as a stream-of-consciousness prose writer. His book Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty is a sustained assault on the idea of what the novel should be, and it is stuffed with his crazy word play – brilliant turns of phrase like ‘a pol potpurri’. After his move from London to the USA, Swells was writing for the Philadelphia Weekly, and you can find his final piece of writing for them and links to other pieces by him HERE.
Steven Wells born Swindon (England) 1960, spent much of his childhood in Bradford (England) and moved to London (England) as an adult, died from cancer Philadelphia (USA) 23 June 2009.» - Stewart Home
“3AM: When did you launch Attack! Books and, more importantly, why?
I was hacking away at a Stuart Home influenced psycho-novel titled Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty, about what would happen if everybody who has ever taken ecstasy suddenly went totally INfuckingSANE and started hacking up their nearest and dearest with garden tools and safety scissors.
Tommy Udo then invited me along to his "extreme spoken word" club The Shining Path where these mad scribblings went down a storm. It was the start of a brutally beautiful sado-masochistic sexual relationship. Tommy had some cash left over from his disastrously brief career as a Channel 4 TV presenter and wanted to start a publishing company.
Soon we had a name—Attack! Books. And a shitload of titles: Pagan Bastards!, Fat Goth Chick, Legalise Cannibalism, Apes of Wrath, Vatican Bloodbath, Prince Bastard (followed by King Bastard and Intergalactic Emperor Bastard) etc.
And a manifesto:
"ATTACK! WHERE THE NOVEL HAS A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN!
This generation needs a NEW literature—writing that apes, matches, parodies and supersedes the flickeringly fast 900 MPH ATTACK! ATTACK ATTACK! velocity of early 21st century popular culture at its most mEnTaL!
HARD-CORE ANARCHO-COMMIE SEX PULP
We will publish writers who think they’re rock stars, rock stars who think they’re writers and we will make supernovas of the stuttering, wild-eyed, slack-jawed drooling idiot-geek geniuses who lurk in the fanzine/internet shadows.
HORROR! SEX! WAR! DRUGS! VIOLENCE!
"Subtlety" is found in the dictionary between "shit" and "syphilis". The self-perpetuating ponce-mafia oligarchy of effete bourgeois wankers who run the literary scene‚ must be swept aside by a tidal wave of screaming urchin tits-out teenage terror totty and DESTROYED! ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! Hail the Social Surrealist revolution! Death to Brit Lit! Meet the New Barbarians!"
And a concept:
"Attack is punk rock—but for books! We are the Tamla Motown of publishing! In your face, down your trousers and up your arse like a shit-eating rabbit on speed! Written by psychopaths! For psychopaths! Gratuitously violent, stomach churning two-fisted avant-pulp rock'n'roll fuck-fiction! Attack! is the literary equivalent of being spit-roasted by two horse-cocked muscle studs! (On crack, obviously).
Our novels will be hacked out by ranks of glassy eyed author-serfs, the skeletal fingers of these mindless minions tip-tapping away at 200 words per minute for 24 hours of every day of every week of every year churning out an endless stream of pulp fiction classics with titles like HUGETITTED SPUNKSUCKING NAZISNAKE SLUTNUNS IN CYBERSPACE!, FISTFUCK TO FREEDOM! , JOYRIDING INTELLECTUAL CRACKBABY BLOODFIENDS!, GASHCRAZED MEDICAL STUDENT CANNIBAL PARTY PAEDOPHILE CRACK-MASSACRE!, SUBMISSIVE BOOTBOY SMACK ADDICT SEXTOY!, I KILL FOR LAGER!, SKINHEAD TAKES IT UP THE SHITTER!, MENTAL SELF-MUTILATION FRENZIED KUNG FU GLUESNIFFER SPUNK RIOT!, I SHAT THE HOT-CUM OF A BILLION NEW LABOUR SPIN-DOCTOR SCUM IN A CRACK-WRAP LITTERED AND BADLY-LIT BACKSTREET BOMBAY BUMBOY BROTHEL FOR BASTARD YONKS!, MY LIFE AS THE DRUG-DERANGED AND SAVAGELY UNDERPAID MAD MONKEY WAGE SLAVE OF CUTTING EDGE ENFANT TERRIBLE BAD BOY NOVELIST MARTIN AMIS FOR PEANUTS AND LOVED EVERY FUCKING MINUTE OF EVERY CUNTING DAY! And SHITSURFINGFISHNETS TOCKINGEDI NTELLIGENT JUNGLECRAZEDMUTANTFERRET SEXSLAVECANNIBALSPUNKADD ICTS INGLEMOTHERDRUGALIEN CRACKSMUGGLINGCOPKILLERAND ROIDRIOT GRRLWHORENUNS FROMREABCLINICCOLDTURKEY HELLVERSUSTHECOCKSU CKERMER CENARYSKULLFUCKEDPSYCHODRUG KOPSPACEFASCI STRANGERSFA NSFROMSPEED GABBAKEBAB PUKESMEAREDMINICAB HELLPLANET 9ONSMACK! 2—THE SCREENPLAY which will sell in their millions.
The stinking ranks of pulpspewing semi-android hacks’ hideously swollen heads will all sport heavy steel headphones which blast cutting-edge extreme pop sounds straight into their shaking skulls whilst banks of video machines spew looptapes packed with horrific images of slaughter, torture, kid’s cartoons and triple-X rated hardcore-europorn straight into each slackjawed slave’s visual cortex through a complicated spaghetti of multi-coloured wiring. Using these revolutionary production methods we aim to flood the English reading world with thousands of utterly psychotic sure-fire smash-hit but shudderingly subliterate teensploitation novel mindlessly churned out in a few hours by the utterly drugboggled brain of an anonymous kidnapped rock hack whose finer sensibilities have been mercilessly crushed by a relentless and totally desensitising non-stop barrage of gratuitously-violent, overtly sexual and utterly tasteless cultural effluent and then smashed into atoms by the computer generated super-orgasms that thrash their emaciated body as a reward each time they concoct a savage sentence, sordid sex scene or sickeningly violent pig-getting-his-ear-sliced-off-in-Res Dogs style scenario that leaps clean over the boundaries of civilised good taste and falls screaming into the abyss of barbarity, perversion and dangerously demented decadence beyond."
And a press release:
"Attack! Books are gaudily painted ruffian whores blatantly flourishing the rouged lips of their distended genitalia and giving you the come on. You are aroused to passion. Feverishly fingering the cheap pages, you speed-read the sordid contents, your mind reeling under the savage mental carpet bombing of the fuck-frenzied prose. At last, satiated and weeping, you collapse in a heaving heap. Then you sit down at your computer and start to write. The world must hear of the glory, the frenzy, the dementia and—yes—the love that IS Attack! Books. The pulsating glory that you once thought could only be found in the screaming amplifiers of beautiful and tragically thin young proletarian sex-rock gods thrashing machine-gun fuck rock out of cock-level held and crude-slogan plastered electric guitars has now found its literary equivalent!
The doors of perception are ripped off their rusting hinges and smashed into worm-ridden matchwood by a barbarian horde of Viking berzerker skum who stomp into the darkest corners of the human soul, howling like crazed wolves, roaring like priapic mastodons, screaming like blood crazed bull-chimps and shitting in your spanking new trainers like naughty puppies. Did someone say punk rock? Fuck punk rock! Did someone say Acid House? Fuck Acid House! All cultural references are redundant. Attack! is like The Battle of Stalingrad experienced by a five year old psychopath on Jacob’s Ladder style CIA experimental combat acid! It’s like being butt-fucked to a bloody pulp by a detective chief constable with a hammer head shark for a cock. It’s like wading knee deep through a sea of used condoms casually tossed aside by the Ghaddafi trained lesbian terror squads whose mission it is to inject infected semen into the arteries of the common mind. But basically, chum, it’s about love. Let’s not forget that, OK?"
But unfortunately Tommy had no money left after having to pay for a series of operations following a disastrous move to America where he tried (and failed spectacularly in front of 7.8 million TV viewers) to make it big on the WWF pro-wrestling circuit.
So we hawked it around: MAJOR PUBLISHER: So who's the target audience for Attack!? US: Um, working class and lower middle class males. Probably. MAJOR PUBLISHER: Do they go into bookshops? US: AAAAAAAAAARGH!
So eventually we fell in with Creation books (nothing to do with Creation records) and put six books out. Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty by Steven Wells, Raiders Of The Low Forehead by Stanley Manly, Satan! Satan! Satan! by Tony White, Get Your Cock Out by Mark Manning (AKA Zodiac Mindwarp), Vatican Bloodbath by Tommy Udo and Whips & Furs—My Life As A Bon-Vivant, Gambler And Love Rat by Jesus H. Christ (edited by Stuart Home). But that relationship is coming to an end and we are currently looking to go solo and are in negotiation with some RICH PEOPLE to make this happen because we got TONS OF SHIT-HOT MANUSCRIPTS screaming to be born.
…Good luck to anybody out to sir up the stagnant, class-ridden cesspit of "serious literature" but the New Puritans seem to be reformists and, as it says on the tattoo on Tommy Udo's horse-sized cock: ONE SOLUTION! REVOLUTION!
3AM: You want a "NEW literature" for "this generation". How would you define this new type of literature?
That slogan: Punk rock for books! It's a tad crude (hem hem). Especially when we're talking about a medium which, in musical terms, hasn't even had its bebop yet. We want literature that is the literary equivalent of No Limits by Two Unlimited, Gabba, Hard Core, Grindcore, The Sex Pistols, Digital Hard Core, Daphne & Celeste, Little Richard, Apocalypse Now, The Beatles Live At The Hollywood Bowl, The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Akira, amphetamine sulphate, The League Of Gentlemen, fucking on poppers, the screams of 80,000 assembled screaming teenypop fans, John Zorn's Torture Garden, Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner, Brute!, the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan. ALL AT THE SAME TIME! We want literature that reeks of the sex, speed and violence of 21st century culture at it's most mental! Writing that sucker-punches you in the heart, head, guts and gonads at the same time!
We're offended by the very concept of "serious" literature. It's so one-dimensional! We're sickened by the constant elevation of prematurely middle-aged 19th century style wannabes as cutting edge enfant terribles. A university English Lit course that fails to teach comics is as redundant as a media studies course that fails to mention television. Fucking hell! Robert Louis Stevenson's wife burnt the first draft of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde because she thought it was shit. So the nutter hammered it all out again from scratch in 72 hours while off his fucking skull on medicinal cocaine. THAT'S Attack! It's about dumbing UP! More is More! Screaming tabloid headlines, Stalinist aesthetics, situationist rhetoric, twisted morality, an ultra-modernist social-surrealist agenda, chips shops on both shoulders—who needs "character development" and "plot" when you've got a manifesto, a hit-list and a billion drugfucked chimps hammering away 24/7 on stained and battered Macs?"I wanna start with an earthquake and build to a climax!"—Sam Goldwyn
Avant pulp is Social Surrealism.
Most novels take one or two good ideas and string them out over 200 pages. Fuck that. We want TEN great ideas. PER PAGE. Grab the reader by the throat and pummel him or her to a bloody pulp. And then fuck the corpse. Live on prime time terrestrial TV.
The swearing, violence, drug abuse and sex in Attack! Books is extreme, savage, frequent and utterly gratuitous. But we’re NOT into middle-class ooh-mummy-look-at-me "mondo" decadence. Pornography is dull. Avant pulp is mindblowing. And Attack! avant pulp is "moral"—from an extreme nutter anarcho-commie perspective. Ie all Tories, smothermummies, wankers, fascists and bastards DIE! Spectacularly.
It isn't "literature." Oh GOD! Fuck NO! The "serious", "psychological" novel is the most tedious genre going. It sucks. It’s boring. Who wants to read about the inside of some knuckle-suckingly middle-class fucker’s head when they could be reading about vampires, aliens, mutant alligators, drug crazed zombies, Margaret Thatcher sex golems, deranged ex SAS assassins, killer-priests, frankensteins, satanic rockers, football hooligans etc etc etc? You know—exciting, fun stuff. Mad POP stuff. Most of the manuscripts we get sent try to be "literature". They fail miserably. Don’t give us "an idea!" Give us a universe! Preferably one per chapter. Be honest, face facts. You know three chords. So hammer out some hilarious, ranting, frenetic, breathless punk rock. Leave the symphony till later. Get loose, Let rip. You’ve got the rest of your life to be boring.
SO - TO SUM THE FUCK UP - WHAT IS ATTACK!?* It’s Motown for Pulp.* It’s literature that reflects the insane revved-to-fuck flick’n’fling pace of the century that spawns it.* It’s extreme digital hard core punk rock’n’roll speed gabba for books. * It’s about whacking 50,000 volts through the corpse of an artform that is so moribund and up its own middle class arse that it considers sad bastard public school Oxbridge junkie Will Self to be a punk rock enfant terrible. Is he fuck! He writes like a sanatogen-sodden geriatric! And you can stick Martin Amis up your arse as well. * It’s in your face, down your trousers and up your arse like a shit-eating rabbit on speed. * It’s a REVOLUTION!
To save the English novel we must first destroy it! Attack! is an unequal-opportunities employer, we’re out to finally and irrevocably destroy the Oxbridge upper-middle class death grip on "literature". Our bible is John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia (Faber, 1992). We have swallowed wholesale the knowledge that the reason novels got so tedious, self-referential and dull in the early 20th Century was as a reaction against mass-literacy. They didn’t want the oiks to read books. God no! Well fuck you, you snobs! The oiks are biting back.
We’ve gone back to Swift, Defoe and Austin and brought them screaming forward into the 21st century. We’re sick of desiccated and prematurely middle-aged bores telling us that comics and action movies should be more like novels (character development, grandiose statements about the human condition witter, drone, bore blah blah blah). Fuck that! Novels should be more like comics and action movies! Visceral, gaudy, exciting, vulgar, cheap, nasty, banal, cheesy, tasteless, head-exploding and gut-wrenching technicolor roller-coaster rides through the nerve-shredding extremities of human behaviour. Cheap thrills! Books that spew 10 ideas a page at you, that leave you breathless, sweating, frightened, excited, inspired and with urine-drenched trousers. Novel writing isn’t an "art form". It’s typing on drugs. “ – 3:am Magazine Interview
