A Brit Writing Grit:
CJ’s Adam Van Winkle Interviews Kirk Lake
Kirk Lake uses a piano top for a writing desk. At least, that’s how I imagine it. How else could he possibly get all the work he creates in writing, music, comics and film? He must be in constant artist mode. Or he’s just one really cool cat.
Kirk Lake first reached out to me after our special Harry Crews tribute issue last year and submitted the little trailerpark vignette, Low Expectations, that follows herein. I was hooked. I found everything I could of his to read, and it, like Crews, knocks me out.
I had to ask him some questions about his process, his creativity, and working with freakin’ Nick Cave. Lake don’t disappoint here, espousing on topics ranging from being a Brit writing American Grit to Crews, to the story behind the Leamington Licker.
AV: You mentioned that you found Cowboy Jamboree through our special Harry Crews issue. We dig talking about our grit lit heroes. How'd you come to Harry Crews?
KL: I think The Knockout Artist was the first I read. I would’ve bought it as a used book in the late 1980s. The yellow paperback with the boxer on the cover. I don’t know if I’d have heard of Crews then. I was always into books about boxing so that’s probably why I picked it up. Back then, pre-internet, it was harder to find books by people like Harry Crews. I’m not sure they were even published in the UK and so as imports they were either scarce or expensive. I was blown away by Crews and then bought his books whenever I found them. With Crews I felt that this was somebody who was being honest with the characters he was writing about and that the style served the characters rather than the other way around. Now of course you can go online and watch films of Crews talking and you can see that the man himself is right there in his books. I’d have already read Wiseblood and the Flannery 0’Connor short stories as they were easy to find but the more contemporary writers that are loosely in that Southern Gothic tradition kind of crept up on me slowly. Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, William Gay etc A couple of years ago I bought an amazing anthology called The Christ-Haunted Landscape, which features stories by and interviews with people like Crews, Brown, Reynolds Price etc and that book kind of put the pieces in place as to how these writers fit together.
AV: "Low Expectations" feels so real, so authentic. How do you write a woman in a trailer park saying "ain't" as a dude living in London?
KL: Well obviously I’m English and this was the first time I’ve really tried to write something completely American. I’ve spent a lot of time in the USA over the past twenty years and much of that in California and often out in the desert. This particular story, the characters I wanted to write about, their situation, was born out of a long road trip and days spent in tiny desert towns. I’ve read American fiction my whole life. I figured I could tell this story and remain truthful and honest to the characters and write it without anybody necessarily knowing I wasn’t American. I think for any writer once you get a handle on a character and you know how they speak and how they think and what they do and especially what they would be up to for all the moments during the time-frame of a novel when they’re not actually on the page then you can create something that seems real and authentic.
AV: Speaking of how you do it, you’re a musician, actor, writer, have created screenplays, books of fiction and poetry, and comics. So how do you do all that? What's your process for creating?
KL: With fiction, for me everything starts with a character and then a story develops. I conjure up an imaginary person and I put them in this imaginary place and I think well what would they do? What is it that makes them tick? What are their dreams or their regrets? What would they say and who would they say it to? What things do they notice and what would they ignore? Then a world gradually evolves and some kind of plot. Though if I’m writing a novel I’ll always know what the first scene will be and I’ll always know what the last scene will be. The tricky part is navigating between the two. I spend ages just sketching out ideas, writing random scenes, bits of dialogue. A lot of this stuff goes unused but it’s important for creating character and tone and in the process I’m identifying what my way into the novel is. Eventually I’ll come up with an opening line. So in the Still Water/ Neptune Blues novel that Low Expectations is extracted from the first line is “It was one of those dogs that looked at you with sad bloodshot eyes through rolls of loose, creased brown fur like a drunk man trapped inside a thrift store fancy dress costume”. And when I wrote that I knew I was good to go.
Film is very different. It’s a collaborative medium which can be a nightmare for a writer if they are in any way precious about the script they’ve written. You have to know that everything you write is going to be changed somehow somewhere along the line. I wrote a feature film called Piercing Brightness that came out in 2012 and I came onto the project very late and I was working on writing a script that already had characters, location and plot fixed. The version that came out is very different to what I wrote. Entire scenes are missing that for me were vital in terms of character and narrative but the director had a particular vision. You have to realize that, even if the film gets made and a lot of the time even if you’ve been paid to work on a script it won’t get made for various reasons, all these lines of dialogue you’ve written won’t make the cut or it’ll be edited in a way that changes the meaning or an actor will say something completely different to what’s written... You have to just let that go for the good of the film as a whole. There’s no point getting beat up about that stuff. Nick Cave described script writing as “dog work” and it often is just that. Sometimes though, you have a great actor and they can replace three lines of dialogue with just a look or a gesture and it’s way more effective than what’s in the script.
The most recent project I’ve been working on is a kind of film noir called The World We Knew which I co-wrote and appear in. I’ve been involved in this all the way through to the edit. It’s a completely independent feature film that’s due out next year. We’ve been billing it as Harold Pinter meets Poltergeist. It’s about a gang of men who are forced to stay overnight in an old house after the heist they have just pulled goes wrong. You’re never quite certain if there are literal or metaphoric ghosts coming after them. We’re using the tropes of film noir: the gambler, the boxer, the old timer out on one last job etc and playing with the form. I appear as a character called Stoker who fronts a night club for one of the gangsters. I don’t act very often, other than Stoker the last thing I did was play an American journalist in a television comedy about the time Alice Cooper worked with Salvador Dali.
With film I’d only usually be doing it if somebody had asked me to. In other work it’s usually a case of having the idea for a story or something to say at least and then figuring out the best form for that idea. I don’t particularly differentiate between very short stories or poems. There might be stylistic differences if I’m writing a poem/story that is going to read out loud as there’s things that work aurally that don’t read well on a page and vice-versa.
In practical terms of actually getting things done if I’m actively working on a novel I’ll work on it every day until it’s finished. But that would be from the moment I consider I’ve actually started by writing the first scene and knowing it’s the first scene. Before that, all the sketching and notes and dialogue snippets I’ll just go at whenever I feel like it and I’ll spend ages just thinking about it or maybe watching films that I think might be useful in getting the tone right or other bits of research. I always think of it as kind of circling around and around until I identify where I’m going to jump in.
AV: Your spoken word albums seem to enjoy a lot of acclaim. How'd this medium come to you, or you to it?
KL: The CDs and records happened because at the time I started writing seriously in the mid 1990s I was friends with a lot of musicians and somebody I knew from a record label suggested it might be interesting for me to read a few of the stories and poems I’d been writing over music. The music on the first album is provided by whoever was available. I ended up being given an okay publishing deal with a major music publisher and so I was able to put together a regular band. We made a few more records and played a lot of shows but it was always difficult to keep it going as there were up to eight musicians in the band plus we had super-8 projectors to cart around. Just a hassle really and not a cost-efficient set up. I made a final album around 2001 and since then I’ve just done the odd thing here and there. A few guest vocals on other people’s records, a few ultra-limited editions for boutique labels.
I’m not sure what I think about my records. At the time I wasn’t particularly convinced that they worked other than on a few tracks. They were generally well received by the critics and I sometimes get messages from people that are just finding them now. There wasn’t really anybody else making records like them at the time so I was never part of any “scene” and the gigs I played were with indie bands and I’m not sure their audiences really dug this kind of garage rock meets free-jazz with a man mumbling bleak stories over the top that we were turning up with. There was a zine-style book of lyrics, poems and stories from the records that came out a few years ago called Most Things Don’t Happen. It’s sold out but if anybody wants one they can email me and I’ll send a PDF. All the rights to the recordings are back with me now and I haven’t bothered releasing them digitally so other than tracks that have been uploaded by somebody else they’re hard to hear these days without buying a physical copy from a bargain bin somewhere. With all that said I am actually working on something new for early next year which will be the first proper album since 2001.
AV: "The Last Night of Leamington Licker" is a brilliant story. The comparison to Crews The Knockout Artist is so apt. Randy's turn from signing the autograph at the opening of your story to wiping down a table is such a fantastic moment of character, and says so much about where Randy's been and where he's at. Tell me about Rough Trade Books. What are these pamphlets and how did you get involved? And how'd you know about Randolph Turpin?
KL: Well the Randolph Turpin story is kind of like folklore in Leamington which is where I was born. This dirt-poor kid from the backstreets of a small Midlands town beat Sugar Ray Robinson, probably the greatest boxer that ever lived, against all the odds and became Middleweight Champion of the World. He was briefly a national hero. But he lost the rematch and then began a slow decline that eventually found him broke and running a transport cafe. My story is a fictionalized account of his final few hours. I’d been wanting to do something with this story for years but was never sure exactly how to handle it. When I was approached by Rough Trade Books to write one of their first pamphlets I looked at all the research I’d already done on Turpin and it all fell into place.
Rough Trade Books is founded by the people who were behind the original Rough Trade record label. Nina Herve is the driving force and is responsible for commissioning the pamphlets. So there are currently a dozen titles with a few more due soon. A real mix of things… the poet Salena Godden, a book of photos from punk historian Jon Savage, a short story from Joe Dunthorne, an art book from Babak Ganjei… They’re all limited editions of 500 and print only. It’s a beautiful, diverse series and I’m honoured to be in this first batch.
AV: Not to just jump around here, but I'm still so fascinated by the diversity of your writing. How'd you wind up writing for Nick Cave and acting in his movie?
KL: Around the time my first novel came out (1997) I met the artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and we became great friends. We worked together on a few things. I scripted a film called Radio Mania for them which was this strange surround-sound 3D installation that was commissioned by the BFI in London. They started working with Nick on some promo films for the Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! albums and the first of these were a series of viral videos where Nick played a fake medium in recreations of old Victorian era séances (these may still be on line somewhere). I was drafted in to fill in for one of the band who couldn’t make it. I guess I was the closest person to hand who looked like he could be a Bad Seed. That was probably the first time I met him other than in passing after a show or something. So later I appeared in the More News From Nowhere video as a strip-club punter.
Then Iain and Jane and Nick had developed the idea for the film 20,000 Days on Earth which is a kind of hybrid docu-fiction ‘day in the life’. I don’t think Nick wanted any actual actors as the idea was to make it seem real so I was brought in to play an archivist and spent three or four days in this elaborately constructed imaginary archive under the town hall in Brighton. I was given boxes full of Nick’s actual archive and told I could ask him whatever I wanted so none of it is scripted. The bits you see on screen are obviously chosen as they fit the narrative arc and themes of the film but we shot loads more. Anyway, after that, I was asked by Nick to write an essay for the sleeve notes of the compilation album Lovely Creatures. I don’t know if he’d read my last book or had seen some of the films I’d made with Iain and Jane but for whatever reason he thought I was the man for the job. I went to Bordeaux for a couple of days and wrote the essay All Hands on Deck! – The Bad Seeds Set Sail and it appeared in the deluxe edition of the compilation.
AV: Back to your CJ story: "Low Expectations" is excerpted from a novel, Still Water/ Neptune Blues. Can you tell us more about that project? And that title?
KL: Well I can’t say a whole lot right now as the official announcement about publication date will happen later. But it’s coming out in 2019. It’s a story set in a desert town in California in 1986. The characters you meet directly in the excerpt are not the main characters. The preacher heard briefly on the radio is more important. It’s basically a story about a teenage runaway who, while attempting to hitch from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, finds himself abandoned in this dying, dusty, near derelict place. In the novel the town is called Baron but its geography and history are loosely based on the real town of Baker in California. Anybody who’s driven from LA to Vegas will have passed by that town but probably not stopped. It’s famous for having the world’s tallest thermometer. The title is the name of a blues record that one of the main characters once made, like A-Side “Still Water”, B-Side “Neptune Blues”. In terms of plot mechanics the discovery of this record is not a key point but in terms of theme and character development it’s really important.
AV: Besides Crews, what writers have shown you the light? Who are your writing idols?
KL: There are just a few writers that I’ve read every single thing they’ve written, obviously not including those who’ve only done a couple of books: Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Hubert Selby Jr, Graham Greene, Denis Johnson probably a few more I’m forgetting now. Of those I guess Greene remains my go to guy. I’ve read most of his books more than once and a few of them many many times especially The End of the Affair. I was really thrilled when I found out that Crews had tried to teach himself to write by breaking down The End of the Affair. It’s such an incredible book and Greene is a masterful stylist.
Many years ago I was working freelance for a magazine and mostly I’d be interviewing generally quite dull musicians but I could suggest things to the editor and I managed to get a commission to interview Hubert Selby Jr. This would’ve been when The Willow Tree was coming out (1998). We did a phone interview and we talked about writing and his process and he was fascinating and inspirational. After the interview came out we spoke a few more times and I’d say he’s had the most influence on me as a writer. I don’t think I write like him at all but he taught me things about being true to your characters, about how to write prose the way a composer does music with tempo changes, crescendo, diminuendo, harmony, discord etc etc and I find myself thinking about this often. He was a lovely, generous, kind man and I always regretted not meeting him face to face. We were supposed to meet up one time I was in LA but he was ill and it didn’t happen.
In the early 1990s I published a zine called Twister and wrote to Bukowski to see if he’d contribute some poems and he sent a few batches of, at the time, unpublished stuff. I loved Bukowski and the fact that he still bothered to send stuff out to tiny magazines just raised him even higher. This was maybe 1993, I know he was writing Pulp at the time, so he was a well known writer. And I still love Bukowski but I think he has been badly served by not being edited properly after his death. This is probably not a popular opinion. When he’s at his best he is an absolute genius but this has been diluted by the sheer volume of work that’s been published posthumously. Some of it is not very good at all. And Bukowski, like Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson, has been responsible for inspiring a lot of really poor writers who think they can write in his style. He made it look easy and it isn’t. But I guess you can’t lay the blame on Bukowski any more than you can blame Bob Dylan for Donovan.
AV: What are you listening to?
KL: I never listen to music when I’m writing but I have always referenced a lot of music. Sometimes if I’ve written in that a certain song is playing in a scene then I’ll stop and listen to the song and work out how hearing that music might affect the characters or situation but then I’ll switch it off and get back to writing. In terms of what I listen to day-to-day… a lot of blues, a lot of jazz, a lot of reggae, always a lot of Elvis and all kinds of other stuff. Instead of trying to curate a list I’m just going to reel off the first ten CDs that are right now sat next to the machine; Bob Dylan – Live 1975, Alice Coltrane – Lord of Lords, Serge Gainsbourg - Vu de L'extérieur, Arvo Part – Passio, Billie Holiday – Giants of Jazz, Flying Burrito Brothers – Burrito Deluxe, John Coltrane – Afro Blue Impressions, John Coltrane – Ascension, Royal Trux – Veterans of Disorder, Tapper Zukie – Man Ah Warrior.
AV: What are you reading these days?
KL: I could do the same as with the CDs but the pile of books I have on the desk in front of me are all research for something I’m working on. It’s all esoteric and occult stuff, conspiracy theories, ghosts… If I listed those I’d seem like some kind of nut so I’ll try and remember what I read recently that’s kind of contemporary. I enjoyed the new Willy Vlautin novel, I don’t think it’s a great boxing book which might seem an odd thing to say considering it’s about a boxer but as a study of ambition, hope and failure I think it worked. I love Pascal Garnier who wrote bleak absurdist noir fiction, they’re not new but they were originally published in French and the first English translations have been coming out fairly frequently. I was introduced to the writer Brian Jabas Smith who has a book of stories called Spent Saints which is worth checking out. He has a new book called Tucson Salvage due later in the year and he’s coming over to the UK for that and we’re doing a couple of events together. He’s the brother of the musician I worked with most often back when I was making records regularly. The novel I just finished reading last night was Cain by Jose Saramango.
AV: What are you watching?
KL: I don’t watch much television. The last film I saw at the cinema was The Apparition which is a French film starring one of my favourite actors Vincent Lindon. I can be somewhat less discerning in terms of film than I am with books and music. I can and do watch virtually anything. If it’s something I’m not engaged with then I use the time to drift off and it becomes just light and shapes passing in front of my eyes while I’m thinking about something else. Usually though, especially since I started working on films, there’s something that you can take from even the worst movie. I’ll find myself thinking about the editing, about the structure of a scene, the set design, the dialogue. Just breaking the film down and trying to fathom what’s not working and why. I watch a lot of old film noir online as there are so many of them available to stream it’s never difficult to find one I haven’t seen and some of these really obscure, ignored B-pictures are just incredible.
For more information or to contact Kirk go to www.kirklake.net or via twitter @kirklake
The Last Night of the Leamington Licker is available at www.roughtradebooks.com or in various book stores, record shops and art galleries.
CJ’s Adam Van Winkle Interviews Kirk Lake
Kirk Lake uses a piano top for a writing desk. At least, that’s how I imagine it. How else could he possibly get all the work he creates in writing, music, comics and film? He must be in constant artist mode. Or he’s just one really cool cat.
Kirk Lake first reached out to me after our special Harry Crews tribute issue last year and submitted the little trailerpark vignette, Low Expectations, that follows herein. I was hooked. I found everything I could of his to read, and it, like Crews, knocks me out.
I had to ask him some questions about his process, his creativity, and working with freakin’ Nick Cave. Lake don’t disappoint here, espousing on topics ranging from being a Brit writing American Grit to Crews, to the story behind the Leamington Licker.
AV: You mentioned that you found Cowboy Jamboree through our special Harry Crews issue. We dig talking about our grit lit heroes. How'd you come to Harry Crews?
KL: I think The Knockout Artist was the first I read. I would’ve bought it as a used book in the late 1980s. The yellow paperback with the boxer on the cover. I don’t know if I’d have heard of Crews then. I was always into books about boxing so that’s probably why I picked it up. Back then, pre-internet, it was harder to find books by people like Harry Crews. I’m not sure they were even published in the UK and so as imports they were either scarce or expensive. I was blown away by Crews and then bought his books whenever I found them. With Crews I felt that this was somebody who was being honest with the characters he was writing about and that the style served the characters rather than the other way around. Now of course you can go online and watch films of Crews talking and you can see that the man himself is right there in his books. I’d have already read Wiseblood and the Flannery 0’Connor short stories as they were easy to find but the more contemporary writers that are loosely in that Southern Gothic tradition kind of crept up on me slowly. Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, William Gay etc A couple of years ago I bought an amazing anthology called The Christ-Haunted Landscape, which features stories by and interviews with people like Crews, Brown, Reynolds Price etc and that book kind of put the pieces in place as to how these writers fit together.
AV: "Low Expectations" feels so real, so authentic. How do you write a woman in a trailer park saying "ain't" as a dude living in London?
KL: Well obviously I’m English and this was the first time I’ve really tried to write something completely American. I’ve spent a lot of time in the USA over the past twenty years and much of that in California and often out in the desert. This particular story, the characters I wanted to write about, their situation, was born out of a long road trip and days spent in tiny desert towns. I’ve read American fiction my whole life. I figured I could tell this story and remain truthful and honest to the characters and write it without anybody necessarily knowing I wasn’t American. I think for any writer once you get a handle on a character and you know how they speak and how they think and what they do and especially what they would be up to for all the moments during the time-frame of a novel when they’re not actually on the page then you can create something that seems real and authentic.
AV: Speaking of how you do it, you’re a musician, actor, writer, have created screenplays, books of fiction and poetry, and comics. So how do you do all that? What's your process for creating?
KL: With fiction, for me everything starts with a character and then a story develops. I conjure up an imaginary person and I put them in this imaginary place and I think well what would they do? What is it that makes them tick? What are their dreams or their regrets? What would they say and who would they say it to? What things do they notice and what would they ignore? Then a world gradually evolves and some kind of plot. Though if I’m writing a novel I’ll always know what the first scene will be and I’ll always know what the last scene will be. The tricky part is navigating between the two. I spend ages just sketching out ideas, writing random scenes, bits of dialogue. A lot of this stuff goes unused but it’s important for creating character and tone and in the process I’m identifying what my way into the novel is. Eventually I’ll come up with an opening line. So in the Still Water/ Neptune Blues novel that Low Expectations is extracted from the first line is “It was one of those dogs that looked at you with sad bloodshot eyes through rolls of loose, creased brown fur like a drunk man trapped inside a thrift store fancy dress costume”. And when I wrote that I knew I was good to go.
Film is very different. It’s a collaborative medium which can be a nightmare for a writer if they are in any way precious about the script they’ve written. You have to know that everything you write is going to be changed somehow somewhere along the line. I wrote a feature film called Piercing Brightness that came out in 2012 and I came onto the project very late and I was working on writing a script that already had characters, location and plot fixed. The version that came out is very different to what I wrote. Entire scenes are missing that for me were vital in terms of character and narrative but the director had a particular vision. You have to realize that, even if the film gets made and a lot of the time even if you’ve been paid to work on a script it won’t get made for various reasons, all these lines of dialogue you’ve written won’t make the cut or it’ll be edited in a way that changes the meaning or an actor will say something completely different to what’s written... You have to just let that go for the good of the film as a whole. There’s no point getting beat up about that stuff. Nick Cave described script writing as “dog work” and it often is just that. Sometimes though, you have a great actor and they can replace three lines of dialogue with just a look or a gesture and it’s way more effective than what’s in the script.
The most recent project I’ve been working on is a kind of film noir called The World We Knew which I co-wrote and appear in. I’ve been involved in this all the way through to the edit. It’s a completely independent feature film that’s due out next year. We’ve been billing it as Harold Pinter meets Poltergeist. It’s about a gang of men who are forced to stay overnight in an old house after the heist they have just pulled goes wrong. You’re never quite certain if there are literal or metaphoric ghosts coming after them. We’re using the tropes of film noir: the gambler, the boxer, the old timer out on one last job etc and playing with the form. I appear as a character called Stoker who fronts a night club for one of the gangsters. I don’t act very often, other than Stoker the last thing I did was play an American journalist in a television comedy about the time Alice Cooper worked with Salvador Dali.
With film I’d only usually be doing it if somebody had asked me to. In other work it’s usually a case of having the idea for a story or something to say at least and then figuring out the best form for that idea. I don’t particularly differentiate between very short stories or poems. There might be stylistic differences if I’m writing a poem/story that is going to read out loud as there’s things that work aurally that don’t read well on a page and vice-versa.
In practical terms of actually getting things done if I’m actively working on a novel I’ll work on it every day until it’s finished. But that would be from the moment I consider I’ve actually started by writing the first scene and knowing it’s the first scene. Before that, all the sketching and notes and dialogue snippets I’ll just go at whenever I feel like it and I’ll spend ages just thinking about it or maybe watching films that I think might be useful in getting the tone right or other bits of research. I always think of it as kind of circling around and around until I identify where I’m going to jump in.
AV: Your spoken word albums seem to enjoy a lot of acclaim. How'd this medium come to you, or you to it?
KL: The CDs and records happened because at the time I started writing seriously in the mid 1990s I was friends with a lot of musicians and somebody I knew from a record label suggested it might be interesting for me to read a few of the stories and poems I’d been writing over music. The music on the first album is provided by whoever was available. I ended up being given an okay publishing deal with a major music publisher and so I was able to put together a regular band. We made a few more records and played a lot of shows but it was always difficult to keep it going as there were up to eight musicians in the band plus we had super-8 projectors to cart around. Just a hassle really and not a cost-efficient set up. I made a final album around 2001 and since then I’ve just done the odd thing here and there. A few guest vocals on other people’s records, a few ultra-limited editions for boutique labels.
I’m not sure what I think about my records. At the time I wasn’t particularly convinced that they worked other than on a few tracks. They were generally well received by the critics and I sometimes get messages from people that are just finding them now. There wasn’t really anybody else making records like them at the time so I was never part of any “scene” and the gigs I played were with indie bands and I’m not sure their audiences really dug this kind of garage rock meets free-jazz with a man mumbling bleak stories over the top that we were turning up with. There was a zine-style book of lyrics, poems and stories from the records that came out a few years ago called Most Things Don’t Happen. It’s sold out but if anybody wants one they can email me and I’ll send a PDF. All the rights to the recordings are back with me now and I haven’t bothered releasing them digitally so other than tracks that have been uploaded by somebody else they’re hard to hear these days without buying a physical copy from a bargain bin somewhere. With all that said I am actually working on something new for early next year which will be the first proper album since 2001.
AV: "The Last Night of Leamington Licker" is a brilliant story. The comparison to Crews The Knockout Artist is so apt. Randy's turn from signing the autograph at the opening of your story to wiping down a table is such a fantastic moment of character, and says so much about where Randy's been and where he's at. Tell me about Rough Trade Books. What are these pamphlets and how did you get involved? And how'd you know about Randolph Turpin?
KL: Well the Randolph Turpin story is kind of like folklore in Leamington which is where I was born. This dirt-poor kid from the backstreets of a small Midlands town beat Sugar Ray Robinson, probably the greatest boxer that ever lived, against all the odds and became Middleweight Champion of the World. He was briefly a national hero. But he lost the rematch and then began a slow decline that eventually found him broke and running a transport cafe. My story is a fictionalized account of his final few hours. I’d been wanting to do something with this story for years but was never sure exactly how to handle it. When I was approached by Rough Trade Books to write one of their first pamphlets I looked at all the research I’d already done on Turpin and it all fell into place.
Rough Trade Books is founded by the people who were behind the original Rough Trade record label. Nina Herve is the driving force and is responsible for commissioning the pamphlets. So there are currently a dozen titles with a few more due soon. A real mix of things… the poet Salena Godden, a book of photos from punk historian Jon Savage, a short story from Joe Dunthorne, an art book from Babak Ganjei… They’re all limited editions of 500 and print only. It’s a beautiful, diverse series and I’m honoured to be in this first batch.
AV: Not to just jump around here, but I'm still so fascinated by the diversity of your writing. How'd you wind up writing for Nick Cave and acting in his movie?
KL: Around the time my first novel came out (1997) I met the artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and we became great friends. We worked together on a few things. I scripted a film called Radio Mania for them which was this strange surround-sound 3D installation that was commissioned by the BFI in London. They started working with Nick on some promo films for the Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! albums and the first of these were a series of viral videos where Nick played a fake medium in recreations of old Victorian era séances (these may still be on line somewhere). I was drafted in to fill in for one of the band who couldn’t make it. I guess I was the closest person to hand who looked like he could be a Bad Seed. That was probably the first time I met him other than in passing after a show or something. So later I appeared in the More News From Nowhere video as a strip-club punter.
Then Iain and Jane and Nick had developed the idea for the film 20,000 Days on Earth which is a kind of hybrid docu-fiction ‘day in the life’. I don’t think Nick wanted any actual actors as the idea was to make it seem real so I was brought in to play an archivist and spent three or four days in this elaborately constructed imaginary archive under the town hall in Brighton. I was given boxes full of Nick’s actual archive and told I could ask him whatever I wanted so none of it is scripted. The bits you see on screen are obviously chosen as they fit the narrative arc and themes of the film but we shot loads more. Anyway, after that, I was asked by Nick to write an essay for the sleeve notes of the compilation album Lovely Creatures. I don’t know if he’d read my last book or had seen some of the films I’d made with Iain and Jane but for whatever reason he thought I was the man for the job. I went to Bordeaux for a couple of days and wrote the essay All Hands on Deck! – The Bad Seeds Set Sail and it appeared in the deluxe edition of the compilation.
AV: Back to your CJ story: "Low Expectations" is excerpted from a novel, Still Water/ Neptune Blues. Can you tell us more about that project? And that title?
KL: Well I can’t say a whole lot right now as the official announcement about publication date will happen later. But it’s coming out in 2019. It’s a story set in a desert town in California in 1986. The characters you meet directly in the excerpt are not the main characters. The preacher heard briefly on the radio is more important. It’s basically a story about a teenage runaway who, while attempting to hitch from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, finds himself abandoned in this dying, dusty, near derelict place. In the novel the town is called Baron but its geography and history are loosely based on the real town of Baker in California. Anybody who’s driven from LA to Vegas will have passed by that town but probably not stopped. It’s famous for having the world’s tallest thermometer. The title is the name of a blues record that one of the main characters once made, like A-Side “Still Water”, B-Side “Neptune Blues”. In terms of plot mechanics the discovery of this record is not a key point but in terms of theme and character development it’s really important.
AV: Besides Crews, what writers have shown you the light? Who are your writing idols?
KL: There are just a few writers that I’ve read every single thing they’ve written, obviously not including those who’ve only done a couple of books: Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Hubert Selby Jr, Graham Greene, Denis Johnson probably a few more I’m forgetting now. Of those I guess Greene remains my go to guy. I’ve read most of his books more than once and a few of them many many times especially The End of the Affair. I was really thrilled when I found out that Crews had tried to teach himself to write by breaking down The End of the Affair. It’s such an incredible book and Greene is a masterful stylist.
Many years ago I was working freelance for a magazine and mostly I’d be interviewing generally quite dull musicians but I could suggest things to the editor and I managed to get a commission to interview Hubert Selby Jr. This would’ve been when The Willow Tree was coming out (1998). We did a phone interview and we talked about writing and his process and he was fascinating and inspirational. After the interview came out we spoke a few more times and I’d say he’s had the most influence on me as a writer. I don’t think I write like him at all but he taught me things about being true to your characters, about how to write prose the way a composer does music with tempo changes, crescendo, diminuendo, harmony, discord etc etc and I find myself thinking about this often. He was a lovely, generous, kind man and I always regretted not meeting him face to face. We were supposed to meet up one time I was in LA but he was ill and it didn’t happen.
In the early 1990s I published a zine called Twister and wrote to Bukowski to see if he’d contribute some poems and he sent a few batches of, at the time, unpublished stuff. I loved Bukowski and the fact that he still bothered to send stuff out to tiny magazines just raised him even higher. This was maybe 1993, I know he was writing Pulp at the time, so he was a well known writer. And I still love Bukowski but I think he has been badly served by not being edited properly after his death. This is probably not a popular opinion. When he’s at his best he is an absolute genius but this has been diluted by the sheer volume of work that’s been published posthumously. Some of it is not very good at all. And Bukowski, like Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson, has been responsible for inspiring a lot of really poor writers who think they can write in his style. He made it look easy and it isn’t. But I guess you can’t lay the blame on Bukowski any more than you can blame Bob Dylan for Donovan.
AV: What are you listening to?
KL: I never listen to music when I’m writing but I have always referenced a lot of music. Sometimes if I’ve written in that a certain song is playing in a scene then I’ll stop and listen to the song and work out how hearing that music might affect the characters or situation but then I’ll switch it off and get back to writing. In terms of what I listen to day-to-day… a lot of blues, a lot of jazz, a lot of reggae, always a lot of Elvis and all kinds of other stuff. Instead of trying to curate a list I’m just going to reel off the first ten CDs that are right now sat next to the machine; Bob Dylan – Live 1975, Alice Coltrane – Lord of Lords, Serge Gainsbourg - Vu de L'extérieur, Arvo Part – Passio, Billie Holiday – Giants of Jazz, Flying Burrito Brothers – Burrito Deluxe, John Coltrane – Afro Blue Impressions, John Coltrane – Ascension, Royal Trux – Veterans of Disorder, Tapper Zukie – Man Ah Warrior.
AV: What are you reading these days?
KL: I could do the same as with the CDs but the pile of books I have on the desk in front of me are all research for something I’m working on. It’s all esoteric and occult stuff, conspiracy theories, ghosts… If I listed those I’d seem like some kind of nut so I’ll try and remember what I read recently that’s kind of contemporary. I enjoyed the new Willy Vlautin novel, I don’t think it’s a great boxing book which might seem an odd thing to say considering it’s about a boxer but as a study of ambition, hope and failure I think it worked. I love Pascal Garnier who wrote bleak absurdist noir fiction, they’re not new but they were originally published in French and the first English translations have been coming out fairly frequently. I was introduced to the writer Brian Jabas Smith who has a book of stories called Spent Saints which is worth checking out. He has a new book called Tucson Salvage due later in the year and he’s coming over to the UK for that and we’re doing a couple of events together. He’s the brother of the musician I worked with most often back when I was making records regularly. The novel I just finished reading last night was Cain by Jose Saramango.
AV: What are you watching?
KL: I don’t watch much television. The last film I saw at the cinema was The Apparition which is a French film starring one of my favourite actors Vincent Lindon. I can be somewhat less discerning in terms of film than I am with books and music. I can and do watch virtually anything. If it’s something I’m not engaged with then I use the time to drift off and it becomes just light and shapes passing in front of my eyes while I’m thinking about something else. Usually though, especially since I started working on films, there’s something that you can take from even the worst movie. I’ll find myself thinking about the editing, about the structure of a scene, the set design, the dialogue. Just breaking the film down and trying to fathom what’s not working and why. I watch a lot of old film noir online as there are so many of them available to stream it’s never difficult to find one I haven’t seen and some of these really obscure, ignored B-pictures are just incredible.
For more information or to contact Kirk go to www.kirklake.net or via twitter @kirklake
The Last Night of the Leamington Licker is available at www.roughtradebooks.com or in various book stores, record shops and art galleries.