From Blue to Black
Joel Lane Serpent's Tail, 224pp, £10
ISBN 1852426187
Joel Lane's debut is that rare thing: a novel about the darker edges of the rock business that carries the stamp of absolute authenticity. The Birmingham-based band Triangle are hopelessly out of touch with the early 1990s music scene. Their lyrics and brooding sound are a direct expression of the deep unhappiness of the bisexual frontman, Karl, who is locked into a destructive affair with the bass player, David.
As Triangle play to crowds of "blue and expressionless faces" in rough Black Country pubs, Karl begins a slow descent into madness. Drinking heavily, he picks up women and men in an attempt to wound David, and to prove that abuse can be an expression of love. The explanation for Karl's destructive behaviour becomes clear only when he takes David back to Stourbridge, where he grew up in the 1970s.
Lane's principal interest isn't so much rock'n'roll as the pain and alienation behind it. His writing is political and angry. He creates scenes of extraordinary desolation: beneath the expressways, Stourbridge is all derelict warehouses and overgrown canals. Pro-Enoch Powell graffiti still scar the walls - unhealed wounds left behind from the Seventies. Karl explains that Powell - a "manipulative, vicious little prick" - was a cult figure in the area. Bullied as a child for being Irish, he blames Powell for engendering an atmosphere of empty hatred.
Later, Karl tells David about a sexual relationship he had with a boy who brutalised him, which is another example of the intermeshing of love and pain, of desire and fear. "When you've known violence," he says, "you can't live as if you didn't know it." Lane shows how the past taints not only the present, but also our sense of the future.
The emotional recoil of Karl's disturbed childhood is felt in his doomful lyrics, fragmenting relationships and in his eventual refusal to play live. Despite what David would have us believe, Karl is actually a mediocre rock musician. The more keenly he is gripped by the past, the more his music becomes self-indulgent. His lonely suicide comes as no surprise. The only survivors in this book are those who, like David, are drawn to witness other people's pain.
There is nothing new in this portrayal of the tortured, sexually ambivalent rock singer. Don DeLillo, for example, explored the nihilism of rock excess in his fine novel Great Jones Street (1973). But Lane gives his rendition of the classic riffs a sharp, contemporary edge. His depiction of prejudice amid the urban decay of the 1970s is impressive. His method of piling agony on agony is as uncompromising as My Bloody Valentine's legendary live performance of a ten-minute guitar chord. But not quite as inspiring.
Tristan Quinn works for BBC2's Newsnight
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