Jeff Noon and 'The Modernists'

Uppers interviews Jeff Noon, author and playwright, about his new play 'The Modernists' and the continuing legacy of the 1960s.

In 1993 struggling Mancunian playwright Jeff Noon published his first novel, Vurt, which brought back slang-ridden contemporary hip Science Fiction from the usual setting of LA, Tokyo and London to the original industrial Metropolis - rain-sodden Manchester. Admittedly, a Manchester where reality seems to have come apart under the influence of drugs, but still recognisable in place and feel.

Winning awards, Vurt span off a short sequence of books based around the same ideas, becoming increasingly restrictive to the author - as it seems was their real world setting. Saying goodbye with the experimental novel Needle In The Groove (Mancunian musical history remixed), he packed his bags and moved to Brighton. Next move was to take experimentalism with language further out with Cobralingus, before bringing the results to bear on a return to straight(ish) narrative with his most recent book Falling Out of Cars, and new play The Modernists - wonder what that last one's about then?

So straight in at the deep end - Can you give us a brief summary of the play, without spoiling the plot?

Sure. Sure. It's set in London, 1962, and concerns the four members of a mod band called The Now. They're just making a name for themselves, and have recently kicked out their original vocalist, and replaced him with another, a better singer, and a better looking guy. This act has devastating consequences, especially for the leader of the band, Vincent.
His whole way of life is called to account, for what is seen, basically, as an act of betrayal.

You've left Manchester for Brighton, a place that's pretty fundamental to Mod legend, and home to plenty today. Was that in any way an influence on the choice of subject matter for the play?

Absolutely. I was just a kid during the Sixties, and my knowledge of the Mod movement is pretty basic. Moving to Brighton opened my eyes to the deeper truth. Walking in the Jump the Gun shop was the key moment. Just falling in love with the whole image, and learning that mod actually stands for Modernist. It doesn't sound like much, I know, but I got a flash of a title page of a novel, The Modernists, by Jeff Noon. That's how these things start sometimes, nothing more.
Anyway, I felt there was something there, a possibility of a story. I did some research, and found out all these fascinating details: of the clothes, the style, ways of talking, and walking, the drugs, the whole ritual of the weekend, and all that. A whole system of shared values. It just seemed such a naturally dramatic subject matter, that the original idea of the novel turned into that of a play.
Without moving to Brighton none of this would've happened.

The members of the band view themselves as modernists, that is, believers in the original values and ideas behind mod. I set the play in 1962, because I wanted to explore the sadness that takes hold, when something deeply felt, and personal, becomes just another fashion, a commericial exercise, ie the modernists becoming the 'mods' of popular knowledge. What happens to the original spirit? - can it survive, will people adapt, or grow up, leave altogether, or just give into the new feeling? (All this I can really connect to, because I was heavily into the punk scene in Manchester, and felt just those feelings, as the movement became popular.) This moment of change is mirrored in the group's decision to go with a new singer, to try and become a more popular band. Are they giving up their principles?

Okay. But really, for me, the play is about language, and codes of behaviour, and the crafting of beautiful masks. And what happens when somebody falls out of love with their chosen mask. It's not an historical play, I'm not trying to paint an accurate picture of mod life; everything is slightly exagerrated, especially the language. Here, I really went to town, inventing lots of new phrases, exploring the rhythms of speak. Another theme is the whole thing about changing attitudes to masculinity. Oh, there's so much there, just in the movement itself. Too much to go into. I had some fun.

You've said that it's a personal project that you've wanted to do for a long time - from the discography of Needle in The Groove, I wouldn't have seen mod as a big musical influence - what's the history of your connection to Mod-ernism?

It's kinda strange, but very much typical of the weird connections that run through my life and work. Back when I was 18 or so, I started to get into classical music, especially the music of Benjamin Britten. I used to love his opera, Billy Budd, and the plotline really stayed with me, over the years. It's based on a short story by Herman Melville, which I read, and often thought about; was there some way of giving this story a contemporary setting? And then, when the idea of the the Modernists came along, I got a sudden flash, that it was connected in some way to Billy Budd. (By the way, Terence Stamp played Billy Budd in the sixties film version, a kinda modish connection.)

So I let Billy Budd give me the basic narrative. It changed along the way, but that was the starting point. Regarding my tastes in music, they are very wide. It's really that simple, and I do like writing stories that deal with the connections between music, and society, and the individual moments of people's lives.

What do you think is the continued appeal of mod - why the repeated waves of interest so long after?

Because it's brilliant. Because it stands for a time when British popular music and fashion wasn't governed by mind-numbing blandness. Because the whole style is so spot on, completely of its moment, and yet of timeless appeal.

Because, in a world where cool is something to do with mobile phones and designer labels and trousers hanging round your knees, the mods really were the embodiment of COOL! Need I go on? Okay. There's a mystery to it all, a sense of danger; a desire to be different, to live your own life. It just appeals, and it always will, and whenever people want to reconnect back to that spirit, the mods will be there, waiting.

Moving on to your books, the Argentinian short story writer Jorge Luis Borges has been a major influence - there are direct tributes in some of the short stories in Pixel Juice, and you've also said that all of your books feature a labyrinth in tribute to him. As well as being a big influence on yourself, Borges was enormously popular during the early 60s, able to sell out lecture halls in France and UK when he did readings - why do you think he connected with that period, and why do you think he's disapeared from view afterwards, unlike, say Camus?

People were more open to the artistic and intellectual life, back then. Regarding his relevence today, or lack of, Borges is very self-contained, in the fact that a lot of his work exists in its own universe; it doesn't have Camus' need to speak of political things. Borges' work appeals directly to the imagination, but the reader needs to be in tune with his perculiar, melancholic darkness. Also, he doesn't really deal with characters; the emotional impact of his stories comes through the narrative events themselves, the words, the ideas expressed. And he never wrote a novel, remember. Just lots of ideas that other writers would waste over three humdred pages. He's a miniaturist, not the kind of art that tends to become that popular. What can I say; he appeals to me on a very deep level. Another sixties' connection is the way his work fed into the film Performance. It's Borges's face that's seen inside the magic bullet wound at the end. Bizarre!

In other interviews you've mentioned J G Ballard as an influence, and your disappointment that SF had moved back from novels of ideas to novels about spaceships. Reading your avant-pulp manifesto (see below) it seems to me to strongly echo the manifesto of the 60s 'New Worlds' writers - not only Ballard, but the general ideas of SF as a way to explore contemporary themes, as an experimental literature and the desire to break out of genre - including the 'literary writer' genre - even themes like entropy, information and decay seem echoed in your work (maybe things haven't changed that much!) . . . was any of this conscious - were you trying to get back to those values - or was it inspired by reading the end products (i.e. Ballard)?

I think any objective history of popular culture will reveal the Sixties as a remarkable decade, just in terms of what people were willing to view as being in the range of the popular. There seemed to be a real desire for experimentation, on the side of both the audience, and the artists. This manifested itself in many ways, in many media, and the new wave of SF was just one part of that desire. A lot of it was massively overindulgent; some of it was brilliant. But most importantly, it created a way of talking about the present day, in terms of a truly speculative, psychedelic writing style; very much like Hendrix mutating the American national anthem.

So, back then, SF was seen as being incredibly cool, part of the counter culture. Nowadays, we're seeing a very strong desire for pure escapism, and SF is quite gleefully feeding that desire. I fear for its other capabilities. Any writers attempting a more explorative literature find themselves stuck firmly in the darker corners of the genre. Nobody knows about it, beyond the circle of cognoscenti. And what's the purpose of the cutting edge, the avant garde, if its not smashing down the doors of the mainstream?

A lot of the problem is simply to do with postmodernism, and the dilemma of what to do when all the formal experiments have been done. Also, I do suspect that we might actually be living in the future now; and what purpose can SF have, if the future has already arrived? It becomes a redundant artform, or else it keeps itself alive by pumping out escapism. I have, personally, little or no interest in that aspect, and so I find my work moving away from the genre. I don't know where I'm going. That's part of the adventure of being alive.

I'd never have actually picked up on Ballard in your stuff - I think his writing style is so different from your own, it's fully absorbed (which is a complement) but there were a couple of other New Worlds writings that did spring to mind when I read Vurt - probably coincidentally but have to ask - have you ever read Aldiss's Barefoot In The Head? (If not as a brief recap, it's set in a Europe where the population had been bombed by acid, leading to societal and perceptual breakdown). Or Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books (Jerry's in love with his sister, Scribble's . . ).

No, not read the Aldiss. Read the first two Jerry Cornelius novels, and really enjoyed them, years ago now. Ballard is not really an influence, in terms of writing style, as you noticed. Just one of those writers who meant a lot to me at an important stage of my life. I am constantly amazed by his ability to extract the extraordinary from the mundane, the future from the present day.

On a more modern note, you've also been grouped in with the 'Chemical Generation' writers - Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, etc - what's your view on that - and them. Do you see them as closer to your avant-pulp ideas than most SF writers today?

It's not really my kind of thing, and so I haven't kept up with the writers. I'm not sure why I was placed in that bracket, apart from the accident of timing. We were/are a bit of a strange generation, I think; in retrospect that whole dance movement thing takes on the quality of a waking dream, quite detached from reality. There was a lack of committment, where the dance itself becomes all important, all encompassing. I'm simplying terribly here, but it's that attitude of fuck art, let's dance; the current mode of omnipresent blandness stems from those years, I think. There were some great records. I'm not sure if there were any 'great' books.

Another constant theme in your books has been Lewis Carroll's Alice - now that you've shaken off Manchester and 'Vurt', have you got Alice out of your system?

I don't think I ever will. I do try to explore entirely new concepts, but the actual process of writing brings me back to the old themes, almost against my will. Ideas have hooks on them, of different shapes, and Alice's hands really do have a firm grip upon my mind. I watched Yellow Submarine again, a few days ago, and was reminded of just how much Lewis Carroll fed into that strand of British pop.

The Modernists is important to me, just because it really does focus
on some kind of reality. It's an exploration of langauge, pushed to the limits.

This is an area I've always been interested in, especially when allied to a good narrative structure. The idea of the avant pulp is to find ways of combining experimentation with more mainstream concerns. These combinations can take many different forms. I'm currently working on a flim script for Vurt. After that, I don't know. Something is brewing, lots of little things, but I don't know where they're pointing. I suspect my next novel will be a real departure.

Uppers interviews Jeff Noon, author and playwright, about his new play 'The Modernists' and the continuing legacy of the 1960s.

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