A Soldier with a Broken Arm Fixed His Stare Into the Wheels of a Cadillac

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE’s website thought it would be amusing to employ a 42-year-old who can remember when everything was in black and white.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, "menk" is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal."

There have been two significant birthdays for me recently.

The first was getting my five-year chip at AA. I’m not supposed to go on about it – Tradition 11, you see. The big book has a dozen traditions or rules that govern everything, and number 11 says, “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.” I’m breaking this shit by even mentioning it. Tradition 11 is like the first rule of Fight Club, only less quotable. It’s necessary because the less I talk about AA the less likely I am to accidentally reveal that my local meeting usually attracts Prince Philip, Idi Amin, The Emperor Palpatine and Francine Smith from American Dad! The weird thing is that, in real life, you’d cross the road to avoid them, but such is the power of the programme that you have a lot of empathy for them as individuals and can often find them oddly sympathetic characters in such a non-judgemental atmosphere – even though The Emperor always talks at length in the time allocated for new or shy sharers and he’s clearly neither, and General Amin always gets to the rooms very early and eats about six times his allocation of digestives.

At my five-year meeting I was so freaked out that I initially put my hand up claiming I’d been sober for 14 years and had to sit down again and wait for the countdown to get to the right number. I got a big round of applause and my five-year chip – which is a big brass coin, like something you’d get in Norway or one of those countries. On one side it has the serenity prayer which reads: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change / The courage to change the things I can / and wisdom to know the difference.” But I’m really not supposed to talk about it at all, so I’ll stop now. Thank God (using the word God however I choose to interpret it) for AA, though.

The second significant birthday for me this month is that of my website, the Quietus. It also turns five. And this fact is not unrelated. My aims when I started the Quietus – a music and culture website – were probably ignoble. I wanted one last crack at earning a meagre living as a music writer because I was just about to throw the towel in. I don’t think I had any ambitions beyond that. I’d simply spent too long – 15 years to be exact – working in factories and behind bars to go back to it and, to be quite blunt, I was such a mediocre journalist that my options as a writer were all but used up.

Sean Adams from Drowned In Sound asked me to apply to be the editor of a sister site to his. There were two others set up at the same time: Thrash Hits, run by the inimitable Raz – which is still going strong – and the Lipster, which is sadly no longer with us. Sean said something like, "Would you be interested in editing a classic rock site aimed at £50 man?" or something along those lines. I told him I could but that I might “tweak” the pitch ever so slightly.

I turned immediately to ask Luke Turner for advice on how to put the pitch together and then when it started taking shape I asked if he’d run the site with me. Thankfully, Luke left a comfortable job at the Natural History Museum to do this with me.

In theory it should be a nightmare running a site with two editors with equal say but it hasn’t really worked out like that. Aside from giving up drinking, asking Luke to run the site with me has been the most important professional decision I’ve made in the last seven years. It simply wouldn’t have worked otherwise. He’s one of my best friends and this is also something very important to the success of the site, as if we were simply business partners he probably would have caved my head in with some heavyweight Sunn O))) vinyl by now. Parts of the last five years have been pretty stressful and for the first few years I saw a lot more of him than I did of Maria.

I remember once when Maria was pregnant we went to hospital for antenatal classes and I got my phone out of my pocket. “This isn’t the time to be texting Luke about The Fall!” she upbraided me. I was only getting my phone out of my pocket to take notes to refer to during the labour but Luke and I were in almost constant contact back then, so it was a fair assumption to make.

The basic idea of the site is very simple. The Quietus isn’t an avant-garde or left field or "arty" or niche magazine; it would be fairer to say that we’re not interested in high, low or middlebrow classifications of music (it’s rapidly becoming outmoded and slightly daft to categorise music in this way anyway, due to the omnivorous way we consume it these days). If indie people are embarrassed by the fact we cover metal or very serious avant-garde people are put off by the fact we cover mainstream disco and house then so be it, it’s their fucking loss. I’d say that we’re simply interested in good new music and forward-looking music released during the last 40 years, that has a modern or futurist aspect to it. It’s true we’re aimed at a slightly older audience but one that feels disenfranchised by all the Beatles and Stones coverage for the baby boomers that the monthlies dish out. (It turns out we’ve got a lot of younger readers as well, which is fine by us, the more the merrier, etc.)

At the outset, we decided to only cover "modern" music, which we decided was essentially non-retro music that came after Kraftwerk released "Autobahn" as a single in 1974. I thought it was daft – I still do, in fact – that I was too young for magazines like UNCUT (a great publication in its own right, just not for me) even though I was middle aged. I mean, by my reckoning, you’d have to be about 55 or 60 years old to have been a record buying fan of Bob Dylan back when he was any good. And the idea that the only rock band of the last 20 years that is worth talking about is The Libertines is risible. Where was the monthly that was going to cover the music I grew up with? Public Enemy, Kraftwerk, the Pixies, Gary Numan…

To put it in very blunt terms, we saw that there was a gap in the market. When we launched most websites seemed to be full of flash animation, short capsule reviews, filmed content, garish design, very hip, aimed at the youth market – so we went in the opposite direction: plain design, with long pieces of text and articles that were aimed at an older reader.

It was a very small team at Drowned In Sound initially and they were very supportive of us. We never had any contact with our potential paymasters – things just didn’t last that long. There was a potentially lucrative deal in the pipeline but that evaporated about two months after we launched and then we were cut loose. There’s no real point in playing "what if" but my gut feeling is the Quietus wouldn’t have lasted this long if things had gone according to plan. It was definitely a good thing that the money fell through.

I knew the funding was going to disappear. It felt obvious to me. I’d been round the block a few times and I’m naturally very pessimistic, so I’d already started preparing. You see surveyors walking round your offices measuring things and think, “Oh, hello – what’s going on here then?” But for me, this knowledge was a blessing in disguise. About a month before it happened I gave up drinking.

I’d woken up underneath my brother-in-law’s car a couple of times and once on the doorstep and on benches and stuff like that. I can sort of remember my sister going mad in the house shouting to Maria that I was going to die soon and all that. It’s true that my liver was over 90 percent adipose fat. Even though alcohol consumed at those quantities is a massive analgesic, my liver was causing me a lot of pain. I had to roll out of bed onto the floor during this period and I couldn’t bend over for long enough to tie my shoelaces. Instead, I just shuffled round with untied trainers like Robert Smith.

I nearly died a couple of times. Once on a train in Coventry. The utter mundanity of death. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really register at the time but years afterwards you can have a panic attack thinking about it, for some reason.

So suddenly, with the Quietus getting cut loose, I had this really massive project to throw all of my energy and newly acquired free time into. The Quietus was my 12-step programme. (I’ve never done any of the actual steps. My involvement with AA has never gone beyond going to meetings.) The site was only half built, it didn’t have advertising on it, we didn’t have offices, we didn’t have backing, it wasn’t worth anything, no one really knew who we were and the few who did hated it… I mean, they really fucking hated us. But on the other hand, we had a great team of writers and a lot of enthusiasm for what we were doing and this hatred fuelled us, really. On the last day in the old nice, West London offices, Luke and I were picking up our stuff in bin bags and our boss was there locking up. He manages Mick Hucknall and kept an emergency wardrobe for him there in case they had to fly off to do an impromptu gig in Russia or something. And he said to us, "Look, this is some of Mick’s old stage gear. Why don’t you take it?"

That was on the Friday. We just said, cheers, took handfuls of gear and left. I just said to Luke, "Look, just go home for 24 hours. Have some nice food. Go out for a drink. Chill out. Let’s meet up on Sunday and decide what we’re going to do."

I turned up to meet him wearing Mick Hucknall’s pants, his boots and one of his shirts. And I brought some of his stationery and Biros to make notes about our future with. Luke was wearing one of Hucknall's suits. And there wasn’t even any discussion about whether we should carry on or not, we just met up, both dressed like Mick Hucknall, and said, "Right. Where can we get some free office space from?"

We were up and running as an independent by the Wednesday of that week, I think.

It was insane at first. A lot of people accuse us of being pompous but I think this perception comes from around this initial period when we had a really militaristic, Us versus The World kind of attitude. I was going round the bend – mainly in a good way – but I’d be working anything up to 18 hours a day, sometimes sleeping under my desk, getting used to being sober for the first time in 22 years, only taking breaks to go to AA meetings or to hospital for liver function tests. I may have come across as pompous but I was going slightly potty. I drank so much coffee I felt like I could control the weather. Not to put too fine a point on it: the site helped save my life, so yeah, I can be a bit serious and up my own arse when talking about it and I do sometimes overreact to criticism of it because it’s clearly much more than just a job to me, it's an integral part of my life.

We had no interest in being part of a continuum of music writing. Sure, the Quietus was inspired to a certain degree by the Melody Maker and NME of the late 1980s and early 90s, and both Luke and I read a lot of old music writing, but it’s simply unhelpful to talk about a golden age. We’re just not interested in looking backwards. There was certainly an age when music writing was a hell of a lot more racist, sexist and homophobic but I don’t know if there was a golden age. There have certainly been some outstanding outlier talents in the past, such as Paul Morley and Lester Bangs, but if you want to disabuse yourself of any quaint notions of what music writing was like 40 years ago, simply buy a bunch of old magazines off eBay and try ploughing through the whole lot. People only remember Lester Bangs writing about Kraftwerk or Lou Reed, they never remember him writing about having food fights with Slade, or his never-ending essays about why he uses the N-word, or 10,000 words on how he would take all his unopened vinyl to the record shop without listening to it and how terrible all music was, or how it was much more satisfying to have a wank than have a girlfriend – a lot of his quotidian writing was either quite boring or embarrassing by today’s standards. It’s not a value judgement on him – on a good day he was clearly a genius – it’s just that a lot of it wasn’t written on a good day.  And more importantly, times have changed beyond all recognition.

There are brilliant young writers out there by the score – give me John Calvert or Sophie Coletta any day. I’d sooner read them than read some 40-year-old essay on The Kinks. Now whether these young writers have the modern equivalent of Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin or The Beatles to write about, or whether they have the same size audience of people hanging off their every word is another matter entirely. Music writing isn’t a parasitic form. Or at least it doesn’t have to be. There are plenty of bits of music writing I’ll read with literally no intention of listening to the music that it’s talking about and I’m not alone. But overall there is obviously some connection between the interest in music and the interest in music writing, and let’s face it, it’s not the all-consuming passion of a generation any more, simply one of many leisure options we have open to us.

Essentially though, if you look at blogs like 20JazzFunkGreats, BlissBlog, K Punk, Woebot; at magazines like the Wire, VICE and Metal Hammer; the coverage by papers like the Guardian and the Telegraph, there’s great music writing out there if you look for it. And that’s just from British writers – if you look at the global picture, it’s even healthier.

So what is all this self-aggrandisement about? Well on top of making you read this column, now I want you to put your hand in your pocket. I want you to buy a copy of the anthology I’ve just published. You want to read about the time that Kanye West got the whole Hammersmith Odeon to boo me because I said he was a mediocre rapper and you want to know what Patrick Moore thinks about space rock, don't you? Of course you do.

A few months ago I received a never-ending stream of polite but insistent emails from a very well dressed Belgian man called Charles Ubaghs demanding that I publish a collection of Quietus writing. Like the Terminator in very nice patent leather slip-on shoes with immaculate turn-ups, he clearly had no plan on stopping fucking going on at me until I acquiesced, went insane or died, so I gave him the green light.

After paying Amazon, all the money is either going to the writers or into a fund to help repair the site. It’s very hard to run an independent music site. I’m not complaining about it because I’ve had a really good time but I’ve had to work second jobs to be able to afford to do this site and the amount of work has impinged on both my physical and mental health. Now I’m getting to the stage where I simply need to raise more money, not just for the staff but for the writers as well. Each year we set out goals of what we want to achieve – goals we always reach – and getting more money for the writers is always the first thing we discuss. It’s really hard when advertising rates for online are so low and we don’t charge a cover price.

So there you go: please buy my website’s first book. Thanks for indulging me on my two birthdays. Next time I’ll get back to the job in hand: baleful stories about waking up in the gutter at the back of Kwik Save in St Helens.

Both illustrations by Krent Able, taken from the new Quietus e-book Point Close All Quotes: A Quietus Anthology. Readers in the UK and Europe can buy it here, US readers can buy it here.

Previously – I Walked 47 Miles of Barbed Wire (Part Two)

You can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.