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In Search of the Crack.
1 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
15 people want to read
About the author
Robert Elms
12Ìýbooks14ÌýfollowersRobert Elms is a British writer and broadcaster. Elms was a writer for The Face magazine in the 1980s and is currently known for his long-running radio show on BBC London 94.9. His book 'The Way We Wore,' charts the changing fashions of his own youth, linking them with the social history of the times.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 14, 2023
CRITIQUE:
From the Crack to The Face (From Fun to Funky)
The title of this novel suggests that narrator/protagonist, Tony Ross, and his Paddy peers are in search of a good time (i.e., they're on a hunt").
However, like the author, Robert Elms, they transition from spending bank-holiday weekends in seaside resort towns (like Bournemouth), obsessing about fashion and chasing fashionable girls, looking good and being a "Face" (in the Mod sense), to dance music, nightclubbing, drugs, acquiring real estate for their own club, and cracking the American market in the hospitality and entertainment industry.
These formerly working class lads become upwardly mobile middle class owners of five storey homes in North London, complete with accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers and drug dealers.
Squatting in a Bucket
A friend of Peter York (the author of "Style Wars" and co-author of a book on Elms himself started writing articles on style for in the early 1980's (the novel features descriptions of the characters' haircuts, threads and brand names), and has ended up as an announcer on BBC Radio London.
On the UK gossip circuit, he's best known for having had a relationship with which started with them squatting together. When a limousine arrived to pick Sade up for her first performance on Top of the Pops, she had to be called inside from the only toilet - a bucket on the balcony.
"You Don't Know What Love Is"
For a while, I searched for any resemblance to Sade in the female characters.
The first suspect was Tony's girlfriend, Rose, a graphic designer - they listen to John Coltrane, and look good together.
However, Elms actually name-drops Sade separately. She turns up at a concert to perform a duet of a Chet Baker song ("You Don't Know What Love Is") with Little Anthony (from a band called the Barbarian Sex Bastards). The song actually sounds like the title of a legitimate Sade song.
Soon after, Rose declares that Tony doesn't know what love means, before leaving him.
A second possibility was a character known only as "the singer". However, she seemed to be merely a dreamlike, fantasy, fairy tale figure (a prototype of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl).
Sade on the cover of the April, 1984 issue of The Face
The Empire of Pleasure
The novel captures a pre-heroin, post new-romantic London scene that was more concerned with style than music.
Tony and his business partners establish a company called Pleasure Inc. to realise their vision of a multinational nightclub empire, starting with the Pleasuredome.
Unexpectedly (for this reader, at least), the vision metamorphoses into a grandiose "ideology for the times", which becomes more overtly political when Tony acknowledges that he "can still feel anarchism in the air".
The target of this ideology is work:
Society is supposed to bear the burden of supporting non-workers, so that they have enough money to survive and go out clubbing.
From Fun to Flunky
Tony calls his ideology, "social hedonism". This is how Tony describes it:
This sounds like some weird left-wing libertarian pleasure principle.
Ashes to Ashes
In Tony's case, the hedonism lasts until true love disintegrates, and he becomes melancholy and mean-spirited.
Ultimately, Tony finds himself sentimental and dispirited by the changes that have occurred in the London that he used to love, a theme that would persist in Robert Elms' non-fiction.
SOUNDTRACK:
From the Crack to The Face (From Fun to Funky)
The title of this novel suggests that narrator/protagonist, Tony Ross, and his Paddy peers are in search of a good time (i.e., they're on a hunt").
However, like the author, Robert Elms, they transition from spending bank-holiday weekends in seaside resort towns (like Bournemouth), obsessing about fashion and chasing fashionable girls, looking good and being a "Face" (in the Mod sense), to dance music, nightclubbing, drugs, acquiring real estate for their own club, and cracking the American market in the hospitality and entertainment industry.
These formerly working class lads become upwardly mobile middle class owners of five storey homes in North London, complete with accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers and drug dealers.
Squatting in a Bucket
A friend of Peter York (the author of "Style Wars" and co-author of a book on Elms himself started writing articles on style for in the early 1980's (the novel features descriptions of the characters' haircuts, threads and brand names), and has ended up as an announcer on BBC Radio London.
On the UK gossip circuit, he's best known for having had a relationship with which started with them squatting together. When a limousine arrived to pick Sade up for her first performance on Top of the Pops, she had to be called inside from the only toilet - a bucket on the balcony.
"You Don't Know What Love Is"
For a while, I searched for any resemblance to Sade in the female characters.
The first suspect was Tony's girlfriend, Rose, a graphic designer - they listen to John Coltrane, and look good together.
However, Elms actually name-drops Sade separately. She turns up at a concert to perform a duet of a Chet Baker song ("You Don't Know What Love Is") with Little Anthony (from a band called the Barbarian Sex Bastards). The song actually sounds like the title of a legitimate Sade song.
Soon after, Rose declares that Tony doesn't know what love means, before leaving him.
A second possibility was a character known only as "the singer". However, she seemed to be merely a dreamlike, fantasy, fairy tale figure (a prototype of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl).
Sade on the cover of the April, 1984 issue of The Face
The Empire of Pleasure
The novel captures a pre-heroin, post new-romantic London scene that was more concerned with style than music.
Tony and his business partners establish a company called Pleasure Inc. to realise their vision of a multinational nightclub empire, starting with the Pleasuredome.
Unexpectedly (for this reader, at least), the vision metamorphoses into a grandiose "ideology for the times", which becomes more overtly political when Tony acknowledges that he "can still feel anarchism in the air".
The target of this ideology is work:
"Work is a thing, for most, of the past...
"We have entered a post-industrial age, have no doubt about that...
"I don't think that work has any intrinsic value, and I don't see why people should work at all in the future if they don't want to."
Society is supposed to bear the burden of supporting non-workers, so that they have enough money to survive and go out clubbing.
From Fun to Flunky
Tony calls his ideology, "social hedonism". This is how Tony describes it:
"[Work's] got to be replaced by pleasure. That sounds a bit hippy, but we've got to start educating everybody to enjoy their lives, to achieve their maximum potential as people, rather than training them as factory fodder for jobs which no longer exist. It's about altering the whole basis of society...
"We must institute a social wage, whereby everybody in Britain gets given a certain amount of money per week simply because they exist...It must be enough, so that if you don't want to work, or you cannot find work, you can live comfortably..."
"The central point of it all is that the social wage must replace work as the mechanism of maintaining the majority of society in the essentials..."
"The idea is that while you are alive, you can earn whatever you can [if you work] and spend whatever you like."
"The whole idea is to create a system which is fundamentally hedonist, rather than materialist. But with equal opportunity of access to pleasure."
"Leisure is a form of liberation...Most people would not choose to do nothing. They would use some of their time to supplement their social wage by whatever means they could, trading in whatever skills they possessed and keeping all the money they could make. Or else they would just sit around and drink and talk and go to the movies, and what is wrong with that?"
"...We must move, full speed, to a future of fun and freedom for all, and that can only be achieved by the adoption of the system of social hedonism..."
This sounds like some weird left-wing libertarian pleasure principle.
Ashes to Ashes
In Tony's case, the hedonism lasts until true love disintegrates, and he becomes melancholy and mean-spirited.
Ultimately, Tony finds himself sentimental and dispirited by the changes that have occurred in the London that he used to love, a theme that would persist in Robert Elms' non-fiction.
SOUNDTRACK:
June 2, 2014
I enjoyed this. It's a while since I read it but I know it mentions the Crown in Cricklewood where I lived and gave a good feel for the Irishness of the place.
From the notes I made at the time (1990), it felt like it was a piece of today being experienced today and put on paper today. A forgotten gem.
From the notes I made at the time (1990), it felt like it was a piece of today being experienced today and put on paper today. A forgotten gem.
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