Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published November 2004]
Ben Myers: The Book Of Fuck
Chris Mitchell
With a title like that, you’ve got to write a good book
or have the word “wanker” silently appended to your
name forever after. Just to make things more difficult,
the press release trumpets the fact that The Book Of
Fuck was written in seven days. I don’t know about
your criteria for choosing a book to read, but something
written in seven days sounds to me like it will be
a cramp-stomached vomit of speed-crazed gibberish,
especially if the back cover states it’s “a buckled breakneck
rant let loose at punk rock speed”.
Thankfully, none of these things are true. The Book
Of Fuck is a homage and a pisstake of the twilight
world of music journalism, a first person reportage
of a starving hack sent off in search of a death metal
antichrist superstar called, to the joy of America’s
Christian masses, the God Of Fuck. GoF is like Marilyn
Manson, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and GG Allin all
rolled into one – the bogeyman of popular culture. But
GoF doesn’t get much of a look-in even though the
search for him propels the plot – the pages are taken up
with the internal monologue of our protagonist, a mix
of furious punning, musical musing and starving artist
BUY Ben Myers books online from and
clichés twisted into new shapes, all set against his love
of London’s squalid glamour. It’s a prose style that can
certainly be called punk rock, but the tone of our hero
is far more gentle and even genteel than even the most
half-hearted sneer from Mr Rotten. He’s a Cat Stevens’
fan, for Christ’s sake.
That notwithstanding, there’s a touch of Hunter S.
Thompson to the prose, which is a compliment not to
be awarded likely because The Book Of Fuck echoes
HST’s style without trying to ape it. It runs in parallel to
rather than behind it, connecting a mordant intelligence
with a sense of amused bewilderment at the predicaments
in which the narrator continually finds himself.
As someone who used to read the music papers religiously
as a teenager, back in the golden era of Melody
Maker at the end of the 80s, The Book Of Fuck has
a lot of resonance with that time, before intelligent
music journalism all but disappeared underneath the
market forces of dad rock and prepubescent marketing
exercises. (Can’t we ban The Beatles ever being
featured on another magazine cover ever?). The Book
Of Fuck doesn’t offer up anything particularly pro-
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