Looking for a Kiss

Description

Looking for a Kiss | ^{Richard Cabut}

An informal chat with Richard Cabut – Writer Poet Musician – Looking for a Kiss

This special extended and amended edition features new text, photos and artwork. There are introductions by brilliant Jeff Young (Ghost Town, Eastenders, Holby City), Cathi Unsworth (Seasons of the Witch, Bad Penny Blues and Jordan;s Defying Gravity) and the author, non-fiction pieces about the novel’s punk, positive punk and post-punk background, as well as further original diary entries and more.

‘Totally fabulous and restores my belief in brilliant, subversive subcultures books still being the active source of our imaginative capital. It’s superb in its occupation of alternative realities. An absolute marvel and the writing is just fantastic. Post-cool invites post-punk in the drenched lysergic prism of a novel of addictive transgressions redeemed throughout by the lyrical arc of a prose that elicits lost futures in the defiant present. With Camden as its subcultures locative, and its green canal the novel’s pineal gland, Robert and Marlene alienated and unknowable to each other in altered states witness each other’s blurred emotions with a philosophic acuity that both stings and leaves astute marks on their dystopian histories…… A brilliant, upending book in which ‘Punk was, in effect, a way of stopping your past from becoming your future,’’ Jeremy Reed, author and poet.

CLICK HERE TO READ “Richard Cabut Interview” by Johnson Clarkson

In the early 1980s, young punks, ‘NME’ writer Robert and his confrontational, openly unfaithful girlfriend Marlene drop acid by the Regent’s Canal in Camden in North London. As they set off for home to their flat, their minds initially enhanced and then distorted by the drugs, they find themselves on an increasingly bad trip…. From this premise, 1980’s music journalist Richard Cabut’s masterly debut novel, ‘Looking for a Kiss’, examines broadly the vast changes in London’s landscape over the last forty years, the passing of the original punk movement and the brief positive punk movement of 1982/1983 which Robert in particular is involved with and which was spearheaded by bands such as Southern Death Cult and Sex Gang Children. Focusing also on issues of trust and commitment, it time travels years into the future to find Robert and Marlene long separated but reflecting on their unhappy time together and whether their lives are any better now. ‘Looking for a Kiss’ was originally published in 2020, but has just been reissued in an expanded edition which includes new introductions, and diaries and essays from the 1980s from Cabut (under his original pen name of Richard North) on punk and positive punk. We spoke to Richard Cabut about ‘Looking for a Kiss’ and its forthcoming film adaption.

PB: ‘Looking for a Kiss’ has been described by one critic as an “unromance”. Do you think that is an accurate description?

RC: Yeah, at one level. The book deals with a couple of cultural arcs. One is a cultural arc and one is a more personal arc, and the cultural arc is punk really and the 1970s, and then it comes to the other level of the arc where punk is really over and also the place where these people live, London, is finished. So it is changing. It is not the ruinous playground that it used to be for them. There is no place in the world for these people or so they feel, and the personal arc intertwines with the wider arc, the social arc if you like. They have invested their emotions and feelings not just into punk rock but into each other, but any romance between them is now dead (Laughs) and their idealism both in the personal and the wider sense hasn’t been fulfilled.

PB: Both Robert and Marlene seem trapped by punk. It seems to be doing more to hold them back rather than move them forward .

RC: They have to move forward. The title ‘Looking for a Kiss’ does not really refer to looking for a kiss. They are looking for redemption. They are looking for a way out, a way forward. I think that is really the story. It is an anti coming-of-age story. By that I mean it is anti in that they don’t come of age. They are still looking for a kiss.

(a suivre … link above!)