Bad Wisdom

"I picked up Bad Wisdom because, as a teenager, I was a fan of the band Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction – a cartoon rock band who were just hilarious. And I found out that this guy wrote this book with Bill Drummond of the KLF, a very different kind of band. So I just bought this book because I was a fan of theirs. And it blew my mind. I went through the whole school system, at a very bad comprehensive, and just hadn’t fallen in love with reading at all. I found it all so boring, my teachers were uninspiring and the books we were given to study, by people like Samuel Butler, were dreary and alienating. This was the first time I’d had the experience of reading a book that felt like it was for me. The first line in it is: “I am shit scared. Shit scared of almost everything.” Then they go on this insane journey. They hired a Ford Escort with the intention of driving to the North Pole, to leave an icon of Elvis Presley at the North Pole, in order to save the planet. That was their mission. The book’s got a really interesting structure. They go through the journey chronologically, as you’d expect, but Bill takes a paragraph, then Manning takes a paragraph. It alternates. So you get Bill Drummond’s very maudlin Scottish Presbyterian worldview – that first line is his– then you get Mark Manning, who goes in a completely opposite direction. Drummond reminds me a little of Knausgaard. He’s such a thoughtful, interesting individual. A lot of detail, very much focussed on the beauty of the everyday. But with Manning, it’s just this wild, psychedelic stuff. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s this idea running through the book of Elvis being kind of a replacement God; that religion might be diminishing as a cultural force, but we still have this deep need for these gods to follow. So, Bad Wisdom is a really interesting journey that works on lots of different levels. It’s funny, it’s very thoughtful, it’s chaotic. It’s like Three Men in a Boat , but with psychopaths. It’s quite shocking as well. It’s really violent, and really, really offensive. I’m sure that Penguin wouldn’t publish it these days. But it really is an extraordinary thing, and I’m glad it exists. When I got my first job as a writer, I thought I would mark it by marking my skin, because Mark Manning has this huge crucifix tattooed on his chest, a massive thing. And I’ve got kind of a replica on my shoulder. So it was a very powerful book for me. You can definitely still see the influence of Bad Wisdom in my writing."