Discharge - Grave New World (1986): A fan resource page

(Please note, this page is a work in progress and will updated as and when new materials come to light or are discovered by the author. If you know of any additional resources about this period, please get in touch.)

Let's face it: if you've even heard of this album, chances are you probably hate it. Most people do. After all, Discharge were practically the kings of the UK hardcore scene back in the day and made a slew of nihilistic punk albums people (rightly) regard as classics, like 1982's Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing. 

But in 1986 Discharge changed tack somewhat - they reinvented themselves as a Sunset Strip-style metal band (as evinced by the photo above!). And their fans were almost universally disgusted. 

Gone was vocalist Cal Morris's gruff bark, replaced by a reverb-drenched falsetto. Gone too were the band's short sharp songs, which made way for extended tunes jam-packed with guitar solos and crunchy riffage. Their lyrics changed too, from brutal minimalist social commentary to something approaching hippie rhetoric.

When Discharge toured Grave New World in 1986, they were insulted, heckled, attacked and despised at every show they played, both here in Britain and in the United States (as you can hear in recordings embedded or linked to below). And to this day, few people have a good word to say about the album.

Me though? I love it. In fact, I think it's one of the best records I've ever heard. I love Discharge's aggressive musical take on '80s hair metal and I enjoy Cal's banshee wail (well, on record at any rate - it's definitely better with a bit of reverb, as the live material below will demonstrate).

And so I wanted to create the page to bring together a selection of resources for fellow fans of Discharge, Grave New World or both, so that they could hear the truth in all the tales of hostile audience reactions, band tension and Discharge's alarming (but little-discussed) time as a metal band. You can find line-up and record label info on the album's Wikipedia page.

Audio:

To begin with, here are the three studio tracks from Grave New World which have appeared on YouTube:

Track 01: Grave New World

Track 02 - In Love Believe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy54XQQnbLY

Track 06: Sleep in Hope

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsxzFQ0TpOE

This is an audio recording of the end of one of the band's sets in Canada. It's particularly interesting because, immediately following Sleep in Hope Cal leaves the stage to a chorus of abuse. But by this point, the band had become aware of the audience's love of old material, so they jam some old songs. The crowd loves 'em and goes nuts! A most intriguing comparison.

Here is an entire live show from the GNW tour (recorded at The Farm in San Francisco). It can be streamed here alongside a great article about Discharge in this period. This show contains all the heckling and abuse the Discharge received and is the most complete live document of this period. Cal sounds a little shaky here, but then again, he was being pelted with beer tins:

http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/7/rules-of-the-tribe-hardcore-punks-and-hair-metal-in-the-1980s

Alternatively, if you'd like to download the live set, you can do so here. This is a blog run by the guy who taped the show, who provides a short account of his experience of the set in addition to the download:

http://truepunkmetal.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/discharge-live-at-farm-in-sf-sept-7th.html

Video:

Amazingly, video footage from the GNW tour exists! The following is a two-part piece that consists of an awkward interview with Discharge's guitarist and drummer, Steve Brooks and Garry Maloney, followed by footage of the band performing Sleep In Hope. Sleep In Hope kicks in around the 4 minute mark on the second video and reveals just why Cal alienated so many punks in the audience. His pseudo-Mick Jagger stage act is cringeworthy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-EePxHkgyg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI9TkESHL44

Photos:

A collection of live photos of the band from this period can be found here. GNW haters will doubtless be amused by Steve Brooks' pink guitar:

http://discharge.yolasite.com/gnw-pics.php

Written documents:

The letter Steve Brooks wrote to Maximum Rock'n'Roll magazine following the tour is archived here. It makes interesting reading and suggests that the band retooled their GNW material for the live circuit with Rocky Shades from Wrathchild, who took over following Cal's post-tour firing:

http://bastardsinblue.tumblr.com/post/47341705496/discharge-letter-to-mrr-about-the-grave-new-world

Clifford Dinsmore from Bl'ast recalls supporting Discharge on the GNW tour:

http://kinggenerator.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/blast-on-discharges-grave-in-new-world.html

Another account of audience abuse from the GNW tour:

https://files.nyu.edu/cch223/public/uk/discharge_main.html

Grave New World tour details:

(NB, these are reproduced from the official Discharge website: http://thenightmarecontinues.yolasite.com/discharge-past-gigs.php)

UK leg:

01/07/1986: Mardi Gras, Nottingham

02/07/1986: Adam & Eves, Leeds

03/07/1986: Rockhouse, Derby

05/07/1986: Clarendon Hotel, Hammersmith, London (Varukers/Chaos) *aka Klubfoot

18/08/1986: Shelly's, Stoke-on-Trent

USA leg:

23/08/1986: The Ritz, New York

24/08/1986: City Gardens, Trenton, New Jersey

26/08/1986: Fallout Shelter, Raleigh, North Carolina

27/08/1986: Metroplex, Atlanta

30/08/1986: The Button South, Hallendale, Florida

02/09/1986: Tombstone, Fort Worth, Dallas, Texas

05/09/1986: Jackie Robinsons WMCA, San Diego

06/09/1986: Fenders Ballroom, Long Beach (Dr. Know/Final Conflict/Cryptic Slaughter/Attitude Adjustment)

07/09/1986: The Farm, San Francisco

08/09/1986: Club Cantell, Sacramento

09/09/1986: River Theatre, Gurnville

12/09/1986: Satyricon, Portland, Oregon

17/09/1986: Wellingtons, Winnipeg, Canada

19/09/1986: Traxx, Detroit

21/09/1986: Peabodies, Cleveland

22/09/1986: Penny Arcade, Rochester

23/09/1986: RPM, Toronto, Canada (Sudden Impact, ????)

25/09/1986: Foufounes Electriques, Montreal, Canada (DBC)

17/12/1986: Perkins Palace, Pasadena (Suicidal Tendencies/Battalion of Saints/Shattered Faith/Killroy/Tales of Terror) * this gig did not apparently take place! 

Lyrics:

All Grave New World's lyrics can be found at DarkLyrics.com:

http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/discharge/gravenewworld.html

Grave New World itself:

Given that GNW is currently out of print and not commercially available, below is a link to a site from which the album can be obtained in digital form:

http://metalwar666.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/discharge-grave-new-world-1986.html

Motorhead: Another Perfect (and thoroughly underrated) Day

I was watching a Motorhead DVD round at a friend’s house the other night when talk turned to the band’s criminally overlooked sixth album, Another Perfect Day, which he said he'd never listened to. 

And it wasn't the first time I'd heard a fan of Lemmy, Rickenbackers and all things sulphate make that admission.

For one reason or another, most of the Motorhead fans I've met as I've drifted through life have passed this little hum-dinger of a record by. So because I'm drinking Jim Beam at home on Saturday night, and life has no ultimate meaning, I thought I'd write a blog about why Another Perfect Day > most Motorhead albums. That's me and that's how I roll.

Anyway, this little-heralded record came out in 1982 and followed a run of five Motorhead albums, including Ace of Spades and No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith, which featured “Fast” Eddie Clarke of the band’s so-called “classic” line-up on guitar.

In his place for Another Perfect Day was a Scottish chap called Brian Robertson, whose six-string work and song-writing had graced five of Thin Lizzy's albums, from Nightlife in ‘74 to Live and Dangerous in 1978, before he joined Motorhead in 1982.

Known as a brilliant lead guitarist and boasting a history like that, it’s fair to say that “Robbo” was a substantial talent, someone who should have added a lot to Motorhead’s sound as a part of the group.

In fact, never mind 'should have'. He did. Another Perfect Day is by far the most melodic album in Motorhead’s discography. By the band’s standards it’s astonishingly complex, and it’s an energetic, memorable and exhilarating powerhouse of a record. If you’ve never heard it, have a listen to ‘Shine’ for a sample of its charms:

Good, no? So why isn’t the album up there with Bomber and the like? Why has hardly anyone I know who’s into Motorhead bothered to give Another Perfect Day a listen?

Well, over the years Another Perfect Day’s been written off for being something of a failed experiment, specifically because it was “too pop” to be a “proper” Motorhead album.

Robbo’s Wikipedia page, for instance, says: "His relatively mellow playing style (by Motörhead standards) did not fit with Motörhead's music, resulting in sales of singles and the studio album coming in less successful than hoped for.”

Thing is, fans might not have bought into the work of the band’s post-Iron Fist line-up, but Lemmy certainly did. He adores Another Perfect Day. In a Metal Hammer interview from 2011, when asked about the prevailing negative fan reaction to the album, Mr. Kilmister said: “‘I know, I don’t get it.  I love that album too,  it’s just Brian [Robertson]that I couldn’t fucking stand. [grits teeth].”

Ouch. And you can sort of see why in this video interview of Lem and Robbo on Channel 4’s The Tube. Lemmy acts like a beered-up, uber-confident, laid-back, alpha-male metal oaf. Robbo, with his short hair, collared shirt and palpable fear (“I’ve never done this before!”) is clearly cut from very different cloth. And, alas, outside the world of sitcoms, odd couples rarely stay together for long.



So, yeah, the line-up was never going to last. In fact, Robbo only stuck around for a year and a half, playing his first gig with Motorhead in May 1982 and bowing out in November 1983. But, sod the personality clashes and tone-deaf masses! Another Perfect Day is well worth your attention. Indeed, if you enjoy Motorhead but you’re generally into catchier, more melodic music, it’s a dream come true.

It’s even a little soulful. Well, as far as Motorhead go, at any rate. I mean, just listen to this:



And if you keep digging through Another Perfect Day, you’ll soon notice that every track’s a gem. It the sequel Ace of Spades should’ve had! This is Motorhead at their most rewarding, and a lot of that is down to Robbo’s lead work.

In his autobiography, Lemmy mentions that Robbo spent an incredible amount of time in the studio overdubbing endless guitar parts and trying out different licks while recording Another Perfect Day, and this perfectionism clearly paid off no end. His melodic guitar parts are stunning, multi-layered and like nothing the band would ever see again. If you skipped the last tune, check out the last two minutes and you’ll hear what I mean...

It’s a shame that the Another Perfect Day line-up didn’t work out and Robbo’s been apparently written out of history by some Motorhead fans. But if you’re open minded and you already dig the band, I think you’ll find that that this lil rekkid’ll make another perfect soundtrack for your day. Ooh! See what I did there? Cor, I frighten meself, I really do.

Copyright be damned. Hear the whole ruddy thing here.

Paul Di'Anno: Running free? Or shackled by circumstance?

In November, former Iron Maiden singer Paul Di’Anno, who sang on the band's first two albums, got into a verbal confrontation with a guy in the crowd at a gig he was playing in the Ukraine. 

The chap had apparently shouted out the name of Maiden’s current, and infinitely better-off, front-man Bruce Dickinson. Which, to put it mildly, wound Paul up a bit. He challenged the guy to a fight, making headlines in the likes of Classic Rock after dissing Dickinson and making some homphobic remarks about the “fan”.

But what the news stories didn’t pick up on was a remark Di’Anno made during his tirade. He said: “Yeah, you shouldn’t be offensive, mate; I came up here to work hard. If you don’t like me, fuck off!” (My italics)

I imagine Di’Anno has a harder time dealing with hecklers than some other professional musicians because, to him, rock and roll is now nothing but a job. A grinding, painful slog undertaken solely to stay solvent and alive. One, I think, he no longer enjoys.

For all his faults, and there are many, Paul Di’Anno is one of the hardest working musicians I know of. But for him, performing is quite literally - and necessarily - a full time gig.

Tour dates for March 2013 recently appeared on his Facebook page, and I dare say they’ll make sobering reading for anyone who assumes that Di’Anno must live a pretty cushy life.

Depending on who you ask, he either quit or was sacked from Maiden in 1981. After that, an attempt was made to launch him as a cookie-cutter eighties rocker a la Bruce Springsteen in 1984, which failed miserably. He more or less disappeared from mainstream view in the mid-'80s, and - to make matters worse - signed away his Maiden royalties years ago.  

So consequently he'll be playing four days a week throughout the entire month in venues all over Sweden, Germany and Holland, belting out ancient Iron Maiden hits all the way. And this is the norm for Paul, week after week, month after month, year in, year out these days: playing all over the world, full time, just to keep going and get by.

Money is a pain in the arse, but it’s a central, integral worry in everyone's life. So, while it might seem trite talking about how the guy makes a living, I think that understanding how he keeps himself alive sheds a great deal of light on “where his head’s at". 

He has to work hard for his money, and he does so at fairly significant personal cost.

By his own admission, he’s led a hard life - lots of drink, drugs, fags, fast sex and violence, and he’s probably paying the price at this point. 

I mean, in his autobiography The Beast he admits that he's got a hole in his septum thanks to his cocaine abuse over the years; a quick glance at the Ukraine video reveals that he's a pretty big guy these days, and an acquaintance of mine claiming inside knowledge alleges that Di’Anno can’t stand up under his own power on stage any more, having to rely on a reinforced microphone as a makeshift cane.

He’s done time in the past as the result of a particularly violent episode in Los Angeles involving an ex-wife, and I think it’s fair to assume just isn’t the kind of guy who’s lived a particularly responsible life. Especially not financially.

Which explains why Paul tours so frequently these days. Because, as I say, he doesn’t enjoy it. This video interview is quite enlightening.

In it, Di’Anno complains of not having seen his family for 11 months and expresses a world-weary grumpiness about the tour he was doing when the interview was taped. He’s generally hacked off, and it’s not the first time he’s expressed that sort of sentiment about his hard rockin’ life.

In fact, he wrote a song about it. The centrepiece of his 2006 solo album The Living Dead is a track called Nomad, on which Di’Anno laments his life. 

“I move around the world, seeking peace but finding none/A thousand cries for help but no pity underneath the sun/I have seen a world where nobody gives a damn/Shed your tears of blood children, all join hands to die” is how it kicks off, and it doesn't take too great a leap of imagination to see where that first line - or the nihilism in the rest - comes from.

Plus, the guy was convicted for benefit fraud in March 2011. He served two months of a nine month sentence for claiming £45,000 in incapacity benefit under false pretences. Say what you like about his scallywag nature - benefit fraud strikes me as something only a fairly desperate man would do. 

I mean, he went to prison - and he had to have known he was running the risk when he decided to start carrying out his little scam. Owing to his unstable lifestyle, it's probably fair to assume that he did "need" the money.

Paul copped a lot of flack for his conviction, and deservedly so to a certain extent - not least because the evidence presented in court consisted of videos of his live performances hosted on his own website and YouTube channel.

But he showed up at the hearing on a walking cane, and I think it’s fair to say doesn't look a well man in the photos from the hearing:

These days, Dianno is busting a gut to earn whatever he can from his music - after a lifetime spent in rock bands and institutions, he presumably wouldn't know how to do very much else. 

Look, I’m not saying he’s a saintly figure in need of of pity - I just think people should know the facts. Di’Anno is a fairly unique figure among performing musicians, owing both to his present circumstances and his past legacy, but he’s also, ultimately, just a man. An injured, troubled man with a job to do, and bills to pay. Like you. Unless you’re a woman. Cut him some slack.

An interpretation of Augustus Pablo's Each One Dub (with embedded audio)

Each One Teach One is a very positive and enjoyable tune even when it’s not being messed about with by Augustus Pablo, but when he’s at the controls it’s all the better.

The tune’s real strength lies in the listener being able to pick up on the fact that the vocal track can be heard throughout. It is because this track, as anodyne as it may seem, contains so many allusions to the milestones of life that it is, quite simply, astounding.

The organ riff at the song’s start is a fanfare, but a fanfare to what? I would suggest the awakening of a thus far unformed mind beginning to crystallise, it being a paralinguistic/musical utterance. “Tomorrow may just be the same,” comes the first properly audible line of the song. The emergence of an understanding of causality in infancy is conjured up from the recesses of one’s mind.

Now it is important to bear in mind that the song is a, perhaps unconscious, musical depiction of the growth and maturity of a person’s mind. The emphasised, obvious vocal passages (“Keep us down…”), in their simple way, represent different generational stages of life, with the elderly mindset represented by the vocal at Each One’s end imploring for the help of some kind of deity just to understand its own condition.

The people who produced this smoked a lot of dope, and one is given to brooding about such matters when one has misted the mind with smoke. It may be wise, when listening to this tune, to proceed according to the example of the musicians. Either that, or harness the imagination to its fullest, I suppose…

Either way, throughout this track we are taken through the various different, emerging and dominant themes in one’s life. “I don’t know why some people have to keep us down,” sings the voice of adolescence, and so it goes.

But the vocal line is there, barely, almost impossible to detect without headphones. And its lyrics tell the tale of one’s struggle against the forces of injustice, their abstract isolation from context in the end taking on a mystical significance as the tune implores “I don’t know why…No…Don’t know, yeah…”

And do any of us? Do any of have any idea of what it’s all for? Of why we’ve developed the way we have, and are even able to ascribe such meanings to what is after all, just a pop song with the words turned down and some echo turned up? To what's nothing more than a collection of sound waves?

It’s astonishing when one gets a sense of the scale of how little we know, especially when it comes through dub.

BBFC grants Human Centipede 2 an 18 certificate - with cuts

Torture porn fans, rejoice! The BBFC have passed The Human Centipede part 2 (Full Sequence) for an 18 certificate in the UK after making 2m37s of cuts to the film.

The BBFC released details of the necessary cuts today (warning, cuts details may contain spoilers):

“[There were] 32 individual cuts to scenes of sexual and sexualised violence, sadistic violence and humiliation, and a child presented in an abusive and violent context.

“In this case, cuts included: a man masturbating with sandpaper around his penis; graphic sight of a man's teeth being removed with a hammer; graphic sight of lips being stapled to naked buttocks; graphic sight of forced defecation into and around other people's mouths; a man with barbed wire wrapped around his penis raping a woman; a newborn baby being killed; graphic sight of injury as staples are torn away from individuals' mouth and buttocks.”

So there you have it, folks. We Brits will be getting Human Centipede 2 in the UK but (some would say thankfully) not in its full-strength form.

Ian Sadler, Sales Director for Eureka Entertainment, the film’s UK distributor said: “We are really pleased that after nearly 4 months of detailed discussion and debate, we have been able to reach an agreement with the BBFC and to produce a very viable cut of the film which will both excite and challenge its fans. Naturally we have a slight disappointment that we have had to make cuts, but we feel that the storyline has not been compromised and the level of horror has been sustained.”

The Human Centipede II was rejected, and effectively banned, by the BBFC in its uncut form in June of this year.

Further details of the UK theatrical and DVD release will be announced early next week.

Don't go to the Blues Kitchen in Camden! It's horrid!

If you’re ever tempted to go to the Blues Kitchen in Camden, take my advice: don’t. I love the blues and I love live music but after spending all of about, oh, ten minutes in this pitiful tarted-up gastropub, I’d quite happily claim to hate both.

As a music venue, it’s an utter joke. Want to experience a night at the Blues Kitchen without actually going there? Easy peasy. Get on a packed tube train at rush hour while listening to BB King on your iPod at half-volume and throw ten pound notes out of the train doors every few minutes.

Though actually, that’s not quite true. At least on the tube you’re less likely to be shoved around by a crowd of preening, braying tosspots with no regard for personal space or etiquette.

Overpriced, overheated and full to bursting with inconsiderate scumbags, this venue is one of the worst I’ve ever been to. From the Google Image printouts of Mississippi John Hurt on its walls to its £4.50 shot prices (nearly a fiver for a shot, ferchirssakes), it tries half-heartedly to be an ersatz juke joint for U2 fans and fails even at that.

The final straw is that if you want to see any of the acts billed, you have to wait ‘til gone 10:30pm, just so the bloody place can crowbar yet more drinks money out of any poor misguided music fans who’ve been hoodwinked through the door.

I don’t want to waste any more of my time recounting what an utter hell-hole this place is: frankly it doesn’t deserve notice beyond “just don’t go”. No matter how good the acts are you see on the posters outside, you’d have more fun listening to a CD at home.

If you’ll pardon me getting a little scatological, fuck the Blues Kitchen, fuck it to hell. Even Camden Rock’s preferable to this. Never go there! Ever! Bah.

Battletoads & Double Dragon soundtrack: SNES vs. Megadrive

I’ve recently been listening to some of the Battletoads & Double Dragon SNES soundtrack pretty obsessively (God knows why, maybe I’m pregnant), but it was only today I bothered to seek out the Mega Drive/Genesis version of the game’s music. Carumba! What a difference. Evidently the two machines’ soundcards were worlds apart when it came to quality/fidelity. The SNES sounds like a decent quality boom-box; the Mega Drive like a swarm of angry, shrieking metal wasps (not that that's a bad thing). Compare these examples and marvel at how not all 16-bit games consoles were created equal…

My Secret Knife: a review of Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession

Where would Whitechapel-based walking tour companies and fly-by-night paperback publishers be without the public’s continued fascination with Jack the Ripper? Yes, ever since Saucy Jack stalked those darkened backstreets near the old City at the close of the nineteenth century, the Ripper legend has continually piqued the interest of generation after generation of rubbernecking gorehounds and Angela Lansbury-esque armchair sleuths alike, resulting in an almost endless stream of theories about his identity and almost as many gaudy books to back them up.

And so we turn to the latest offering from the Ripper mill, Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession, a book in which David Monaghan and Nigel Cawthorne claim that the man who made whoring in the East End decidedly dangerous was none other than ‘Walter’, the author of the infamous (and voluminous) Victorian erotic memoir, My Secret Life.

For anyone unacquainted with My Secret Life, the story goes something like this. Between 1888 and 1895 a Belgian peddler of erotica, Auguste Brancart, was summoned from his adopted city of Amsterdam to London by “a rich old Englishman, who desired to have privately printed for his own amusement a huge MSS”. What this manuscript contained was nigh on a million words of an anonymous erotic memoir, allegedly drawn from the author’s diaries of his day-to-day amatory life. Over a period of some years, and involving a chain of smugglers, stooges and rogue printers, this manuscript was printed up in 11 volumes, comprising some nearly 4000 pages in total (including a more-than-thorough 56-page index). According to the author only six copies of the whole work were printed, although as researchers Ian Gibson, Steven Marcus and others have demonstrated, a great many more copies were printed up than that. The book sold for the then-astronomical sum of £100 a set and was marked ‘Not for publication’ on its title page. This isn’t surprising: the content of the book is about as obscene as it’s possible to imagine. The author narrates his sexual development from childhood onwards, detailing literally thousands of copulations and other sexual indiscretions and exploring every possible type of perversion. Attempts to publish the book over the course of the 20^th century met with bans, obscenity judgements and prison sentences, and it wasn’t until 2004 that all eleven volumes were finally made available online (at this location).

The author of the text has never been definitively identified (much like the Ripper), but the most convincing attempt at identification I’ve read is Ian Gibson’s masterful and endlessly entertaining book The Erotomaniac, in which Gibson asserts that the author of My Secret Life was Henry Spencer Ashbee, a bibliophile, traveller and industrialist who wrote three huge bibliographies of erotic literature under the name Pisanus Fraxi in the last half of the nineteenth century. I have neither the time nor desire to attempt outline Gibson’s reasoning here but it seems to me pretty watertight and that Ashbee was indeed the author of the My Secret Life – he had the time, inclination (after a lifetime’s immersion in the field of erotic literature) and most importantly the wealth to see the book through the press. According to publisher Charles Carrington, who acted as the book’s distributor, it cost the author £1100 pounds to produce the work – a staggering sum of money, which would place the author in the country’s financial elite.

However, Gibson’s work and research rather scuppers Monaghan and Cawthorne because of one crucially important conclusion reached by the author: My Secret Life is a work of fiction. Despite the book presenting itself as memoirs drawn from a diary, a number of internal inconsistencies coupled with the sheer unlikelihood that anyone could possibly live as ‘Walter’ purported to do, mark it out as a fantasy autobiography rather than a true record of a life lived. Beyond this, Gibson demonstrates fairly conclusively from comparisons with Ashbee’s diaries that he and Walter share the shame stylistic tics as writers, the same problems with spelling and syntax, and the same character traits. And if Ashbee was the writer of My Secret Life, which he is generally assumed to have been, any possible link between ‘Walter’ and the Ripper completely breaks down. The very nature of Ashbee’s life as a businessman, author, head of a family and social butterfly are utterly at odd with what we know of the Ripper’s character and the facts of his killing spree.

I have to confess a personal fascination with the life, work and character of Ashbee. As he is described in the few books which exist about him, he amuses me enormously, and so I thought I’d buy …Secret Confession to see if there was any possible way that Henry Spencer could have been the Ripper. Unsurprisingly I came away from the book unconvinced.

The reasoning advanced by Monaghan and Cawthorne is at times ingenious and a glowing demonstration of their ability as lateral thinkers, but rests largely on the Christian names of one or two of the prostitutes mentioned in My Secret Life corresponding with those of the murdered girls in Whitechapel, as well as a few overlaps in locations described in the book and those in which the Ripper crimes took place. The writers also place their own interpretation on phrases in My Secret Life, making assumptions and guessing at (nonexistent) double meanings in order to bolster their case. Beyond this they rely on amateur psychoanalysis to arrive at the conclusion that Walter was a killer. The writer of My Secret Life certainly put a great deal of aggression into his work and expresses a fascination with the blood associated with sex acts (although it must be said that he expresses a fascination with anything even remotely connected with sex), but the authors’ assertion that Walter was a murderous paedophile who killed the girls who procured him young virgins is overstating the case and a quite unsubstantiated assertion. And besides, if My Secret Life was the work of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the book is very unlikely to bear much, if any, relation to the author’s actual life, movements and experiences.

That said, Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession is quite the page-turner. The authors quote liberally from the more lurid episodes in My Secret Life, which are as shocking (and consequently entertaining) as you might imagine, as well as from reports into the underworld of 1890s London, and spare no detail in describing the Ripper murders. Of course this is material that’s been reshuffled many, many times for countless Ripper books, but not being particularly interested in Jack the Ripper myself, the book revealed to me a wodge of facts about the case and Victorian society at the turn of the 20^th century of which I was previously unaware. The writers’ tactic of alternating chapters which focus heavily on the facts of the Ripper murders with others focusing intently on My Secret Life is effective and makes the book seem pacy and urgent. And, as My Secret Life is not easily available as a book, nor a particularly quick or easy read, the quotes picked out in …Secret Confession are of such a length as to be almost a précis of that work, which is jolly useful. The mixture of extreme sex and extreme violence, which is what the book essentially boils down to, is well chosen, and the authors have been able to serve up their lurid source material in great and graphic detail whilst maintaining a scholarly air. While this book won’t tell you who the Ripper is (nor indeed will it firmly settle on the authorship of My Secret Life for that matter), it will entertain and engage you ‘til its end. Even approached with as sceptical a set of prior assumptions as my own, the book is an entertaining summary of the agreed facts around Jack the Ripper, a whistle-stop tour of late-Victorian London and an engaging discussion about one of English literature’s most hotly debated and notorious works, all of which are assets of the work to be commended. Well worth a read, but make sure to pick up a copy of Gibson’s Erotomaniac as a companion to avoid the potholes of occasional far-out and slipshod reasoning within.