FUTURE GLASGOW: Graham Rae On ‘Soundproof in Satellite Town’ and more

Graham Rae is a self-taught writer, originally from Falkirk. Soundproof in Satellite Town is his new Scottish sorta-futuristic novel set in the 22nd century.

In it, Johnny Certex and Ratsoup, two disenfranchised young men, have a mad, fast, weird last weekend of drugs, booze, digigames, sex, and muzak, before starting their manufactured jobs on Monday morning.

GRB: Hi Graham, can I start by asking (for anyone who’s not familiar with your work) if you could give us a rundown of the original publication history of Soundproof.

Graham Rae (GR): God, it’s so convoluted! I’ll try and keep it brief. I started writing Soundproof in June 2001. I had moved from my old home town of Falkirk to Edinburgh. In the process I had stopped talking to somebody I had been pals with for over a decade. I knew nobody in Edinburgh, so I started trying to recreate our relationship in the page. Then I moved back to Falkirk, emigrated to Chicago, got married, became a father, got divorced, moved back to Scotland. I just kept writing it as a sort of deranged hobby, tormenting myself updating it for years.

It was published in 2011 as the first and only ebook Creation Books put out. I found out a month later that James Williamson, the owner, was an international scamster who hadn’t paid his writers in a decade. He disappeared forever when I pulled him up about it. So, it sat for five years and I put out a self-published edition just to have something physical for myself for those years of mental and emotional and aesthetic toil.

I got talking to you (Chris Kelso, interviewer) in January 2020 through research you were doing for your book Burroughs and Scotland which I did the intro for – because you knew I had written a lot about William S. Burroughs. I sent you a copy of the book, you loved it, and you got me a publisher through Cody Sexton at Anxiety Press. That’s the history of the book, in severely truncated form. An act of sheer deranged folly! I actually have a book of my Burroughs writings coming out from Anxiety Press later this year.

GRB: Was the process of returning to this text challenging? If so, why, and do you recognise the person who wrote that earlier edition?

GR: Challenging? It never quite left me for many years, so . . . the whole mentality, right, behind it . . . it’s twenty-two years! Madness! It never actually stopped until the book was published for the last time, this time. I’ve been playing with Soundproof in my brain since 2001. So I knew the person. Also, I didn’t know the person because that book was written at over eight or nine addresses, in two separate countries. I had moved to America, gotten married, became a father, worked over there and got divorced, came back here, and my parents had died. So many huge life things had happened in the time it took to write that book and finish it that, from start to finish, I was not anywhere near the same person as I was. I was far more sprightly and spry at the start, less internally sunburned.

GRB: ‘Semisec.’ ‘Skinsensertive.’ ‘Hypoclit.’ ‘Neutronuke.’ ‘Skarboards.’ The portmanteau vernacular of Soundproof is fascinating and intricate. You’ve almost created a kind of mongrel argot a la A Clockwork Orange. How different was it to keep coming up with new neologisms? Did you streamline it, did you ever write a notebook with what words meant?

GR: Nope, nope. I just made them up on the spot. I do it all the time anyway. I just throw a fucking million words all the time together constantly, just smash and bash them together and see what happens. That’s just the way my head works. So, I think about stuff constantly, it’s piss-easy because it’s the way my brain’s trained. It’s probably becuase of growing up in the advertising era, y’know? Like popular media, tabloids . . . a lot of the stuff in the book is popular words, phrases recontextualised, or jammed together with something else, to come up with some new sort of configuration. And that could only have happened in the late 20^th and early 21^st century because the vocabulary of the world has changed so much since then.

GRB: One of the most authentic elements of the book (and one of the most striking somehow) is the punk aesthetic that runs through it – from the snappy repartee of Johnny Certex and Ratsoup to the alliterative poetry by the narrator, to the kind of fanzine philosophy . . .

GR: Yeah, you’re right . . .

GRB: So, I was thinking about the fanzine aesthetic, the disposition of the characters, kind of espousing ideals of individual liberty, anti-authoritarianism, the DIY ethic, non-conformity, anti-corporatism . . . as I was reading the book, all these words were coming to mind. Anti-government, direct action, not selling out. Now, I know you . . .

GR: Indirect action! (Laughs)

GRB: And I know that you also live by some of these tenets. How much did re-releasing the book have to do with that sort of motivation, to spread the word of anti-authoritarianism. Or is it a manifesto, or just a really good example of world-building and storytelling that comes from a creative, imaginative place?

GR: It’s creative and imaginative. I don’t believe that you’re really doing anything special in writing a book. There’s a tsunami of books, TikTok videos, Facebook, Twitter, that it’s easy to get lost in. I think you have to be a very arrogant person to believe that what you’re saying is not going to get lost, unless you’ve got some kind of backup, or you’ve got a lot of connections. And even then, a lot of good stuff just falls between the cracks and you can just get stuck with a lot of complete shit. Just any popular . . . I can’t think of any popular writer to say because I pay no attention to popular writing whatsoever.

GRB: Are you an anarchist, or are you apolitical, or can you be both?

GR: You can be both. You can be totally political . . . I mean, anarchism’s a political stance, isn’t it? But it’s a load of shite, really. It’s a kind of myth that’s been propagated by punk music, basically, since the mid-70s or so. It’s become this kind of saviour myth, it’s a transcendental myth. Because people want to escape this horrible fucking planet and all the shit the corporations have put us through. But there’s just no fucking escaping this web of corporate shit. And I thought I’ll just put this out for a laugh, cos the writing’s good. And nobody else in Scotland, apart from probably yourself, that I know of, is writing anything that’s supposedly based in the future.

There’s a line in the book that goes “Anarchism, socialism, communism, warm social jism.” Everything’s been fucking tried. It’s just these little rebellions and idiocies erupting like boils on the skin of social media. Nobody can make sense of anything anymore, there’s no linear anything. And they’ve learned quite quickly over the last twenty-five years how to turn the internet into one big propaganda machine that can demonise any person or anything that they want, any corporation, company, country. And sometimes that goes awry and sometimes it doesn’t. The world’s just full of madness now because of social media and the internet. Is that making sense?

GRB: Definitely – and it leads nicely into my next question as well. Any art or music or comedy that’s chaotic has a tendency to be nihilistic. So – punk or The Goons, or Dada or alternative comedy – they all include an element of that rejection of everything. How much do you buy into that?

GR: I think it’s quite joyful. It’s creatively destructive. There’s a line from the Manic Street Preachers that I stuck in the book that goes “I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing.” I actually just found out recently it’s originally from 2000 AD! A lot of the lyrics on The Holy Bible are just from books and comics and things that Richey [Edwards] Manic was reading. He was like Morrissey in that respect, somebody with not that much of a social life just synthesising elements of the popular culture they’re consuming into the work.

GRB: Do you think that Soundproof has elements of that as well?

GR: Oh fuck, aye. The third or fourth line in the book is “Mike check one two, who’da thought” and then I cut it off. That’s an Eminem line from The Way I Am. I just don’t mention his name, so as not to date the reference. Song lyrics are just as important as actual canonical poetry to me, if not more important.

The whole book is meant to be one big mad cyberdrunk futuristic space opera, in a way. If I thought three or four words thrown together would look like a good lyric from a song, then they went in the book. There’s constant wordplay and lyricism in there. Song lyrics have often meant far more to me than actual literature. I’ve got the Dead Kennedys in there, I’ve got The Dwarves, I’ve got Joris-Karl Huysmans ripped from À rebours, the late-19^th century decadent French novel that inspired Oscar Wilde. I’ve got Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, hardcore pornography, Rimbaud, William S. Burroughs . . .

GRB: Interestingly, you’ve just led onto the next question again.

GR: Sorry, (laughing), I don’t mean to be helpful!

GRB: Soundproof has this kind of jeu d’esprit, I find it really comedic . . .

GR: That’s because it is funny, it’s meant to be funny . . .

GRB: But really well written, really funny, the good funny, A Confederacy of Dunces funny. I thought, ‘The person who wrote this is either insane or a chameleonic genius’. So which one are you?

GR: Well I’m obviously insane. That’s why you’re sitting here talking to me . . . in prison! (laughs)

GRB: Why do you think 2024 needs a book like this?

GR: Look, the book is a statement, right? It’s the first ever Scottish book written with all-American spellings.

GRB: Why is that?

GR: Two reasons – one, to make a point about American linguistic and cultural colonisation of this country – and two, to piss off Scottish literary purists. The book is totally original, nobody else in Scotland has ever written a book like it before, or ever will again. I don’t know if it’s any good or not, I’ve got nothing to measure it against. I can’t measure it against anything from the 20^th century. 21^st century, I have no idea.

GRB: You have all these abducted Americanisms, but it still feels really Scottish. I was wondering what your relationship is with America.

GR: Not a fan. The whole Western world is just America, now, right? And America is just a huge open-air insane asylum. But any country is just its people, there are some great people there, and I know some of them.

GRB: You’ve got an American daughter, too.

GR: Aye, Fiona, she’s great, obviously. But living in America for nearly eleven years [from 2005-2016] was an eye-opener and I found it a very inhumane, cruel place. Which is why the accelerating tendency of our culture to adopt Americanisms (in sneering bad American accent) “Oh cool story, bro! Awesome, my guy, y’all!” . . . it saddens me.

It [America] is kind of an abstraction, too – in that I only lived in Chicago and its suburbs. So I don’t know what Vermont’s like, I don’t know what Los Angeles is like, any of the (laughs) 243 states that they’ve got . . . I don’t know what these places are like. I saw what I saw and I lived in a very violent and nihilistic city. And there were people getting murdered in the same building I had been living in after I moved out. So that does tend to affect your view of a country.

Ironically, a lot of my writing influences are American – Harlan Ellison, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski. And you’ll see all of them in Soundproof. And J.G. Ballard, but obviously he’s English.

GRB: What was the first Scottish book you ever read?

GR: The Wasp Factory, I think – as a teenager. I liked it. Dark as fuck. Before that I was reading Clive Barker and Stephen King in my early-to-mid-teens. When I was sixteen, I subscribed to the Stephen King newsletter, Castle Rock. I used to write to Stephanie, the secretary for the newsletter, who was the sister of King’s wife Tabitha. “Does Stephen like George A Romero movies?” Teenage shite. (Laughs)

Stephen King was a massive influence on me as a kid. I wrote my first short stories aged twelve because of him, I just replicated that sort of stuff. I grew up with horror novels of the seventies lying about the house. That and true crime magazines, serial killer books.

GRB: Which Stephen King books, in particular?

GR: Ah, fucking everything, man! The first book of his I got when I was eleven, I bought Cujo. Which is a (laughs) child getting mauled at six or seven years old! When I was ten, I got Prophecy by David Seltzer for my birthday. They made a film . . . I remember a teacher asking me: “Oh Graham, what’s that you’re reading?” Except in a South African accent, because I was in South Africa then. “Is it  a love story?” And she looked at the aborted mutant foetus on the cover. “Oh, that’s not a love story!” “No.”

But there were always books in the house. Serial killer books and horror books and horror magazines. Then I outgrew Stephen King and I grew into Clive Barker for a couple of years. Then I hit Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs in my late teens, William S. Burroughs and the usual self-destructive Scottish-mentality-adjacent cabal. And it was all just words, and it was all just good.

GRB: I almost forgot to ask, where did you get the J.G. Ballard quote from [on the cover of Soundproof]?¹

GR: I just looked him up in the Who’s Who in Falkirk Library in 1996, wrote to him a few times and he wrote back. There’s a letter of mine to him, from 2006, in his archives in the British Library in London. I need to get a copy of it, to remind myself what I said.

GRB: That’s an unusual way to address such a famous writer.

GR: Always approach from unlikely directions, is my motto. That’s how I ended up interviewing Hunter S. Thompson’s son, Juan, too, in 2016. Great guy, great writer. But that’s another story. There’s always stories . . .

GRB: Graham Rae, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

This is part of a collaborative project between Glasgow Review of Books and Bella Caledonia. The Glasgow Review of Books is an online journal which publishes critical reviews, essays and interviews as well as writing on translation. They accept work in any of the languages of Scotland – English, Gàidhlig and Scots