Last Orders: John Doran on Jolly Lad

The trouble with being a music journalist is that eventually you'll stick around long enough to end up answering exactly the sort of questions you’ve spent years volleying towards various beleaguered musicians. John Doran's been realising this quite a lot of late; as he prepares for the release of his debut book, Jolly Lad, and accompanying tour with Norwegian experimental metal musician Årabrot, he admits over the phone to The Skinny. “I’m so fucking conscious about how pompous doing these interviews makes me sound.” 

For anyone familiar with the music writing of Doran, co-founder in 2008 of music website The Quietus, freelance writer for Vice, Metal Hammer as well as many others and, to our notice, one of the finest music critics of the past two decades, such reticence might come as a surprise. Unafraid to rain down critical blows in an era of almost uniform positivity, Doran’s tone, be it startlingly personal (search out musings on Richard Dawson or Aidan Moffat's L. Pierre project) or a withering takedown of one of indie’s latest young dreams, is, at its most stinging, akin to sending an armoured tank into battle, swatting off those happy to hand out a good review for the quiet life.

Menk, Doran’s regular column for Vice, was a departure, though. Commissioned initially to write about anything but music, he began to turn inwards, pulling off the scabs of his life’s wounds and laying bare with stark vulnerability. Recent recollections of adjusting to new fatherhood sat side by side with admissions of long-term alcohol addiction, habitual drug use and severe depression, played out amid austere late-80s northern factories, seedy pub backrooms and decaying housing estates. These stories would form the framework of Jolly Lad, structured as a series of short stories that are by turns bleak, angry, hopeful and frequently imbued with black humour. The crux? Doran's recognition and subsequent fight against his addiction – predominantly to alcohol. “I remember disconsolately thinking after two months of not drinking, ‘Why did it have to be me?! I fucking love drinking so much!’" he ruefully laughs. "Which is so stupid because obviously that’s the whole point of alcoholism isn’t it? It's always people like me.”

Doran has allied himself with becoming a dad and the rejuvenating power of music in a battle that's seen him kick the booze and ultimately taken him away from a past that's involved dropping out of university at Hull after a term, struggling to hold onto various shift work positions, lurching between various cockroach-infested Withnail & I abodes and drinking his way through a position on Fleet Street before finding music journalism.

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“If I’d known what writing this book was going to be like, I wouldn’t have done it. It was one of the worst experiences of my life” – John Doran

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If that suggests a conveniently neat narrative of redemption, the reality is a little different. “If I’d known what writing this book was going to be like, I wouldn’t have done it. It was one of the worst experiences of my life,” Doran says matter-of-factly, laying bare the harsh truth that 'beating addiction' shouldn't be confused with leaving it completely behind. “I was having problems with a painkiller addiction and had just come off anti-depressants around it,” he says. “Even when doing the column I found that through these rambunctious, funny stories the façade was cracking, I just started finding it really depressing. You’re maintaining a subterfuge with a column, though; with a book you go over it 30, 40, 50 times, and what you’re left with is the extent to which you’ve been lying to yourself for years.”   

Doran’s path into drinking was as unremarkable as any kid's growing up in a backwater town – in his case Rainhill, near St Helens, formerly home to a huge lunatic asylum, the grounds of which he was a frequent curious visitor. On a couple of drinks at a mate’s house one evening he writes, ‘things in exterior life seemed to become time-stretched and then broke away from me in ragged chunks.’ From then on he was hooked, 'constantly drunk between the ages of 15 until 37.' Escapism could’ve been a part of it, from a Catholic upbringing or depression that dropped on him during his teens (linked in the book variously to watching terrifying 80s nuclear war drama Threads, his once beloved Simple Minds selling their soul on The Breakfast Club soundtrack, and equally formative icon Adam Ant’s eschewing of his Dandy Highwayman persona at Live Aid). Doran ponders this but says, “I used to think ‘Oh I’ve ended up like this because my dad’s suffered from depression, or because I got badly beaten up once as a child, or had a really bad drug experience as a teenager,’ but that’s just the wallpaper. I think I’d have ended up an alcoholic anyway.”

Doran's careful to affix Jolly Lad is more than just seeing the light through street gutter tales, though. “There’s a quote from German playwright Frank Wedekind that goes, ‘Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it,’” he laughs, and though the medium of 260-odd pages is, for him, a new one, Doran again proves his chops through several devices that leave the reader in a disorientated state that never feels like it quite meets up with time's linearity. Several alcoholic blackouts punctuate his stories, while perspectives of living in Hull, Welwyn Garden City and Manchester during the 80s and 90s could transfer to any post-Thatcher northern working-class community. Together with frequent hallucinations – the lengthiest, involving him going on a Forrest Gump-style walk around the coastline of the UK, would prove the inspiration for his forthcoming tour – it leaves the narrative working as its own psychedelic trip, not totally unmoored from reality, but certainly where reality is viewed through a prism.

“I guess I'm interested in these violent liminal zones between this life and someplace else,” Doran posits. “The blackouts that an alkie suffers are more like a little death than an orgasm in my book. These unrecoverable, super-dense blanks in the middle of your life, like little bubbles of death in your existence. It's the same every time you go under the surgeon's knife or get kicked unconscious; it's like a run up for the real thing but also a weirdly dark psychedelic event. You're standing – or lying down probably – with your face pressed up to a membrane that separates you from another realm that you have no chance of understanding.”

Music is unsurprisingly a constant, but chapters on U2, sections of Bobbie Gillespie or the late 80s St. Helens punk scene (he recalls one band playing stood facing a TV on stage so that they wouldn't miss the football) aren't the namedrops of a Nick Kent memoir, they're more to reflect on his own personal stasis. Indeed, what's more striking is an apparent desire to question what constitutes as ‘normal’ – from shoe-frying neighbours and retired ex-corporals unable to let it go, to drug dealers and musicians with post-review rage, Jolly Lad is littered with socially perceived oddities. “Mental health’s all over the place isn’t it?” he says. “You can get a downgrade to an ‘eccentric’ if you’re posh, whereas I think people are much quicker to label you mad if you’re working class."

Doran's rehabilitation goes on. It'd be disingenuous to him to say he's 'on the up', or 'over the worst of it', but he can admit, "I’m not mad compared to a lot people... although you know, I spent time at university thinking I was dead, and if a clock or something went off I’d think ‘that’s just a machine keeping me alive while I’m in this coma.’”