Nobody wants a history lesson, even in something as interesting as the New York club/rave scene. Well Tony Fletcher has created a book that will teach everyone about the early 1990s club scene but has done it in the form of a crime novel called Hedonism.
Hedonism is the city's top dance club. When top DJ Skippy winds up in hospital in a coma, the victim of a mugging, his best friend Holy decides to solve the crime himself. Hedonism is a fast action trip through a hardcore underworld of hip dance music, S&M sex and mountains of illegal drugs.
This is not a tell all like Frank Owens Clubland or numerous documentaries that were created about Party Monster Michael Alig but Fletcher has been building but instead is a rousing good read about wild characters trying to solve a murder.
Before British native Fletcher became a DJ at the Limelight in New York City he was a journalist for first his own magazine Jamming! in the late 70s and early 80s and later on after finishing his run at the clubs he dove into writing Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend, a biography of Who drummer Keith Moon. Fletcher calls this novel Hedonism and Im sure he learned a lot about that subject from Moon himself.
Check out Tony Fletchers website to order Hedonism.
Daniel Robert Epstein:What made you decide to do this as a novel rather than a memoir?
Tony Fletcher: I know why I didnt do it as a non-fiction book and thats because I wouldnt have objectivity. Ive done other non-fiction books and I was distanced from the subjects so I was able to get some perspective. There is lots of stuff to talk about with that era but I was kind of inside it and certainly didnt want to do the non-fiction book of that period. Frank Owen [author of Clubland] was the right person to do the non-fiction book and even he was more closely involved than any journalist should be. As opposed to a memoir I had more fun doing a novel.
DRE: I read that you started it even before the Keith Moon biography.
TF: I probably got the opening chapter done in a different form then went and did the Keith Moon book. All the time I was doing the biography I felt the book was there. While I was writing the Keith Moon book The Limelight went through all the legal battles. As much as anything I didnt want to write the truth. There was just this world I moved in and a lot of the characters were very powerful. I put them all into a pot, stirred them up and reinvented them as different people. I thought I would be able to go off in the direction I wanted to go and do some real fiction adventures. There are a few incidents in the book that are very close to real life but the majority of the book is a real novel. I wanted to have some characters that reflected the times and talk about those times without telling anyones secrets or hurting anyones feelings.
DRE: Save that book for later on.
TF: [laughs] Yeah maybe. The book that I should really get to is that over the years a lot of memoir stuff about my life back in London. When youre writing really naked stuff like that, you really wonder if you want the book to come out and have people see it. The answer I figured out is that yes and I need to get it into shape. Thats something where I want to tackle the truth while Hedonism is something I wanted to do from the start.
DRE: Is crime fiction something you were always interested in?
TF: No and funny enough the only battle I had with [Omnibus Press] the English publishers was that the head of the company wanted to call it a crime novel. I was determined not to because I didnt set out to write a crime novel. I just set out to write a novel and it ended up with this crime element. We fought back and forth about it and the final verdict is that we got the words crime novel off the cover and he kept it on the back cover. I would argue its not a crime novel but having said that Ive got a neighbor whos a very good crime writer named Chris Niles and she wrote a great crime novel called Hells Kitchen. She read Hedonism and told me that I was one step away from writing the classic crime novel. Its nice to discover a hidden strength without trying to it.
DRE: Is there any book that you looked to for structure?
TF: No I dont actually read crime novels. Maybe there is that old saying about being under the influence and absorbing someone elses structure. There are certain books form both Britain and America that I always had in the back of my head. Trainspotting was such a strong book.
DRE: Trainspotting is great example because thats basically a crime novel set in the world heroin junkies.
TF: I guess so. Certainly there is the aspect of something taking place at the start of the book, you want to solve it by the end of the book and hopefully along the way your characters reach an epiphanies or destinations. I was aware of a book called The Fuck-up, which I know you know about. I was aware of similar down and dirty books. To be honest Trainspotting was a very successful book and The Fuck-up was merely a cult novel. Im happy to be in the middle of those territories.
I set out more to say something about the clubs cultural scene and it just happened it was driven by crime. If there is any reason I pulled it off it was because there was a lot of crime around the New York club scene ten years ago. Maybe it was more the firsthand experience of that kind of violent crime.
DRE: Has the book been passed along to people you knew or worked with back then?
TF: Some of the people from there have started picking it up. When I did the reading at [the lower east side Manhattan club] Sapphire a few months ago that was interesting. It was Monday and that is kind of the DJ night and attracts a lot of the New York underground. Its called Mondaze and a lot of the older heads go there. When I did the reading I was surprised by how many people from back in the day came out to listen. There were probably half a dozen DJs from that era and every one of them picked up a book. A few them of them came back to me and said that it brought up a lot of memories, some of them good and some bad. There is one person in the book who was just too good to change from real life. It was important to me to make the main characters not based on one particular person. There is one character that is based on a good friend of mine. I was worried that he might not like seeing himself in there but he said it was really funny.
DRE: From what I know of the scene some of these people you just cant make it up.
TF: This is true [laughs]. If you are going to deal with this stuff you cant make up Michael Alig. Which is why there has been books and movies about him. When I was writing this I never thought anyone would believe the book but then two days later or something I would read about an incident that was very similar to something in the book. I just realized that in fiction its really hard to go beyond the comprehensible. You can push at the boundaries but no matter how far you go there is someone who has done something similar in real life. Dealing with the club world gives you license to go off the deep end and people will remember something like that happening.
DRE: How come the book is not out in the United States yet?
TF: I have to admit to being a little bit baffled by that. I wish I could give you a really sensible answer. We sold it in the UK and I had an agent I was confident with. We got a lot of positive feedback from a lot of publishers and every single one of them had a reason they couldnt commit to the book. Obviously its a little bit disappointing but I cant fathom them out. I met with smaller publishers like Akashic and Soft Skull. I felt if I couldnt get a big fat deal then I would like to go with one of those companies. They both resisted on odd reasons. Soft Skull we got really close to but they decided they had too much fiction and Akashic wanted to make too many changes to a particularly central character so I said no way. Im starting to feel the way about the publishing industry here the way I always felt about the music business.
DRE: It seems like those two publishers will publish anything as long as its edgy and your book is very good as well.
TF: I have to admit. I dont really get it. I met some young editors at publishers who were absolutely all over the book. They were really kind of apologetic that they couldnt get it through their senior editors. Those people just look at the hardcore sex, the theme and they just find it too edgy at this period in time. Ive also talked to those same senior editors and it does seem like they dont quite get it. At the point at which Akashic put an editor one who wanted to make changes to the character of Monkey, I was close to the British deal being done so I didnt want to go through another rewrite if Britain is taking a chance on it.
DRE: Yeah in Britain they are really conservative about things like that.
TF: Thats true. Ive kind of taken care of some of this stuff but by next year Barnes & Noble will have purchased a number of copies so they will be selling it. Thats entirely me doing it myself. From doing the Keith Moon biography one of the men who runs Barnes & Noble with his brother is a huge Who fan. At the end of the day you have to pull all the contacts you want so he ordered them for the store from the UK. The nice thing about the way its turning out is the word of mouth thats happening. I keep bumping into people who have heard of the book and we get people at readings.
DRE: Well if you sell enough books at Barnes & Noble someone will pick it up.
TF: Yeah, I do want it out properly. But as long as people can read it thats good so Im not complaining.
DRE: In reference to the actual plot of the book were people actually motivated at the clubs to investigate a murder? From what Ive seen about Michael Alig it doesnt seem like people were motivated to uncover anything.
TF: Right which is one reason why my book places the club kids more at the periphery. The central character in Hedonism is somebody who does want to make but is just getting lost for a period.
I dont know if people would be motivated. Among the many things you pick up when writing a novel you do try to start at the furthest point of reality and then go out from there. Because people might not have been motivated to solve things, thats why the book may be of interest. Were picking up on a character that does want some answers. At the same time Holy is a pretty hopeless in a lot of ways. The answers kind of come to him rather than him finding them so hes no great mastermind. Back then I did know of people that got hurt and the weird ways they found out what happened.
DRE: It seems like everyone I interview or who writes a book either used to DJ or is a DJ. Why are so many DJs multitalented?
TF: I came to DJing through doing music journalism. I think thats not an uncommon way to go. Youre writing about music long enough and in my case back in 1989 I had a roommate in New York who was a bartender at Limelight and knew everybody there. He saw my record collection so he said between the fact that he knows everyone and my knowledge of music we should do some kind of alternative night because there is nothing like that in New York. So I learned to DJ on nights in front of a crowd. I didnt have the turntables at home and there werent those little bars in the city that had a DJ for me to learn from. I could have been dragged into the club world but I stopped. Not so much because of the fact that people were dying around me, which they were, but it was also because I was a writer first and foremost. Particularly when the rave scene started off there were these 16 and 17 year old DJs who had the energy to stay up all the weekend running their night for free while I was in my late 20s, about to get married and I didnt have that energy. I did that with punk when I was 14 but I couldnt do it again. So I backed off.
But with a lot of DJs if they can articulate themselves in music then they may be able to do it in words as well. I think that DJing could well be the sun thats in the middle whole all the other things, writing, producing, choreography and many others could be around the world of DJing. I think that more people just love to DJ but their prime skill maybe outside of it.
DRE: Were you surprised when the Limelight closed?
TF: No not at all. It was crashing and again it comes down to the drugs again. Im sure many of us have experimented with a lot of things and I think thats an important part of discovery. You should open your doors of perception. I think everyone in the world should take ecstasy at least a couple of times.
DRE: Im scared of ecstasy.
TF: Then you might be doing the right thing for yourself. I think you should but having seen creative people like Michael Alig and Peter Gatien move on to bad drugs like heroin and Special K and lose all grip on reality. If you have a grip on reality you want to get as far away from that as possible.
I was scared heroin and Special K so I never tried them. For my mind there was a dividing line between what you can control and what can control you. I chose to not cross that line. There are people who can do that and come back and of course some people who cross that line and dont come back.
DRE: There are of sex and drugs in the book did you have to tone it down at all?
TF: Not by much maybe by two or three percent. There a few things my agent mentioned but I stuck by them. I think what really concerned me was when I did a first draft was that the hardcore sex stuff should be plausible and be in the book for a reason not just to be gratuitous. I think when I edited the book for the UK I added in two more sex scenes [laughs].
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Hedonism is the city's top dance club. When top DJ Skippy winds up in hospital in a coma, the victim of a mugging, his best friend Holy decides to solve the crime himself. Hedonism is a fast action trip through a hardcore underworld of hip dance music, S&M sex and mountains of illegal drugs.
This is not a tell all like Frank Owens Clubland or numerous documentaries that were created about Party Monster Michael Alig but Fletcher has been building but instead is a rousing good read about wild characters trying to solve a murder.
Before British native Fletcher became a DJ at the Limelight in New York City he was a journalist for first his own magazine Jamming! in the late 70s and early 80s and later on after finishing his run at the clubs he dove into writing Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend, a biography of Who drummer Keith Moon. Fletcher calls this novel Hedonism and Im sure he learned a lot about that subject from Moon himself.
Check out Tony Fletchers website to order Hedonism.
Daniel Robert Epstein:What made you decide to do this as a novel rather than a memoir?
Tony Fletcher: I know why I didnt do it as a non-fiction book and thats because I wouldnt have objectivity. Ive done other non-fiction books and I was distanced from the subjects so I was able to get some perspective. There is lots of stuff to talk about with that era but I was kind of inside it and certainly didnt want to do the non-fiction book of that period. Frank Owen [author of Clubland] was the right person to do the non-fiction book and even he was more closely involved than any journalist should be. As opposed to a memoir I had more fun doing a novel.
DRE: I read that you started it even before the Keith Moon biography.
TF: I probably got the opening chapter done in a different form then went and did the Keith Moon book. All the time I was doing the biography I felt the book was there. While I was writing the Keith Moon book The Limelight went through all the legal battles. As much as anything I didnt want to write the truth. There was just this world I moved in and a lot of the characters were very powerful. I put them all into a pot, stirred them up and reinvented them as different people. I thought I would be able to go off in the direction I wanted to go and do some real fiction adventures. There are a few incidents in the book that are very close to real life but the majority of the book is a real novel. I wanted to have some characters that reflected the times and talk about those times without telling anyones secrets or hurting anyones feelings.
DRE: Save that book for later on.
TF: [laughs] Yeah maybe. The book that I should really get to is that over the years a lot of memoir stuff about my life back in London. When youre writing really naked stuff like that, you really wonder if you want the book to come out and have people see it. The answer I figured out is that yes and I need to get it into shape. Thats something where I want to tackle the truth while Hedonism is something I wanted to do from the start.
DRE: Is crime fiction something you were always interested in?
TF: No and funny enough the only battle I had with [Omnibus Press] the English publishers was that the head of the company wanted to call it a crime novel. I was determined not to because I didnt set out to write a crime novel. I just set out to write a novel and it ended up with this crime element. We fought back and forth about it and the final verdict is that we got the words crime novel off the cover and he kept it on the back cover. I would argue its not a crime novel but having said that Ive got a neighbor whos a very good crime writer named Chris Niles and she wrote a great crime novel called Hells Kitchen. She read Hedonism and told me that I was one step away from writing the classic crime novel. Its nice to discover a hidden strength without trying to it.
DRE: Is there any book that you looked to for structure?
TF: No I dont actually read crime novels. Maybe there is that old saying about being under the influence and absorbing someone elses structure. There are certain books form both Britain and America that I always had in the back of my head. Trainspotting was such a strong book.
DRE: Trainspotting is great example because thats basically a crime novel set in the world heroin junkies.
TF: I guess so. Certainly there is the aspect of something taking place at the start of the book, you want to solve it by the end of the book and hopefully along the way your characters reach an epiphanies or destinations. I was aware of a book called The Fuck-up, which I know you know about. I was aware of similar down and dirty books. To be honest Trainspotting was a very successful book and The Fuck-up was merely a cult novel. Im happy to be in the middle of those territories.
I set out more to say something about the clubs cultural scene and it just happened it was driven by crime. If there is any reason I pulled it off it was because there was a lot of crime around the New York club scene ten years ago. Maybe it was more the firsthand experience of that kind of violent crime.
DRE: Has the book been passed along to people you knew or worked with back then?
TF: Some of the people from there have started picking it up. When I did the reading at [the lower east side Manhattan club] Sapphire a few months ago that was interesting. It was Monday and that is kind of the DJ night and attracts a lot of the New York underground. Its called Mondaze and a lot of the older heads go there. When I did the reading I was surprised by how many people from back in the day came out to listen. There were probably half a dozen DJs from that era and every one of them picked up a book. A few them of them came back to me and said that it brought up a lot of memories, some of them good and some bad. There is one person in the book who was just too good to change from real life. It was important to me to make the main characters not based on one particular person. There is one character that is based on a good friend of mine. I was worried that he might not like seeing himself in there but he said it was really funny.
DRE: From what I know of the scene some of these people you just cant make it up.
TF: This is true [laughs]. If you are going to deal with this stuff you cant make up Michael Alig. Which is why there has been books and movies about him. When I was writing this I never thought anyone would believe the book but then two days later or something I would read about an incident that was very similar to something in the book. I just realized that in fiction its really hard to go beyond the comprehensible. You can push at the boundaries but no matter how far you go there is someone who has done something similar in real life. Dealing with the club world gives you license to go off the deep end and people will remember something like that happening.
DRE: How come the book is not out in the United States yet?
TF: I have to admit to being a little bit baffled by that. I wish I could give you a really sensible answer. We sold it in the UK and I had an agent I was confident with. We got a lot of positive feedback from a lot of publishers and every single one of them had a reason they couldnt commit to the book. Obviously its a little bit disappointing but I cant fathom them out. I met with smaller publishers like Akashic and Soft Skull. I felt if I couldnt get a big fat deal then I would like to go with one of those companies. They both resisted on odd reasons. Soft Skull we got really close to but they decided they had too much fiction and Akashic wanted to make too many changes to a particularly central character so I said no way. Im starting to feel the way about the publishing industry here the way I always felt about the music business.
DRE: It seems like those two publishers will publish anything as long as its edgy and your book is very good as well.
TF: I have to admit. I dont really get it. I met some young editors at publishers who were absolutely all over the book. They were really kind of apologetic that they couldnt get it through their senior editors. Those people just look at the hardcore sex, the theme and they just find it too edgy at this period in time. Ive also talked to those same senior editors and it does seem like they dont quite get it. At the point at which Akashic put an editor one who wanted to make changes to the character of Monkey, I was close to the British deal being done so I didnt want to go through another rewrite if Britain is taking a chance on it.
DRE: Yeah in Britain they are really conservative about things like that.
TF: Thats true. Ive kind of taken care of some of this stuff but by next year Barnes & Noble will have purchased a number of copies so they will be selling it. Thats entirely me doing it myself. From doing the Keith Moon biography one of the men who runs Barnes & Noble with his brother is a huge Who fan. At the end of the day you have to pull all the contacts you want so he ordered them for the store from the UK. The nice thing about the way its turning out is the word of mouth thats happening. I keep bumping into people who have heard of the book and we get people at readings.
DRE: Well if you sell enough books at Barnes & Noble someone will pick it up.
TF: Yeah, I do want it out properly. But as long as people can read it thats good so Im not complaining.
DRE: In reference to the actual plot of the book were people actually motivated at the clubs to investigate a murder? From what Ive seen about Michael Alig it doesnt seem like people were motivated to uncover anything.
TF: Right which is one reason why my book places the club kids more at the periphery. The central character in Hedonism is somebody who does want to make but is just getting lost for a period.
I dont know if people would be motivated. Among the many things you pick up when writing a novel you do try to start at the furthest point of reality and then go out from there. Because people might not have been motivated to solve things, thats why the book may be of interest. Were picking up on a character that does want some answers. At the same time Holy is a pretty hopeless in a lot of ways. The answers kind of come to him rather than him finding them so hes no great mastermind. Back then I did know of people that got hurt and the weird ways they found out what happened.
DRE: It seems like everyone I interview or who writes a book either used to DJ or is a DJ. Why are so many DJs multitalented?
TF: I came to DJing through doing music journalism. I think thats not an uncommon way to go. Youre writing about music long enough and in my case back in 1989 I had a roommate in New York who was a bartender at Limelight and knew everybody there. He saw my record collection so he said between the fact that he knows everyone and my knowledge of music we should do some kind of alternative night because there is nothing like that in New York. So I learned to DJ on nights in front of a crowd. I didnt have the turntables at home and there werent those little bars in the city that had a DJ for me to learn from. I could have been dragged into the club world but I stopped. Not so much because of the fact that people were dying around me, which they were, but it was also because I was a writer first and foremost. Particularly when the rave scene started off there were these 16 and 17 year old DJs who had the energy to stay up all the weekend running their night for free while I was in my late 20s, about to get married and I didnt have that energy. I did that with punk when I was 14 but I couldnt do it again. So I backed off.
But with a lot of DJs if they can articulate themselves in music then they may be able to do it in words as well. I think that DJing could well be the sun thats in the middle whole all the other things, writing, producing, choreography and many others could be around the world of DJing. I think that more people just love to DJ but their prime skill maybe outside of it.
DRE: Were you surprised when the Limelight closed?
TF: No not at all. It was crashing and again it comes down to the drugs again. Im sure many of us have experimented with a lot of things and I think thats an important part of discovery. You should open your doors of perception. I think everyone in the world should take ecstasy at least a couple of times.
DRE: Im scared of ecstasy.
TF: Then you might be doing the right thing for yourself. I think you should but having seen creative people like Michael Alig and Peter Gatien move on to bad drugs like heroin and Special K and lose all grip on reality. If you have a grip on reality you want to get as far away from that as possible.
I was scared heroin and Special K so I never tried them. For my mind there was a dividing line between what you can control and what can control you. I chose to not cross that line. There are people who can do that and come back and of course some people who cross that line and dont come back.
DRE: There are of sex and drugs in the book did you have to tone it down at all?
TF: Not by much maybe by two or three percent. There a few things my agent mentioned but I stuck by them. I think what really concerned me was when I did a first draft was that the hardcore sex stuff should be plausible and be in the book for a reason not just to be gratuitous. I think when I edited the book for the UK I added in two more sex scenes [laughs].
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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sweeeeeeeet