But Walsh is neither PC pornographer, chick-lit peddler with a Loaded bent, nor frothing feminist. Huddled in her coat here in Buswell’s hotel, she just a writer on the publicity trail, a 26-year-old Malaysian-English beauty more likely to be seen spread across the pages of Arena than Pencil Sharpener’s Monthly sure, but a hardcore (in the textual as much as sexual sense) writer nonetheless. ‘Sheepshagge’r author Niall Griffiths describes ‘Brass’ as working on the reader “like a binge or a spree – by the time you realise you’re on one, it’s too late; you’re captured, trapped and transfixed by a horrible fascination as to how and when it’s going to end.”

And while it’s not what you might call the most intricately plotted novel of recent times, the depth of characterisation and the sheer drive of the language make for a pretty intense and at times gutter-poetic reading experience – as befits a book with a Rimbaud quote for an epigraph.

Ask how an adolescent girl developed a taste for literature normally associated with bohemian males at least a decade older, and she says this:

“I think the crossover book was (Barry Hines’)’ A Kestrel For A Knave,’ which was the first kind of grown up book that I read. I was always big on Enid Blyton, I had every single one of her books, but up until recently I’ve never picked up a book by a woman. It’s not been a conscious thing – it’s just the books I grew up with were books by men. I started off with Steinbeck and Hemingway and then progressed onto Selby, then I was introduced to ‘Trainspotting,’ Bukowski, and then Fante. A lot of them at that time were getting picked up by Rebel Inc, I’ve got nearly all the Rebel Inc books at home which I’ve collected from being a teenager.”

Given that the Scottish chemical generation laureates had a kinship with the hard boiled exponents of pre and post-war noir, plus the kind of titles published by the Olympia Press in Paris in the 60s, Walsh is right at home on the Canongate roster, a publishing house that has managed to establish a direct bloodline from Miller, Celine et al right through to Caledonian practitioners such as Alexander Trocchi, Irvine Walsh, Janice Galloway, Alan Warner . . .

“(James) Kelman,” she adds. “I was about 13 or 14, and to know that kind of literature existed, my whole world just burst open. And then I got speaking to people who put me onto the likes of Bukowski and Fante; that was the thing that made me want to write. I always kept a journal, but I always found the likes of Austen and all the famous classic women not so much impenetrable, but just didn’t relate them to my everyday experience and understanding of life. And although ‘Last Exit To Brookly’n was set in the late 50s, early 60s, it was great to discover that pocket of literature. And I’m sure there was even more underground and darker stuff at the time.” In ‘Brass,’ the main protagonist Millie is an unapologetically rapacious and sexually predatory young woman. Curiously enough, the rhythms of her language bear more resemblance to famous passages written by men utilising the female voice – Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of ‘Ulysses,’ the harrowing ‘Tra La La’ section of Selby’s ‘Last Exit’ – than most women writers per se. Walsh will deny that Millie is aping male behaviour, yet acknowledges that few women write with the sort of alpha-female instincts you can see in any city centre bar or nightclub on a Saturday night.

“In terms of women, the only female novelist recently that I discovered was Maggie Estep,” she says, “you really should dig out her book ‘Soft Maniacs.’ There’s a lot of women characters in her book that do real male arcane things, but it’s presented in a non-sensationalist, non-titillating way and it’s so normal, it’s such a part of the everyday landscape that it’s legitimised. But it’s interesting you know, I hate to use this kind of gender access, but most women, apart from Natasha Walters who loved it, I’ve had a real public stoning from feminists and women’s rights groups. But the thing is, I never set out to write a political novel, and that was the whole thing of Millie’s character. The sex isn’t political, it’s just dirty and it’s crude and it’s animalistic and it’s about instinct and raw desire in the crudest sense; it’s fucking as opposed to . . . it hasn’t got a sociological access to it. But women want to criticise the sex and criticise Millie’s character and say it’s damaging to feminism.”

Why does she think that is?

“I don’t know. I think women are very frightened by that kind of sexuality. It’s such hypocrisy, because feminism is apparently about wanting the same rights as men, and you get a character like Millie who runs in a very male world . . .

But she’s not a ladette. It’s not about swilling pints and acting like a rugger-bugger. She just has a taste for young women as well as older men.

“No, she’s totally not a ladette. But she doesn’t suffer guilt or think about the repercussions of sex in a way that a lot of women do and therefore restrain themselves and repress themselves. She’s just very honest and frank. I found when I did my first batch of interviews, journalists, especially the British press, and women, they’re so desperate to not so much pigeonhole you, but they don’t like you, in terms of your sexuality or gender, being slippery or evasive in any way.”

Well, hermaphrodite sea anemones don’t give a fuck.

“Exactly. But I don’t know, I mean, I grew up as a tomboy, my parents were fairly relaxed with that and it was only in adolescence that I became aware of two discreet genders, and from those genders there’s one sexuality. I kind of felt like a pariah for a lot of my adolescence ’cos I didn’t even like the word bisexual, I never saw myself as bisexual, as gay, as straight, never really saw myself as a girl but never saw myself as a boy either. I was always comfortable with my body, with my anatomy, but I still now find it very difficult to socialise and interact with girls, they just freak me out, they frighten me so much, whereas with men I’m really relaxed. I just find women really different creatures.”

Maybe it’s because more women are attracted to other women than might care to admit.

“Do you know what though, I was having this exact conversation with a gay friend of mine last week in London, and he was saying that he thinks all that arguing – which really, really annoys me – that everyone’s got latent homosexual impulses, I just think of what my dad says to me, ‘I’ve never been attracted to a man, and it’s not repressed homosexuality.’ I believe him; I don’t question it. But popular culture for the last 20, 30 years, even more so in the last decade, has totally, totally made it so much more fashionable for women to indulge and experiment with other girls. Now if that had been the same thing for men, if it had been seen as something fashionable and alluring, I wonder if in today’s society there’d be a lot more men-on-men. ’Cos society is seen as on women’s side, society backs women in a very self-conscious way to experiment with other women, whereas it doesn’t do the same for men, and if it did would there would be more fluidity and transgression or is it just a biological thing?”

I’ve no answer for that. What I do know is one aspect of ‘Brass’ that has received praise from all quarters is its sex-scenes. “She has the best – as in the most honestly and evocatively described, not necessarily the highest quality – sex of any contemporary fictitious sex I’ve read,” wrote Zoe Williams in The Guardian. I concur, but I think the reason is not because of Walsh’s chosen subject matter, but her descriptive process. Anybody can have sex, do drugs and play rock ‘n’ roll; precious few can capture the experience in prose.

Portland writer Tom Spanbauer, author of ‘The Boy Who Fell In Love With The Moon,’ teaches in his Dangerous Writing classes that in order to evoke experiential sensations to their fullest, the writer must dispense with abstract adjectives and adverbs. ‘Piercing’ headaches and ‘searing’ pain just won’t cut it. He calls this process “going on the body”, in other words, unpacking each feeling into its component parts, employing as many of the five senses as is possible, evoking the protagonist’s thought processes and body language, every aspect of the experience. This technique is best exemplified by writers like Amy Hempel, JT LeRoy or ex-Spanbauer student Chuck Palahniuk. My point being, yes, the sex in Brass is good, but it’d be just as vividly evoked if Walsh were writing about the act of eating a watermelon. Check out the following passage in which Millie has a random encounter with a prostitute in a flat that looks “like the consulting room of a backstreet abortion clinic”:

“I kneel down behind her. The carpet is coarse and claws at my knees. I part the cheeks of her arse. I run a flat tongue over her cunt and lap her like a dog. She tastes vulgar – rubber and cunt juice and stale, stale sweat. I love it. As the lust in me swells, I have to refrain from asking about the bloke with the ponytail. Is this his spunk I can taste? What did you do? Did he fuck you up the arse? Did you suck his cock? Did he lick you like I am doing now? The images run amok in my head. Him forcing his cock into her tiny arse and fucking her hard and wild. Her cunt soaking, belying the face that feigns such apathy. I bet you love getting fucked don’t you? I bet you lie awake at night, wanking over your punters.”

Everybody says the British can’t write sex. Did Walsh think ‘this is good shit’ as she was writing some of the scenes in’ Brass?’

“Yeah,” she laughs.

Why? Did she get aroused?

“Yeah I did, totally. I mean, more so with the last sex scene with Sean, I was really, really kind of horned up about that. I dunno, I just found writing them so easy and they were the only parts of the novel that when I went back to them after finishing the manuscript, I never edited or honed or tweaked them. They were very crude and raw and I thought, ‘That’s how sex actually is.’ It is so raw and earthy and I wanted to leave those grammatical mistakes and leave it as it is . . . do you think it’s a given that boys are going to react differently, not so much empathise but sympathise with Millie’s character more?”

Maybe. But then, has she ever listened to bawdy blues singers like Ma Rainey?

“No. My dad’s got them all. She had a really fluid approach to sexuality as well, didn’t she?”

As did Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. And there’s that famous Lucille Brogan lyric ‘Shave ’Em Dry’ from 1935: “I got nipples on my titties/As big as the end of your thumb/I got something between my legs/Make a dead man come.” Or better yet: “Now your nuts hang down like a damn bell clapper/And your dick stands up like a steeple/Your goddam asshole stands open like a church door/And the crabs crawls in like people/Oooww . . . shit!”

Of course, now with Madonna-Britney-Christina sandwiches available at any corner deli, plus the kind of media bias Walsh mentioned earlier, girl-on-girl action is considered pretty mainstream. But there’s also been a surge in interest in the deviant impulses at work throughout history, particularly the London demimonde of a century ago, although one wonders how much of Sarah Waters’ lesbiana fiction is modern-day mores being back-projected onto the Victorian era.

“I don’t know if you’ve read any of Focault’s stuff,” Walsh says, “but he does a history of sexuality and he talks about the late 1800s where repression starts to seep into the morals and norms, but prior to that it was just far more progressive than we could ever hope to attain. And it wasn’t just confined to the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. You can read things from historical accounts of sex back then, and it was just open to everyone. It’s very much a class thing now in the UK, the upper class and middle classes don’t feel as repressed as the working classes. Which is totally different to how, say, my grandma’s generation were.”

One of the most refreshing aspects of ‘Brass’ is the almost total absence of sexual guilt. One suspects a lot of the flak Walsh has received comes from her non-PC stance (she claims that while at college she blew her first student loan in two weekends on lap dancing binges) and a refusal to approach the subject of prostitution from a moralistic standpoint or characterise sex-workers as victims-by-definition.

“I think that’s the defining part of, not so much Millie’s sexuality, but her personality more than anything,” she says. “She’s presented as a very, very pretty little waif, alabaster skin, bright brown eyes, very skinny, the kind of girl all men fall in love with and all women want to look after. And she would have no problem pulling a beautiful looking girl or a beautiful male. But she doesn’t even go to escorts, which she could afford. She goes to the lowliest kind of street waifs – in Liverpudlian terms, we call streetwalkers ‘brass’ – and I think that sets her apart, and a lot of those deviant impulses are brought out by drink and drugs.”

Walsh herself studied sex and deviance in her sociology module in college. At what point does she think a genuine fascination with that aspect of humanity becomes voyeurism, slumming it?

“Oh God. Are you talking about Millie’s character or . . .”

No.

“Em, I dunno, it’s such a flimsy line and I’ve crossed it so many times. Millie’s character is not an autobiographical projection, but there are parallels to be drawn and her experiences are coloured by a lot of mine. That whole self destructive thing is kind of brought about by the coalition of drink, drugs and whatever shit is happening in your life at the time, but when I’ve gotten into states where I’ve set out just from a purely voyeuristic point of view, I’ve gone to solitary drinking haunts in bad areas and listened in on conversations on what people are talking about, what people are wearing – sometimes there’s that danger of wanting to be part of the furniture. And there have been a few occasions when that’s happened, but I mean, not so much as you would think. I don’t take drugs anymore, and I think that’s always the point where it happens, it just breaks down inhibitions.”

Walsh started to lose her inhibitions at the age of 13 in Warrington at the height of the rave scene in the summer of 1990, where a local club called Legends became her life’s locus point. She recently wrote about this period for the Observer monthly music magazine, and it’s one of the finest evocations of the era I’ve read. Being a pubescent girl on the scene, was she ever in danger?

“It’s a really difficult one to argue,” she considers. “A lot of people ask me, ‘Do you think you were lucky, or just worldly, very mature for that age?’ but I dunno, there’s been a couple of occasions of that whole decade of indulgence and abuse and self destruction where I almost came to some harm, but I just kind of sailed through that period unscathed.”

After the decline of the rave era, Walsh became involved with a few dodgy boyfriends and got into shoplifting designer clothes, pick pocketing and hovering up coke. She left town for reasons she usually prefers not to discuss, but it doesn’t take a genius to work it out: young doe-eyed E-head gets involved with the Class A crowd, next stop, a big fat drug debt and no means of paying it off. She fetched up in Barcelona, befriended a transvestite called Angel, worked as a ‘fixer’, introducing johns to prostitutes, and took her first female lover. Soft landing? “Initially yeah, but the same kind of things happened again,” she says. “I mean, as a young girl I saw it as an inalienable right that people gave me drugs and gave me things ’cos they thought I was this nice bolshy kid who was getting away with it. As I got older people weren’t so lenient or protective, it was kind of, stand on your own two feet. And that was one of the reasons for me leaving Barcelona.”

Walsh returned to Liverpool and attended university, scoring the highest sociology mark in eight years. An unsatisfactory stint in London at a film and literary agency left her feeling isolated and disillusioned, so she moved back home to live with her mother. There followed a cycle of drunken sprees, blackouts, depression, self-mutilation, and eventually, nine months of writing the karmic get-out-of-jail-free card that was ‘Brass’ at her mother’s kitchen table. She’s now working with socially excluded teenagers in North Liverpool and writing her second novel, having swapped E’s and whiz for the buzz of prose.

“It was only when I got to 17 or 18 that I kind of woke up to the fact that, ‘Christ, I’d really been flirting with dangerous men but I’ve gotten away with it and I can’t get away with it any longer,’” she says. “So of course when it came to paying up time and I had to go out and buy my own cocaine I thought, ‘Sod it, I’d rather give up!’”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.