“If people know Them! and Goats, I think it makes sense,” Ronson says, sipping tea in the suite of his Dublin hotel. “I’m just doing to myself what I do to other people. It’s quite easy and comforting to go off and say, ‘Look at that person, he’s fucking nuts,’ but it’s almost like sedating yourself against your own life, which I suppose is why people watch ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ and stuff. I think it’s quite important to keep writing about this stuff, even if sometimes you do come in for criticism for being too middle class or whatever. People who are very political think, ‘Why waste your time writing about little things that affect people on a daily basis?’ when you should be fighting the system.”

Thing is, if Orwell were around, he’d be documenting what Kavanagh called ‘the miasma of the middle classes’. Even grand old dystopians like JG Ballard have for the last decade aimed their socio-satirical brickbats at the gated estates. Modern life is insane. Professional 30-something parents driving their offspring half a mile to school in monstrous SUVs while agonising over obesity levels. Or barricading themselves inside kid-friendly compounds and wondering why their spawn grow up spoiled rotten and utterly bereft of horse-sense or social skills.

“Or £12,000 a year just to keep a kid in some crappy private school,” adds Ronson.

The school he’s referring to crops up in the book’s key chapter ‘Blood Sacrifice’, where the writer draws unfavourable parallels between the mind control techniques of The Jesus Christians, a religious cult he’d investigated, and the sinister insularity of the private school his son attended for a time.

“That school was horrible,” Ronson says. “A lot of it was to do with fear of kids who live on council estates, it just chills you to the bone. And it’s real. The fact that you have kids in this shite fucking private school, stuck inside this horrible bubble, and then you go into another bubble which is your Land Rover, and then you take them home to the third bubble, which is a big Georgian house. And there’s a council estate behind the Georgian house where you hear all the kids playing together, but the kids in the Georgian house are stuck on their own. And they’re saying that David Icke is nuts! That’s why I wanted to write this stuff. I wonder if there’s a whole book in it?”

Most certainly. It’s the metropolitan English equivalent of ‘The Stepford Wives’. Secular daylight horror is perhaps more subversive than its rural religious equivalent, mainly because it’s where so many of us live these days. As Ed Power pointed out in his recent Bloc Party album review, the majority of the planet’s population now resides in urban and suburban territories.

“My wife is sort of encouraging me to write about that stuff,” Ronson admits. “She likes ‘Them!’ ’cos she likes the way it’s written, but she sees it as a sort of boys’ book, it doesn’t really talk to her. But we live in a weird mixed area where you’ve got people from all classes, and the really posh ones are so dysfunctional, they’re like the stuff I write about, but times a hundred. We’d go to their houses for dinner, and I’d say, ‘What a lovely coat’ and they’d say, ‘It’s perfect for the school run on a crisp autumn morning.’ And I’d say, ‘Did you go anywhere nice on holidays?’ and they’d say, ‘We went to the Bahamas; the children played barefoot in the sand.’ Everything they say is about how they think they appear to other people, so they’re seeing themselves from the perspective of passers by happening to notice their perfectness. That is a fucking weird way to live your life! Kind of aesthetic lunacy. Like Leni Riefenstahl’s films. Isn’t that what Hitler was all about? ‘We must look fabulous!’”

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.

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.