mThrough the firecracker of his debut from 2020’s The Young Team, Graeme Armstrong takes the reader from protagonist Eazy’s pre-party pharmaceutical preparation, through the resulting mysterious abandonment and euphoria, and the inevitable crash back to Earth. The narrative of distressed humor is a welcome update of Kingsley Amis’s beer-soaked anxiety in Lucky Jim. All this, set against the fraught backdrop of teenage turf wars in working-class Airdrie, near Glasgow, earned Armstrong a place in the 2023 Granta Best Young British Novelists list.
You would think there was nothing more to say on the subject of outlaw raves, but in his second novel he doubles down on it, abandoning social patience for cartoonish political satire. Narrator William Patterson, aka DJ Turbo, has a regular gig spinning discs for children at an ice rink, until a new political party gains power in Britain, demanding a return to civilized values and promising to end moral decadence. High on the agenda is a complete ban on electronic music and its associated youth gatherings. Freedom, fun and independent thinking are disliked. Suddenly out of work, Turbo becomes Scotland’s least enthusiastic data-input clerk while secretly plotting a rebellion.
Whereas the Young team favors linear prose presented in a vigorous Scots dialect, here verbal simplicity is prioritized over plot, with digressions, rants, handy guides to street drugs and pages of script-like dialogue. The set of characters is presented as a list with nicknames, long descriptions, and favorite soundtracks. Turbo’s lustful co-worker Jessica is represented by Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, Strawberry Switchblade’s Since Yesterday and Spellbound by Siouxsie and The Banshees; The key visuals come with a suggested techno anthem for fans. The story involves real and fictional DJs.
Taking inspiration from Scottish hero William Wallace, Turbo enlists his crew – Phish, Orbit, Section B and, reluctantly, his own “mellow brother” Rab to form the Scottish Techno Pirates with wild plans for a campaign of civil disobedience. With predictable controversies over methods, particularly the use of violence, other groups rapidly form around them. The dairy product-chucking milkshake marauders are generally useless, while the Wiccan, Plath-raving Scottish hardcore coven can only be relied upon for backup. Meanwhile, Rab is critical about his brother’s fitness to lead: “Oot aye the size, thick as toast, and life aye in feddin’ glory aye young team’s veteran stories…Yee need to organize yourself, William.”
Although its patchwork, accretive structure varies wildly, there are plenty of common references with the previous book; We’re in the same world of JPS fags, bottles of “Tonic” (Buckfast Tonic Wine) and Tennent’s cans, and meticulously precise style notes. Revolution will be fashionable. Paired with “a vintage khaki Stone Island smock, baggy cargo pants, n chunky fluorescent Hoka trainers” (for a lassie) and “2004-5 salmon pink and black Juventus trackies” are Berghaus shells set against the ubiquitous Rangers and Celtic “taps” and ever-present Glasgow drizzle.
There is a melancholy sense of the passing of time as Turbo reluctantly recognizes that he is now at the end of his illustrious career. Like Ezzie in The Young Team, she realizes that it’s not that the drugs don’t work anymore; In your 30s you are more aware of mortality and physical loss. Furthermore, “the stagnation of taste is real. Your finger slips off the pulse and new names and faces come up, while you cling to familiar, past things already done and done.” (That trackie, for example.) “Then we did our time in the sun, and as it magically arrived, ascension ended on your hurtle towards the Earth, the altitude loss, torso disintegration, brace fur effect.”
There are hilarious bits of abuse against hipsters, incomers and posh English students, yet for all the sledgehammer satire, sensitivity permeates the narrative. Armstrong’s own references include Milton, Dante, the Bible, Apocalypse Now, and of course, Braveheart, with its striking cover art featuring Robert Burns as Che Guevara. Turbo is a less fleshed-out character than Eazy, and the plot gets lost in the pile of information, but Armstrong’s passion for the subculture is infectious, even to the uninitiated. Beyond the glow sticks and beats lies the compelling and universal question of what it means to be fully alive.
