Trevor Hoyle Rock Fix (Futura, 1977)

I’m no expert but this has to be among the best rocksploitation novels of the seventies. Hoyle was author of Rule of Night (track down to May 9th 2019 entry to see what I have to say on that) a novel that puts weight without pretension on the boover boy cycle of pulp originals. Rock Fix effortlessly aims to do the same with the pop exposé.

This is the story of The Black Knights, five northern lads on an endless grind of working men’s watering holes – Hanlan’s Drop Forgings’ Social Club among the more memorable – whose fortune changes for the better (or maybe not) when they meet the pint-sized Phil Martins who helps them get hit records, adulation and drug addictions. The price of fame is high and payment is not long deferred.

Hoyle has an easy almost invisible style to his writing, he’s unobtrusive with a sharp eye for detail, especially the everyday. Past midnight at the Dornan Hotel, Scarborough, the band try getting something to eat:

‘Would a sandwich do?’ the woman said, placing two keys attached to numbered blocks of wood on the desk.
‘Yes. Thank you. What kind have you got?’
‘Cheese,’ the woman sad, and stared him out.
‘I’ll have cheese,’ Ric said.
‘Make mine cheese,’ Dave said.
‘Can I have cheese?’ Andy inquired.
‘Cheese for me,’ Johnnie said.
‘What about you?’ the woman said.
‘Pardon’ Dice said.
‘Do you want a sandwich?’
‘Yes.’ Dice said. He fixed upon her a beautiful smile.
‘Cheese.’

The sandwiches are made of sliced white bread, Stork margarine and Kraft cheese slices and there’s not even a tin of Tartan bitter to help sluice it down.

When the band cut their first record they undergo a name change – God’s Gift – are restyled – white suits – and given a marketing angle to match the theme of their single about a northern girl in search of the bright lights who ends up working the streets. A promotional film and the problem of getting such material on TOTPs is discussed:

It’s time they did something with a bit of gut feeling instead of all those films of pooves walking through forest glades with sunlight in the branches,’ Norman Fowler said. He sat forward. ‘That’s the tack we’ll take. Social realism. A band with something important to say, a moral viewpoint. Get clean away from all this glam-glitter crap and hit them with a social statement. I can see it coming together – a Dylan-style approach but relevant to the ‘seventies. Social problems. Social statements. Social commitment.

No doubt written before punk had claimed any public attention, Hoyle puts the politics of the Edgar Broughton Band into the pop mainstream but then reveals the shallowness of the conceit when the band confect a four part concept album and their management talk of an American tour supporting Jethro Tull.

In keeping with the cover image, there’s lots of sex talk (and some action). Most of it takes place in the back of the band’s van, sometimes in an alley. It is always coarse and desperate stuff, no love, no romance, no sentimentality. Hoyle captures the group’s casual misogyny and racism, which he never overtly condemns, but leaves the reader with little doubt where he stands on such commonplace matters.

There’s no rock ‘n’ roll flash on display here, no Bowie or Bolan stars in the making, just working-class lads bonding together on stage and at the bar in the Sunderland Boilermaker’s Club who almost get what they wanted.

‘Come on, let’s drift.’

Despite being republished in 2003, Hoyle’s novel about a Rochdale bovver boy is still little known and even less written about. Originally published as a pulpy paperback by Futura, and though lacking the requisite exploitation imagery used by NEL on their Skinhead series, you would have thought it would have at least rated a mention in Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette’s estimable Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980 (PM Press, 2017). Fact is, Rule of Night is anything but an exploitation title. It is by far the most convincing portrait of disaffected youth I have read; its depiction of working-class school leavers who lurch from one unskilled job to another is nuanced and subtle. Hoyle plots their endless drift around the town and excursions to Manchester and Luton, watching them getting drunk and blocked between the chance encounters that give vent, in spasms of gratuitous violence, to their balled-up anger.

*Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980*

The central character, Kenny owes nothing whatsoever to the romantic renderings of teen life essayed in S. E. Hinton or J. D. Salinger novels, and Hoyle shows little interest in the pop sociology approach taken by the authors of Amboy Dukes or Blackboard Jungle. Rule of the Night is devoid of sentimentality, Hoyle never patronises, nor sensationalises, he doesn’t explain motives; he just shows how it is. His teenagers are barely formed, grasping for a maturity that constantly outflanks them, and so search for it in beer, fags, obscenity strewn language and violence:

He says sneeringly into the face of the man, ‘Did you get a good look or do you want a photograph?’ And then says, ‘Cunt’, and goes on repeating, Cunt. Cunt.’
Fucking Jesus, he wants to hit the man. Fucking Cunting Christ, the man’s pale frightened face sickens him so much that nothing would feel better than kneeing him in the bollocks and seeing that awful fear he loves and despises turn into pain.

And that search for maturity is also there in the kids’ desperate longing:

Skush is the quiet one; he drinks his pint slow and calm and waits for the others to make up their minds. He’s never been out with a girl, never had it . . . and now wonders if it’s possible to get his end away without the acute pain and torture of having to approach a girl, talk to her, make easy conversation while all the time his lips are numb and his throat squeezed tight and dry.

Beyond the rich and varied characterisation, Hoyle makes a number of sharp observations on youth cultures; a small gang of Bury yobbos dressed as figures from Clockwork Orange infiltrate a Rochdale v Blackburn game; away from the terraces greasers and bike boys take their turn to fight with Kenny and his gang. On a trip into Manchester to sell stolen prescription drugs they encounter a motley crew of Teds at the Bier Keller on Charlotte Street, behind the Piccadilly Plaza Hotel:

Down the green steps and into the dark smoky warmth where the Teds are gathered in sullen groups listening to Gene Vincent and Fats Domino and Elvis. . . The three lads don’t respond to this kind of music: to them it seems crude and obvious . . . But there’s a market and a good sale to be had here for blues and black bombers; the Teds won’t touch acid or grass but rely on lager and pills to give them a charge.

A page earlier they are trying to off load their pills at a northern soul night. The momentarily empty dance space is described as ‘a sacred patch of territory which can only be invaded when the time and circumstances are judged right . . :

Almost precisely on the stroke of nine, a boy with short back and sides and dressed in an open-necked shirt, blue and yellow striped pullover, a pair of baggy trousers with turn-ups, and brown leather shoes with hard soles begins to dance alone . . . looking down at his feet, intent on the movements and rhythms, as though what comes next is as much a surprise to him as to the people watching.

That image of the lad in a state of surprise is unsurpassed in writings on northern soul dancing.