NASTY BUT NICE…

‘Here Comes The Nice’ and ‘Piccadilly Bongo’ by Jeremy Reed (Chomu Press, £11.99)

Screw the No-cult Noughties, all X-Factor, no sex-factor and spray-tan tarts. Really, why shag when mystique, charisma and chic don’t mean sizzling seduction but empty, unwarranted first names?

Frankly, 21st century shagging – no matter what with –is more mundane than Lady Gaga’s magpie muse. So no wonder hot-shot, maverick poet and omnisexual flaneur Jeremy Reed has seized on Mod(ernism), the first seminal, genuine youth-quake of the swinging 60s, as his metaphysical hard-on par excellence.

Not surprisingly, spunk – implied or actual- splatters every page of Here Comes The Nice, Reed’s latest novel. A masterly hymn to pop-art, gay male narcissism, it’s centred on the Face, a brooding, insouciant dandy who addictively trolls the ‘Dilly meat-rack for rent. “Faces didn’t need girls,” Reed states, “they were above them, and prettier and somehow untouchable…”

Definitively nailing 1964’s heady youth cocktail of speed, sex and deliberately alienated style, Reed’s simply superb on the peacock allure of pop, his ecstatic thumbnails of the Rolling Stones, Small Faces and Who classics of their kind.

Obviously first-hand, there’s a raw heat to his evocation of then-illegal, gay rules of attraction that makes his literary rivals read like castrated clowns. But – and it’s a huge, wobbling, Divine-at-his-biggest “butt” – Reed nearly shoots his load to no purpose with an ultra-complex, neo-sci-fi plot.

Frantically mashing an obsessive, Mod appreciation of gay clothes designer, John Stephen, channeled through Paul, a features writer haunted both by the period and an apparently immortal, time-travelling mod, the Face, Reed also factors in an incipient, London civil war between returning, Iraqi war veterans and rogue bankers.

If no easy read, but a stylistic tour de force, the book’s also irritatingly hampered at times by a po-faced, linguistic pedantry and an often toe-curling, tin ear for naturalistic dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, when Reed hits the spot he’s superb, but too-poetic precision and stiff, essay erudition often skew his magnificent, methedrine miasma of dawning gay pride, nostalgia and loss.

It’s a tonal problem far less intrusive in Piccadilly Bongo, Reeds’s latest poetry suite, bundled with a CD of ‘Soho Songs’ by Marc Almond. With lines like ‘Poetry needs a ritual suicide/A scarlet fry-up like a post-op sunset’ and ‘Poets should be like HIV carriers to society/undercover agents spraying vision across the walls of corporate giants’, he’s at his best as petulant, post-modern provocateur and zeitgeist addict.

Still, poetry works best as spoken word, and Reed’s current performance option, The Ginger Light, with sound landscapist Itchy Ear (check the net for dates) is an ideal entry point to this fizzingly ambitious, 21st century Jean Genet. Face it, if you like your Soho, sick, fried and torch-song’d, and thronged with gorgeous, rent-boy ghosts, Piccadilly Bongo – with Marc Almond in fabulously elegiac form – should top your illicit pleasures ASAP!

 4/5

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