An Introduction to Niall Griffiths and Interview.
By Malcolm Paul.
Niall Griffiths is in my opinion one of the most talented contemporary writers in Great Britain at the present time.
Certainly one of the most original authors putting a pen to paper nowadays.
Consistently excellent since his groundbreaking debut novel ‘Grits’ in 2000, Niall has carried on delivering some of the most innovative, daring and uncompromising fiction in what is often a stuffy/tame UK literary scene.
Stuffy/tame are definitely not appropriate ways to describe Niall’s style and depiction of life in modern day Britain.
A bleak place indeed where we, like Niall’s characters, often struggle to hold mind and body together as fate shows all the compassion of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre unleashed.
His last book ‘Of Talons and Teeth’ (2023) was no exception to a long list of exemplary works including ‘Sheepshagger’, ‘Stump‘, ‘Wreckage’, ’Runt‘, ‘Grits’ and the iconic ‘Kelly and Victor‘, which was turned into a successful film directed by Kieran Evans in 2000.
(For a complete bibliography check out Niall’s webpage or Wikipedia.)
Niall was born in Toxteth Liverpool in 1966, but as his name suggests he has long traditional roots to what is now his permanent home in Wales.
Apparently at the foot of a mountain.
Niall’s family emigrated to Australia in 1976 but returned to the UK after Niall’s mother ”became homesick“.
Back in the UK Niall began falling foul of the law during his adolescence and was eventually sent away to ‘Outward Bound Centre’ at the age of just 15.
(A form of punitive remedy for juvenile offenders at the time akin to a modern day ‘Boot Camp‘ or ‘Short Sharp Shock‘ punishments.)
Niall was eventually sent on an Outward Bound course in Snowdonia, Wales.
An experience that was to have a profound effect on the young troubled mind – we can imagine a juvenile mind in need of another direction other than crime.
Reading about Niall’s awe and enlightenment faced with such life enhancing beauty brought to mind the painting ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich.
Where we see a man captivated by the magnificence of the scenery he’s gazing at in wonder.
The beauty of the countryside in that part of the United Kingdom proved to be an uplifting experience that refocused Naill’s mind and he then went into further education gaining a University Degree in English.
After taking an assortment of menial jobs Niall enrolled in a PhD Course in post War Poetry that he chose not to complete.
He then went decisively into the next phase of his life and became a full-time writer.
Niall’s books often depict dysfunctional people in hellish situations, at best trying to get out of them, and if miracles are on the menu, find some kind of salvation/redemption from a chaotic existence.
Just as Anton Newcombe succinctly points out:
“The motherfuckers never try to stop drilling holes in your head.”
The meaning of life?
Like slogans painted on GIs helmets in Vietnam.
“Yeah, though I walk through the valley of evil, I shall fear no death… ‘Cause I’m the meanest motherfucker in the valley!”
“Griffith’s language is lyrical, brutal and startling.” (Guardian)
“Sexual Freedom”
“The vilest, most disgusting book I’ve ever read. No question. The sheer depravity of this book floored me. It is grim and nihilistic… but so are the agonies of poverty and drug addiction. This is hell in book form”
(Goodreads reader)
“Make love not War”
“Set against a backdrop of urban despair, spiritual absence and a world swamped with pornography, this is a novel about yearning for union, for purity, and for magic and mystery in a world that denies them all. And it is, above everything, a love story – or all that 21st century Britain will allow of one.”
(Penguin on Kelly and Victor)
“Born to breed“
“Phyllis
Rhonda
Kathy
Judy“
“Bring ‘em back alive…”
Characters in Neill’s novels often adhere to outsider’s gospels written in Life’s combat zone.
Short and to the point as if you were chalking your last words on a combat jacket, in case you couldn’t speak at the end of your last day.
“GO
GO LET ME FUCKING GO
is this sleeping
Is this death“
“What is it is it
Let me rebuild myself “
(Kelly and Victor)
The Poet:
‘RUBBING THE LAMP’
“If a man came through the door
with his eyes rimmed with blood
wearing a terry- cloth dressing gown
his hair in fire
& carrying a gun
then me, my rat & my spiders
would have some to write about “.
Red Roar (pun intended!) is one of the most jaw droppingly excellent collections of poems I’ve read in a lifetime of reading poetry.
“Brutal”, “Raw“ and “Uncompromising“ are comments from the appraising critics.
I hope that Niall continues to write poetry.
(I believe he still does.)
His skill and mastery of the craft is inspirational and his imagination soars off every page.
Niall has often commented on paper and in recorded interviews that he personally – like some of his characters in his books like ‘Broken Ghost‘ – can find mystery and meaning in the beauty of
nature and our interaction with it.
I have heard Niall speak in wonder of a spider’s web in the morning, the wild rugged beauty
of Wales, the seasons and the weather.
As if hope and redemption could be embodied in anything it would be as a part of the sky, bone and Soul of Nature.
It’s as if you walk out of the door of your ‘domestic bunker’, you walk into the crossfire of just trying to survive from day to day, but with a bit of Cosmic luck and the intervention of good Karma and the ’I Ching’, perfect cloud formation and Niall’s favourite read the King James Bible, we can actually just might make it through the day in one piece.
Or end up in one of Niall Griffiths unforgettably good books staring down the twin barrels of a plot to die for.
Many times Niall has been asked if his own self-confessed dissolute life in the past conflates with the desperate lives of his many characters whose hedonistic out-of-control lifestyles fuelled by drugs, drink and transgressive sex are all cooked up together like ‘crack rock’ and smoked through a literary pipe.
Niall knocks that idea on the head neatly:
“I won’t go into this too much here, because I prefer to prism it through fiction”.
Read on.
Interview with Niall Griffiths.
In a recent email exchange I had with you Niall, I quoted from an interview I did with the author Toby Litt in March 2024.
I would like to share.
It went like this: Subject Toby’s Beat novel ‘Beatniks’: Beat Influences.
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MP: Your critics, at least some and unfairly I feel, thought Beatniks was going to be and
English version of On the Road. How did you feel about that?
TL: Well, I think I subtitled it ‘An English Road Movie’. I wanted it to be read alongside On the Road, but to show all ways in which we English fall short of the wild, open, hip beatnik dream. We have a fundamentally different sense of space. We’re Europeans, and that’s like being born with a number of deaths in the family.
You meet people like Neal Cassady occasionally, but they’ve got nowhere to go! I’m speaking only for England. I think Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland are each different. Niall Griffiths’ early novels have something of the Beat in them. And Alan Warner’s ‘Morvern Callar’.
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- Q) What do you think Toby meant by that?
Do you think Toby was just referring to the geographical space in Wales – your home?
(A minor version of a vast American landscape indeed)
Or do you think he was referring to a portrayal of marginalized characters in your novels, who are to put it bluntly, a bit “fucked up”, seemingly lost on some existential rollercoaster ride, but at the same time trying to find something – perhaps themselves – through a self destructive – transcendental sic journey?
Or do you think my interpretation/speculation is way off? Any comments?
- A) I think that yes, Toby was referring more to a sensibility; the search for meaning, for transcendence, that characterises some Beat writing, rather than the depicted journeyings (that said, tho, I was aware that, with Stump, I was writing a kind of road novel). I wouldn’t want to cite the Beats as a particularly powerful influence on my work, to be honest; of course I read them in my teens and early 20s, and what they represented lifestyle-wise chimed with something inside myself but I think I was aware, even then, that much of the writing they produced was self-indulgent nonsense, and really only relevant in a historically deterministic kind of way. When I revisit them now, I often wince. And cringe. They fulfil a young man’s appetites in certain ways (and I’ve yet to meet a woman who reveres them). Sooner Kerouac than Andrew Tate, of course, although that ridiculous twat will probably spend his final years just as Jack did; getting bitterly drunk with his Ma. I don’t bridle at the comparison, or take any kind of umbrage, but as I say, the influence is slight.
- Q) In much the same way the Beats careered across the American landscape, while experimenting with ‘transgressive sex’ (not quite sure what that means nowadays), drug taking hedonism and a Zen transcendence.
Something Eastern?
Do you think Toby after reading Beats saw that connection in your early writing?
Besides that, there aren’t exactly any road trips in your novels as far as I remember.
- A) Well, as I say, there’s Stump, but that’s about it. The transgression, the willed outsider-dom, the rejection of insultingly unfulfilling mores and norms…that’s more important.
- Q) When did you start writing? Was it in your teens?
If so, what did you write?
- A) I started writing as a child, pretty much from the moment my motor functions had developed sufficiently to hold a pen. I don’t really know why; my childhood homes were bookless, but they were stuffed with stories, thrilling, strange, exciting stories of Old Countries and wars and ghosts in the telling of which the world seemed to make sense. My grandparents’ knees were the flames in the cave. Listening to and telling tales was a way of both enhancing the terrible oddness of the world and constructing mechanisms to cope with it.
- Q) You started being published in the year 2000 at the age of 34.
Do you have a bottom draw full of unpublished novels?
Or as I suspect you were very busy living life to the full? To put it delicately.
- A) I had the manuscripts of a couple of unpublished things but now they’re in the archives of the National Library of Wales, and thank the Lord for that; had they been published, I’d spend far too much energy disowning them. I later cannibalised them, a little, and no doubt they contained the seeds of what was to come, but I regard them as I might regard a son or daughter who voted for Brexit or who admires Trump. Or, even worse, listens to Coldplay.
- Q) A Ming vase question if you don’t mind me asking.
Was it a life of excess? Novels, ‘Forward’ and poems in ‘Red Roar’ would suggest so.
- A) It was, yes. Dissatisfaction, the outdoor rave scene, dismay, the burning needs concomitant with being working class and creative in a world that seemed to want to disallow that combination. I won’t go into this too much here, because I prefer to prism it through fiction, but it’s nice that, after particularly intense bingeing, I would reappear in the world not only with a sense of loss and green gunge on the end of my dick and flecks of blood on the toilet paper, but also the blueprint for a novel.
- Q) Do you think we also find that recovery is a very individual experience?
I don’t just mean addiction – yes chiefly – but also a dependance of a very chaotic dysfunctional lifestyle.
How do we break free from something so overwhelming? What do you think?
- A) Speaking personally, I’m finding it impossible to break completely free and I always have. It’s the buzz in the blood and the brain, that feeling of being awfully alive; how can that be totally denied? Of course, it’s the harm that we do to others that creates a brake and stay, that reins us in and curtails certain behaviours, but, and let me be totally candid here, I’ve practiced the art of apology over many years and also the skill of persuasive promise that part of me knows will be broken. It’s quite a hopeless state of affairs, yes. I can’t disagree. But these flames inside. Luckily, I find the act of writing intoxicating and thrilling and it makes me feel vulnerable and excitedly alive so I can use that as an ersatz drug. But how do we break free? I don’t know that we ever entirely do. It’s the eternal mystery: why do we throw ourselves into hurricanes and maelstroms when all we really want is peace? (Forgive me if I’ve already used that question).
- Q) Were you a big reader at home? Did you read any of the Beats? If so, which ones?
Books like Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ or William Burroughs ‘Naked Lunch’?
Poetry by the Beats such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder?
The author CJ Stone said in an interview with me a while back:
“The Beat writer who has most effect on me would be William Burroughs, but this would be more because of his approach to writing, his writing style, than anything else. I read Cities of the Red Night much later. There’s something in the way he puts words together. The writings are almost like spells, or invocations. They come alive in your mind in an almost visceral, sometimes repulsive, way. He’s fucking with your brain in a way that almost no other writer can do.”
If you read Burroughs – would you agree with CJ?
- A) As I say, I don’t want to get too much into the Beat stuff here. And, God, how do their personalities stand up now? Too many of them were misogynist (especially Burroughs). The Crowley-esque ‘do what thou wilt’ produced intra-personal cruelties. Ginsberg was a pederast. It was a movement of its time.
- Q) As Brian Patten once said in an interview with me, he was “attracted to the ordinary language of the man, woman on the street”.
Do you feel the same way as Brian?
- A) Yes. I agree with this. ‘Ordinary language’ contains rhythm, simile, metaphor, all the ingredients of what might be termed (by tossers) ‘higher registers’. This is a rich and kaleidoscopic language. This nonsense that ‘ordinary’ people speak in iambic pentameter or something – no they fucking dont; that’s the comment of a working-class classicist terrified of being seen as drifting too far away from their roots. But there’s a particular power to this ‘ordinary’ (God, can we find another word here?) demotic, yes.
- Q) Do you have any writers who influenced your style of writing?
Selby? Trocci? You have mentioned them in the past as writers you admired.
- A) Selby perhaps, and McCarthy, and several poets, but more Renaissance tragedians and the King James Bible. That supercharged language, drug-strength.
- Q) In your introduction to Jorg Fauser’s ‘’Raw Material’, you write critically about Charles Bukowski.
Is that a view you still hold?
“Much of Bukowski’s work is mediocre. When he hits, he hits powerfully, but all too often he misses by a mile”
- A) Yep, I still hold this view. With him, tho, it’s vital that you encounter the more prosaic, workaday material alongside the mightier stuff; it’s all of a piece. It’s all his voice. You finish one of his collections with the feeling that you’ve just spent time with a certain kind of individual; rambling and egotistical and self-absorbed but with flashes of searing insight and word-flight. Often boring, occasionally uplifting and inspiring. That’s his persona. Like spending time with a cat. Never wasted.
- Q) Your Wikipedia entry mentions you reading ‘Alexander Trocci’ and ‘Herbert Selby’.
Herbert Selby in my opinion is criminally underrated.
Alexander Trocci is comparable only to William Burroughs. Trocci was an avant garde innovative writer of international standing who was claimed/loved by both Beats and the Situationists.
If I viewed those two excellent authors as bookends I would imagine there was a lot more alternative literature sandwiched between the bookends being read by a younger Niall Griffith.
Is that true?
- A) Well, to be honest, when I was younger, I had no idea what kind of writing was out there; all that spoke to me, really, were a few Americans and, in the UK, Kelman and Ron Berry. The Oxbridge set might as well have been speaking Plutonian. It was only when I fell under the tutelage of the sadly missed John James that I was introduced to alternative voices in anthologies like Albion Rovers etc: Tom Pickard, especially, became influential. But my bookshelf, as a boy, really consisted of the Rothman’s Football Year Book and the Guinness Book of Records.
- Q) I’m thinking if I had walked into your flat, bedsit or squat in those early years when you started writing what sort of books would be lying around?
Irvine Welsh? Brett Easton Ellis? Louis Ferdinand Celine?
Did you read pulp crime fiction?
Science fiction?
Colin Wilson?
- A) Definitely not Easton Ellis. Yuck, although ‘Less Than Zero’ made a small impression on me. Celine, yeah, and Bukowski, and various ‘underground’ pamphlets. Wilson I found strangely flimsy and I didn’t read Irvine until I was in my 30’s. I dunno, I was floundering, in literary taste as well as everything else.
- Q) Niall, I have just finished reading through the poems in ‘Red Roar’. (Red Raw!)
People describe them as being ‘brutal’, ‘raw’ and ‘startling’.
As a reviewer once wrote: “Within these pages you will find an unflinching document of a life lived raw, a mind that lights the darkest corners of existence and a voice that never ceases to ring anything other clear and bright and true.”
Niall when I read your poems and novels I thought to myself, how else could one describe a life lived in pain, despair and often hopeless chaos?
I lived that life once, so it’s so very tangible to me.
Lyricism is swept away by reality. Poems as sharp and crude as a prisoner’s shiv.
There can be no other way to describe such a life.
Could you reflect on that comment?
- A) I agree. To my mind, lyricism must accompany despair. There can be no other way. What’s the point, otherwise? And it’s in that exploration of the black pits that commonality can be found, a shared suffering, and language must recognise and reflect the strange beauty of that. It has to.
- Q) Niall if you have thoughts about how redemption might look and feel to you, could you share them, please?
- A) An understanding and acceptance that grief is the price we must pay for care. That we are joined by suffering. And that a colossal pity lies at the heart of all love.
I knew a guy who came off heroin, and he got through ‘cold turkey’ playing Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ over and over and over until he was through the worst. The red mist cleared.
- Q) Would you describe ‘Broken Ghost’ as a novel about redemption?
People finding their own way out of the mess they made of their lives, or had forced upon them?
- A) Yes I would, but it’s also about those forces that will not allow redemption; that view it, indeed, as a thing to be thwarted, oppressed. What, you have a soul that seeks and strives and yearns? Pfft. Forget such stuff. Know your place. Be a good little citizen. We’ll nail your hands and feet to this earthly plain.
- Q) Is it a metaphor that we all stare at a cloud formation and see something different – hang on to that – if it’s a symbol it’s our symbol/meaning that we want to hang on to as a key?
In the same way addicts experience their own recovery as a unique experience that works for them.
It’s encrypted for us alone. A key to a DNA that will allow us to live another way. Free of a mind and body enslaved.
‘Life Always Finds A Way‘
“Some morning soon
You will wake up
Throw of the blankets
Stumble yawning to the window
Slide open the curtains
&
See below you
A Guinness – head layer of ruffled cloud
Lit from beneath
With a lovely,pulsing,lilac light
& for once
You will not feel the urge
To climb back into bed”
NG
I think if I’d written all the poems in ‘Red Roar’, over the period of twenty years, I’d feel a real sense of achievement.
It’s a remarkable testimony to a life lived in extreme, but recorded with a beautiful forensic intensity, like
a blast of light through a stained glass window.
- A) That’s a beautiful thing to hear, thank you.
‘The Forward’ to’ Red Roar ‘is as powerful and introduction to a book of poetry you are ever likely to find – a crisis alert somewhere between a warning siren, and a slow bleed -a cri de coeur it’s so visceral.It almost needs saw dust on the floor to soak up pain.
- Q) Do you still write poetry?
If so, will we see another collection of poems like ‘Red Raw’ anytime soon?
- A) Yes, almost every day, and yes, hopefully. . .
- Q) I often found in my previous interviews with Brian Patten, Toby Litt, Gary Lucas and Carol Grimes that Bob Dylan’s name cropped up.
Were you a Dylan follower and did you have any connection with his lyrics? Were there any other song writers or band lyrics that you admired? If yes, who?
- A) I never really listened to Dylan until I was in my 20s, and still he’s not a large figure in my cultural life, and openly reading poetry as a kid would’ve earned me a beating. But punk shocked me into poetry; The Clash, Nick Cave, etc. I still get goosebumps every time I listen to ‘God Save the Queen’: that fury. Oh, and Tom Waits, now, and for many years. Musicians and singer/songwriters were always more important to me and influential on me than ‘proper’ poets. Which is not to say I don’t read a lot of poetry now: Geoffrey Hill’s massive collection, at the moment.
- Q) Do you still need that form of catharsis? Or are you now settled, able to reflect in peace?
- A) Jeez, I hope I never find the kind of peace out of which no poetry wants to be born. I want calm, not comfort. Transitory calm in which to produce the momentary stillness of a poem. I’ve been through some upheavals in my personal life of late and, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the world is convulsing in agony, so yeah, I still need those times alone, in a corner, with a pen and pad.
- Q) Niall, unless I’m mistaken, you don’t mention music a lot in your novels or poetry.
Is this because you are more focused on characters and events, rather than concerning yourself with a soundtrack?
If I’m wrong, please correct me.
- A) I think you’re wrong. In fact, I’m surprised at this comment! Music has always driven my work (indeed, certain songwriters are some of my biggest influences). Broken Ghost, for instance, is carried along by a soundtrack, to the degree that the central triumvirate of words that propel the plot – ‘dig and bridge and wild’ – come from songs (as the novel explains). The novel I’m working on right now is kind of constructed of three acts, each individually characterised by a certain genre of music. Growing up, music was a doorway into artistic endeavour. It’s an essential component of my armoury.
- Q) Apologies for getting that wrong. ‘Broken Ghost’ is indeed a book where music is important to the plot.
Does music play an important part in your life?
If there were tapes and albums stacked up in the corner of the room or scattered across the floor what would they have been?
Do you still keep all your old albums?
- A) Lots of punk and lots of psychobilly and, through those genres, their roots in rockabilly and bluegrass and stuff like New York Dolls, Suicide etc. My taste is very wide now. I haven’t kept my old albums, no, but my Spotify and Youtube playlists no doubt discombobulate the algorithms.
- Q) Do you listen to music when you are writing?
- A) No, just birdsong, but I’ll often play a song to fire myself up when I sit at my desk: something quite fiery and/or melancholic. Some might say this is histrionic, to which I’d say ‘yes. you’re right’, and I’d also say ‘so fucking what, it works’.
Q)Considering your poems in ‘Red Roar’ are short and like Mayakovsky’s ‘slap in the face’ poetry do you think you could either have written Punk lyrics, or had your poems accompanied by a 3 chord punk-like assault?
- A) Well, I was in a punk band as a teenager and wrote most of the lyrics. Initial forays into versifying, I guess; if I had called them poems, I would’ve been beaten up. So being the songwriter for a punk band was, in hindsight, a way of being a poet without incurring a drubbing.
- Q) Do you think there is a place for ‘counterculture/rebellion’ in our society any more?
If so, what do you think it might look like and seek to achieve?
- A) I think it’s absolutely fucking essential. What might it look like? Like an emanation of a ferocious need to tell a truth in whatever genre or form seems most suitable to the individual practitioner or aspirant. There are cunts out there who are creating universes in which they are emperors. Fight them.
- Q) Niall I believe you are working on a new book at the moment. You mentioned it earlier in the interview.
Is there anything else you would like to say about it, and when it is due?
Could you say a bit more about it without giving us any spoilers?
A) It’s not finished yet, so I imagine it’ll appear sometime in 2027. It’s called Knotted and is set during one wedding reception at Nanteos mansion in Wales and it’s a celebration of resilience and love and joy and the heartbreaking innocence of mankind (I’m not kidding!).
Thank you very much for taking the time from a very busy life and demanding, writing schedule to answer my questions.
It has been a pleasure ‘talking’ to you over quite a long time.
P.S. I think you would have got on with Mayakovsky.
Should be a part of him in every poet/writer.
Perhaps without the tragic ending.
.
Malcolm Paul
.