How I Left the National Grid

This book is the epitome of cool. A cross between
Twenty Four Hour Party People
and Tom Perrotta’s
The Leftovers,
written by Julian Barnes. It contains a narrative as spiky as a punk set, a whole symphony of ideas composed by Mankowski within a few subtle bars of text. A brilliantly written literary treat.

AJ Kirby
, reviewer for
The New York Journal of Books

Anyone who remembers
Melody Maker,
or who attended indie nights in clubs strewn with snakebite, will fall in love with this book immediately. Mankowski captures brilliantly the psychology of ‘fan obsession’. Those of us who marvelled at ‘The Secret History’ or ‘A Passage To India’ are sure to find it enthralling.

Matthew Phillips
,
Huffington Post

Already recognised as a major rising talent, Mankowski here establishes himself as a significant voice in British fiction with a novel that will raise knowing smiles from the rock cognoscenti, plaudits from literary critics, and will captivate readers every-where. This is clearly a writer of great talent.

Andrew Crumey
, author of
Pfitz and Sputnik Caledonia,
longlisted for The Man Booker Prize

Mankowski creates a very convincing band and history. The novel has a lot of classic story lines – the search for the missing hero, the last chance at dreams and ideals, the tension between a ‘real’ job and an artistic life – along with a thriller element. It’s funny too, at times I laughed out loud. With the character of Robert Wardner I felt he was channeling The Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards, The Fall’s Mark E Smith and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis simultaneously. Very powerful. There’s so much about this book that people would enjoy. I really enjoyed it.

Lyn Lockwood
, Chief Examiner for A Level Creative Writing, AQA

Guy Mankowski’s latest novel,
How I Left The National Grid,
showcases the rich research, scintillating prose, and psycho-logical depth that characterised his earlier books. Here, though, those qualities are used to bring to life a potent and still vital place and time in British culture: post-punk Manchester. Set in the present, but reflecting on the past,
How I Left The National Grid
reveals that so much of where we are now grew from who we were then. Flashbacks and corrupt memories flesh out the ambitions of a band formed in those past moments, in vivid, haunting, and haunted scenes. But readers can also experience the thrill of the chase to find people who do not want to be found in the present. In doing so, we are forced to ask: what becomes of our dreams? Mankowski’s original and captivating alternative history depicts the conflicted start of a turbulent era when we were told there was ‘no alternative’, and thereby perhaps sketches a different landscape for the future.

Dr. Adam Hansen
, editor of
Litpop: Writing and Popular Music
and author of
Shakespeare and Popular Music

It’s hard to remember what it was like being onstage on
Top Of The Pops.
However bright and emotional and vivid it was, it becomes kind of inert. I can remember certain neurons being fired in my brain though. Pleasure impulses I’d not experienced before, or since.

In 1981 we were properly famous. Schoolchildren saw me as
‘
that alien bloke off
Top Of The Pops.’
My mother got hassle off chippy journalists coming into her salon and asking if it were true that I’d been sent from the future. And she would say no, it wasn’t, because she distinctly remembered giving birth to me in a bathtub in Hulme, in 1955.

It just happened suddenly. It was weird, because overnight all the ideas I’d scrawled in my notebook, which would have got thrown away if I’d left them on the bus, were suddenly a source of massive speculation. It was as if by being on the front of magazines and on TV I’d cracked something and now I had all the answers. No wonder it seemed as if we were from the future. Our single, ‘The Commuter Belt’, was released with the record company hoping for no more than it might chart. It went to number 4. Daydreams about what I would do if I got on TV had to become a reality in a matter of days.

First thing, we got some money off the label and went to a military surplus store in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens. I wanted us dressed in urban camouflage when we went on TV, like we’d been fighting guerrilla warfare. But they only had four of these black security guard outfits so we had to make do with them. They had badges on, saying ‘I’m…and I’m here to serve.’ I ripped them off, so we definitely wouldn’t look like traffic wardens.

Regardless, I was going to make an impact. Millions of people would be watching, and I was about to do something that would scorch my face on their retinas. I didn’t know what, but I knew I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.

Bonny put the four of us on a bus to BBC Studios. Jack nervously
drummed against my seat the whole way there, Theo kept saying, ‘We’ve got to do something outrageous. Television is the only way to teach people how to behave these days.’ I just drank my whisky and told him to stop twisting about. Simon knew I was working on a plan.

I’d been preparing for this for almost ten years.

That was the first time I went onstage as Clive Douglas, not as Robert Wardner. For years I’d been thinking about Clive. Some worker drone trapped in a power plant, on a shift that refused to end. Thinking about what he would do if he ever got the chance to show the world how he felt. That night, I’d perform as him. Twitchy, black-eyed, desperate. Starved of sunlight, bewildered by technology. Flailing about, spiralling into panic. Just behind me onstage, like a watchful supervisor, Simon would be playing guitar.

All the other bands were asking the girls in the makeup department to make them look tanned, though I doubted they’d ever been anywhere hotter than the Isle Of Wight. Singers in those days usually requested the wardrobe girls find them sweaters to put over their shoulders, so it looked like they’d just come off a yacht. They weren’t used to being asked to make them as white as possible, like I did.

I wanted us to look like we were no longer human. I wanted to make the point that the most alien amongst is the most familiar. That a human being, gradually messed up by night shifts and low pay, could eventually look as if they’d fallen from Mars.

The makeup girl used thick, sharp lines of dark paint under our eyes to make them more pronounced. Theo was the only one who broke our uniform code. He wore his younger sisters’ undersized black leather jacket, complete with this ridiculous fur trimming. We couldn’t have predicted that soon everyone would be wearing an exact copy of it.

The studio was dowdier than I’d ever imagined. Small and badly-lit, but still that feeling in my stomach wouldn’t settle. As the moment for us to go onstage neared everything sped up. Some bloke with elbow patches, who looked like he’d just come off
University Challenge,
came into the dressing room and told us to listen closely for onstage instructions. Play the game, he said, you’re lucky to be here. I asked him when
we would get to check the sound levels, and he stared down his crooked nose and said, ‘I wouldn’t worry about that, son, no one is going to be listening to you.’ The rest of the band looked at the floor but I slowly clenched my fists.

‘I’ll make sure they catch every second,’ I thought.

We were given various orders, all of which we solemnly accepted and straight away ignored. I wasn’t going to get pushed about by Henry Kelly. He abandoned us the minute The Human League came flouncing round the corner. Their singer, with his long black hair pulled back over a diamond earring, looked Theo up and down and shuddered. Then all these young girls started screaming when a Latino woman in a red flamenco dress came round the corner with a clipboard, showing Julio Iglesias the way to the stage. Simon looked at his healthy face and deep leather tan, then looked and me and said ‘I think you’d better start taking some vitamins, Rob.’

As Iglesias’ entourage came past us they pushed Simon out of the way, his guitar dropped to the floor and a string broke, seconds before we were due to go on. Iglesias didn’t even apologise. He was a love-god, and we were dirty guttersnipes from Manchester. That was the picture. I thought, right, that’s it.

Bonny told us to focus. There was steel in her eyes, then, hard as the cut of her bob. I think she saw in us a way to make her mark on the world. Prove to herself she could be a figure other women looked up to. Sometimes we needed her ferocity. I remember them lining us up in the wings before we went onstage and the look on her face was just unforgettable. Even she thought this wouldn’t happen so soon. ‘Don’t blow it, Rob,’ she kept saying. ‘Remember what we’ve all given to get you to this point.’

We were cooped up in the corridor, and through a crack in the door I could see aimless young girls going into the studio, all oversized sweaters and white dinner jackets. Jimmy Savile was giving them party hats and streamers to chuck about, getting some of them to drape them over him. He was like this manic jester in the middle of it, a bit unhinged. There was this feeling building in the air, this tightening of
the moments that I’d never known before. Every inch of clothing you had on, every expression you gave was being carefully scrutinized. As the room filled with young bodies, clutching their chests and looking around them, I realized that with one gesture I could cause an explosion. With one statement, one movement, one act, I could sweep away all the polystyrene and lights and make everyone at home sit forward. But I still didn’t know what I’d do.

The pressure to conform was incredible. You felt yourself doubting everything about you, especially when elbow patches told us we wouldn’t get to practice being onstage, because Iglesias had taken our spot. I rallied the four of us together in that little corridor, skinny limbs in black against this sea of white casual day-wear. I told the boys nothing was going to shake us off course, this was our chance. We were going to blow the roof off the place and we were going to do it our way. Forget all the party poppers and bunting, I said. Let’s introduce something real here. Show the world what a charade this all is.

Simon was shaking as the girl pointed us to the stage. The stage was a small black square, set amongst a background of grey plastic cubes and dry ice. The lights were down, in seconds they were going to go up.

When we went through those doors we looked like we’d crawled out of the underworld.

We were pushed onstage, into a bath of boiling light. Jack squirmed onto his drumming stool, Theo squinted out at the waiting crowd. Simon looked as if he’d forgotten how to hold a guitar, but seconds later he was grasping its neck as if his life depended on it. Already, the makeup was starting to run down our faces. I stood on the edge of the stage, looked out at the sea of silhouettes and tensed.