Alternatives To Valium

Alastair McKay

Polygon, £12.99

UNLESS my arithmetic is badly failing me, it’s been nearly 40 years since Alastair McKay sold me a couple of issues of his fanzine, Alternatives to Valium, when we were both students in Aberdeen. Though fairly typical of its time, it was a more intellectually inquisitive fanzine than most, and the sandy-haired, craggily handsome McKay seemed like a smart, cool guy, with the air of someone who knew where he was going.

It turns out that he didn’t, not quite, and would spend a long stretch at the beginning of the 1980s on the dole before finding a way into journalism through “cracks in the fabric” and going on to write fascinatingly about music and TV for numerous mainstream publications.

All these years later, he’s resurrected the title Alternatives to Valium for his memoir of how a painfully shy boy from North Berwick – a place so unremarkable that even a visit by Brigitte Bardot passed unnoticed – found his voice thanks to punk rock.

Anyone who grew up in a small Scottish town at a time when music was a matter of life and death will find much to identify with in the book’s first half. Living in a newly-built estate that already feels like a retirement community, the McKays are “a Grattan catalogue family in purple polyester kung fu pyjamas”, with Alastair thrilling to the sounds of Slade and Gary Glitter and pestering his mum to scour Haddington for a pair of glam rock shoes.

Such books always run the risk of slipping into lists of kitsch 1970s ephemera, and at times McKay, unable to resist namechecking Betterware and Sodastream, comes close. But it’s his punk-fuelled journey of self-discovery that’s the story here, as he forges an identity by spending his Saturdays touring the Edinburgh record shops and taping interviews with punk stars from Radio Forth with his dad’s Marconiphone tape recorder.

He throws himself into producing fanzines and singing in bands, but he’s a frontman whose stage presence is so subdued he looks like he’s desperately trying not to be noticed. Writing a song so sad he decides no one should ever hear it marks the final setting-aside of his musical ambitions. “I have come to accept that my future does not lie in being an extrovert,” he says.

But now that punk has helped him to find a voice, his next step is “learning to listen”. The second half of the book gathers together selections of interviews he’s done over the years, with artists as varied as Nirvana and Dolly Parton, in which he found out how to turn his weakness into a strength: “Interviews are a form in which shyness can be a secret weapon. If you are familiar with awkward silences, you can use them. If you worry about having permission to speak, the interview is your friend.”

Which isn’t to say it’s always easy. Interviewing The Cure’s Robert Smith, McKay remembers being “deferential to the point of self-harm”. And his selections highlight the awkward, discomforting aspects of music journalism so well that they’ll induce horrible flashbacks in anyone who’s done it for a living. We see him mercilessly berated by Shane MacGowan, out of his element around Rod Stewart and pals as they get bevvied before a Scottish Cup final, or feeling physically threatened by a hostile Paul Weller at a Red Wedge press conference.

They’re not all like that. But even the more relaxed, cordial interviews, like Iggy Pop, Kate Moss or Billy Mackenzie, capture the strange dynamic between journalist and interviewee: a temporary negotiated space with undefined edges. As the young fanzine writer understood from the start.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT