The downward spiral

I'll admit to feeling rather uncomfortable to find myself reading Toby Litt's I Play Drums In A Band Called okay - a lurid, largely comic tale about the misadventures (predominantly sexual) of a Canadian indie rock group - at the time that the revelations about Arcade Fire's Win Butler emerged. The novel may only have been published in 2008, but in post-#MeToo 2023, though sexism remains rife in the music industry, the landscape looks very different and the fact that the callous, misogynistic treatment of women by the band's members (including the narrator, drummer Clap) is frequently played for laughs is hard to stomach.

I also at times struggled to understand why Litt felt the need to create a fictional band, given that the narrative arc traced by okay - "lower case, italics" - is one familiar from countless rock memoirs and biographies. But of course it gave him the freedom that comes with invention: no pressure or responsibility to be slavishly faithful to "the truth" - if that can even be uncovered - of a specific band's history, no fear of misrepresenting or defaming anyone alive or dead. (That said, given that they "wear suits at all times", their music is "slow and formal with lyrics about love and guilt" and they "sound like the Velvet Underground on quarter-speed", okay might appear to be modelled on Interpol.)

Though it doesn't present events in strictly linear chronological order, the novel follows Clap, Syph (vocals), Crab (guitar) and Mono (bass) from their teenage beginnings rehearsing in "Crab's sock-and-crotch-smelling attic", when they had principles, "almost a manifesto": "No guitar solos, drum solos. No lighters-aloft moments. No cocaine, no heroin." Needless to say, all that goes out of the window, as the four find fame and start to behave like overgrown toddlers let loose in a toy shop. Indulgence, excess and cringeworthy pretention ensue, as do jadedness, friction, rehab, radical and ill-advised attempts to change direction, loss of dignity, cynical cash-in tours and serious illness.

As this summary suggests, Litt leaves practically no rock 'n' roll cliche unturned, but clearly revels in playing with them and getting his characters to act them out. There are several proper laugh-out-loud sections - the opening scene, for instance, which sees a worse-for-wear Clap spew on a Dutch dog; the point when the alcoholic Crab makes pissing himself on stage a trademark move that is subsequently taken up by copy-cat fans; the blink-and-you'll-miss-them details like the fact that the band okay support on their first UK tour are called John Craven, or that the mere sight of Syph with an acoustic guitar immediately sounds warning sirens. But there are also, by contrast, some disarmingly moving and emotive passages as okay's members grow older and (marginally) wiser, navigating dysfunction and personal tragedy along the way.

However, arguably the greatest strength of a somewhat fractured and occasionally frustrating novel is Litt's knack for pithy, witty observations that seem to nail the experience of being in a band - at least to someone who has always been on the outside looking in. Take, for instance, the comment that "musical differences" is "the threat anyone in the band always makes when they take something so seriously that they are prepared to break up the band over it". Or the comment on how chemistry is a double-edged sword: "Right from rehearsal one, along with the pleasure in knowing we worked, there was a kind of resentment ... We knew that we were tied together." Or the maturing Clap's wry observation that "being the drummer in a mid-level indie rock band was the best preparation for parenthood: the general sense of bewilderment and disorientation, the hours of boredom, the moments of all-redeeming joy, the ubiquity of bodily fluids, the subservience to endearingly unreasonable ego-monsters, the love of exhaustion and the exhaustion of love".

"To be famous is to be put into a position where failure is your only option", muses Clap at one point. That okay's swift ascent to stardom is followed by a long, messy unravelling is entirely predictable, but such is Litt's talent that their story remains very readable.