Help a Folk Devil publish "Paying for the Party"

Help Publish 'Paying for the Party': a rehab memoir and love story. Donations will be used to cover our end of a hybrid publishing deal... just like making an independent record. It makes editorial sense and the publishers have an in with Waterstones etc...

Who?

Mark Whiteley is a writer, musician, survivor, tellurian, malcontent, and optimist. He is a founding member of post punk legends ‘Folk Devils’, journalist, and academic who holds a BA in Social Policy, an MSc in Criminology, and researched a PhD at Cardiff University. He has also been a drug addict for the last 38 years, give or take a few.

What?

‘Paying for the Party’ is ‘a twisted auto-ethnographic rehab memoir with a love story woven in’.

It is an account of detox, rehab and beyond. Of how an impossible but redeeming love can carry us through the toughest of times; and a cautionary tale of catharsis and hope.

Why?

This book exists now for two reasons. To make use of Whiteley’s myriad experiences; converting pain into something durable, timeless and beautiful. And to be of use to others.

It is for addicts trying to change things, and for professionals or interested civilians. It maps an odyssey from the streets of Brixton, through ill health and into a journey of recovery in a completely contemporary way. It tells us how it is, right now, for so many people.

‘Paying for the Party’ is very much ‘of its time’, and it’s time is now.

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Matthew Stokoe

Screenwriter and Novelist; Colony of Whores (2014), Empty Mile (2010), High Life (2002), Cows (1998)

On ‘Paying for the Party’, March 2024.

 

‘Paying for the Party is a memoir of addiction and recovery ferocious in its honesty, brutal in its bravery and unflinching in its self-examination. Mark Whiteley, bass player and one of the founding members of seminal 80s indie rock band The Folk Devils, loads both barrels with 12-gauage junkie fuck-up and detonates them without hesitation. The reader, though, is not the only target of this gutterblast. Whiteley places his own battered mug just as squarely on the firing line as any of the exterior horrors that haunt his years’ long swan dive (one of many) into narcotic despair – a homicidal neighbour, slumlord housing purveyors, labyrinthine medical requirements, a cancerous kidney.... And while the genre demands its share of self-evisceration, Whiteley’s knowledge of literature on the nature of being human, and his own refusal to blinker the gaze he turns on his world, add a dimensionality that enriches this work, transforming it, as we watch Whiteley himself transform, into a record of a journey to a world where hope is no longer an impossible ideal.’

Anyone who chips in, if wanted, gets a name-check on the sleeve.

With love n thanks. MWx