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London's brooding underbelly has spawned many a literary vision, from the schizoid suburbias of Martin Amis to Shane MacGowan's daze of wine and roses. It's landscape has been used to skewer the contemporary psych, rendering it as fragmented and as discordant as a map of the capital's underground. Yet amongst all London's poetic champions, few have captured its crusty vomit-splattered veneer so well as Martin Millar. His half dozen or so novels come washed up on a wave of cheap cider and dried sweat, all presented with cartoonish anarchy and riotous satire. His is a world populated by ghoulish squatters, dogs on string, punks, groupies and bouncers; never-has-beens and never-will-bes; characters who have embraced the trash aesthetics of their age and turned them into a rock'n'roll lifestyle all their own, Imagine Denis Leary writing scripts for East Enders and you get close to the savage bite and raw wit of this most renegade of writers.
In person Millar has a puckish, laconic presence. He is sitting in his flat in Brixton which he has occupied since his flight from his native Glasgow, a product of the Seventies Scottish exodus. He pulls on a Silk Cut as we talk about the kind of changes that his chosen city has undergone.
"I moved down here in my late teens with my girlfriend," he explains, "at that time the choice seemed to be between getting married and settling in your home town or coming down here where there seemed to be a much greater sense of potential. London offered the bands, the clubs, the fanzines... There was that sense than anyone with the energy or the inclination to get involved in 'pop culture' could do so. The thing now is that nearly everyone you meet in London - in Brixton certainly - is a would-be poet or artist or musician. but few of them ever seem to produce anything. It's like there is a whole set of people who have rejected conventional careers but who have lost the creative nerve to put anything in its place."
This is certainly true of the people who haunt his latest novel. Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving centres around the dispossessed bohemians of Brixton. Its central character - Elfish - is Crustie incarnate. Unemployed, unwashed, undone, she is the bastard offspring of Eighties apathetic nihilism - John Self's niece from hell. She throws up copiously, pisses herself regularly, rips off everybody, is grotesque, a bottomless sickbag of a character. She is also the novel's heroine.
"The point about Elfish," says Millar, "is that although she is completely intolerable, she is the only one in the noel who actually achieves anything. Everybody else is consumed with self-pity, it is only her appalling behaviour that goads them into action."
This seems to be the cutting edge of Millar's writing - the ability to transform a twitching slice of urban decay into an imaginative cluster of comic irony. He offers us the sound of laughter in the dark - gallows humour which is always one step ahead of the angst that it portrays. What is surprising is that for someone whose finger is placed so firmly on the pulse of the contemporary, he has little interest in the writing of his peers. Mention of authors who are mining a similar seam to himself are received with a wry shrug - not dismissive, simply disinterested.
"My favourite writers are probably Jane Austen and Shakespeare, " he muses, "but obviously Austen only wrote six novels so I spend more time at the moment re-reading Shakespeare. Have you read Troilus and Cressida?"
This is not the kind of question you expect from someone whose work bristles with references to Sonic Youth, Captain Beefheart and the New York Dolls.
And this is precisely what sets him apart. The distance between what he reads and how he writes - his influences and his input - means that his work is refreshingly free of any hip swagger of post-modern paralysis. He welds an English literary tradition to a t(h)rash metal sensibility, and in so doing gleefully breathes life back into them both. Like the best of groundbreaking art forms, Martin Millar's novels are refreshingly old fashioned.
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