Matt “Wolfboy” Connor
Matt “Wolfboy” Connor’s literary zines – self-published and recently made into a compilation by De Stijl Records – are like what John Fante would been writing about if he were a music-obsessed, skateboarding hardcore kid turned babysitter turned (student) nurse.
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For like Fante, Wolfboy has had many jobs, travelled to many places and encountered lots of curious situations. But nobody’s life can be encounter-filled constantly, so he expounds on the mundanity of daily life by exploring the details of existence with what some might call an obsessive-compulsive disorder. By virtue of doing that, he can be talking about a Felt B-side for four pages and it somehow ends up coming out as a treatise on broken hearts and getting to the bottom of why girls can be so mean sometimes.
He is friendly with Palace Skateboards, sometime child-minder to London’s rock “n” roll royalty and his new book is called Friends of the Family and has Lindsay Lohan on the cover, because these are the kind of people he rolls with sometimes – in between volunteering at homeless shelters in LA (where he met Lohan) and falling off his bicycle.
VICE: Hi Matt. How’d you get started on this crazy road where you ended up meeting Lindsay Lohan?
Matt Connor: I was 13, but can’t remember what it was about now. All I do remember is that an English teacher complimented me on my writing, which got me saying I wanted to be a writer whenever adults asked me what I wanted to do with my life. This was partly because this was the first time a teacher complimented me on anything.
Writers tell stories, but there are as many types of writers as there are stories. At first, most of my writing was informed by this idea that the writer was a “reporter”, a “recorder of information”. In my case this largely consisted of writing to bands I had read about in fanzines, asking them questions that they would answer on a cassette which I would then transcribe, trying to shape 45 minutes worth of hums, ahhs and silence into coherent text. This transcribing, editing, cutting and pasting was my writing at the time. My interview with UK Hardcore mavericks Extreme Noise Terror (complete with portraits of the band hand-drawn by the late Phil Vane on the back of the return letter) was one of my early short stories. Now, I can see that I was practicing what I am still practicing today, even though my methods have developed, for better or worse, the more I have read and have written.
What made you wanna become a writer? What were the books or films or records that made you wanna do that?
In the beginning, my knowledge of writers went as far as the Shakespeare we were meant to read at school, plus a bit of Kerouac, Burroughs and Bukowski that I probably read about in Thrasher. I tried to emulate things I read in fanzines, and things I’d seen on the counters of record shops, or had been sold by lone men or women at gigs. The NME of the time was also a big influence, and I remember being caught reading it at the back of maths, the teacher genuinely bemused that I was reading a “newspaper”. This made me want to be a reader, too.
From quite early, I associated being a writer with a sort of freedom; being able to escape the drudgery of my actual life in a small town. What I gleaned from the aforementioned books, for better or worse, encouraged this idea. What freedom meant, or what I would actually do with this freedom if I was ever granted it, I had no idea.
Until one day, when I was invited, as an older friend’s guest, to a terraced house in Bolton, where the owners of Manchester’s Eastern Bloc records lived. In their front room they had a mini ramp. It didn’t matter that you had to bend over to avoid banging your head on the ceiling when you were stood on top of it, or that it was only six feet wide and a few feet high. Because these were the first adults I had known who weren’t either my parents or schoolteachers. And they had a ramp, standing where I had only ever previously seen a television and sofa. This I now associated with freedom.
The cover of ‘Friends of the Family’
You worked at the adult video shop Dreamy Lips in Soho at some point. Perhaps this foreshadowed your meeting with Lindsay Lohan – she appeared in that film The Canyons with adult performer, James Deen.
I moved to London on the premise that I was attending university, but really I moved here for the skate spots, music, books, art and culture which I had read about. It was my roommate who first had the job in Dreamy Lips, and he introduced me to the shop’s elderly Maltese proprietors.
Looking back, I can see that working in there was the culmination of reading a lot of American crime fiction (Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Raymond Chandler, etc). In my head, I had created the impression that a writer’s life, if he is going to be a proper, “authentic” writer, needs to be gritty and a little bit of a messy. This can be problematic, because it can, and nearly did, get in the way of any actual writing.
For example, I didn’t actually write anything during this period, and just behaved as if I might be working on something. People succumb to all kinds of ghastly habits that they can stay stuck with years later. Fortunately, I only worked in a dirty video shop for a year, and I now know that you can be just as good, or as bad a writer, even if you’re a babysitter.
Soho’s changed quite a bit since your days there, eh?
The Soho that I gravitated to, the one that is all alleyways, illegal drinking dens and neon lights, does seem to have shrunk. Things have been tidied up, but essentially people are still the same. For example, all the male prostitutes used to congregate in Burger King in Leicester Square. That’s where they went, and so would you if you were looking for their company. While they don’t hang around there now, or with the advent of the internet, have to, prostitution has not gone away. It has just changed. People still fuck and get fucked regardless of Jamie Oliver opening up a new restaurant.
Hopefully, the world is always going to be equally terrifying and exciting when you’re stepping into it as a young adult for the first time. I’m sure it wasn’t any better in the 1960s. Your parents were just younger, and if they had been older, they would have moaned just like me about how things aren’t as good as before. For example, I am now at the age when I sometimes overhear people reminiscing about tiny moments in history, where I realise I was also in attendance. Sometimes I even read about these events in magazines or newspapers. It’s always about how you want to remember it, which is fine.
Take the Pistols playing at the 100 Club – I wasn’t there but you won’t be able to convince me that everybody who was in attendance had that same experience they now chronicle in all the official punk history books. What about the people stuck outside, or those being sick in the toilets, or those stuck at the bar? Was everybody in strict agreement that they were taking part in a pivotal moment in history, so shouldn’t drink too much in case they were later expected to recall the evening in minute detail? Maybe it’s because I have always been the guy stuck at the bar. I saw Blur once at the pub – they weren’t very good then, and they aren’t now.
As well as your meeting with Lindsay Lohan, music plays a really big part in these stories. What got you into music as a kid?
It wasn’t just listening to the music that was a fun thing to do – it was everything that went with it. For starters, I had to find a record shop – once I exhausted Woolworths, the nearest one was 25 miles away. This meant travelling to the city alone for the first time in my life. I would find the record shop I was looking for, and then hang around the counter or the section I was most interested in. A couple of times I got lost and was robbed by local kids.
In these shops, I would meet others like me who had made similar journeys. Some of these people were slightly older, so their influences were already wider than mine, and these would be shared out among us. Eventually I made friends with the staff at Eastern Bloc records, who were nice enough to interrupt playing promos destined for the Hacienda to play me the latest hardcore 7”s, much to the frustration of the DJs gathered at the counter. I now look back upon these men (including Martin Price from 808 State) as my teachers.
Every new record I discovered made me want to be a writer, because writing about them (and more importantly thinking about writing about them) was my way of expressing enthusiasm – I still didn’t dare to dance.
Why do Oasis crop up in the book? What was that first wave of Oasis mania like? Did you experience it? It was almost like the Lindsay Lohan mania.
Definitely Maybe came out the year I stopped attending university. Oasis’ first album is the sound of a band taking their first steps outside of the bedroom/rehearsal room they had been writing the songs in. Songs written when they were still living at home, dreaming of big houses, immortality, hotels, what goes on in London and generally being a rock “n” roll star. What they would do with their freedom once they had secured it, was always going to be their business.
Until I dropped out of university I felt that, even though I had moved to London, I was still living in my proverbial bedroom – listening to the same records, reading the same books and eating the same food. Until 1994, I hadn’t ever drunk coffee or eaten couscous. Suddenly, I not only drank coffee and ate couscous (mixed with tinned tuna), but found myself collecting glasses in a gay club and smoking cigarettes. Before that I worked in a launderette and lived on cheese and onion sandwiches. It was as if, like Definitely Maybe, I had also finally arrived that year.
But while I liked the first album, I felt no pressing need to actually be at the concerts. I went to the Olympia one as a friend’s guest, and it was pretty boring. I remember wandering around thinking “Is this it?” You had to reassemble what it was supposed to sound like in your imagination – the sound was that bad. Alex Higgins and the singer from The Only Ones were at the after-show, I remember.
Kate Moss is a fan of yours, right? How did she get a copy of one of your zines?
I’m not sure she is a fan, although she has had my fanzines pushed upon her as presents by mutual friends. Like books at Christmas – who knows what happens to them. I am a childminder, and the children I look after are friends with her children. I once had to pick up the children from hers, and while she got ready she put on the Peter Kaye Christmas Special, before making me a vodka and tonic. I remember thinking that to be in that position could be seen as enviable – especially since, looking back, I would have been being paid hourly at the time. But she got ready, we went to the kids party, lost each other and life goes on. The children are now older and don’t need picking up from people’s houses any more. And I don’t get invitations to go on my own.
The life you have lived – with all the different jobs and travelling all over, working and being friends with artists – has been kinda wildly bohemian, but not in the Rolling Stones 1960s sense. Do you know what I mean? Do you consider yourself a bohemian?
I don’t know about that, really. I haven’t really had a proper career, just a succession of jobs that have never paid more than the minimum wage. And I’m now 43 and back at school studying to be a nurse. I suppose you could call that being a bohemian. Whereas once I found this lack of direction frustrating, I am now glad of the experiences I’ve had doing different things, especially when, at a certain age, I saw others who had focused on one thing: “succeed”.
I feel very successful, although for a while back there I doubted this, and I would have been happy just to be richer. Not any more. I think it’s very important to be positive. Now I think that the real creativity lies in how you survive without doing yourself in, while remaining creative. Some of this has to do with the company you keep. How you go about it is your business, but it’s important to figure out.
I hope people have got this far down the article ‘cos of the Lindsay Lohan headline. What happened the time you met her?
I think she was in the same building as me for a while but we never actually met.
Cool.
This book about Lindsay Lohan is available for £3.50 in the UK and £4.50 worldwide from Oogabooga in Los Angeles, Good Press in Glasgow and Dolon Books in London.
Wolfboy’s Greatest Hits compilation is available here.
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