Simon Morris - Watching The Wheels
Amphetamine Sulphate.
84pp. Perfect bound.
ISBN 978-1-7337567-3-0




The accompanying blurb on the back cover of Simon Morris’s latest Amphetamine Sulphate publication compares Morris to Philip K Dick and Thomas Pynchon. Dick I’m not so sure about [I’m no big fan to be honest] but Pynchon? That’s a big claim to make. He’s been cropping up with unnerving regularity of late. Pynchon that is. I was in a pub in Halifax a few weeks back, a gathering of the Bald Heads of Noise, when Morris walked in and dropped on the table Christopher Hitchens memoir ‘Hitch-22’. ‘If anybody wants this they can have it’ he said and being partial to a bit of Hitchens I took it home and read it. In it Hitchens mentions Pynchon in relation to the ‘Rushdie Affair’; Pynchon rings Hitchens, confirms that it can be only he and a conversation ensues. At the conversations end Hitchens asks Pynchon if he can have his number to keep him updated to which Pynchon laughs down the line and hangs up. No 1471 in those days.

After I’d finished reading ‘Watching The Wheels’ I picked up my dropping to bits Penguin Classics Deluxe Version of Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ with its deckled edges and V2 artwork to peruse a few lines of the mans most difficult book. That was this morning. I read a few lines and marveled once again at how a writer could even begin to put together such a tome. A few hours later I found myself stood in Mirfield Co-op in need of sustenance and after exiting the check out stood perusing the charity book sale where Pynchon’s ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ sat there looking like a fish out of water. I have to admit that no small amount of pleasure ran through me at this point and wondered if ‘dark forces’ were at play. This for a book that I’ve already read. Its not like the mans keeping Dan Brown off the chazza shelves is it?

Pynchon appears twice in Watching The Wheels. In the final chapter ‘Putting The Record Back In The Sleeve: Greatest Hits USA Edition’ Morris admits that he’s feeling deadline pressure ‘for his next book’ and gives us a minute by minute account of how his evening is panning out, including the temptation to hit Lidl for a bottle of gin and cancelling the gardener [?] all while entering in to an online conversation with someone who asks him;

“Tell me a favourite writer of yours. And be honest if it’s fucking Rowling. I enjoyed one of her Galbraith crime novels.” 22:45

“Thomas Pynchon.” 22:46

“Fuck, you serious?! Have read every word. Many of which I didn’t understand fully but I tried.” 22:47


Copying and pasting online conversations in to your manuscript when deadlines loom is never going to get you a contract with Faber and Faber but in a non linear work like this it fits like a stiffy in a featherlite. And is entirely in keeping with the way Morris writes. I get the feeling that Morris spends a lot of time on online forums; sex forums, Queen forums, G N’ R forums, conspiracy theory forums and forums where only the bravest [or desperate] dare tread. 

This is the fourth book of Morris’s to have appeared through AS and like the previous volumes weaves Morris’s existential angst, suicides of past friends, drugs, relationships, both sexual and platonic and childhood years in to the back catalogue, not of Guns N’ Roses this time but Queen. Starting with their ninth studio album ‘The Game’. Which was recorded at Musicland in Munich, a building linked to many suicides. Blackpool, Hoylake, Liverpool, Manchester and Bolton go toward making up an anarchists ‘A’ of a leyline of sorts. Hoylake being a one-horse town on the Wirral peninsula where Morris is convinced this is all going to end one day. Somehow this all mirrors with the movements of Mark Chapman in the run up to the murder of John Lennon. Lennon used to holiday in Blackpool as a child and married Cynthia who came from Hoylake. You see?

In Watching The Wheels Morris writes about his childhood, his drunken parents, looking up girls skirts and losing his virginity. He takes one of his fathers sleeping pills just to see what would happen [he falls asleep], there’s a flirtatious encounter with an aunt, a fetish for nylon is revealed, inspired by punk he forms childhood bands using ice cream tubs for drums and drawing pins for studs, fire extinguishers are let off. Blackpool landmarks the Magnolia Cafe and The Purple Penny arcade are frequented, a cherubic young Morris is chatted up by gay men on Blackpool seafront. A whole childhood of novelty joke mugs, pale ale, orange crush and sexual frustration scattered among the Queen back catalogue.

At the beginning of book Morris admits that:

‘Sex is just something I don’t understand, swear to God’

A sentence that not only encapsulates Watching The Wheels but the entire Morris oeuvre. Sex. And death. The big two. They haunt Morris’s work. And madness of course. True madness. Not just a bit bonkers madness but madness madness, the stuff that drives people to drink and drugs and sexual humiliation and suicide. The casual references to drugs and porn are still here and continue to unnerve but at its core Watching The Wheels is Morris looking in to his childhood for answers. 

The comparisons to Pynchon are relevant in that both he and Morris litter their work with numerous characters but then so did Charles Dickens. I think Morris is far nearer to Brett Easton Ellis in style and delivery and while that particular author appears to have left his best days behind him, this one seems to have his best ones in front of him. Like his other books its not an easy read. Not if you’re squeamish or easily offended that is. His matter of fact writing style, openness and erudition bely the fact that for years he fronted the Ceramic Hobs, probably the most unstable band in Britain. Now that The Hobs have gone the way of all flesh [after thirty odd years - we can forgive him] we can only hope that Morris continues with the pen. Or the copying and pasting. I'd be more than happy with either.  






Amphetamine Sulphate