Hello. In 1995 I made a documentary called Hotel Auschwitz for BBC Radio 4 about the marketing of the concentration camp.
I lost the cassette 29 years ago and never heard it again. No one has, and so it’s become something of a mysterious lost artifact for deep-cut Ronson fans. Well: a few weeks ago, after my Psychopath Night show at Hamer Hall in Melbourne, a couple came over and handed me a UCB stick. On it was Hotel Auschwitz.
I wish I could thank them by name but I don’t know their names. If you’re reading this, thank you!
So: I just listened to it for the first time in 29 years, in part because of a message I received from subscriber Dougald Hine. He wrote that he had an idea for a future post for me - about how people who do good work often start by doing bad work. Because back in 1994, he wrote, he read a stocking filler book I wrote called Clubbed Class and…
…didn't enjoy it, but I did read the whole thing …These days I would have put it down after a chapter or two. A couple of years later I read Them, and it immediately went to the special shelf of exemplary non-fiction writing that I come back to repeatedly, but I was puzzled, because wasn't that terrible book by the same guy?
Roll forward to 2015 and, somewhat unexpectedly, I'd been appointed leader of artistic development at Sweden's national theatre, so I decided to put some thought into what "artistic development" even meant. One thread I found myself following was the improbable transformation, where there seems to be a radical break in someone's creative development, after which they are producing work which nothing they had done earlier would lead you to expect. [An] examples I'd talk about was "How did Jon Ronson go from writing such a terrible first book to such an outstanding second book?"
It might make for a future post: can you say anything about what *did* happen between Clubbed Class and Them that made for such an improbable transformation?
Well, one thing that happened between the two books was Hotel Auschwitz. The timeline being,
1994: Clubbed Class.
1995: Hotel Auschwitz.
1996: Tottenham Ayatollah, a documentary for Channel 4 which became the first chapter of Them. I’ve re-watched Tottenham Ayatollah several times over the years, and it holds up really well. It feels like my voice finally emerged with that film - to a great extent because it was a collaboration with the director Saul Dibb, and we both cared a lot about brevity and humor and leaving things unsaid. I uploaded Tottenham Ayatollah to Vimeo, and those links will take you to it.
Whereas Clubbed Class feels like it was written by a different person - by someone who had read too much PJ O’Rourke. I mentioned here a few weeks ago that when Them was shortlisted for the Guardian’s First Book Award in 2000, some bastard blabbed on me - and I think I know who - and told the judging panel that it was actually my SECOND book. The head of the panel called me to ask if it was true. I said, “Well, I suppose Clubbed Class was book-shaped…”
So I was disqualified. Also, I was recently approached by the documentary maker Gussy Sakula-Barry to appear in her documentary about the ‘90s and Loaded - a magazine I wrote for in its earliest days. I declined, because I just can’t stand behind anything I wrote / made before 1996 - before Tottenham Ayatollah and Them. The early 90s were my apprenticeship years and the less attention that’s drawn to them the better.
In the end, though, I thought Gussy’s Loaded documentary was GREAT, not least because it drew a careful distinction between the magazine’s exciting and experimental early days and the horrific thing it later became. Plus, as Lucy Mangan put it in her Guardian review, Loaded’s founder James Brown comes over very well in it, ironically and sadly because…
'…he looks like a shadow of his former enfant terrible self. He moves gingerly, speaks softly, is on steroids, he tells us, and feels ill. The double hearing aids he wears are visible now that the famous mop of curls is shorn. The cockiness that helped make his name is far less apparent. As a presence, he seems much more engaging than he did in his heyday. You suspect this is no comfort.’
So: I very much recommend the Loaded documentary (Miranda Sawyer comes over brilliantly in it too) and I recommend Tottenham Ayatollah. But what about Hotel Auschwitz? I just didn’t know. So I swallowed and listened.
The first 19 minutes are TERRIBLE. It was horrifying and embarrassing to hear. It’s so bad I still think it was probably unwise for me to have posted it here. I have the worse condescending drawl. In fairness to me this was the ‘90s when EVERYONE had a condescending drawl. We learned it from Damon Albarn - the king of letting everyone know he was better than us.
But then - thank God - at 19 minutes it gets a lot better, at least until 33 minutes in.
How could I not know the difference back then between good and bad?
Anyway, I made notes as I listened…
