He didn't ask me to write a book review but I didn't ask him to write the book so we're evens. I'm glad he did though. Unfortunately I didn't purchase it this time from the News from Nowhere Bookshop on Bold Street Liverpool because I was nowhere near there but bought it on a whim from Waterstones, Aberystwyth. Not that I was flush but I wanted to read about the the flash "Ullo John got a new motor". Like his first memoir this again is a slow burn which is an honest reflection of a person's life but by the time you get to the end you realise that there will be another one if not two after this one. Well a guy has got to make a buck somehow and you realise that Alexei Sayle was very adept at doing that. Although I never went to see him live I was and am a big fan. His anarchic comedy was a blast of fresh air and hope in Thatcher's Britain and by the end of the book you will believe that he actually stole Thatcher's trousers, not the other way round. We begin at the Chelsea College of Art, he has left Liverpool out of Lime Street Station and returns sporadically to visit his mother Molly and their cat. He dedicated the first volume to his mother and this one to his wife of many years Linda who became ostensibly his manager and you feel that if it hadn't been for her guiding hand and gentle touch that he would have gone off the rails many times. The hours he kept and the people he mixed with would have frazzled the fuse of many a lesser mortal but there was a burning desire to make people laugh and to make it at the same time. I'm afraid that the Young Ones passed me by but I tuned in just to see Alexei Sayle in it and turned it off once he'd finished his bit. Whenever I knew that he was on the telly I would tune in and seeing him was like being prodded with a cattle prong, his electricity ignited yours and reading his words in this volume has once again switched me on politically. Despite his success I detect a sadness and subjective puzzlement at show business and the people within it. Fame does not come without a cost. He names others but does not shame them but is frustrated by the madness of others because he of course is the maddest of them all, at least on stage. I suspect that he's far happier talking about guns and cars in real life but he knows that should he write a third volume of memoirs that I will buy it and review it whether he wants me to or not! Katanga!
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