Available for the First Time in Forty Years - the Rock Horror Cult Classic
Featured in MOJO Magazine's "Paperback Rioters" article (MOJO #290, January 2018)
"A hell of a ride... The closest parallel is probably David Bowie's Diamond Dogs album."
- From the Foreword by Alwyn W. Turner.
A WILD NEON-LIT NIGHTMARE CITY - A BAND ON THE EDGE OF SANITY
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...At the first moment of their appearance in the stadium the constant screaming of the fans swelled to a great bestial chaos of sound.
Malk held up his arms and appealed for quiet, shouting into his mike in a futile attempt to make himself heard.
--Okay, here we go. A-four, a-three, a-two, a-one!
They launched into the act. No-one heard them. Like figures in a silent movie they plucked their guitars, mouthed and gaped, stamped, shook, gesticulated.
When Sonny smashed his instrument to pieces and hurled away the bits, began to tear off his clothes and scratch his face, the fans took it all as part of the performance.
They smelled blood, and howled for more...
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...PSYCHEDELIC, PSYCHOTIC... TOO OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD TO BE FACT, TOO TRUE-TO-LIFE TO BE FICTION
"A future world dominated by vast discrepancies in wealth and power, and shaped by sex, drugs and rock and roll, with lashings of violence, riots and revolution, not to mention transvestites and deviant sex. ...There's barely a pulp fiction button left unpressed."
- From "Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats."
ABOUT DRUMMER
In 1971, Scottish author Richard Carlile's novel DRUMMER was first published. A delirious nightmare journey melding rock-'n'-roll madness, bloody ultraviolence, and unnerving psychological horror, it was a visceral reaction to the recent Manson Family murders, deaths at the Altamont festival, and other savage cultural flashpoints at the forefront of society's consciousness. The novel's unique immediacy and impact earned it a dedicated cult following.
Now, DRUMMER returns to print after more than four decades, published by Carlile's son and with a new foreword by pop-culture maven Alwyn W. Turner, emerging into a very different but no less brutal or uncertain world. Appearing surprisingly prescient to the 2018 eye, DRUMMER reveals a twisted carnival-mirror vision of the corrupting exploitation of the entertainment industry - transgenderism - mass hysteria - and the tragic descent of a divided society into all-out civic war.
Proudly published in the U.S.A. by CARLILE MEDIA.
About the Author: Richard Carlile is a Scottish author, poet and singer-songwriter. From the Foreword by Alwyn Turner: "Carlile left St. Andrew's University in 1969, where he had studied English literature and philosophy. Disillusioned with literary fiction, and feeling that 'things had turned bad' with the counter-culture, he threw himself into producing a lurid vision of the future that would be deliberately unliterary. Written at speed, and published exactly as written with no editorial input, Drummer was one of the first works to articulate the comedown from the cultural high of the 1960s. Despite its post-Altamont origins, Drummer isn't fixed in time. I first read it in the late 1970s, when punk was at its peak, and it made perfect sense then in the context of the Sex Pistols and of Derek Jarman's film Jubilee. It still does in a world of transglobal corporations and growing economic inequality."
