A music-obsessed recovering alcoholic’s advice on curbing bleakness, being a better father and becoming less of a meff.

In partnership with Off the Shelf Festival.

Due to overwhelming popular demand (three emails, one Facebook post and a vague request from his mother), music critic and mauvais vivant John Doran is turning his popular and long running MENK column for VICE into a book.

Jolly Lad concerns the author’s attempts to deal with his life as a recovering alcoholic, to calm his enthusiasm for narcotics, to take control of his wildly fluctuating mental health issues and to curb a tendency toward bleakness in order to become a better father to his young son and less of a meff.

John’s columns have been significantly rewritten for Jolly Lad, which also features several new chapters, a new introduction and several appendices.

Here John will, for the first time, read excerpts and chapters from his book before it is published in November on Strange Attracter Press.

When it is published Jolly Lad will be accompanied by an album of spoken word and music, featuring musicians from Manic Street Preachers, Factory Floor, British Sea Power, Fat White Family, Teeth Of The Sea, SunnO))), Grumbling Fur, Gravenhurst and more.

***MILD SPOILER*** – Jolly Lad will contain the following sentence: “This roaring oaf of a ukulele salesman was trying to kick the bathroom door down.”

John Doran is the founder and editor of The Quietus website. He has written for the BBC, The Guardian, the WIRE, Metal Hammer, The Stool Pigeon, VICE, the Word, Q and NME. He co-runs the QPC record label the QLC publishing venture and is an occasional broadcaster for NOISEY and the BBC.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, “menk” is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal.”