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Looking for a Kiss
Looking for a Kiss is set in post-punk London (and New York) – it is a fabulous chronicle of speed, madness and flying saucers (Warhol/Edie Sedgwick reference) – acid, pop art, teenage perversity, breakdown, breakup and breakout, the nature of melancholy, the Spectacle, bathroom functions, clairvoyance, personality crises, primal scenes, screams and schemes, the eternal quest for cool and the endless search for redemption. And much more.
‘A Jarmanesque journey in Vivienne Westwood heels, to love’s shrine,’ David Erdos, International Times
As far as I am concerned – this is a crucial account of the post-Pistols punk era from an actual WRITER.’ – PT Madden, artist.
‘Like a bitter sweet Coltrane solo crashing into Einstürzende Neubauten. Books like Looking for a Kiss are a flare in the dark.’ – Malcolm Paul, writer.
‘A drug-fuelled beat/punk, love/hate story. Like (say) Kerouac, it’s shot through with sadness. Not just the comedown, but the inability to bridge the gulf between the enlightened moment of Beatitude, and the bleak surroundings you exist in the rest of the time,' Paul Gorman, Into the Gyre
‘A Jarmanesque journey in Vivienne Westwood heels, to love’s shrine,’ David Erdos, International Times
As far as I am concerned – this is a crucial account of the post-Pistols punk era from an actual WRITER.’ – PT Madden, artist.
‘Like a bitter sweet Coltrane solo crashing into Einstürzende Neubauten. Books like Looking for a Kiss are a flare in the dark.’ – Malcolm Paul, writer.
‘A drug-fuelled beat/punk, love/hate story. Like (say) Kerouac, it’s shot through with sadness. Not just the comedown, but the inability to bridge the gulf between the enlightened moment of Beatitude, and the bleak surroundings you exist in the rest of the time,' Paul Gorman, Into the Gyre
222 pages, Paperback
First published November 19, 2020
95 people want to read
About the author
Richard Cabut
9 books28 followersCurrent books.
Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances (Far West Press).
Looking for a Kiss – extended edition (PC-Press)
Richard Cabut is author of the novels Looking for a Kiss (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020) and Dark Entries (Cold Lips Press, 2019), editor/-writer of the anthology Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zer0 Books, October 2017), contributor to Ripped, Torn and Cut – Pop, Politics and Punks Fanzines From 1976 (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Growing Up With Punk (Nice Time, 2018).
His journalism has featured in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, NME (pen name Richard North), ZigZag, The Big Issue, Time Out, Offbeat magazine, the Independent, Artists & Illustrators magazine, thefirstpost, London Arts Board/Arts Council England, Siren magazine, etc.
His fiction has appeared in the books The Edgier Waters (Snowbooks, 2006) and Affinity (67 Press, 2015). He was a Pushcart Prize nominee 2016.
Richard’s plays have been performed at various theatres in London and nationwide, including the Arts Theatre, Covent Garden, London.
He published the fanzine Kick, and played bass for the punk band Brigandage (LP Pretty Funny Thing – Gung Ho Records, 1986).
Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances (Far West Press).
Looking for a Kiss – extended edition (PC-Press)
Richard Cabut is author of the novels Looking for a Kiss (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020) and Dark Entries (Cold Lips Press, 2019), editor/-writer of the anthology Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zer0 Books, October 2017), contributor to Ripped, Torn and Cut – Pop, Politics and Punks Fanzines From 1976 (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Growing Up With Punk (Nice Time, 2018).
His journalism has featured in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, NME (pen name Richard North), ZigZag, The Big Issue, Time Out, Offbeat magazine, the Independent, Artists & Illustrators magazine, thefirstpost, London Arts Board/Arts Council England, Siren magazine, etc.
His fiction has appeared in the books The Edgier Waters (Snowbooks, 2006) and Affinity (67 Press, 2015). He was a Pushcart Prize nominee 2016.
Richard’s plays have been performed at various theatres in London and nationwide, including the Arts Theatre, Covent Garden, London.
He published the fanzine Kick, and played bass for the punk band Brigandage (LP Pretty Funny Thing – Gung Ho Records, 1986).
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 14, 2021
Robert and Marlene are the star-crossed angelheaded hipster types tripping their lawless way around the streets of 1988 post-punk London. Looking for a Kiss is a riot, this raucous call to arms having all the faded grandeur and doomed affectation of your fave rockstar idols.
July 15, 2021
Looking for a Kiss has been described as being post punk and pop art but, really, I think its author has moved beyond any such confines or definitions.
Having said that, set at the start of the 80s, the book describes perfectly the almost overwhelming crises – personal and cultural – that had to be faced at the end of the 70s, and of the punk era.
And it both utilizes and portrays pop art as a point of reference and feeling in the context of glamour – that is, glamour in its most interesting sense: as a spell; fascination, distance, illusion and translucence, and sprezzatura – terms which also describe the sense of the book itself.
Looking for a Kiss is cool, clever, magical, literary and very, very exciting – the author has found his distinctive voice and train of thought/ideas – it’s a novel of insight, wild characterisation, and statement.
For those who remember the gritty Camden Town/London and the East Village/New York of the 1980s, the novel is a trip back to view an unravelling tapestry of moods and images that depict the convulsive and compelling meaning of the times.
But, Looking For a Kiss, is not a book of the past: rather its territory is the past, present, and future moulded into a timeless and ongoing form.
There’s some considerable skill and talent here – a contender for book of the year.
Having said that, set at the start of the 80s, the book describes perfectly the almost overwhelming crises – personal and cultural – that had to be faced at the end of the 70s, and of the punk era.
And it both utilizes and portrays pop art as a point of reference and feeling in the context of glamour – that is, glamour in its most interesting sense: as a spell; fascination, distance, illusion and translucence, and sprezzatura – terms which also describe the sense of the book itself.
Looking for a Kiss is cool, clever, magical, literary and very, very exciting – the author has found his distinctive voice and train of thought/ideas – it’s a novel of insight, wild characterisation, and statement.
For those who remember the gritty Camden Town/London and the East Village/New York of the 1980s, the novel is a trip back to view an unravelling tapestry of moods and images that depict the convulsive and compelling meaning of the times.
But, Looking For a Kiss, is not a book of the past: rather its territory is the past, present, and future moulded into a timeless and ongoing form.
There’s some considerable skill and talent here – a contender for book of the year.
December 31, 2021
The Canis Major constellation seen in an acne-ridden chest. Sirius. Rainbow-stained smoke risen from a fag end. Morning broken. Cold London coming in through the windowpane. It's over too soon. Bloop!
An Elizabethan scrying mirror held up in a London bedsit. Prismatic light refracted through the hair of an aging punk crusted with wood glue. No future forever and abandoned by the past. We gulp down cold tea and fag ash, not waving bur drowning. John Dee stood outside a Jobcentre Plus with a phone in his hand. A text message flashing on the obsidian screen. HOW DO WE BEGIN?
An Elizabethan scrying mirror held up in a London bedsit. Prismatic light refracted through the hair of an aging punk crusted with wood glue. No future forever and abandoned by the past. We gulp down cold tea and fag ash, not waving bur drowning. John Dee stood outside a Jobcentre Plus with a phone in his hand. A text message flashing on the obsidian screen. HOW DO WE BEGIN?
May 5, 2021
A remarkable eyewitness account from the powerful nihilistic undertow in the wake of punk. If punk as a movement was a single shattering blow, the trick was to resurface, remake/remodel and refuse to be trapped in awe of its hypnotic negativity. LSD was one tool that could be applied with care and consciousness, allowing the author the freedom to zoom in and out, time-travel, and explore the beat bombed world in which we found ourselves at the end of the 80s. I couldn't put this book down and pretty much read it in two or three sessions, savouring the ideas swirling around my head in between...
July 25, 2024
A very honest recollection of the London punk scene.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews