‘My reading pile is turning into a Jenga tower’: Graeme Armstrong in Airdrie, where he grew up. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Interview

Graeme Armstrong: ‘When I stopped taking drugs, I felt a kind of loneliness’

The debut novelist on how to write violence, taking the same advice as Irvine Welsh, and his love of Goosebumps

Alex Preston

Saturday 22 February 2020

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raeme Armstrong, 28, grew up in Airdrie, east of Glasgow. He was involved with gang culture from a young age. Expelled from school in his mid-teens, he transferred to Coatbridge high school, and went on to study English literature at Stirling University. The Young Team, his first novel, is a raw and lyrical Bildungsroman that traces the life of Azzy Williams, a smart, secretly sensitive boy growing up in a rough Scottish town where he is drawn to gangs, drugs and crime. The book is written in a voice that recalls Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner – dialect that fizzes off the page.

How much of Azzy Williams is your own experience?

I was engaged in gangs in the local community, in North Lanarkshire. I spent many, many years living the life of Azzy Williams. His voice is a mouthpiece for my own experience. Of course he’s a fictional character in a fictional world, but his voice and my voice are akin.

How did you come to write the book?

I stopped taking drugs on Christmas Day 2012. I was in my first weeks of withdrawal and I had tried to stop taking drugs before and it’s quite a lonely space. I didn’t hang around with friends much at that point. I was pretty isolated, up in my university in Stirling, just sitting smoking cigarettes in my flat. I was thinking about Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen, how good that was, how it was the first time my generation had been portrayed: kids of the 90s and 00s. I saw my life in that. I thought: I’m going to write a film that’ll be the next Sweet Sixteen. After about 15 minutes I realised that writing films wasn’t for me. Then I wrote three words on the page: “The Young Team.” I thought: “What’s this?” – and I just started writing. I bashed out the first draft there and then. It was an outpouring. By the end of 2015, I had about 250,000 words and everything since then has been editing, cutting back. It has taken almost seven years altogether.

Would you agree that there’s a certain nostalgia for your time in gangs that comes through in the book?

Absolutely. I think part of the seductive nature of gangs is that there is a brotherhood between gang members. It’s a tough environment, a very masculine environment, where young men are under intense pressure to put up these hard fronts. In the brotherhood of a gang setting you find safety in numbers, but also camaraderie. In my own experience, when I stopped hanging about with gangs and stopped taking drugs and moved to the city, I felt a kind of loneliness.

You write brilliantly about drugs and violence, both of which tend to lie outside the realm of language.…

You’re right that they do transcend the normal vocabulary of how we say things. When it came to violence, it was all about pace for me. Violence in real life is much more confusing than it is in films. It’s very, very quick, and afterwards, you don’t always remember things, and that’s just adrenaline. You remember what happens to you afterwards, the injuries or whatever, but the violence itself is often just a blur. In the book I increase pace to give these frantic moments, but they’re not tales of heroism. Azzy is the victim of gang violence on numerous occasions. He’s always covered in “eggs” – that’s something I remember, that you always had these lumps all over you. You didn’t feel them at the time because you were drunk so often, but you felt them afterwards.

The dialect is, in places, quite hard for the uninitiated to follow. Did this worry you?

The first versions I wrote, I think they were much harder, much more true to life. They were what we’d call MSN speak, which was the chatroom we all used. It was almost indecipherable to others. I met Janice Galloway at Stirling University and she offered to read some of my work. She said to me: “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Irvine Welsh: you’ve got to cut back on the dialect.” So I thought if it’s good enough for him, it’s certainly good enough for me. I wouldn’t say I sanitised it, but I rewrote in a way that was more legible, and with an awareness of the fact that there would be people who would be reading this book and may struggle.

What was the last great book you read?

This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan.

Which novelists or nonfiction writers working today do you most admire?

The ones that have really left an impact on me recently: Sally Rooney, both of her books, Conversations With Friends and Normal People. It’s outside my normal sphere of reading but it’s really, really tremendous writing. Very sparse but so accomplished. Kerry Hudson’s book Tony Hogan… and her memoir Lowborn. Jenny Fagan, The Panopticon, that left a huge impression on me. I’ve not been doing as much reading as I would like, with all this work. My reading pile by my bed is turning into a Jenga tower.

What was the last classic you read?

The Catcher in the Rye. It wasn’t what I had expected for such a classic.

What book would you give to a 10-year-old?

The Hobbit. That was one that I was exposed to really young and it captivated me.

What sort of reader were you as a child?

I read a lot of Goosebumps to tell you the truth, and I’m not ashamed to admit that. They were fantastic, I loved all that stuff. Quite young – very early high school if not primary school – I was on crime fiction. Ian Rankin and all of that sort of stuff.

How do you organise your books on your shelves?

I’ve got different shelves for different things. I’ve got a nonfiction shelf, a Scottish social realism shelf and a general fiction shelf.

• Graeme Armstrong appears at Waterstones, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow (5 March) and Aye Write! festival, Glasgow (12 March)

• The Young Team by Graeme Armstrong is published by Picador (£14.99).

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