 So I was interested in the fact that literature and the cinema and the theatre told stories about people who hadn't turned up before in stories. And so when I did my beautiful lawn-drat, it was a similar kind of revolution, you might say, that these people hadn't been portrayed before. You'd never seen Asian characters really, um, on the telly or in literature. And so one of the things that you can do as a writer is bring in new news, you know. These people are here too. This country is changing and and hello, you know, that's how creativity develops by people opening the door to new voices. And around that time there were a lot of teacup empire films, like the Raj Quartet or Passage to India that David Lean had made. People under thaturism were really fascinated by the master race. You know, there were the whites under colonialism having a really good time and the Indians were rushing around making their tea, you know, and making courage for them. But actually, you know, the the reality was much more like my beautiful lawn-drat. So that's what artists, if you're lucky, you can do that. It's new at the time. Yeah, there was a lot of casual racism that we faced. So the racism of Britain, I mean, Britain's never been a fascist country. And there's never had a real fascist party. So it's mostly casual people gobbling on you and smacking you about. Racism and the racism, let's say, of exclusion. Or the racism of superiority. But certainly after the war, I still have those empire attitudes and they thought they were the master race. They looked down on Indians and thought you were inferior and uneducated and basically born to be their servants. But it's really interesting to be at the if you can survive it, to be on the receiving end of it, actually. Because it's very shocking to suddenly find yourself the victim of other people's attitudes. And in a sense that made me want to be a writer as it will wiggle out of being shoved into that hole, into that position, I guess. But at the time, certainly in the suburbs, it was very, very traumatic for me. Very, very oppressive. Really horrific and I thought the only way out of this is to try and be an artist, otherwise I'll just disappear. Well, I grew up at a time when the idea of having a sort of fixed identity was beginning to decline. If you grew up in the 50s and early 60s, there was the idea that, you know, you got married at a relatively young age, you had your kids, you got your house, you did your job and then you retired. You didn't suddenly become a transvestite halfway through, you know. You really were destined to be that person in the civil service, indeed, as my father was. And then in the 60s, of course, was the idea of social mobility and then the idea of dressing up with more clothes, a bigger pop star, changing your hair, wearing a different jacket, wearing velvet trousers. You became, you know, a signifier for other people of difference, as they put it. And obviously, Bowie was very important to that, but also pop was very important. I mean, I was fascinated by the performance of pop, acting up, dressing up. And you could see that in the book of Superbius. I mean, you can be so oppressed by your identity. So if you are, as it were, a packy for other people, then you are always their victim. You know, you are always, as it were, fixed by their language, by their words. So it's partly to escape other people's idea of who you are, which you might, I don't know, become a hippie, or you might decide that your masculinity is of that sort rather than that sort, or you might become gay or whatever. And particularly if you are a victim of other people's words. Well, I wanted to write about the neighbours, the streets, what you wore, the furniture you had. It was really, I grew up at the beginning of consumerism, you know, and you'd spend a lot of time thinking about carpets, and everything became sort of disposable. And it was really the consumer revolution, and you buy stuff and chuck it away. So we in the suburbs were the guinea pigs of consumerism. It's not the dullness of the place, I think that bothers me really, it's the idea that the expectations of those who have surrounded us, and you might say it was quite difficult to be involved in culture. And that's partly to do with class, I mean, being lower middle class, you might say, everybody around you. The world was much narrower, you couldn't dream very high, you know, if you're lucky you might move to Beckham, which was considered to be the local apogee of class. So I'm quite interested in the limitations, and how if you're lucky you can overcome them. Those days, you know, people really believed in social mobility. So when I went to the Royal Court when I was 18, it was amazing to me that to meet people who spent their whole lives working as actors, or as writers, or as directors, or movie directors, or whatever, because I'd never met anybody who spent their whole life doing culture. Culture seemed so extraordinary, and so outside of our experience, the people who did it seemed to me to be like sort of all of them were geniuses. Well, he's had a big trip, Kareem. He's come from the suburbs, and at the end I think he goes to New York with Charlie, and they start to become quite disillusioned. And really that's a picture of the 60s, as it turned into the 70s, as it turned into punk. It all turned from, you know, people smoking dope to people taking heroin by the end of the 70s, dying in hotel rooms in New York. The idea that you can just have pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, the hedonistic idea of escaping from the sort of Victorianism of Britain in the beginning of the 60s, by the 70s, the hedonism has become rather tiresome. It was a party, but of course parties have to end, and it becomes decadent and cruel and empty. This is really the beginning by the end of the Buddha, of neoliberalism, of the idea of constant consumption, and the thought of thatcherite Reagan idea that you have to go shopping, of compulsive enjoyment, you know. So we really move from the period of prohibition, you know, you can only have sex if you're married and under certain circumstances, and blah blah blah and all of that. By the end, people are exhausted with the horror of having to have a good time all the time, and that was really the story of that period. Jamila's a really interesting figure because, I mean, she's much more serious than him. He's much more like me in some sense, and she also has my seriousness too there. I mean, she's quite serious about her politics, and her father wants her to have an arranged marriage. It's really much rougher for her, and she becomes a feminist. But there's something really important about it, that people were really doing serious stuff. They really wanted to find new ways to live. You know, could you live with three people? Could you experiment with your sexuality? Could you bring up children in a new way? And certainly the feminists, the women, were doing that. So I was thinking about my childhood, about growing up with kids who were, who all became skinheads, represented in the film by the working class actor Daniel Delos, and I'd had an uncle who'd taken me around Laundrette's because I think he thought the writing business was probably not going to work out, although I've been working in the theatre for quite a long time, I don't know. This is the early 80s. So I had the Laundrette's stuff. I had some friends who were kind of semi-gangsters, I guess. I had the skinheads. I had really the Thatcherite theme, really, of enterprise, of setting up your own businesses. And also, of course, the white working class who were sort of represented by the skinhead and his gang, Genghis and Moose and so on, who were sort of excluded, I guess, or beginning to be excluded and would later be represented by people like Nigel Farage because they were really on the margins. Well, I'd been very interested in, as indeed many people have the fat wire against my pal, Zalman Risti, but so interested in it that I started to research these kids in the 90s and who got involved in it. And out of my research at the mosque, the college isn't actually just down the road from here, not far from here, and then going to the east end and et cetera, et cetera, hanging around with those kids, I developed the Black Album and later the story of my son the Fanatic and later, of course, the movie, my son the Fanatic, that in those days, even after the fat wire, the people were not particularly interested in fundamentalism as a thing. They just thought the fat wire was sort of one-off. They didn't realise it was the beginning of a worldwide revolutionary movement. But I just wanted to talk to these kids who were like me and not like me. I mean, they were mixed-race kids, mostly, like me and Muslim background, who had grown up in the west and suddenly they were on their knees and they were peddling a version of religion that we had never seen before and now had turned up in London and it turned up in the mosques and the colleges. And at the same time, I'd become very interested in ecstasy and dance culture and the new music because I'd always been interested in music and drugs and fashion. So they slammed together in the Black Album where I posited a kid, Shahid, I think his name is, who was interested in both and really likes fundamentalism because it's, as it were, comes out of his family. They're Muslim kids like him from the Muslim background and they believe in stuff and they're busy and they have values and the other stuff seems quite decadent. The west is getting really decadent, mostly fascinated by shopping by Madonna, by drugs. They're just fascinated by narcotics and synthetics and consumerism and plastic rubbish and suddenly he finds an ideology that really stands for something that he thinks is important, I guess, that there are real values here, but of course these values are coming to cost, you might say, of a certain idea of women, of what literature should do, of morality and so on. So he's hypnotised by it and he's torn apart by it. At the end of the book, Shahid, it was quite half a meter right because you have to find a way through and he gives up his friendships and so you say he betrays them which is a really important betrayal. He betrays the ideology for pleasure, for love and he sees that these are really important values. But by then and obviously now, it's really hard for the west to justify itself. What are the values that we actually stand for? Is it just shopping and fucking? As Mark Ravenhill put it rather well. What actually are our values? Do we just want to go shopping? Do we have anything? This democracy? What does it actually mean, this free speech? What does it actually mean? This equality? This feminism? What does it actually mean? What are these values for us? Or are they really just a bit of icing and the rest is basically this capitalism making money for people who are creating a super-rich elite class that we have now created. It's interesting how we got rid of authority in the 60s and broke it all down. Then it comes back with the swing in the 90s with fundamentalism that really introduces the most virulent form of authority that we've had for a long time actually and absolutism that has really been absent from the social realm you might say. So that was really interesting to me because in the 60s and 70s we spent decades smashing everything up, breaking everything down, getting rid of all that obsolete, hopeless authority. Then it swings back in this terrible new form, what Freud calls the return of the repressed with a new form of, you might say, neo-fascistic religion. It's very shocking because nobody expected that. We thought we'd got rid of that form of old-fashioned paternalistic authority and it comes back with a bang as you might say.