The first thing I should mention is that the new edition of Richard Cabut’s Looking for a Kiss is a wonderful thing. Beautifully designed, it’s a proper bit of quality, the kind of book you’ll need to buy a coffee table for. Tbh you’d be better off accompanied by something stronger than coffee when you read this though. Starting with an acid trip and ending up with (maybe) some kind of insight, “Put some romance in your life. Another dream satisfied”, Looking for a Kiss is Robert and Marlene’s journey through selected scenes of young man and womanhood, the soundtrack post-punk and the going not easy. Being twenty in the eighties and living in Camden Town sounds like a lot of fun but, frustratingly, quite often wasn’t. How do you work out what you want to be, who you want to be and what drink and drugs are going to smooth the way to answer these questions? And, actually, how does this really work when the ‘squares’ are still very much in control of the social, economic and political narrative? “Outside they recognised that the world had somehow, while they were dreaming of poetry and chaos, assumed its form of consumer and market culture”. As Looking for a Kiss jumps from the past to the present and back again, Robert grabs hold of literature and film, the best kind of life raft, to help him into the future. And Robert and Marlene? In this edition’s new introduction, Richard Cabut gives an answer, “This is fiction as a drift of music, as a dream - which is how it’s perhaps best to think of, and where to leave Robert and Marlene: forever young dreamers wrapped in reverie in Camden Town”. A dream of a book, Looking for a Kiss is a must read.

Looking for a Kiss – Richard Cabut – publ. PC-Press - £25.00

Steven Long