When is a scrubber not a scrubber? When she's a groupie: at least that's the first and most superficial message of Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne’s long-awaited novel ‘Groupie’ to be published in October. The blurb on the cover could well kill the book for anyone who did not look beyond it for an assessment of the contents. One is reminded of the lurid excesses of Harold Robins and his genre. ‘ The boys who knew too much , the girls who cared too little, etc. etc.’ but in this book it’s not sex but speed the boys knew about and the girls are careless of plating rather than pregnancy.

With a book written by a groover, about other groovers and with a potential readership of the converted, one can reconsider it on two levels: as a literary work, within the general concept of such things and as a piece which need only be judged by the standards of the limited world with which it is concerned. As far as the first is concerned, ‘Groupie’ hardly ranks among the great works of our time. The style is autobiographical, written by a girl; Katie, or nineteen, and as suck it’s very accurate that is, it seems just as if it were written by a rather naïve girl of nineteen. Her progress from masturbation at fifteen (because she wasn’t having orgasms with a Reichian who felt sorry for her) to the heights of celebrity screwing (coupled with the clap) is charted in an uneasy manner that never really establishes whether it is an analysis of a groupie’s life or the musing of a stoned out mind. She mixes of (sic) analytical pieces, such as the casual, and highly derivative comments on the Plaster-Casters (see Rolling Stone no. 27) with the Edna O’Brien style orgies hideously practical and purposeful, with vast consumption of innumerable drugs, phalluses and the egos of GMs, PMs, and God Forbid, RMs.

Literary style apart, it is both more rewarding and more interesting to consider ‘Groupie’ as an attempt to portray the complexities of pop from the point of view of someone who plays an intimate role within them. Katie drives a straight line comprised of a mixture of pleasure and pain - both mental and physical. The angle on the scene that the reader is given is strictly from her point of view. Gigs, clubs, rows, the fuzz and even the pop stars themselves drift in and out of her life, touching her to greater and lesser extents and leaving their individual marks on both her, and the book.

The exotica of her world are the drugs she takes and the clothes she wears - there is almost fetishist preoccupation with the latter in some places - every stitch of her ‘Thea Porter’ gear is lovingly relished. Drugs and the whole vocabulary and life style that accompany them are an accepted part of the scene; whether it’s tincture, acid, leapers or downers, or even boring old pot itself. Katie is in there lapping it up. In any other book a line like ‘Sometimes maybe it’s uncool to be too cool, I don’t know…’ would be ridiculous; in ‘Groupie’ it’s absolutely right.

As well as the description of living the groovy life are several deep insights into the whole pop world that stand out as perceptive and important, such as the cruelty of experienced heads to one who is less experienced, and is having the horrors on an overdose of tincture, they prefer to lock him in a cupboard rather than let his screams arouse the locals. The whole status-seeking, cool-obsessed world is described in the book. But, since Katie is obviously in love with the whole scene, the description is rarely critical, in the world of the super group and the super cool, one never questions or attacks - one accepts and perhaps observes a few extraordinary events. To lose one’s cool is unforgivable; Katie rarely does and she makes it to the top by the end.

A book written in the detached style of ‘Groupie’ could hardly be termed sensational - despite the treatment the topic has been given by the mass media. Everything comes into it, yet nothing is really considered in depth, even Katie’s affairs lack any real feelings. The style succeeds in capturing the transience of the pop scene, where the rapid rise and fall of groups and music styles is only part of an ever-changing pattern of people and feelings, each one ready to be replaced as soon as something better comes along. In ‘Groupie’, Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne have succeeded in showing what life is like in a world where the extraordinary is commonplace and to be commonplace is a sin.