Author Will Ashon: ‘There’s a real value to being lost’

The former record label boss and novelist on why he decided to write a book about Epping Forest and all of the misfits it harbours

Will Ashon, like Dante, found himself lost in a wood in middle age. Unlike Dante, Ashon had spent most of his adult life running a record label, discovering and signing names from Roots Manuva to Kate Tempest to Speech Debelle. He’d also been a hip-hop journalist and a novelist, but his midlife collywobbles prompted a different kind of writing, a book, Strange Labyrinth, which tells the cultural history of Epping Forest. Ashon explores the woody edgeland that straddles London’s East End, turning up gloriously peculiar stories of outlaws, punk rockers and frantic doggers. He lives in Walthamstow, north-east London.

Why the move from hip-hop to psychogeography?
Running a record label is hard work. It sounds glamorous in theory but in practice it’s a very full-on office job. And for every moment where you feel you’ve helped someone achieve what they deserve, there are all the moments where it goes slightly wrong. The music business is not big on natural justice. Or talent, for that matter. I still feel a lot of affection for the label, though, and for hip-hop more generally. I like to think of quotes as samples!

What drew you to the forest?
I think that the fact that you can’t see very far in a forest changes the way that you think. If you go for a walk in the mountains, which is what I’ve traditionally done, going off with my family to the Lake District or whatever, you spend your time admiring the view, but in a forest where your sightlines are constantly blocked, there’s a tendency to look the other way, which is to look inwardly. One of the pleasures of walking is that inward gaze.

This isn’t a book in which you find yourself, though. You seem, in fact, to be lost most of the time.
I think what I felt that I learned is that there’s a real value to being lost. There’s so much interest in finding ourselves, so many self-help books about finding yourself, but what I found was that the process of being lost is just as valuable, and I wanted to capture that in the book without ever losing the reader. I do actually know my way around a bit better now. Which is a little bit sad, because the thing that first excited me was just this sense of how, although it’s quite a small place, it’s utterly discombobulating.

Why Epping in particular?
It’s important to have a space like this so close to London that is both in the countryside and in the city, which fits in both and not in either. It’s a contradictory and confusing space, and we live very ordered lives much of the time, and it’s good to have a place where you can step outside all of that.

There are a lot of outsiders in your book.
It’s a countercultural history of Epping Forest. It’s a space which seems to have attracted a succession of people over a very long period of time, who have used the ambiguities that are inherent within that space to explore certain ambiguous ideas of their own.

You write about the time you spend with Penny Rimbaud from the band Crass. Their story feels like an important link between your life and his – music and writing.
With a lot of people, there’s a half-glimmer of recognition when you mention Crass. They were from a very specific era. I’d describe them as the leaders of the second wave of the punk movement. The founders of the anarcho-punk movement that started in the early 1980s, which led to US hardcore. Bands like Black Flag were very heavily influenced by Crass. But they don’t really fit with the neat repackaging of punk that we’ve had. They tend to be written out as slightly problematic and troublesome, which I think they quite like.

How did he come to be in Epping Forest?
Penny Rimbaud [Crass’s lead singer who, with Wally Hope, founded the Stonehenge free festival] and Gee Vaucher [Rimbaud’s long-time artistic partner, who designed the covers of all the Crass albums] still live at Dial House, just north of Epping Forest, which from the late 60s was a commune and from the late 70s the headquarters for Crass. It’s just a really remarkable place which they fought a long campaign to keep from being sold out from under them for development. It’s been described as the Charleston [home of the Bloomsbury group] of the punk generation, which I think is great.

Though they’re not obvious punk rockers. When you first meet Penny, he’s gardening. He’s also a Zen Buddhist.
They were criticised for being vegetable-growing hippy punks at the time. When I was 14 or so and I first listened to Crass, I found it quite forbidding and scary. So when I first went to see them I was worried that they wouldn’t think me right-on enough, that I’d fail all their tests. But they’re actually just lovely people who want to have a good talk.

Which other writers do you admire?
I’m currently reading Nell Zink, Eley Williams, Charlie Fox and Jenny Diski all at once and they make for a good combination of tastes and textures. I think what I admire most is writers who are fearsomely technical, very human and, ideally, funny. In nonfiction, I’m mildly obsessed by Janet Malcolm and it would be hard to write a book like Strange Labyrinth if it wasn’t for the space cleared by Geoff Dyer.

What are you working on now?
I’m writing a book about the Wu-Tang Clan’s first album, Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. In theory it’s 36 interlinked essays using that hour of music as a way to write about everything.

Who’s your ideal reader?
Anyone who sticks with it. I pray for creatures of infinite patience.

• Strange Labyrinth by Will Ashon is published by Granta (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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Interview by Alex Preston

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