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| INTERVIEWS |
| REVIEWS BY PHIL SHOENFELT |
| CONCERT REVIEWS |
| RELATED ARTISTS |
| Nick Saloman Bevis Frond |
I worked with Phil briefly a few years ago and found him to be a charming, talented and thoroughly likeable chap. If he hadn't moved to the Czech Republic who knows what might happened! I noticed he wore two big rings on one hand and I interpreted this as a sign of great self confidence. I'm not sure how accurate that was. His songs were/are mostly miner key homages to a life spent in the seedier parts of the world - New York, Berlin, Kidderminster. Dark, yet somehow melodic and paignant. Phil somehow instinctively knows how far to take the listener. He'll drop you off just at the edge of town, just when it could all get out of control, so that your feet remain on safe ground while his run across the minefield. You can watch, you can listen, you can admire what he does - what he's about - but his is intrisically a lone trip. Phil has always gone his own way, and if there's anything like a God, he'll continue to do so long after we (and he) are all gone... |
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| Barbara Manning Go-Luckys! |
I can tell you about a time when I was hurt by an explosion of misguided self hatred, just at a moment when my compassion peeped through its aged and tattered curtain. Fury slapped my emotional face. I showed the teenaged middle finger and went to my room. What to listen to? I was raging now. I needed music that could match the sullen anger and isolation; some thing to play loud enough to disturb outside of my little space; something that would touch the deepness of my hurt and comfort me!I put Phil Shoenfelt and I felt understood and validated... |
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| Nikki Sudden Jacobites, about Phil's novel "Junkie Love" |
You can always tell a good book by the first line - this is a good book! I first read PS's description of his 1980's Camden Town lifestyle in Prague some five years back and was immediately struck by the quality of his writing. In a way, for the subject matter, this book is as important as William Burrough's Junkie. Too much writing about heroin addiction merely enforces the romance of the drug but Shöenfelt also reveals the darker side of addiction. Not in the grotesquely tainted style of an Irving Welsh but with far greater purity. Some of the scenes depicted are remarkably sleazy but the author never falls into cliché. If this book suffers through anything it's only in its bad timing at appearing after such an overrated book as Trainspotting. If nothing else Junkie Love would make a far better movie. The thing about a junkie lifestyle is it may be sordid and at times unspeakably sleazy but it's still a form of living that is at odds with the way civilisation expects us to behave. When you're a junkie all that really matters is the next fix and how to get it. As Shoenfelt points out the drug is, "For nihilists and hedonists - for people who have either given up trying to make sense of existence... or who don't give a shit about a future they can't see or believe in." It's also a drug that artists have sought solace and inspiration in through the years - it will continue to be so. With his music, especially on his last two albums, Blue Highway and Dead Flowers For Alice Shoenfelt has conjured up a place all of his own. Junkie Love joyously shares the same territory. The best book about heroin since Junkie. An essential read! |
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| Nick Cave The Bad Seeds, about Phil's novel "Junkie Love" |
Junkie Love - A nice, nasty read. I enjoyed it a lot! |
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| Ruth Weiss American poet, about "Junkie Love" |
This book is tough love. Junkie Love shoots straight for the gut, puts the picture in your face, what a junkie faces from moment to moment, through each night, through each day. That Phil Shoenfelt, the author, is well today to tell it, is a triumph of a soul in its struggle to the light. The art of Jolana Izbická draws a haunting line through Phil Shoenfelt's story, ending with a spiral upward. |
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| Iva Pekárková Czech novelist, about "Junkie Love" |
Filled with refreshing graveyard humour, Junkie Love is a gripping soldier's story from the times when a junkie's worst worries were himself and the badly cut drugs. |
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| Michael Gira Angels Of Light/Swans, about "Junkie Love" |
Shoenfelt brings a sure, cold, almost empirical precision to his descriptions: ever-descending scenes of brute squalor, self-inflicted wounds and abjection. Ultimately though, what's revealed is an underlying compassion for the characters in Junkie Love, their helplessness in the face of their obsessions, and their misguided, naked need for transcendence and love. A trenchant, cautionary tale that successfully avoids the self-righteous tone of the 'recovered'... |