Welcome to a pair of bookends, the book Club you Can Carry Anywhere.

I'm your host, Hannah mat Donald and I'll be bookending the conversation with some of the most exciting voices from the bookish world.

Welcome to our book club episode for October.

I know we are a little late with this one.

Last month's pick was It's Not a Cult by Joey Beatty.

It's Not a Cult is a quirky, fun and chaotic folk horror novel set in Northumbria about a band that accidentally starts a death cult.

It's a story that examines our relationship with social media and viewing the world through a screen, the reality of reaching dizzying heights of fame, and the joys and chaos of the creative process.

This is a perfect read for these dark winter nights, and if you haven't yet read it, you can grab yourself a copy via the link in the show notes.

After an intense month of book touring, filming, and the premiere of The Witches Season four, I am thrilled to have finally got the opportunity to chat with Joey all about his amazing debut.

Joey Betty is an actor musician, singer, songwriter and author.

He read modern and medieval languages at the University of Cambridge before featuring in the Royal Shakespeare Companies Olivier and Tony award winning productions of wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies on the West End and Broadway.

He has since played numerous roles on television, but is most known for his lead role in Netflix's The Witcher as the bard Yescia.

He also writes and directs music videos, live sessions and short films for his folk band The Amazing Devil, which released their third album in twenty twenty two.

His debut novel, It's Not a Cult, is out now and published by Raven Books in the UK.

Welcome Joey to a baron Bookends.

Thank you so much for Homely.

I'm so happy to be talking to you, and you must know that your book, It's Not a Cult, was our book called pick for the podcast for October, which was very exciting, and I've had quite a few messages of people.

I had a listener called Katie who said it got her out of a reading slump.

Oh lovely, So she'd been really struggling with reading and then this was the book that got her back in.

So that's a huge accolade.

I have that all the time.

Because I do so many things for a living, it's really difficult to try and find books.

But it's also quite hard books unlike you know, television shows or even music.

It's so difficult because it's an investment of your time but also of your concentration.

You can't second screen with a book, and so you kind of want something that you know you'll like, and it's very hard to find that without having people around you who read, or being part of a book club, or having an online community that shares your sensibilities and what you like.

And so, yeah, that's a huge, huge that I've got.

I've de slumped someone.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean the second screen thing, it really worries me.

I know there's a lot of TV writers that have to take that into consideration now, But I hope that's not a thing with novels, because I find that it's the one thing where I can lock in and just my book and forget the world.

Yeah.

I find that even with audio books.

I'm not a huge listener of audiobooks.

I listen to a lot of like history books on audiobook, but I don't listen to a lot of novels, right, But even with audiobooks, I can't do anything else.

I just want to lay in a bed or go for a walk and then be told a story.

Yeah it's so nice to go for a walk with an audiobook in your ears.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can't go to the gym with it.

Unfortunately, I need something slightly more.

I need something aggressive in the gym.

But this was your first book tour?

How was that?

It was intense?

Yeah?

I did love it, but it was it was I had a press stol for another for another project that I was doing, and then jumped straight into the book tour and traveled around the country and I got to meet so many different kinds of people.

But every every one of these these rooms, all these in some cases churches, was filled with people who who were perhaps you know, enjoyed some of my work in television and my work in music.

And I don't get to see a lot of that.

I don't get to go out into the world, and I don't do a lot of press events with the masses because I just I'm just boring and quite reclusive.

If a month and uh, and so I got to actually meets fans of the Amazing Devil my band, and that was incredibly heartwarming.

And there was lots of letters and little gifts, and I took them all back and lay them all on the bed and read all the letters and brought a little tear to my eyes.

It was very, very heartwarming for little exhausting to kind of kind of just get it's just traveling and yeah, and I find public speaking not always the easiest thing to do, so no, it's not.

And I think it's like that for a lot of writers, you know, where they say that it's the fun part is writing the book, but then having to go out and speak about it is the really nerve wracking thing.

But I'm glad that you had a really great time.

It sounds like it went really well.

My friend was at the Monster event and said it went amazing, so oh great.

Oh I hope they enjoyed it.

Yeah, they did, they did.

Before we dive into your book, I do always like to start by asking what you're currently reading, So could you tell us.

Oh, what my reading?

I've just finished.

The last book I've finished was Lucy Rose's debut novel Amazing, which was Yeah, it's something else, it's absolutely astonishing And it's not for the faint of heart that one.

No, it's not.

And I've been staring at the first ten pages of Psayacha Marata's new book.

But again, I think I much like your friend getting out of the slump.

I think I me in a slump at the moment, and I'm just currently just sort of trying to ease myself back into reading.

And I think and I loved Earthlings by Marato as well, and I loved fiction that is so utterly strange.

And I also like the darker side of fiction and that it is unafraid of like really base and quite tenebrous human emotion and weaving it into a into a story that that can that can actually help you because it can serve as a metaphor for something else.

And yeah, so that's that's currently where where I'm at.

But I might have to get on the audiobook for that one because my eyes are getting tired.

No, that's so fair.

I mean, I haven't dived into the world of Marathi yet.

I've heard many things about it.

But the Lamb by Lucy Rose I love.

I thought it was incredible.

Yeah, yeah, goodness, me stayed with me that one.

That's yeah, you turn the last page and you're like, what a.

Month.

Honestly, let's get into your book.

It's not a cult.

So you've said that you started writing books at the age of twenty one, and you've written around eight books in that time, which is just incredible.

And obviously, you know, I think you've made it quite clear your schedule is quite intense with various other projects.

How do you keep yourself motivated to write.

It's actually the one thing that I find easiest to motivate myself to do because I think I'm a big believer in habit and discipline, and so I developed that habit when I was about nineteen twenty or so.

I started to write, and I was wondering if it was something that I enjoyed.

And I think it's a bit like exercise, it's a bit like diet, if you just train yourself to sit in that space and try and even if nothing comes to you, even if nothing's written down.

I said this on the tour.

Actually, someone asked me, like, how do you get over writer's block?

And I said, I don't believe writer's block actually exists.

I think right block was invented by writers as an excuse not to write.

So true.

So I but what I said was just get to the blank page.

And even if you write nothing, even if you write one sentence that whole day, that's that's still writing.

And so I think that's I guess my ethos when it comes to writing.

And it also is just for me one of the most calming and riching and activities that I can do.

Yeah.

Absolutely, I feel slightly targeted by.

The writer's block is just an excuse for writers that don't want to sit down because I'm sorry.

No, it's very true.

Your your debut is, of course a folk horror.

Where did your interest in horror begin?

It's funny, So I don't invent the genre like that this book is sold on.

I don't write the blurb or the taglines or anything like that.

That's all done by one four people over at Raven and at Bloomsbury.

And so when they started to refer to it as I think, my editor Theres said you need to keep calling it a darkly comic folk horror, and I was like, is it though?

There are certainly aspects of it that are fantastical.

There are aspects of it that are dark, and if it comes close to being horrorful in any way, it's largely in what I hope is the exploration in our own complete obsession with self documentation and hyperfixation, and what can happen when mob mentality sort of spills out from behind the keyboard and into the real world.

That, to me was the thing that scared me.

I asked myself that question when I sat down to write the book.

I you know, I've had various different run ins on in real life and on social media which have been quite horrible and harmful, and I started to ask myself, what would happen if these people got up from their keyboards and actually and organize themselves.

And the answer was this book that the answer was that that scared me the most.

So I guess that's the most horrorful aspect of it.

Yeah, definitely.

I think it does lend itself to horror in the sense that, you know, it reveals the most horrifying aspects of humanity at the moment, which is this kind of obsession, this obsession with our phones, this feeling of ownership over people we don't even know.

It's all very kind of absurd.

There's a specific scene in the book that I was really struck by, and I think it might be cal that's talking about being stood in the town center of the past when he was younger with his mom and some man just turns and starts sprinting, and then everyone just starts following him, and that is something like directly out of a film.

It really settled.

That happened to me that really I painted it in the book a little bit differently, and it happened to me in my twenties actually, and I was on Oxford Street, a small road off Oxford Street with a friend and yeah, we just saw people running and we were like what.

We started asking peoples running past it, what's happening, what's happening, and every single one of them was like, we don't know, but we just saw people running, So now we're running and it was obviously and so yeah, and so I wish I could say that my response was as calm and strange as Callums was in the book, but I just I ran as well.

I grabbed so yeah, and we found a building and you know, ran into it and said like, okay, can we turn on the news or something happened?

Nothing had happened, to be clear, absolutely nothing.

It was like, we chuck, we checked social media, we looked at the news, and we stayed in that building for a couple of hours just to be safe, and then got home and it was like, no, nothing happened.

It was just some people just ran paniced, and and I did too.

That's wild, am I think I'd be terrified if something like that happened.

You also have another really explosive scene, which is the opening scene of the book.

We open it's in this.

Incredibly cinematic way where we're sort of thrust onto the edge of a cliff in the midst of a storm.

There's you know, there's waves crashing, there's a crowd going towards us.

Again, and I was really curious what inspired that opening?

Was it the first thing that you wrote?

Yes, Yeah, it was actually yeah, because well, I don't want to do any huge spoilers for anyone who's not read the book, but I tend I do, yes, start with the beginning in the end, and you work out how to get to the end, how to get to the beginning, And this was one of the first things that I set out to write.

When I first I always talk about meeting characters, and it makes me sound deeply esoteric, and I promise you that I'm not as mad as that maybe I am.

But I met the character of Mel.

She was at the bottom of my bed about three o'clock in the morning.

I woke up and I was like, who are you?

And she was just like, what do you mean?

Who am I?

I was like, oh, you're going to be fun.

Okay.

Then and I met Callum as well, and now I and you meet these characters and you kind of try and describe it as like dating them.

Do you go on walks with them?

I sometimes call to dinner with My record is just to see if they fit you, if I like them.

You have to be completely in love with every character that you write in some small way.

Otherwise no one's no one's going to find this book interesting in the slightest.

So I met Meloscene and then I asked her like, oh, where are we now?

And she was just like, I'm obviously at the top of a cliff looking awesome, like obviously, and that image came to me and I was like, yes, this is this is the place to start this book.

And I thank you for your kind words.

I was aiming for something that was quite cinematic and theatrical, because a lot of this book is down there.

Well, the entire book is that the thing.

There's only a handful of scenes, maybe one or two scenes that are not seen down some form of a camera lens, whether it be a mobile phone or a camera or security cameras or whatever.

You and so I wanted it to have that in a metagraphical bent, as it were, but it.

Definitely has that effect.

I could, you know, absolutely see this being adapted for screen, but I was just yet so completely wrapped up in that scene and the fact that you start with that you feel like, Okay, I know where we're going.

Now we're straight in there.

I'm excited to see what happens.

Now.

You just mentioned how a lot of this book is seen through seen down a camera lens, and this is a sort of compulsion that your protagonist Al has, And I was really fascinated by Al, because you know they're introverted, they sort of obsessively record their life.

And one point they describe with this impulse as the world is too bright, too whild, too peripheral when I'm not seeing it through a viewfinder, where do you think that compulsion to move through the world camera in hand comes from?

For Al?

I think so I'm of a generation that grew up in this sort of in the four or five year space where camera phones were exciting by the time, but they were still pretty terrible.

You couldn't film anything on them.

By the time I got to university.

I think that was maybe the first iPhone had come out around about then.

I wasn't not rich enough to own an iPhone at this point, and so I realized that in the next fifteen years after that, I started to notice that we're now watching the first generation that have been exposed to phones and given phones from a very very early age, and it's become embedded in people's limbic system.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, this need for self documentation has become an almost existential struggle to define oneself and to ensure that ones self matters.

And I think a large part of that I wanted embedded in the character of Al, but also throughout all the characters in the book and try and understand what it means to matter, but also to be recorded and then finally to be remembered.

I think it is a very normal human thing to want to be remembered by your loved ones, because it gives your life meaning.

It means that what you've done has had effect, has given kindness to the world or changed it for the better.

And now we don't If you remove all those nice about it, it all just becomes about filming.

It just becomes about you know, if I don't do a tip top video today, then then what is my worth?

And I'm personally not on social media.

I don't engage with it, but I have friends, and for me, this is one of the hardest things to ever talk to them about.

But I'm like, when we're at dinner and I'm like, why are you on your phone here with me?

Please?

And I just was like, right, screw this, I'm gonna write a whole book about it.

I mean it definitely like I felt really challenged by the book.

And I mean that in the best way possible, because I think it is really important that we sort of, you know, really look at our relationship with social media and this compulsion to be on our phones all the time.

It really does become this obsessive relationship.

And I went to a gig like I don't know how many months ago it was, and I went to get my phone out to record and just saw this sea of phones.

And I was like, what am I doing?

Like why am I not in this?

You know, just enjoying the moment and enjoying the music and this performance.

It's such a weird thing to automatically do.

Yeah, yeah, I think I've had that when even on the book tour and things like that, And I get it's a little bit different when you're doing an interview, and but I do have this sort of appropriate sceptive mapping of my environment, and I can tell when someone's filming me, and that might be as a result of being in the public eye or being or being performing in other aspects of my careers.

But like or maybe I think it's largely just like a knee joke response to being watched and to being recorded without permission.

And I think that perpetual level of being perceived and being watched throughout the book is another thing that I try to bring into this sort of horrorful niche again, just never quite knowing that you can't just be alone.

There's not many there's not a single scene in the book where someone's just on their own without a camera without being looked at, so and a lot of that becomes about facade.

And I'll try and talk a lot about this one.

But the character of Melosine we spoke about who for those of you who have not read the book at home, is a very sort of about landish character.

But we start to see that facade melt Away be stripped away, and we see the kind of person she is when she's not being watched as well.

And I think I've got friendships like that.

I've seen people if who do that, who are completely different until they realize that they're on their own.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

It's the I think it is in the opening scene where she realizes that Al is filming and it suddenly switched on and Al is like, oh yeah, she's monologue in now, which.

Is I think?

I do want to ask you about the band that they're in.

It's the band is no name, And of course you're part of a band yourself, as.

You mentioned, the Amazing Devil.

What is it about that lifestyle that you were drawn to exploring through your writing.

Well, to be clear, the Amazing Devil my band has nothing to do with the musical group in the book.

I think some people would be forgiven for thinking that before reading it.

But then myself and my bandmates are hopefully a little bit nicer than the characters and book.

Yeah, I think I love I loved writing about music.

I wanted to ask myself what is the opposite of this obsession with self documentation.

What are the things that can actually bring us together as a community without and bring people happiness without having to remember it all, without recording it all?

I think, and you get a lot of this through two things.

The two things that can't really last beyond their very selves is music.

If you play a song live, as you mentioned, people are trying to record it, but really they're missing out on what music truly is.

Once the song has ended, once that concert's finished, then the death of that needs to matter as well.

We enjoyed it for what it was in the moment, and now that the song has ended.

The only other thing that I found that comes close to that is laughter.

Is joking is actually making jokes with your friends, And you know, once you've told a joke, it's no longer yours.

It now travels throughout the world and becomes everybody else's way of making other people happy and making people laugh, And so these were the things I wanted to try and use to be the antithesis of this hyper fixation and modernity.

I wanted to return to the things that we've always had, and talking about music was one of them.

I've got a tremendous love for music and for live music, but I needed it to be terrible.

I needed it to be like a really crummy band, because I've been in those bands, and I've sweated in the Dog and Parrot with in front of seven people nursing a pind and loved every second of it.

It doesn't matter how many people you're playing in front of if you love what you're doing.

I mean, it's a different experience altogether, isn't it being in a sort of pub venue.

You watch it and it's a totally diffe, But I feel like you captured that so well.

You know, you could really feel like the sticky floors under your feet in the rooms they were performing in, which I loved.

I do want to ask another question about their music, which is that a lot of their lyrics are inspired by so do.

I say it as soulcats?

That?

How you say?

Right?

Yeah?

Where did the inspiration for that come?

From could you tell us a little bit about that?

So the Soulcats are a mythology that is created by a character in the book called Calum, and it's a sort of pantheon, I suppose, of these semi not really that powerful at all, these these gods of the little things, of betting shops and of mud and loose change and things like that.

And I have a great love of folklore, and particularly British and Irish folklore.

But I found in my research that there wasn't anything particularly specific to the Northeast.

There is, there are bits of folklore that is that are very Northeastern, but there wasn't a sort of you know, like a sort of Finn mccorl like character.

There wasn't any There wasn't the Ulster cycle or anything like that.

There's not There's not a lot of stuff that isn't borrowed from Scandinavian or from Scottish, from Irish or what have you.

So I want I just sort of asked myself what would happen if someone just invented one, because that's what a lot of mythology is.

It's just, yeah, someone started telling stories and wrapped them all up in bigger and bigger volumes and told more and more stories like that, and so I was like, I kind of was drawn to creating this mythology.

I got very into it.

I got like and I removed a lot of it from the final draft of the book because I was writing.

I wrote a language.

I wrote like all the songs that feature in the book, I wrote all of those, I wrote all these lyrics, and I have all the mythology written down in this big tone.

And then I got to it and I was like, I don't think we need to know any of this.

This isn't the point.

I just mean because it's all about Al's understanding and perspective of the soul Cats rather than the mythology in itself.

Yeah, I imagine you as I can't think what show it's from boys where the guys in like his sue and he's got all the stuff.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly exactly what.

Because all my friends would come by, like in the evening, I would be like, Hi, how are you whatever, I'd be like, guys, I've cracked it so on this moment here and they're like, we realize that none of this makes sense and you're not even going to use it, Yeah, but I have to know, I have to.

Know it's useful to you.

You have these amazing illustrations at the start of each chapter, and I think those are the illustrations of the Soul Cats.

Is that right?

They are the illustrations as imagined by my great collaborator, Madeline Hyland, who also worked with me in the Mason Double.

Yes.

She worked on those for about two year two and a half years.

Brilliant and there are many, many drafts and scrawls, and we talked endlessly about wanting to create some art for this, for this project, and I find them so beautiful and to haunt it.

We didn't really we hoped they would make it into the book.

But then but that's not guarantee, particularly for a debut novel, Like getting things printed and artwork into a book is actually you know, it kind of makes it more expensive to make.

But Raven and Bloomsbury came along and said, well, can we have a look at these images, and so Madeline and then I sent them over and they went, oh my god, genuinely quite so good ahead of them.

So they were like, can we put these in the book?

I was like, that was the plan, so they were really gracious about it.

And I'm just so lucky to have a collaborator and a friend like Madeline who who can draw on some really dark depths of her own humanity and bring something to this project.

Yeah, it felt like she completely understood, understood your your vision of what these these things were.

I loved, you know, I really took my time, you know, going back and looking over them as I read the book.

I really loved them.

I wanted to.

Ask you a question about the dialect in the book, because obviously it' set in the Northeast.

I think you're set in around Northumberland.

Is that right?

My geography is shocking.

I'm sorry, it's really amazing and refreshings.

Who read a book that has this sort of northern dialect in there, because I don't think we see it often enough.

Was that representation important to you?

Yeah, I think it was.

It took me a while to write about the Northeast.

That's where I'm from, and I, as you mentioned earlier in the podcast, this isn't my first book.

I've written lots of others, but not one of them has been set in the Northeast.

I think I was quite hesitant to write about the Northeast.

I love the Northeast.

I have tremendous fondness for the people who are very proud and very passionate and very funny, and I love that those characteristics in the people.

But it wasn't the nicest place for me growing up.

I had and I actually left home when I was sixteen and to make my way in the world.

And so it was only many, many years later where I was writing this book.

I was writing it in Santa Fe in New Mexico, of all places, and I wanted to find a corner of the world that was forgotten.

I needed the I knew what was going to happen in this novel.

I knew that it was going to become a very unwieldy experience for these characters, and it's I kind of wanted something so massive to happen in the most idiosyncratic, quididian places.

I needed it to be in you know, the betting shops on the corner, or the off license around the back, or in you know, a disused water park, or just on the moors like I needed it.

I needed something so fantastical to be put in direct contrast with with you know, the almost the quiet, beautiful mondanity of the town moors and things like that.

So yeah, I wanted to.

I finally sat down and realized that I can set it in the northeast, and but I tried to avoid all the landmarks, all the fun bits.

I tried, I'm not going to do anything next to the Angel of the North.

I just felt that was a bit too on them.

Not.

I mean, I love reading about these places that aren't considered as you know, very glamorous.

You know, these dingy pubs and the betting shops and the you know, the war park that's not being used anymore.

I think it's so nice to the beauty.

In those places.

I think that's what I want to try and show.

Definitely.

Now, I'm aware we are running out of time, so I would love to finish by asking before I ask for a recommendation, I'd love to find out what is next for you all, to tell us what.

Is next for me?

Well, I'm writing, I'm currently getting I'm working on two books at the same time.

Well, this is what I often do.

I'll often write about Twitter.

I'll get to about twenty or thirty thousand words in a book and then I'll know if I want to finish it.

So I've got endless half finished books.

But it's my way of getting to know the characters.

Do I love them?

Do I want to keep telling the story?

Is the story important to tell?

So I'm doing that at the moment, but whilst I'm also editing the fourth album of The Amazing Devil's latest music.

So and on top of all that, just trying to wrest my weary bones.

It's been a long year.

You've been so busy, obsessed with the fact that you're working on two books at the same time, just to figure out if you're to stay.

I love, I'm very blessed because I've you know, I don't have to I know what it's like to write a book after doing two shifts at the pub, you know.

And I know what it's like to be writing at two am because that's the only time that the house is quiet.

And now I'm in a position where I'm able to dedicate time and not have to worry too much about, you know, running into the next shift or you know.

I used to work as a personal tutor and or for a lot, and that was like my incumbent.

So I am I know how lucky it is, and I know how how pompous sound work on two books, Like, I absolutely know how lucky I am to be able to do that.

I mean, it's amazing that you're able to recognize that, and that you've been on both sides of it.

You know.

Certainly, I'm working more jobs at the moment and trying to do all the creative stuff in between, so it's nice to see.

But that's where I'll end upart.

Finally, I want to ask you, Joey, for a recommendation for the listeners.

Is there anything that you've been watching, reading, listening to recently that you'd like to recommend?

Oh, you know the worst thing?

Okay, I'm going to recommend something that has well nearly ruined my life.

Okay, well, okay.

I was working on a book which I was quite excited by, and then I watched Pluribus on Apple TV.

I only got two or three episodes out, and I had to rip up the book because I realized that Vince Gilligan had it was like a similar, similar sort of outlook towards the book, but he'd also just written it way better than I ever cared in the literary I was like, no, Vince, you've done it again.

So I would highly highly recommend that.

But to be honest, I haven't been taking it much media in at the moment.

I think I've been so stuck making it that soon it comes to comes to like recommendations that half of half of my recommendation is go outside.

Go for a walk and listen to the I love that, but I am really excited to watch that show.

You're not the first person to rave about it, so yeah, I'm excited.

But Joey, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for your brilliant book.

It's not a cult, which for any listeners.

I haven't read it yet.

It is out now, so go grab yoursell as a copy.

Links are in the show notes.

And thank you so much again, Joey.

Thank you the world.

What a lovely, lovely way to start my day.

Thank you so much, and for everyone else, goodbye.

M