Dr Stuart Griffiths

Ex-Para | Recovering Photojournalist | Author | Alto Saxophone Player

[Dr Stuart Griffiths @PlanetGriff]

Who owns England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿?

https://t.co/Wy4acOXZot

[The La’s 👁 ✨ @_The_Las]

https://t.co/HKqxs9Zymb

[Dr Stuart Griffiths @PlanetGriff]

Join Good Law Project to stop hate and bring hope. https://t.co/mX4rWCbvgj via @goodlawproject

[Dr Stuart Griffiths @PlanetGriff]

Original footage from Wednesday 19th August 1998 - from when I was evacuated from DR CONGO: BRAZZAVILLE: FOREIGN NATIONALS FLEE VIOLENCE IN KINSHASA https://t.co/Ixq2SuxWo2 via @YouTube

[Dr Stuart Griffiths @PlanetGriff]

https://t.co/ZJ5UwWlOe0

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

Stuart Griffiths went from 3 Para in Belfast to standing outside The Ivy in Soho with a long lens. About four years between those two postures.

ParaTripper is the book about the four years. And the fifteen after that, before anyone gave the trembling a name.

@PlanetGriff

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

From ParaTripper, on the Soho pap years: Stuart Griffiths describes his Canadian colleague who watched the door of The Ivy in the late 90s as having the focused stare of a documentary photographer.

The woman on the same stakeout watched, he says, like Diane Arbus.

@PlanetGriff

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

Stuart Griffiths spent the late 90s working pap shifts outside The Ivy and the Met Bar. The woman he worked with watched the door, he said, like Diane Arbus.

ParaTripper is the book about that decade. The PTSD wouldn't be diagnosed for fifteen more years.

@PlanetGriff

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

Three lives, in order: 16-year-old in 3 Para, paparazzo in Soho, doctor with a PhD and a PTSD diagnosis thirty years overdue.

That's Stuart Griffiths. ParaTripper is the middle volume.

@PlanetGriff

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[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

When Stuart Griffiths arrived in Kinshasa on a photography assignment, soldiers surrounded him, grabbed his camera and passport, kicked and punched him down a dirt road, and made him remove his shoes while a civilian hit him on the nose.

That is the opening of ParaTripper. It is not the most dangerous thing that happens in the book.

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

From Pigs' Disco: "But I am filled with a sense of euphoria, like this is a battlefield and I survived the great epic battle."

The great epic battle is Christmas Eve in the NAAFI bar, Belfast 1990. He's 18. He's on acid. He survives the night.

@PlanetGriff

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

Pigs' Disco is the rare military memoir that knows the army wasn't a separate country. The boys in 3 Para were the same demographic as the boys in the Hacienda, with worse food and a longer shift.

@PlanetGriff

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

From Pigs' Disco, on the sergeants' mess at 17:

"Come any closer and I'll gorge your fucking eyes out, I shouted with my tough Mancunian accent as I held out the spoon. I'd seen the film Scum when I was younger, which warned me of the dangers of being confronted in confined areas."

Griffiths' first defence weapon in the army was a dessert spoon.

@PlanetGriff

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

Pigs' Disco was a 20,000-word novella in 2013. Ditto Press, 500 copies, gone in a fortnight after the Daily Mail picked it up.

The new Yellow Press edition is four times the length. The bits cut for space the first time round: the bullying, the boredom, the LSD in the NAAFI bar.

@PlanetGriff

https://t.co/a9eTcmbGXv

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

"In many ways, Griffiths brought the culture that enveloped him in the Army, and which he now remembers with antipathy, to the Brighton rave scene. Veterans from army days appear throughout the narrative, displaced and angry in the neo-hippy rave culture of the 1990s, but attracted by its chaos, anarchy and drugs, and its undemanding sense of community."

Val Williams, Seaside Photographed, on Stuart Griffiths' Pigs' Disco

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

From Pigs' Disco: "The floor is slick with beer, vomit and piss. Paratroopers ask me things I do not understand; they are too drunk to even care about standing up."

Christmas Eve 1990. Palace Barracks, Belfast. Griffiths is 18 and on his first acid trip.

@PlanetGriff

https://t.co/a9eTcmbGXv

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

When Pigs' Disco was first published in 2013, 500 copies, launched at a Paris photography book fair, it sold out almost immediately. The Daily Mail ran a piece. The Guardian reviewed it. The BBC covered it.

It was also described by one angry veteran on Facebook as: "You low life pig. Well just remember if I ever bump into you I'm going to fucking hurt you. WANKER."

Stuart Griffiths included that review too.

[Yellow Press @YellowPressco]

Shaun Smith finds out two of his own gym members are dealing steroids on his floor. What follows is not what you'd expect. A slap, a lot of shouting, then the sit-down where everyone leaves with an agreement, and Shaun three and a half grand lighter. From The Debt Collector, the Vice documentary produced by Graham Johnson and based on his books The Cartel and Young Blood. Yellow Press has just published Graham's new novel Kontrolle, alongside Stuart Griffiths' Pigs' Disco and ParaTripper. Out now.

The Debt Collector followed Shaun Smith, the former Liverpool enforcer turned the UK's scariest debt collector, as he worked the grey zone between the legal economy and the underworld out of his gym in Warrington. The film pulled in more than 32 million views online and remains one of the most watched pieces of British underworld journalism on the internet. Graham has been writing about this world, and the people in it, for thirty years.

Kontrolle is Graham's historical crime novel about MK-ULTRA, the CIA's behavioural conditioning programmes in 1950s America, ending in Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963 with the JFK assassination. Pigs' Disco is Stuart's memoir of joining the Parachute Regiment at sixteen, serving in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, and falling into the acid house and ecstasy rave scene that followed. ParaTripper picks up after the army, as he tries to become a Fleet Street photographer while PTSD catches up with him. Three different routes into the same question: how violence shapes the people who carry it, and the people who watch.

[Dr Stuart Griffiths @PlanetGriff]

Authors Beware -- look out for "book club" scams https://t.co/2hNKrg6Yg4

[Dr Stuart Griffiths @PlanetGriff]

From Para to Pariah to PTSD https://t.co/4v40AlIIhs