Editor’s Notes
Brand awareness
16 May 2008

You can tell a lot about a society by looking at its pop culture icons. There are currently three figures dominating Britain's tabloid landscape. They are strikingly similar, at least in appearance. They are pale and glassy-eyed with stylishly mussed hair. They have each taken enough drugs to stock a high-street pharmacy. A small but influential minority proclaims them as geniuses, but most people regard them with horrified amusement. They are Pete Doherty, Amy Winehouse and Russell Brand.

I confess to having a soft spot for the last one: a talkative comedian who someone described as looking like a cross between Jesus and the devil. I know this is a minority position, as I've yet to meet anyone else who admits to liking him. So when I took his autobiography on a recent holiday I left the book jacket at home to avoid public embarrassment. My Booky Wook is a sordid, self-deprecating and unexpectedly poignant account of Brand's miserable Essex childhood, his Dickensian life as a struggling actor in London, his battle with manifold addictions and his ascent to stardom.

Religion doesn't get much of a look-in at first (though curiously he describes having a spiritual experience in St Peter's Basilica). But after he weans himself off drugs he meets a swami who "radiates the truth from his eyes" and teaches him "that life is transient and material attachment brings suffering".

With this new spiritual perspective he returns to his old ways. He attends a sex party in East London, where he sees "a thousand tiny tragedies". "Everywhere there was this intangible sadness," he notes, recognising that until now his life has been soulless and self-destructive.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, Brand's life seems to have passed through the three stages set out by Søren Kierkegaard in his celebrated book Either/Or. First, there is the aesthetic stage, where man dedicates himself to immediate gratification; second, the ethical stage, where he discerns right from wrong; third, there is the religious stage, where he perceives divine truth. Brand is lucky to have made it alive through the first stage (let's hope Doherty and Winehouse do too), and he is now one of the few pop culture figures who speaks openly (if flippantly) about God.

What does My Booky Wook tell us about modern Britain? That plenty of people are stuck in the aesthetic stage of life, but are stumbling forward in search of the ethical and religious life. The Church must dedicate itself to helping them reach it.

Luke Coppen, editor