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 "A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid. . . the reports collected in 'I Wouldn't Start From Here' are graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology."
- Jonathan Meades, Books of the Year, Evening Standard
"An utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots."
- Michael Bywater, Books of the Year, New Statesman
"I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller."
- Rory MacLean, The Guardian
"A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage that will remind readers of the work of P.J. O'Rourke, Jon Ronson and David Foster Wallace."
- The Washington Times
"Unafraid to portray the world's warring people not just as victims and sufferers of legitimate grievances, but also as bloody-minded bastards and ill-informed fools."
- The Kathmandu Post
"A mix of dark humour and incisive political discourse."
- CNN Go
"His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company."
- The Los Angeles Times
"Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller's interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute."
- Booklist
"Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity."
- George Dunford, Books of the Year, Readings Monthly
"An addition to the genre founded by P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays In Hell', but it is one that pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian
"Mueller is the embodiment of what can happen with a fire in the belly and a desire to write out loud."
- Australian Book Review
"Mueller's travel writing is as incisive and entertaining as anything he's ever written about music."
- TNT
"A joy."
- Financial Times
"Delightfully laconic."
- The New Statesman
"Alternately chilling, funny and surprising, there's some great reportage here as Mueller struggles to reach an understanding of the world, quizzing the highest minister and the lowliest peasant."
- The Glasgow Herald
"His acerbic wit is matched by true empathy. . . we need this kind of gonzo journalism more than ever."
- Wanderlust
"Mueller spins what could have been the grimmest geopolitics into the finest black comedy. Like a print version of 'The Daily Show'."
- FHM
"Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator."
- Chris Ayres, The Times
"Touching, often blackly comic reportage."
- GQ
"Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable."
- The List
"Snappy, self-deprecating and sometimes outright hilarious."
- The Age
"Indelibly humorous and heartfelt."
- Sydney Sunday Telegraph
"An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones."
- Time Out
"He brings to his material the mixture of rage and earthy irony that is the mark of a great satirist
. . . rewarding, thought-provoking and ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters
"Mueller's book is an excellent example of why today's brave, lucid hacks are forced to admit fear and confusion."
- South China Morning Post
"His reporting is sharp, his experiences terrifying and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun
"If you enjoy your international affairs and politics with a good dose of cynicism and black humour, then this book is one to read."
- Brisbane Courier-Mail
"Often laugh-out-loud funny, the writing is utterly engaging."
- Launceston Sunday Examiner
"Mueller's irreverent reportage from abroad is fundamentally a clever cover for the author's ruminations on race, religion, revolution, rock'n'roll and other important issues since September 11, 2001."
- The West Australian
"As hilarious and sardonic a host as this ridiculous world of ours demands."
- Shortlist
"Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and upsetting."
- New Zealand Herald
"A real eye for surreal moments of black humour. . . Mueller's work here digs much deeper than the standard newspaper travel essay."
- Sydney Sun-Herald
"His best story, about his brief, bizarre jailing in Cameroon, reads like a 21st century 'Goon Show' script."
- Good Reading
"A rollicking ride through some of the world's scariest scenarios."
- Kalgoorlie Miner
"A strikingly funny book about some seriously unfunny places."
- Perth Sunday Times
"Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga."
- The Wagga Wagga Advertiser
 "Andrew Mueller's piece about my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favourite thing ever written about us. The fact that he is a war correspondent (though he claims otherwise) and music journalist and
approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting
writers out there to me."
- Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers
"The most important critical anthology on popular music from a single author in a long time, its humour and insight equal with collections by Nick Tosches or Robert Palmer."
- KEXP Seattle
"Take one part P.J. O'Rourke, a healthy dose of Lester Bangs and a dash of Hunter S. Thompson, and you've got Andrew Mueller."
- Bookgasm
"Sharply observed and wittily constructed."
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser
"New edition of the rock classic."
- NY Press
"Mueller's humour makes for some enlightening reading."
- Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald
"Sharp, witty and sarcastic."
- Chicago Tribune
 "Really rather good, in a barnstorming, country-punk sort of way. . . a highly capable ensemble."
- The Quietus
"A more than capable debut - allusive country-tough songs."
- Uncut
"The Blazing Zoos are undoubtedly fun, but they also have depth. . .
everything from Mueller's extensive use of brackets to the band's loving
recreation of classic country riffs bespeaks sincerity."
- Americana UK
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Viva Dead Ponies sleevenotes
Sony records, 2007
NEVER was an album so suited by its lyric sheet. The words to the songs, and intermittent demented fragments, that comprised The Fatima Mansions’ “Viva Dead Ponies” were presented in a dense, barely decipherable, spidery scrawl. At first glance, they resembled the manifesto of a fulminating desperado in a remote shack, composed in between posting home-made explosives to bewildered bourgeois opinion-formers. On closer inspection, this seemed even more likely to be the case. “Viva Dead Ponies” is a fabulous, disgusted, paranoid invective, a howl nonetheless primal for its eloquence.
The demented urgency that fuelled “Viva Dead Ponies” was demonstrated by the speed of its arrival. Singer and songwriter Cathal Coughlan’s previous band, Microdisney, had imploded in 1988. A little over a year later, The Fatima Mansions – named after a notably drug-ridden Dublin housing estate – launched the exploratory salvo of the “Against Nature” mini-album and “Blues For Ceausescu”. The colossal earth-scorching barrage of “Viva Dead Ponies” followed in 1990.
Thematically, it was a companion volume to Microdisney’s 1998 swansong, “39 Minutes”. “Viva Dead Ponies” was another survey of Cork-born Coughlan’s adopted London as a Hobbesian dystopia, a filthy and heartless kleptopolis, a “victim farm”, its avaricious citizens bafflingly unperturbed by “the queues, the burning trains, the squalid, mute despair”, and unheeding of a returned Jesus Christ – who was, as the title track explained, now running, for reasons known only to his father, a newsagent’s in Crouch End.
Musically, however, The Fatima Mansions forsook Microdisney’s suave soulboy threads for the rent garments of ranting, derelict street preacher (Coughlan would later embrace this role fully in a memorably wretched video for the 1991 single “Only Losers Take The Bus”). “Angel’s Delight”, “Look What I Stole For Us, Darling” and “Chemical Cosh” were deranged, if oddly melodic, jerry-riggings of metal and electronics. Even the album’s relatively pretty moments – “You’re A Rose”, the unhinged Euro-disco of “Thursday” – felt, in this context, as sinister as a clown with a switchblade. At the heart of it all fumed Coughlan as a prophet without honour, a sandwich-board Jeremiah balefully wandering the gold-paved streets, largely failing to interest passers-by in their impending doom. “I could have been important,” reflected the righteously ranting protagonist of “A Pack Of Lies”, “if I’d been somebody else.”
The Fatima Mansions made three further albums: “Bertie’s Brochures” (1991), “Valhalla Avenue” (1992) and “Lost In The Former West” (1994), which are anthologised on the second disc of this artefact. All three captured the extraordinary feat of a band managing to keep pace with the increasingly promiscuous range of Coughlan’s writing. The Fatima Mansions’ catalogue included the juddering, seething, lyrically overloaded monologues (“Belong Nowhere”, “The Loyaliser”), spectacular eruptions of bile (“Humiliate Me”, “Evil Man”), Brechtian melodrama (“Bertie’s Brochures”), at least one ballad that would have graced the canon of Roy Orbison (“Behind The Moon”), and the establishment of the still woefully under-subscribed field of great heavy metal songs about Vatican complicity in the exile of wanted Nazis (“Popemobile To Paraguay”).
The best-known of The Fatima Mansions’ treasurably belligerent t-shirts demanded “Keep Music Evil”. Feverishly intelligent, defiantly erudite, a careening carnival of the grotesque, “Viva Dead Ponies” and all that followed it adhered to that credo with the white-knuckled determination of passengers in a derailing roller-coaster carriage. The Fatima Mansions are still mourned by any and all who’ve ever felt that Howard Beale was being unnecessarily circumspect.
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