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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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PROTEST AND SURVIVE
Mark Wallinger interview
The Independent on Sunday, January 2007
EARLIER this week, the veils came off a new installation in Tate Britain. The uninformed observer could have been forgiven for wondering why it had ever been covered up: anyone who has driven or walked through central London in the last five years has seen it, or something very, very like it.
“Here,” says Mark Wallinger, who built it, “anything I say could be taken down and used against me.”
The artist shuffles across a line of black masking tape which slices across the floor of Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries.
“Now, here,” he says, “I’m free to speak my mind.”
The tape marks the limit of the Exclusion Zone which has forbidden all unauthorised demonstrations within a one kilometre radius of Parliament Square since it was created by the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA). The line also more or less bisects Wallinger’s newest work, “State Britain”, a meticulous reconstruction of the most famous victim of the Act – the sprawling, jerry-built, anti-war protest camp manned by the indefatigable campaigner Brian Haw in Parliament Square since June 2001, and dismantled by police newly empowered by the Act in May last year. Wallinger has rebuilt all 40 metres of it, every flag, banner and placard, every sentimental slogan, every message of support, every workaday detail of Haw’s lonely, angry, determined existence – a sleeping bag, umbrellas, half-eaten chocolate bars, a flagon of yellow water marked, perhaps unnecessarily, “Not for drinking.”
Wallinger was one of the least heralded, but most interesting members of the troupe of Young British Artists that Charles Saatchi sponsored into being in the 1990s. Lacking the propensity towards self-aggrandisement or shock value of certain of his approximate peers, he managed to evade the notoriety acquired by the likes of Tracy Emin, Damien Hirst (who beat him to the 1995 Turner Prize), or even his former girlfriend Gillian Wearing. His multi-media musings have registered in the general consciousness only with “Ecce Homo”, a life-size statue of a near-naked Christ which perched upon Trafalgar Square’s vacant plinth in 1999, its humility rendering the surrounding monuments to military figures faintly ridiculous. It is not too much of a stretch to conclude that Wallinger sees Haw’s relationship to the power enshrined in Westminster as something similar.
“I’d been following Brian’s protest for a while,” explains Wallinger, “just taking lots of pictures, not with any real intent, just because I was interested. Then the possibility of using this space was offered to me by the Tate. I took about 600 photos of Brian’s set-up on the 18th of May, and it all got taken away in the early hours of the 23rd.”
It was regularly said that Haw’s protest was an eyesore, and indeed it was – but freedom, as Donald Rumsfeld correctly observed during the post-invasion pillage of Baghdad, is untidy. In the Tate, however, Wallinger’s replica fits between the columns – and across that line – with eerie symmetry.
“I know,” says Wallinger. “Serendipity has been a big factor. When I first heard about the exclusion zone, I had a hunch. I got my compasses out, discovered that it cut pretty much through the centre of Tate Britain and thought, ooh, this is quite thrilling. My one worry was how it would look among the columns, but I really like the way it negotiates that. It’s a bit of the busker getting a gig at Albert Hall.”
Haw maintains his vigil in Parliament Square, glowering at the Palace of Westminster from the three-by-two metre space he is now permitted to occupy. One of the many delectable ironies of Wallinger’s painstaking recreation of Haw’s improvised construction is that it seems to be attracting more – and more thoughtful – viewers than the original. In Parliament Square, Haw had to plead for the attention of irritated motorists and bemused tourists. In the calm and quiet of the Tate, high school art classes sit cross-legged with sketch pads. Visitors wince at the lurid photos of the victims of war. People tend to stop at that black line on the floor, and smile, to themselves or their friends. It is a lovely, if bitter, joke. By a rigorous reading of SOCPA – the pertinent clauses of which are reproduced in the “State Britain” programme – the sign reading “Support our troops – bring them home” is illegal, while the adjacent teddy bears nestled on a rainbow flag urging “Peace” are able to go about their business unmolested.
“The fact that it looks real but isn’t kind of slows the attention span,” decides Wallinger. “You can marvel at it, while being shocked and appalled by what you’re looking at. Really though, I wanted to make something visible that had been rendered invisible. I thought this would be a melancholy reminder of things that we’d let slip through our hands.”
The point rather makes itself – a living protest against a continuing war is now only permitted to exist as a simulacrum housed in a place where we go mostly to reflect on the past.
“I just hope,” says Wallinger, “that people might be brought up short by the fact that this has been allowed to be confiscated, and that no one seems to give a toss. It was born out of anger, and I’d like people to bit a horrified by the complacency that seems to be abroad in this country.”
The quote is heartfelt, but unrepresentative of Wallinger’s conversation. He laughs often and generously, and seems to have been drawn to Haw and SOCPA as subjects at least as much by a connoisseur’s fondness for absurdity as by anger at this government’s fatuous erosions of freedom of expression. The programme also lists other splendidly idiotic applications of the Act thus far: Maya Evans, arrested (and subsequently convicted) for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq at the Cenotaph; Steven Jago, arrested for wandering Whitehall bearing a placard quoting Orwell.
“I mean,” whoops Wallinger, “that’s just too perfect, isn’t it?”
Wallinger’s previous works have included “A Real Work Of Art” (a racehorse, called exactly that, whose undistinguished track career was prematurely ended by injury) and the weird and beautiful “Threshold To The Kingdom”, a slow-motion film of passengers emerging into London’s City Airport from the no-man’s-land of air travel, to a soundtrack of Allegri’s “Miserere”.
“I’m interested in thresholds,” says Wallinger, “and where lines are drawn. So I was, uh, drawn to this one. ‘Ecce Homo’ was more about us being the crowd in the square baying for blood, and I thought that worked well because everything else there is so aggrandised – Napier, Havelock, these old generals that nobody really remembers anymore. But there is a link to Brian, on his own, up there in Parliament Square. He has been painted as a nuisance, but how different is he from the guy who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square?”
Haw’s protest, and Wallinger’s fabrication of it, both serve as rebukes to a country which seems to have lost all interest in outrage. In February 2003, the streets around here swarmed with hundreds of thousands of people objecting to a war that was shortly to be launched in their name, with their money. Four years later, there’s only one left.
“Yeah yeah yeah,” nods Wallinger, animatedly. “Exactly. Just one. And I think that’s amazing.”
We head off in search of somewhere to set the world to rights over a couple of pints. Without any particular plan, we end up wandering towards Westminster, and feels wrong not to drop in on Haw – who has been enthusiastically supportive of Wallinger’s new project (“Although,” recalls Wallinger, “he told me to piss off the first time I asked. I had to go back with a catalogue of my stuff.”) Reaching Haw’s post isn’t easy – Parliament Square, which should surely be a readily accessible haven of protest, is effectively a roundabout, with no proper pedestrian crossings linking it to the rest of Westminster. We skip through the beeping, growling, screeching traffic, and find Haw improbably asleep beneath a blanket in two pushed-together deckchairs, his trademark badge-spangled hat over his eyes. We don’t wake him.
“Anytime you draw a line that divides or joins things,” Wallinger had said earlier, “it gets a bit bizarre. But once you draw a circle around the seat of power, that is a surveillance society you’re creating.”
There had then been a pause.
“Mind you,” he’d noted, “the zone does go through Buckingham Palace, as well, and if one was to misinterpret the Trooping of the Colour. . .”
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