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Ripped Backsides: Postcards From Beneath the Pavement
Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides is not a memoir, nor a travelogue, nor a novel. It’s a séance disguised as a book—a fragmented, flickering chronicle of lived intensity, cities and selves collapsing into poetry, philosophy, and psychic drift. Published globally by Far West Press on 24 June 2025, this defiantly unclassifiable work weaves together prose, photography, and personal mythology into a hypnotic, hauntological collage.
Subtitled Postcards from Beneath the Pavement, Ripped Backsides unfolds as part dream-diary, part psychic field manual, part poetic dérive—charting a hallucinatory route through the urban subconscious.
Amsterdam, Berlin, London, LA, Manchester, Marseille: each city becomes a portal into remembered lives, sublimated loves, aesthetic debris, and symbolic ghosts.
Cabut, a former punk musician, cultural theorist, and long-time chronicler of subculture, writes with cinematic flair and poetic dislocation. The book takes its place somewhere between the streets and the spirit world—where fragments of dialogue, deranged aphorisms, found postcards, and intimate flashbacks form “a literary mosaic... a creative directory... a ruined map,” in the author’s own words.
Subtitled Postcards from Beneath the Pavement, Ripped Backsides unfolds as part dream-diary, part psychic field manual, part poetic dérive—charting a hallucinatory route through the urban subconscious.
Amsterdam, Berlin, London, LA, Manchester, Marseille: each city becomes a portal into remembered lives, sublimated loves, aesthetic debris, and symbolic ghosts.
Cabut, a former punk musician, cultural theorist, and long-time chronicler of subculture, writes with cinematic flair and poetic dislocation. The book takes its place somewhere between the streets and the spirit world—where fragments of dialogue, deranged aphorisms, found postcards, and intimate flashbacks form “a literary mosaic... a creative directory... a ruined map,” in the author’s own words.
120 pages, Paperback
Published June 24, 2025
About the author
Richard Cabut
8 books30 followersCurrent books.
Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances (Far West Press).
Looking for a Kiss – extended edition (PC-Press)
Richard Cabut is author of the novels Looking for a Kiss (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020) and Dark Entries (Cold Lips Press, 2019), editor/-writer of the anthology Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zer0 Books, October 2017), contributor to Ripped, Torn and Cut – Pop, Politics and Punks Fanzines From 1976 (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Growing Up With Punk (Nice Time, 2018).
His journalism has featured in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, NME (pen name Richard North), ZigZag, The Big Issue, Time Out, Offbeat magazine, the Independent, Artists & Illustrators magazine, thefirstpost, London Arts Board/Arts Council England, Siren magazine, etc.
His fiction has appeared in the books The Edgier Waters (Snowbooks, 2006) and Affinity (67 Press, 2015). He was a Pushcart Prize nominee 2016.
Richard’s plays have been performed at various theatres in London and nationwide, including the Arts Theatre, Covent Garden, London.
He published the fanzine Kick, and played bass for the punk band Brigandage (LP Pretty Funny Thing – Gung Ho Records, 1986).
Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances (Far West Press).
Looking for a Kiss – extended edition (PC-Press)
Richard Cabut is author of the novels Looking for a Kiss (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020) and Dark Entries (Cold Lips Press, 2019), editor/-writer of the anthology Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zer0 Books, October 2017), contributor to Ripped, Torn and Cut – Pop, Politics and Punks Fanzines From 1976 (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Growing Up With Punk (Nice Time, 2018).
His journalism has featured in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, NME (pen name Richard North), ZigZag, The Big Issue, Time Out, Offbeat magazine, the Independent, Artists & Illustrators magazine, thefirstpost, London Arts Board/Arts Council England, Siren magazine, etc.
His fiction has appeared in the books The Edgier Waters (Snowbooks, 2006) and Affinity (67 Press, 2015). He was a Pushcart Prize nominee 2016.
Richard’s plays have been performed at various theatres in London and nationwide, including the Arts Theatre, Covent Garden, London.
He published the fanzine Kick, and played bass for the punk band Brigandage (LP Pretty Funny Thing – Gung Ho Records, 1986).
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 13, 2026
very interesting format and concept; immersive rampant read
May 25, 2025
So pretentious…actually the most pretentious thing I have ever read… so pretentious, it may be self aware and an act of camp? Sex, parties, European and American cities, art, philosophy, all made into experimental poetry prose. Perhaps best read over time and not all in one sitting.
June 22, 2025
I enjoy a bit of psychogeography. Cut and paste methods always interest me too. Like the travelogue feel across time and space. Kind of horizontal splice of countercultral moods in global cities.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews