“I wanted to explore what it means to be watched, and what it means to watch others,” muses Joey Batey – a sentiment that captures the fraught interplay of creativity, interpretation, and obsession at the heart of his debut novel, It’s Not a Cult.
Set against the rugged backdrop of the North East of England, the book follows a small, deliberately nameless band whose music – based around the lore of the Solkats, enigmatic gods who oversee the little things in life – unexpectedly attracts an alarmingly fervent following. Told through the eyes of Al, the drummer and narrator, the novel charts the band’s rise from dingy pub gigs to overnight notoriety, mapping the precarious dynamics of fandom and adoration that can tip into extremism and raising questions about the ethical and emotional challenges inherent in visibility and artistic creation.
Raised in the North East of England and a graduate of Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge, Batey has built a varied career across stage, screen, and music. From early sketch shows at university and performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company to his breakthrough role as Jaskier, the bard in Netflix’s The Witcher, he has long been drawn to storytelling in its many forms – a pursuit that flows seamlessly into his work as the lead vocalist and primary songwriter of the alt-folk band The Amazing Devil, whose music blends narrative, emotion, and myth.
In anticipation of the novel’s release, CinemaChords spoke with Batey about the sparks that inspired the story and the lore of the ephemeral Solkats woven through the band’s songs. He reflected on how acts of watching, recording, and being seen shape identity and the dynamics of friendship and performance – and on the unsettling intersections of creativity, fandom, and selfhood in a world attuned to spectacle.
The book is largely told through the lens of Al — the band’s drummer and the novel’s narrator — with the camera acting as a second set of eyes. What led you to use this specific visual storytelling device in a medium as word-bound as a novel?
I wanted to explore our modern obsession with self-documentation. I was recently witness to a situation involving some friends of mine whose children were misbehaving. As a form of punishment, the parents took away their phones — and I watched these children experience what I can only describe as genuine physiological withdrawal in response to the sudden absence of documentation.
It shocked me to the core. I was watching young people so deeply tethered to their perception of what it means to be — and to be alive — that their very existence seemed to lose meaning when it wasn’t being recorded, shared, or used as a representation of self in the world.
So when I sat down to write the book, I became quite interested in what it would be like to build some narrative parameters around that idea — to frame the world strictly through a lens, and to intentionally skip over entire narrative beats simply because they weren’t being filmed. In fact, I believe there are only two moments in the entire novel that aren’t viewed through the camera’s eye.
That constraint allowed me to explore both this hyperfixation on self-documentation and how young people construct and understand their identities.
And as a musician and performer, it’s become almost anathema for many creatives — and anyone in the public eye, really — to be captured without permission. Yet it’s now so ubiquitous that it feels unavoidable. On a personal level, I find that kind of quiet, almost innocent violation to be quite unnerving — and very constant, too.
As an actor and director, were you consciously drawing on your experience of storytelling through framing, perspective, and reliable/unreliable viewpoints?
I’ve definitely developed, over the past 15 or 20 years, a kind of echolocation when it comes to knowing if a camera is on me. There’s this really odd sixth sense I seem to have inadvertently developed — if someone’s filming me, I can usually tell. I know when, where, and how.
I’ve always been fascinated by watching performers — not just actors, but any kind of performer — when the cameras are switched off, and who they become in those moments. That’s something Al explores in the book: they film friends who are used to being quite performative, particularly Melusine. When she doesn’t realise she’s on camera, she becomes an entirely different person.
What I’ve found is that many young people — in fact, many people in general — have developed personas and personalities that are increasingly distinct from one another, depending on whether or not they’re being watched.
Al’s visits to their grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s, are some of the most revelatory and poignant scenes in the book. The grandmother’s expressions and reactions are ambiguous: maybe profound, maybe accidental. But through those visits, Al starts to sense that what they are a part of with the band might be bigger than they first thought. How did the idea come about to use the grandmother as both a kind of confessor and as the catalyst for that shift in Al’s understanding?
I think I wanted to explore what it really means to be preserved in memory. That’s one side of the coin. The other is the constant documentation of our lives through phones and cameras. It’s almost impossible to be forgotten if you’re filming yourself all the time.
But for someone like the grandmother, Christine, the memories of her own life are jumbled and faded. The ambiguity of self has been transplanted into her very psyche — and that fascinated me. Very sadly, a close loved one of mine suffered from, and eventually died as a consequence of, Alzheimer’s. Being at her side at the end of her life profoundly impressed on me a respect for the human mind and a deep appreciation for what memory truly is.
As a result of that tragedy, I wanted to try and immortalise that struggle — to find some happiness and positivity within it, and to transform it into something almost mythical, almost magical. The idea that being robbed of your memories, and at times of your selfhood, doesn’t mean that the unique tenets at your core don’t continue, or remain preserved.
That’s something I hope to live by. If I were ever to lose my memories, or suffer from a condition like Alzheimer’s, I’d hope that the person I truly am — the part rooted in perseverance — would still endure.
The band’s music is built around the mythology of the Solkats – the gods who oversee the little things we take for granted. How much of that mythology did you create from scratch, and how much drew on folklore or myths you already knew about — or discovered when researching for the book?
I think it’s probably about 70% my own creation. The Solkats were certainly born when I was a young child. I often imagined creatures — both benevolent and malevolent — as a way of trying to understand the world around me, to make sense of it, and to give it meaning.
As I grew older and began researching folklore, particularly from the North East of England, I found there wasn’t as much of it compared with other parts of the world, where mythology and folk tales are far more abundant. So I started to imagine what the North East’s own gods — the gods of little things, and of nothing in particular — might look like.
By the time I began to figure out how they would appear and be portrayed in the book, I was writing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, surrounded by a wealth of petroglyphs etched into stone for hundreds of years. The haunting images I encountered on my excursions into the desert really stayed with me. They began to shape the eeriness of the Solkats, lending them an incorporeal quality that felt far more threatening, strange, and magical than anything I could have invented on my own.
So, in the end, it became a happy merging of those two worlds — the imagined and the discovered.
The band’s refusal to adopt a name is a fun and clever subversion – denying audiences the chance to project meaning before hearing a note. This reads like a very specific commentary on how we package and pre-judge art.
That’s a wonderful question. The words ‘brand’ and ‘branding’ appear in my day-to-day life far more often than I’d like. There are so many people whose job it is to create a brand — or a sense of branding — out of creativity and artistry. I understand that it can be difficult to navigate, and in some cases, to circumnavigate entirely.
Of course, it’s important to celebrate art, and sometimes the only way we can do that is by naming it, judging it, critiquing it, and trying to understand it. But from an artistic perspective, that can be difficult to reconcile. You can’t keep making art if you can’t make a living from it — and for a lot of artists, that’s become almost anathema. The old image of the starving artist living in a Parisian garret has endured for a reason: there’s a certain romanticism to it.
But today, in our hyper-capitalist and globally connected world, finding art that truly speaks to you is both easier and harder than ever. Easier, because it’s all out there, within reach; but harder, because you have to wade through so much of what’s being sold to you — what you’re being told to love or to like. So, I think it takes more effort now than it has in decades to find art that genuinely touches you.
If the band’s anonymity speaks to a desire to avoid being defined too early, I wonder whether choosing a title for the book presented a similar challenge — one that wouldn’t invite those same kinds of preconceptions before readers had even opened it?
It actually came about as a joke from my dear friend Madeleine Hyland, who also created the artwork for the book — the artistic depictions of the Solkats. She made a quip one day that really struck me, and I thought, “Oh, that’s a beautiful sentiment.”
We did discuss the title — myself and my lovely colleagues over at Raven — but it’s always been ‘It’s Not a Cult’. I’ve always loved titles that immediately make you ask: “Why are you so insistent that it’s not a cult? And what is it, then?” That kind of intrigue draws you straight into the story.
And I also like titles that, by the end of the book, make you go, “Well then, what was it?” — that make you question the title all over again.
And how much of Callum’s quest to create what the book calls “unapproachable, intellectual, unreachable art” is something you’ve encountered – or maybe even wrestled with – yourself?
I think what I’ve been taught – again, by my good friend Madeleine – is that certain industries, and I would hazard to say Hollywood is certainly guilty of this, have become so reliant on what they perceive as an “unintelligent” audience that they rarely challenge people anymore. Very little of what’s produced today really pushes audiences to think.
That’s what Callum is doing in the book. With his creation, with his art, he assumes that his audience is willing to engage, to challenge themselves, to dissect his work to within an inch of its life. At the beginning of the book, because of the over-intellectualism of his art, they only have a handful of followers.
But I see this as a reflection of what I hope for in an audience, and what I try to cultivate in my own work: people who are as rigorously full of challenge and full of critique as anyone else. That’s what I think Callum is striving for with his art — and what I wanted to show through his journey.
I love books that make me ask questions. In my personal book club with friends, my favourite thing is sitting down with a pint at the pub, having all read the same book, and hearing everyone come to completely different questions and ideas. I believe it was Dave Grohl — of all people, the lead singer of the Foo Fighters — who said, “One of the greatest feelings in the world is writing a song for your reasons, playing it, and then hearing people sing it back to you for their 10,000 different reasons.” That kind of ambiguity is something I’ve tried to implant in the book as best I can.
Of the handful of friends who’ve read it, I’ve noticed two distinct groups: one loves it for one particular reason, and the other says, “I didn’t like that concept, but I loved this bit.” And I just think, “You’re two people I love dearly, and yet you’ve come away with two completely different readings of the same book.” That, for me, was incredibly rewarding — and quite surprising.
One of the book’s most intriguing ironies is Callum’s horror at people finally “getting” his work – art he perhaps designed to be undecipherable, and therefore immune to critique. The story also explores how metaphor and meaning can be misread, especially in an online world shaped by algorithms and collective interpretation. As a writer, how did you navigate your own relationship with allegory in It’s Not a Cult? Were you ever concerned about being too clear – or not clear enough?
I found the first draft of the book very easy to write. It flowed naturally out of me, thanks to meticulous planning. This is my seventh or eighth book that I have written, so I’ve developed a way of working that relies on a tremendous amount of sheer and arduous graft before I even put pen to paper. By the time I sit down to write, I already know exactly what I’m going to say.
Within the book itself, I don’t think there were many moments where I felt I needed to curtail some of the more difficult concepts. Thanks to my editor, we did try to strike a balance, particularly with phrasing and word choice. Some words might not be entirely familiar, but ideally, a reader shouldn’t have to reach for a dictionary to understand a sentence. That balance — between complexity and accessibility — felt like the medium that worked best for us.
I think one of my rules is that if you use a long word, within the next two sentences, you need to include some kind of joke. I kept trying to balance what some people might call purple prose with simpler language. It was important to remind myself of Al’s love of words and their love of playful imagery. In the end, it became much more of a character choice — a way of shaping Al’s voice through the wording of certain phrases — than anything else.
I think my one job is to provide some kind of escapism, a way for people to feel safe while exploring themselves. That’s what this book is about, and what a lot of my music is about. If that affects even one or two people in the entire readership, then I’ll be really happy.
Coupled with this, the book explores the idea of “collective adaptive systems”—groups that evolve their own kind of intelligence, often around a shared but shaky belief. Al fears these systems the most (even though they are only talking about parties in the book), particularly when misunderstanding spirals into harm, violence, or manufactured outrage. Were there particular online cultures, algorithm-driven behaviours, or fandom dynamics that helped shape this part of the story?
I think a lot of what those theories explore came from a question I started with when writing the book. I’ve been, to a minor extent, in the public eye for a few years, and I’ve seen fandoms and hyper-fixations on various artists come and go. I asked myself: “What would happen if one day these people got up from their keyboards and acted on what they’re saying online?“
To me, that was one of the most chilling questions I’ve ever asked myself. I didn’t have an answer because I think I was scared of what it might be. You see it every day with some of the biggest artists in the world — the fandoms behind people like Taylor Swift are so fanatical that it borders on delirium. And that’s no disrespect to those fans: if they love something ardently, and do so safely and respectfully, that’s a wonderful celebration of art and creativity.
But if it slips into an us-versus-them mentality, or involves bigotry or abuse, it suddenly opens doors to a very real and frightening reality. We’ve seen it in attacks at concerts, bomb threats, and other extreme responses — all stemming from online words. That reality can be truly terrifying to the point of paralysis. And that, for me, was where I wanted the bedrock of this book to start.
Building on that idea of online communities and collective behaviour, how do you see phenomena like cancel culture affecting artists and creative voices today?
I think when artists are being silenced by large corporations or political powers that seem beyond reproach, it acts as a distant knelling bell — one that only artists and creative people are often able to hear. Throughout history, there have been countless examples of artists being silenced. The old adage holds true: poets and artists are often the first to be muted because they are among the loudest voices attempting to instigate change.
If society collectively resists that silencing, then there is hope — and I have to believe there is hope. We all have to, otherwise there’s nothing else to believe in. I’m confident in the voices of comedians, authors, writers, and performers to support one another in times like that.
You are in your own band, The Amazing Devil. How did being in that band shape the book’s narrative? And conversely, has writing the novel changed the way you approach music or performance?
The inception of this book actually predates The Amazing Devil — which, by the way, was named by a then six-year-old — and the concept certainly existed before my involvement in the band. I only eventually put pen to paper many years later. The band in the book is wholly distinct from any real band, and certainly from my own.
That said, I do know what it’s like to play in front of seven bored people in a dingy pub in the North East of England. I know the disheartenment that comes from a lack of audience, and I also know the value of that kind of graft. I wanted to start the book in that place. But I also wanted to explore what it’s like when you “achieve” something you thought you wanted, only to realise it isn’t actually what you ever truly wanted — it’s just what you were told you wanted in your formative years.
My own band hasn’t been particularly affected by the book, nor has the book been shaped by The Amazing Devil, but I did draw on some of those experiences to lend the story a touch of authenticity. I like to keep these things distinct: my acting is separate from my writing, which is separate from my music. It’s a way of exploring my own agency.
At the end of each project, I want to move on to something different. Finish a television series? I move to writing. Finish a book? I create an album. That cyclical nature of my work has helped keep me a little bit sane, and I’m hopeful it’s a sustainable rhythm going forward…
It’s Not a Cult by Joey Batey is published by Raven Books on 23 October.
