Rat Scabies, former drummer with The Damned, and his neighbour from Brentford on a psychedelic road trip to find the Holy Grail. The Da Vinci Code gets the punk rock treatment.

Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail is solid proof that reading The Da Vinci Code need not induce brain necrosis. Even those who felt that their thinking tissues were starved of oxygen while they grappled with the publishing phenomenon of the year are likely to enjoy this ramble down France to the source of the conspiracy theory, Rennes-le-Château, in the diverting company of Scabies, former drummer with the legendary punk combo the Damned, possessor of a droll turn of phrase and, surprisingly, a Grail scholar from way back BB (Before Brown.) His Boswell is the music writer Christopher Dawes.

Rat Scabies was the drummer in the Damned, the third biggest British punk band ever. As a teenager in 1978, music journalist Christopher Dawes saw him at a Damned concert in Peterborough, setting fire to his drum kit and sparking a riot. The next time Dawes saw him, nearly 20 years later, the two were living opposite each other in the same quiet suburban street, and his former musical hero was clambering out of a battered Ford wearing a leather flying helmet and swimming goggles. Dawes' book is about the friendship that formed between the two of them as they chatted over neighbourly cups of tea and spliffs, and which was cemented when they journeyed to France in search of the Holy Grail.
 
They were guided on their quest by two parchments allegedly rediscovered at the turn of the century in a church in the Pyrenees, and by the same set of esoteric conspiracy theories that recently helped Dan Brown find a fortune, involving the Priory of Sion, the Cathars, the Knights Templar, assorted medieval French kings, Popes and Nazis, da Vinci and Doctor Who.
 
Don't be misled by the fact that Scabies wears his slippers throughout the entire book. A genuine English eccentric whose appetite for life and thirst for mischief look to be undiminished by age, he apparently set out on his quest fully believing it might be successful. The more sceptical Dawes went along for the ride, and in the more modest hope of staving off a mid-life crisis. His sardonic account of their various encounters and misadventures along the way asserts the value of believing in your friends, even if they believe in fairy tales.

You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. When semi-retired music journalist Christopher Dawes discovers that his next-door neighbor in Brentford, England, is former Damned drummer Rat Scabies, a friendship blossoms in Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail. The irrepressible Scabies soon infects Dawes with his heretofore unsuspected obsession with the Holy Grail, and before long the pair are jetting off to France, Rome, and elsewhere, searching for clues to its whereabouts. Shot through with crypto-mysticism, freaky characters, and spooky/trippy historical revelations, Rat Scabies And The Holy Grail reads like a post-punk Travels With My Aunt and is almost as entertaining. As the Damned once sang: Neat, neat, neat!

A dizzy and highly enjoyable caper after the Holy Grail with music journalist Dawes and Rat Scabies, drummer for the seminal punk band Damned.
 
Dawes and Rat were London neighbors and at loose ends: neither had much going on the employment side, and both had developed an interest in the strange tale of Berenger Saunière, priest of Rennes-le-Château in the late 19th century, who discovered some parchments in his church and, without even a trail to follow, became a wealthy man. It's been conjectured that Saunière's find had something to do with the Grail, and so Dawes and Rat embark on their own quest. Their quarry is as slippery as "oil-wrestling a squirmy octopus," but it leads them on a host of squirrelly adventures involving people who traffic in extraterrestrials, ascended masters and indigo children. There'll be historical guesswork; religious mythology; folklore; occult jiggery-pokery; geographic and geometric oddities, and weird sciences like paleography and cryptography.

Dawes has enough stories up his sleeve to raise the hair on your neck, but he's also a good historian, capable of giving a concise chronicle of the Cathars, walking you through the initiation ceremonies of the Knights Templars, or explaining why the Merovingians were known as the "sorcerer kings." It all makes for a rich broth as Dawes and Rat go where King Arthur, Adolph Hitler and Monty Python failed before them. But failure hardly matters, for there are enough ghosts (Dawes gets to experience a couple of them at close range), from Renaissance painters to Nazi treasure hunters, to keep Grail enthusiasts happy.
 
"The Holy Grail is so precious, so important, so knee-bendingly sacred, that only those with a pure heart have the faintest hope of getting anywhere near it. Which probably ruled me out." True, and that goes for Rat too. But it doesn't mean they can't try, and get a glittering horde of stories to tell.

English music journalist Dawes, who has interviewed everyone from Nirvana and New Order to Guns N' Roses and NWA, also lived across the street from former Damned drummer Rat Scabies, considered the best punk rocker this side of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, who guarantees that this quirky account, salted with Monty Pythonesque antics, is not your typical travelogue. Because of Scabies, Dawes was drawn into a wild search for the Holy Grail, the mystery of which apparently centers around a remote French village in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Like all serious Grail hunters, Scabies compiled a list of things to do, including boning up on historical research and attending appropriate meetings. Lacking anything better to do and in the throes of a low-level midlife crisis, Dawes tagged along. Despite its rather off-putting title (which punk rockers of all stripes will unconditionally love), the resulting picturesque picaresque is rather sweet. Dawes has a droll humor and a winning style that make the book bounce along nicely. Very weird and goofy and quite irresistible.

Though there are no Knights Who Say "Ni" in Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail, author Christopher Dawes was clearing channeling Monty Python (along with an unlikely mix of Umberto Eco, Dan Brown and Indiana Jones) in his real-life quest aimed at "converting [my] loft and/or finding Holy Grail."
 
Dawes (a British music journalist when he's not on the hunt for holy relics) gets drawn into the mystery surrounding the French village of Rennes-le-Château and its inexplicably cash flush, hard-living abbe Berenger Sauniere, who supposedly found coded ancient parchments hidden inside a pillar in his church. Did Sauniere decode the documents and locate the Holy Grail?
 
As he tries to make sense of silver ghost horses and glowing blue apples, Dawes introduces us to the likes of Tony the Templar, the pony-tailed restaurateur of the Pomme Bleu; Henry Lincoln, an always barefoot scholar of Sauniere lore; and Richard Bellia, an Anglophile French photographer often found at the wheel of a cheese van. And of course there's the guy who dragged Dawes into the quest in the first place: Rat Scabies (aka Chris Millar), former drummer for the Damned, one of the seminal British punk bands of the 1970s and, as it turns out, Dawes' new neighbor.
 
Rat Scabies is the real star of the story. He's an infectiously enthusiastic and sometimes surprisingly erudite crackpot who tries to sell Dawes his back porch and plans to get rich off a little lap desk he's invented designed specifically for rolling joints. He was an idol to Dawes, who traces his career in music to the first time he heard the Damned. In the course of their (spoiler alert) unsuccessful attempt to find the sacred chalice of eternal life, unending riches and whatnot, the two become close friends.
 
Dawes is at his hilarious best when he's describing the antics of his fellow treasure hunters. His attempt to claim Sauniere as a sort of proto-punk priest is a bit of a stretch, and his link of the quest to his own low-burn midlife crisis also reads a little too pat. But for a comic romp through the silliness of secret esoterica, this book is a profane treasure.

History, mystery, celebrity and gimmickry: They all lined up for Melody Maker reporter Christopher Dawes in the mid-90s, when he discovered that his spliff-sporting oddball neighbor was Rat Scabies, ex-drummer for the iconic London punk band the Damned - and that Ratty, as Dawes came to call him when the pair became fast friends, was fixated on the 19th century legend that entails a French priest, hidden treasure, murder, Jesus, the devil, kings and a pet monkey, and that later inspired The Da Vinci Code. Dawes' account of their fevered rambles, Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail, is madcap proof that the worst things that can possibly happen on the road sometimes turn out for the best. As Dawes puts it, not finding the Holy Grail can teach us what really matters most.

Part mystery, part travelogue, part history, part comedy - "Rat Scabies And The Holy Grail" is ultimately a tale of 'the bizarre nature' of friendship. Christopher Dawes (aka Push - ex Melody Maker, Muzik and Mondo scribe) and Rat Scabies (The Damned) - both residents of the leafy backwater of Brentford - embark on a quest to locate the treasures of Rennes-le-Château.
 
Our intrepid Indiana Joneses collate Lists Of Things To Do - (1/ Buy metal detector) - and spend far too long reading books and surfing the internet before setting off for Rennes-le-Château to look for clues to the whereabouts of Berenger Sauniere's mythical treasure stash.
 
The myth duly unfolds: The Knights Templar, the treasures of Solomon's temple, the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans and the subsequent removal of the treasures of the Hebrews, the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths and the looting of the treasures of Rome, the Merovingian sorcerer Kings Of France, The Priory Of Sion, Friday the 13th, Rosslyn, the Accursed Treasure, Berenger Sauniere - and a cast of thousands.
 
Dawes and Scabies infiltrate the locals of Rennes-le-Château, visit Lyon, Paris and Rosslyn - and generally leave no stone unturned in the search for their illusive esoteric treasure. Along the way Rat throws up during an impromptu performance, rips his jeans on a cemetery gate, smokes weed with a series of improbable stoners, generally remains amusing and informative throughout - and wears his slippers for the duration of the quest. Dawes initial tongue-in-cheek cynicism soon turns to genuine faux-paranoia as the strange forces protecting the Grail begin to conspire against them.
 
Punk rock and the search for treasure of an esoteric nature have always been one and the same - The Quest Remains The Same, if you like - and that's why Dawes and Scabies succeed where so many have failed. Rat Scabies And The Holy Grail will make you laugh as well as think - use it as a portal to further investigation of the Grail Myth, if you will – but don't forget to smile while you dig.

Christopher Dawes (aka music journalist Push in the 80s) has written a punk rock version of The Da Vinci Code and strangely enough I was halfway through Dan Brown's book when I got this in the mail. I looked at the first page and immediately switched books. Five pages into it there's a passage on an old Damned gig wich made me put the book down and play the old Best Of The Damned LP, but other than that I've mainly been reading this the two last days. I had to sit at the art gallery where my paintings are displayed and this was a rather dull affair (sitting still on a chair in an art gallery that is, not the book or my paintings) so thank God for Ratty and his quest for the holy grail.
 
Remember the music press going on about how the punk generation wasn't going to be any different; that they were all going to end up old pop stars in the country side of France? Turns out they got it half right. This is a very straight forward telling of how the author's neighbour - and punk rock drummer - Rat Scabies manages to convince Dawes to go with him to France following a mess of old legends, rumours and secret codes. Unlike The Da Vinci Code this appears to be a true story, with real people and real beliefs, with a very real Rat Scabies in the middle of it. I must admit that I was afraid the old bastard had caught some sort of new age goffic disease but there's none of that. You get to know a fair amount about the Rennes-le-Château legends but mainly it's a story about two mates. It's a detective story of sorts I guess. It's also a travel story, with the two running into interesting characters on their way. It's also very entertaining in a dry british sort of way.
 
It's actually kinda inspiring. I'm glad I'm off on a short tour because the book really made me wanna travel. Just go some place new and do something new. Even if it's just drinking red wine in some remote village in France. Which just happens to be how most of the actual grail hunting is done in this book.
 
Rat Scabies And The Holy Grail was good company. I loved it. Like all good books you miss the people in it once it's finished. I'm an old punk rocker who grew up with Treasure Island, graduated to Indiana Jones and went on to study both archeology and religion at university. I did cryptography when I was in the army. Obviously a book about Rat Scabies searching for a treasure and a 2000 year old religious artefact is something I would like, but I think you'll enjoy it too.

The best book Jon Ronson never wrote.

Rat Scabies And The Holy Grail is a dope saturated odyssey through arcane texts and obscure beliefs, taking on board mad Frenchmen, paranoid conspiracy tourists and obscure 1970s desk toys. Although the author cliams that it's his and Rat's strange friendship that's at the center of the tale, less charitable readers might see it as a journey of two middle-aged men with too much time, and dope, on their hands. Still, it's ideal beach reading for conspiracy theorists and punk buffs everywhere.

By turns comedic and downright spooky, rich with bizarre coincidences and all manner of shady shenanigans. A highly entertaining book.