Pride Words / Gig

On Monday I’m appearing at Pride Words at Foyles bookshop in London. It’s the first time I’ve been asked to provide next of kin and emergency contact details for a reading so I’m wondering what kind of crowd they’re expecting.


I had some trouble filling in the form as I don’t know what my mum’s or my partner’s addresses are. I toyed with the idea of putting down my own address, thinking that if anything happened to me then everyone would probably gather round there. But then I realised that they wouldn’t know anything had happened to me if I gave out an address for a place where they’re not.


I’m looking forward to the event but nervous as well as I always come away from these events feeling depressed. I believe everyone else is cooler and more intelligent than me. Mind you, I’m the kind of person who can feel inadequate crossing the road.


“Look at him, the way he nipped between the cars, it was brilliant!”


I’m currently reading Simon Armitage’s ‘Gig’. I bought it after watching his BBC4 documentary on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If you don’t know, Armitage is a poet, and he has recently translated Sir Gawain which is a 14th century poem about a knight from Arthurian legend.


Anyway the documentary was brilliant. Armitage followed the journey Gawain would have made in his quest to battle the Green Knight. The poem has beautiful descriptions of place, sex, and a powerful narrative.


The documentary also had a fantastic soundtrack and it was then that I remembered seeing Armitage’s book about music last year when it was out in hardback. I can remember where it was too. It was Sheffield’s Waterstones and I was in there during the break between matches I was watching at the Crucible (the snooker place).


The book is funny (‘It’s amazing how many hermits have websites these days’) and warm and in one point moved me to tears. This was when he got to interview David Gedge from the Wedding Present in the Holmfirth Pictodrome. The whole interview consists of Armitage asking Gedge a series of either or questions:

SA: Hudderfield or Halifax
DG: Er… I don’t know really.. Er…
SA: The right answer’s Huddersfield.
DG: Put me down for that, then.

There was something honest and unassuming about it that touched me. The truth these days is either hard, or slippery, so we spend a lot of time giving poncey responses to poncey questions.


I can remember the first records I ever had. They were bought for me and my brother by our mum and dad. It was on the same day they bought us a stereo. It was one of those that looks like a suitcase and weighed about half a tonne. The records were something by Shawaddywaddy and Ravel’s Bolero. As a musical education it was a start.


My mum moved house a few years ago so me and Will (my partner) were called in to clear out / sort through my old stuff. One of the boxes contained my old music cassettes and I was pleased to see that it contained nothing too embarrassing, Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy, Closer by Joy Division, Boy by U2, Get Close by the Pretenders, Ratus Norvegicus by the Stranglers, Savage by Eurythmics, Bauhaus, New Order and so on.


(I haven’t got that good a memory, I’ve just brought down the box from my spare bedroom. Sad in a way because I don’t have a cassette player to listen to them. My current CD collection represents my musical taste from the last 8 or 9 years during which time I’ve been settled back in the UK.)


Like a lot of people that have older brothers, my older brother was a big influence on me in his music tastes. He was also always a lot cooler than me. He was in a band, various bands in fact, and then worked in a record shop.


Nick, my brother, was the kind of person who could nip out to the local shop for a hairspray and then come back a week later having been to London and Brighton. At 40 he hasn’t changed a great deal although his flights become more precarious and worrying.


That same day in Sheffield at the Crucible he managed to disappear. It was only as he leant forward to speak to the taxi driver, late at night, not recognising the town he was in to ask the question:


“Are we in Derby?” (where he lives)
“No, this is Bradford mate.”


Back then I was more into computers. On a Sunday I was allowed to plug my Sinclair Spectrum into the tele in the lounge. If Nick was around then he would play too and I remember one of our favourite games was Psion Tennis, little black stickmen running around a black and white court.


Nick would be in charge of the music and I can remember while playing that tennis game was the first time I heard The Smiths. Years later Morissey’s lyrics would come to be music that defined my coming out and Hatful of Hollow still seems to me to be an album full of gay angst. I mean just read the song titles, ‘William, It was really nothing’, ‘What Difference Does it Make?’, ‘These Things Take Time’, ‘How Soon is Now?’, ‘Handsome Devil’, ‘Still Ill’, ‘Accept Yourself’ and so on. And to this day my favourite lyric remains, ‘If you ever need self-validation, I’ll meet you in the alley by the railway station’.


I’ve got nearly everything Morissey has recorded since The Smiths but I’m pleased to say, in my humble opinion, that the latest album, Years of Refusal, is the best thing he’s done since his musical youth.


The first gig I went to was Sting at the Royal Albert Hall in 1985 for the Dream of the Blue Turtles Tour. I was 14 and went with my brother on the train to London.


I remember just before we set off I was in my bedroom playing Bomb Jack on the Sinclair Spectrum.


“Come on,” he said, “we’re going to see Sting.”
“Hang on, I’m about to get my high score.”


You see, not cool.


The best gig I’ve ever been to was Elbow last year at Rock City. They came on stage in darkness. The strings were playing the intro to Starlings. Through the smoke the band members all raise the trumpets they are holding and then comes the blast of noise and then, alone, Garvey’s voice. It makes me almost cry just thinking about it.


You see, not cool.


The worst gig I’ve ever seen was two years ago at the Charlotte in Leicester. I can’t remember what the band were now but they were something young and trendy. The place was packed and they made us wait for ages and ages before they came on like they were the fucking Beatles reformed of something and then they played for about fifty minutes before pissing off.


I went and stood at the back and drank wine so it wasn’t a total washout.


The band I’m most pleased I’ve seen is The Cure because I love The Cure. They’ve had a new album this year too and like Morissey it’s probably the best thing they’ve done in years.


The biggest gig I’ve been to was Michael Jackson. He was good. It was in Montpellier in the South of France. That’s when my dad worked on a roller-coaster and it was a good summer all round.


The band I’ve seen the most is Marillion and they are always excellent. I’ve been to their last two conventions in Port Zelande in the Netherlands and that’s just a good time all round. Lovely people, food, place and music.


All of this might explain why I wrote a novel about a band, gay pop duo Down by Law. I don’t know. All of the above though I’m sure are the things I am into, books, music, poetry, travel and that is how I see myself, this passionate, awkward, uncool outsider. How this will translate into me appearing at Pride Words might be interesting to see. I hope my next of kin details will not be needed.

Resolutions

If you kept your eyes closed, you’d miss it, Christmas. And now the New Year is raising its white flag, wafting it around, begging us to take notice.


In my head I’ve been summing up the year.

Writing = 3
Work = -4
Life = 2.5

Total = 1.5

All in all, not bad. One year I was minus two million so things are looking up.


Recently I’ve been having fantasies about winning the lottery. In these fantasies I don’t spend the money, or tell anyone that I’ve won it. Instead I put it in a bank and then have nightmares about the bank collapsing and losing everything. Then I think I’ll divide the money between lots of banks and then I get stressed about having so many bank accounts. Where would I put all my bank books?


What I think this fantasy tells me is that I crave security. Like America has the Declaration of Independence in a museum, behind thick glass, heavily guarded. It lets Americans think they stand for something.


(I got the above fact from National Treasure, one of my favourite films. Still Life by Jia Zhang-Ke is another of my favourite films.)


It’s depressing every time you look at the news, more people are losing their jobs, shops are folding, rich wealthy middle-class people with university educations are telling us times are hard.


In another fantasy I am walking through a wood with a friend. A chaffinch warbles. I turn to my friend and say, “I remember when all this was shops.”


It makes you realise how precarious the whole capitalist endeavour is. Bring back communism I say. But what did Marx have to say about love? What do capitalists say, for that matter?


Except that it can be bought.


My problem is that I am too easily influenced. Last night I was listening to the Elbow special on Radio 6. They like PJ Harvey, I order a PJ Harvey album from HMV, they play Beck, I buy a Beck song from iTunes, they are friends with the Doves, I write a letter,

Dear Doves,
You don’t know me but…

What I want is to be cool in my own right. I want to be Vince Noir, from the Mighty Boosh. Or rather I don’t want to be him, I want to be a cool me.


Don’t get me wrong, things are ok, and besides this is a blog about writing and books.
I am currently reading, This Book Will Change Your Life, by A M Homes. I am halfway through and my life is still the same. I wonder if I can take it for a refund.


(Just kidding – it’s great!)


I plan to read more books by A M Homes this year, and by A L Kennedy, P G Wodehouse, J P Donleavy, V G Lee, W H Auden.


That is my first resolution. To read books by authors who are known by their first two initials and surname.


I want to travel the length and breadth of Vietnam in a jalopy.


I want to enjoy writing, and do it for me, and not be crippled by insecurity.


I want to be fitter, healthier, and become a lean mean fighting machine.


I don’t want to do the things I don’t want to do.


I want to organise my CDs in alphabetical order.


I want to find the thing in life that makes me happy.


And world peace.

Happy New Year to you all,

Love from

Drew x

I’m a book designer! I’m famous!

This week I got my contract from the BBC for ‘Teeth’. It will be recorded in the same studio as the Archers, although not at the same time. Then it will be broadcast in July. I’m not going to be reading it, people ask me that. Nor will I be famous. Some people say that too.


“You’re going to be famous. You’re on the radio.”


These are the same people who when I mention my book ask, “How many pages is it?” Then when I show them the cover, “Did you design it?”


That’s right. I’m a book designer. I’ve just kept it quiet.


Then they go on to say, “It might be a film. Just think.”


I’m thinking. I love books. I write books. I’m happy that it’s a book and that’s why I wrote it as a book. If I wanted to be famous I would have a sex change, swim the channel to the Netherlands and then tie myself to the wing of a windmill while local children throw wet flannels at me denouncing the plight of Iraqi wildlife.


“Those bombs, played havoc with the camels. Yes sir!”


So I’m excited, I’m going to be on the radio. It might be a film! And while we’re not talking about money I’m being paid £260. People want to ask that too.


I admit it. I am famous and rich!


Move out of the way of the roller-coaster of my life before you completely lose your breath and asphyxiate yourself slowly.


This is at exciting as it gets. Today I’ve been moving between the sofa and my bed reading ‘Penguin Special’. This is a history of Penguin books. This is what the rich and famous do.


Penguin Books was started by Allen Lane in about 1935. Before that cheap, high quality paperbacks weren’t available. Penguins were sold for 6p and you could buy them in Woolworth’s. The fist ten included books by Agatha Christie, Hemingway, Dorothy L Sayers. Other publishers thought Lane was mad.


The first twenty included reprints of ten Jonathan Cape books. Cape had a literary list second to none (and still true today – they are my publisher). Lane went to see Cape. Cape negotiated Lane’s offer up from a £25 advance per book to £40.


Cape was described as the ‘most tight-fisted bastard’. Cape thought the Penguins would be a disaster but if they were going to be a disaster he ‘wanted to get £400 off Lane’.


Of course they were a huge success, selling millions in the first year to the new mass market of the 1930s, offices were springing up everywhere, there was a new middle class.


Virginia Woolf was horrified. She didn’t think that kind of person should be reading. But she wasn’t very nice, was she?


I bought a Penguin myself this week. A new edition of The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. It has the most brilliant cover and is part of Penguin Red Classics. In the same series, Books for Boys, are The 39 Steps, The Lost World, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Riddle of the Sands, She.


I’ve read them all except She.


What a brilliant world, with such things in it.

Currently reading – see above


Currently listening to – Strangefolk by Kula Shaker

Orson Wells players present – ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’

You also called Kent the same thing

Just enjoy it. I’ve been telling myself that this week.

That’s probably easier said than done if this week’s Curse of Comedy is anything to go by. This week it was Hancock and Joan, the doomed relationship between Tony Hancock and Joan Le Mesurier.

It didn’t show any of the good times. Bang, it started with Hancock in rehab, his first meeting with Joan and it was downhill from there.

“You called my mother a c…” says Joan as Hancock is back in hospital. “I can’t even bring myself to say it.”

She smiles.

“You also called Kent the same thing.”

Hancock smiles. “I called Kent a cunt?”

They laugh, or seem to. In fact Hancock is crying.

I wanted to say to him, ‘Just enjoy it’. He had that tremendous success. But it was never enough, or the right kind of success. So in lieu of being able to tell Hancock (being dead, a messy suicide in Sydney) I’ve been telling myself.

‘Just enjoy it.’

It’s easy to forget because we always want more. But I’m going to enjoy it. Three months and a bit now to Me and Mickie James coming out. I have a good publisher. The person who read it at Dazed and Confused loved it. I’m going to be on the radio. I have a launch and other events.

It’s brilliant.

But then you read something like ‘Then We Came to the End’ and you think, ‘I want to be as brilliant as that. Now, that is brilliant!’
I loved it. It’s about office life. It’s narrated by ‘we’.

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our morning lacked promise.”

The characters drift in and out of each other’s offices. Stories are started by one and then continued by another, they start out with the mundane. “I’ve been to McDonalds” but turn into something else, a colleague whose child has been abducted and murdered mourning in the McDonald’s PlayStation.

“No a PlayStation is something else.”

“What?”

“A PlayStation. It’s a games console.”

“You’re missing the point.”

This colleague is sitting in the balls, just looking at them day after day. Or someone else being left a totem pole in a will, someone stealing someone else’s medication, someone dying of cancer. All their dreams – writing a novel, a film, quoting Emerson, Thoreau, not thinking about life.

“There are two things you can’t advertise. Fat people and death.”

But while they are scooting around the office, swapping chairs in fear (that’s a long story), life is ongoing.

And if I could write something like that then I would be happy.

I would, I’d be happy. I’d be happy with that.

I’d be happy.

Currently listening to – The Whip, X Marks Destination

Currently reading – Bad Traffic, Simon Lewis

Clip from The Rebel

Unhappy Funny People

I’ll be quick today. I’ve got to be off soon to the daily grind and I’ve got to feed my ex-cat on the way.


Actually first something that made me chuckle at work. A domestic incident – ‘BOYFRIEND AND GIRLFRIEND ARGUE OVER BOYFRIENDS ATTITUDE.’


Well, perhaps you would be upset if your boyfriend was buying a magazine for gay men. Or perhaps she wanted to read it and he wanted it first? Who knows?


I’ve had almost a week off from writing and have been instead watching BBC4’s season of programmes about unhappy funny people. First off was ‘Steptoe and Son’.


‘Steptoe and Son’ is a memory from my early childhood. I didn’t know that Harry H Corbett wanted to be a serious actor, or Wilfred Bramble was a repressed homosexual. I didn’t know that they hated each other, and the show, and their lives.


It was all pretty grim.


I thought about my life. If they made it into a tv show would it be equally grim? Is my life tragic because I go to work in an office doing a job I don’t particularly like? And I have something that I’m passionate about, can escape to. (The writing. I don’t own a caravan in Skegness if you were wondering…)


What about the people who don’t have this thing that they do? Are they more tragic than Corbett and Bramble?


They must have good times I thought. This was upheld by the Mark Lawson interview with Galton and Simpson, the writers of Steptoe (and Hancock’s Half Hour). Of Hancock, ‘He wasn’t depressed when he worked with us’. They talked about how happy Corbett and Bramble were to do the Steptoe series.


And they talked how happy they were to get their first letter from the BBC. In their late 70s they still had a big smile on their face. Two weeks ago I got my first call from the BBC. I can understand that.


Sellers in ‘The Life and Death of Peter Sellers’ seemed to be unhappy in a different way. He was equally trapped, by the Clouseau role, but his belief in himself seemed to allow him to treat everyone around him badly. You don’t have to be nice when you are powerful.


I can appreciate that. The things I quietly seethe about now I would stand on rooftops and shout about if I had more than two half-pennies to rub together. Which is why it is a good thing that I will always be a complete failure. It keeps me nice.


I also read some good books this week. Finished ‘Submarine’, which was great. Then ‘Boy A’ which is a good companion piece to ‘Submarine’. I read a collection of brilliant short stories, ‘Caravan Thieves’ and started to read also the history of Penguin books, ‘Penguin Special’.


Yesterday I started writing again. A new short story. Or it might be a long one.

Currently reading – Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris


Currently listening to – Beginning of the Twist – Futureheads

Geoffrey Rush as Sellers:</B

www.drewgummerson.co.uk

Yes I am now www.drewgummerson.co.uk. In the future when my many fans flock towards me (Note from the editor – ‘Can one person truly be said to ‘flock’?’, ‘Or be ‘many’?’) I will no longer have to cast my hands novelistically in the air and say, ‘Just Google me’. Meaning my old website address was a few cats and a rabbit short of the Magna Carta.


For those of you who are interested and I didn’t know myself, it is very easy to buy a domain name (i.e. www.drewgummerson.co.uk). I did it from here, but there are loads of others and it cost £5 for two years. All web traffic to your chosen domain name is then sent to your old website (if you have one).


It’s been a good and busy week so why I found myself at one o’clock this morning sitting on the side of the bath sobbing I don’t know. I’d just been watching Michael Jackson perform Billie Jean at Motown 25 and I think I was reminded of the time I’d first watched it with my mum, my dad and my brother, all of us together. Or listening to Thriller on the bus to France on holiday and thinking it would be great if I sat upstairs right at the front. And then the sun came up and up and up.


That’s the thing about past. It is always behind you.


And I was emotional anyway because I finished the third draft of the Penguin Variations yesterday. When you get to the end you always think, ‘this is shit. I’m rubbish. I’m stuck in a call centre till I die with a phone welded to my ear’.


Then this morning I got a call from the BBC as you do at 10:30 on a Sunday morning. They want one of my stories. Woo hoo! If you read this blog you know I love the BBC. So woo hoo!


I’d sent them the story a couple of years ago. The person who read it originally liked it but was told to send it back. She has since left that post, returned to a position of more power and this time it’s in. Or on. It’s not signed in blood yet, but it should be ok.


Also this week I was proof-reading my story ‘Intimacy’ which is going to be in ‘Boys In Heat’ out in June. So for those of you who like hot boy on boy action (and who doesn’t?) note it in your diary. Actually my story is about a policeman who is sent to train a Polish bicycle task force, there is a serial killer cutting off penises, some stuff about the Catholic Church and Al Qaeda. The usual.


And finally this week I was at a photo-shoot for Leicester’s What’s Your Favourite Book. You can see the damage here. Nice to see everyone dressed colourfully in complete black…

Currently reading – Submarine by Joe Dunthorne


Currently listening to – Duran Duran, Red Carpet Massacre, Sweeney Todd, and Michael Jackson, Thriller.

Rik Mayall reading George’s Marvellous Medicine:

Kenneth Williams and Jackanory: