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.

Some things, and some other things

I recently decided to write a novel of ideas. I quickly jotted down some notes, Darwinism, Nietzsche, Freud, the disintegration of modern society. Now all I needed was a story.


What about that bloke who wandered around the planet two thousand odd years ago, dangling his willy in front of all and sundry? What was his name?


Christ!


My memory isn’t what it used to be.


First of all, (after those other first things as per above), apologies that this blog has been absent for a week or so. It’s been a busy time.


I’ve done two readings, one of my story ‘Gus’ at the YMCA in Leicester, and one from ‘Me and Mickie James’ at Polari in London. Both went well, (in positive blog terms rather than what was going on in my head) and at the YMCA my name appeared in big letters and I got to wear my new cardigan both of which are a plus. You can see the picture here.
(‘Gus’ is available in a new short story collection ‘The Global Village’ just published.)


I’ve also been on the Eurostar to Brussels. If you haven’t been on the Eurostar then you should. It’s great. It goes at 270 km an hour and you leave from a city and arrive in a city – it was only ten minutes walk from the train station to our hotel.


We are the only generation that will enjoy cheap air travel. I wonder what will happen to airports in the future. Will they become hubs of duty free shopping as imaginary planes take off and land on video screens?


Idea for a novel….


After one night in Brussels it was another train journey to Rotterdam and from there on a bus to Centreparks Port Zelande for the 2009 Marillion Convention. You can see the pictures for that here.


Me and Will had our own chalet overlooking the sea, there was a big tent in which Marillion played a concert each night for three nights, there were excellent support bands, there was really nice food, and red wine was available to buy.


I have only been to two conventions, both for Marillion, one in 2007, one in 2009 and both at Port Zelande so I have nothing to compare them to. I once imagined a convention of ratchet salesmen for a story I wrote but that’s about it. A convention of ratchet salesmen wasn’t laugh a minute in my head.


I have also seen here and thereabouts that Star Trek have conventions. While I am a fan of Star Trek I don’t know that I would want to go to a convention. What does one do there for a start? Dress up as Spock? Watch repeats of Star Trek in a darkened room? It all seems, well, a bit geeky.


I wonder if that’s what people think of a Marillion convention. But it wasn’t, or didn’t feel like that. There were people there from all over the world. ‘America’ didn’t get as big a boo this time when it was flashed up on one of the screens. No doubt this is the Obama effect.


(And I wonder too who will save British politics? In the news today is Jacqui Smith claiming her husband’s wank movies on parliamentary expenses. This is the same woman who refused to backdate police pay which has alienated the whole police force from the labour party.)


While the thing that had brought the 2500 people there was Marillion it seemed to be much more than a sum of that single part. What I’m really saying is I had a nice time.


Now I’m back home and busy again. I’ve recently been commissioned to be a professional blogger over on the Literature Network, and I’m writing 72 linked short stories, and I’m buying a house. And there’s sill all those books on my shelves to read. And exercise to do.


And I still hoped somewhere, some day, to change the world.

Marillion at Port Zelande

Living with a No. 1 Fan

(This blog is also available as a podcast here).

The other morning in bed, my partner, Will asked me if I could name the eleven studio albums Marillion had made since Fish, their former lead singer, had left the group in September 1988.


To my surprise I found I could name ten, and when prompted with the initials, H. I. E, I could get last one (Holidays in Eden, of course).


This was not bad going. Three and a half years previously when we had first met all I could have told anyone about Marillion was that they were a Scottish rock group and their biggest hit was Kayleigh.


I should at this stage say that Will is Marillion’s Number One Fan. This is an official title, given to him by the band’s manager, Lucy Jordache, on the Marillion Official Facebook group.


I should also at this stage that Will is not old, he’s twenty-seven, doesn’t have long hair, wears fashionable clothes, and is a huge fan of music in general. The 324 CD storage unit I bought him for Christmas doesn’t even come close to holding half of his collection. The rest remain in tottering towers or duly converted sock drawers.


Will was four years old when Kayleigh came out. And no he doesn’t like it. Not that it’s a bad song, more that it’s an easy shorthand for other people to say what they do, or don’t like, about Marillion.


It would be like saying, I imagine, that you were a big fan of Shakespeare because you had once seen Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet.


In 1995 Will’s brother took him to a Marillion album launch in north London and from that point he was hooked.


“It was Steve H’s voice. Awesome.”


Steve H is the lead singer. As one of the many t-shirts you can buy will tell you, “Mr H, new singer since 1989”.


That was my first recontact with Marillion, H’s voice, at a solo concert he did at Sheffield’s Hubs, just him and an electric piano.


“I’m doing this to pay my tax bill,” he said.


I wasn’t expecting to like it. No, not exactly true. I was going for Will because he wanted to go. It was one of those early relationship things you do, testing the waters, tentatively exploring for some common ground.


But I did like it, everything about it. The place, it was small with tables with candles on, and there was red wine at the bar, always a plus point for anywhere I go. H talked about his life, growing up in Yorkshire, working as the house band on a cruise ship, his dad, and his mum was there in the audience, a little old lady, obviously pleased as punch by her son, up there.


I hadn’t expected him to talk, and I liked that. All good art, I believe, should come from hard work and experience. I don’t buy into this X Factor dream, instant gratification. You can’t buy passion, or pay for it.


Nick Hornby in 31 Songs writes that he chose Rod Stewart, in the early 70s, over prog rock, because Stewart led to other things, Bobby Womack, Sam Cooke, The Temptations, the Isley Brothers, Aretha Franklin and so on. Prog rock, he argues, has no musical precedent, except perhaps Pink Floyd, and is therefore shallow, vapid.


I don’t know about that, because H sang songs that night that he loved, had influenced him, Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman, Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat, The Beatle’s Help, a version of In the Ghetto (made famous by Presley), Bowie’s Life on Mars, Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting and so on.


But I am going on, getting carried away myself, when this is about Will, about him being the number one fan.


However, I think that initial moment is important; coup de foudre, the French would call it, a sudden intense moment of love.


I had it going to see Elbow. The backing strings are playing gently and the band members walk on stage each holding a trumpet. There is some riot of noise and then Garvey’s voice in the quiet, singing Starlings, about not been good enough for someone you love, I feeling I know only too well.


When Will gets drunk he will admit to this, that it is love. On his birthday last year we were stood outside his house at two o’clock in the morning. Someone had dared say something detrimental about Marillion during the night and he was still upset hours later.


“You don’t understand,” he said, as he threw his phone across the garden, “I love Steve H. He’s always been there for me.”


And he’s right in a way because music is always there for us. Especially these days, with MP3s, iPods, music playing mobile phones. And music can touch us more intimately than words can and it defines us too. Like the dead, music can never make a mistake.


‘Made Again’ for example, will always be a song about the rebirth of love, it will always start off spare and haunting, perhaps hinting at melancholy and loss, but when the guitar kicks in two minutes in it will always bring a smile to my face and make me want to jump up and dance.


Those five minutes will forever be available to me, the same, unwavering, while the economy crumbles and Israel pounds Gaza, again.


When Will is not drunk his love is more of the obsessive kind. Marillion have both a website and on this website a forum, where fans can chat. He will be on these everyday, for hours possibly, like someone who has Alzheimer’s, they have been told the cure is imminent and they are just waiting, waiting. I dread one day that he will get an internet enabled iPhone, then it will be Marillion twenty-four hours a day.


I made the mistake of telling him that I was writing this blog and that I wanted a video to go with it. He is straight on YouTube, here are Marillion on a French radio station, here is some grainy footage taken on a mobile phone from the back of some concert hall in a minor Dutch town. Do I want to use that? Hang on. There’s another one…


A few quick scenarios:


In my house the computer is in the lounge. I go upstairs to the toilet, when I come back down Will be typing something on the forum. When we come back into the house the first thing he does is go on the internet.


Will’s most commonly used phrase, “I just want to check something…” This something is, of course, Marillion.


A few quick conversations:


“Do you like the new single?”


“Have you read the eWeb?”


“Have you pre-ordered the album?”


The answer to all of these is ‘yes’ and an extra question to the last one would be, “Then how much did you pay, including postage and packing. Exactly.”


In the past three years I have been to seven Marillion concerts, been down to London as part of an exclusive session for the Bob Harris show, watched them do an acoustic set in HMV and had them sign their single, all three versions.


I attended the last Marillion convention, in Port Zeland, Netherlands, and am due to go to the next one in March – three nights, three concerts. I pre-ordered the last album and have my name on the booklet inside, I have shaken Steve H’s hand, and stood in the near vicinity of the drummer, Ian Mosley, outside a venue while he has a fag. And the band’s manager, Lucy Jordache now knows me by name. On iTunes, I have 275 songs by Marillion.


Oh yes, and I have been, on more than one occasion been moved almost to tears while listening to the music.


I was talking to a friend about this, about Marillion, in concert and she was quite dismissive of it. Her opinion was that at a concert a kind of mass psychosis takes place. That if you are with a group of people who like something, then you will like it too.


I don’t know if this is true. I like to think that if I had been at the Nuremberg Rally I would have put my hand up and said, no actually Hitler, I think you’re a bit of an arse. And besides I’m gay, I’m used to not going with the flow. Last time I looked I didn’t have two point four children running around my feet. Point four of a child, what would that look like?


So does that explain why Will cares about them?


Who can say why certain things stick with you? Or why you stick with them? The very nature of our society is disposable. That’s what capitalism is, the production and disposal of an ever increasing array of products. Marketing is slick, images are buffed, air-brushed. Promotion takes precedence over content.


Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher, said that the biggest tragedy of a man’s life was to have no passion. (Or was that Bob Dylan.) Either way I agree. So I can live with Will’s obsession, if the obverse is the lack of one. It is good to believe in something, whatever it is, especially these days when all the big ideas are dead. The Beatles’ revolution never did come around, and peace wasn’t given a chance. But somewhere amid the gloom small epiphanies glow.


The title track of Marillion’s latest album is ‘Happiness is the Road’, a long sprawling ten minute affair. Listening to the album, I have to admit it is not really a song that I liked a great deal or got. That is until I saw it live.


The chorus is the repeated refrain, ‘Happiness aint at the end of the road. Happiness is the road’. And I was with them then, because that is something I need to tell myself, to enjoy the moment, to do what you want to do.


It’s not the result, it’s the action.


And maybe that is what Will likes too. The chance to be part of the band, to buy their music, to support them, meet them, watch them on tv, hear them speak, travel with them on their journey.


Or maybe he just likes the music.

‘Happiness is the Road’, Marillion’s latest album is available in shops everywhere now. You can visit their website here. You can even join the forum.

Drew Gummerson is a writer. His latest novel, Me and Mickie James, is about a pop group, not Marillion, but Down By Law, and their struggles to make it in the music business. Mickie James has a hunchback. You can read some reviews here, read an extract here, or buy it from here or any good bookshop.

Marillion – Happiness is the Road

Me and Mickie James Cover

This week I received the cover for ‘Me and Mickie James’. I was surprised. I was expecting a picture. Instead it is covered in writing, front and back. Also it’s black.


I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book covered in writing and I can’t think of many black books.


The last thing Felicity, my agent, asked me for before sending the book out was a blurb. I ran upstairs, grabbed a few books I liked and quickly wrote one. Those are the words that are now all over the cover, in squiggly white letters.


I’ve been looking at it a lot. I printed it off and took it to bed with me. I didn’t actually sleep with it but it was there on the bookshelf next to me. I kept taking out other books and comparing them.


“Yes,” I said, “it’s your cover.”


I held it at a distance.


It looks at a fly-poster for a band. The book title is in yellow and the writing under it is white. It’s like the name of a pop group and then the venues they are performing at underneath. This is a good thing as the book is about a pop group.


Looking at it more closely I like the quirky details. There are astericks in yellow and little pictures. There’s a picture of a toilet and one of St Pancras Station. There’s a boat, and a weapon of mass destruction. This is a good thing too as the book is quirky.


It works I think as it would make someone want to pick the book up. They would want, I think, to know what the writing says. And hopefully then take it to the cash desk and hand over some money.


That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?


Well, perhaps. It’s scary that people are investing money in me; designing a cover, editing the manuscript, producing the book.


But for me I would do the writing regardless. This week I’ve been working on The Penguin Variations. It makes eighteen days now that I’ve been going over the first two chapters. I’ve been reading them again and again and again. I look at paragraphs for minutes on end, thinking, ‘is this any good?’, cutting bits, adding bits, for hours and hours.


I think about it when I’m lying in bed, when I’m at work. I feel guilty when I take a day off, which I haven’t, and do anything else.


It’s worth it. Because then I might get to see another nice cover.

You can see the ‘Me and Mickie James’ cover here.


You can join the ‘Me and Mickie James’ Facebook group here.


You can pre-order ‘Me and Mickie James’ here.

Currently reading – Six Word Stories (read them and vote for your favourite)


Currently listening to – Children of Men soundtrack (fantastic – John Lennon, Jarvis Cocker, Deep Purple, Donovan and so on)

Marillion performing ‘Made Again’

Shock! Horror! Plot in Crisis!

John Richardson was interviewed on Front Row this week. For the past 30 years he has been writing the biography of Picasso. This month years 1917 – 1932 are published. Richardson still has 41 years to go. Picasso died in 1973. Richardson is 84.


Richardson’s final words of the interview were, “I’m beginning to see to some extent how his mind works.”


After 30 years! I should hope so.


What would life be without an obsession?


I know mine too well.


I went to Picasso’s house once in Antibes. I say house but in was a chateau in the true castle sense of the word. I remember being truly amazed by the work on display there – sketch after sketch after sketch, rooms of them. My father was living in Antibes then. He had been working on the beach until threatened by the local heavies and wound up as a grill chef at a little bar facing the beach.


In a strange conjunction of resonances this week I bought the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote. The cover is sand-coloured and in the bottom right-hand corner is a pen and ink drawing of a knight on a horse. It is fabulous. Looking on the back I found the drawing is by Picasso. Don Quixote was just about my father’s favourite book. Of course though, he read it in Spanish.


My only other meeting with Picasso was in New Orleans. I was practically penniless, hot, killing time and I nipped into gallery, lulled by the air conditioning. I picked up the brochure on offer there and was skimming through it when swooped upon by an all-toothed American.


“You are looking for something in particular, sir?” she said.


I narrowed my eyes. “My mother, she collects art.” In fact, just the previous year we had cut out some Gaugain pictures from a book we had stolen from the local Oxfam and slipped them into clip-frames. They looked grand on the walls of our council house.


“Well, we have some Picassos in the back. Would you like to view them?”


“Ok,” I said.


What I remember most of the viewing is my footwear. I was wearing the shoes I always wore that year, espadrilles. The upper was cotton and I could see quite clearly my big toe sticking through.


Picasso, no doubt, would have approved.


(For those of you who think this is all too High Art let me set the scene. It is Saturday night. I am on my fourth beer. I have watched x factor, both the contest and then the results. Because of x factor I went onto YouTube and watched the Beatles performing ‘The Long and Winding Road’ (Leon had sung it on x factor), then I went to Amazon and decided I wanted The White Album and Rubber Soul, then I went to iTunes and looked at Michael Bublé (Leon apparently sounds like him), then I went back to YouTube and watched a clip from the movie ‘Help!’)


‘Help!’ was my favourite film as a child. Me and my brother would watch it over and over. They showed it on tv just after John Lennon was shot and killed in New York. That was in 1981 and I was 10 then.


On that day mum and dad came to collect me from school. I knew something was up. They never came to school to collect me.


“John Lennon’s dead,” my dad said.


“Bang bang,” my mum said. She’s a bit of a comedian my mum.


“Who’s John Lennon?” I asked but when we got home it was all over the news.


“He just seemed to be getting back on his feet,” my mum said. “Had his haircut.”


We watched ‘Help!’ I remember feeling sad. I think it was the first time I had ever cared about anything.

***



Coda: When I have an idea what that particular week’s blog is going to be about I write it on a piece of paper next to the computer (a Mac!) This week I had no idea. That is until I was in the shower at the gym this afternoon. John Richardson, I thought. Picasso, I thought.


I was so caught up in my ideas I was totally lost. In the middle of this I looked down at myself and saw that I was naked.


“Fuck!” I thought and jumped. “You’re naked!”


Then I remembered. I was in the shower.


“Drew,” I said. “It’s ok. You’re in the shower.”


Enough.


I’m dull.

Currently reading – Don Quixote, Cervantes


Currently listening to – Sowewhere in London, Marillion





Watch – ‘Help!’ trailer

The Only Way to Rob a Bank is Naked

I’m a big fan of public transport. It’s the people they let on it that bothers me. In the same way I’m a big fan of democracy. It just depends whose hands it’s in.


Brief excerpt of overheard bus conversation:


“And who’s paying for it? Us! The taxpayers. It’s all going on these foreigners. I was staying in the hotel. It was £40 a night. Not cheap. It was like a halfway house. Full of immigrants.”


Sadly, I judge people only on whether they will or will not buy my book. These people probably would not.


Luckily I was on my way to the Phoenix Theatre to see the Joe Orton Project premiere. This was a one man show, two chairs.


On stepping through the door I was a handed a leaflet by a very nice woman (a definite book buyer!).


“Are you aware of the, uh, content of Orton’s work?”


I smiled, “Yes, I am. Do you know where the toilet is?”


This was a joke. It was lost on her. It was partly lost on me.


The foyer was full of book buyers, I could tell. The effete old man who walked with a cane. The tall man with the silver hair. Two men with scarves (scarf wearers are the biggest book-buyers according to Heat magazine.)


I bought a glass of wine and asked for a plastic cup so I could take it into the auditorium. Glasses of wine make or break cultural performances.


For example, the Marillion concert at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall was better than the Marillion concert at Rock City. The former served wine, the latter beer. Both had the edge over Steve Hogarth at the Union Chapel (no alcohol allowed out of the crypt (bar area) and into the concert hall (church).


“This is a church for Christ’s sake!” said the angry bouncer.


Will and I had to relay from the pew, taking it in turns to have a drink.


Jesus!


U2 played the Union Chapel this week. Perhaps Bono will petition the Pope. Have I told you my pope story?


But I’m losing the plot.


This week’s blog was going to be about Art and how great Art is, how it can be the meaning to your life. You see, along with the Joe Orton Project, this week I watched Jindabyne and eXistenz. Jindabyne was a film with proper acting, scenes like Carver (from which it came), eXistenz a film with a proper story that was full of imagination.


(Me and Mickie James was sent to a film agent this week. Fingers crossed!)


I also had three proper days editing The Penguin Variations. I’m halfway through now. I love it when it takes over my whole brain. I spent one night reading the chapter I was working on out loud, over and over again. If you can hear me through the walls neighbours,


“Sorry.”


I said that out loud.


Actually I know they can hear me. They complained about my music about two days after I moved in. They called the landlady, she called me.


“H E L L O,” I shouted down the phone. “S O R R Y, JUST LET ME TURN THE MUSIC DOWN. I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”


And that so is a true story.


Luckily, they are not something I specialise in. Like democracy they so often end up in the wrong hands.





Currently listening to – Werner Herzog talking about Rescue Dawn



Currently reading – The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt

Clip from Orton’s Loot – a naked bank robbery

Joy Division

First off, as this has kind of become a blog for what is happening to Me and Mickie James, the copyeditor’s comments are back. As with the editor’s comments, there are very few and it only took me an hour or so to go through them.


Then today I got a email telling me that Me and Mickie James was to go to production and did I want to leave any pages for acknowledgements and dedications? I hadn’t thought about that.


So it is all happening there. I suppose you never believe these things until you have the finished book in your hand and you are running up and down the street naked banging on your neighbours’ doors begging them to buy it.


I can’t wait. (The neighbours I can’t answer for although at a guess they probably don’t want to see me naked in the street clutching a book they have never heard of.)


It all seems very different to Factory Records (on BBC4 this week). I liked the anarchist sensibility of their business plan, 50% for you 50% for us and if you don’t like you can fuck off. No marketing. No hard sell.


“We will stand out,” said Tony Wilson, “because while everyone else is trying to sell themselves, we won’t be.”


Blue Monday was the biggest selling 12’’ of all time but because the packaging was so expensive they made a loss on every one sold.


And I love Ian Curtis. Or at least the image I have of him dancing. His eyes are so focused and the way he moves his arms and legs, so out of control. That is what it feels like in my brain only the exterior moves much more slowly.


I have a hundred things going on and the writing is a kind of focus. Actually, it is a focus, not a kind of one. I wonder what I would do if I couldn’t do the thing I love. How do other people manage, not having an obsession? Is it children? I don’t know.


On Saturday night I was at the Union Chapel, Islington. I was sitting on a pew, there for a Steve Hogarth concert, not a late conversion to Christianity.


You get the feeling that he can look back and feel content. He seems to have followed his passion. Mixed with the songs he reads from his diaries; an acoustic tour of the States with the boys from the band or travelling across Doncaster on a bus, getting hit, going to a party, seeing rain that appeared in later lyrics to a song.


People have often said that I’m brave, because I went to the Czech Republic on my own, or to Japan. I always thought it was the opposite of brave. If you can look back on your life, whether from the middle or the end, and not have done everything you wanted to do, and face up to that fact, then you are far braver than me.

Currently reading, The President’s Last Love – Andrey Kurkov


Currently listening, Joy Division

Control trailer