Hearing from Rumur

A while ago, my girlfriend went through a spell of engaging famous people in conversation. It seemed to be a passing phase. The other week though, we were driving around Shepherd's Bush green. We'd been talking about Paris, the Pere Lachaise cemetary to be precise.

While we'd been at the cemetary, she'd become annoyed by my grumpiness because I couldn't find the grave of Jim Morrison. I turned around to say to her, 'go up to someone and ask, 'where is the Lizard King' in French,' but she wasn't listening. She was sitting on a headstone drinking from a bottle of wine that she'd bought at a shop down the street.

'Oh' she said as we went around the green, 'Rumur's just been there. Paris.'

'Who's Rumur?' I asked.

'You know, Rumur the singer. She's my friend.'

'What do you mean, she's your friend?'

'On facebook. She sent me a message about it.'

'You mean you liked her page, and now you get sent her messages.'

'No. I send her messages too.'

'That doesn't...' I started to say.

'Yes it does,' she said.

I didn't say anything.

'Ou est le Lizard King...' she said, and started laughing.

Tyrannosaur

There's a nice webchat with Paddy Considine, writer/director/actor/bad mutha who has the rights to The Years Of The Locust, over at the Empire site here.

His first film, Tyrannosaur, is out soon. I was lucky enough to see it, and it's terrific, one of those movies that stays around in your head for a time afterwards. There's a guy in it called Eddie Marsan, who, if you're like me and aren't that up on films, is one of those actors whose face is familiar, and who always seems to be in good things. I last saw him playing the tragi-comic Tish in Pierrepoint, when he manages to break your heart as the noose goes around his neck. He's like that in Tyrannosaur, both threatening and pathetic at the same time, and he has a couple of jaw-dropping moments. It's a tremendous performance. And if you've only seen Olivia Colman in Peep Show, well, brace yourself is all I'll say, because she'll break your heart, too.

Tyrannosaur's also a great title. It fits the film, and lots of other things as well. I would have nicked it if I could...

In the garden

This blog's a bit like an overgrown garden at the moment, and there's too much going on in the house to get out there and hack at the weeds.

There's the book I'm supposed to be writing, the two that I'm not supposed to be writing but am anyway, the e-book of some of the stuff from my cricket blog that I seem to have unilaterally decided to waste my time on, and then the stuff that pays the bills, which at the moment is a big piece on the year of 1986 for Classic Rock, and something on Kiss's Unmasked tour of Australia in 1980 for a book that the band are doing. Plus the usual other things... And my girlfriend wants me to write her A POEM too...

You know that I would, darling, If I could... that rhymes doesn't it? No? Maybe there's something in Clintons Cards I can nick...

Back

Been too long since I posted here but am supposed to be writing other things. Will keep it short and sweet for now.

People I've interviewed in the last week or so: Mike Gatting, three members of Slayer, Graeme Souness. I am probably the only person in the world with this list....

Cast adrift...

Sometimes it's easier to see when you've been left behind by things than others. I was looking at Ross Halfin's blog [try it, it's very funny] - he'd been shooting Kings Of Leon in Hyde Park.

'Hang about,' I thought. 'Kings Of Leon? Headlining Hyde Park?' Surely you mean the Marquee or somewhere...

But no. Sixty-five thousand people turned up. Kings Of Leon. Hyde Park. When the hell did that happen...?

News of the Locust...

There's a line of news here on the film rights for The Years Of The Locust. Big thanks to Lesley Thorne and Lucy Luck...

Home

Have just picked up the copy of Visiting Mrs Nabokov I have on my desk after doing the Dabbler bit referred to below. In the intro, Martin Amis says: 'In 1980, I quit going to an office and became a full-time writer. The main characteristic of this way of life, it seemed to me, was that nothing ever happened to you'.

Perhaps that line jumped out because I've just finished a spell of going into an office. As I'm not Martin Amis, I expect I'll have to go back into one at some point, too, but maybe not for a while. I've worked in some good ones. The first was the Black Cat building at Mornington Crescent, where Kerrang! was sited on the ground floor round the third corner between Sounds and a woman's mag that I think I remember was called She. Then we went to the Daily Express building at Blackfriars, 'the 'grey lubyanka' of Private Eye fame where I once got the lift with Eve Pollard, Jean Rook and John Selwyn Gummer. We had a brief spell in John Street below an Arabic paper that had fearsome security before we moved to Carnaby Street. Later, long after I'd left Kerrang!, I worked in an office where The Office was filmed. The one I've just left was referred to, with chilling modernity, as 'a campus', even though it's not.

Somehow, I've been doing this since I left college [LCP - depressing, brutalist tower block at Elephant and Castle, from where the police station just up the road sometimes recruited us to make up the numbers in identity parades; fee - a can of flat beer...]. Although I've almost always gone to offices, many of the things I've written have necessitated getting out of them, too. Something nearly always happened while I did.

Now I'm at home, writing something that doesn't involve going out. Like Mart said, nothing has happened so far, but then I've only been here a day. We'll see.