Jon Hotten

Hearing from Rumur

2012-01-17T12:33:00.000-08:00

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

2011-09-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-22T06:16:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-05T13:52:00.003-07:00

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...

2011-06-25T03:31:00.000-07:00

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...

2011-06-22T04:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

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.

More Mart

2011-05-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Have written about Martin Amis's journalism over at The Dabbler. It was brilliant [his journalism, not the piece].

Feeling Rand-y?

2011-05-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

I've read this story a couple of times now, and I'm convinced of its creepy weirdness. It appeared at Huffington Post, and it's the kind of thing that probably wouldn't make the traditional press. It's just too... strange.

It's about Ayn Rand, who appears to be coming back into fashion yet again, this time as an icon for US republicans. Steve Mariotti, the writer of the piece, seems to have lived his entire life in response to his three somewhat overwrought meetings with Rand, with whom he became obsessed as an adolescent after reading Atlas Shrugged. He writes:

'She wore a black dress that came to just below her knees, and her hair was pulled back and up. She made a point of standing beneath a topless portrait of herself painted 40 years before, when she was in her thirties. She examined me intently, wearing the same sly smile she had in the portrait. She was beautiful and, standing directly below the picture, she seemed to be saying: "And I am still this sexy?" She was.

It doesn't end well, as you can probably guess...

Dontacha just hate the successful...

2011-04-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

It's perfectly natural and healthy for writers to disparage other writers, especially successful ones. Or so I tell myself. Literary envy breaks down into two broad types. There's the sort between the lions of the page who can't stand one another, eg Truman Capote and Gore Vidal [Capote's revenge fantasy against Vidal, as told in George Plimpton's oral history, is a mind-boggling classic]; and then there's the sort between the unsuccessful and successful ones, where the unsuccessful convince themselves that what they do has an innate merit missing in the lowest-common-denominator work of the successful. Richard Tull and Gwynne Barry, the protagonists in Martin Amis's The Information are primo examples, with Tull sentenced to lugging all available copies of his painstakingly-wrought small-press novel around in a sack while Barry's schlocky new-age blockbuster sells billions and wins a million-quid prize.

Such was the case when I went to the Cadogan Hall with my younger daughter to see Jodi Picoult. My daughter loves Jodi, and she is not alone. There were the other 700 people who turned up to fill the place [at fifteen quid a ticket, which included a copy of Jodi's new book]; then there were the many thousand others who've gone to see her on tour [yes, she goes on tour, and had been since March 1 through Europe and America]; and then the 14 million who've bought her books, including My Sister's Keeper, recently back on the bestseller lists after being made into a hit film [as will her next novel, already optioned by Ellen De Generes even though she hasn't finished writing it yet]; and also my girlfriend, who thinks she's great, too.

Oh how I [justifiably] wanted to hate Jodi Picoult, who came onstage wearing a tiara to warm applause. How I wanted to loathe her entire family [she talked about her son, another dismal Picoult under-achiever who is at Harvard studying Egyptology, speaks four languages and in his spare time runs a theatre group for underprivileged kids], and the friend she'd brought along who had composed the soundtrack to her new book, and Rosie Boycott, who provided an eloquent onstage introduction.

Annoyingly, I couldn't though. The tiara turned out to be a self-deprecating joke. Her pal was quite a useful singer. Jodi began by reading a ten-minute passage without a stumble, a first person narrative that set up perfectly her story and that, irritatingly, left everyone, including me, wanting to know what happened next. Then she invited questions from the audience, which elicited some terrific responses and revealed how seriously she takes her research - going as far as visiting an execution chamber and being talked through the process of lethal injection, and debating the Bible's position on homosexuality with a far-right religious nutter. My daughter asked the first question, about her plot twists [something else she apparently excels at], which got a revealing answer about having a solid start and end but a middle that allowed her subconscious room to provide solutions she didn't know she had.

Afterwards, we stood in the queue to get our books signed, a queue that was - annoyingly again - very long. She inscribed my daughter's book with a thoughtful personal message, had her picture taken with her and generally made her night, making it impossible for me to dislike the multi-millionaire writer Jodi Picoult in any way at all.

What the evening showed was how good you have to be to be as good as Jodi Picoult, and how hard you have to work. Yes, Jodi Picoult is annoying. Annoying because she's bloody great at what she does. And bloody nice, too. Dontcha just hate her? Oh.

It ain't what you do...

2011-03-21T12:58:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend encountered Sue Pollard outside Sainsbury's and pretended to know her. Now she has met the singer Terry Hall on a bus and pretended to know him, too.

'What happened?' I asked.

'Well I was on the bus and I saw him, so I thought, 'why not?''

'Oh yeah, why not,' I repeated.

'So I just went up to him. He's quite attractive'.

'Is he? What did you say?'

'All I said was, 'hello, Terry'...'

'And?'

'Well you know, he said hello, and then I told him that his music meant quite a lot to me when I was growing up.'

'Yes,' I said, 'they usually love it when you remind them how much you used to like them.'

'Then he got off, but it was our stop too, so we got off as well. We had a chat by the bus stop. I said, 'my daughter's seen you play four times'.'

'They especially like it when they hear that they've entertained generations of the same family...'

'Oh shut up, you idiot,' she said. 'He was very nice. And he had a nice suit on. We said goodbye and he just went off.'

'So are you going to carry on with this, going up to famous people?'

'Yes,' she said.

The JT situation

2011-03-16T13:05:00.001-07:00

Heard not one, not two but three radio phone-in debates about John Terry and the England football captaincy yesterday [what can I say, I listen to Talksport and 5live]. JT was once the skipper of course, but lost the hallowed armband for an affair that he probably didn't have with peripheral squad-member Wayne Bridge's girlfriend.

Setting aside the fact that the off-field JT is a living parody of a contemporary premiership footballer - fined for taking the piss out of Americans at Heathrow airport days after 9/11; cleared of wounding with intent following a 'nightclub fracas'; said at one point to be gambling £40,000 per week on horses and dogs; exposed for taking money for tours of Chelsea's training ground; admitting to unfaithfulness with more than eight women ['I'm not going to cheat ever again']; getting married, unmatchably, 'in a £1m ceremony' at Blenheim Palace; being voted 'Dad of the Year' by Daddies Sauce - it is his on-pitch quality that fired up the phone lines.

Terry does one thing that endears him to the England follower. He 'puts his body on the line'. It was a phrase that cropped up supernaturally often in the discussion. It was something he did during England's classic world cup campaign of 2010, when he attempted to head a ball that was going along the ground, and it's a quality that passes unquestioned. It's a particularly English notion, the kind of Henry V style skipper who will lead from the front without a thought for his personal safety.

The context in which is meant must be accepted [what, after all, is the worst that's going to happen to JT when he does put his body on the line? Will he be hit by the stingy ball? Will he get stitches or do a ligament? It's hardly as dangerous as show-jumping or rugby, let alone being in the army] but even within that context it's a quality that is bestowed upon few positions in the game. In fact, it's almost unique to central defenders. Full-backs are rarely hailed for 'putting their body on the line', nor are tricky midfielders or show-pony strikers. It's always players like Terry or Tony Adams or Terry Butcher, who aren't really any good at anything else.

It does say something about which skills are prized by the England fan, and they're not skills that the Brazilian or French follower loses a lot of sleep over. Sure, they'll accept the need for the odd thicko with a high pain threshold who'll stand in the way, but they probably won't feel their chests bursting with pride when they think about him, and they probably won't care if he's captain or not.

Capello, who is really far too intelligent to be subjected to the hapless task of England manager, and might actually reveal at some point that he decided to turn the job into a situationist stunt at the expense of the FA, has read the runes and yielded to this strange feeling that the genuine England fans have [they are genuine fans, and I wouldn't knock them for that]. It's a national characteristic and he's accepting it, in the same way that the Italians accept that the most capped player wears the armband.

NB: Maybe we should do that, and then the skipper would be Ashley Cole.

The Magic Smells Of Glen Campbell

2011-02-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

Bought Rhinestone Cowboy: The Best Of Glen Campbell on Amazon the other day for a piffling sum. Glen Campbell has Proustian overtones for me. One of my first genuine early memories - as opposed to those that feel like I'm remembering things that other people have told me happened - is of Rhinestone Cowboy on the radio in the kitchen during the summer I got my first decent cricket bat - a noble Stuart Surridge that cost six quid. Back in the days of Stuart Surridge and Glen Campbell, bats needed to be oiled before use, thus Rhinestone Cowboy always evokes for me the magical, heady smell of linseed oil on willow.

Rhinestone Cowboy: The Best Of Glen Campbell has 27 tracks on a single CD. None are more than two and half minutes long. If you don't like one, don't worry - there's another along in a sec. That's how pop was back then. Campbell was expert in a lushly orchestrated kind of country music: he sounded as much like Scott Walker as he did George Jones. The sleevenotes say he was 'the seventh son of a sharecropper from Alabama' but I'm not sure about that. One thing he realised early though was that Jimmy Webb could write a tune: Galveston, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, Where's The Playground Susie, Honey Come Back...

I bunged the CD in the car. 'I've got a Glen Campbell compilation,' my girlfriend said, as if that negated my purchase of this one. I played it anyway. 'This is different to the one I've got,' she said at least four times. Then By The Time I Get To Phoenix and Wichita Lineman came on back to back. We listened in silence, momentarily forgetting we were approaching Marks And Spencer. I was thinking about Stuart Surridge bats, but don't tell her that...

Filthy Dabbling

2011-02-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

Have a little post over at The Dabbler on Irvine Welsh's profane and viciously funny Filth.

Irv's a bit of a hit and miss writer, but Filth's a bullseye. The protagonist, demonic copper Bruce Robertson, always put me in mind of Jerry Sadowitz, even down to the way that Welsh describes his physical characteristics.

Here's a good and sad piece on Jerry from Catherine Deveney in Scotland On Sunday. Jerry's life seems full of self-inflicted pain, but he'd be perfect for the forthcoming movie adaptation - if only someone could persuade him...

Hi-De-Hi

2011-02-13T07:02:00.000-08:00

I've been going out with my girlfriend for seven years. Never, in all of that time, do I recall us having any kind of conversation about, or even mentioning the name of, the actress Sue Pollard. Nothing unusual there. It's not as if either of us are fans of her body of work, nor evidently do we hold any kind of irrational dislike of her that might be worthy of discussion. Sue Pollard is just one name on a very long list of people we have never spoken about.

The other day, we were approaching the doors of Sainsbury's, Islington. I glanced up, and walking towards us, wearing a leopardskin top, mini-skirt and green leg-warmers - and thus not particularly inconspicuous - came Sue Pollard.

Without warning, my girlfriend sprang out from beside me. 'Oh, hello Sue!' she yelled, 'how are you?'

'Hello darling,' shouted Sue Pollard, putting down her shopping. 'How have you been?'

They proceeded to have a five minute conversation, while I loitered nearby.

'Anyway,' said Sue, 'lovely to see you. Send my regards to everyone'.

We went inside Sainsbury's. 'I didn't know you knew Sue Pollard,' I said.

'I don't,' she said, and headed up the fresh produce aisle.

Paying dues

2010-11-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

Charles Bukowski wrote a story once about the time he realised he was a writer. He was young, weird, unpublished and rejected by every magazine he sent his stuff to. He'd left home and was travelling round America taking low-paid jobs. He found himself sleeping rough in a park, spending the little bit of money he had on booze. He came round from one session to find a newspaper and a pencil by his side. He'd been scribbling a story in the margins.

Now amongst other things, Buk was a notorious self-mythologiser. Much of his claimed ten year period on the road actually seemed to have been spent at his parents' house. But the part about the newspaper rings true. Bukowski wrote throughout his life, wherever he was and however drunk, right up until he was days away from dying of cancer.

James Frey seemed to fancy himself as a bit of a tough-guy writer too, till he got busted for making up his booze and drugs memoir by Oprah. Maybe Bukowski would have been busted in this day and age, too, who knows. That doesn't really matter. The point about Frey is, he carried on, this time making sure everyone knew what he wrote was fiction.

There was an interesting piece about him in New York Magazine. He's set up a publishing agency, offering people the chance to develop young adult franchises of books and movies, paying very low fees for manuscripts [$250 initially] but with the chance to make some serious back-end money if things take off. One book he co-wrote is about to filmed by Steven Spielberg, so the scheme is not without precedent.

The journo spoke to someone in one of the [many] MA classes at Ivy League universities toured by Frey when he was offering the chance for the students to submit ideas. The students were all repulsed by the offer of course ['I felt like I had to take a shower'], but then most of them sent him something anyway.

'We were desperate to be published any way we could,' said one. 'We were spending $45,000 on tuition, some of us without financial aid, and many taking out loans that were lining us up to graduate six figures in debt. A deal like the one Frey was offering could potentially pay off our loans and provide an income for the next decade. Do a little commercial work under a pseudonym, sell the movie rights, and never have to suffer as a writer in New York. We wouldn’t even need day jobs.'

Invited to sympathise with someone who's willingly paid $45,000 to a college to sit around doing something they could do for nothing with a pencil and piece of paper, I found myself sympathising instead with James Frey for having to share a room with these people. They are victims of a system of course, that convinces them that giving $45,000 to a college that pays a lot less than that to a few writers to come along and talk to them once a week and 'read' their manuscripts is the way to get published, but they are victims of their own pretensions too. There was only one writer in the room, and he was the one offering the contract.

As Bukowski once said, this battlefield has a name, my friends....

Dabbling innit

2010-10-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

Have done a thing over at the Dabbler on Mr Leonard McLean and his longtime foe Mr Royston Shaw and their battles both in the unlicensed boxing ring and in print, via their autobiographies.

One thing I didn't mention, because it didn't really fit, was Lenny's passing resemblance to Big Mal in Smart Mart Amis's stellar short story State Of England. Lenny was a more successful fighter of course - Mal and his pal Fat Lol got beaten up in a car park by a bunch of opera-goers whose cars they'd just clamped.

Big Mal also had a role in Yellow Dog,where one of Mart's better sub-plots concerned gangster Joseph Andrews' attempts to write his tell-all autobiography. Amis obviously read a few hard man memoirs, probably Frankie Fraser's ['he's gone and done me with the fucking scythe'] and perhaps the Krays' [both of Andrews' fiancees commit suicide 'for reasons best known to theirselves'], but there's also a bit that could have been inspired by ghostwriter Peter Gerrard's rendering of The Guv'nor: 'Come the very sad conclusion of my friendship with Keith The Snake. It started off foolish really, just one of them things. I've had a drink and I've gone and done him. I go in to visit and I've said, 'Keith mate, I sincerely apologise. I bitterly regret what's occurred and can you find it in your heart to overlook it'. So we shake and that. Then of course he's barely out of hospital and I've gone and done him again.'

Fingers in the till, Mart...?

Critical mass

2010-10-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

My friend and estimable rock music writer [amongst other things] Paul Elliott has been asking everyone he interviews if they can remember their worst review. They all can, in great detail, no matter how long ago it was - and it's usually a long time.

One irony here is is that the reviewer has probably long since forgotten about it. I've been writing them since 1988, several hundred of them. Quite often, back in the day, I'd be talking to someone at a gig or lig or bash of one kind or another and they'd say, 'You reviewed our album' - a sentence to chill the blood of course, but one that's probably karmically due, or at least deserved. 'Oh, did I,' I'd say, with a sickly smile...

The first time I realised the effect that reviews had came when the manager of Cinderella, a long departed hair metal band who I'm now quite partial to, phoned and told me that the album I'd just slaughtered [in shamefully po-faced manner, I recall] had shipped 50,000 copies and he was coming round to 'shove each one of them up your ass'.

I've been on both sides of the fence now. The experience of being reviewed is utterly disproportionate to that of writing one. No matter how transparent the act is to you [here are the usual thought processes of the reviewer: 'oh shit, is that due tomorrow/thursday/whenever'; 'that's a funny line, I'll get that in somehow'; 'how good does this review, as the reviewer, make me look?'] it's still impossible to be blase about it. When I knew that the Guardian was reviewing my book Muscle, I stayed up until 12, obsessively updating the website until it came on there. Oh yeah. That's what being reviewed is like. Forget all that stuff about it not ruining your lunch. You won't be eating any.

What really hurts is when the reviewer hits that sore spot, the part that you know in your heart is true. The worst I've ever had was when Rachel Cooke reviewed Muscle in the New Statesman. I looked at it in Smiths on the concourse at Waterloo Station. Ruin my lunch? More like count my balls. I've read it once. Never again... 'Don't worry,' my editor said cheerily. 'No-one reads the New Statesman'. 'Yes,' I said. 'But I've read it...'

You can laugh about it eventually, and I imagine if you've written American Psycho or Money, your victory is absolute. But there's still that bit of you that sees yourself saying, 'Oh hi, yes Rachel, lovely to meet you. You reviewed one of my books once...'

The best story that Paul Elliott's been told so far comes from Paul Rodgers, singer in Free and Bad Company, a man with perhaps the most effortlessly brilliant voice in rock. Bad Company had just released Rock n Roll Fantasy, a song that Rodgers felt recaptured the early, freewheeling excellence of their first few years. 'I opened up Sounds,' he said, 'got to the singles page, and there it was: 'Bad Company, Rock n Roll Fantasy'. Great, I thought. The first line said, 'The coffin lid creaked open...'

That review came out in 1979, but still. 'The coffin lid creaked open'. There's no recovering from that.

Songs of innocence and experience

2010-09-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

I first went to the Reading Festival when it was called Reading Rock, and it had two stages, one next to the other, on which the bands appeared alternately. Can't remember the exact years, but I recall seeing Black Sabbath's one-off appearance with Ian Gillan as their singer, when the Stonehenge state set they'd built for the occasion was so big that the top of the tryptics extended beyond view [an incident often incorrectly attributed as the inspiration behind Spinal Tap's little Stonehenge - Tap had already been filmed. Ian Gillan told me in an interview that they'd chucked their Henge into the docks at Rotterdam].

There was also Marillion, with Fish in full face paint, MSG, with Mad Mickey Schenker bringing back slick-haired Australian lothario Graham Bonnet on vocals [Bonnet later wrote Night Games, the only rock song about the nocturnal proclivities of librarians, a tune that I enjoy singing to my girlfriend, who is a librarian... 'Oh the girl from the library - she's just like you and me...'], Thin Lizzy's last ever gig and many appearances by The Enid, one of which that was so stirring I went and bought one of their albums from a stall by the stage. You live and learn. At night, we would return to freezing tents down by the river, where the mist would roll in and chill our bones...

All of which came to mind when my eldest daughter went to this year's do. She had something called early admission [which, astonishingly, they charge you for...], which meant she and her friends pitched tent in the middle of a giant storm on the wednesday. She was home next morning. 'You know it hasn't actually started yet...' I said.

She fought her way back and saw it out. The look in her eyes when I picked her up took me back down the years - it was the festival-goer's thousand-yard stare that asks, plaintively, is it really over now...? Oh, I know that look. I've seen the world through those eyes. The next evening we watched the highlights together on TV. That was good.

I was amazed by the number of guitarists who have to look at their guitars while they play. Amateurs. The best band by a mile were Guns N' Roses. Axl is now a cross between Leigh from Bo Selector and a second division darts player. He needs an oxygen tank in the wings, and his personal manager used to be his cleaner. He spent 15 years making an album, and overslept before the gig so he was late on stage. When the promoter threw him off, he got a megaphone and harangued the crowd. What more could anyone ask?

We laughed as we watched, and it was lovely to share the moment with her. One day, she can tell her children that she was there...

Mr Rendall, yeah-aah

2010-08-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

It was a pleasant surprise to be asked to contribute the odd thing to The Dabbler, a new site by some worryingly erudite people with many hours to spare. Relax, though, it'll be the usual performing monkey tricks from me.

Here's a bit for the 1p books section* on Jonathan Rendall's wonderful Twelve Grand.

* This 1p books idea will almost certainly be nicked by a magazine within 12 months.

[Parking] Space Ritual

2010-07-20T14:37:00.000-07:00

Spent part of the weekend at Guilfest, which, with fantastic literalness, is a festival in Guildford. It has two great advantages over any other festival ever - I can drive there in half an hour and it's easy to park. In festival terms, these are blessings from a benign universe. It also has the kind of bill you can only put together by writing a load of bands whose names you've half-forgotten on bits of paper and then pulling them randomly from a hat. The headliners this year were Status Quo, the Human League and N-Dubz.

Guilfest's absolute speciality is bands who no longer have their most famous member. Last year, they had From The Jam, which, with glorious inevitablity, is the people from the Jam who aren't Paul Weller. This year, it was the Blockheads, sans Ian Dury for obvious reasons, 10cc, who have hundreds of identical blokes with long grey hair, none of them recognisable, and Ali Campbell's UB40 [this is admittedly a slight inversion, Ali Campbell being the most famous member of UB40, but now the only one...].

On Saturday, Arthur Brown [who'd painted his face green], Alvin Stardust, Hazel O'Connor and Hawkwind all played on the same stage. Arthur Brown did Fire, and then he said, 'I played that song on the Tom Jones Show once. Afterwards Tom and I shared a bottle of champagne. Neither of us said anything, but that was for other reasons...'

My girlfriend wanted to watch lots of indie bands, all of whom were about 16 and had names that started with 'The'. I spent the time trying to think of any bands I like that have a name that starts with 'the'. I came up with The Black Crowes, and that was about it. But then I have no taste in music, and it's only getting worse.

Probably because of its mad eclecticism, Guilfest was packed. It's fun being at the only place on earth where you can watch Alvin Stardust safe in the knowledge that Hawkwind will be on soon. And then get in the car. Sweet.

Chip off the old block

2010-06-29T00:27:00.000-07:00

Legged it to the bookshop yesterday and got a copy of Imperial Bedrooms, the new novel from Bret Easton Ellis. I'm a big fan of the BEE; I've just re-read Lunar Park, with its ineffably, vastly sad final pages, some of the most beautiful of recent years.

Imperial Bedrooms comes in a superb Chip Kidd jacket, a hazy silhouette of a kind of satyr wrapped in acid yellow art paper that distorts the image even more. As an object it's sharp and tactile, perfect for a writer who's so often concerned with the surface of things.

I'm glad that publishers are prepared to do it, and I don't mind paying for it. When CDs and then digital music diminished the need for record sleeves, no-one fully grasped how important they were, what they added, and they've slipped away. In retrospect, they would have provided a smaller, viable market for a baffled industry.

Some people will want Imperial Bedrooms on the ipad, and that's okay. But others like me will always want the physical experience of it. It's a market that will exist for as long as it's supplied, yet once it's gone you can't get it back.

This is England

2010-06-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

Engerland's World Cup exit saw them fall a round before their ranking - which is an optimistic number eight, but presumably someone calculates these things somehow - says they should have. That's not a stat that was punted about much before the tournament commenced, mostly because it's not in the media or the sponsors interests to temper expectations. This was the 'Golden Generation', a somewhat nebulous concept that has sustained a cyclical four-year money bonanza for all involved, from car-flag sellers to crisp manufacturers.

In reality, no-one goes around saying, 'Oh, I'm the eighth-ranked 100m sprinter. I'm nailed on for a gold medal here'. Bangladesh, eighth-ranked cricket nation, don't go to the World Cup with their newspapers yelling 'We're going to win this'. Tennis gamblers aren't exactly lining up to get their money on the eighth seed in the men's singles at Wimbledon.

England's attempt was summarised by John Terry - who better - in the Slovenia game, when, in an attempt to block a shot, he threw himself into a full-length dive to head it away, despite the fact the ball was going along the ground. Perfect in his moment, he looked like Billy The Fish. 'He put his body on the line...' said the commentator, in admiration.

So that was it, this is England. A man trying to head a ball that's going along the ground, forever. Hopefully his autobiography will be out soon.

The Mick Jones Test

2010-06-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

'So, what's it like having no taste in music?' My girlfriend asked me this after seeing two TV adverts that I really liked, the first that has a country and western version of Guns N' Roses' immortal Paradise City in it, and the other that features REO Speedwagon's lachrymose classic Can't Fight This Feeling.

'It's alright,' I said. 'It's quite good actually, because after a while, you don't care what anyone else thinks.'

At this point I told her about the Mick Jones Test, which was devised some years ago by me and my friend Paul Elliott. The Mick Jones Test is a single question, the answer to which puts you into one of two camps. All it involves is asking, when you hear the name Mick Jones, which band do you think of?

If your answer [predictably] is 'The Clash', then you're on one side. If you reply 'Foreigner', then you're on the other. On one side you have, by most accepted critical measures, musical taste. On the other, you're with me and Paul Elliott. There's no point arguing about their relative merits, you might as well go and sort out the Gaza Strip. It's not an intellectual distinction. You either think of Foreigner or you think of the Clash, and that's how it is.

If you think of Foreigner, you will appreciate the following story, told by Mick Jones [the proper one] about writing I Want To Know What Love Is. When it was recorded, he invited Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic records, to the studio for a playback.

'By the end,' said Jones, 'We were both weeping'.

Who can blame them. Altogether now...

NB: REO's Can't Fight This Feeling contains my favourite lyrical couplet, courtesy of the great 'Kick-Ass' Kevin Cronin: 'It's time to bring this ship into the shore/And throw away the oars/forever'. Amen, brother.

Gazza's blues

2010-06-03T00:17:00.000-07:00

The press reaction to occasional sub Theo Walcott's omission from the England squad smacked of desperation for any kind of story [it was on the FRONT PAGE of the Sun] and an indication of how this mania will feed on itself, but it did remind me of being present at a real World Cup shocker.

Back in '98 I was writing for footer mag FourFourTwo, and just before the final World Cup squads for France were announced, trudged off on a ludicrous junket to Waterloo station, where a boot company, adidas or suchlike, had hired a Eurostar train and put some footballers on it. It wasn't going anywhere [you'd like to think that the adidas marketing department was making some sort of arch comment on Glenn Hoddle's management, but probably not], so Mark Overmars, Michael Owen and Paul Gascoigne were plonked in different carriages and small groups of journos had to troop up and down the train and then crouch down in the aisles to talk to them.

Michael Owen was about 10 years old at the time and had already been media trained into oblivion, unable to utter anything but football cliches, every answer prefaced by the qualifier 'if selected'. When we got to Gazza, who despite his myriad problems was by far England's best tournament player, having almost got them into finals in Italy and at Euro 96, someone said, 'look Paul, we've not got long, so can you forget about all that 'if selected' stuff, and we'll just talk about the tournament coming up?' He agreed, and so we did, and since Gazza was untrainable in media terms, he was good fun.

About 48 hours later, Hoddle dropped him. Never mind the Sun, it was the lead item on the nine o'clock news. It was obvious from talking to Gascoigne that he had absolutely no idea it was going to happen, and nor did anyone else, mainly because even if he was drunk he was still better than anyone else England had.

It was also obvious from talking to him how badly affected by it he would be - he was completely obsessed with football, he loved the game to the exclusion of almost everything else, and so it proved. England didn't get very far, and although Hoddle tried hard to spin it as bad luck, it wasn't. He was a vain and egotistical manager, and that was his downfall.

Anyhow, the madness begins again. FiveLive have just lead a sports bulletin with the essential information that England's plane has touched down in South Africa. No news yet as to whether they all managed to successfully walk down the steps...

My day with Fergie*

2010-05-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

So Fergie has been Fake Sheikhed [The Sheikh is on a roll - England's brave John Terry, John Higgins and Triesman have all fallen to him and his hotel rooms and his funky robes of late].

On the radio, Max Clifford made the observation that any half-decent PR would have seen this one a mile away and steered Fergie clear. It was a classic Clifford statement, one that a] implied it would never have happened had she been with him [true] and b] that she must be employing pretty shoddy people.

Perhaps he's right. When Muscle came out, Chloe Johnston-Hill, estimable press guru at Random House, got me a batch of interviews on BBC regional radio stations. Instead of traveling to them, which would cost a fortune for a few minutes on air, the BBC system is that you go to the studios just off Oxford street, and sit in a little booth where they plug you through to the relevant people. Inbetween times, you can sit around and if you're feeling flush, treat yourself to a cup of the famous BBC coffee from the machine.

It's not hard, and you quickly get the message from press officers that they don't feel the need to go down there with you and hold your hand. You know, just tell them your name at the desk and keep your receipts...

When I arrived, there was only one other person there, and it was Fergie. Or rather, she was the only other person being interviewed. With her, she must have had at least five people, all striving to look busier and more stressed than the other. One was reduced to fussing at great length and volume about the coffee machine. All of them failed to get her into the right studio, and the producer had to come out and get her.

I thought of them yesterday. The Fake Sheikh would have had that lot for breakfast - and probably did. And on another, even more obvious note, who's doing PR for the royals? Surely, post-Diana, someone like Max would quietly tell them that the best way to handle the exes would be to give them a few quid now and again, keep them out of trouble...

* Not actually 'with', but you know. Chloe's other great PR coup on Muscle was to get me on Good Morning with Pip Schofield [as we call him in the bizz] and Lorraine Kelly. God knows how she managed that, but we spent a morning in the green room with my new showbiz chums Jordan, Peter Andre and the family of the royal butler Paul Burrell. Lorraine Kelly touched my knee. Happy days my luvvies...

Doing up Downing St

2010-05-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

Heard an interesting interview on the radio this morning with Anthony Seldon about what the incumbent prime minister is and isn't allowed to do when they move into Downing Street.

One of the perks is that you're allowed to choose the artwork. You can have anything you like from the National Collection. There's a fair old choice. The National Portrait Gallery has 160,000 pictures, the National Gallery has another 2,300 dating from 1300.

So what should DC pick? First would obviously be Mark Quinn's blood head. That would look choice in the entrance hall. My next selection would be a picture I saw in the National Portrait Gallery a few weeks ago - it's [apparently] Salman Rushdie, by Bhupen Khakhar.

Ace, isn't it? I especially like the bloke who's lurking behind Rushdie. When I saw it, I imagined the call going in: 'Hey Salman, National Portrait Gallery here. Yup, you're in mate. Good isn't it. Wondered if you'd like to come down and unveil it. Yeah, you'll love it... looks just like you...'

I think the visiting heads of state would be as delighted by it as Salman undoubtedly was...

The best a man can get

2010-05-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

My friend Paul Elliott, who I met back in the gory glory days of the late 1980s when I wrote for Kerrang! and he wrote for Sounds and the offices were almost next to each other at good old Greater London House [separated only by a woman's mag called She, I think], texted me from a gig the other night.

It was a bit of a do up in the frozen north, Sheffield no less, organised by Joe Elliott for a good cause, and the first man on stage was John Parr.

'Guess what he's playing' the text read. Well there was only one answer, I thought, and that answer was Man In Motion, his timeless theme tune from the St Elmo's Fire soundtrack.

'No!' came the triumphant reply. 'He's playing The Best A Man Can Get'. Yeah, that's right, The Best A Man Can Get, best-known as the jingle to the Gillette adverts.

John Parr wrote that [or at least he says he did - there's an interesting ownership wrangle here] and if he did, as Paul and I later agreed, the bugger will be seriously loaded.

It's an interesting phenomenon, musos who get rich from jobs like that. It's the equivalent of ghostwriting, I'd say, except you get all of the money. Another man from back in the day who's probably doing okay is Jimi Jamison, ex Survivor singer [not the one who sang Eye Of The Tiger, but the one who sang Burning Heart - another ker-ching scenario...].

Jimi wrote and sang a little pearler called I'm Always Here, which you might be familiar with - it's the theme for Baywatch. Baywatch is the most-watched TV show of all-time. I'll Be Ready is played at the start and end of every episode. Ker-ching!

Life's good if you can come up with one of those. It makes you realise too, despite the hype, how small and insignificant the British music market is. There are radio stations in America that play songs like this all day, every day. You only need to write one...

Here's JP giving it some.

Secret ballot

2010-05-05T13:05:00.001-07:00

My girlfriend is deciding how I should vote. Well, not exactly how.

'Show me a list of candidates in your constituency,' she said, 'and I'll tell you which ones are acceptable for you to vote for'.

This has come about because she thinks I'm going to vote Tory. She thinks that because I've gone around saying, 'I'm voting Tory'.

'I can't go out with a conservative,' she said.

'Just because I might vote Tory doesn't make me a conservative,' I said. 'You're not necessarily 'a conservative' just because you vote for them once.'

She remembers the glorious socialist era of Baron Kinnock of Bedwelty though.

'You're in love with Cameron,' she said. 'I can hear it in your voice'.

'Well he's not fallen in the sea yet'.

'He's got a plastic face. You can't vote for someone with a big plastic face'.

'Well you'll never know. When that curtain comes across, it's between a man and his pencil'.

'I'll know. I can always tell when you're lying...'

That's why I love her.

Good review

2010-04-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

Saw my sister the other day. She'd been to Mexico. 'I read six books on holiday,' she said. 'And yours was definitely in the top three'.

I took it as a compliment.

Head up, Steve Bruce

2010-04-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

Brit, a fellow fan, drew attention to this interview with Steve Bruce, football manager and also novelist. After being sacked by Huddersfield Town in 2000 ['devastating'] Bruce wrote a book called Sweeper!, which I can honestly say would be one of the last of my books that I'd ever part with.

'I suppose it went with my reclusive phase,' says Bruce of his novels [the piece says he wrote two others, Striker! and Defender!, although I've only ever managed to confirm the existence of Striker!]. 'They were the biggest load of rubbish I ever did. I'd read the Dick Francis novels and thought he was a jockey and a trainer, and I could have fun trying this. They were the biggest load of crap ever written. I did learn I was never going to be a writer'.

Sweeper! is actually quite a hard book to describe, though the plot is simple enough. It's about Steve Barnes, former footballer and now manager of Leddersford Town, who discovers the body of the club's elderly caretaker while working late one night. Finding some strange tattoos on the man's arm, he begins an investigation that leads to Barnes being kidnapped by an extremist group, a group he identifies as Israeli after their ruthless female leader tells him that her favourite footballer is Eyal Berkovitz. Barnes escapes in an ending probably best termed enigmatic.

What's harder to convey is why Sweeper! is of value. First of all, it's very funny. Bruce has opted to set it in a fictional football universe: Bruce himself is obviously Barnes, while his assistant John Deehan becomes 'Jock Durham'. Leddersford play matches against Burnwick and Mulcaster. Barnes and Durham used to work at Threshfield. Yet the plot hinges on Berkowitz, which makes me laugh.

There's also Bruce's style, which is somewhat inimitable and, if you're used to hearing him speak on television, impossible to read in anything other than his voice. Take this paragraph, also picked out by Brit:

'The gun was level with my belly. So this was what it was like to die. There was no doubt that I was about to die. And not even in Newcastle. Not even Premier League. In Halifax of all places, with a club in the third division'. Only a man steeped in football would have that as his final thought.

Often, he conveys lots about daily life at a professional club amongst blokes who are thrown together by circumstance and are slightly bewildered by the scale of the world and its information:

'Francoise-Auguste Jaquemin. French national but of African extraction. Don't ask me what country his parents came from. I can't remember. Geography was never my strongest subject at school. And even if I learned it at school, the name of the country has probably changed by now. Everybody calls him Jacko, mainly I think, because we can't pronounce Francoise-Auguste Jaquemin.

'He's a damn good distributor of the ball,' Jock said.

Talking of names, Jock Durham is not from Scotland.'

There's something about the rhythm of those sentences, and of those throughout the book, that is naturally comic. It would take someone as attuned and skillful as Martin Amis to parody them properly at any length. The proofreading, which is terrible, also adds to the pleasure of the book. Bruce often refers to Leddersford as 'Leddersfield', and every word that begins with b is capitalised, whether it starts a sentence or not. Touchingly, the book also concludes with the words 'The End' in bold type.

I know that there's a joy to something bad, and that's part of the joy here, but not all of it. There's no schadenfreude, and I don't like it because it offers the chance to patronise Steve Bruce. A while ago, the Guardian ran a piece from well-known writers offering advice on how to write. It skirts the fact that writing is a bit like putting in golf: there's more than one way to get it done. Although Hotten's Rule still stands, I think the only really useful words come from Stephen King: finish it.

Steve Bruce did [well I think he did, or at least he thinks he did - you really have to read the end to know what I mean]. He also turned to writing while he was at a low point in his life, and tried to use it to cheer himself up and dig himself out. There's nothing wrong with that. The world is full of competent, boring and pretentious novels. I've read a few of them. I've probably tried to write a few of them. Sweeper! is none of those things. It's bad, but it's not rubbish. There's a difference. If you ever get the chance to read it, do. It will give you pleasure, and that was one of the intentions behind its creation.

So Brucey, don't go around thinking it's 'the biggest load of crap ever written'. It's not, not really.

Come on Leddersford. Or Leddersfield, whichever one you fancy.

Crumpland

2010-04-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

Simon Crump, author of the ace My Elvis Blackout and Neverland, has a blog. And he's having a book turned into an i-phone ap. Get him.

Not in the woodshed

2010-03-31T02:26:00.000-07:00

AS Brit and Gaw regularly report, the countryside can be joyously strange, in small ways and large. Out running yesterday on the track by the field that leads to the pond, I met a toothless crone.

Actually, to be fair, she wasn't quite toothless - she had a couple of nice ones in there - but she otherwise fitted the archetype, a lined and weatherbeaten face, weird clothes, special mad hair and a dog.

She looked across at me and shouted 'good luck down the bottom there'.

'Why, is it flooded?' I said back, but she didn't answer. It took a couple more minutes to run to the gate, time enough to wonder whether 'good luck down the bottom there' was a warning, a prophecy, maybe even a curse.

I got down there. It was muddy, just like usual.

Ooh arr ooh arr aye

2010-03-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

Is 'when the moon shines on the cow shed' the greatest opening line to any song?

I think it could be.

What would Larry do?

2010-03-10T12:22:00.000-08:00

Have just finished watching Curb Your Enthusiasm series six. After a Curb blast of several episodes in a short space of time, I often begin to notice the sort of everyday things that Larry David alchemises into a show.

The other day me and my girlfriend were in the crypt cafe of St Martin's church opposite the National Portrait Gallery, where the Lord saw fit to charge me a fiver for lentil soup and a cup of tea [yeah, I almost felt like Jesus eating that]. Went to freshen up afterwards, and coming out of the gents I surprised a man who was coming in by pulling open the door just as he was about to push it. He emitted an over-loud and effeminate shriek as it happened. Before I could stop myself, I laughed at him. He avoided my eye and shuffled into the toilets.

A few minutes later, walking up the steps to go out, still gleeful, I was telling the story to my girlfriend. I impersonated the shriek. It came out louder than I expected, and at that moment, I knew with stone cold certainty that the man was behind me on the stairs, and I knew that he knew I was talking about him. What could I do then? I couldn't turn around because that would make things worse, so I just kept walking.

We crossed the road and went to the Portrait Gallery. Sure enough, a little later, there he was, with his wife. Had it been an episode of Curb, I would have been doing the impersonation again. As it was, we both just looked at the paintings on the wall.

Reality slip

2010-03-05T06:45:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the allegedly real world becomes so much like an episode of The Day Today, so much like a huge, immortal satire designed to point out the small madnesses and absurdities in everything that you have to sit there with a cup of tea or something, firmly gripping the sides of your seat to remind yourself that yes... this is real, and you've not slipped into some kind of string-theory parallel universe in which everyone is Alan Partridge.

First I read a report about Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical, a sequel to Phantom of the Opera, which has been co-written by Ben Elton and Frederick Forsyth. That's Ben Elton and Frederick Forsyth. Imagine the combined contents of their heads. I'd have been less surprised if it had been written by Elton John and Bruce Forsyth.

Then came news from the Jackson 'compound' in LA, where Jermajesty Jackson, son of Jermain, attempted to shoot Blanket Jackson, son of Michael, with a stun gun Jermajesty's brother Jaafar bought on the internet.

It's actually quite a sad story, rendered ridiculous by the names of the people involved. It's a Rumplestiltskin world where, were you required the guess their names, you'd be there for about a thousand years.

NB: I can only ever think of Leigh Francis's demented Michael Jackson whenever Blanket's name is mentioned. 'Why's he called Blanket? Cos he got a motherfucking blanket on his head'. Truest words spoken all day...

A-lister

2010-02-26T03:07:00.000-08:00

Have been trying to come up with a writing tip, as per those in the Graun below. Last night, as a storm rolled in overhead and things turned bible black, it came to me. Here it is, Hotten's one true rule of writing:

'Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law'...

Like it? I do...

Tips out

2010-02-24T10:03:00.000-08:00

The Guardian asked a collection of writers for their tips on how to do it. Will Self came up with the only one you need:

'Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself whilst holding a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under your desk. The next day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.'

NB: Nothing to do with the above, but this is dark genius [that began here].

Read dwarf

2010-02-19T02:30:00.000-08:00

Haven't been writing much here because I've been writing something else, which has been both nice, and a relief. I find that there's something there, usually for quite a long while, like a cloud on the mind's horizon, blowing towards the conscious very slowly. It seems to take forever to arrive, but then it hoves in, massed and near, and you get a few paragraphs of something that don't feel alone but instead have that mass behind them. The subconscious is a weird and unknown land, but it's where it all happens - the lot.

On a less pretentious note, have got 100 pages into The Pregnant Widow. The first dwarf has just turned up. Four feet ten. Always a great moment...

Looked up from it briefly to see a bit of the winter 'olympics'. Good god. It requires another definition of what is or isn't sport, beyond the shoes rule. So here's rule two: it's not a sport if the equipment used came into being as a children's toy. And that one's final...

How journalism works [part 765]

2010-01-29T02:01:00.000-08:00

JD Salinger has died. The Daily Mail cuts straight to the key issue:

WHY DID JD SALINGER SPEND THE LAST 60 YEARS HIDING IN A SHED WRITING LOVE NOTES TO TEENAGE GIRLS?

Well he can't be libelled now, can he...

Voodoo Mart's slight return

2010-01-26T12:24:00.000-08:00

Sneering sex dwarf [or whatever the Daily Mail feels like calling him next] Martin Amis is gearing up for the publication of a new novel, The Pregnant Widow. I'll be in the queue for a copy, partly because I don't buy the hype either way. Sentence for sentence, Mart will not let anyone down, that's for sure.

The first newspaper pieces are emerging, and it's as interesting as ever to have Amis articulate his thoughts. He's never been a standard interview [his mind may be too subtle for that] but he does tend to press certain phrases into service in each session.

Most impressively though he's probably a member of the last generation capable of talking in fully-formed sentences. There are no, 'I was like, you know...'s with Mart, and I bet he has no upwards inflection at the end of them, either...

Not so bad

2010-01-21T01:56:00.000-08:00

Heard a good story the other day about Victor Hugo, who, anxious to know how his new book Les Miserables was selling, sent a note to his publisher that said simply '?'

The reply that came back was '!'

WWGWD?

2010-01-19T12:56:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you, but when I'm standing in front of the bookshelves looking for something to read, I'm often thinking 'now, what would Gok Wan do?'

'You go girlfriend,' I'm sure he'd say. 'Forget about all those dowdy old books you've had all your life, throw them out! Make those shelves fresh and funky with the autobiography of Chris Evans! Aren't you fine!'

I also have this creeping, growing anxiety that one day, something wot I've wrote may fall under the unforgiving eye of Laila Rouass of ITV's Footballer's Wives. Or even Dave Spikey, the awesomely hilarious nightclub announcer from Phoenix Nights.

It could bloody happen too*, because they're all panelists on More 4s TV Book Club, which has controversially ditched the only good thing it had going for it, the interventions of the great Richard Madeley.

Amanda Ross, the producer, is routinely described as 'the most influential person in publishing', because she picks the featured books, which then sell loads. Nothing wrong with that, except for the apparently universal notion that we require a celebrity to confirm whether something is any good or not.

Somewhat exquisitely, the thought was extended this week by the news that PMQs on Radio Five Live is now hosted by Gabby Logan. Even better, The X-Factor's Dermot O'Leary should soon be joining her at the Beeb for the election. You see, the big thing about Dermot is that he's absolutely not 'a classic mainstream shiny-floor presenter. I always try to bring a bit of edge to whatever I'm doing'.

Of course he does ['Jedward, you were like amazing brother...']. The country's most famous X-Factor fan, Gordon Brown, might even be counting on an easy ride...

*Er, probably not though. But if you're interested Amanda...

Too much perspective

2010-01-13T12:12:00.000-08:00

Brit at Think Of England posted this fine thing on beginnings and endings and The Years Of The Locust. I would both agree with and applaud his thinking even if it wasn't prompted by the book [you're just going to have to take my word for that... honest...].

He makes the point about the arbitrary nature of narrative perfectly [and at about a hundredth of the length that the book does...]. In a book or a film, you can play with that notion harmlessly, whether that's through a simple Hitch-style macguffin or, like David Peace's new book [and Rashomon, where he apparently nicked it from - I don't know, I've never seen Rashomon], by telling the same story over and over from constantly shifting perspectives. It's all okay, and the writer/film-maker/whoever can pat themselves on the back from here to kingdom come.

At the heart of Tim Anderson's case [he's the boxer in Years Of The Locust] though, was a kind of real life version of the above. The reasons that Tim killed Rick Parker were both simple and complex, immediate and deep-rooted. Perception really does shift depending on what bits of them you hear.

In court, the narrative was mediated by the judge, Richard Conrad. He decided how much of Tim's story could be told, he dictated the angles from which it could be seen. Throughout the writing of the book, I rather stupidly thought, 'oh well, that's the American system...'

What I've been thinking about today is how unavoidable that is in anyone's system. At some point, someone will decide where your story starts and where it ends, and they'll decide who gets to tell it. I suppose you've just got to hope that their angle favours you.

Getting wood, kindling

2010-01-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

David Beckham, Victoria Beckham, Jordan... all people with the awesome distinction of having written more books than they've read. Tooling around online today, I found out I'd semi joined them. Years Of The Locust looks like it's available on Kindle in the Evil Empire over the water.

Having apprehended a young geek nerd and made them shout an explanation into my ear-trumpet, I can confirm that I've written more books than I've read on Kindle. And I have to say... who the fuck would want to read a book on something like that?*

I'm sure other people have said the same thing more eloquently, but the joy I get from books comes partly from their texture, their physical existence. For someone who spends all day looking at a screen, they're a confirmation that not everything can be manufactured by a 1 or an 0. I doubt that there's a writer in the world sweating their bollocks off and going, 'ooh, I can't wait to see what this looks like on a Kindle...'

* Don't let that stop you though.

New boots and panties

2010-01-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

Found this rather nice blog about book jacket design. Pretty obviously, some designers who might once have been in record companies doing album covers are in publishing houses producing some fine work.

There's one point of difference. Many of the best designs on the blog are for new editions of classics, which go down a storm. Yet record companies don't seem to think the market would countenance re-jacketing a storied album. Maybe someone should take a punt...

What counts most

2010-01-05T12:22:00.000-08:00

So that's all that again then... I've always preferred New Year's Day to New Year's Eve. I like to get up early and write something - a strange kind of ritual-come-statement-of-intent [not that it works...] I finished Muscle on a New Year's Day at about 7am. I was contracted to write 70,000 words. When I ran it through the wordcount, it came to 70,004. Close but no cigar [it got added to, cut back, edited of course, but don't they always...]

A few years later, it was a fight to the death with The Years Of The Locust. The manuscript was due on January 30. I worked out that I'd have to write 900 words every day in January to make it. I didn't, of course. Everyone has their natural limit and mine's around 500 if I want them to be even vaguely usable. I got there a couple of weeks late, sent it in and... they didn't read it for another NINE WEEKS.

This year, it was the no-sweat-at-all position of just starting something. That felt better somehow...

NB: Cormac McCarthy auctioned the typewriter on which he'd written about five million words over 50 years [that's 273 words per day, writing every day...]. The estimate was $20,000. It went for $254,550 [for charity]. There's magic in it for sure, but only for him...

Shoegazing

2009-12-22T11:30:00.001-08:00

Further to the post on chess below, in the mid-80s it had the idea of becoming a popular TV 'sport', like snooker. It failed*.

At one of the magazines I work for, we spent an afternoon in the office trying to come up with a definition of what a sport actually is. My suggestion was that it's not one if you can do it in your normal shoes.

That would rule out darts and snooker, which admittedly is on the harsh side considering they demand almost everything of the competitor except physical fitness, but then you have to draw the line somewhere. Chess, with its potential for the ruin of the body to follow the breaking of the mind, would also miss out.

Soon afterwards, someone on the mag was interviewing Ronnie O'Sullivan, the nonpareil of the green baize. The shoes theory was put to him. 'Tell whoever thought of that he's an idiot', was Ronnie's reply.

There were further repercussions, too. During the interview, Ronnie, a keen runner, mentioned that he'd heard that the marathon world record holder, Ethiopia's Haile Gebreselassie, was a fan of snooker. A little while later, I found myself interviewing Gebreselassie on the phone. He was on a mobile in Addis Ababa at the time. 'I HEAR YOU LIKE SNOOKER' I yelled several times, to a man who, it became apparent by the silence, had never heard of it. Haile might well think I'm an idiot, too...

* You could say that it has achieved the same sort of popularity as snooker now, but that's not necessarily a good thing...

Grand master

2009-12-22T00:58:00.000-08:00

The great Amis made a rare uncontroversial public appearance last night on a terrific little BBC programme called How To Win At Chess. Smart Mart wrote one of the great pieces on chess [no pun intended] which appears in his book Meeting Mrs Nabokov. It's about the Kasparov v Karpov match, an encounter played at such a level that even the ranks of grand masters sat in the front row watching couldn't work out who was winning.

After his towering ego cost him the first couple of matches, Kasparov embarked on a strategy of breaking Karpov, who he loathed with a passion [he describes him as 'slimy']. Over an entire winter, Kasparov set out to draw every game. After more than sixty draws, Karpov was a physical and mental wreck, wheezing and muttering to himself, wracked by flu and brain-warp. Just as Kasparov set in motion phase two of his plan and began winning, FIDE, the vicious and corrupt governing body, cancelled the match.

Kasparov had a cameo in the programme, being ineffectively sledged by the British player Nigel Short for being covered in body hair ['the women players call him fur' simpered Short, just before being annihilated], but the real star of the show was a man who played postal chess. As the name suggests, postal chess involves players writing their move down on a card and mailing it to their opponent, who then makes his move and posts it back. 'It's probably not the game for you, if you like the adrenaline rush of regular chess,' the guy said. You're not wrong there, pal.

NB: I was only interested in the show, and in chess, because of Amis's article, which is a minor masterpiece. He writes equally brilliantly about darts, which it's safe to say is probably at the other end of the intellectual scale, sports-wise. You can't argue with talent like that.

Service with a smile

2009-12-16T11:42:00.000-08:00

In the strip-lit, desperate consumer hell that is Partners buying an envelope the other day, I was behind a fifty-something man in the queue. He was trying to order something. The kid serving him was maybe twenty.

'Can I pay when I pick the order up?' asked the customer.

'No, you have to pay now,' said the kid.

''Oh well I'll leave it then,' said the customer, slightly tetchily, and walked out.

The kid looked up at me, smiled and said, perfectly cheerfully, 'what a wanker.'

I'm not actually sure how I was supposed to react to that.

Burning love

2009-12-15T12:06:00.001-08:00

The Observer magazine did a little series of memorials to those who've died this year. One of them was Gordon Burn, whose death from cancer seemed woefully under-reported. He was one of those writers who could flip between fiction and non, and in keeping with the times [and with what's seeming more and more like an obvious truth] blurred the two in his later work.

Alma Cogan is a terrific novel, but my personal favourite is Pocket Money, his 1986 book about snooker in its boom time. Burn's ear and eye are equally attuned. In a scalpel-sharp anecdote, he sketches Alex Higgins: 'at one point he was dossing down in a row of derelict houses in Blackburn, where, he claims, he kept just ahead of the bulldozer, with five addresses in one week:9, 11, 13, 15 and 17 Ebony Street'. The 'he claims' tells you as much as the rest of the sentence, and it's a sentence that tells you a lot.

The real star of Pocket Money is not a player but a promoter, the great Barry Hearn, who Burn finds impossible not to like, despite his voracious appetite for the good life, Essex-style [the first chapter of the book is called 'To Get Rich Is Glorious']. There's a priceless section where Hearn persuades his players to launch an aftershave called Matchroom 'for men who play to win'. They end up humping boxes of the stuff around various chemists shops, offering to sign them.

I've interviewed Barry a couple of times, and he's fantastic. My favourite anecdote of his concerned Fish-O-Mania, a TV show he launched on Sky Sports. He wanted to start the inaugural event with a bang, so he persuaded Chris Eubank, the super-middleweight world champion that he promoted, to do a bungee jump over the lake.

'He had a problem with his retinas or something, so he couldn't do it,' Barry said. He got Chris Quentin, former star of Coronation Street, to do it instead. A problem with his retinas. Magic.

Pocket Money was reissued a couple of years ago, and it's well worth the price of admission.

Good stuff by friends

2009-12-09T12:23:00.000-08:00

The experience of reading a book written by a friend is a strange one. It has some extra dimensions that aren't, it seems to me, often acknowledged. You have the image of them writing it for a start. Then you have a knowledge of their day to day voice, which is usually quite separate from their authorial one. You might know something of their personal circumstances when they wrote the book, which may make you read certain sections differently. If you're a writer as well, there's a part of you- a horrible, black, shameful part - that wants their stuff to be good, but not as good as your stuff. It's also bit like snooping round their house when they're not in.

For all of those reasons, two books I really liked this year aren't in the post below. One is When Giants Walked The Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin, by Mick Wall, and the other is Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth.

I've known Mick since 1987, when he was top gun at Kerrang! magazine, the writer we all wanted to be, privy to rock stars, writing great, funny stories about them and telling even funnier ones back in the office. He's written a wickedly, brilliantly bleak book, Paranoid, that describes those times better than I could.

His Led Zeppelin biography began in the shadow of Hammer Of The Gods, one of the most famous music books around, a trashy, sleazy and notorious shaggy dog story about Zep's excesses that had somehow become the must-read book on the group. He had to pick through that mythology, plus all of the other mythology around the band, and also incorporate and give due weight to their music, too.

He pulled it off, and he pulled it off bravely, imagining the interior lives of the band as well as the hard facts. He out-writes Hammer Of The Gods because he was smart enough to realise that the madness around Zeppelin does not negate what they achieved. In short, it's the first proper biography, and already acknowledged as the standard work on the group. The bastard.

Cathi Unsworth worked at Sounds at the same time Mick and I were at Kerrang!, and as the offices were open-plan and next to one another, there was nothing more than a friendly rivalry between the mags. We lost touch for a long while, but when The Years Of The Locust was coming out, my editor asked if there were any crime writers that he might send a copy to for a possible recommendation.

I knew from various bits of press that Cathi had written two highly-praised novels, and I hoped she might remember who I was. The next thing I knew, she'd not only read the book, but written a really encouraging email and a blurb, too. At the time, she was finishing up Bad Penny Blues, her third book,and offered to send me a copy when it was done.

So that's the full disclosure. Cathi gave my book a huge and generous boost when she didn't have to. Equally, it would be doing her a disservice to blow smoke over hers. Luckily, I don't have to. Bad Penny Blues is the kind of novel that is bracketed as crime because people die in it, but is really something else: a book that reimagines and reinhabits a particular time and place. It's a fictional take on the 'Jack The Stripper' murders in London, but killing is only part of its context. It ends without a neat resolution, just like life. I recommend it, and When Giants Walked The Earth, too.

The good stuff

2009-12-07T12:25:00.000-08:00

Everyone else is doing it, so here are my books of the year, in no particular order [and with no guarantee that they were actually published this year. I read them this year, so that's what counts]:

Neverland, by Simon Crump

I once had an idea to write a book with the proposition that Elvis had survived his heart attack on the toilet, had a transplant, made a monumental comeback at Live Aid and later discovered that Lisa Marie was about to marry Michael Jackson; Elvis and his guys then declared war on Neverland. After reading Simon Crump, I understand that I wasn't even in the ball-park. Following his gloriously insane My Elvis Blackout, he imagines a world in which Wacko is, in a series of inter-connected stories, prospecting for gold in the Klondike, alive, dead, buying a unicorn on e-bay, hanging out with Uri Geller and Bubbles, and, yes, is married to Lisa Marie. And it's mostly narrated by Lamar Fike, one of Elvis's guys, who has emerged from a long coma to work for Michael. A book that stays with you.

Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill

Continuing the trend of choosing books that begin with the letters 'Ne' and end in 'erland', this is precisely the kind of novel I usually hate: thoughtful, studied, almost elegaic, yet Netherland has a tremendous force behind it. At the centre is cricket, which, in the post 2001 New York, is a hidden game, played by the lost of the city.

Me Cheeta, by James Lever

Much has been made of the brilliance of the satire in Me Cheeta, and it is viciously funny. But even better was the opening section, when Cheeta describes his capture in the African jungle - it's magnificently strange and sad - and the overarching friendship between chimp and man, Cheeta and Johnny Weissmuller.

Grunge Is Dead, by Greg Prato

I would never have picked up this book had I not had to review it, but I read it in a day. It's an oral history of the grunge scene in Seattle of the early 90s, years when I was still working full time on music mags. A litany of names that I used to hear every day but had entirely forgotten came rushing back. The last section, which covers the death of Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley is harrowing. One witness describes a last meeting with Layne. By that point he was a hopeless junkie, wrapped in an old coat, unable to recognise his friend, his hand minus a couple of fingers that had become gangrenous. It was genuinely shocking.

My girlfriend Yasmin, who's a library manager and who knows a lot more than me, picked hers too, minus the pretentious opinions:

Notes From An Exhibition, by Patrick Gale

The Outcast, by Sadie Jones

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

Hearts And Minds, by Amanda Craig

Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby

Noah's Compass, by Anne Tyler

Self-aggrandising

2009-12-06T11:09:00.000-08:00

Locust also made the Telegraph sports books of the year list. If I could pick one to be on, it would be this one. Andrew Baker is the broadsheet journalist who does the most to champion sports books, and I respect his opinion greatly. Thanks Andrew!

Nice...

2009-12-05T01:16:00.000-08:00

Years Of The Locust made the Independent On Sunday's books of the year list, and thanks also to the World Of Sport site for not just being nice about it, but for plugging Muscle too. Cheers! So get over there and buy stuff. It's Christmas, you know.

NB: And it made Metro's end of year list, too. I will now stop googling myself.

Grizzly

2009-12-03T11:44:00.000-08:00

Tim Anderson, the boxer who's the subject of The Years Of The Locust, sent me a good letter the other day. Firstly he said that he's been signing copies for prison officers and inmates, which is a bloody cheek of course [but it made me laugh]. Secondly he included a photo of one of the people who have got back in touch with him since it came out, a guy called Doug Wilder.

Doug played a small role in Tim's life, but a key one: he introduced him to Rick Parker, the boxing promoter who Tim would shoot dead in a hotel room in Orlando. In the photo, rather strangely, Doug is standing next to his nephew, and also the actor who played Grizzly Adams in the 70s TV show.

Tim has been wrong and has been wronged in his life, and he's paid a heavy penalty. But even though he's in jail, he's still somehow in life too. Stuff happens to him. He's alive, in a real way.

Thanks for that

2009-12-01T12:48:00.001-08:00

Spoke to Steve Hogarth, Marillion's singer, for a short piece about their new acoustic album, Less Is More, in Classic Rock.

He told me a funny story about something that happened a couple of weeks ago on tour in Oberhausen, Germany. He was in a shop buying a pair of trousers when a Dutch guy came up to him and said, 'Hi Steve, I have come all the way from Holland to see you play tonight. I just want to tell you that I don't like your new album. For me, less is definitely not more.'

Steve stood there, one leg in the new trousers, pondering the weirdness of having fans...

Standard: read all about it!

2009-11-26T06:48:00.000-08:00

Any magazine writer can tell you about the standard interview. It's the one you get that everyone else gets too. The first time it happened to me was with David Coverdale, the singer in Whitesnake. The band were enormous at the time, and were just about to put out the follow-up to their biggest record, 1987.

I interviewed Coverdale in what he said was the most expensive hotel room in London. He was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots. Success suited him. He was immensely charming and courteous. He introduced me to his [then] wife Tawny Kitaen, who emerged from the bedroom in a short silk robe ["she's been lying down," he said. "She's been shopping..."]. He gave me a great interview, and I descended from the penthouse in its private lift sure that me and David had, you know, connected.

For the next six months, as he made his way around the world on tour, I read the exact same piece with the exact same quotes in every other magazine that spoke to him. The quotes were fantastic, so good that everybody ran them. It was the standard interview, executed by an expert.

The current master of the standard interview is James Ellroy, who's on tour promoting Blood's A Rover. The standard Ellroy interview goes thus: he talks about his divorce and the breakdown he suffered after his last tour in support of The Cold Six Thousand. He talks about the character based on his early days as a panty-sniffing peeper. He talks about the mysterious woman called Joan, with whom he fell in love while writing Blood's A Rover, and to whom the book is dedicated. Then he reveals something of his lifestyle: he lives in an apartment in LA that has no television. He has no computer either, and writes longhand. He does not read newspapers or surf the internet. Instead he "sits in the dark and broods", communing with women, real and imagined.

It's heady stuff. Anyone walking away from an interview like that would feel that they've connected. That it, until everyone else's pieces come out. Congratulations are in order, then, to Scotland On Sunday's Catherine Deveney, who got something different, and even rattled Ellroy at one point. She also teased out the name of his current girlfriend, the writer Erika Schickel.

A quick google of Schickel produces a little interview in which she mentions how she first encountered Ellroy 'at the LA Festival of books, and met again on occasion'.

'Then,' she says, 'I friended him on Facebook, and the rest is history'.

That's nice then, but oh, hang about... Facebook?! But he's James Ellroy... he lies around in the dark, communing with women real and imagined! He doesn't read newspapers or have a TV or a computer! Facebook?!

Standard interview, see. Gets 'em every time.

Discovered

2009-11-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

The shelves of Waterstone's are currently festooned with little index cards clipped next to books that the staff have read and want to recommend. The current lot are titled 'My Discovery'.

Today, I saw one headed 'Sam's Discovery' - next to er, 1984.

NB: It does work if it's done right though. I found the beautiful freakery of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love this way.

Fat croc face

2009-11-21T09:47:00.000-08:00

Further to the post below, the news that Nick Frost has been cast as John Self is not encouraging. He just doesn't look right, does he? Okay, he's fat, but Self is not just fat, he's big. He's also hard - he wins several fights in the course of the book, including a battering of Frank The Phone, and he shrugs off being smacked in the face by a pool ball in a sock, courtesy of Fat Paul. That takes a certain kind of person, and it's not Nick Frost.

I've never been entirely sure what Self does look like, but this week, it hit me. He looks like Jimmy White. The pub palour, the dodgy rug, the mad teeth, the glorious shiftiness. The casting director should give Jimmy a bell.

Filming Money

2009-11-16T13:04:00.000-08:00

Money is my favourite book; it's the only book that's ever made me cry with laughter. The news that it is going to be filmed by the BBC is bittersweet. It's existed in my head for so long, any attempt to externalise it is bound to change things somehow. But also, good, you know? It's about time they made something the proles won't like rather than spunk the money on another series of My Family or give it to Jeremy Clarkson to spend on a car that turns into a helicopter. Although they'll probably do that too.

It seems to be generally agreed that Money is 'unfilmable', although the same was said about American Psycho. Both books, though wildly different, satirise many of the same things, and both are essentially long internal monologues by unreliable narrators. Both are short on plot. Amis himself describes Money as 'the story of a fat bloke making a film'.

What I know about writing TV scripts could comfortably fit into a sentence, but if I was having a go, I'd say concentrate on the film within the film. Many of the best sections of the book are about Bad Money, the autobiographical movie that John Self is trying to get off the ground, and they're among the most tangible parts too.

Anyway, I hope they screen it, and that it draws people to the book. I've always wondered whether Amis will be tempted back to John Self, a bit like Updike was with Rabbit Angstrom. Self in his fifties - if he made it - would be good value.

NB: Almost all the comments at the bottom of the newspaper reports seem to be from people sneering at the book. All read it though, lads, haven't you...

First

2009-11-10T12:52:00.001-08:00

Bret Easton Ellis has twittered the first line of his new novel, Imperial Bedrooms, a sequel to his debut, Less Than Zero.

It's: 'They had made a movie about us'.

Anyone who loves LTZ will like that line, suggestive of a fiction-meets-fact-meets-fiction-again type thing.

I remember buying LTZ when it came out as a Picador paperback original. I got it on Waterloo station, from the same shop where I bought Women by Charles Bukowski on the recommendation of my friend Mick Wall.

It was about the time that I started going to LA on assignment with Kerrang! magazine, too, and LTZ really came alive there, on the bone-white canyon roads.

Both writers have stayed with me. One of my most treasured possessions is a signed edition of Bukowski's Crucifix In A Deathhand, and I've bought each subsequent BEE book as it's come out. He's written two masterpieces in my opinion, American Psycho and Lunar Park, so I' can't wait for Imperial Bedrooms.

In the same spirit, here's the beginning of the book I'm working on. This'll probably end up in the middle somewhere if it survives at all, but it's:

The first line of the book I bought at the airport says, 'people are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles'.

Which kind of brings things full circle...

Hidden

2009-11-08T10:40:00.001-08:00

My desk is in a corner of the living room, behind the door. I wrote all of The Years Of The Locust at it, plus the other stuff that pays the bills, quite often while other people sat in other parts of the room doing productive things like watching television.

'I was thinking,' said my girlfriend yesterday. 'You could actually put a screen up around your little corner. Not a high one, you know, just enough to make it like a work cubicle. You'd still be able to look over the top and see the telly'.

'Yeah,' said one of my daughters. 'Then we might not be able to hear the tap-tap-tap all the time. Either that or you could buy a proper keyboard that doesn't make a noise when you hit the letters'.

There's never anything as boring as that which your father does for a living...

NB: What I'd really like is one of those luxury sheds at the bottom of the garden, with heating and electric. And a key...

Insurgent

2009-11-05T12:47:00.000-08:00

Have been compiling my albums of the year list for Classic Rock, one of the magazines I contribute to. Back in the days when I wrote for Kerrang! ['87-'94 - the glory era, of course*] this list was the source of much agony. Once all the writers had voted, an overall chart was published, and an album of the year annointed.

This was the cause of as much lobbying, vote-rigging, ballot-fixing and gerrymandering as you'd get at at third world election. There were hanging chads and ghost candidates, and we usually ended up with a number one that nobody had actually voted for - almost always Iron Maiden.

But one of the great joys of having written about music for so long has been the albums that I would otherwise never have heard, from Burning Tree to the Broken Homes, albums that I still play now.

This year, my top choice was Insurgentes, by Steven Wilson, a record that's a case in point, a rare gem.

* I joined Kerrang! directly from a journalism course at the London College of Printing. In those days, record companies had money. On my first trip to LA, I stayed at the Sunset Marquis, 'the Loser's Hilton' as Hunter Thompson accurately described it. As I walked in I saw Bruce Springsteen in the swimming pool and Steve Van Zandt sitting at a table nearby, shirt off, headscarf on. This is the life, I thought...

You don't even need to get dressed

2009-11-03T12:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, well, that didn't take long, did it... Like good old Brian 'Beano' Johnson, I'm ba-a-a-ack, in black or whatever colour you fancy. Feeling enthused. I'll blog about my endlessly fascinating life as a writer - if you've ever seen Californication, it's exactly like that. If you haven't, feel free to stick around for the details.

I'd like to blog about some good books too. I've just finished Neverland, by Simon Crump. It's beyond description really, a mad and funny reimagining of Michael Jackson's life with Lisa Marie, Lamar Fike and Uri Geller*.

In a great interview at Asylum, Crump came out with one of the best quotes about writing I've seen. 'You don't need any equipment and you don't need a studio. You don't even need to get dressed.'

Perfect. Show that to the next person who says, 'I've always wanted to be a writer'.

A writer? You don't even need to get dressed pal...

NB: Uri Geller phoned me up once. It was while I was editing a music mag called Select [a job I loathed...]. I walked in one morning to the usual sea of miserable bastard indie-loving po-faces that made up the staff, and found a note on my desk that said, 'Uri Geller phoned'. He was living in a big house in Sonning, bored out of his tiny, spoon-bending mind. He combed magazines to find mention of his name and then rang them. It was good to talk to him. Hope he reads Neverland.

Just like starting over...

2009-05-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

Right, I'm about to revamp this blog and do what I originally planned to do, which was to write something a bit more honest and straight-up. And to blog more than once a week... Promises, promises... Back as soon as I've made it look a bit better.

Hats off. And on again.

2009-05-07T13:54:00.000-07:00

Ricky Hatton's loss to Manny Pacquiao wasn't the kind that lends itself to the self-delusion described in the post below. It was wholly unequivocal. That presents its own set of problems, psychological and otherwise.

Like half the population of England, I've met Hatton a couple of times. My friend Kerry Kayes, star of Muscle, was his nutritionist and strength coach for lots of his big fights, including Kostya Tszyu and Floyd Mayweather. Ricky's a very nice guy, but there's a hardness to him that extends beyond his re-routed face.

I predict he won't retire on a loss. He's not the sort. Which means a farewell fight against someone who can't knock him out. Finding a credible enough fighter will require some skill. I'd guess at one stat: whoever he picks will have stopped less than fifty per cent of his opponents.

Boxing: the city of self-delusion

2009-04-29T08:09:00.000-07:00

No man tells himself he's going to be alright more often than a boxer does. He might not use those words - Ali had his poems, Tyson said stuff like 'I'm going to eat your children' - but they all meant the same thing. Because their bodies are vulnerable and their skills are pregnable and their hearts are breakable, they psyches must be impenetrable, and there's only one way they can do that.

Tim Anderson, the boxer in The Years Of The Locust who shoots and kills his promoter Rick Parker, made decisions about his life and career that seemed to be wrong and stupid to the point of recklessness and beyond. It wasn't until I started thinking about the way he thought that they became understandable. Why did he do those things? He did them because he could.

It's what was so interesting about Donald McRae's interview with Ricky Hatton in the Guardian. Hatton's only lost once, to Floyd Mayweather, but he was beaten up for ten rounds and then knocked out. Immediately after the fight, Hatton blamed the referee, who'd stopped him from in-fighting with Mayweather. Now he says, 'It took me a good couple of months to get over it. It shattered my confidence for a while and I lost my passion for boxing. I started panicking a bit, thinking I'd lost it all'.

That sounds like acceptance, but it's not. Now he thinks he lost because his old trainer prepared him badly, because he used his old style. In the interview, McCrae chides him gently for referring to himself in the third person; to me that just seems like more armour, more reinforcement of his self-image.

Hatton's next fight is with another pound-for-pound champion, Manny Pacquiao, in Las Vegas. It's too easy to say that Vegas is a city of illusion. Boxing is the real city of illusion, and self-delusion. It's the only safe place there.

Can't fight the feeling

2009-04-25T02:40:00.000-07:00

Have been in a strange kind of torpor since the book came out, wanting to write but not knowing what to write. Then the other day it just sort of dropped into my head.

It's weird the way the subconscious works. What it gives you is a sense, some kind of feeling or shape, of what you could write, something not quite tangible. It's there but it's not. Then it just sort of comes into view. Your brain solves the problem, but slowly, and while you're not thinking about it.

It happened when I was writing The Years Of The Locust, too. The story in the book was complicated because it was impossible to tell entirely in a linear fashion. That required too many digressions: too many different and apparently unrelated things were happening at the same time. One day I just started writing bits of the last section in thematic chunks and it worked [or at least it worked better - and the first section still needed Tristan, my editor, to unpick it properly]. There are also parts of it that I have no memory of writing.

That was all a while ago, so I'm glad there's something in there again. Now I just have to get the little bastard out...

Sweet sweet science

2009-04-23T03:13:00.000-07:00

Away for too long. In lieu of a proper post, a link to a nice review by Bob Mladinich on the Sweet Science website.

Bob has written a long article about Tim Anderson, the boxer in the book, which is linked with the review. He also did me the huge favour of photocopying the trial transcript for me when I first got in touch with him. It took him a long while, and I kept wondering why. Then it arrived. It weighed 17lbs. Thanks Bob...

Occupation [tick one box]

2009-04-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

When people ask me what I do - not a regular event - I usually say 'journalist' [unless it's some kind of insurance company, when the most advantageous answer for anyone with anything to do with this kind of thing is 'publisher' - there aren't too many alcoholic, suicidal, car-crashing amoral publishers on insurance company risk assessment databases] but sometimes I say 'writer', although it always feels fraudulent and unearned.

I've said it a few times recently, and been on the receiving end of twenty-minute monologues along the lines of 'Oh, I've always wanted to be a writer... I think I'll take a course... I've got this great idea... ' It's like people saying they're going to get fit at new year, just as soon as they join the gym, buy some trainers, get some dumbells...

As Bukowski used to note, 'this battlefield has a name, my friends'.

Jim vs Buk: There's only one way to find out...

2009-04-14T12:08:00.000-07:00

James Ellroy is back with a four-part story for Playboy, The Hilliker Curse. There's a new novel out later in the year too, his first for eight years. I'm a big Ellroy fan. My Dark Places, his book about his mother's murder, was a major influence when I was working on The Years Of The Locust. I think it's his masterpiece so I'm looking forward to The Hilliker Curse, which examines how his mother's death impacted on his relationships with the women in his life.

He's talking it up like a crazy man, of course; Ellroy is a master of self-mythology. Maybe that's why he seems to loathe Charles Bukowski so much. He's having another go in the LA Times. The town ain't big enough for the both of them, according to the Demon Dog. Bukowski was a self-mythologiser too, and Ellroy seems to think this makes him inauthentic.

Yet Bukowski's LA is very different from Ellroy's. A love of both men's writing builds a wonderfully rich and diverse vision of one city seen in two ways. If anything, Bukowski's was the more authentic [at least until My Dark Places] because his LA was quotidian, a radical counterpoint to Ellroy's hotwired, fevered version of the town.

I think Ellroy would enjoy and recognise Bukowski's LA if he forgot about the pissing contest and read the books. He revealed more than he thought when he told the Times, 'you know how men seek authenticity through the most specious and vile male human beings? Thinking artists like Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson are authentic. Au contraire. It's puerile. Real guys love God, Beethoven and women'.

Well Bukowski went to great lengths to write about the power women had over him, and even the most cursory read will reveal that he only ever listened to classical music, especially Ludwig Van, who he loved to call 'The Bee'.

NB: It occurs to me that Thompson - another lifelong self-mythologiser - incurred on Ellroy's psychological terrain too. Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail is one of the great anti-corruption screeds of our time.

I'm loving the other Angel instead

2009-04-13T04:27:00.000-07:00

The best Masters for years, albeit not for my finances. I had the 'Angel' bit right, just the wrong one. Spanish loverboy Jimenez knocked it around like a rich man over the weekend. He finished last of the Europeans who made the cut.

Cabrera might not have been the oldest man to win a Major - as Kenny Perry would have been had he not imploded in a heap of fear over the last two holes - but he looks it. Read in the paper this morning he's only 40. Jesus. Must have had a hard life back there on the pampas. He'll live the good life now, though.

The play-off was almost a sideshow after the Mickelson-Woods pairing. After nine holes I thought Mickelson would win it. After 16 I thought Woods would win it. Mickelson played to type, jaw-dropping brilliance mediated by hacker's mistakes. Woods was even more incredible in his way: he hadn't played better than his 'C' game all week, and still finished sixth. That's why he's Tiger, baby. He'll be unbackable by the US Open.

Gooseless article

2009-04-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

South African choker Retief Goosen has departed Augusta, taking my fiver with him. Realise now it was the wrong tournament to back the Goose. He's a US Open man, obviously. A grinder. Might have to revisit him then, give him another chance.

Jimenez in cruise control though, one under with only Garcia, Stenson, Westwood, Harrington and Sandy Lyle ahead of him, European wise. A good weekend run at 33-1. Can see him getting past a few of that lot. Garcia's using a belly putter, which is practically cheating. Still, proves he's not got what it takes on the greens. Harrington's clinging on though.

Woods still well back, but Saturday is usually his day.

Useless beauty

2009-04-10T09:15:00.000-07:00

Augusta was at its most beautiful yesterday; at times it looked like a strange kind of Eden with its creeks and its trees, its pools and its sands - albeit an Eden populated by fat guys in golfwear. But however it looks, it has a great gothic sadness to it too, an Antebellum past, a sense that a price has been paid for its beauty, and not by the people who enjoy it. Augusta can be summed up by the fact that one of its founders shot himself down by the lakes on the par three course.

The golf was Augusta golf though, and not before time. Plenty of birdies, a few of which went to the great Jimenez, who shot 70, the same as Woods. 70 is Woods' best opening round. He's shot it three times and won every time.

I have to keep faith with the Goose, too, who shot three over. I mean, really... on a day as good as that...

Big Mig, Angel of the South

2009-04-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

They're out of the traps at Augusta National, and the two noble beasts bearing the cross of the Hotten investment - aging, ponytailed Spanish loverman Miguel Angel Jimenez and flint-eyed South African Retief Goosen - are already on the course.

Jimenez never looks better than when he's smoking a fat stogie on the back nine on Sunday. He never wins either, but the joy of this bet is he doesn't have to. I've backed him to be Top European at a generous 33-1, probably because so many heads have been turned by Harrington, Casey, Poulter, Stenson and stacks of other Euros who look like they should be miles better than Jimenez, but who, Harrington apart, usually aren't.

The Goose has managed to resurrect himself this year and is a solid 6-1 for Top Rest Of World Player. Good old Goose; I can see him now, oozing his way through the field on Sunday. He'll need to hold off Ogilvy, but he has the chops for that.

For me, golf's the perfect sport to bet on. I know a bit about it, but not too much. Knowing too much always induces fear; the variables seem too great, you're too aware of what can go wrong, of how tenuous sport is at the highest level. I like watching Woods crush his quisling rivals, but have no real emotional investment in it either, so I don't really care who wins.

My girlfriend has been seized by visions of Paul Casey in a Green Jacket, so the ideal sunday scenario will see him in contention but just losing out to Miguel, hopefully after he finds his ball sitting down in a divot created by a Jimenez cigar, and the mighty Goose soaring home as top International with eagles at thirteen and fifteen. Let's factor in a late charge by Greg Norman for old times sake and allow Woods to round things out by inducing ever-more sickly grins on the face of quisling-in-chief Mickelson. You read it here first.

Kill 'em all

2009-04-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Kill Your Friends, John Niven's book about an A&R man at a nameless record company in 1997. Just because the central character is a misanthrope who snuffs various girls/work colleagues in his flat while an ironic CD plays on a stereo system so expensive it hurts to look at it, it's been compared to American Psycho. I mean, you know.

I've often wondered how Bret Easton Ellis feels about this gag-reflex on the part of reviewers. Like almost all of the books given the namecheck, Kill Your Friends is without the moral ambition, which was really the whole point.

It's great fun though. Niven set the book in '97 because he felt that it was the last great era of record company excess. Every generation thinks that. I was editing Select magazine in 1997* having spent much of the previous decade writing about hair metal bands for Kerrang!. 1997 seemed tame.

I remember my first trip to LA, a decade earlier. I was staying at the Sunset Marquis (where else? It wasn't called the Loser's Hilton for nothing). When we walked in, Motley Crue were in the bar and Bruce Springsteen was in the swimming pool. We went just up the road to the Hyatt, where Poison were trapped in the lobby by screaming boys and girls and Little Richard came down in the lift in a red velour jogging suit, accompanied by a young man with a towel. Outside, people fainted when Poison tried to get in their tour bus. 'This is nothing,' sniffed the photographer I was with. 'John Bonham used to ride his motorbike into that bar over there'.

None of which detracts from John Niven's book, which is terrific. He didn't ask for the American Psycho comparison, he just wrote a novel with that rare quality: it makes you want to turn the page while you're still laughing out loud at the previous one.

*Thinking about it, it was 1996, but you know, close enough...

The gambler

2009-04-06T02:56:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend had a bet on the National on saturday.*

It didn't just not win. It didn't just not place. It didn't just not finish. It died.

It reminded me of the time that a friend had a horse he part owned in a no-mark race on a windswept, half-empty course somewhere or other. It was winning until it swallowed its tongue coming down the hill. It never ran again. You have to retire them if they start swallowing their tongues. That's what they told him, anyhow...

* She's also got a bet on Paul Casey to be top European at the Masters this week. Let's hope he survives, at least.

History: written by the winners

2009-04-05T14:02:00.000-07:00

There's a trailer on TV for the Nibbies, the British Book Awards.

The featured authors are Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and Jordan.

All the greats, then.

* Bitter and jealous, me? Oh come off it...

More than zero

2009-04-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

I used to think Bret Easton Ellis was, like, you know, exaggerating or something. And then I saw The Real Housewives Of Orange County.

The Los Angeles of the Bretster's imagination, those deadened malls and bone-white freeways [no-one merging], those vapidly, uselessly beautiful people doing vapid, useless things in vast, numbingly similar houses that may or may not be their own... that, you know, happens.

You can't explain Real Housewives. It just is. You sit there and think, how? How does all this money get there? What do they do to get it? And why?

Now ladies, there's someone that you really should meet. This Patrick, Patrick Bateman. Yeah, he's new in town...

Can we not just knock it?

2009-03-31T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Independent on Sunday had an interview with Graham Taylor, the former England manager. 'I only swear in football company,' he said, and that in turn says something about the man.

I interviewed him once. It would have been around '96 or '97, when he was back at Watford after he'd managed England and then Wolves. The turnip stuff that follows him still was fresher then, but he was a remarkable character with a sort of indestructible optimism about him. It was for a piece about his friendship with Watford's chairman Elton John, an unlikely yet enduring arrangement that had begun when Taylor first went to Watford in the 1980s and got them to the Cup Final.

He carried two chairs to the centre circle of the training ground and told me to turn on my tape recorder. He proceeded to tell a series of fantastic stories about him and Elton, including the famous one about Elton's burgeoning alcoholism - Taylor had rampaged round to Elton's house, filled a pint glass with brandy, put it on top of Elton's piano and said, 'there you go, are you going to fookin' drink that, you bloody idiot?'

After about an hour and half of sitting in the sun, he turned to me and said, in a harried voice, 'anyway, have you got enough now, because I can't sit out here all day you know'.

He seemed a terrific guy, a fundamentally decent man. Elton's 'people' had said that I could speak to Elton if I spoke to Graham first. I ended up interviewing him by fax, and am still not sure whether that counts or not.

NB: I'd cravenly bought the IoS because they'd said they were reviewing the book. They had, and it was very nice, but it's not online [update - it is now]. The Morning Star did too. There's something strangely reassuring about the fact that Morning Star is still going.

Arthur Kade, bad boy

2009-03-27T12:14:00.000-07:00

Arthur Kade's blog may be an exquisitely-judged satire, but anyone with a heart will be hoping not. It would take a writer of considerable gifts to have invented him. Ostensibly designed to chart the 'journey to stardom' of a financial planner turned actor, the deep joy it offers comes from the gap between the reality us mortals occupy and Arthur's reading of it.

Landing a role as an extra on an Angelina Jolie film ('I was selected to be in the middle of a large crowd') Arthur finds himself five feet from the woman he has personally chosen to be 'my number one for years, and who I've always considered to be a 10', only to discover that 'she didn't live up to the hype'.

With a heavy heart, he notes that 'she was wearing a ton of make-up' (maybe because she was shooting a movie, Arthur) and that 'she's 'mother hot' rather than 'stripper hot'.' It's an observation that leads him to the rather sad realisation that it's never going to happen between Angelina and the brooding extra, however much she might want it to. 'I can't say she would stick out for me if I met her at a hot club like 1Oak or Rosebar', sniffs Arthur.

Still, that blossoming career offers its consolations. Soon, Arthur is working on more central questions than whether Angelina Jolie is 'mother hot' or 'stripper hot'.

'How will Arthur Kade be remembered?' he asks. 'Will I be a humanitarian like Angelina Jolie?' (at least she has that going for her, then), 'or will I be a bad boy like Colin Farrell? Will I be a drug addict and party boy like Robert Downey Jr? Or Will I be a recluse like Mickey Rourke? I began to think about what life will be like when I achieve my dream, and whether it will change the core of who I am'.

My brain hurts just thinking about it, Art. No-one on earth wants Arthur to lose the core of who he is, but with a dream like this one, perhaps it's a price worth paying. Stay tuned.

Another review of The Years Of The Locust, in Metro.

Seconds out...

2009-03-23T12:37:00.001-07:00

A couple of reviews of The Years Of The Locust, from Scotland on Sunday and the Daily Telegraph.

The only sayable thing about being reviewed is, it's alright if they're good. One thing is guaranteed: no-one reads faster than someone reading through a review of their book/film/album/whatever for the first time. And no-one reads a good review more often than its subject.

Except for the names, and a few other changes

2009-03-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

Uh, is this thing on? Okay, good, let's get this show on the road. Or as Rick might have said, 'let's make lemonade out of these lemons'.

Rick Parker had lots of little homilies like that one, the tricks and tics of a man who knew how to talk fast and keep talking. He got them from Zig Ziglar, another salesman, who was a hero of his. Rick was one of those guys you could call a street savant, not intellectual but whip-smart, a self-realised, self-made man who wanted more. He was already rich by the time he went into boxing, but boxing was his ticket to the real money, the kind of money that bought you the dream, the big, bad American dream that anyone can do anything they want.

He named his dream The Windfall Factor. 'Millions and millions of dollars, all at one time, as he used to say.

You can probably tell by the use of the past tense where Rick and his dream ended up. But how he got there... well, as Lou Gramm once sang, that might take a little time.

To the people that encountered him in the period from 1986-1992, he was the quintessential B-movie bad guy, a badly-dressed, hard-living, fast-talking embodiment of his time and place. The story of his reign of terror is told elsewhere; this is a site for the fragments and the spin-offs, for the oddities and the other voices and the things that didn't quite fit. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, here's something I've come to think of as Rick's theme tune. As many people have said over the years, he never did care for the sound of being alone.