Where did it all begin?
I was born in Darlington but my Dad had the classic 1970s/80s manufacturing industry career, i.e. he kept getting made redundant, so we moved all over the place: Kettering, Bedford, back up North, Slough, and finally East Anglia. For a bit of stability my folks parked me in a north London boarding school in 1986 and I’ve basically been here ever since (London, not the boarding school). Weather aside, it’s the best city in the world.
What do you do for a living / on the side?
Right now I’m lucky enough to spend half my time writing novels – The Alternative Hero came out last year and Death of an Unsigned Band is out in July – and half the time playing drums with Fink. These have been my twin day-jobs for the last eighteen months and with any luck it’ll stay that way.
Mini me…
I air-drummed my way through childhood and somehow figured out that the bass drum was played with a foot pedal and that most drummers crossed their hands when playing the hi-hat. Phil Collins was surprisingly useful.
With writing, I was fortunate enough to have the most fantastic English teachers (Green, Clifford, Turner and Rattue, you know who you are), but otherwise it’s all just reading and practising. That’s the beautiful stubbornness of writing: there are no short cuts. If you don’t read and practise, you’ll always be bollocks at it.
What were you like as a child/teenager?
Pretty much exactly the same except I drank less and had no patience. I’d write the chorus to a song but lose interest for the verses. I’d think, “ooh, that’s a great idea for a story” and then give up after one page. My song lyrics were atrocious. Right up until the age of about twenty-two, actually – just the most vomit-inducing cheesy garbage. No wonder I’m in my late-thirties and still not a pop star. The only thing I really stuck at was drumming. Having a bedroom above my mother’s kitchen helped – she always yelled at me to stop after about fifteen minutes so there was never enough time to get bored.
I also had an uncommon obsession with maps and had my own imaginary country, for which I used to do dull things like draw road signs and motoring atlases. My parents thought I was nuts, but it kept me off the streets I suppose.
What made you think you’d be good at all the things you’re doing?
Drumming-wise, I’ve absolutely no idea. It’s completely weird. I just had a feeling, from the age of about four, that I’d be able to do it. My parents refused to accept the noise implications of this and bought me a guitar, which I petulantly ignored. I was about twelve or thirteen before I was able to have a go at drumming properly (there was a lot of hitting cushions and detergent cartons in the interim), and it definitely took a lot longer than I expected before I sounded like “those guys on the records”.
As for writing, I wasn’t sure at all until I got to the end of the first book and thought – Ah. I’ve written a book. Not that finishing a book necessarily proves its quality, but I reckoned that if it hadn’t bored the pants off me by the end it must be okay.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
Fink are doing a fourth album, out next year we hope, which they’ve let me play a lot of guitar on it as well as drums, so that’ll be interesting. And I’m trying to write a third novel. I’m going to delve deep into childhood for this one. I think I’ve created a real spoilt little whining precocious brat for a protagonist. He’s going to be great. There’s nothing like a bit of lead character empathy to keep your readers hooked.
What do you like and dislike about what you do?
I like the obvious things: being my own boss; fiddling around with silly things like drums and writing and calling it work; having the occasional day off in a foreign place and feeling like it’s an instant holiday; having people tell me that they identify with a character or (extremely rarely) a drum beat.
The things I dislike are often the flip sides of the very same factors: having no one forcing me get my head down and concentrate; feeling guilty when I leave my daughter at nursery and then go home to fiddle about with drums and writing; being away a lot; being constantly pestered by people telling me how great I am (Christ, it’s a bore).
Where did you grow up and how did that affect your life choices or aspirations?
I suppose being in London since the age of thirteen has had an affect, perhaps not a completely good one. The trouble with London is it’s so big, and there’s so much to do, that there’s less of that drive to escape, which fuels many artists who grew up in, say, a “boring” little town. Consequently, for me, there have been so many distractions, gigs to go to, pubs and clubs, or simply fucking about in a big city, when I could have been making more work early on in life. I really didn’t do anything decent until I was over thirty, by which time I thought: okay, enough messing around. The paradox is that living in a big city makes you want success – at least, you simply need more money to live there. There’s only one solution: get into absolutely piles of debt. It’s a winner
Do you get a lot of encouragement from friends and family?
Nice words of encouragement and support, but never any meaningful advice. I’m quite happy about this. I’ve known colleagues in the past whose parents or siblings were constantly interfering, pushing their views into the picture, behaving like they were experts. It’s far from constructive and always ends in arguments or resentment.
What’s your family like?
My Mum and Dad are wonderful people, but for the most part they’re very conventional. They’ve never pretended to know much about the music side of things, which as I said I’m pleased about, but when I started writing the books my parents could at least vaguely comprehend it, because they’re both avid readers. The other thing we all share is a rather silly sense of humour, and I can definitely see that reflected in what I do.
I must say, however, that my parents have never been risk takers. They’re very old-fashioned: one should have a proper secure job, toe the line, not do anything outlandish. I think both my sister and I have deliberately gone our own way as a reaction to this – but I can also see that I’ve not exactly been the biggest risk taker in my own career either, so I certainly think that my upbringing has been more than a little influential in that region.
What’s the best advice anyone’s ever given you?
Various people have given me the same piece of advice over the years. It’s not very exciting, it isn’t sexy, it isn’t profound and it’s probably really rather dull but it’s been amazingly useful, encouraging and (at times) utterly exasperating: KEEP GOING.
Collections or strange hobbies?
By nature I’m not a collector, but if anything I guess I’ve become attached to my books. I have a rule: if I’ve read it, I keep it, if I’ve read part of it and given up, I pass it on, unless I feel it’s an important book that I ought to have another go at. Otherwise, I want to have tons of the things. I want to use them instead of wallpaper. We’ve got a long corridor in our flat and I wanted to have them alphabetically on one long shelf, with one of those motorised scooters you can jump on for browsing. I think I’ve got delusions about the size of our flat though (and of our book collection).
If feeling uninspired, how do you re-inspire yourself?
I take a teaspoon from the cutlery drawer, open the fridge, take half a scoop of cream cheese and half a scoop of strawberry jam and scoff the lot. Repeat two or three times. Instant cheesecake. The fiddly meticulousness of it, the sugar and the protein all sharpen the brain. I go back to the laptop and feel like I’m Hunter S. Thompson.
What inspires you?
Cities are amazing to wander around for inspiration, as long as it isn’t raining: London, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Berlin, Melbourne, New York. And Lisbon, which I’ve been to once but would dearly love to visit again. If it’s raining, an English beach can be surprisingly stirring as long as you’ve got the correct footwear. I do listen to a lot of Police, mainly for Stewart Copeland’s insanely brilliant drumming. Lots of music, really: Elbow, Radiohead, Beatles, Elliott Smith, and a Danish band called Kashmir who I’m genuinely perplexed aren’t global superstars. I love books that I can go back to, mainly non-fiction music books: Chris Heath’s excellent ‘Pet Shop Boys, Literally’ which you don’t have to like the Pet Shop Boys to appreciate, ‘The Last Party’ by John Harris, ‘One Train Later’ by Andy Summers. Novels: ‘Espedair Street’ by Iain Banks, ‘Fatherland’ by Robert Harris, ‘The Hippopotamus’ by Stephen Fry. And films, almost always for the dialogue: This Is Spinal Tap, Annie Hall, Withnail and I, Twenty-Four Hour Party People, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Tall Guy.
What websites do you regularly visit?
My recurring favourite is iMDB and in particular all the variously insane things actors and directors say on the “quotes” page. It’s fascinating. One veers between chuckling at the quiet wit of people (Woody Allen, Emma Thompson, Matt Damon, Warren Beatty) and screaming “what are you, a bloody life coach?” (Jennifer Lopez, Gwyneth Paltrow)
What do you like doing to relax?
A nice drink in a beer garden with my wife when we’ve managed to find a babysitter.
If you could go back in time, would you do differently?
It’s easy to say you’d do stuff differently but in reality there’s very rarely any guarantee that it would actually improve things. My suggestions, therefore, would probably not be artistic but more prosaic ones: financial decisions, for example, which have had a knock-on effect. Loans from the Royal Bank of Beer Money. You know the thing.
People who inspire you?
I’m in bewildered awe of people who’d already made lots of good stuff by a very young age – Stephen Fry, Damon Albarn, Lennon/McCartney – but being someone who took absolutely ages to be able to earn the semblance of a living doing their own thing, I’m naturally drawn these days to the slow, patient, hard grafters: Jarvis Cocker, Bruce “Withnail and I” Robinson, Elbow’s Guy Garvey, David “Cloud Atlas” Mitchell. In fact, the novelist world is populated with them. Probably because writing a novel is so inherently boring, far fewer people in their twenties can be arsed to sit down and do it.
Plans for the future?
It’s all about the fourth Fink album and the third novel. If I can keep this crazy illusion going that I’m worth investing cash in, the future is positively crimson.
Dream life?
My dream life is pretty much what I’m doing now except with better weather, slightly more money and in an age when someone has invented pollution-free air travel.
If anyone is interested in doing what you do, what advice would you give them?
Someone else asked me this the other day, and this is what I said (all on the topic of writing):
01. Just do it. I don’t mean to sound like a Nike advert – what I mean is, with my first attempt at a novel (which remains unpublished and unfinished), I thought about it, and thought about it, constantly saying to myself “well, when I start doing it, I’ll do such and such..” – and then one day I just thought: there’s Word on my desktop – just open a new document and get on with it…
02. You don’t have to start at the beginning. Just do whatever bit you feel like doing.
03. It’s very, very, VERY slow. Don’t be disheartened if you spend an entire afternoon on one paragraph, or even one sentence. Sometimes it will go quicker than other times. You might get a third of the way through a novel, then hit a rut, and eventually abandon it and never finish it. This isn’t failing, it’s practising. There will be many times when you read what you’ve written and you think – “I suck!” Don’t worry, read it the next morning, and if you still think so, change it so it doesn’t suck. When you’ve finished a chapter, perhaps give it some space, read it in a week, do another bit in the meantime. Slowly but surely it’ll all come together. But it takes fucking ages.
04. Don’t worry if there are bloody great chunks of the writing process that you don’t enjoy. What’s important is that you (eventually) enjoy reading it back.
05. Keep reading other books. Read, read and read some more. Read anything. All genres. Not just the one you’re writing – although make sure you’ve read SOME of that genre (!!)
06. Edit/revise like mad. Edit, rewrite, fuck about, try stuff. Over half the time I spend “writing”, I’m not actually writing, I’m editing.
07. Make sure you print out and read bits – it’s always totally different when you see it on paper.
08. At the risk of sounding glib: write the sort of book that you would like to read. There’s really no point in doing anything else.
Anything else to add?
Nah. As Marti di Bergi says in Spinal Tap, “that’s enough of my yakking.”
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