Was it really thirteen years ago? I had an idea for a novel and went to the Glastonbury Festival, the last year before they built the big fences. I wrote a long diary about it and, by the time I’d finished that, had a commission to write Festival. It was written as a YA novel but works fine as a short novel for adults too and, I was pleased to find when rereading it this year, most of the music references are to artists who still mean a lot today. Festival was my best selling YA novel this century, even without counting the free copies given away with every issue of Just Seventeen magazine ten years ago.

Why was I rereading it? Because the rights have reverted, so I am able to publish it as an eBook, with the brilliant East Lane Books, and it’s out today. Since becoming a university teacher, I’ve been delighted by the number of students who’ve told me how they read Festival prior to their first Glasto visit. One even told me that he used the map in the book as a way to get round! Which is a bit foolish, because aspects of the lay-out change every year. I’m happy to say that those nice people at e.festivals.co.uk let me use their map from the 2000 festival, so the map in the eBook is much better than the one with the original novel.

I’ve also written an extensive afterword, about the writing of the novel, which I hope that readers will find interesting. And, as an introductory offer, I’m making the eBook half price  until this year’s Glasto is over. That’s right, for the whole month of June you can get it for just £1.53: less than a coffee or half a pint of beer in a pub.

Festival is the only one of my novels that didn’t change titles in translation. Above is the cover of the Flemish version, published by Facet (rights to all other languages available!). In common with most YA novels, Festival didn’t get much in the way of reviews at the time (although it was runner up for the Leicester Book Award) and any reviews, anywhere, this time will be appreciated (especially on Amazon, where the old ones have vanished). Book bloggers can get in touch for a free copy. You’ll see that I have added a subtitle to this new version, to help with metasearches and the like. It’s now called Festival: The Glastonbury Novel. But I haven’t messed with the original text in the slightest.

Festival is published today on Kindle. Versions for other e-readers here. Here’s a song that makes an appearance at a significant point in the book.

David Bowie – Heroes [Single Version]

Five albums and fourteen Grammies into her career, Alicia Keys has the purest soul voice of her generation. She nearly fills the Capital FM Arena, where she last appeared twelve years ago, an evening that my companion witnessed. He describes it as a painful event: she only had one album out and every song was extended with singalongs and solos to make a 40 minute set last twice as long. These days, she’s a veteran, bolstered by her biggest hit to date, singing with Jay Z on Empire State of Mind After a bombastic intro, Keys appears behind a curtain to sing a snatch of that classic, but we know she’ll save the full version for last.

Five security guards sit impassively in front of the triangular stage, surveying the audience. They won’t be needed, as Alicia soon discards her black fedora and treats us to her impressive range, following the bump and grind of Karma with the smooth, catchy soul in You Don’t Know My Name. I’m making a note about its Delfonics-esque backing vocals when the song segues into a brief version of the Delfonics’ classic La La (means I love you) to the more poppy, anthemic title track of her latest album, Girl On Fire.

Purple lights herald a bunch of male dancers for the new Listen To Her Heart. I had mixed feelings about the dancers who accompanied her for half of the show, and couldn’t tell if the ballerina in Like You’ll Never See Me Again was there, or on video. Slowly the piano, her home, takes centre stage, but did we really need a guy acting as her lover while she sang Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart to him? There’s no point to her aping Beyonce or Madonna and, anyway, she also narrates between songs, using her strong Prince influence to good effect. Pity she doesn’t do her famous Prince B side cover, How Come U Don’t Call Me Up Any More? but you can’t have everything.

The dancers are dispensed with for much of the second half, which becomes more intense as a consequence. A series of piano ballads is unleashed with her gorgeous breakthrough hit, Falling, then a brilliant Brand New Me, followed by my highlight, the powerful ballad Not Even The King, which she describes as her and her infant son’s favourite song. I put it our best of year CD (tracklist now deleted, but the song’s available again below, for a brief time).

If I Ain’t Got You and No-One build the momentum to a climax, before she’s back for a terrific New Day and new album title track Girl On Fire, on which she plays drums all the way through. Seriously, it works. Throughout she has been dressed in a simple black outfit, but she changes into a purple ball gown for the final encore. In case you were in any doubt what it was going to be, a video of Jay Z plays over the white curtain. Then she brings the arena to its feet and tears up Empire State Of Mind, concluding nearly two hours of top notch soul. On fire indeed.

Photos above by Kevin Cooper for the Nottingham Post. This is an extended, slightly rewritten version of my review from today’s paper.

Alicia Keys – Not Even the King

The Delfonics – La, La Means I Love You

About three years ago, I heard mention of a novel with an intriguing title that had an introduction by one of my favourite writers, John McGahern. I got it and read a couple of pages. It looked well written but, rather… ‘a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man’ says The New Yorker on the cover. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? And the opening pages, about a Missouri farm boy heading to agricultural college, aren’t gripping.

Then I read this article about how Stoner, while little known in the US, was steadily gathering readers all over Europe (a selection of the translation covers above) and thought, I’d better give this another go. I finished it in 48 hours this bank holiday weekend. The novel was published in 1965, at the beginning of the psychedelic era, but despite its title, has nothing to do with drugs. It has more in common with another novel, published two years earlier, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, which also took a long time to be recognised as the classic that it is. Stoner is, essentially, a campus novel, and one about the generation of men who preceded its author, John Williams, who taught at the University of Denver for thirty years (Stoner is set at the University of Missouri, where he did he PhD).

The cover quote is misleading, for Stoner is not an entirely virtuous or dedicated man. It’s only towards the end of the novel (slight spoilers in this sentence) that he becomes a good teacher and it’s ironically amusing to see him having to wrangle to be allowed to teach for an extra two years, until he’s 67, the age that lecturers of my generation are now expected to teach until. The portrayal of campus politics still rings resoundingly true. Funny how little universities seem to change. Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, written a few years earlier but set later, is more dated in style but still feels accurate. An interview that Williams gave close to his retirement, nearly thirty years ago (quoted by McGahern in his introduction) could also have been given this week, by one of my colleagues contemplating retirement. He complains about Literature being treated as something to be studied and understood rather than experienced. ‘It’s to be exegeted, in other words, rather than experienced?’ the interviewer Brian Wooley, asks. ‘Yes, as if it were a kind of puzzle.’ ‘And literature is written to be entertaining?’ ‘Absolutely,’ Williams replies. ‘My God, to read without joy is stupid.’

Amen to that. And this is a beautifully written, gripping, highly entertaining novel that deserves to be much more widely read. The less you know of Stoner’s story before starting it the better, but let me say that, while acute on English Literature lecturers, it is also good on love and has a character who is akin to, but more sharply drawn than Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (the movie of which I mean to check out this afternoon – hesitantly, as it’s one of my favourite novels).

Talking of movies, I kept imagining Michael Shannon from Boardwalk Empire (also to be seen in this month’s excellent movie, Mud) as Stoner, with his stolid yet anguished expression, and thick farmer’s hands. Interesting, too, that McGahern should help resurrect it. The protagonist’s farming background and the estrangement from his family that Stoner experiences must have had strong resonances in McGahern’s background. McGahern also points out that Williams only wrote four novels, each of them so different that you would not have known that they were by the same writer. I like that ambition in an author. Very, very few try. Hardly any pull it off.

An extended version of my review as it appears in today’s Nottingham Post.

Thanks to TV and film roles, Eddie Izzard has become a household name. A documentary series about his ill-fated Mandela marathons begins tonight. He’s so popular that a second date was added at the Capital FM Arena. Confusingly, it’s the day before the first Force Majeure show.

Last time he performed in the city it was for 220 people at Lakeside. I tried to get tickets but missed out by a minute. Did get to see him at his next appearance, at this arena, when he was warming up for the then new Labour leader, Ed Miliband. Odd occasion. The other well known warm-up/microphone handerouter was Joan Bakewell. Eddie says he wants to be the next London Mayor or, failing that, a Labour MP. You could, therefore, be forgiven for thinking that his heart is no longer in stand-up.

He comes on to a flashy credit sequence, and talks in French for 15 seconds before switching to English so we won’t be confused. There’s a running theme about how he’s looking forward to performing his French shows in the French language (rather more, we are led to suspect, than he was looking forward to tonight’s show). There will be just one, four letter word, in English. Fuck, of course, though I couldn’t put this in The Post. He says fuck and fucking a lot and I don’t  have a problem with that, used to do the same thing myself, until I realised that it made me sound a bit… immature.

Eddie can be endearingly bonkers and surreal, but at first he sounds and looks tired. There’s some stuff about Charles I, the beginnings of democracy and the origins of the English Language that flatters our intelligence and is mildly amusing, but the show doesn’t once take off and soon starts to sag.

Maybe it’s because ‘this nice, cosy aircraft carrier’ as he describes it, is less than half full. It’s hard to get an atmosphere (and, therefore, his comic adrenaline) going when the biggest response is a low rumble of chuckles. On the other hand, this did mean we got moved from right at the back to somewhere around the middle. I still found myself staring at the video screen rather than the guy beneath it, though. Why do people go to see comedy in an arena? For a night out with friends, I suppose. In every other respect, it would work better on TV.

He makes a frequent point of his forgetfulness and the show is awash with missed comic opportunities. For instance, there are crowd pleasing references to tax avoidance with Google, Starbucks and the Cayman Islands, but references is all they are: no jokes attached, certainly no biting satire. Are his political ambitions making him more careful in how he attacks his targets, in case caustic words rebound on him in the future? A shame if so.

A 50 minute set is followed by a 30 minute second half where the biggest laughs come for a section about dressage (well, there was one woman near us laughing very loudly). There are inspired flashes like ‘our bodies are like two weasels covered in gravy, nailed to the back of a tractor’ and some effective physical comedy.

The ten minute encore starts edgily, with drugs and the Tour De France, but descends into a tired Lord of the Rings routine. The sold out show may well be better, but this was Izzard on autopilot. Pity.

Back from the Iron Age festival in Cullercoats mentioned in my previous post. Pete Mortimer’s Iron Press was celebrating its fortieth birthday, a remarkable achievement. The redoubtable Pete (who was born up the road from me, in Sherwood, and recently wrote a memoir about coming back to Nottingham) organised and MCed a remarkable array of talent. Even more remarkably, virtually every event was sold out, with over two hundred people at the Friday and Saturday night events. These featured former Iron magazine assistant editor Ian McMillan (above), the ‘bard of Barnsley’ in the Crescent Club and Newcastle man David Almond (whose first two, pre-Skellig, books of short stories were published by Iron) in the Community Centre. Sunday saw a celebratory mural (if that’s the word) on the beach, pictured above.We met loads of old friends (for instance, Andy Croft, seen above, who I edited a short-lived literary journal with back in 1979) and made some new ones. There were several book launches, including Nesting, a ‘best of’ David Almond’s early stories and Miranda’s Shadow, short stories by the wonderful Kitty Fitzgerald (pictured above). I was only sorry that we had to leave after Andy’s Great North Run poems, which meant we missed Melvyn Bragg, Sean O’Brien and co. Congratulations to all involved, and particularly, Pete. There’s nobody like him.

Another particularly enjoyable aspect of the festival was that there was music with every event. The highlights were Me and Mr Jones (pictured), who performed with no less than nine Iron poets (including, and introduced by Valerie Laws), Gemma Gates and Freya Grace at the Salthouse (where the festival continued until late every night) and, opening for David Almond, the wonderful Bridie Jackson and The Arbour (also pictured above) who were a new name to me, but have won a place (from 10,000 entries) to perform on the main stage at this year’s Glastonbury. Their brand of folk, ethereal, absorbing, never twee, is hard to describe, but here’s a track from their Scarecrow single (which I bought, along with their album after the gig), a guitar version of the song that closes their debut CD. You can hear the whole album at their website.

Bridie Jackson & The Arbour All You Love Is All You Are