A belated thanks to everybody who came to my book launch at Rough Trade last week. Great to see so many old (and new) friends, but it was a very sad night for me, as my oldest, dearest friend, Mike Russell, had died earlier in the day, after a long illness. We shared a passion – some would say obsession – with popular music and went to many, many gigs together. We were meant to be at two in the week before he died: this one and this one. Two days before the onset of his final decline, he stood throughout a raucous Libertines show at Rock City, which he enjoyed enormously. That was our last show together. The Saturday before last, at the Northern…
Just listened to a wonderful Desert Island Discs with Lemn Sissay, who, at one point, talks about people deciding to ‘knit me a novel’. It got me thinking. Today, I want to tell you about the new Bone & Cane novel, published this year. I don’t want to dwell on why it’s a year or two late, largely due to the collapse of my old publisher and the need to find the right new one. Glasgow’s Freight Books have done an excellent job with it. Look at the great cover above. Instead, let me tell you about the different threads I knitted together to create this story, my most ambitious to date. It has three main time periods (and three smaller ones): the late ‘60s,…