Comic books hooked me on reading. My grandparents in Sheffield used to post my brother Paul and me a bunch of comics every week. They were The Beano, The Dandy, Hotspur and TV Comic. I got through loads of novels by Enid Blyton but comics were my big love. At eight I discovered Superman and Batman. I spent all my pocket money on them. A little later, I found Marvel Comics. They were still in their Golden Age of fantastic art and stories. I became an addict. Spiderman was my favourite. Then X-Men, The Fantastic Four and The Silver Surfer. But Marvel comics were hard to find. Nowhere in West Kirby had a regular supply.  I found the issue of Spiderman featuring the death of…

Aldeburgh is the first whole weekend poetry festival I’ve been to. It was also my fourth festival of the year – readers may get the impression I’m addicted to the things, but it’s happenstance. General reader, hold on. Yes, I know, it’s poetry – I can hear the yawns, but stick around for a while… Aldeburgh is the biggest poetry festival in the UK. Most of the events take place in the Jubilee Hall, which seats 250. Every event is sold out. The only time I’ve been part of such a huge, enthusiastic poetry crowd was when I saw Ginsberg read in Cambridge, back in ’78. What took us there this year? I live with a poet, and, for the first time, her work pattern…

I didn’t take to Elliott Smith’s music at first. I checked him out because reviews described the sort of act I normally like. I found the singles I bought a bit wimpy, lacking in substance. Then I saw him on the first night of Glastonbury 2000. He was following the highly touted (and hugely overrated) Badly Drawn Boy in the New Bands Tent. I was knocked out. He had a full band and a sound reminiscent of late period McCartney Beatles. A lot of the songs were about heartache and the meaninglessness of life. They were beautiful pop constructions whose beauty and zest offset the mournfulness of the lyrics. I bought his latest (and, as I’ve since discovered, best) album Figure Eight from a festival…

Eleven years ago, my career was knackered. I’d published a well received, much translated first novel and half a dozen short stories. But I couldn’t get my second novel taken anywhere. Or the third. The Young Adult market was in deep recession and nobody was buying. I’d quit my full time job three years earlier. It was beginning to look like a mistake. Then I got invited to write for a new series, Point Crime. I was commissioned to write what turned out to be the first book in the series (which fed off the success of the Point Horror series). The title I chose was controversial, but the publishers thought we could get away with it, and we did. My first novel sold a…

In my 2001 novel Festival one of the main characters is a Liverpudlian singer/songwriter called Jake. When he gets into the Glastonbury festival, the second act he sees is a young Welsh singer who’s doing a lot better than him: Matthew Jay. Jake stands at the front, watching enviously as Jay is ogled by several teenage girls. I watched Jay’s set at Glasto, partly because I’d bought his first EP and liked it, mainly because I thought he’d fit in the book. He was good, just as I described him. At the time, he seemed to be destined for big things. There was a new acoustic boom. His first album was about to come out. I couldn’t for a moment have imagined that he’d be…