Believe in the Sign - Pomona, 2007
ISBN: 1-904-59017-9, £9.99, pp 212.
After three books about football I felt I had written enough on the subject
but I changed my mind in the middle of 2006. I had been working solidly on
an as-yet unpublished novel, slogging away on the fifth or sixth re-write
(true) when I rediscovered a swathe of writing from way, way back - some of
it 20 years old. It was about growing up in Rochdale and supporting my local
football team. I realised that this material was better than my current work:
fresh, unaffected, authentic. I spent just three or four months tidying it
up and, lo, I think I have produced my best book so far.
With the novel, various publishers and agents had 'advised' me on narrative, tension, pacing etc and it was all starting to make me fed up and borderline sick. I resolved with Believe in the Sign to make it deliberately episodic and let it flow without any obvious narrative. It's basically a collection of anecdotes from my growing up years fastened to a time-line set by the fortunes of Rochdale AFC from 1974 to 1982.
Inevitably reviewers will mention Nick Hornby (except it's about a small-time club and based in the north and I'm not from a middle-class background) but, re-reading it recently, I felt it had more in common with the likes of Simon Armitage, his excellent All Points North especially.
Again, influenced by my experiences with the novel, I decided to publish the book on Pomona. I could foresee another scenario developing whereby my agent would send out the manuscript only to receive letters back telling him it was well-written and evocative but that a) a book about Rochdale had minimal appeal, b) the marketing department wouldn't 'get it', or c) any other reason they could think of.
It is the first time I have self-published and it feels good. I had complete control over every aspect - the paper used (beautiful book weave), the cover, the back, the typesetting - and, for once, not having to make a single compromise felt fantastic.
Incidentally, my old mucker Trevor Hoyle, the original Rochdale poet laureate, wrote the copy for the back cover. And it's brilliant so buy it here from Pomona Books. Excerpt here.
Life Sentence - Parrs Wood Press, 2001
ISBN: 1-903158-23-0, £8.95, pp 256.
Praise be The Times. Most especially Keith Blackmore and David Chappell
who, back then, were the grand overseers of the paper's sports coverage. Recognising
my ridiculous, unrequited passion for Rochdale AFC, and realising I was one
of thousands with a similar affliction (supporters of lower league clubs,
not specifically Rochdale), they gave me a whole season to chronicle my feelings.
Each Saturday through the 2000/2001 season I was granted about 1,000 words to emote and, boy, did I emote. Unlike my previous two football commissions (see below), I was not expected to interview players or figures within the club but simply to write in the first person what I felt at every turn through a fascinating season, where, in the end, we missed out on the promotion play-offs by one point.
For someone who had started out as a kid contributing to Rochdale's AFC programme 20 years earlier, to be writing about the club for the world's most famous newspaper was, well, I'm still on a high now, years later.
The book gathered together the columns with additional words where I tried to contexualised the club with what was also happening in the town. The end section was given over to scores of testimonies by Rochdale supporters, looking back on a season that, as ever, had offered so much hope but ultimately led to disappointment (as usual).
Parrs Wood, now sadly defunct, were good publishers, allowing me to design the cover and working hard to get the book noticed. When they ceased trading in 2006 I managed to secure a boxful of Life Sentence and copies are available via the Pomona website. Two excerpts from the book are here and here.
Blue Moon - Mainstream, 1999
ISBN: 1-84018-205-5, £7.99, pp 224.
Once more I was asked by The Times to spend a season affixed to a
football club. This time it was Manchester City who had just been relegated
to the third tier of English football, the lowest point in its 110-year history.
It was the converse of the previous commission (see below) and presented a
fascinating assignment because I was largely mixing with people on the edge
of a nervous breakdown.
City granted me an open door so I was able to interview everyone from the chairman to the washroom ladies. Along the way I met personal heroes like Colin Bell, Stuart Hall and Bernard Manning (well, I admire his gall). I think this prompted some of my best journalism (see the two excerpts here and here).
I had an affinity with City because until my family moved to Rochdale when I was ten, I had supported the club. The first ever football match I attended was City v Sheffield United at Maine Road in 1971. City won, 2-1.
The book was generally well packaged by Mainstream although I don't like the cover. Unusually for me, I trusted them to it and ended up with the rather bland shot of two City shirts hanging on a peg. It said nothing of the passion and drama I encountered through the season.
It has sold extremely well and run to at least three reprints, each with a different sub-title. Originally it was 'Down among the dead men with Manchester City' and was later flagged up (quite rightly!) as 'the modern football classic.' It was Sportspages' (RIP) best-selling book of 1999, out-selling (in its two stores at least) Alex Ferguson's autobiography.
Life at the Top - Queen Anne Press, 1998
ISBN: 1-85291-602-8, £7.99, pp224.
Now we're talking! I had spent the previous year establishing myself as a
member of The Times' match reporting team. The final game of the season
(1997/98) for me was covering Barnsley's match against Bradford City. They
had to win to secure promotion to the Premiership. They did so and my report,
a virtual prose poem, made me first choice for a project the paper had been
considering for some time.
In a unique and brilliantly progressive move (though I'm bound to say so, I suppose), the paper 'adopted' Barnsley for the forthcoming season. The club had toiled away for more than 100 years with little success but were now a member of football's elite in the Premiership. Lots of potential material, then. I was asked to present to the paper a column of between 800 and 1,000 words each week about some aspect of the club. Easy. Bliss. And great, great fun.
I was left to work autonomously, tracking down former players, plotting the enigma of the club's fervent and often reckless support. I got into several scrapes, falling out with Danny Wilson, the manager, and falling in with a mad crowd of drunken fans on an away day to Liverpool. And I was given the run-around by a man dressed as a dog.
During the season I interviewed one of my favourite writers, Barry Hines, and he kindly wrote a foreword for the book. He has since become a good friend. I had the idea to pastiche a classic Penguin design for the book which was an anthology of the columns. It was an obvious choice to copy specifically John Braine's Life at the Top. We substituted Danny Wilson for Laurence Harvey (the star of the film of the book) and used the club's mascot Toby Tyke instead of the famous penguin illustration. Justin Slee provided some great photographs for the chapter title pages.
Two excerpts from the book are available here and here.
Queen The Early Years - Omnibus Press, 1995, re-published 2004
ISBN: 1.8444.012.2, £7.95, pp198.
I hated Queen, truly hated. I was of the real world: the rain, the North,
chippy teas, redbrick houses, buses, Arndale Centres, me mam giving me a good
clout when I was naughty. This lot were mere projections of people, skipping
about in flowery clothes, pompous and preening. I wanted to write about The
Smiths or Paul Weller or The Fall. I got Queen instead. Once more (see
below), I did it because I was asked.
At least it was the bit of their story that was the most interesting: getting started, being desperate for it. I actually had a good time doing the research, flitting around Devon and Cornwall and country lanes in Leicestershire. This was pre-internet days so I had to knock on doors, meeting people in coves in St Agnes or in woody pubs. Lovely. I had no feel for the music or the people as such but I liked taking it to source, breathing in the past. I love going to places where something once happened, something historic, such as the Driftwood Spas in Cornwall where Queen played some of their first shows.
It sold well and as a journalistic exercise I was pleased with the outcome. Interestingly, Queen have been the recipients of some hearty revisionism lately and they are now seen as a national treasure. Even some of the new pop-punk bands name check them, which is bizarre. Maybe I was a visionary after all and needn't be so discomfited about my association with these fancy dan show offs who can all play their instrument really well (such sinners). On this theme, Chris Charlesworth, my editor at Omnibus, acquiesced to my wishes that my name be printed 'as small as typographically possible' on the book. You need a magnifying glass to find it (do they still sell them?).
post-script: I sometimes wonder whether my aversion to Queen has something to do with a former girlfriend. She adored them and it was one of those fundamental anxieties: if you love them and I hate them, then how can I love you and you love me? In fact, what is the basis exactly for our relationship? She left me in the end. The King Rat of the Queen song of that name shares the same birth date as me: it was written in the stars, then. Strangely, I've recently added Killer Queen and You're My Best Friend to my iPod. Queen rule.
Simply Red - Omnibus Press, 1993
ISBN: 0-7119-3336-7, £12.95, pp 112.
What was I thinking? What I always do, I suppose: bringing it to where I
am, what I'm interested in. Most people, asked to do a book on Simply Red,
would think about the slickness, the stardust, the great big fat designer
soul songs. I was intrigued in the other side of all this, the starting out.
I knew a little of Hucknall's punk roots but wanted to know more. He'd sung
for years in the Frantic Elevators, a proper blood-on-the-forehead punk/new
wave band. They were so fundamentalist that they insisted on rehearsing every
Christmas Day. I like and understand that kind of commitment.
As I had done with Queen, I tracked down as many of his old mates as I could in the hope of understanding why Hucknall had turned into this dapper superstar from such defiantly gritty roots. I spent several long, fascinating afternoons with ex-punks now working in warehouses or driving vans, all of them slightly bemused by Mick's antics (with the ladies, mainly) and his gallivanting lifestyle. Few of them were jealous; most were pleased for him.
I was also interested in the relationship with his former manager Elliot Rashman. Years earlier they had formed a kind of cabal where, in acute detail, they discussed their plans to conquer the world. I like that it came true for them, although Rashman chose not to stay the course and opted out at the buying-hotels stage.
My favourite bit of the book is probably where the band's former guitarist Sylvan Richardson reveals what is so unique about Hucknall. ''He's the only person I've ever met who says exactly what he's thinking, not bothered about what impact it will have on anyone.'' That, friends, appears to be the secret.
The only downside, of course, was that I had to listen to Simply Red's music and pretend to be knowledgeable and concerned about stuff that was as relevant to me and my life as crochet or scuba diving. As most people do, I concede that Hucknall has a strong voice but the super-smooth production and arrangements leave me cold.
The book did okay but, as Omnibus later realised, fans of some groups are more literate than others. In crude terms the Simply Redders weren't all that bothered about the detail and much preferred the smooch and the sway as Mick crooned his sweet love songs. We takes our choices.
As Tears Go By, Marianne Faithfull - Omnibus Press, 1991.
ISBN: 0.7119.2401.5, £12.99, pp216.
Where to start? The cover. Awful. It doesn't even look like Marianne. Of
all the iconic photographs that have been taken of her, they chose this: not
smiling, not frowning, not angelic, not wasted. Just a bit tatty haired and
tired and looking like the bit-of-a-hippy woman who works part-time at the
local deli, asking whether you'd like mayonnaise with it or salad cream.
After the critical success of Thank Yer, Very Glad (see below) I was offered the Marianne book. It was a project several other writers had started and left for various reasons. I was young, I was keen. It was going to be a sturdy hardback containing lots and lots of words and I was granted nine months to research and write it. Nine months. I was ambitious and easily flattered. I said yes.
Inevitably I was out of my depth, up to my ears. I reverted to type. I collected up as much information as I could, scurrying up and down the country, and I laid it all out as one long, rambling, aimless chunk of information. Consequently, the book had no focus, no point. Worse than this, however, was that I was intimidated by the book's framing. I felt that as I was covering this very famous lady from a very famous (and celebrated) era I was duty bound to sound all clever and grown up. I surrendered my natural style (which had suited Thank Yer, Very Glad so well) and adopted a spurious, haughty tone. In several excruciating places the narrative is ridiculously far-fetched and the malapropisms still whack me hard in the heart after all these years. It is the kind of book that, if someone is getting off the bus to walk down the street, you are told that someone alights the omnibus to perambulate the walkway.
Once again, I treated my subject far too reverentially (as below). My sticky earnestness sees Marianne treated in the same way as you might, say, a Samuel Beckett or Benjamin Disraeli. The book Omnibus really needed (though they were never pushy or intrusive: maybe they should have been) was a quick-hit celebrity ten-bobber about sex and Mars bars and much pondering on whether Mick Jagger was a devil-worshipper, sex maniac or chancer (or possibly all three). No, I walked up and down Marianne's old street, had tea and biscuits with her octogenarian neighbours, and helped wheezing ex-friends and ex-addicts, cough up anecdotes.
In its defence there are a few decent stop-offs on the story and I work valiantly to create a sense of place but, still, I'd rather copies were burnt on a pyre, higher and higher. Intermittently (since I now own the rights) I make vague plans to completely revise and update the book and set it down in a proper, straightforward way but then I find the enthusiasm draining away. On the bright side, a film company in Hollywood send me a small cheque each year while they mull over whether to make a biopic of Miss Faithfull's hectic life as set down in the book.
Marianne herself was very rude about me and my book in her own autobiography. I think the word 'scabrous' was used. A bit harsh, Marianne, especially when I'm sure my exhaustive research at least gave you a framework for your own masterpiece. Her own book, incidentally, was very well received, probably because it landed at a time when she had cemented her status as the kind of left-field plucky wisdom-flushed survivor so beloved of the broadsheets. My drug hell, art from life, kind of thing.
The Wedding Present - Thank Yer, Very Glad - Omnibus Press, 1990.
ISBN: 0.7119.2106.7, £7.95, p96.
I had met David Gedge, The Wedding Present's main-man, while working at the
Middleton Guardian in Manchester. I did a piece about his band for the paper
and we got on really well. When they started to become successful I wrote
to Omnibus Press and said they should do a book about them. A few days later
I received a letter telling me their name had cropped up at an editorial meeting
and they were indeed looking for someone to write such a book.
I did the obligatory sample chapter and they commissioned me. I was given a small advance and three months to write it. I left my job at an evening newspaper immediately: this was what I had always wanted, no going back.
I set about The Wedding Present and Gedge in particular with unhealthy vigour. I was mad keen to make it deeply personal. I had it in mind that since he was plundering relationships forensically in his songs for material (and had been acclaimed for this and mapped out as some kind of expert) it was fair-game that I found out who these characters were, what they thought of what him, how truthful it all was, what they were doing now.
Gedge, perhaps understandably, didn't like this. His songs had proffered a pseudo-truth, lots of sensitivity and angst but obviously no names. I suddenly made his life transparent; in fact, I dealt with him as a subject as you might someone much further up the pop cultural hierarchy, a Dylan maybe or a Morrissey. I appreciate now that I over-did it. He had the misfortune to bump into someone with a sharp journalistic bent, a fanatical obsession with truth and an earnestness that bordered on illness.
We had a bit of spat in the pages of the NME and Gedge disowned the book. At this point he had already, and very kindly, allowed me access to his school reports, graduation photos and phone numbers of ex-girlfriends. I think he was worried that some of the mystique that most bands (quite appropriately) like to entwine around themselves would be stripped away. I believe now that he was right but, alternatively, it helped solidify their image as true-to-life, honest. I also view it as a writer's job to do as he pleases, find things out, without being overly concerned with the effect this might have, so long as this isn't done maliciously. And it wasn't.
I remember a conversation with David several years after the book was published and he said: ''I've seen some of the other books Omnibus have done on bands and they're nothing like yours.'' True. The rest were what is known routinely as 'scissors and paste' jobs containing little or no primary research. I trawled through everyone - longs chats in smoky Leeds pubs, thorny conversations in Brighton flats - and I tracked down every cutting, every television appearance.
I'm still proud of the book. It is snappy, lively and enthusiastic and if I were a Wedding Present fan (and I was at the time, and still think they're pretty good), it contained everything I would want to know about them.
Omnibus did a good job with the design and the photos are great. Thankfully they also got my name right on the cover. I had, beforehand, been borderline neurotic that they'd spell my name wrong and call me HodGkinson. How I hate that G. Nope, they got Hodkinson correct. Unfortunately, instead of calling me Mark Hodkinson, I was listed on the proof covers and spine as Brian Hodkinson. I asked if this was a joke, revenge for my vanity on insisting they spelled my surname correctly: no, it was an accident. Sadly the book is now out of print but copies appear on eBay occasionally, though they can be expensive.
An excerpt from the book can be found here.