Wilko on wheels

I went to see Wilko Johnson at the Half Moon in Putney on Saturday night – my first proper blues gig for some time, I’m ashamed to say. Watching the great man up close and personal – from a position just a few feet from the stage – was a remarkable experience.

For those who haven’t seen Wilko, or the fabulous Oil City Confidential documentary about Dr Feelgood, the first thing to say is that he looks odd enough when he’s stationary. Bald, boggle-eyed and intense, dressed all in black, he sings into the mic and thrashes away at his stylish guitar (matt black with a shiny red fingerplate) in his own unique manner. (My friend Chris, who understands more about these things than I do, says he manages to play lead and rhythm guitar at the same time, which ought to be impossible.)

But it’s when the verse ends that it gets truly strange. Freed from the need to stand still, Wilko suddenly veers across the stage, extremely fast, soloing as he goes, with an almost trance-like expression on his face. Given that, from the audience, you can’t see his legs, you end up wondering if he’s on wheels, because surely no one can move that fast sideways. Sometimes, by way of variation, he shoots up to the front of the stage and back again, and it’s like an effect a cameraman might try, zooming in and out while keeping the subject in focus.

Meanwhile, off to one side of the stage, bassist Norman Watt-Roy is feeling every note, hunched over his guitar and sweating profusely as he twists and turns and grimaces and gurns. He’s the antithesis of the Bill Wyman school of bass playing.

With all this going on, it’s easy to forget about the music, a powerful, percussive r’n’b, including a few Feelgood classics for the old-timers in the audience (which was most of us). It’s just a shame that Wilko barely uttered a word from the moment he arrived on stage to the moment he left. I thought he might have wanted to share a few stories from his long, strange career. But clearly he prefers to let his guitar do the talking.

The great superhero rip-off

On the recommendation of Scott Pack, who I saw speaking at the London Writers’ Club last month, I bought a book called All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman. Scott himself provided the front cover recommendation on the edition I bought, which reads: “Buy it, borrow it, steal it but just make sure you read it.”

Well, I read it, and now I wish I’d borrowed or stolen it, rather than paying £7.99 for it.

Not that it’s a bad book as such. I can see why some people find it inspirational – it’s one of those symbolic stories that people can readily project themselves into, a bit like the crap that Paulo Coelho writes, though not that bad, fortunately. It didn’t do much for me; it was a mildly diverting short story, basically.

But here’s the thing. All My Friends Are Superheroes is being sold by Telegram Books at the same price as you’d pay for a 500-page novel. I know this because my Amazon order also included the latest Matt Beaumont novel, which is over 500 pages long, but still retails for £7.99.

However, Kaufman’s squib runs to just 108 pages – and of those, 15 or so are blank. And it’s printed in above-average size type. Let’s be honest, it’s basically a short story, or a novella if you’re feeling generous. And I can’t help feeling ripped off as a result.

This isn’t a criticism of Andrew Kaufman, who doubtless has no influence on how his book is priced. But it does suggest to me that the publishing industry has got a serious problem with its pricing structure. To use a musical analogy, I wouldn’t expect to pay the same for a three-track EP as for a 20-track album.

It also points the way towards new ways of distributing fiction. I’ve yet to download a novel for online reading, but All My Friends... is the kind of work I might be prepared to experiment with, at the right price of course. I would feel less cheated now if I’d done that, rather than shelling out for the printed version.

Too famous to tweet?

Having had it drummed into me by all and sundry that as an aspiring author, it’s essential to be on Twitter, I signed up a few months ago and now tweet whenever inspiration strikes.

Half the fun of being on Twitter is finding out what people I like or admire are saying, not least in the field of creative writing. So I clicked on ‘Find People’, then on ‘Browse Suggestions’ and selected the ‘Books’ category. A long list came up – but it contained few authors I’d heard of, and only one I had any interest in following. Maybe established, successful authors don’t feel the need to be on Twitter, I thought, and left it there.

But it nagged away at me, and the other day I decided to test the theory. I quickly jotted down the names of my favourite contemporary British novelists and had a look online to see if any of them had a Twitter feed. It’s fair to say the results were not encouraging.

Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Nick Hornby and David Mitchell all have websites that are clearly maintained by their publishers (though McEwan does at least have a presence on Facebook). Matt Beaumont (being rather less famous) has a website that looks like he maintains it himself, and Jonathan Coe’s site contains a blog. I was momentarily excited to find an Iain Banks Twitter feed – but it turned out to be a ‘placeholder’, maintained by his publisher in case he ever decides to tweet. He’s more switched on to modern media than most, though – his website trumpets the launch of his new iPhone app.

The exception to the rule is Stephen Fry, one of the most followed people on Twitter (he’s currently got 1,619,347 followers, which makes my 8 look a bit puny) and famous as an enthusiastic adopter of new technologies – he already has an iPad app, for instance. Then again, he hasn’t published a novel since 2000, so he’s hardly an active novelist.

So what can we conclude from this? That full-time authors are too busy writing to tweet? Or that they don’t feel the need to use social media to build an audience, since they’ve got major publishers and their PR departments to do that for them? Or maybe it’s a gender thing: my favourite authors all happen to be male – maybe female writers are more into social media? (Though that’s not borne out by my experience of Twitter in general.)

Whatever the reason, it’s a shame: I’d like to know more about the authors of the books that inspire me to write, and Twitter is a great way to share insights into the life of a writer. I’ll try to remember that if I ever hit the big time.

Twisted logic

I’ve been a fan of John Irving ever since I took The World According To Garp on an Interrailing trip around Europe in the 80s. It was one of those life-changing novels, unlike anything I’d read before, and I’ve followed him loyally ever since.

My enthusiasm has been waning in recent years, though, and having just finished his latest, Last Night In Twisted River, it’s fallen a little further. Not that it’s a bad book, not at all. But there are things about it that are highly irritating, and since one of them is to do with writing, I’ll focus on that.

The central character in the book, Danny, grows up to become a successful novelist, and as Irving describes them, each of Danny’s novels is based on a significant incident from his life. To give just one example, in the 1960s his girlfriend offers to bear him a child so that he can be exempt from service in Vietnam under a law passed by President Kennedy. He becomes a so-called ‘Kennedy Father’ – and subsequently writes a novel called The Kennedy Fathers in which the main characters go through exactly the same experiences.

There’s lots more in this vein, and it’s not the first time Irving has used this device: a character has striking and unusual experiences and then writes novels that retell them, with only minor variations in the details. It’s almost as if Irving is trying to tell his readers that you don’t need any imagination to be a writer – just have an interesting life and write about that.

Of course, every novel is autobiographical to the extent that everything that makes it onto the page comes out of the writer’s head. But (speaking for myself, at least) most of us mingle experience and invention, and keep on doing so until the end product has no obvious real-life counterpart. If one of my friends read a scene I’d written and said “I remember that party” or “You’ve described x to a tee”, I would regard myself as having failed as a novelist.

Irving is clearly aware of what he’s doing – at one point Danny even expresses anger that critics insist on regarding his novels as autobiographical. Maybe I’m missing some subtle point, and the reader is supposed to pity Danny for his lack of self-awareness. But to me it just reads like a non-writer’s idea of the way writers come up with their plots.

A definite article

Hot on the heels of my radio debut, my first online interview is now available to read in issue 2 of arts magazine The Kaje. I was interviewed by Jason Newton a few weeks ago, and the article is accompanied by a moody picture taken by photographer David Tett in a back street near my office one lunchtime. Oh, it’s all glamour being a published author, believe me.

One small niggle about the article, though: the book is referred to throughout as ‘The First Time I Met The Blues’. Buddy Guy didn’t start his title with a definite article, so I didn’t either. Indeed, to my way of thinking, it sounds rather prosaic with an initial ‘the’.

Moreover, with my journalist’s hat on, I might comment that the first principle of good sub-editing is to checking the facts, and that this kind of slackness is simply further proof that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I might, but on this occasion I won’t.

Confidential thoughts

I finally caught up with Julian Temple’s excellent Dr Feelgood documentary, Oil City Confidential, the other night. A few thoughts that arose while I was watching it:

• That Wilko Johnson is a bit odd, isn’t he?
• The songs I knew Dr Feelgood for - the chart hits like ‘Milk and alcohol’ and ‘Down at the doctors’ – were actually recorded after Wilko left the band. I never realised that
• Dr Feelgood were to the early 70s what The Yardbirds were to the early 60s: a shot in the arm for British blues, a shot of pure adrenaline. I wish I’d seen them live at their peak, but it was before my time
• Did I mention that Wilko Johnson really is quite odd?
• It’s also odd that no one really followed the Feelgoods’ lead. The accepted wisdom is that the energy and on-stage aggression of the band was a major influence on punk, but I’m not aware of any blues bands who picked up the baton and ran with it. Maybe it’s just that punk was so all-pervading that any potential new young blues bands went down that path instead

Talking about the Feelgoods also gives me a chance to repeat one of my favourite pieces of trivia: that every member of the band had the same name. Bassist John B. Sparkes kept his, drummer John Martin became The Big Figure, guitarist John Wilkinson became Wilko Johnson, and singer Lee Brilleaux’s real name was Lee John Collinson. What’s more, when Wilko left the band, he was replaced by Gypie Mayo, whose real first name was (guess what?) John, and he in turn was replaced by Johnny Guitar. He was eventually replaced by someone called Gordon, and that’s when the rot set in.

Amazon mystery solved!

Good news! I’ve finally worked out how a self-published author (ie me) gets paid by Amazon:

1) Customer buys book through Amazon

2) Amazon notifies a sub-contractor (Bertram Books) of the order

3) Bertram notifies Nielsen (the organisation that issues ISBNs) of the order

4) Nielsen notifies the publisher (ie me) that an order has been received

5) The publisher (ie me) supplies the book to Bertram, who then send it to the purchaser

6) The publisher (ie me) then submits an invoice to Bertram

Simple, isn’t it? Except that it took me several emails to find out about step 6, which is by no means obvious. It seems that the brave new world of self-publishing still has a few kinks that need ironing out.