The Psychogeography of “Dead Rock Stars”
(NB- this one is for people who’ve already read it only- spoiler threat alert!) I’ve been very touched by the reviews and response so far to “Dead Rock Stars”. Given what a personal novel it was (I was brought up on the Isle of Wight and much of it centres around a young, lost, creative boy called Jeff who isn’t a million miles from me) I feared it wouldn’t find an audience or even have once, so when it went to #2 on some Amazon charts a week or so ago I was encouraged. More than any other novel I’ve written it was written with real geographic locations in mind, many of them based around the places I lived as a young boy on the Isle of Wight. But the opening scene is set, during the nineties heyday of Emma (heavily into her Kinderwhore phase at this point) at The Purple Turtle in Camden, a venue which I had great times playing at with my own band Alba Nova. It’s a novel written over the course of one summer, a summer in which Jeff brings himself to read the diary that ...