GUY MANKOWSKI

Great to now be represented for book and film rights by Matthew Hamilton at The Hamilton Agency of Holland Park, London and for film rights by Leah Middleton at Marjacq. It's an honour to be alongside other authors and musicians the agency represents, (who've informed my writing so much) like Tim Burgess, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Alan McGee, John Robb, John Crace, Tim Booth, Nicholas Blincoe, Nick Kent, and Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite. Matthew's enthusiasm for the Kristen Pfaff book puts the project in great hands. Website here 

This is the first chapter from  ‘I Know How To Live’: The Life of Kristen Pfaff  by Guy Mankowski  (with an afterword by Jason Pfaff). It’s 1993, and a teeming English summer afternoon. A crowd sways in front of the stage. The singer wears a guitar over her grey trench coat. Smoke flows through her hair as she waves her lit cigarette at the crowd. A man in the crowd shouts, with contempt, ‘she’s dyed her hair!’ There’s a woman next to her in a black miniskirt, carrying a black bass with the confidence of one who treats it as an appendage. The black hair that obscures her face is somehow more convincing than that of the singer, who doesn’t look at her. The singer strums, her singing inaudible at first and the woman to her right winds her mike stand, plectrum in her mouth. There’s a sense of growing conviction about her. Ear-splitting feedback. A sense of occasion, the clenched body language of a band determined to prove themselves to this huge crowd at The Phoenix Festival. Fatima Mansi