Over the last few months, I’ve been quietly publishing some of my Young Adult novels onto Kindle. The most popular so far has been the reissue of my 2001 novel about the Glastonbury Festival, but the time has come to go further back, to the early 90’s, with my Nottingham based series about young police officers, The Beat. The Beat mysteries, while ostensibly a YA series, was aimed rather older and always had an adult audience. While there’s alway a teenage point of view character, the majority of the protagonists are in their twenties or older. Over the course of eleven novels, it follows the central character, Clare Coppola, from her first day on the beat to just after her twenty-first birthday and the…

Was it really thirteen years ago? I had an idea for a novel and went to the Glastonbury Festival, the last year before they built the big fences. I wrote a long diary about it and, by the time I’d finished that, had a commission to write Festival. It was written as a YA novel but works fine as a short novel for adults too and, I was pleased to find when rereading it this year, most of the music references are to artists who still mean a lot today. Festival was my best selling YA novel this century, even without counting the free copies given away with every issue of Just Seventeen magazine ten years ago. Why was I rereading it? Because the rights have reverted, so I am…

Five albums and fourteen Grammies into her career, Alicia Keys has the purest soul voice of her generation. She nearly fills the Capital FM Arena, where she last appeared twelve years ago, an evening that my companion witnessed. He describes it as a painful event: she only had one album out and every song was extended with singalongs and solos to make a 40 minute set last twice as long. These days, she’s a veteran, bolstered by her biggest hit to date, singing with Jay Z on Empire State of Mind After a bombastic intro, Keys appears behind a curtain to sing a snatch of that classic, but we know she’ll save the full version for last. Five security guards sit impassively in front of the triangular stage,…

  Back from the Iron Age festival in Cullercoats mentioned in my previous post. Pete Mortimer’s Iron Press was celebrating its fortieth birthday, a remarkable achievement. The redoubtable Pete (who was born up the road from me, in Sherwood, and recently wrote a memoir about coming back to Nottingham) organised and MCed a remarkable array of talent. Even more remarkably, virtually every event was sold out, with over two hundred people at the Friday and Saturday night events. These featured former Iron magazine assistant editor Ian McMillan (above), the ‘bard of Barnsley’ in the Crescent Club and Newcastle man David Almond (whose first two, pre-Skellig, books of short stories were published by Iron) in the Community Centre. Sunday saw a celebratory mural (if that’s the…

I can’t find enough time to listen to music at the moment. Don’t remember there being a better month for new albums since the 70’s, if then. Tomorrow sees the official release of Vampire Weekend’s stonking third album. Critics tend to say that the third album the key release in determining a band’s longevity, , and in the case of Modern Vampires Of The City, they’re probably right. There are also new releases by Primal Scream (their best for 20 plus years) and Rod Stewart, whose Time is his best album since the mid-70’s ie sincer I saw him with The Faces, 40 years ago this christmas, when they were on top of the world. Seriously. Have a listen to the song below if you…