In 2008, fresh out of college with a master’s in philosophy, I emerged from campus life bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and then my problems began. The global financial crash happened and I found myself like many others in the employment scrap before I had even started. I returned to my parents’ home in the Midlands, England and returned to my summer job as a cleaner/porter/hospital driver, lifting buckets, dispensing medicine and transporting souls from place to place. This began a renewed but not sentimental education; the hospital library was full of strangest oddities from which I borrowed books like Jerzy KosińskiS ‘ Being there, Luke RhinehartS ‘ The dice man AND Jack KerouacS ‘ On the roada far cry from the hospital’s conservative mood, despite the life/death cycle that had become commonplace.
I started doing music reviews, for free and happily, for defunct websites like Sabotage Times. Eventually, I accumulated enough experience that I was able to write down what I know, and so I spent many years on my novel, Asylum policypublished by a small British publisher, Urbane Publications, to whom I am eternally grateful. The book is an account of my working life in the hospital, written at length in a style that brought Virginia Woolf clashing with William S. Burroughs.
From there, I went on to write several non-fiction titles. the first, In Never in 2020, is an in-depth account of Nine Inch Nails’ multi-million-selling 1994 album, The downward spiral. It was a great experience to tell the story of a great album from my teenage years and I followed this up a few years later with Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsterswhich told the story of Bowie’s life in 1980 as he vacated Berlin and tried to make a new life for himself, delivering a rock-pop classic that gave birth to the New Wave era. Lastly, my book Darker than the Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs of Love and Deatha deep dive into his discography, is being reissued by Bloomsbury in paperback and audiobook editions, which is really exciting as Nick Cave continues his great renaissance, touring the world, writing The Red Hand Files and still looking to the future.
The following books, among many others, gave me relief from the daily slump and inspired me to write myself out of a one-sided situation. Maybe they will do the same for you.
