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This year started with some great news. It’s taken me till now to write a blog about it because… well… because life’s been busy, because there aren’t enough hours in the day, and because the evidence shows I’m probably not quite as organised as I’d like to believe and am easily sidetracked by a good book or a day out on the mountain bike in winter sunshine.
The news – slightly old by now, I grant you – is this. At the start of the year I signed a contract with a publisher in the USA for them to print and distribute City Baby in North America. For those of you reading this blog and wondering what on earth City Baby is, it’s the autobiography of Ross Lomas, bassist with UK punk legends GBH, which I helped co-write, and which has been selling like hot cakes ever since.
I got involved with writing Ross’s autobiography because it was a story which needed to be told, and which deserved to be told – not by some academic who would analyse the phenomenon of punk from a sociological perspective – but simply as a good rollocking tale related by Ross himself. The man who lived it. A story complete with the ups and downs and the highs and lows which happen to anyone.
Working with Ross was an absolute pleasure, but the road to writing City Baby started long before I sat down with him in the back of my camper van and began recording what he had to say. I could say it started when I was lucky enough to have Steve Ignorant ask me if I wanted to work with him on the story of his life, The Rest Is Propaganda, but – while it’s certainly true that helped set me on the way – it started way before that, when I discovered I had a special interest in telling stories which would otherwise go unheard, simply because those are the stories I want to hear. Because without them – without the stories which re-balance the airbrushed histories of ‘great men’ – our view of the world around us gets skewed. We learn that people like us don’t matter, that nothing in our lives is worth recording, that no-one else shares our experiences, our hopes, or our fears.
I thought those stories were worth writing down. The good news is that a lot of other people think so too. City Baby is on its third print run already, and with the US contract in place there’s every reason to believe a lot more people are going to get the chance to read Ross’s story for themselves, which makes me very happy. On top of that, I’m glad to say my old mate Steve Ignorant is finally making some money from his book – the previous publishers had a somewhat unorthodox approach to accounting – after taking over publication and distribution of it himself. If you want a copy of The Rest Is Propaganda (which is definitely worth a read whether you like punk or not) you can buy it direct from him here.
There. I finally wrote the blog. And there’s still time to get out on the bike.
Result.
