Small Town England
Small Town England is a book about growing up in the outer reaches of the rural suburbs and having only a cheap electric guitar and some cut out pictures of Glenda Jackson to keep me going. Set between 1978 and 1983, it harks back to a lost age of black white telly, punk and 50cc motorcycles with the silencers taken off.

Peppered with musical lists, local maps and various graphic novel style interjections, Small Town England is a sort of lyrical comic memoir for the punk grandad generation.

To be published April 2010 by Ebury Press.

From the press blurb:

Do you remember your first crush, or falling in love with the local beauty queen? Your first illicit Strongbow down the park? The names of the rubbish songs you churned out with your band? That confusing period between childhood and adolescence, where you are trying to be grown up and get your first snogs whilst at the same time still playing with airfix models and making dens. This is a tale about suffocating British smalltown life at a particular time in the late-mid 20th Century. Life in this small town was a rollercoaster of mundane happenings. Small Town paints a portrait of the energy and melancholy at the heart of our generation, the inability to live for now and the feeling that something better is just around the corner. Too young (just) to be baby boomers and too English and uncool to call itself Generation X. It's a universal tale about dreams, ambitions, brass bands, cubs, rugby songs, football stickers, tractors, young love and valve amplifiers connected up to cheap distortion pedals, set at a time of political change and pudding basin hair. And it's all true. Apart from the stuff about girls fancying me.