How I Left the National Grid
Page 18
The room danced, with their hands above their head. ‘We’re all part of the same cult now’, they sang. A strange chorus line of dark leather, hairspray and nail varnish.
These people are made of the same awkward substance as me, Sam thought. People like us never quite adjust to the world, only fully understand it through the records we live through.
Even though The National Grid wouldn’t reform Sam realized then how their music endured. In under-attended discos, late night parties and, perhaps most importantly, in private reflections. Sam suspected he would soon turn to their music again, to help him take on a world that had finally begun to open.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Lynette Rasco for the cover photo. This book was written and researched over the course of three years as part of a Creative Writing PhD at Northumbria University. I am grateful to have had the time afforded by a studentship, for a year and a half, to work on it. I am hugely indebted to my PhD supervisors for their kind and enduring support. During the course of researching this book I was fortunate to interview various post-punk artists. Thank you especially to Jehnny Beth and Julie Campbell. Thank you also to Hanna and Lyn for your support, and to Norah Perkins at Curtis Brown. I was fortunate to benefit from the insight of such a great range of authors, editors, musicians and agents. This book is dedicated to my wife, Bethany.
At Roundfire we publish great stories. We lean towards the spiritual and thought-provoking. But whether it’s literary or popular, a gentle tale or a pulsating thriller, the connecting theme in all Roundfire fiction titles is that once you pick them up you won’t want to put them down.