Backlisted - Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn

Episode Date: November 27, 2017

In a special edition recorded earlier this year live at the Durham Book Festival, John and Andy are joined by writers Adele Stripe and Ben Myers to discuss Gordon Burn's debut novel Alma Cogan. The 'WHWBR?' slots are occupied by Pevsner's guide to Durham and The Buried Giant by Kazuo IshiguroTimings: (may differ due to variable advert length)2'45 - County Durham Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England by Roberts, Martin, Pevsner, Nikolaus, Williamson, Elizabeth10'35 - The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro16'26 - Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to this special episode of Backlisted, the podcast that brings new life to old books. We've transplanted the show lock, stock and barrel 260 miles north,

perched on the banks of the River Weir to the Gala Theatre in the beautiful Cathedral City of Durham. We're here as part of the Durham Book Festival, which, as it was founded in 1990, is one of the country's oldest book festivals. I'm John Mitchinson, publisher at Unbound. Unbound's a website that brings authors and readers together to create something special. I'm Andy Miller, and I'm the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us on our trip to the north are the following guests

hello to adele stripe adele stripe is a poet and novelist whose first novel black teeth and a brilliant smile about the playwright andrea dunbar was shortlisted for this year's gordon byrne prize at the durham book festival according to experts including me and john mitchinson it's a bloody great book in adele's personal, she is married to the writer Ben Myers. We're also joined by the writer Ben Myers. Under duress. He is a writer... That's not what you said in your email, Ben.

Ben is a writer and journalist whose third novel, Pig Iron, won the Gordon Byrne Prize in 2012. He has also won the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers Award. He's the author of seven novels, two this year alone. Incredible. John talked about one of them,

The Gallows Pole, on an episode of Batlisted earlier this year. And the other, These Darkening Days, was published a few weeks ago. And according to experts, including John Mitchinson, it's bloody great too. In his personal life, Ben is married to the writer Lionel Shriver. Sorry.

Sorry. Sorry, Adele Stripe. Sorry. Bloody Wikipedia. That is old news. That is fake news. Fake news. Andy Miller. Fake news that is fake news fake news andy miller why don't we give them a round of applause for the hell of it yes i i these darkening days i did i elsewhere, somewhere other than this podcast.

But I did, I know Ben was happy with this, coined the phrase Elroy in a flat cap. I love that. Which is because it's a gritty thriller set in the north. The novel we're going to talk about today is Alma Cogan by Gordon Byrne, winner of the 1991 Whitbread Prize for fiction. But before that, before we get into Gordon Byrne, as is traditional on this podcast, I look across the table and say to you, Andy, what have you been reading? Well, I've been reading this week.

In fact, what I've been reading in the last couple of days, yesterday and today, is the Pevsner Buildings of England guide to County Durham. I'm just, if anyone doesn't know what the Pevsner Buildings of England guide to County Durham. I'm just... If anyone doesn't know what the Pevsner guides are, they were a wonderful series that was created in the early 1950s by Sir Nicholas Pevsner, and the County Durham volume, which is a guide to the architecture of the area, was one of the first ones that Pevsner wrote

and one of the first ones that was published. It was published originally, I i think in 51 or 53 and these volumes of architectural guides are regularly updated the buildings of england series is now owned by yale university press and they they publish new editions every 10 to 15 years or so because of course buildings rise and fall if we look out the window at the venue here we can see buildings of some of the buildings that presumably put up here in Durham in the 1980s 60s 60s being taken down but I just want to read the opening of what Pevsner himself wrote about Durham because he was passionate about this city he says and I should say this volume covers County Durham, the section on the city itself is 100 pages long. I mean, it's a book within a book.

And he says, he wrote, Durham is one of the great experiences of Europe to the eyes of those who appreciate architecture and to the minds of those who understand architecture. The group of cathedral, castle and monastery on the rock can only be compared to Avignon and Prague and by circumstance and planning the old town has hardly been spoilt and is to almost the same degree the visual foil to the monuments that it must have been 200 and 500 years ago. The river Weir forms so close a loop that the town is surrounded on it by three sides. On the land side the two medieval bridges are a bare 900 feet from each other. The position was ideal for a

fortress and it is ideal for the picture of a town. For a cathedral it is as unusual as for a monastery. Avignon and Prague have been mentioned but what distinguishes Durham visually from them is again something exceedingly English. The pictures of the buildings on the hill which one remembers all have foregrounds of green. The most moving one from the Prebens Bridge in fact shows the cathedral rising straight above the tops of the venerable trees up the steep bank as if it were the vision of a Caspar David Friedrich or a Schinkel. Verdure mellows what would otherwise be too domineering, domineering the castle, domineering the site of the cathedral, domineering the architecture of the cathedral and domineering inside the cathedral

the throne of the bishop raised on a higher platform than the shrine of the saint. Now I think the thing that's so wonderful about that and what's so wonderful about this series of books is that is inspired yeah that writing is inspired writing in the true sense that pevsner was able to come here he got his wife to drive him because mrs pevsner did all the driving and made the sandwiches before they set out. So she'd drive him around all day and then he would stay up until two in the morning typing in their bed and breakfast. And then she'd make sandwiches in the kitchen the next morning and they'd set off again.

And out of that industry and her sacrifice came this brilliant series of important, wonderful, beautiful books. It's one of those glorious things that... I mean, which is not unique to this country, but I've put Pevsner alongside the Oxford English Dictionary and the Ordnance Survey. It's just this sort of desire to kind of, sort of this taxonomic desire to pin things down

and to create these incredible reference books. But when I, my former life as a reference publisher, Pevsner was always the standard bearer, because what you want is reference books that are written by people, real people who've got engagement with what they're doing, not sort of faceless panels of American academics, which a lot of reference books have become. But his voice shines through all of the...

And my story about that particular book is, when I grew up in the North East, and then we emigrated to New Zealand when I was quite young, and when I was about 15, in a second-hand bookshop in Auckland in New Zealand I found a copy of Pevsner's Durham and it was it became a kind of sacred object to me because it was I could reconstruct not just but bits of Sunderland bits of the whole of the northeast that I remembered from my childhood from reading the Pevsner when i came back when i was 18 it was it was a book that i took everywhere when i came to retrace my steps so there are probably bits i could recite from heart it's it's uh i i the other thing i sorry there ben the other thing that i love about pevsner though and unfortunately in

some of the recent editions they've started smoothing this out yeah he's really but he's very grumpy you know he loves durham but if you've ever read matt our producer was telling me earlier if you ever ever read his um his account of cornwall he's furious at that cornwall is so big and so full of nothing of interest uh he he uh and he's a little bit sometimes he's hated i mean they're absolutely hated there's a bit here stand first he does this thing. The sections of the books have a thing called a perambulation, where you can walk around the city with your pebs and the guide in your hand,

with him as your guide, saying, look at this building, look at that building. And here's a bit from the Durham Perambulation 2. Stand first on Framwell Gate Bridge and look south to the incomparable view of the River Gorge, with only castle and cathedral above the trees and the Prebens Bridge closing the vista at the bend of the river. Then look north at the disappointing jumble of Relief Road Bridge, banal yet self-assertive 1960s office block

and 1940 ice rink. And I sort of... I think the 1940 ice rink has gone. I was looking for it yesterday it's not there anymore so even that you know the nostalgia for the things that he didn't like when you pick these are now you know that's a shame that carbuncle is no longer there well i grew up in durham as well and i i haven't read any of that but it's interesting that he talks about these uh banks of greenery and that sort of evoke casper david friedrich i know exactly what he talks about these banks of greenery that sort of evoke Casper David Friedrich. I know exactly what he means.

These big ivy-covered banks. When I was 15 or 16, me and my friends, we didn't see the kind of aesthetic, artistry, beauty of it. We saw it as an opportunity to climb up and halfway up, about 100 feet up, there's a little ledge where we're able to sit and drink underage every Friday night out of the way of the risk of getting beaten up by the toughs from the villagers.

So the very banks he's describing, we used to climb up and then we'd carry a bag full of our empties, hang it from a branch. He hasn't described that. This is the Bevsner guy. It's very Gordon Byrne though, I love that juxtaposition I must also say, before I ask you John what you've been reading

I have been reading this morning I was very fortunate, I did a talk here at the Durham Festival yesterday called Author Confidential I talked a bit about my mum's favourite author my mum's favourite author is the novelist Alan titchmarsh and my mum will never hear this so it's fine and uh so i was saying how whenever i write a book she reads it and then says well it's all right andrew but when

will you write something more like alan titchmarsh and uh so i was out and about yesterday and a gentleman called lee who is here in the audience approached me in the street and said I really enjoyed the event, I've got something for you and he's bought me a copy of the novel Mr McGregor by Alan Titchmarsh so I've started reading it Lee, I've started reading it

it's no good you've made a bad thing worse with my mum but anyway, John, what have you been reading? I've been reading The Buried Giant You've made a bad thing worse with my mum. But anyway, John, what have you been reading? I've been reading The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. The reason I've been reading it is I started it and I didn't finish it, and then he won the Nobel Prize.

And like a lot of people, I was pretty confident that Margaret Atwood was going to win, which would have been a very, very good thing. But if Margaret Atwood wasn't going to win it, then I hadn't really thought about Ishiguro. But it made me think how many Ishiguro books I had read and loved, and how I think he has done something almost unique in writing, in kind of writing in a different genre for each book. He's the publisher's worst nightmare. He writes a completely different book each time. You know, you sort of, you have the kind of Downton Abbey of the butler in The Famous One, which I love.

The Ruins of the Day. And you've got The Famous One, Never Let Me Go, which is sort of sci-fi. But Buried Giant is, and I have to say, I think it's a really very fine book. And I was amazed by it.

I actually finished reading it this morning and was very, very moved by the ending. I mean, it has a sort of weirdly appropriate feel to Durham. I don't know if you know, the book is set in a kind of imaginary England in the first millennium, between the departure of the Romans and the Saxons are just beginning to arrive. But there are still ogres kind of on the edges of villages. And life is hard. And it turns out that the main character, an old man called Axel and his wife Beatrice, wake up one morning with this strange presentment that they need to go on a journey. And they don't quite know why.

And it turns out the book is quite long. I mean, as everything Ishiguro does, it's exquisitely written. But it's like a sort of pale medieval tapestry, the way it evolves. They discover a broken old knight, Gawain, who is part of the old British past, the heroic past of King Arthur. And then it turns out that the book is, all their memories have basically been put on hold by the breath of a she-dragon.

And without giving you the plot away, I mean, it sounds mad. I hear myself saying these words, and I think, why would anyone want to read a book like this? But you should, because he's got this amazing ability to tell these stories of fables. I was trying to think what it reminded me of. And I suppose, like I say, on one level, it has that kind of medieval sort of saint's life feel to it. But the other thing suddenly struck me.

It's like a, it's like, it really is like a sort of samurai movie. You know, it's kind of broken samurai going on a journey. They're trying to find, it turns out they're trying to find their lost son. And again, you know, without giving spoilers away, and the resolution at the end is incredibly beautifully done. It's so unlikely that ishiguro would be writing this and yet again when you read it you think it's all the ishiguro stuff is there memory time the kind of the the kind of class because the basically the saxons are a rebuilding britain

and the britains are sort of clinging on to the past and there's it's really interesting um how many can i ask the audience members for a show of hands how many of you here have read one or more novels by Kazuo Ishiguro now i think that's pretty great for a nobel prize winner yeah i i i'm really happy that he's won it i think he's a brilliant advertisement for fiction i've i've read one i i've read one and i think maybe i think i've read one and a half novels by Kazuo Ishiguro. How about you? I'll guess Ben and Adele. You know how many we've read. Why else would I ask? Between us we've read

zero. But you can ask us about any other author. I will. I'm happy to. I have to say you are two of the most I love, you're very good at putting up on Instagram things the books that you're buying. I just think you've got the most I mean the range of books that you read and you get through it's

almost it's almost in the miller class no it's no they're far above me i mean i'm interested though this is we we talked about this a bit earlier does ishiguro winning the nobel prize for literature make you more or less likely to read one of those novels well actually it makes no difference to me um because he has been recommended to me before by people who i trust and never let me go is the one that has always popped up yeah um so i think perhaps I will try at some point to purchase a copy Do you think you are more or less likely to read one as a result of the prize being awarded?

I would I would want to find out why him I know loads about him and the book John mentions Buried Giant, I've read so much I mean this is the problem, sometimes you read so much about a novel that you don't read it because you know the plot. You get all the different opinions.

It was mildly controversial. Ursula Le Guin came out viciously against it, saying that it was not fantasy. It seems to me to be a bit of a paper target because I don't think he'd ever said it was fantasy. And in fact, I think what he's doing is perhaps a bit more interesting. But that made her cross because there is this thing,

if you're going to do fantasy, you should do it properly and take it seriously. And she felt it was somehow insulting to fantasy writers, which I don't really understand. I just think it's like all good writers, at some point you have to just relax into their vision of reality. You just have to just relax into their vision of of reality you just have to you just have to go with it i mean yeah well let's let that is appropriate to what we're here to talk about the the the writer's vision of reality we'll be back in just a sec so we're here to talk about

a novel that was published as john said in 1991 called alma cogan by the late gordon burn and i'm going to start the discussion by asking Ben I think as I do on these occasions where were you when you first heard about Gordon Byrne or heard about this book or read this book or or whatever well I've been thinking about this quite a bit and it's hard to pinpoint exactly because it seems like it's kind of drifted in and out of my consciousness over the years but I think as I as I said, I grew up here, and I was studying just about to start failing my A-levels when the book came out.

And I remember reading about Gordon Byrne in the local press. There's some good free local arts magazines in Newcastle. It was less about the book and more about him. It probably sounds naive now, but I wasn't aware that there was that writers really came from the northeast at the time i was pat barker but at the time age 16 i read about this guy who's from the west end of newcastle i don't know how much you know about his upbringing was pretty humble you know outdoor toilets and poverty basically but

he decided to be a journalist which is what i wanted to do at the time and in fact still am to some extent and he had he went to university but he had no formal journalistic training and he basically went and interviewed someone and sold the article to the local paper which then sold to the times i think and then he was away and i read this story about a guy who went right i'm going to go to Newcastle and he didn't smooth off his Geordie edge I think he used it to his advantage his confidence and his brashness

and his sort of bullshit detector I suppose he writes brilliantly about art but he does it without pretension so I read about this guy who London seems a long way away from Durham when you're kind of a teenager so I became aware of him and this book that he'd written called Alma Cogan who, you know, London seems a long way away from Durham when you're kind of a teenager. So I became aware of him and this book that he'd written

called Al McCogan about some sort of faded, you know, primetime music style that I'd heard about. But I actually only properly read it about ten years ago. I wrote a novel called Richard about the disappearance of Richie Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers. So it was a novel about a real person. But I remember about Al McCogan, it was just a book that feels haunted all the way through.

It's like one big exercise in foreshadowing. There's something bad is coming. And I kind of wanted to do something similar with Richard because the reader would know that this guy is about to disappear. So I've read it about three or four times over the years and it seems to have been there since I was about 16. that this guy is about to disappear. So I've read it about three or four times over the years, and it seems to have been there since I was about 16. Adele, can you remember when you first read the novel?

It was probably... Ben gave me it when we were living in Nunhead. So I think that was probably about ten years ago. But I first came across Gordon Byrne when I was living in a rat hole in Leeds, a back-to-back. And I heard about On the Way to Work, which was his book that he wrote with Damien Hirst. And I was interested in that book because it was the stories, it was interviews with Damien Hirst. And I was interested in that book because it was the stories, it was interviews with Damien, but Damien was talking about his life in Leeds quite extensively in that book. And there is a picture of Damien in there,

and he'd been into the Leeds mortuary, and there's a dead guy's head that Damien has pushed his face up against and he's about 16 years old and he's dossing about with the corpses and it's it's awful it's awful but it's also quite funny um so that was where I first came across Gordon Byrne was that book yeah it's another upbeat episode of death memory i mean it's worth saying that that this is a novel but we should explain a little bit i mean should we do do you want to put a blurb be a yeah i think it would be useful for the audience to uh at home and and here if we can just position the book for people because it's it's quite an people because it's quite an unusual premise. It's quite an unusual premise. And Gordon himself was known...

I guess he was kind of influenced by the new journalism. I think reading the executioner's song by Norman Mailer when he was young really influenced what he did. So he started writing kind of non-fiction. And he's fond of quoting John Berger. There's quite a good background to the idea of why his fiction isn't much like a lot of other fiction he said there was a quote by john berger that i had in mind that imagination is not as most people think the ability to invent

it's the ability to disclose what already exists so already you've got somebody who's thinking about fiction in a rather different way. And a lot of his references, fictional references, are to writers who don't write. W.G. Zobel was one of his favorites, again, who write novels that could almost be nonfiction. But here, on the back of the Faber edition, which doesn't have, I think, a particularly great cover. We'll talk about the iconic covers in a minute, but it has a reasonable blurb. How does it feel to never be allowed to die? In his classic debut novel, Gordon Byrne takes Britain's biggest selling vocalist of the 1950s and turns her story into an equation of celebrity and murder.

Fictional characters jostle for space with real-life stars from John Lennon to Doris Day and Sammy Davis Jr. as Byrne, in a breathtaking act of appropriation, reinvents the popular culture of the post-war years. As beautifully written as it is disturbing, Alma Cogan remains a stingingly relevant exploration of the sad, dark underside of fame. exploration of the sad dark underside of fame and we'll just um just so uh i'll say a little bit about alma cogan so so she was born in 1932 and she died in 1966 the idea of this novel is that in fact she didn't die in 1966 that she's still alive and she narrates the novel from the late 1980s it's written in the late 1980s and she was known in her era she was very popular in the 1950s as the girl with the giggle in her voice and gordon clearly felt that she represented a kind of pre

beatles pre-rock music uh era that he wanted to write about and insofar as there is a plot in alma kogan alma is she's a hyper articulate woman in her 70s looking back on her life. And she goes to London where she meets a couple of her old friends and has a meal and then travels to the house of a collector, an obsessive collector who has basically gathered an archive. She got rid of all her, she lives in a small cottage in a small coastal village adele i wonder if you've got something that you could we've set up so people understand what the what the premise of the book is have you got something you could read that might give us an idea of how gordon then tries to carry that into prose i'm going to read

a small uh section from the opening page of the book and I think it actually tells us quite a lot about Byrne's descriptive observational style of prose. He uses litany quite a lot throughout the book and I think that's one of his great skills, actually, being able to do that in a compelling way. So I have chosen a particularly visceral section. So I will give it a go. I can't do it in Alma Cogan voice, I'm afraid. I can hear a giggle in your voice. You're going to have to forgive me.

I think the giggle, without giving too much away about the novel, the giggle has gone by the time she's narrating this book. So here she is actually describing her fans. And of course, this is a book about celebrity and fame. So I will begin. The women pressed close, smelling of dandruff, candlewick, camphor and powdered milk, thinly disguised by a top note, as the perfume manufacturers put it, of evening in Paris or Coty, Leomont or some other cheerful, rapidly evaporating technical astink from Woolworths.

cheerful rapidly evaporating technical a stink from Woolworths. Despite the fact that they were wearing their best clothes the men gave off stomach heaving waves of dog and diesel, boot dubbing, battery fluid, pigeon feed, dried cuttlefish, cooked breakfasts, rough tobacco, week-old hair oil, and belched-back beer. They were odours that I unwillingly but instinctively associated with scenes of domestic mayhem. Children scalded, wives abused, small dogs dropped from high windows. And of the time when the scraps of paper, being so urgently thrust forward for my signature, would be found curled up in the back of some sideboard drawer or dust-lined wallet. I can remember, I remember, I started as a bookseller in December 1990 and I remember sitting in the tea room at Waterstones in Brighton and reading the publisher's catalogue for basically the first time ever and seeing this book described

and a proof copy had arrived at the shop. A proof copy is when they send them to booksellers and journalists early to attract interest. And Adele, I can remember the bit you've just read. I remember reading it on my tea break. You know, that terrible, grubby,ubby seedy thing and after that first paragraph thinking i'm in you know that it's so wonderful that it sets the scene so perfectly in terms of both the milieu that he wants to write about and the tone of voice but again the fact that he like

he describes people as smelling as of small dogs dropped from windows. It doesn't make sense, but it does. Like Adele said, it's a litany of details. And I think the entire book is an accumulation of details and observations and ephemera and artefacts and memories. I think John was almost generous in describing the plot because there isn't really a plot at all, is there? And there isn't really any characters

as such. But they're kind of ghostly figures. In particular, one who I'm sure we'll get to, who appears at the end of the book. But it's a book that every time I read it, I get a bit more from it each time.

But primarily it seems to be about fame and celebrity, which is something that Byrne was actually ahead of his time in discussing, really, because celebrity now is a word that has come to take on no meaning at all, really. And I think he was fascinated with the idea of fame. I mean, it's described on the edition I've got is the American edition, and it's described as a dream memoir, but I would describe it more as a nightmare biography or a haunted portrait, perhaps.

Yeah, I think the obsession with celebrity, which he wrote brilliantly about, the celebrity on one hand of famous sports people, one of his early books was brilliant, inserted himself into the world of professional snooker, a book called Pocket Money, but also of people who commit crimes. He famously, obviously, wrote the definitive book on Peter Sutcliffe.

And again, Happy Like Murderers on the West. Really, really difficult books to read but brilliant because of the way that he he did his research he was interested in the fact that he says something about celebrity which i think is quite he says celebrity is a thin weightless thing and mostly exists as a series of electronically generated pulses and pixels often it is literally without foundation or substance it is an inevitable fallout of the galloping and still ongoing process which has seen the electronic society of the image the daily bath we all take in the media replace the real community of the crowd and this idea of of community he said you know communities where nobody used the word

community but everybody was part of one the kind of it's it's more than just the north south divide it's about a moment in history i think where things change and that that you know from alma cogan to the beatles and you know we'll talk about about about some of his other books in that connection he strikes i've read this book again this week. I hadn't read it. So it's the first time I've read it since 1991. So I was 23 when I read it. I'm 49 now.

So a significant gap of time and life have occurred to me in the intervening period. Exactly the same for me. I was also a bookseller. I also read it. And weirdly, I couldn't... I'm amazed how little of it I remembered. I remembered the... We'll talk well the big reveal at the end the difference is one of the

differences is because Gordon sadly is no longer with us and you can see his work as a whole yeah which you couldn't then it struck me coming back to it and having read some of his other books in the interim. He was a journalist whose work in both fiction and non-fiction and sort of sliding backwards and forwards between the two, journalism is often his subject. The relation of journalism and the things that journalists, British journalism is obsessed with. Celebrity, true crime, sport, news. And then into that pot you also focus it strikes me ben something you've written about he is there's two other things going on and they are art because

he was a brilliant writer about art and knew a great deal about art and the north yeah he's a great as you said northern writer so you've got this interesting stew of all these things that you tend to find in various mixtures in each of his books whether it's a novel or whether it's non-fiction or whether it's something in between yeah and i think some of it predates the sort of current obsession that we have now with particularly with fame and celebrity um there's he has a there's a great quote quote that he has Alma Cogan say very early on in the book, which applies today more than ever. She says,

to be famous is to be alone but without feeling lonely. And I think that's what a lot of, you know, the big brother era of celebrity, I think that's what a lot of people crave. They want the adoration of fame and celebrity so that they feel less alone. And I mark that passage too because it of people crave. They want the adoration of fame and celebrity so that they feel less alone. And I mark that passage too, because it always reminds me of one of the bits of the Beatles anthology that stuck in my mind. I can't remember which one it is.

They would be booked into the whole floor of a hotel when they were touring. And they'd always end up in one or other of the bathrooms, laughing and drinking. bathrooms you know laughing and drinking and it's just that sort of weird sense of of you know the idea that you know four friends would want to have this vast kind of space to themselves it's completely misunderstood the the notion but that thing of being being a fame being alone but not being uh lonely it's really it's key to this book i I think. Adele, did you think that... How do you feel the book stands up as a book about celebrity written before the internet? Well, Michael Herr describes it as a ruthless antidote to nostalgia.

And I think that's right, because there is always this kind of worry when writing about the past that we try and look at it through the rose-tinted glasses and see it in a different way she is kind of aware of her own celebrity and fame but she's walked away from it and she's now living in when she is speaking in the book she's reflecting upon it and trying to piece together her past as a celebrity so she's living quite an isolated existence she's living in a cottage surrounded by other people's things and it's it's quite strange like how has she ended up there what happened to her did she lose all of her money it leaves you

with all of these questions about this character of alma cogan but then there are sections in the book where she is almost it's quite clever and i kind of describe it as a russian doll effect so she goes to the tate gallery and she looks at the portrait that Peter Blake has made of her and there is a catalogue an official it looks like an official Tate catalogue listing of the Peter Blake Alma Cogan portrait and he's written it in a style that is you you would not you would think that that actually existed but it's a fiction but that is a biography within a memoir because it's kind of a fictional memoir really Alma Cogan so it's really clever how he does it well we've got a clip here of Gordon talking about why he wanted to write about Alma

Cogan specifically and what Alma Cogan represented to him in terms of the subjects that he returned to write about. So if we could hear that now. Popular culture, as we now know it, but we didn't know it 35 years ago, is newness, sexiness, newness. The two are interchangeable. So television coming into people's homes and British post-war homes obviously was the most exciting thing that happened probably since the war and in a way it seemed like her life her only life was in front of a theater audience or a television camera and in a way when her celebrity was taken away from her in the early 60s after the beatles and the

local stuff all happened she almost stopped living in a fairly kind of essential way. Something about her life had kind of seeped out of her. And that being robbed of a television camera and being robbed of large audiences somehow robbed her of a part of herself that she felt she needed to go on existing as this media person. You know, and she died when she was very young, 34. People feel that their own small lives are in some way compensated for by these large lives. That's the role that celebrities play in post-war life. So he actually met Alma Cogan.

And when Gordon was a teenager, he was an autograph hunter, which is not surprising, really. Brilliant. I didn't know that. And he met her in Newcastle off the train, and he carried her suitcase to the hotel, and he must have only been 14 or 15, so that's where his kind of obsession with Alma began. Oh, my... That is amazing. I didn't know that.

That's mind-blowing. The reason why that's mind-blowing is that... It's really good to hear, though, because you couldn't write about the obsessive details of fan behaviour. Well, he never mentioned that in any of the... as far as I can tell, in any of the press. I want to... sorry, everybody. Spoilers, to some extent. In the final chapter of Alma Cogan, I this last night and I was scratching my head I couldn't I couldn't make head nor tail of it without giving too much away there's a scene at the end of the book where the narrator who we assume is Alma is driven up onto Saddleworth

Moor and buries a couple of mementos on the moor. And the last lines of the book are, I cut a small grave for the door plaque with the words Alma's Room and the crinoline lady that I am carrying in my pocket. I will pack the peat around it with my fingers and close the lid of turf and make certain before I leave it that the moor has been put back in its original state. And I read that and I thought, why would Alma Cogan do that? And then I thought, well, Alma Cogan wouldn't do that, but Gordon Byrne would do that.

And the last chapter, it suddenly occurred to me, I had this little revelation of thinking, he's done a brilliantly Gordon Byrne-ish thing without telling you that I who has been Alma Cogan for the majority of the book has switched in the final chapter being I Gordon Burn so what you've just told me well there's more that that you can Adele can share but perhaps about the hair yeah well Gordon had really like a strange hairdo so he was bald but he had like this skullet thing going on where it was like really long at the back should we quote should we explain what a skullet is for anyone yeah well a skullet is a mullet but the skull show yeah it's it's a sort of like well I don't know medieval executioner haircut from uh haircut. And that was his look when he was writing Alma. And apparently he grew his hair out

because he was channeling Alma's hair. And he used to comb it out and comb it out in the morning. And that was the look for writing the book. But there's a piece at the time, for his second book the guardian did a big profile and they describe him turning up for the interview and he's wearing um sort of beige trousers which look they described as being looking as if he'd made them himself and and he'd grown his skull out into kind of oily ringlets and this was for the and this is a guy

with a very keen artistic eye turned up and i think maybe slippers or something or some slip awful slip on shoes and this is for a couple of carrier bags carrier bags full of booze yeah and and this is a journalist who's turning up for his probably his first major profile um so i think that just sort of shed some light i mean maybe he was doing a kind of stars in their eyes alma cogan in the entire book was as you said andy channeling well i was just gonna say he was the thing i i met gordon i mean several times and i always liked him but i liked him because he was completely uncompromising and you never quite knew what you were going to get

from him he could be incredibly friendly or he could be fantastically blunt. I mean, a couple of things he said to me were kind of blood-curdlingly to the point. You can't really. No, I can't really, no. Excellent. Press your red button now. In the bar afterwards. The thing is, for a lot of people, I think, for anybody who had any background in the North,

he had this talismanic quality, because he wrote, when he wrote the Sutcliffe book, I mean, he lived for three years, and he went out drinking with Sutcliffe's brothers most evenings. I mean, the degree of immersion that he got into to write that book, which is still... It's called Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son.

And it puts him on the map as a... I mean, it's still a classic in its own right. It's impeccably written. I just kind of think it's one of the definitive books on Sutcliffe. I've read many of them. I still go back to Gordon Byrne. I think he nails West Yorkshire and the community and the culture and the life that Sutcliffe had the family life that

he had because Gordon Byrne kind of understood that world he he was accepted in Bingley he wasn't seen as an outsider whilst he was living there he wasn't I don't think it to the Sutcliffe family he was a writer or journalist poking about. He was a guy who was drinking with them, who was probably going to write something. You know, that's how embedded he was. Yeah, completely. And I would say the same about the Fred and Rose West book, Happy Like Murderers, which I've read twice, and it's a punishment of a book. But I mean that in the best possible way, because I think it's the best crime book I've ever read.

He felt he'd been chosen. You know know there was nobody else who could write it but he he i remember him he said to me you know i i wish i hadn't had to go there really but he i mean i think the idea of being haunted that you talk about he's he felt haunted by the stuff that he had to look at for that book yeah it affected him so we've been told yeah i mean what nightmares which kind of and and the kind of psychic punishment that you go through as a writer to have to write that kind of book the material he went to the west trial and it you just wonder kind of what he had to take on in order to write well it was while he was covering the west trial that he wrote his second novel, Full of Love. You can tell.

Partly as a way of just offloading some of the trauma of sitting there listening. And it's probably no coincidence that that book is ostensibly about the disintegration of a kind of middle-aged journalist who's falling apart. Partly about, you know, I imagine there's a lot of him in there

or his career on a slightly different path i just want to um go back to to alma cogan for a minute what i'm going to say two things about reading the book again and one of them i'm going to slightly play devil's advocate is when i was reading the first half of the book again somebody on twitter who i think may be here today had said when i when i'd revealed that we were doing this book they said oh yeah yeah i like that book i had no problem with alma cogan uh still being alive what i couldn't understand was why she talked like don delillo and right and so the first half of the book i was reading it thinking oh that's a heavy burden to bear it there is some evidence of delillo in the prose right because in my opinion clearly gordon he's a massive i think you know what i think it is i think what is this reminding me of uh hyper articulate uh

lonely woman uh looking back and trying to make sense of a life that has been disappointing to her yes it's anita brookner it's anita brookner that i'm suddenly failing but through through a strange delilo kind of you know filter but you've managed half a podcast without mentioning anita i did i suddenly thought you meant alma kogan not me for the record alma kogan is a brookner heroine i'm sorry but but what i was going to say was i i my memory of reading the book in 1991 was that when it came to the last 50 pages of the book, and we're slightly skirting around what happens in the last 50 pages of the book. We should talk about that. It was the last 50 pages that I remembered as the whole book.

And so any reservations that I had about the voice early on kind of get left behind in that final fugue of 50, 60 pages. Particularly, and this is relevant to the second thing I want to say, John, you mentioned there's a character called Francis McLaren who is a collector of Alma Cogan memorabilia. And towards the end of the book, Alma goes and stays in his house in one of the most unpleasant and creepy scenes imaginable. Okay. Very awkward. Aw awkward awkward but brilliant so brilliant when al mccogan was published in hardback as authors do gordon did several events to promote it one of which was at waterstones in charing cross road don't look for it it isn't there anymore

i remember coming up from brighton and i went specifically because I love the book so much two waterstones in Charing Cross Road to see Gordon read from it and talk about it and when he came out onto the like the little stage where we are now or the equivalent thereof you could see him look in the audience and mutter something to the chair and and shake his head slightly anyway so Gordon reads from the book he answers questions from the chair. And then the chair says, and now it's time for questions from the audience. And a man immediately puts his hand up in the front row and says, Gordon, I'd like to ask you why you came to my house to look at my Alma Cogan memorabilia and then you put me in your novel.

Oh, my God. And Gordon went, well well it's a character you know it's not really and you were so helpful to me and then i saw gordon in the pub afterwards that's not what he was saying in the pub afterwards that's all i'm gonna say but but he skirted very close in his books as a journalist would and this is one of the things i want to talk to you about then as a journalist would in terms of his relationship with characters who he then fictionalised or didn't fictionalise. Yeah, I think Gordon Byrne showed that you can merge the two.

I mean, again, perhaps he was ahead of his time because there's so much discussion now about truth in journalism and factual accuracy. And I believe it's all storytelling. Journalism is storytelling and so is fiction. And I think you can use fiction to tell... I mean, this is probably better than any biography you would read about Alma Cogan. Because... It caused huge...

It's probably quite factually accurate. Alma Cogan's sister is extremely kind of upset by it the problem is that yeah if you adopt the approach that he that he did they're often victims I guess or people who maybe don't appreciate the artistic intent the I mean there's no point in getting around the the central The central kind of collision in the book is that, the reveal is that when Ian Brady and Myra Henley were torturing Lesley-Anne Downey, the song that was playing in the background was Alma Cogan singing The Little Drummer Boy.

But actually it wasn't. It wasn't. It was the Ray Conniff singers. It was the Ray Conniff singers. Because I had to check. That's right. And that's in the book as well. Yeah. Because I had to check. That's right. And that's in the book as well. Yeah.

But she had to check. The character in the book. The quest is to find that out. And obviously, so what he's doing is he, Gordon's bringing together the two things that really interest him, celebrity and the celebrity of famous people and the seedy underbelly.

I mean, the book is... The point is, it's not that things all went to hell and a handcart in the 60s. It's that in the 50s, although it looked like the girl with the giggle and the voice, but the terrible scenes of sort of sex on buses and that kind of 1950s TV entertainment was every bit, possibly even more seedy and degenerate

than anything that came after it. And it's just that she can't make the transition. She is a sort of a fictional character, because she is a fictional character, you know, being sort of consumed by the audiences. So bringing that together is what gives the book its kind of power, and it's no doubt what, you know, that's why the original cover, which has got a picture of Alma Cogan and the iconic picture of uh myra hindley

and that i read it you have a theory about um alma and myra yeah he used them the thing that i take from the book is that really it's about two sides of one woman uh you know the yin and yang of the human personality or female personality. So you've got someone who's very outwardly very wholesome and represents the good times of post-war Britain. And then you've got a woman who tortured and murdered children. And they've both got powerful haircuts. They've got strong eye makeup. They're both icons of their time.

But they both seem to me to represent the kind of two sides of one one coin one represented innocence uh hope in the future and myra hindley as most people would probably admit sort of represented the death of something in britain not just the literal death but the death of innocence you know she in the same way that peter sutcliffe has totally cast a shadow across yorkshire and the north the moose murderers killed something in the psyche of the north of england gordon the famous quote from gordon is almost everything i have written has been a bit about celebrity and how for most people celebrity is a kind of death yeah and i mean the thing is we were talking about this

there is no way i suspect that a book would come out with this cover now and yet the thing is, we were talking about this. There is no way, I suspect, that a book would come out with this cover now. And yet the cover is so good for telling you what the book is about. The book is about how if you achieve a certain kind of notoriety, fame, celebrity, all different slightly nuanced things, that plus the passage of time means your actual deeds will be forgotten and you come to represent as the pictures on this cover show are almost warhol like flash frozen moments and actually who is the most famous of the two women on that cover is it alma cogan or is it myra hindley and that probably tells us something about who we are and how history records absolutely

you know the the perpetrators of crimes there's something he said about novelists he wrote an another novel which where he we're talking about news and journalism where he wrote the news as a novel which is I can't remember was the year 2007 born yesterday which he talked to born yesterday which is again another another really original book. But in that book, he writes about Gordon Brown, for example. He writes about the McCanns. Anyway, this is what he said about novelists. Novelists, he says, the lucky ones, have the time and are or should be unaligned.

They are able to make connections between the visible and the invisible world that maybe aren't immediately apparent. How the sight of a prime minister so clearly uncomfortable in his own skin or the rolling story of two middle-class parents who've been named official suspects in the disappearance of their daughter can breed a wider underlying unease which finds its way into the dream life of those of us on the ground and that just seemed to me that idea of this seeping into our dream life yes it's sort of what great fiction does do to us and i think i'm not sure whether alma kogan is his best book and i'm not sure whether even you might say it's a it's it's a success on

all for all the things you said but it is it's like nothing else i think that's the thing when you reread gordon but burn i also think there's a really strong poetic element to this novel and there are lines on every page that are golden they just jump out at you there was one in particular that i wanted to read one short paragraph um and it's just a description of hands, and he does it so well. My hands, as it happens, are the part of me that has altered most. From being porky soft and mottled, they have turned spartan and squared off, like the hands of market traders and old landladies that I admired. Women who thought nothing of going into a chicken up to the elbow to haul

out the giblets or into a stock lavatory to the shoulder, who unflinchingly saw to the corpses of family and neighbours and rose well before anybody else in the house to lay fires on chilly misty mornings. Brilliant. We would like to mention briefly, John, wouldn't we, that we both recently read, I read last week, a book called, one of Gordon's other books called Best and Edwards,

which is a book about football, about fame, celebrity, all those things. John, we were talking about it last night, you made such a good point about it. I mean, dislike sport very much and i i i dislike books about sport very much and you don't have to like sport oh it's such a wonderful book um but you were making the point about it it's almost like he wrote it 15 years after he wrote alma kogan and it's almost like the themes of alma kogan revisited with the benefit of hindsight the great duncan edwards

uh who would have gone on to captain england would have would have been died in munich and he represents a kind of uh in a way that sort of community culture football before before the money happened and then george best is the kind of the he's like the sort of that he's the beginning of celebrity football culture and who famously you know know, where did it all go wrong? I mean, drinks himself into an early grave. And the book is brilliant meditation, I think, on exactly the same themes as Alma Cogan. Where Edwards represents Alma Cogan al mccogan best represents

yeah the 60s and the beatles it's the same it is basically the same the same passage and and of course what he does like like hindley and thing on the cover he just makes that juxtaposition really wonderful it's a brilliant book as is al mccogan and i think had he had he you know was he would he still be alive now? I think he would have... He'd have written a book about Jade Goody. Well, yeah, he was fascinated with Jade Goody. Because he was obsessed by her.

And he had all of her books, he has them. I mean, do you think... I mean, I feel strongly that he's a massive loss, that he would have gone on to write other, maybe even better things. Yeah, I mean, we never met him, we never knew him. We've kind of got this odd position in that because I won the first Gordon Byrne Prize, the actual prize was getting to go and temporarily live

in his country cottage in the borders in Scotland. His partner Carol sort of... Yeah, they're very generously set up a trust and damien hurst is involved and you know they want to encourage writers and artists and they often choose people like us who have no money and very little profile and you go and stay amongst gordon's stuff just like in alma kogan where she goes and lives in somebody else's house, surrounded by their things, you go and are surrounded by Gordon's things. It's literally notebooks and post-it notes. We've literally slept in his bed. My last three novels have been edited at his desk.

This is in no way unsettling. It's so Gordon Byrne it's brilliant well it's yeah so I re-read Alma Cogan this week and thought well I've kind of lived that but without the horrific ending and without the Myra Hindley connection

but in terms of being surrounded by someone's life someone who I didn't know but I admire and have sort of felt haunted by

but you can be haunted in a good way can't you you can be aware of her presence and inspired by it rather than creeped out

but we know him through his words and through his book collection. So obviously, if you pull out books from his shelves, like An English Journey is full of his post-it notes for the North of England Home Service where he was making notes. So he's left you his post-it notes in the books, which is so interesting. It's both interesting and perfect. There's a book to be written about it, doesn't there? We've got to stop.

Thanks to Ben Myers, to Adele Stripe, to our producer Matt Hall, to the Gala Theatre in Durham and the Durham Book Festival. Thanks once again to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts if you prefer to listen to it

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