If I were to say that Cathi Unsworth sure gets about a bit, would
you think I was insinuating she’s a slut? Because that wouldn’t be my
intended meaning at all. She has, however, written for a slew of famous
publications here in the UK, including Sounds, Melody Maker, Bizarre and Dazed & Confused, before moving from journalism into fiction.
Since then she’s published two novels; The Not Knowing in 2005, and The Singer,
which was released last year on Serpent’s Tail. And maybe because she’s
been on the other side of the entire process so often in her music
journalism days, she knows how to give a good interview. Even her
emails are garrulous and charismatic, with a veritable bounty of
trivia, word play and warmth.
She’s not been in the media much since the rave reviews that greeted
The Singer, which was labelled “the great punk novel,” by novelist
David Peace, and “a heartbreaking elegy for the blank generation,” by
author Jake Arnott. A lot of high praise to live up to.
So, why she’s been so quiet of late?
"I am just coming to the end of a new novel I have been working on for 18 months. It’s called Bad Penny Blues,
after the Humphrey Lyttleton single that was engineered by Joe Meek.
It’s set in the late fifties and early sixties in Ladbroke Grove and
Soho, which allowed me to dig into a lot of local history from a
particularly fertile time, when so many strange paths crossed.”
And what’s it all about, then?
“What started me off was finding out that when he worked at
Lansdowne Studios, Joe Meek lived on Arundel Gardens, where I used to
rent the basement flat. It was in that flat that he did the séance in
which he was given the date of Buddy Holly’s death. I was reading a
book about the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders of prostitutes who
lived and worked around Ladbroke Grove, and the first victim was last
seen in June 1959 on the corner of Holland Park Avenue and Lansdowne
Road, directly opposite where Joe would have been working through the
night on his secret I Hear A New World album."
"That was more than enough to start me off. Then a friend gave me a
book about the pop artist Pauline Boty, a contemporary of Peter Blake
and Derek Boshier, who studied at the Royal College of Art in 1959 and
lived in the next road to where I do now. Someone else gave me a book
about Tanky Challenor, the cross-dressing Detective Sergeant who
inspired Joe Orton’s Inspector Truscott in Loot; the supposed the
scourge of Soho who was fitting people up left, right and centre."
"All
of these things and many others fed into a parallel universe of
Ladbroke Grove and Soho in which my story developed. It has been a very
long, strange trip going back to a time that I never lived through, but
I have had so much help along the way from unexpected sources,
unearthed so many coincidences and parallels that I never knew existed,
that I feel I am on the right leyline.”
But all of this seems a world away from Cathi’s previous
incarnation working on magazines such as Sounds. What are her memories
of those times?
“I loved writing for Sounds, which was my first writing job, and Bizarre,
because on both of those publications I was surrounded by brilliant
people who had real love for what they were doing and that between us
we created something pretty unique and well worth doing. I met and
interviewed some amazing people through all the magazines I’ve ever
worked for, some of whom have become lasting friends and sources of
much inspiration. When a magazine is going really well, it’s like being
part of some kind of fabulous Addams Family who keep you safe from the
deathly miasmas of the commonplace!”
I’m green with envy at this romantic description. But if it was so wonderful, then why move away from that world?
“When my last Addams Family at Bizarre was dissolved, after the magazine was
bought from John Brown Publishing by
the erroneously named I Feel Good, it became clear I was not going to
be able to keep both my job and my integrity. Sounds was bought out and closed down, Bizarre
was taken over by people who didn’t have the first clue what it was
supposed to be about. There is only so much of your heart, soul and
brain cells you can pour into a magazine that you don’t own and have no
control over. I decided that enough was enough; I would have to use
everything I had learned in life to write a novel, as at least I
couldn’t sack myself or make myself redundant halfway through. I didn’t
have a deal or anything; just had a load of words and rage inside me,
which became The Not Knowing.”
Her advice for other aspiring writers is straightforward and succinct:
“You have to be very, very patient and work extraordinarily hard – book
publishing is a painfully slow-moving and low-paying racket.”
And, much as she says she wouldn’t advise doing the same, Cathi’s
descriptions of her methods when writing show she’s kept an essential
enthusiasm for the creative process: “Most people like to do their
research and work out their plot outline before they start writing. I
do my research as I go along, cramming in anything and everything
relevant that I can, and I never know what the story is going to do.
This can be hairy, but I don’t see the point of it otherwise: why take
the journey if you’re not going to discover anything on the way? Most
of the time I am fumbling around in the dark, trying to corral the
chaos into order – and crime fiction is very good for giving you the
discipline of a tight plot to adhere to. But you can’t work out
everything in advance. Otherwise, how can anything magical appear?”
Indeed.