This is taken from my book, GEORGE A ROMERO ON SCREEN, which features lots of cool interviews with Romero collaborators and reviews of each movie.

SEASON OF THE WITCH...
​
In the supposed "lost era" of Romero's career, in between the releases of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, the man most know as the King of the Zombies made some pretty interesting films to say the least. These movies were varied, colourful, bold and daring, and unfortunately none of them have got even half of the credit they deserve. Season of the Witch was another low budget flick, this one released in 1973, and it's also gone out under the titles Hungry Wives and Jack's Wife. Season of the Witch though, you have to admit, is a much more eye catching title.
   "There's Always Vanilla and Jack's Wife were seen by very few people," Romero said in one recent interview, "and I am not sure what my fans today would make of them. Maybe they'll see a little bit of my style, maybe they'll see a little bit of my head in there. There is always something instinctive. You can look at an artist's work and you can maybe see a little something there."
   Romero had a point. Season of the Witch (the title I am going to refer to this film by) may not seem totally typical a subject matter for Romero, our zombie godfather, but there is much more to him than the stumbling undead. He is a masterful director in the truest sense and his movies are never thrown together in the slightest. If you compare his Dead movies to straight to video or B movie zombie flicks of the 80s and 90s, the comparisons are non existent. He never liked zombies for zombies sake, they were always a tool for metaphors and subtext. But when you think of the camera angles, the way he gets you inside the story, in the depth of the characters' desperate situations, he is a few miles above even the most notable horror filmmakers. He establishes a mood of fear, dread and utter hopelessness, but never gets us too bogged down in the negative aspects of the dichotomies the characters are stuck in. He may use gore, but never as the premier attraction. It's usually as a way to remind you that the fear the characters are feeling is justified and they are very much in danger.
   But Season of the Witch definitely stands alone in his filmography, although stylistically it is very much a Romero movie. The direction brings to mind some of the most chilling moments of Night of the Living Dead, so even a complete zombie junkie will find something to take away from a picture such as this.
   What hinders the wide discovery of this film was its messy release. Filmed as Jack's Wife, Romero and his small reliable crew were intent on shooting a proper study of the realm of the occult with their tiny $100,000 budget. However, the film's distributor got busy with the film reels, cutting out integral scenes and putting it out into the world as a kind of soft core porno flick under the title Hungry Wives. It went out in 1973 to a mostly muted response. In fact it wasn't until he made good with Dawn of the Dead in 1978 that the film was rereleased and of course reappraised under its new title Season of the Witch. With such a muddled past, perhaps one can see why Romero never fully accepts it as a proper part of his filmography.
   The film takes place in Pittsburgh, where bored wife Joan Mitchell (played by Jan White) gets tired of her violent, sexist husband's ways. As she and her friends discover a new mysterious addition to the neighbourhood, Marion (Virginia Greenwald), Joan begins to learn about witchcraft. After a tarot reading, it is revealed that Marion is the leader of a witches' coven. When Joan grows even lonelier and more frustrated, she obtains a book about witchcraft. She puts a spell on the man who is seeing her daughter, Gregg (Raymond Laine again), so that he becomes attracted to her. In between this, Joan has consistently horrific nightmares and in the end, kills her husband, before joining Marion's coven.
    As straight forward horror, Season of the Witch is not exactly frightening. Instead, it deals with the occult in a more literal and intelligent way, and is never over the top nor totally unbelievable. Where the movie is perhaps more interesting is in its underlying subtext. Clearly, Romero  is using the witches coven as a symbolic manifestation of the women's movement, the witches being feminists rising up against their sexist and dominating males. Romero using feminism in film is nothing radical for him though; in many ways he was one of the first forward thinking, radical, casually feminist directors in the horror genre, or any genre for that matter.
   Romero's feminist leanings didn't begin right away in his first film though, at least not by his own choice. Like his openness to casting black lead actors, his knack of writing strong female characters developed over time. In Night of the Living Dead, Barbra is little more than a catatonic cardboard cut out, as much a zombie as the creeping flesh eaters outside the barn. She's the quintessential horror film chick, running and screaming from the creatures, then being no use to herself or anyone through most of the picture. Gaylen Ross's character in Dawn of the Dead however, as pregnant and morning sick as she is throughout, is not a screamer, nor a hopeless fleer of the dead. Even if it's only due to the fact that Gaylen refused to scream as the script wished her to, she was a step towards Sigourney Weaver in Alien territory. Season of the Witch then, put out before Dawn to little fan fair, was more direct in its revolutionary approach, how conscious or unconscious it all was.
   The AV Club saw it as a long lost cousin to Ang Lee's acclaimed movie The Ice Storm, in as much that both films, in very different ways, reflect a changing time in early 70s suburbia, exploring the forbidden and the mysterious goings on in what appears to be the average neighbourhood. I would liken it to the 1985 Madonna hit Desperately Seeking Susan, which of course seems to be a very odd comparison on the surface. Yet in that film, Rosanna Arquette plays an upper middle class housewife, bored of her marriage to a wealthy business man. Her friends might envy her for all the shallow materialism of her life, but she is trapped and seeks escapism. Whereas Arquette's character chooses to follow the exotic life of wild child Susan (Madonna), whose adventures she follows in the local paper, Joan Mitchell the hungry wife turns to the liberating power of witchcraft. So is this horror? Is this a film of witchcraft and the occult? Yes and no. Again, Romero is simply using the horror template to explore something with more depth. Whereas he seemed a little lost in the midst of There's Always Vanilla - a film much closer to Brian De Palma's early New York art house pictures (Hi Mom and Greetings, both starring a young Robert De Niro) than anything Romeroesque - Season of the Witch feels like a Romero film, and he is very much in his own territory.
   Although the original cut is not in existence (despite the odd deleted scene popping up here and there), the currently available version of the film is the closest we will get to Romero's vision. There are some undeniably good scenes, up there with George's finest cinematic stand outs. The mood he sets in the scene when Joan hears her daughter having an orgasm during the storm is utterly uncomfortable and powerful, especially when you consider the fact she is actually semi-masturbating to the sound of her daughter making love. But it's the shadows that cast and the imposing statues in close up which make the scene truly unforgettable. She is the ultimate bored housewife, reduced to getting off on her own daughter getting her rocks off. Again, as in Night of the Living Dead, Romero blows apart the established standard dynamic of the family household; disturbing and delighting in equal measure.
   "There’s only one that I would like to remake which is actually the third film that I made, called Season of the Witch," Romero told Cinema Blend, "and I didn’t have enough money to do it well and I think that I could really do a good job with it today. I’ve sort of been noodling on an updated script for it, but it’s the only one that I would even think about remaking. Most of my stuff was sort of of-the-time."

Q AND A WITH JOEDDA McCLAIN
(STAR OF SEASON OF THE WITCH)
 
How did you end up getting the part in Romero's Season of the Witch?
 
I was 21, working as a model , doing commercials and voice over work in Pittsburgh. Pa. My agent told me about the casting call. There were a lot of girls, I was shocked when I got the part. At that point in George's career Living Dead was not a cult film yet. He was not being viewed as a serious filmmaker. When I first met him I thought he was very cool and funny. At the interview there was a lot of joking and banter. 
 
Do you remember the first day on set?
 
I was a nervous wreck the 1st day. The 2 leads were N Y actors. I was very anxious about my inexperience. Everyone was very professional . That was a crazy time, I expected to have some confrontations about sexual advances That was pretty standard at the time. Nothing like that happened. It was a FIRST!!  I was really happy working with the whole cast.
 
What was he like to work with?
 
George definitely had a vision; he could see the film in his mind. We worked long days, he was very interesting and present.
 
Did you like the film when you saw it?
 
I was definitely disappointed with the finished product. I think George wanted the film to be dark, a twisted look at current lifestyles. A lot was left on the cutting room floor. I doubt any of us felt it looked like we were expecting. It was altogether a time of growth and expansion for me. I was very grateful for the opportunity.  I never saw George again after the screening party. When his career became such a cult following, I was happy to say I worked with him.

If you're looking for a film that's so entertaining it ought to be a crime, then The Man with the Screaming Brain (2005) is well worth seeking out, one of the funniest and most enjoyable horror comedies released in the past few decades. Written, directed by and starring the great Bruce Campbell - he of Evil Dead fame and much, much more besides - the picture features Campbell himself as an arrogant yuppie who ends up in Bulgaria on a business trip. The legendary Stacy Keach is Dr Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, a wild eyed scientist who has a plan to insert two brains into one man’s head, to see if they will operate independently from one another. A mystical gypsy hired by the mad doctor is sent out to find an extra brain, and eventually she slays a cab driver, whose brain is inserted into Campbell’s noggin. Ivan is ecstatically happy that the plan has worked, but unfortunately Campbell panics and escapes. The plot becomes more ludicrously imaginative from here on, which is really saying something.
   The story was originally written by Campbell, David Goodman and Sam Raimi, and its genesis went as far back as the mid 1980s. Twenty years on, Campbell eventually got the project together himself, though not without had work and toil. He had directed before this of course, including shorts and TV episodes, but this film proved how talented he was as a feature director. Highly creative behind and in front of the camera, as in his other cult classic My Name is Bruce (one of the most entertaining films you will ever see, in my view), Campbell proved himself to an all rounder. Here he lovingly pays homage to the B movies of Roger Corman and other filmmakers. Played with over the top yet highly controlled precision, the whole cast are splendid, especially Campbell himself as the arrogant suit turned science experiment freak. It is Keach who puts in the craziest effort, though, playing the crazy haired Bulgarian doctor to a tee.
   Asked about working on the film in one interview, Keach clearly had fond memories: “Oh, Bruce (laughing). He’s a great guy and I love working with Bruce Campbell. He was excellent as a director. I always love working with good actors who decide to try their hands at directing. Generally speaking, they’re the best because they understand the process. He knew his way around the camera and he’s a great storyteller. Bruce is an extremely talented guy and I’m so very happy for all of his success.”
   When I asked Bruce Campbell himself how he got Stacy Keach involved in the film (for a book I did on Keach's filmography), he told me, “He was suggested by my producer. I said yes, of course, because of his track record. I knew that he was a well-regarded actor for decades.” On directing Keach, Campbell said, “He was great. He was totally on board. I respected his process, so I made sure to have my shit wired as a director. I handled that by being ready as a director. I didn’t want to waste his time. He was a pro. I’m a pro. We got along because of our mutual professionalism. Stacy was a dream. Actors and directors don’t always get along, but we did via mutual respect."
   The Man with the Screaming Brain, if you don't love it already, is highly recommended essential Campbell. His huge filmography contains many gems (the Evil Dead films, Bubba Ho Tep, My Name is Bruce, and much more) and countless memorable cameos (Congo, Escape from LA, The Quick and the Dead), but for me The Man with the Screaming Brain is up there with his finest work. 

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​“IT’S SO OUT-THERE!”
JEFF BRIDGES ON STAY HUNGRY
 
Jeff Bridges is one of the most iconic American screen actors of the past fifty years. Emerging in the early 1970s in a string of pictures, including The Last Picture Show (co-produced by Bob Rafelson) and Fat City, Rafelson cast Bridges in his film adaptation of Charles Gaines’ 1972 novel, Stay Hungry. I got the chance to ask Jeff a few questions all about the making of the film and working with Bob Rafelson.
 
How did you get the part in Stay Hungry?
 
Hey Chris! Gosh! Now this is all so long ago. I’m trying to think back now… Well, it all started with The Last Picture Show, which Bob’s company produced. BBS. God, what other company is named after the people’s first names? I loved that! The Last Picture Show was one of their big productions, so Bob was aware of me from that. And it kind of fell into place. I can’t recall exactly. It must have been through my agent though. It all started with Picture Show…
 
Bob Rafelson was such a wildly creative man. Were you excited to be working with him, especially given the great films he had already been a part of?
 
Oh God yeah, of course! I remember seeing the trailer for Head and feeling knocked out, and saying, What the hell is going on? The trailer ended with them saying, You have just been given three minutes of head! I thought, This is wild. I was a big Beatles fan, so the Monkees were an Americanised version of them. And seeing The Monkees in Victor Mature’s hair! Yeah, I was excited. I mean, Five Easy Pieces, that’s when I got turned on to country music, which was a weird way. But hearing Stand By Your Man, that got me turned on to it, so did The Last Picture Show actually. But yeah, all of Bob’s movies were so intriguing and Bob was such a wild guy. And then Stay Hungry was Sally Field’s first movie. So that was good. She might have done The Flying Nun, but maybe not the more dramatic pieces. Sally was great to work with too.
What was he like as a director? Was it a fruitfully creative relationship you had with him during filming?
 
Oh, he was totally open. He was one of those guys that really encouraged input from all over the place. I just remember having a wonderful time with him, and we kind of empowered each other. I empowered him to have power over me (Laughs). He allowed me to influence his thoughts as well.
 
The film has such a varied cast - yourself, Arnold, Sally Field, Robert Englund, the body-builders, etc. The last time I did a Q and A with you, you told me a lot of your early movies were quite “out there”. Just looking at the cast there, I imagine Stay Hungry was a stimulating experience.
 
Oh my God, yes, it was stimulating. And you got to throw in the writer, Gaines. I mean, Arnold had just done Pumping Iron before that too. I loved his performance in Stay Hungry. It was a wild experience, man. One thing comes to mind, probably one of the funniest things that ever happened to me in movies. I don’t know if I can describe it properly. It was a shot of me doing an exercise called a Toe Raiser. Arnold is playing my trainer in the shot, and he was sitting on my back while I go up and down with my toes, a calf exercise. And we are talking about the girlfriend. He says, It’s OK, love has its own ways, etc. And the camera was positioned in a way so that it looked like we were having anal sex (Laughs). You know, that Arnold was giving it to me up the heiny. But none of us knew it would look like that until we saw the dailies. In the dailies it looked like my legs were his legs and his legs were my legs. Can you get the picture? I don’t think it’s in the movie but I thought it was a great way of dealing with the homosexual thing about body building. You know, you see this thing, it’s in your mind and then the illusion breaks and no, my legs are mine and his are his, and not the other way around. I don’t know if you can get that image Chris, but it was amazing seeing the dailies. In those days, dailies were a wonderful form of entertainment and celebration. All the artists and crew could get together and say, Look what we did the day before. That doesn’t happen now. It was so much fun and we’d all have dinner and watch dailies. We don’t do it now, because it’s instant and you see it on digital right away. It used to be wonderful.
 
I find that Stay Hungry is a film that often gets overlooked in Rafelson’s filmography, but it definitely has its admirers. Do people mention the film to you at all, and do you ever meet people who recall it with fondness?
 
Yeah, you’re right, very rarely. I don’t think too many people have seen it. But it’s so out-there! Such a weird thing. Body builders running through the street. RG Armstrong’s rape scene with nitrous oxide. It was such a wild, wild thing!
 
How do you look back on Bob Rafelson now? Do you think he gets the credit he deserves for the films he made and what he achieved?
 
No, I don’t think he does. I don’t think any of us get any credit for how brilliant we are in life! (Laughs) We are all so unique and special and so un-special and un-unique all at the same time. A lot of people get passed over, some people get over praised. We are all praise worthy. But Bob, man, I dug his unique quality. He excelled as a director and a producer, excelled on so many levels. Producers are so important and they can vary in their purpose. They can be a classic executive producer that just has his name on the screen for some reason, who doesn’t even do anything. But a producer who DOES do something… In my view what a real producer can do is support the director’s vision. Like on The Last Picture Show, Bob gave Peter Bogdanovich a chance to direct. He had only done Targets before that, with Boris Karloff, which was very low budget. I remember Peter calling them up, BBS, and saying, Can we have just one more day in our budget? And their response back was, I want you to take three days and do a really great job. And also, How is your weed supply? How are you holding up? They were so supportive, you’d ask for their support and they would just surpass your expectations. That was Bob’s way as a producer. And as a director, he had that same feeling. Anything is possible! What do you think? What you got Jeff, any ideas? We had a great time, man! A lot of the celebration I feel can be summed up in the dance routine at the fiddler’s party when they broke out the moonshine. I had some of that moonshine too, on the day, which I think is quite evident! But Bob was a wonderful guy to work with.
OK, is that it? All right Chris, I hope this helps out. Good luck. Toodle-oo! 

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​

The prolific writer and broadcaster talks to Chris Wade about poetry, writing, and some of his personal favourite projects.
 
Did you always want to be a writer?
 
For many years and for some unimaginable reason, I had ambitions to be an actor. A performer, anyway. My dreams seemed to be on the point of unfolding when, within weeks of arriving at university in 1960, I was invited to perform a comic turn in a university ‘smoker.’ These intimate revues were all the rage in those days following the huge success of Beyond the Fringe and I couldn’t believe my luck when I was to be invited the following summer to join a gang called the Oxford Players at the fledgling Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
   In the tiny Wilkie House Theatre we put on a musical based on The Plutus of Aristophanes, followed by a late night revue called In Revue Order, which starred many of those who would shortly become the founders of Private Eye, among them Richard Ingrams, Willy Rushton (known in those days as Bill), Andrew Osmond (the first owner) and Candida Betjeman.
   Being only at the end of my first year at university, I was unable to join them, but the taste for satire was still very much in my mouth - until I met a theatrical agent who told me I wouldn’t spend my life being permanently out of work. So in 1965 I got a job as a trainee copywriter in an advertising agency.
   As a training for a career as a professional writer, penning ads for the likes of Wills cigars, Kelloggs cornflakes, and Wilkinson Sword razors could not have been bettered. In those days, many of the London agencies employed budding novelists of the likes of William Trevor, Salman Rushdie and Fay Weldon, and within weeks of joining the London Press Exchange, I was hard at work every night on my first work of fiction - a comic novel called French Polish.
   It found favour with a top literary agent but sadly not with a publisher. However, after a few years in a variety of agencies, including J. Walter Thompson, I got a job in the advertising department of The Times and The Sunday Times and met some of the editors who were kind enough to commission me to write travel articles and light-hearted pieces about London life in the Sixties.
   Journalism has always played a big part in my professional life and most of my books, fiction and non-fiction, were written alongside articles on any number of subjects - travel, television, restaurants, property, books - for any number of newspapers and magazines. And then there was radio. In the late Sixties, through introductions by an old BBC hand, I found myself writing light-hearted contributions to a weekly radio series based on items mined from the depth of the BBC Sound Archives - a department of BBC Radio for whom I have since written any number of programmes and devised many series of my own.
   One of my favourites was Something to Declare - a variety of conversations, reminiscences and revelations with famous travellers on all manner of subjects from sailing the Atlantic and crossing the Sahara to exploring the Amazon jungle and living beneath the ice in the Arctic.
   Another series of which I was especially proud was called Plain Tales from the Rhodendrons, produced by the brilliant Alastair Wilson, in which I returned to a corner of Surrey in which I was brought up during and after the war and interviewed as many of my parents’ friends as I could find and invited them to recall life in leafy Surrey during and at the very end of the Second World War.
   It was as a result of making that programme that I decided to turn much of the material and more into a fictional diary by a 12-year old schoolboy, not unlike myself. The title is A Nightingale Sang in Fernhurst Road. It was published by John Murray in 1999, was later dramatized by BBC Radio 4, and is a book of which I am especially fond.
   But I’m getting ahead of myself...
 
Which writers and poets most inspired you when you were young?
 
The man who I always claim to be the one responsible for my being a writer - and especially a humorist - was Ronald Wright. He was the Latin master at an eccentric prep school in Surrey I attended as a day boy during the late 1940s; but it was not until a number of us were, for reasons never explained, removed to become the founding few of a brand new school not far away in Westerham, and Mr Wright decided to join us, that I got to know him well.
   As well as continuing to teach us Latin and Greek he it was who introduced us to the writers, past and present, who would generate in all of us a love of English literature. I had never met, and never would again, meet anyone with a deeper knowledge of and passion for the greatest English poets and novelists, and it was entirely thanks to him that at an early age I became a huge fan of Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, W.W.Jacobs, P.G.Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome.
   He had some old Strand magazines containing early Sherlock Holmes stories which I once read when laid low with ‘flu and was hooked for life.
   Studying Latin, Greek and Ancient History for A level at King’s, Canterbury, I was also very lucky to enjoy regular periods with S.S.Sopwith - an old boy of the school - who had been senior English master at Shrewsbury, and who introduced us to any number of writers whose names we might all too easily have missed: Spenser, Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and the wonderfully eccentric Sir Thomas Browne.
   When I was younger, like all my friends I got stuck into the likes of Arthur Ransome, Conan Doyle and John Buchan until we were overwhelmed by the countless stories, fiction and non-fiction, that came out of the Second World - The Cruel Sea, Reach for the Sky, The Wooden Horse and so on. It wasn’t until later, in my teens, that the idea that one could entertain and amuse grown-up readers about serious subjects came as quite a surprise, and for that I owe a great deal of thanks to the likes of Richard Gordon, John Mortimer and the man who wrote the best and funniest book ever about schoolmastering, Evelyn Waugh.
   I remember being introduced to Waugh by a fifteen-year-old boy who invited me round to his house to see his books. He seemed quite surprised when he pointed at his collection, in orange Penguin covers, of almost every one of Waugh’s novels, that I reacted with such obvious ignorance. Happily, I made up for in the months that followed in no uncertain terms.
 
What made you decide to write Now We Are Sixty?
 
Like so many good ideas, it came about purely by chance. John Murray had just published A Nightingale Sang in Fernhurst Road with some reasonably good reviews from Keith Waterhouse and Frank Muir, among others, and my editor asked if I had any other ideas for a follow-up. For some reason, I found myself telling him that I had once written a book called How to Survive Middle Age which had done quite well, adding that perhaps I should consider writing a follow-up. How I survived middle age and how I’m feeling now: that sort of thing.. We could call it something like Now We Are Sixty, I said.
   He seemed quite interested and asked what sort of book I had in mind. A sort of confessional perhaps? A diary? A sort of male Bridget Jones, perhaps? I confessed I hadn’t the faintest idea and on that disappointing note, I left the building.
   It was Alan Coren who came up with the answer.
   ‘Well,’ he said, 'you’ve nicked Milne’s title, so you might as well nick his poem.' He was, and always had been, a very good editor. And one of my closest friends.
 
Who has been your favourite collaborator?
 
Life is so much to do with luck and, looking back, I can’t believe how lucky I have been to work with so many extraordinary people, beginning in 1981 when Benny Green and I were asked by Colin Webb of Pavilion Books to compile an annotated edition of Three Men in a Boat.
   A great jazz musician and hugely well-read, Benny chose to concentrate largely on the social and historical background to the journey, while I explained the countless references to the dozens of locations, whether historical, or geographical, or purely eccentric, that distracted the attention of the three men from the daily routine of rowing, mooring, negotiating the many locks, and not bumping into the countless numbers of fellow oarsmen for whom a week or more on the Thames was the perfect antidote to the daily grind of office life in the city.
   Happily, our collaboration extended to a fortnight on the river with our friend and part-owner of Pavilion Books, Tim Rice, when the BBC, with Richard Denton at the production helm, filmed the three of us as we battled our way from Kingston to Oxford in a wooden camping skiff - exactly like the one the three men would have hired.
   I say ‘happily’, though Benny was extremely dubious about the whole project from the word go, partly because he had no intention of sleeping on the boat - or even pretending to - which Tim and I did, but mainly because he had never learnt to swim.
He also hadn’t the faintest idea how to row.
   However, being a pro, he finally agreed to lay his doubts and fears to one side, joined the boat at Maidenhead, proved that he was an even worse oarsman than we could have imagined, and quickly became a key member of the crew alongside Tim’s beloved boxer, Bonzo.
My next collaborator in 2003 was Alan Coren. The idea for Freedom Pass occurred to one of us (we could never remember which) during one of our many lunches upstairs at The Queen’s at Primrose Hill. We were discussing entitlement and how we both felt when we walked into the chemist to claim our first free prescription.
   For Alan it was not a moment to savour - not because he didn’t think he deserved it, but because it was the first time he’d declared himself in public to be old. Well, sixty anyway. Indeed, for some time he went on paying, as usual. I seem to remember confessing that I was far less self-conscious and quoted Othello’s line about having done the state some service, and wanted to know if he felt the same way about travelling free on London Transport.
   It was shortly after that that we found ourselves wondering why we confined our conversations, memories, apercus to the bar at The Queen’s when we could do the very same thing while travelling around London on public transport - visiting old haunts, solving long-held mysteries, getting lost, entertaining ourselves alongside anyone who happened to turn on their radios. And all for free.
   And so it was that we travelled to Enfield in search of a shop that sold tortoises, to Dulwich to see the house where I was born, to Greenwich to re-live Alan’s memories of being rowed down the Thames dressed as George 111, to Highgate because we happened to see a bus going there, and to the Aviary in London Zoo to see if a bird I had once sponsored was still alive. We even went to Southend where Alan used to be taken on holiday as a child and at fish and chips on the longest pier in Britain.
   As a travelling companion and programme collaborator, Alan, was an unending joy - until he died (he did apologise first), whereupon Des Lynam volunteered to take his place in a series called Touchline Tales in which we visited a variety of small, local sporting events. We went to a gymkhana in Sussex; a golf day at Blackheath; a rugger match at Rugby school; and a fishing competition under the White Cliffs of Dover.
   Des’s dry humour (often at my expense) was huge entertaining, the only drawback being that wherever we went, people wanted to come up and talk with him while I stood nearby with a silly smile on my face. By the time he called it a day, I had acquired some idea of what it must have been like to have been Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting.
   Sadly I was able to do only one Freedom Pass-type programme with Terry Waite when we travelled by bus to St Paul’s, where we visited the crypt and the Chapel of the Order of the British Empire of which he is a member, before moving gently down the Strand and Whitehall to Lambeth Palace where he once worked for Archbishop Runcie. His stories about his years of imprisonment in Beirut were, and are, unforgettable.
 Finally, between 2013 and 2017, I made a series of delightful programmes with another old friend, Martin Jarvis, during which we traced our lives from our childhoods in South London and Surrey (Grey Shorts and Sandals), via our early efforts (Setting Out) and eventual successes (Hanging In) to our impending dotage (Grey Hairs and Bus Passes) which we recorded on the Royal Hospital, Chelsea.
Given the above cast, how could I possibly pick a winner?
 
What do you think about the state of modern poetry?
 
I’m still hard at work trying to decipher The Wasteland - and have been since it was introduced to the Classical Sixth by Mr Sopwith in 1956.
 
What are your personal favourites from each area of endeavour?

As far as fiction goes, I have always had a soft spot for A Nightingale Sang in Fernhurst Road; and given that it is my only genuine best seller, Now We are Sixty has to be my poetic Top of the Pops. As for my forays into the world of broadcasting, I never had more fun than I did with Alan in Freedom Pass. Some have gone so far as to suggest that it set in motion a trend for programmes, in radio and on television, comprising two friends out on the loose, doing what they like doing best and exchanging occasional words of wisdom amid the jokes.
 
christophermatthew.co.uk

Here's one from the Hound Dawg archives, a 2013 interview with 60s icon DONOVAN. It features in HOUND DAWG Issue 21 and focused on Donovan's rich back catalogue. 

​You can read it below....

Hi Don. The new release is the Sensual Donovan. Could you tell us a little about when and where these tracks were recorded?

I recorded   these   tracks in The Factory   Studio LA in 1970. My dear friend  John  Phillips (Mamas &  Papas) produced  the initial   recordings  and  I  took Production over   35  years  later. So Co-produced by John Philips and Donovan.  The  band  is  The Crusaders .  

What are you memories of recording these songs?  

It  was  such a  joy  and  so  like me  to  create  another  mad Donovan Genre. Although  Jazz  is  no  stranger  to my  albums, The  Crusaders are  a  Fusion  and at  the  time   were   the  hot studio sound. Joe Sample, Wilton Felder and David  T  Walker, cool players par excellence. I can’t recall the drummer but I think Bobbie Hall was percussionist.  During  mixing Rod  Callan  and  I  heard  a rattling  jingle and couldn’t  figure what  it was, on David  T Walkers’ guitar tracks. Then Rod finally sussed it , it  was his Jewelry  on his  arm  as he played  the  guitar. It was in tempo so it works!    

Do you think it's important to release these songs? Perhaps they are a link between the sixties material and the seventies?  

I  re-discovered  the  masters  in 400  Analog  Tapes   in  my archive  and  thought  I  will finish the   tracking  and   mix  it  in The Works  Studio  Dublin,  with  Rod Callan  the  owner  of  the  studio then. I put on the horns that Wilton Felder    would have done.  The horn players were Michael Buckley (who co arranged with me) and Ronan Dooney.  The female vocal   on Only You and Hotel Lonely is Susanne Bushnell. I added some sample strings. When  I  found  the masters  again, I  wanted  to honour  John  Phillips who  has passed  on. And  also to release The  Sensual  Donovan, a  sexy warm sound  for  the Winter Holidays 2012 /2013,  for lovers and  families  to  cuddle  up by the  fire  and   just  get  Mellow with   the   smooth  easy   grooves that I made with the great Crusaders  and  Bobby  Hall  and the  Irish  Horn  players I mention above. Smooth and Sexy. Ha Ha.  

It's the latest in a massive catalogue. Looking back over 50 years, how do you see your work as an artist has changed, or perhaps progressed?  

Always  fusing   new  sounds and production  ideas,  recording  is such a  great  art  to  be  in. I  don’t think  of  its  release, just  the  act of  tracking  and   overdubbing and  mixing, it’s  magic. Of  course  the sounds  change   but  within  each production  is  the  Poet, the  Lyric and  the  Guitar. My  accents  and character  voices  change  too  for the  style  and  tone  of  the  poems.       

When writing a song, what comes first? Is it often a chord progression, a title even? How does the creative process usually begin with you?  

This  famous   question  can  never be  answered... sometimes a phrase I  hear said or read  and  a  melody for it pops into my consciousness ... from  where? Or  a playing  of  a  style  of  guitar  or  early acoustic guitar  country  blues, in an  old  1940's  bungalow  in Santa Monica, and  a  tune  will appear sounding  like  the  period the  old house  was built. The  creative process  is  half  way  between concentrating  and dreaming,  I pick  up the  guitar  and  open  the possibilities   by  singing  the classic  Jazz Blues    chord  shapes  that  I  taught  George  Harrison and Lennon  and  McCartney,  the ones  they  missed   that  is,  when they  learned  every  early  Pop Chord Progression in Hamburg night  after  night in The Star Club.

I would love to ask about a Gift from a Flower to a Garden, my favourite of your records. Was it difficult to persuade the label to release the first double album? Also, what are your memories of writing and recording it?      

When  Clive  Davis  saw  the artwork  and  heard   there  was one  disc  for   young  parents  and one  for  their  just  being  born kids, he  didn’t want  a  double album. 7 colour separations, fine art paper and a box! He said 'Classical gets a box, Jazz gets a box but  Pop  Music  doesn’t.  I said ‘but I want one. It  would be the first Sixties Music Box.’ He said 'You  will  have  to  pay for  it  out  of  your  royalties.’ I said ‘okay’. Then he  insisted   the 2 discs  be  released  as  separate before  Christmas and  the  box after Christmas. The 2 discs reads above    in the   100's in the chart before Christmas. When  the  box was  released   in  the  new  year  it went  GOLD! So  my  dear  art director  friend  Sid  Maurer  who did  every  album  cover in NYC at  the  time  for  all  labels,  and had designed The Gift Box with me, called up Clive and said, 'Clive? You blew it and Donovan was right!’ Haha. Clive had missed the Christmas market with my Gift to the world!  Then  George  Harrison  did  'All Things  Must  Pass'  and  he  asked EMI  for  a  Box  Set, they  said 'Classical  gets  a  box,  Jazz gets a Box  but  Pop  doesn’t  get a  Box'. And George, who had become my dear friend on the path said to EMI, 'Donovan got one!’ So George got his box but of course paid for  it  out  of  his royalties. Haha.   

Of all the albums you've done, which was your favourite, and the most fun to create?  

Hard to say... perhaps Sunshine Superman, the album. But then again, Barbajagal was a gas to record.  

About the Hurdy Gurdy Man book, how long did it take to write? Was it hard remembering everything?  

It was being written over many years in bits. I guess 10 years on and off. To remember periods all I had to do was put the music on from the time. And notebooks and diaries.  

The first book was very well received. Do you think you may write a second volume, seeing as it ends in 1970?  

Watch my  website  as  I  serialize the next  part The Seventies and read  it,  each  part each month from the  new Lunar  Year February  2013 to February  2014.  

There has definitely been a resurgence of interest in your work and the past few years have seen you finally getting the recognition I think you deserve. How has it been to experience this, with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the clear interest in your songs and your ideals?  
I was always an outsider. But those that knew, knew what I was doing. The Hall of Fame was a singular honour and just in time, not late at all. I believe the sixties way of recording and the whole lyrical outlook is coming back now.

Why do you think maybe the music of that time is still such a big draw to people?  

The 1960s galvanized the recording techniques and we Bohemian artists invaded popular culture and took over the airwaves. Poets reclaimed music and all The Arts were again free from 2 wars and a depression. Such a renaissance comes only occasionally and with it comes Self Discovery and many ways to heal a broken world. Since the Sixties doors were opened, the new Artists can now run through them and create anything they want to.  It was not always so.

​Go check Donovan's site:
www.donovan.ie  

​Michael Moorcock has been one of the most popular and prolific names in what we call science fiction since the 1950s. Though his many readers and Moorcock himself would not dub his work SF, or limit it to any category in fact, there is no getting away from the fact that he’s one of the most important names in the history of the genre. Born in 1939, Moorcock began his writing career as editor of New Worlds Magazine and has written dozens of novels and countless short stories. One of his most popular characters is the mysterious and enigmatic Jerry Cornelius, a man (is he a man?) whose adventures can take him to nay time and any place. I was honoured to ask Michael about the origins of Jerry Cornelius, the places his character has been over the years, and where he plans to take him next.
 
You've been a writer and editor for so long now, and written in so many styles and genres, but I wondered if you remembered first coming up with the character of Jerry Cornelius.  
 
I remember it very clearly. I was sitting in a cafe on the corner where Portobello and Kensington Park Road divide when I saw a good-looking young man with long, fine hair walking towards me.   Behind him  at Notting Hill gate was a greengrocer called  Cornelius of  London. I  had been looking for a character with a European name and gender unspecific appearance and there he was! Probably October 1964.  In January 1965, with two very young babies to take care of, I wrote the book in ten days, sometimes feeding the babies so my wife would not have to get up. We were living at 8 Colville Terrace,  a rackman-controlled slum  at the time. In 65 we moved to 87 Ladbroke Grove,  thanks  to Mrs Pash who ran the musical instrument shop in Elgin Crescent and she was  moving.  For a while nobody would buy the book until eventually Allison and Busby, just starting, took on that and behold the man. Avon books in the USA were very enthusiastic and in 1967 when New Worlds went to large size, I began a sequel which I wrote in monthly parts as a serial, A Cure for Cancer, illustrated by Mal Dean, who established the graphic appearance of the character.
 
What I love about Cornelius is that he can be anywhere, in any place or time, and we accept that fact every time we read about him. Was it and is it liberating to be able to bend your stories into all kinds of shapes, time periods and tones, and have a character you are able to do that with?  
 
That’s why I created him! I wanted a myth figure for the 20th century then and now one for the 21st—a figure who could represent rapidly changing times. I wanted, as I put it, a character and a kind of story which could be cool in hot times! One who could respond to the present as rapidly as possible.
 
There are many novels and short stories featuring Cornelius. Which ones did you enjoy writing the most, and which ones challenged you as a writer? Do you have any you are happier with than others?
 
I enjoyed writing almost all of them. It’s easier to think of the ones I didn’t feel were particularly successful. I need to forget about ‘Pegging the President’ which I wrote about Trump. I was far too angry with Trump and the story isn’t that cool at all! It did not do what it was supposed to do. My most recent, which will appear in New Worlds later this year, is one of my best, if not the best short, and is called ‘Wigan!’. I think it’s one of the best I’ve written. Illustrated by Mark Reeve, who is a fine successor to Mal Dean.
 
Other writers have written Cornelius stories, and you've even encouraged them to do so. It's very rare that an author will pass a character on to a contemporary. Do you think more writers should allow their characters to be adaptable and not be as possessive of their creations?  
 
M. John Harrison, who wrote three of the best, said that Jerry was not so much a character as a technique and I’m inclined to agree with him. He stopped writing them because he felt Jerry was ‘a  character for the sixties’. I strongly disagreed with that. Some of the best stories are those written since the sixties – I think of The Entropy Tango, The Spencer Inheritance and Cheering for the Rockets which were written in  the 70s, 90s and 2000s and were all I think pretty successful stories, all dealing with ‘hot’ issues of the day and lasting pretty well now!
 
People use the word fantasy and sf when talking about your work,  but I've never seen your stories as escapism. In fact they often mirror real life more than a lot of supposedly "realistic" fiction. How important is it for you that your writing works as satire and commentary while also being a highly readable story in its own right?  
 
I have never seen the Cornelius stories, in particular, as sf, fantasy or, indeed, ‘spy’ stories.  They are sui  generis, intended to work as a form of literature for modern times. It’s very important to me for the stories to be understood as, I suppose, absurdest, yet serious, commentary on issues which are both of our day and speaking universally.   
 
On the subject of genres, do you feel that categorisation limits what a lot of readers might delve into, or do you see the tags as useful for the writer and the reader alike? (For example, I have heard people who claim they do not like sf then reading one of your books and loving it.)  
 
I have found the same. Early books of mine were generic sf, without a doubt, and like the early fantasy were written to support New Worlds and my family. All books since The Warhound and the World’s Pain, Gloriana, Mother London, the Pyat Quartet and various others were books not intended to be read as generic books. The Dancers at the End of Time was an odd book in that I forgot to put the sf in the final volume and had to go back and rewrite it to add an sf element. Behold the man – the novel – was not written as a generic book, either! Sadly some people read an early sf or fantasy book and judge my work according to that, while booksellers insist on shelving my books as sf or fantasy when I have always believed in books being shelved by author!
 
I always look at Cornelius in a similar way to Pilgrim's Progress, or even Lindsay Anderson's Mick Travis in his trilogy starting with if.... Do you have any more plans for the character in the future?  
 
The Pilgrim’s Progress was the very first book I bought with my own  money – a shilling (5p) given to me for my birthday by a neighbour. I read it and came to understand  that a book  should contain a plot, characters who represented some sort of moral quality, some sort of moral intention, social observation and a dynamic (not necessarily linear) structure which maintains the reader’s attention. I have tried to offer the reader those same qualities ever since, only to be judged by some as formless, presumably because, as in my current ‘Whitefriars’ novels, I have  not provided them with a linear story-line! Frequently the books have both!

INTERVIEW WITH GRAHAM MASTERTON
AUG 2024
 
Graham Masterton is a legendary British writer, known primarily for his horror fiction, though he has written prolifically in many areas. He’s authored dozens of books over the past few decades and has a huge readership the world over. I got in touch with Graham recently to see if he might indulge me and answer some questions about a book of his called The House That Jack Built, a chilling horror tale which was published over thirty years ago. I was pleasantly surprised that Graham not only answered me, but also said he would happily take time out of his schedule to answer my questions. It’s a book that genuinely frightened me, wrapped itself around my psyche, and one which I read compulsively. If you are a fellow fan of Masterton and The House That Jack Built in particular, you might find these responses interesting. So here they are…
 
You were already well established by the mid 90s when The House That Jack Built came out. I wondered if you remembered how you came up with the initial idea for the book. Did anything specific inspire it? How do such books come about?
 
I started spending a lot of time in New York in the 1970s because I was the editor of Penthouse magazine in the UK and I was helping to bring out the new US edition of Penthouse to challenge Playboy on its own turf. After I quit Penthouse I still visited New York regularly because I was mainly publishing my sex instruction books and novels in the US, and my agent lived there. My late wife Wiescka and I took a trip up the Hudson River one weekend and we saw some remarkable houses up there, like Lyndhurst Mansion at Tarrytown. I combined those houses with the characters of some of the tycoons I had met during my time on Penthouse, including the owner and publisher Bob Guccione, who at one time owned the largest private house in Manhattan. I liked Bob a lot, but he could be bombastic, and although he was wealthy, he was given to starting up doomed enterprises like casinos and magazines, rather like Donald Trump. I was trained as a newspaper reporter, so I have always had the facility to combine one arresting feature or incident with another, to create a story, and that is how the idea of The House That Jack Built was germinated.
 
It begins with such a disturbing scene, but it's also a perfect beginning because it stuns and pulls you straight in. How important do you feel it is to come up with such an arresting opening chapter, especially in horror?
 
For horror stories, I think it’s essential. It’s the same as a news story – you should catch your readers’ attention and start their adrenaline pumping from the very beginning. After all, that’s why people read horror novels – to be excited and frightened but know at the same time that they are not in any real danger.
 
The character of Jack Belias haunts me to this day. Did anyone else inspire him?
 
Bob Guccione, as I have mentioned. There was no doubt that he had a charisma that was almost tangible. And one or two other American business people that I met, such as Albert Freedman, who was caught in the 1950s fixing a TV quiz show called Twenty-One by giving the winning contestants the answers in advance and paying the losing contestants to fail.
 
The characters are so vivid and at times relatable in The House That Jack Built, but Craig is such a flawed man from the start. Was it unsettling for you to explore the psyche of that character as Jack burrowed himself more and more into his very being?
 
I found it interesting, not unsettling. My training as a newspaper reporter gave me the skill to question people’s motives and their personality traits without holding back – a technique which eventually led to my writing sex instruction books such as How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed based on a real conversations with real people.
 
At the end, Effie moves on in her life. Did you ever think what might have become of her? Do you ever think about what characters might do after the story is told?
 
Sometimes I think of writing sequels. Very few of my books were originally written with a series in mind, like Rook the college teacher with psychic insight, or Night Warriors about ordinary people who become battling heroes in dreams. A classic example is my series about the Irish detective Katie Maguire, which started off as a stand-alone thriller. The twelfth Katie Maguire novel Pay Back The Devil will be published this October.
 
Did The House That Jack Built do well upon release? You have mentioned that the early 90s were a weird time for horror fiction because for some reason sales dipped. 
 
You’re right, and horror sales did dip dramatically in the 90s. My publisher Simon & Schuster did not want to publish The House That Jack Built but I sold it to Carroll & Graf as a hardback and Leisure Books as a paperback and it sold very respectably.
 
You grew up reading horror masters like Poe and Lovecraft. Other than how to weave a masterful horror tale, what did you learn from them on a technical level? I see a direct link with the genre's original masters and your own prose, which is smooth and so carefully written at the same time as being hugely engaging.
 
What I mainly learned from Poe and Lovecraft was not to be afraid of writing about any kind of horrific scenario, no matter how absurd it may seem, because if you write it with conviction, your readers will suspend their disbelief, at least for as long as they are reading it. Dwarves being suspended from the ceiling and set on fire, for example, which is not something you see every day. I liked some of Lovecraft’s characters, such as Brown Jenkin, who I pinched for my novel Prey, but I am not a great fan of his style, particularly the way he gets all hysterical at the end of story. 
 
A little off topic, but as a huge admirer of the Beat writers, what did you learn from the like of Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs, both as men and as writers?
 
From Allen Ginsberg I learned not to allow a jet-lagged Beat poet with greasy hair to lie on the floor and fall asleep so that he stained my new pale Italian suede shoes (I was a Mod). From William Burroughs I learned never to be afraid to write about anything, no matter how explicit. He and I also worked many hours together on language, taking it apart like a car engine and putting it back together again so that it purred. In other words, we worked on writing rhythmic sentences with simple words so that the readers would not be aware they were actually reading, but would feel they were actually inside the story. We also wrote a ‘cut-up’ novel together Rules of Duel to explore the concept of writing a sentence and then cutting it up so that it had a new meaning. From William I also learned not to go to Lebanese restaurants and get so drunk that he shouted ‘Bomb the Ay-rabs!’ and was politely asked by the management to leave. The artist and writer Brion Gysin and I managed to drag him home across Trafalgar Square.
 
With so much published now, how do you keep your mind so fresh and adaptable to different genres and subjects?
 
I am always on the lookout for new ideas. Again, I think it’s another result of my newspaper training. I have just finished a new horror novel House of Flies which combines recent outbreaks of flies with Old Testament stories. I am also co-authoring stories with two younger writers, Dawn G Harris and Karolina Mogielska. Dawn has published her first supernatural novel Diviner and co-authored horror stories with me in an anthology called Days Of Utter Dread, while Karolina and I have published several major horror stories together in four different languages as chapbooks, such as The Dark Days of Christmas, published by Phantasmagoria Books. Dawn and Karolina and I are very much in tune with each other in our thinking and our writing, and it is really refreshing to work with them.

​
Will Self is undoubtedly one of the most important writers and thinkers of our time. His novels and short story collections have received wide acclaim, he currently teaches Modern Thought at Brunel University London, and continues to write articles and columns on the issues that concern and interest him. I was honoured when Mr Self  agreed to answer some questions about his novels, short stories, and thoughts on the creative process, especially given some of the stories were about work he wrote decades ago. Thank you for indulging me, Mr Self… This Q and A if from early 2023.
 
What I love about your short stories is the fact they are spare and detailed at the same time. You get to the core of a moment or a character in a single detail that often says so much more than if you went on to over-describe every single thing, as some writers do. Was it a purposeful decision when you started writing fiction to reach a sort of balance, of not being over descriptive? I know you have always written for yourself, but was it a conscious stylistic decision?
 
No, not really – and while I’m gratified that you say that (it’s certainly a very satisfying phenomenon for a reader), I can’t claim that it’s the way I’ve intentionally gone about things – rather, with the early stories, I was animated by the riff: most of them actually began as sort of bullshitting to friends; What would it be like if there were a Native American tribe characterised by being... boring? What would it be like if there were only eight people in London who actually had free will – and they controlled all the rest? And so on. When it gets to the novels – and especially the later ones, more influenced by Modernism I think I really have problem with not being to exhaustive when it comes to the world the characters inhabit... Modernism has to be, in part, precisely a revolt against the schematic quality of fictions that leave this description out because they assume their readers occupy a commonsensical world... 
 
My favourite story of yours (at the moment anyway) is Ward 9. It's such an exciting, engaging story, but there are some fascinating points raised in it. At the end, Busner says, 'You had the choice to be a patient or a therapist, you decided to become a patient.' Were you making bigger points about mental health and how hospitals can heighten and even create states of madness? Also, did you ever imagine the main character escaping the ward instead of being swallowed up by it?
 
Well, thank you – but I wrote the story almost 35 years ago, so can no longer speak definitively about intentions or motivations – suffice to say, it was inspired by the fact that I knew several psychiatrists and psychoanalysts at that time whose children had succumbed to mental illness – I was also very influenced by the anti-psychiatrists: Foucault, RD Laing, and especially Thomas Szasz, whose concept of ‘the therapeutic state’ informs all of ‘The Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Basically, I was proposing that a lot of the mental pathologies – as then (and still, now) defined – were iatrogenic, and I believe that the most recent research bears me out on this, whether you approach the issue from the position of psychology, or genetics... Here’s a link to a review article of mine which sets the issues out clearly: 
Then there’s Chekov – my Ward 9 is actually a response to his Ward 6, so in order to understand my motivations in respect of the ending, you have to know the other story...
        
I saw you do a talk fairly recently when you read parts of Scale, and you were pleased it had aged well. That is still such a wonderfully surreal story. May I ask where you got the idea for it? Did it just pop in there one day, or were there ideas in it which had been bubbling away in the kettle of your mind for a while?
 
My first marriage was breaking up, I had two young children and an opiate addiction, we lived outside Oxford near to the M40, I often took the kids to the model village at Bekonscott... so it was fairly autobiographical... I was also obsessed by alterations in scale, which Levi-Strauss observes: ‘Always sacrifice the sensible in favour of the intelligible...’ The actual proximate inspiration for the writing was John Major’s speech to the Tory Party conference in 1991, the centrepiece of which was him inveighing against the lack of services on British motorways – he cited the newly-opened M40 as a major culprit when it came to kids pissing themselves in the car... I just thought it showed up the extraordinarily ephemeral character of contemporary politics, and immediately thought: but what will the people in the distant future make of these monumental earthworks...? But of all my work it probably came the easiest: I remember sitting down and writing it in in more or less a complete draft at one sitting... but then I also remember giving the then Prince Charles a blow job – and I’m pretty sure that never happened...   
 
Shark is one of those books that is addictive and constantly unsettling at the same time, both a dream and a nightmare. How challenging and invigorating is it to work on such a long and intense piece like that?
 
It’s pretty intense... ‘Shark’ is tightly structured for a long novel with now paratextual apparatus – chapters, section breaks – and no supervening narrative voice... I also wanted to summon up at least two worlds with painful exactitude: that of the USS Minneapolis, and Genie’s childhood... But the novel was (is) part of a trilogy, and when I’d finished ‘Umbrella’ I knew where I was going with it, which was to express a dialectical relation between technological ‘advance’, psychopathology and warfare... I also had my methodology: an intense focus of the minutiae of human experience that’s usually eliminated by schematisation in fiction (see above)... I like ‘Shark’ a great deal... but I’ve yet to meet anyone who understood what was going on in the last twenty to thirty pages...
 
Chest is one of my favourite stories. There is a specific moment when you describe something being as bright and rich as a peacock's tail under a taxidermist's glass dome. Such details are mouth watering. You have said you take much pleasure in using rich and varied language in your work, but I wondered if you derived as much satisfaction from these types of descriptive detail. These little moments seem so minutely specific I am sure they please you as you tighten and hone them...
 
Yes, maybe – but you can’t really build fictions entirely out of well-constructed metaphors, and indeed, I came to believe that metaphor is a bit of a blind-alley for fiction (and by this I mean constructed metaphor, not merely allusive or colourful language)... The Umbrella trilogy is, in part, precise a reaction against so much English literary fiction, which goes along like this: tum-te-tum-te-tum ‘metaphor’! Tum-te-tum-te-tum ‘simile’! I really wanted to get past this – and if you read the trilogy with any attention you’ll see there isn’t a single constructed metaphor in all of its 1.500 very odd pages...
 
 I feel creativity is a restless pursuit of sensory satisfaction. How much do you think fiction is an exercise in trying to create the ideal aesthetic? Do you often feel it's an unfeedable hunger, that there is truly never enough to satisfy the creative urge?
 
No, I like making love, drugs, bringing up children and physical exercise when it comes to sensory satisfaction – and I have this much in common with Herman Goering: when I hear the word ‘culture’ (which is really socialised aesthetics – but then all aesthetics are... socialised)  I, too, reach for my gun... I write out of an urge to express and communicate, and also so as to have worlds that I alone control: I am the demiurge of my fictions…
 
The Indian Mutiny ends with a horrific nightmare (again a detail so graphically described), but the rest of the story is so believable. (It reminds me of Unman, Wittering and Zigo.)  Was this story inspired by a true event at all or was it from your imagination completely? (I had a teacher go mad, but he didn't kill himself.)
 
Again: it’s a long time ago, and I can’t remember the end of The Indian Mutiny... I thought the teacher just went mad in it... It absolutely was based on a real incident – indeed, there’s scarcely any invention at all... Pretty harrowing, really – and having worked as a teacher myself now for the past decade or so, my sympathies are squarely with the pedagogue...