I’ve launched a new website which I hope will be of use to writers amateur or professional. This is Adventures in the Wriggly Pig Trade (www.wrigglypig.com), which discusses how I came to write some of my sixty-four books, provides insights into the life of a writer, and discusses issues relating to publishing for children and young adults. It’s a work in progress and I welcome comments and questions (just email me). I shall do my best to respond to any queries about writing, from the very basic to the mind-blowingly sophisticated.

I’m happy to say that I’ll be appearing at the Million Dollar Bash, the event which will celebrate the golden anniversary of the 1969 (Dylan) Isle of Wight Festival.  The event takes place on Sat 31 August at the Isle of Wight County show ground and I should be onstage around 1pm on the acoustic stage.  Needless to say I’ll be reading from 69ers, besides sharing a few anecdotes about the festival, where I worked as an electrician at the tender age of 14 (see pic).

Signed copies of 69ers will be available at the event – but if you can’t make it you can always buy a copy here.

In a market saturated by funny stories for children, it’s a great honour to be shortlisted for the 2017 Lollies (Laugh Out Loud awards).  Thimble Monkey Superstar is my fifty-somethingth novel for juniors in a career of many ups and downs, and this nomination comes twenty-one years after Little Stupendo was shortlisted for the Children’s Book Award – also in concert with that fantastic illustrator Martin Chatterton.  The central character (not the monkey!) is based on my young son who has cerebral palsy.

Those who know me for my teen thriller The Last Free Cat or adult novel 69ers (aka When Dylan Sank the Isle of Wight) might be disappointed that Thimble is not quite as radical in content, but I can assure you it is not conservative in any way either!  Judge Michael Rosen has written that it would be good to see humorous books for kids taking on more political themes, but all I can say is, I have tried!  First we need publishers willing to take a punt on such books.

Now that the shortlists have been drawn up, The Lollies are decided by popular vote.  There’s an inbuilt advantage for those authors already well known through TV with thousands of followers on social media (David Baddiel won last year and is shortlisted again in the 9-12 category), but I know already that children love Thimble, and like all my books, Thimble Monkey Superstar is nothing if not original.  You can buy it at a discount price from excellent indie publisher Firefly Press, and if you or you kids like it, please vote for it!

Thimble Monkey Superstar, my latest novel for children, can be found here.

All those who have read When Dylan Sank The Isle of Wight (formerly 69ers) will have enjoyed the adventures of prog-rock band Butterhorn, loosely based on my own outfit Peach who played around Southampton in 1972-3.  I played in many bands after that, most notably new wave outfit The Cutouts who had a decent following in Nottingham in the early 80s.  As my writing career took off, however, the music got sidelined, and in 1986 I played my last electric gig – or so I thought, till getting up on stage with a friend’s band at my 60th party gave me the bug again.  But I had no intention of playing tired old blues songs or Stereophonics covers.  I had a set of great original songs which had never seen the light of day and come hell or high water I was going to perform them.  Now I’m in a fantastic trio with a 23-year-old bassist and 38-year-old drummer, both fans of great music through the ages, rehearsing in the fabulous Cardiff Arches in the city centre under the railway line.  Here’s a taste of what we do (or what I did with a drum machine before it got even better with live drums!).  Check our website at www.shipbuilding.wales .We’re also on Twitter and Facebook – still early days, so give us a like if you like us!

I still have some of the first print run of 69ers (aka When Dylan Sank The Isle of Wight) and am selling these off for just £6 per copy, signed by the author.  There is no other fictional record of this event, and certainly not one by a prize-winning author who saw the 1969 Isle of Wight festival both up front and backstage.  But besides being the story of a 16 year old grammar school boy thrown into a challenging new world, 69ers is also a meditation on the values of that era.  As in most of my fictional output, it’s both humorous and political.  Check out the reviews on Amazon – none of them written by friends or relatives! – then consider whether this might make a great present to a loved one or even yourself!  An ebook is also available, needless to say not signed by the author, but a little bit cheaper.  Buy either the paperback or ebook here.

I’m enjoying reading Stealing Dylan From Woodstock, albeit with a critical eye, and will post a review of this shortly.  Meanwhile, however, by the wonders of modern communication I have been propelled back into contact with members of my early 70s prog-rock band, Peach.  I won’t say that Peach are immortalised in the first chapter of 69ers, as Butterhorn are a heavily fictionalised version of the real-life band, but the introduction to them is pretty true:

“But it was music that had united Gerry and Scott, in particular the desire to write a rock opera before they had mastered three chords. Oblivious to humiliation, they had performed their first efforts in the back bar at the Royal George on a Woolworth’s chord organ and a mandolin. What they produced was barely music, but to their minds it was exactly its lack of attention to time, tune or structure which elevated it above the commercial crap that progressive rock was destined to supercede.
Like ten thousand others, Gerry and Scott felt uniquely worthy of the world’s attention.
They did progress, however, inspired by a sense of mission which led them to mythologise every event in the band’s evolution: a chance meeting with Tim the strumming telephone engineer became Stanley’s encounter with Livingstone; a trip to Shaftesbury Road to buy amps and guitars became Moses’s expedition to the Promised Land.”

Butterhorn drummer Stan Carey is very much the villain of the piece, terrorising the band with the threat of rearranged faces, then insisting Phil Collins-style that they perform his songs and splitting the band when they  won’t.  I’m happy to say that Peach’s drummer Tony Webb was not quite such a villain, and indeed it turns out that he remains the band’s number one fan – after 43 years he got in touch with me from his home in Canada and we have exchanged many enthusiastic emails (and a rough recording I’ve just made of extracts from our 43-year-old rock opera).  Thanks to Tony I’m also back in touch with guitarist Brian McGrath on whom the character of Tim was based:

“As foreign to pretension as Gerry was to groundedness, Tim did his best with the rock operas but was far more at home with a classic blues or a concise slice of Cream. Tim was a dry character with a ready wit, a droopy moustache and an old Austin A35 which only sporadically committed itself to forward motion, its favoured action being an up-and-down clown-car bounce till whipped and cursed back into progress like a surly mule.”

I’ve played in many bands since Peach, but never one that tried to play a prog-rock major opus to an audience consisting entirely of skinheads in the shadow of an oil refinery.  I included the travails of Butterhorn to give some context to the great festival of 1969 and having so surprisingly found myself thinking about that enterprise again, am very glad I did.

Mantis head thanks to http://www.cindychinn.com

My second offer is a completely new novel for junior-age children, Insect Day, which will be COMPLETELY FREE for five days from Nov 20, and thereafter just £1.49. This again will be an e-book available on Amazon.

With Christmas in mind, if anyone is interested in a signed copy of any of my many other publications for children, I shall make these available at the price on the book cover plus postage – just drop me a line.

As the Island Slowly Sank is an invaluable addition to the history of both Bob Dylan and the first Isle of Wight festivals. As author Derek Barker (editor of Dylan fanzine Isis) acknowledges, these subjects were well covered by Brian Hinton’s Message To Love, which Barker draws upon for his booklet, but there is much new material here. First-hand interviews with key figures and research based on little-known publications has filled some important gaps in our knowledge of a hugely significant period in the history of popular culture.

I certainly gained some new insights into Dylan’s motivation for playing the Isle of Wight. Having withdrawn from the spotlight to concentrate on bringing up a family, the imposition of a major festival (Woodstock) down the road from his home, cashing in on his fame, was not something to which he took kindly. There’s plenty of detail about this period, and the process by which Dylan agreed to appear in England instead – although we also learn how the IOW was not quite how Dylan had romantically imagined it.

Barker is very thorough and level-headed on a number of key issues: how much Dylan actually got paid, why the huge delay before his performance, and indeed how good that performance actually was. There are plenty of interesting details about life at his residence at Forelands Farm and even the significant absence of a toilet in his backstage caravan – a matter of huge importance to his friend Al Aronowitz, whose ability to remember the conversations of 40 years ago verbatim must surely be taken with a pinch of salt.

For a short book, As the Island Slowly Sank does attempt to cover a lot of ground, and in doing so flies off at a few tangents to give incidental information which might better have been relegated to footnotes. While almost everything in the booklet was interesting to me, it might not appeal widely beyond Dylan fans or festival veterans, but then there are plenty of them! I certainly recommend it, not just for the read but also as a stimulus to further discussion of the subject, to which I am now inspired to contribute at http://www.dylan69.com.