Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now: My Difficult 80s: My Difficult Student 80s [Paperback]

Entertaining and surprisingly familiar read ... Even for those of us who were still in pre-school at the time, the joys and lows are all given an added relevance via the author's emulation of Nick Hornby's self-deprecating humour. Like High Fidelity, if it had been written by a teenage Rob Fleming', Rock Sound .'It's perceptive, moving and excruciatingly funny. A treasure', Sunday Times .'Beautifully observed, cleverly narrated and very readable, it's like being part of the great unwashed again', Jockey Slut .'Collins' easygoing charm is hard to resist. A welcome visitor into any home that houses a Nick Hornby or a Tony Parsons', The Herald

Does for the adolescent and student experience what Where Did It All Go Right? did for childhood

'Higher education comes at exactly the right time: in the twilight of your teens, you're just starting to coagulate as a human being, to pull away from parental influence and find your own feet. What better than three years in which to explore the inner you, establish a feasible worldview, and maybe get on Blockbusters.'

After an idyllic provincial 1970s childhood, the 1980s took Andrew Collins to London, art school and the classic student experience. Crimping his hair, casting aside his socks and sporting fingerless gloves, he became Andy Kollins: purveyor of awful poetry; disciple of moany music, and wannabe political activist. What follows is a universal tale of trainee hedonism, girl trouble, wasted grants and begging letters to parents.

A synth-soundtracked rite of passage that's often painfully funny, it traces one teenager's metamorphosis from sheltered suburban innocent to semi-mature metropolitan male through the pretensions and confusions of trying to stand alone for the first time in your own kung fu pumps in a big bad city.

(20040624)

Does for the adolescent and student experience what Where Did It All Go Right? did for childhood

Like all authors, I welcome with gritted teeth the world of customer reviews on this site. They are, like it or not, democracy in action. (I often post them myself, although only if I really enjoy something.) Of course, it is a pleasure to read positive comments, and horrible to read the bad ones. But you have to take it on the chin. You're in the public domain. Having said that, it seems clear from the reviews for Where Did It All Go Right? that it can divide people. I didn't set out to write a love-it-or-hate-it book but it seems to be the case. Those that hate it, and a few have vented their spleen here, seem to take against the fact that nothing happens in the book, when that was always its modus operandi. I had hoped that this was made clear on the cover. Though it disappoints me to think of someone paying good money for my book and not liking it, I'm more disturbed by the idea that they didn't know what they were getting. So let me re-state, the whole point of the book is that nothing earth-shattering happened to me growing up. I loaded my story with detail and footnotes to make the point that ordinary lives are just as valid as extraordinary ones. This, it seems, is what those who do like it hook into. If you are wavering before buying, heed my words! (Or just read the four- and five-star reviews!) Whatever you think of the book, visit my website (it's the title of the book dot com) and tell me. Authors have never been this accessible, nor have readers had such a public platform. We should talk.

Andrew Collins was born in Northampton. He began his journalistic career at the NME and went on to edit Q magazine. He has written for Select, The Observer, New Statesman, Word, The Guardian and Radio Times, where he is Film Editor. He won a Sony Gold award for 'Collins & Maconie's Hit Parade' on Radio 1 and co-presented Collins & Maconie's Movie Club on ITV. Andrew was a scriptwriter for EastEnders and Family Affairs. He hosted Radio 4's weekly film programme Back Row for nearly three years, presents a daily show on BBC 6 Music and fronts The Day The Music Died on Radio 2. His first sitcom, Grass, written with Simon Day, aired on BBC2 in 2003. He also co-wrote and performed Lloyd Cole Knew My Father on stage and for Radio 2. In addition to Where Did It All Go Right?, Andrew is the author of Still Suitable For Miners, the official biography of Billy Bragg, and Friends Reunited. He is married, lives in Surrey and cares deeply about the world. (20040624)

The Long Way

ROCKERS ARE GETTING COOL FEET
If you want to look like a rock star this summer, fellas, throw your socks away. Most of Duran Duran seem to favour the sockless look. Even Echo and the Bunnymen's moody Ian McCulloch has chucked away his socks. I was so impressed that I tried it over the weekend and all I can say is that it has to be the most uncomfortable fashion yet invented!
John Blake's Bizarre column, The Sun, 28 July 1983

'Dave Griffiths doesn't go out looking like that!' Mum snipes, slamming the cutlery drawer to underline her point.

We're having one of our free and frank exchanges of views, becoming ever more frequent as my need for fumbled self-expression increases. I'm on my way out to collect Sally for tonight's big party. Why does she always wait until I'm on my way out to challenge me? Why do all mums do that? In the old house at Winsford Way you could get from the stairs to the front door without passing the kitchen ('I'm off out, won't be late, bye!' slam). Not at Kestrel Close. The kitchen's between the stairs and the door, like a sentry box.

'I don't want to look like Dave Griffiths,' I protest. Dave Griffiths is my ultra-straight friend who is leaving sixth form not for university but the RAF. Where's Dad when you need him to arbitrate? He usually dries as she washes.

'I sometimes wish you were Dave Griffiths,' she shouts. Ah good, she's strayed into fantasy. I give her an eye-rolling look of derision and reach for the door handle. The argument is over. I have won the battle, and so, in her mind, has Mum.

'Won't be late, bye!' slam.

I was, to be fair to Mum, beginning to put my head above the parapet in fashion terms that year. I wore my hair increasingly blow-dried and lacquered, in deference to Ian McCulloch and Robert Smith and other pop peacocks whose aromatic, dark music I'd fallen in love with on Switch or The Tube. Boots on the Market Square did brisk business with their gender-unspecific green hair gel that year. Black pumps were de rigueur, even when it got too chilly to wear them sensibly sans chausette. October was the reluctant start of the sock season, by which time I'd be off.

There is something about me in plentiful Truprint photos from the time that suggests I am not content merely to be part of a group that stands out from the crowd. Either my jeans are rolled higher than everybody else's, or I am wearing my hair spikier, or the sleeves have been more roughly hacked from my T-shirt for that Bono soldier-of-fortune effect. And no one else seems to be wearing fingerless gloves.

You couldn't play the drums in fingerless gloves, more's the pity. The local band I drummed for and gigged with had risen from the ashes of a previous band, Absolute Heroes. We were called, with no hint of embarrassment, Sketch For Dawn, after a Durutti Column track that bassist Craig and I particularly loved. All four of us in the band backcombed our hair to varying degrees, as did the knot of kids who came to see us play at the Black Lion in town. In fact, only Dave Griffiths stayed completely square, as if he were perhaps in the pay of my mum.

It was a Northampton thing. Provincial, Middle English, suburban, it was fertile soil for the sombre flowering of a generation too young to have experienced punk first-hand and too far away from the nearest city to affect New Romanticism. A tartan cape and jodhpur ensemble would have got you kicked in down town, and perhaps rightly so. It was all right for the actual New Romantics - they lived in London and got taxis. Their look and lifestyle was never going to translate to Northampton. But second-hand overcoats, check shirts and cheap hair gel? Bring them on.

You needed nothing much to do and nowhere much to go in order to get a fix on this moody new music's A-level-friendly ennui. Minor chords and wailing vocals, it was a custom-made soundtrack for our wannabe disaffected, misunderstood years. The movement's Beatles and Stones, The Cure and Echo & the Bunnymen, were in the process of going awkwardly overground in 1983 - fixtures suddenly of Top of the Pops and Smash Hits - but their sartorial influence was, it seems, much more heavily felt outside London. Macs, multiple T-shirts and heavy fringes were anything but the uniform of an ostracised cult in Northampton. They were everywhere, or seemed to be. Though big hair and outdoor slippers were not welcome at the town's only notable nightclub, Cinderellas, we successfully colonised select pubs and newly minted wine bars and kept our overcoats on, however hot it got.

Cinderellas - or Cinderella Rockefellers, to use its full, disagreeably aspirational title - remained off-limits. Until, that is, it opened its doors to the great unsocked by advertising its first ever Alternative Night. This meant no door policy, and Northampton's raincoat brigade jumped at the chance actually to see inside the place. They were playing 'Mad World' by Tears For Fears - an approved record - as we pushed through about the third set of silver-laminated double-doors, but the mythical Cinderellas was no better than a hotel disco really. And no bigger either - once you'd taken into account the ubiquitous mirrored surfaces. It was not a wild success. The dance floor was too keen and obvious and needy, with its pulsing floor and flashing lights and remained forbiddingly empty for much of the night. On reflection, we preferred the dour ambience of the Masonic Hall.

Northampton's more conservative soul boys, who were legion, might have considered us avant garde - actually, poofy's more accurate