- 10th February. 6-9pm. Free. Forest Cafe.  READeasy Writers’ Group is a safe and encouraging space for writers to meet up, hear their words read, and get constructive critical feedback. It’s open to writers of any style, experience, identity and genre — but places each month are limited.  See the Writers’ Group page for full instructions (including length limits).

- Sunday 13th February.  7.45pm-9.45pm. £4/£3. The Store (formerly GRV), Guthrie Street. Poetry at the… hosted by Rob A Mackenzie. This month featuring, Kevin Williamson, Miriam Gamble and the lovely Sasha de Buyl-Pisco.

- Monday 14th February. 8-11:30pm. Donation (suggested £4/3 – it’s a fundraiser!). The City Cafe, 19 Blair St, Edinburgh. DON’T FUCK A POET: The Anti-Valentine’s Slam. Presented by Inky Fingers with Harlequinade of the Chemical Poets. More info about how to enter and what’s in store at the Inky Fingers website.

- Tuesday 15th February. 8pm. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. Gutter’s Alternative Valentine’s. Join acclaimed novelist and story writer Ewan Morrison, author of The Last Book You Read, Swung, Distance and, most recently, the fabulous Ménage, for a night of left-field lurrvvv. Ewan will be joined by Alabama ’s very own Amy Burns, whose brilliant debut Wake Me Up When It’s Over is coming soon, poets Richie McCaffrey and Alexander Hutchison, author of the acclaimed Scales Dog. It won’t be McSex, it’ll be Gutter Romance – so don’t miss it!  It’s free but ticket only – which go über-fast so go to http://www.nls.uk/events or phone 0131 623 3918 to book.

- 17th – 20th February. £1 each event. At Stereo, Renfield Lane, Glasgow. Margins Book & Music Festival is a celebration of live music and literature from Cargo Publishing. Over four days, seven shows and over 30 performers, Margins brings you the biggest names in Scottish literature, like Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, Ewan Morrison, Doug Johnstone, Alan Bissett and Rodge Glass, to brand new talent and collaborations with the most popular regular literary nights in Scotland, including Words Per Minute, Golden Hour and Seeds of Thought.

- 27 February. 7.45-10.15pm. £4/£3. The Store (formerly GRV), Guthrie Street, Edinburgh. Shore Poets. This month, featuring: Vicki Feaver, Jim C. Wilson, Alastair Cook and music by Dorothy Lawrenson.

Mark your calendars, folks:

- 3rd March. Launch of Doug Johnstone’s new novel, Smokeheads. It even has its own trailer (made by Ewan Morrison)!:

- 16th-20th March.  StAnza Poetry Festival 2011: The printed brochure is now available, and it can also be viewed online here. Make sure to catch ForPub hosting our infamous Golden Hour event on the 16th! More info: GH at StAnza.

Big Ups:

- A hearty WELL DONE to our friend, Helen Mort,  who was shortlisted for the coveted Picador Poetry Prize! Amazing!

- New books out from CARGO Publishing! Grab yourself a copy of Alan Bissett‘s ‘Moira Monologues’ which, in fact, is awesome.

- Check out Nick Holdstock‘s new CNY-y piece in the LRB: Rabbits v Tigers

- Now available from NewLeaf magazine: Subscription service! If you would like to make sure to receive the latest issue of the long-standing international poetry & prose magazine (lately also with plays!) directly to your home, please drop them a line with your postal address at: newleaf.office@uni-bremen.de.

- Having you been missing your monthly fix of new TALES FROM THE MALL videos? Well miss no more!  This video answers the question:  What do a cigarette, a medieval game and a wrecking ball have in common?

Click on the video to get  to the Tales from the Mall page and watch more videos!

And a couple of Excellent Opportunities:

The Istanbul Review: “A Living History of Voices in Ink”. Submissions are invited for the first annual volume of The Istanbul Review to be published in 2011. We welcome writing in the form of essays, fiction and poetry but not full length plays or novels, though self-contained extracts are acceptable. The work must be neither previously published nor accepted for publication. All submissions must be received by July 1st 2011.  For more information visit www.theistanbulreview.com All submission should be sent to submissions@theistanbulreview.com

DeforestAction: Project Borneo. Our friend Emily Ballou is involved in an amazing project. In short: go to Borneo for 5 months and work with orangutans and the number one orangutan conservationist and be in a 3D movie. Not bad.  Information and how to apply by submitting your video clip, here: http://gg.tigweb.org/tig/deforestaction

Get your Feb on.

- We were excited to see a review for Alan Jamieson‘s new book in the Scottish Review of Books. Alan’s Da Happie Laand was called ‘a work of power and originality’. Kevin MacNeil also reviewed James Kelman’s new book in the same issue. Check it out!

- Our own Nick Holdstock has an article, ‘After Xinjiang‘ in n+1 magazine.

- Nice review of our friend David Briggs who joined us in Bristol, in Stride Magazine!

- Keep an eye out for the lovely Jane Flett, featured in Issue 1 of Oh Comely magazine. An issue preview is available here.

- Check out Elizabeth Gold‘s poems “Absinthe” and “Wild Turkey” in the summer volume of The Gettysburg Review. Snag yourself a copy online or at B&N.

- This week’s new Tale from the Mall is a market research study that uncovers some disturbing facts about ‘The Key to Happiness.‘ Also, this week The List Magazine launched the Tales from Mall story competition in collaboration with Ewan Morrison and digital media company Blackwatch. They will be turning 25 mall stories into an enhanced ebook, and turning five of them into animated films, with award winning animators. So send your mall stories to Ewan!

Events:

*

As a band, you claim your origins in Japan. How did you all meet there?

Well, the three of us went to the same university in Japan, which is the easy answer to this question. The more detailed answer is that Corinne ran a creative writing group through the university, which is how we all met in the first place. Becoming a band was a slightly more complicated process. Corinne and McGregor (sometimes called Yuriko) began playing music together on the violin, cello, and piano- some classical pieces, but this then shifted into projects of transcribing and arranging songs such as Nick Drake’s “Road” and “The Crane Takes Flight” by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Corinne already played full time in the traditional Irish band “Mutiny”, and the two of us were asked to accompany one of the musicians from that band in a Christmas gig in Hiroshima. In the process of hitchhiking all the way from Tokyo to Hiroshima in the middle of winter, a band (and a close friendship) was formed. Later, Yuko began playing flute and adding some vocals and it was decided that we needed her musical talent and her level-headedness permanently.

What made you move your act to the UK? Are you settling here?

This is a difficult question on many levels. The truth is, we all migrated to the UK at the same time by “coincidence” (read “serendipity”). Corinne graduated from university in Japan, and McGregor and Yuko moved to London to do a year abroad. We never wanted to break up the band to begin with, so we decided to make a major effort to continue it in the UK, despite the major obstacle of the distance between London and Edinburgh. None of us are completely sure if we will be staying, Yuriko and Yuko in particular have close ties to the UK as they both grew up partially in England. However, we definitely have plans to keep the band together, despite the drawback of changing geography.

You all boast an impressive range of instruments between you, from guitars, piano string instruments and a ukulele to a ‘deathmetal kazoo’. Was music always an important influence in each of your lives, growing up?

Corinne: Music has always been my first and main love in life. I started playing the violin when I was 9, and I had to absolutely beg my parents to let me learn. They wanted me to study piano, because we had one already and they were certain I would play the violin for a month and then get sick of it. But I hounded them so, and they finally made a compromise that if I studied the piano for a year and showed that I could commit to music, they would help me get a violin. I grew up with classical music and rock from the 60′s and 70′s; both of my parents were really into listening to a range of music and are musical themselves. The two things I am always wanting to do, every second of the day, are make music and write poetry, and both arts are irretrievably linked in my mind. I also studied traditional Irish fiddle, Indian singing, and various other random instruments/styles of music.

McGregor: It’s more just therapy now, but music was a synonym for many things in retrospect – obligation, alternative language, selling point, socialising skill, stress relief, birdcage… it all gets a bit lengthy in explanation. But yep, music’s been important, almost like roots and stones in Ta Prohm – without music, there’d hardly be a life left to talk about.

Yuko: Although I’ve always played the flute and have loved music, for me it has only become a significant part of living life only recently. Thanks to music though I think I’ve managed to meet and have some sort of connection with people I never thought I would have. It sounds cliché, but I’m impressed in its ability to bring people together. I also have a lot to thank my fellows for in terms of discovering new music.

Your style of music is quite unusual, where you refer to yourselves as playing a “Folk/Eclectic mish-mash”. What type of music do you listen to yourselves? What artists do you think have influenced your style?

Well, I think we’ve all had really different influences, which makes it even more exciting to make music together. Corinne is particularly fond of expressive classical music like Saint-Saens or Dvorak, and is heavily influenced by eclectic and lyrical singer-songwriters; particularly Bill Callahan, Joanna Newsom, and Diane Cluck. She also listens to, and would argue is influenced by, a really bizarre range of stuff, such as New Jersey punk musician Ted Leo, the Japanese musician Shiina Ringo, her upbringing of rock music from the 60′s and 70′s, CocoRosie, Nina Simone, Modest Mouse, Andrew Bird, traditional Irish music, and old musicals.

McGregor says her disorganised iTunes tells her that genre-wise, she listens most to Alternative&Punk, Electronica/Dance, Alternative, Rock in that order with ‘Other’ reigning top. Everyone seems to want to re-educate her in my musical taste though, so she really can’t say. Her current playlist has Dillinger Escape Plan followed by The National. If the music she scribbles ever decides to go public, she’ll be ready for claims from artists like Ludovico Einaudi, Patrick Wolf and Lily Allen. Oh, and Beethoven might be turning in his grave too.

According to Yuko, as a band, she doesn’t think she has contributed much creatively (she lies!) but she loves music with beautiful lyrics or beats/melodies that make you move. She listens to a mixture of folk-influenced music like Joanna Newsom, Belle & Sebastian, Andrew Bird and a mixture of alternative/indie music like Modest Mouse, the Shins, Beirut and four tet. She loves some Chopin and Latin Music (she will always admire Buena Vista Social Club) as well, so she’s not sure where she stands musically. We all think the fact that she is a lovely Flamenco dancer has some effect on Yuko’s musicality as well.

Basically the band meets musically under artists such as the Be Good Tanyas, Nick Drake, Joanna Newsom, Modest Mouse, Andrew Bird, and we all bring in this bizarre mash of influences, which makes creating music an absolute blast!

And, finally, where can we listen to more of your wonderful music after April’s Golden Hour?

Well, we don’t yet have an answer to this! We would like to do some more serious recording this summer, but that will depend on time and funds. There will probably be another gig in Edinburgh at some point in the next few months, since this last one was so incredibly fun, but the best I can do now is say that we’ll post any news of gigs on our facebook as soon as we’re aware of them! We’re hoping to get a little tour together for a few weeks in July, but everything depends on us being able to get ourselves organized.

*

Updates on The Sparrows and samples of their music can be followed via their Facebook page!

Check out this awesome video of them playing ‘Osaka Cat Blues’  at the Golden Hour: Osaka Cat Blues

Kona Macphee was born in London but grew up in Australia, where she flirted with a range of occupations including composer, violinist, waitress and motorcycle mechanic. Eventually she took up robotics and computer science, which brought her to Cambridge as a graduate student in 1995. She now lives in Perthshire, where she works as a freelance writer and tutor, and moonlights as the co-director of a software and consultancy company. Kona received an Eric Gregory Award in 1998. Her first collection, Tails, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004, and she is selling the remaining copies to raise money for UNICEF. Her second collection, Perfect Blue, is recently published by Bloodaxe Books. To support new readers of poetry, she has released a free companion e-Book for Perfect Blue, including author commentaries on all the poems.

Kona will be reading at The Golden Hour this March 24th.

Kona, the subject matters in your new collection, ‘Perfect Blue’, range from trotting pheasants to the impact of the media to your intriguing ‘Book of Diseases’ series of poems.  You obviously have a wide range of interests, which are also reflected in your skills of writing, drawing and even software engineering!  How do these personal creative interests inform each other in your work or do you prefer to keep them separate?

I guess these creative interests are “separate” in the sense that I’m not doing multimedia projects (though I’m quite tempted by the idea of making some computer-animated short films, possibly with music…. ah, if I only had more time!)  However, I don’t think of them in a compartmentalised way, because they’re all just different flavours of the wonderful pleasure of “making things”.  I’m completely addicted to “flow”, that awesome state of mind where you become deeply absorbed in some challenging creative task, and time just seems to vanish.  I don’t care how I get the flow, as long as I get it every now and then!

I suppose there’s a further common thread in that, for me, a key purpose of artistic work is to communicate – and particularly to communicate emotion by recreating it in the mind of the reader/listener/viewer.  Music is fabulous at this, but poetry can be pretty handy at it too.    Obviously there are other motivations – sheer playfulness, for example, or the desire to try something new and difficult (which explains my drawing efforts – I’m no artist!), but the need to communicate emotion is always there in the background for me.

Coming from a postgraduate background of robotics and computer science at Cambridge, you have incorporated this experience into your electronic music-making.  Would you encourage the incorporation of computers or technology into artists’ work these days? Do you find that technology helps or hinders your work?

My definition of “good technology” is something that quickly disappears into the background and allows you to focus on what you’re trying to do, rather than battling with how to make the tools achieve it.

I do my writing on computer, using a very techie, no-frills editing tool called “vi” which has been around since the 70s.  Because I spent so long using it to write computer code, editing with vi has become as instinctive as driving a car – the technology simply fades away, and I get on with the writing.  (By contrast, trying to use a WYSIWYG editor like Word, with its requirement for a lot of mouse use, drives me bonkers and constantly distracts me from my goal).  I have a somewhat fetishistic love of stationery, so I regret the fact that I can’t write fluently with a pen and paper anymore:  being so used to on-screen writing and editing, I get intimidated by the fact that I can’t easily move things around on paper, or quickly try out different variants of a particular line.  Somehow paper is associated with finality, whereas on screen there’s still a liberating provisionality.

New technologies can obviously open up interesting new ground for artists to explore,  and they can also assist in more traditional activities; for example, the excellent “Rosegarden” software makes it possible to write some multi-instrument music, and then play it back, in a way that would be difficult without it.  However, I’m no advocate for incorporating technology simply for its own sake;  there has to be some compelling reason (in terms of artistic intentions or productivity gains).  If I wrote more easily on paper, I’d write on paper.

You appear to be a very active blogger which, you’ve said, has helped you overcome your own writer’s block. This is obviously a benefit to blogging but why else do you feel compelled to do it and are there any pitfalls to putting your work in the public sphere in this way? For instance in putting rough work up, etc?

I don’t actually think of myself as a proper blogger, because I’m not writing a conventional blog (is there such a thing?), but simply posting a poem once a week (with an accompanying commentary and usually an audio recording).

The “Poem Of The Week” blog has really turned my creative life around.  By 2007 I’d pretty much given up writing, and assumed I’d never produce another poetry collection;  feeling that I had nothing to lose, I started the blog as an experimental challenge, just to see what happened.  I’d always been a very slow writer, so the goal of writing a new poem every week seemed like an absurdly difficult target.  I built up a cushion of six poems before I even started, and figured I might be able to keep it up for maybe three months. The fact that I’ve had the blog for more than two years now, and I haven’t missed a week, still seems unbelievable – and it has given me a new-found faith in creativity’s abundance.

The poems that are posted are always nominally “finished”, but some weeks they’re simply no good.  It’s quite painful to have to post the bad ones and leave them up for twelve weeks, but it’s part of the process:  I put up with being embarrassed by the bad poems, because the public commitment to the blog helps me write more of the good ones.  (Anyway, it’s quite therapeutic for a recovering perfectionist to fail in public from time to time!)  I also like to hope it’s encouraging for new writers to see so-called professionals producing spectacular failures on a regular basis.  None of us should ever be afraid to experiment;  a failure’s just a failure, not a huge black stain on one’s character.

A lot of poets seem reluctant to put any work on the internet.  (I’d assumed this was because poetry magazines wouldn’t subsequently accept it, but that hasn’t been my experience;  most of the UK magazines I’ve asked are happy to consider work that has appeared briefly on a personal blog and then been taken down again.)  I get particularly frustrated by poets’ websites that provide long lists of publication credits but no actual poems.  Don’t dazzle us with the length and breadth of your publication track record; show us some poems and let us decide for ourselves if we like your work.

In poems like ‘The questions that go at first unanswered’ and ‘My life as a B movie’, you seem to be interested in the spaces after the ‘typical’ narrative has ended.  Is this curiosity about those untold stories a strong motivation when you’re writing?

I’ve never thought about it that way before!  I suppose one thing that I’m obsessively interested in is psychological undercurrents: the thoughts that aren’t expressed, the feelings that aren’t acknowledged, the events that aren’t mentioned.  I’ve long been fascinated by how we can hide such things even from ourselves.  There’s a terrible loneliness inherent in being divided (by denial, repression or whatever) from your own authentic self;  perhaps this is why loneliness of various kinds has been a recurring theme in my writing.

Currently you’re working with PoetryAid to raise funds for UNICEF by selling off the remaining copies of your earlier collection, ‘Tails’, and donating the proceeds to this charity.  How did you get involved in this? What inspired you to feel so strongly about this cause?

In 2008 I acknowledged that, four years on from publication, any remaining copies of ‘Tails’ were destined to sit in a warehouse – such a waste! – unless I did something with them.  Like many writers, I felt extremely uncomfortable about going out and trying to sell my book – it seemed embarrassing and boastful.  (I acknowledge that this is a pretty irrational attitude if you’ve already accepted commercial publication of your work, but it’s not uncommon…)

I decided that if I could sell the books for a good cause, without making a profit myself, I wouldn’t find it so humiliating.  Fortunately that proved to be the case:  by deciding to give all the profit to UNICEF, I felt empowered enough to attempt my own amateurish experiments with sales’n'marketing.    (I should note that I was also glad to be doing something to support Bloodaxe, who had taken a chance on me by publishing the book in the first place: poetry publishing is a terribly marginal business).

I chose UNICEF because I was already a regular donor.  No large charity is without its inefficiencies, but I feel that UNICEF have the resources and the experience to make a difference, and to support long-term projects in “unfashionable” locations not featured in the latest TV news.  Within reason, I don’t think it matters what particular reputable charity you support; the most important thing is that you do it.  I prefer to support a charity working in the Third World because I feel incredibly blessed to be living in a wealthy country that provides free healthcare and at least a basic welfare net, a country that is not riven by war or famine;  in this respect, we in the West occupy an incredibly privileged position in history.  I feel it’s a duty – a joyful human duty – for we, the lucky, to share some of our resources.  When I no longer have children to support – another (mostly) joyful duty! – I hope to be able to donate more abundantly.  At the moment I feel like a terrible hypocrite for saying “I’m a charity supporter” when I compare what I give with what I have.

And finally, what was the last book you felt guilty for enjoying?

Here’s an admission that really does make me feel guilty – I don’t read nearly enough!  By force of circumstance, our daily routine right now involves getting up very early (which, to be fair, has been great for my writing productivity).  Sadly, since I need an absurdly large amount of sleep, this requires falling asleep very early too.  My natural timeslot for reading is last thing at night, and so I don’t get nearly enough reading in.  (If I don’t get enough sleep, I can’t do anything creative the next day – so sleep always trumps!)  I could really do with an extra life or two, to give me some chance of fitting everything in!

Interview by Ruth Hallinan

*

Some handy links
Kona’s website: http://www.konamacphee.com/
Kona’s writing blog: http://www.thingwright.com/
News story: http://www.konamacphee.com/news.php?story=12
Poetry Aid for UNICEF: http://www.konamacphee.com/poetryaid.php

Alan Bissett is a novelist, playwright and performer. His latest novel, Death of a Ladies’ Man (2009), will be released in paperback in May by Hachette Scotland. There is a double-bill of two of his plays, The Ching Room and the Moira Monologues, at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow from 9th-13th Feb. Bissett himself will be starring as ‘Moira’. He also helps with the splendid reading series, Discombobulate (where literature and comedy collide) in Glasgow. Alan read at The Golden Hour in January 2010.

WHAT BOOKS/ALBUMS/MOVIES ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS YEAR?

I’m a big fan of Goldfrapp, so I’m very excited about their new one, Head First, which is going to be ‘a bit Eighties’. Peter Mullan, one of my great cinematic heroes, has a new one out this year called Neds. And as for books, welll we have a bonanza due now that J.D. Salinger is dead. He had about fifteen novels in the safe, only to be published after his demise. That’s BIG news for a Catcher in the Rye fan.

DO YOU KEEP UP WITH THE GLASGOW/SCOTTISH MUSIC SCENE AS MUCH AS THE NAME DROPPING IN DEATH OF A LADIES’ MAN WOULD SUGGEST?

I must admit, things are so busy now I’m not going out to gigs much, but I certainly was when I was writing that book. I usually try and catch up with what the following bands of muckers and comrades are doing: Burnt Island, Maple Leaves, Zoey Van Goey and Y’all is Fantasy Island.

DEATH OF A LADIES’ MAN IS EXTREMELY PLAYFUL WITH NON-LINGUISTIC FEATURES SUCH AS PAGE LAYOUT AND TEXT SIZE, EVEN CONVERTING TO SCREENPLAY FORMAT AT CERTAIN POINTS. HOW DO THESE ELEMENTS AFFECT YOUR PERFORMANCE WHEN GIVING A READING? EQUALLY, HAS THE EXPERIENCE OF LIVE READINGS, BY FOCUSING ATTENTION ONTO THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE, HELPED TO SHAPE YOUR WRITING AT ALL?

Obviously it’s very difficult to reproduce formal experimentation for the page live in a reading. For the book launch in the Arches I did actually act out a screenplay scene, with my girlfriend playing Nadine, and the ‘screen directions’ being read out. That’s the only way I could make that work. And yes, I’d say that when you perform you get much more of a sense for pace and the flow of the writing, how the ‘voice’ can hold or lose audience attention, which translates for sure into the way I write.

YOU HAVE GIVEN A LOT OF READINGS AS SUPPORT FOR VARIOUS BANDS AROUND SCOTLAND. HOW DID THESE READINGS COMPARE WITH YOUR AVERAGE BOOK STORE READING, WHERE THE AUDIENCE HAVE COME SPECIFICALLY TO HEAR A NOVELIST TALK?

It really depends. Almost every time I’ve done it, the audience is completely respectful and quiet, but that’s usually been in fairly intimate venues to small crowds. But I did once read at a gig in the ABC, with the likes of Sons and Daughters and Teenage Fanclub on the bill, in a cavernous space to an audience of about 1000 who were there to hear rock n roll. I was just performing into a wall of noise. I gamefully carried on, but it wasn’t fun.

IN A GUARDIAN ARTICLE CONCERNING JAMES KELMAN’S COMMENTS AT LAST YEAR’S EDINBURGH BOOK FESTIVAL, WHICH CRITICISED THE ATTENTION THE SCOTTISH LITERARY SCENE PAYS TO “MEDIOCRE DETECTIVE FICTION AND MIDDLE CLASS WIZARDS“, YOU TALKED ABOUT SCOTLAND’S “ENORMOUS, BRISTLING, EXPERIMENTAL TRADITION“. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THESE PERENNIAL KIND OF CONVERSATIONS CONTRASTING LITERARY AND GENRE FICTION, AND HOW DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN RELATION TO THAT EXPERIMENTAL TRADITION?

To be quite honest, I am utterly fascinated by that debate. I grew up in a household without books, on the same diet of pop-culture that everyone did, and had a consciousness partly shaped by Marvel comics, Star Wars, MTV, Britpop and Tarantino. But I also studied English to Masters level and can say that without question my mind was expanded by what we might call great literature and intellectual discourse. So I’m quite schizophrenic in my position here. They’re not entirely mutually exclusive, of course – there is a porous element to both – but I am fascinated by the way that power flows through these contrasting spheres. Is pop culture merely a false, commercial form of corporate imperialism, or is it determined by the masses themselves? Are some artforms actually just better than others? Who gets to decide? What does it mean to be ‘alternative’ in a world ruled by the marketplace? Is there any such thing as ‘authentic’ cultural values? Is elitism a virtue or a vice?

These questions are at the heart of any response to an artwork. You have to interrogate them before you even interrogate the work itself. Avatar is clearly innovative and groundbreaking in all sorts of way, but by prioritizing spectacle to such a degree, does it make our culture more weightless?

To bring it specifically to Kelman – I’m broadly in support of his view. While it’s absolutely not a comment, for me, on Crime authors themselves – who are writing passionately within a genre for others who are passionate about it, and that’s a good transaction for me – I do think it’s the case that Crime fiction has taken over Scottish literature. It gets a huge amount of attention on shelves, at festivals and in the broadsheets – because it’s supported by massive bookchains and supermarkets – and that makes it more difficult for those of us who aren’t writing in that genre to break through. Scottish literature in the 80s and 90s was on fire – you only have to look at the names of Kelman, Leonard, Lochhead, Gray, Galloway, Smith, Welsh, Warner, McLean, Kay, Butlin, Banks – who were utterly fearless. These were the people who gave me a real sense of what it meant to be Scottish and working-class. Without them, I’m only half a person. That’s absolutely a tradition I want to keep alive. Unless the younger generation find those same reserves of energy and will to pass on then a really significant Scottish culture will be crushed. There seems to be signs of that happening, with things like Gutter magazine, Cargo Press, Two Ravens and the spoken word scene (hello, Golden Hour!), but I really don’t think the Crime genre is the place where Scots are going to discover a renewed sense of purpose about their nation. No disrespect to those writers, but as good as they clearly are, that’s just not their remit.

THERE SEEMS TO BE A LOT OF POP CULTURE WHICH FILTERS THROUGH YOUR NOVELS. ODDLY, I WAS READING AMERICAN PSYCHO AROUND THE SAME TIME AS DEATH OF A LADIES’ MAN , AND SAW SIMILARITIES BETWEEN CHARLIE AND PATRICK WITH THEIR SENSE OF DETACHMENT AND ABSORPTION OF POP CULTURE AND DRUGS ETC. WOULD YOU SAY THAT MUSIC, FILMS ETC. ARE AS MUCH AS AN INFLUENCE AS OTHER LITERATURE ON YOUR WRITING? DESPITE THE CROSSOVER, ARE THERE ANY EFFECTS THAT ONLY LITERATURE CAN ACHIEVE? FINALLY, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, WILL THERE EVER BE A DEATH OF A LADIES’ MAN FILM THAT I CAN SCREEN AS A DOUBLE BILL WITH AMERICAN PSYCHO AT MY FLAT AND WHO DO YOU THINK WOULD WIN IN A FIGHT, YOU OR ELLIS?

Well, American Psycho was an enormous influence on me. I think it’s a brave, visionary masterpiece that absolutely blew open the doors on what it was possible for fiction to do. And I can see the thematic connections you’re making: Charlie Bain and Patrick Bateman, to a certain extent, inhabit similar worlds on either side of the Atlantic. It’s difficult NOT be influenced by pop-culture when it’s so omnipresent. While my characters speak that language – I mean, my friends and I can virtually communicate with each other in film-quotes alone – I think it also has to be really examined for what it is. We can be trapped and cattle-prodded by pop-culture into a false, perpetual state of ‘enjoyment’ and stimulation; very large corporations have a financial stake in making sure we are. I think that’s dangerous. So it’s an influence that has to be resisted as much as it’s consumed.

As for the fight, well Bateman has done things to people in those books that still make me feel sick. So there’s no way I’m going nose-to-nose with the man who created him!

Interview by Niall Henderson.