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Alma Cogan
How does it feel to be never allowed to die? In this classic debut novel, Gordon Burn takes Britain's biggest selling vocalist of the 1950s and turns her story into an equation of celebrity and murder.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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350 people want to read
About the author
Gordon Burn
27 books43 followersGordon Burn was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction.
Burn's novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity, as well as life through a media lens. His novel Alma Cogan (1991), which imagined the future life of the British singer Alma Cogan had she not died in the 1960s, won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. His other novels Fullalove and The North of England Home Service appeared in 1995 and 2003 respectively. His non-fiction deals primarily with sport and true crime. His first book Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son was a study of Peter Sutcliffe, 'the Yorkshire Ripper' and his 1998 book Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West, dealt in similar detail with one of Britain's most notorious serial killers.
Burn's interest in such infamous villains extended to his fiction, with Myra Hindley, one of the 'Moors murderers', featuring prominently in the novel Alma Cogan. His sport-based books are Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker (1986) and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion (2006), which deals with the twin stories of Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best and the "trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways."
He also wrote a book with British artist Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, a collection of interviews from various dates between 1992-2001. He contributed to The Guardian regularly, usually writing about contemporary art.
Burn's novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity, as well as life through a media lens. His novel Alma Cogan (1991), which imagined the future life of the British singer Alma Cogan had she not died in the 1960s, won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. His other novels Fullalove and The North of England Home Service appeared in 1995 and 2003 respectively. His non-fiction deals primarily with sport and true crime. His first book Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son was a study of Peter Sutcliffe, 'the Yorkshire Ripper' and his 1998 book Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West, dealt in similar detail with one of Britain's most notorious serial killers.
Burn's interest in such infamous villains extended to his fiction, with Myra Hindley, one of the 'Moors murderers', featuring prominently in the novel Alma Cogan. His sport-based books are Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker (1986) and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion (2006), which deals with the twin stories of Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best and the "trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways."
He also wrote a book with British artist Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, a collection of interviews from various dates between 1992-2001. He contributed to The Guardian regularly, usually writing about contemporary art.
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May 7, 2021
When you stop appearing on television, the assumption, natural enough I suppose, is that you’ve died.
Gordon Burn (1948-2009) was a writer whose work straddled the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction.
Indeed he was originally and quite explicitly influenced by the New Journalism and the 'novel-without-fiction' genre invented by Truman Capote.
His non-fiction works include his debut "Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story Of Peter Sutcliffe" (1984) and "Happy Like Murderers: The Story Of Fred And Rosemary West" (1998) as well as "Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion" (2006)
These twin pre-occupations - with infamous serial killers and with fame and celebrity leading to oblivion - came together wonderfully in his first fiction work (although arguably not his first 'novel') Alma Cogan (1991) which won the Whitbread (now Costa Prize) First Novel award.
Alma Cogan is a fictionalised re-imagining of the life of the "Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice", born in 1932, and the highest paid British female entertainer of the 1950s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Cogan), voted "Outstanding British Female Singer" by NME Readers four times between 1956 and 1960. The rise of the Beatles and similar bands made her suddenly unfashionable in the 1960s, although she was personally friends with the band (and even, in some accounts, John Lennon's lover).
That I - and perhaps you reading this - barely recognise her name is part of Burn's point.
In this retelling, Alma did not die of ovarian cancer in 1966, aged just 34, but instead retired and withdrew from public life, and the novel is narrated by her looking back from 1986-7, a time when the police were searching Saddleworth Moor for bodies after the Moors murderers had reportedly confessed to two further crimes.
A key inspiration for the novel is the true fact that in the infamous recording, played in the Moors Murders court, of the torture of Lesley Ann Downey, Cogan's The Little Drummer Boy, can be heard playing on Radio Luxembourg in the background.
Alma opens the novel musing on fame, and in particular encounters with her fans:
’Enduring the bizarre projections of others’ somebody* once said was one of the penalties of game. But that was okay. I was prepared for that.
What I couldn’t handle was [being] terrorised by the instant access that being well known seemed to give me to the complexed, mysterious interior lives of complete strangers. ... the devious dark energies I began to suspect in people ... which of these faces would one day rise to notoriety and have a name put to it?
(* my note: actually a question from Joyce Carol Oates to Philip Roth in an interview in 1974, discussing the latter's experience of fame)
The fictional Alma’s (and the author’s) preoccupation with notorious killers recurs throughout the novel: Dennis Nielsen, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, Crippen and Christie, among others, feature and with news of the Saddleworth Moor searches on newspapers and radio/TV intruding into the present day narrative.
And looking back on her own life Alma sees, quoting Nabokov*, ‘a stranger caught in a snapshot of myself'
(* That quote I can not source although it has also been quoted, and attributed to Nabakov, by Pamela Stephenson, and Nabakov did write:
“and in that snapshot I shall be.
My likeness among strangers")
Burn writes wonderfully about the celebrity scene of the 1950s and 1960s, blending real stars (e.g. Sammy Davis Jr.) with fictional lesser-knowns, but equally effectively portrays the sleepy coastal village of Alma’s mid-80s present.
(see quotes at this review https://pechorinsjournal.wordpress.co...)
In one nicely meta-fictional touch, Alma visits the Tate to see a 1961 painting of herself done by artist Peter Blake (perhaps best known for the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album), and the novel reproduces the catalogue essay with quotes from Blake.
Except that the catalogue entry is fictional, the painting didn’t exist, or at least it didn’t exist in 1961. It was actually painted in the 90s, especially for the novel. As Burn explained in an interview:
Burn's final novel was Born Yesterday, published in 2008, where he attempts to capture in near real-time the events of the Summer of 2007. He said:
The collage of impressions produced in the novel, is as Jonathan Coe has acknowledged ( https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) the forerunner for the more recent works by himself, Olivia Laing's Crudo and of course Ali Smith's seasonal quartet.
And Gordon Burn's name and legacy lives on in the Gordon Burn Prize for new writing.
http://newwritingnorth.com/projects/t...
The Gordon Burn Prize seeks to reward a published title (fiction or non-fiction) written in the English language, which in the opinion of the judges most successfully represents the spirit and sensibility of Gordon's literary methods: novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past; writers of non-fiction brave enough to recast characters and historical events to create a new and vivid reality. Literature which challenges perceived notions of genre and makes us think again about just what it is that we are reading.
see also https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... and https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Interestingly both Crudo and Autumn were featured (although neither won)
Overall - an important book from an important and innovative author.
Gordon Burn (1948-2009) was a writer whose work straddled the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction.
Indeed he was originally and quite explicitly influenced by the New Journalism and the 'novel-without-fiction' genre invented by Truman Capote.
His non-fiction works include his debut "Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story Of Peter Sutcliffe" (1984) and "Happy Like Murderers: The Story Of Fred And Rosemary West" (1998) as well as "Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion" (2006)
These twin pre-occupations - with infamous serial killers and with fame and celebrity leading to oblivion - came together wonderfully in his first fiction work (although arguably not his first 'novel') Alma Cogan (1991) which won the Whitbread (now Costa Prize) First Novel award.
Alma Cogan is a fictionalised re-imagining of the life of the "Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice", born in 1932, and the highest paid British female entertainer of the 1950s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Cogan), voted "Outstanding British Female Singer" by NME Readers four times between 1956 and 1960. The rise of the Beatles and similar bands made her suddenly unfashionable in the 1960s, although she was personally friends with the band (and even, in some accounts, John Lennon's lover).
That I - and perhaps you reading this - barely recognise her name is part of Burn's point.
In this retelling, Alma did not die of ovarian cancer in 1966, aged just 34, but instead retired and withdrew from public life, and the novel is narrated by her looking back from 1986-7, a time when the police were searching Saddleworth Moor for bodies after the Moors murderers had reportedly confessed to two further crimes.
A key inspiration for the novel is the true fact that in the infamous recording, played in the Moors Murders court, of the torture of Lesley Ann Downey, Cogan's The Little Drummer Boy, can be heard playing on Radio Luxembourg in the background.
Alma opens the novel musing on fame, and in particular encounters with her fans:
’Enduring the bizarre projections of others’ somebody* once said was one of the penalties of game. But that was okay. I was prepared for that.
What I couldn’t handle was [being] terrorised by the instant access that being well known seemed to give me to the complexed, mysterious interior lives of complete strangers. ... the devious dark energies I began to suspect in people ... which of these faces would one day rise to notoriety and have a name put to it?
(* my note: actually a question from Joyce Carol Oates to Philip Roth in an interview in 1974, discussing the latter's experience of fame)
The fictional Alma’s (and the author’s) preoccupation with notorious killers recurs throughout the novel: Dennis Nielsen, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, Crippen and Christie, among others, feature and with news of the Saddleworth Moor searches on newspapers and radio/TV intruding into the present day narrative.
And looking back on her own life Alma sees, quoting Nabokov*, ‘a stranger caught in a snapshot of myself'
(* That quote I can not source although it has also been quoted, and attributed to Nabakov, by Pamela Stephenson, and Nabakov did write:
“and in that snapshot I shall be.
My likeness among strangers")
Burn writes wonderfully about the celebrity scene of the 1950s and 1960s, blending real stars (e.g. Sammy Davis Jr.) with fictional lesser-knowns, but equally effectively portrays the sleepy coastal village of Alma’s mid-80s present.
(see quotes at this review https://pechorinsjournal.wordpress.co...)
In one nicely meta-fictional touch, Alma visits the Tate to see a 1961 painting of herself done by artist Peter Blake (perhaps best known for the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album), and the novel reproduces the catalogue essay with quotes from Blake.
Except that the catalogue entry is fictional, the painting didn’t exist, or at least it didn’t exist in 1961. It was actually painted in the 90s, especially for the novel. As Burn explained in an interview:
The painting, created especially for the book, was supposed to go on the cover, but Peter works so slowly that his picture wasn’t ready when the publisher needed it for the dustjacket. Luckily he finished it in time for it to be inserted into the body of the book. By then, the publisher had come up with the Warhol-esque series of portraits which were used on the jacket.And the novel ends with an encounter with an obsessive super-fan, who refers to Alma the star in the third person in her presence as if perceives no connection between the mid 50s lady before him and the girl with the giggle in her voice of his dreams, and where Alma, is his extensive collection, discovers one particularly morbid exhibit revealing her connection to the Moors murders.
Burn's final novel was Born Yesterday, published in 2008, where he attempts to capture in near real-time the events of the Summer of 2007. He said:
I’d had this idea about taking the Capote/Mailer non-fiction novel thing to its ultimate, which would also involve how things have changed with rolling news. The idea was to find a story, and the moment the news explosion happened to go there and write about it, turn it into a novel in the way that happens all the time through rolling news, newspapers, blogging. And to turn it around fast, so that the novel came out while the news coverage was still fresh in people’s minds.As it transpired there was no one defining 'news explosion' that summer, although there was the end of Tony Blair's premiership, the Madeline McCann abduction and the Glasgow airport bombings.
The collage of impressions produced in the novel, is as Jonathan Coe has acknowledged ( https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) the forerunner for the more recent works by himself, Olivia Laing's Crudo and of course Ali Smith's seasonal quartet.
And Gordon Burn's name and legacy lives on in the Gordon Burn Prize for new writing.
http://newwritingnorth.com/projects/t...
The Gordon Burn Prize seeks to reward a published title (fiction or non-fiction) written in the English language, which in the opinion of the judges most successfully represents the spirit and sensibility of Gordon's literary methods: novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past; writers of non-fiction brave enough to recast characters and historical events to create a new and vivid reality. Literature which challenges perceived notions of genre and makes us think again about just what it is that we are reading.
see also https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... and https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Interestingly both Crudo and Autumn were featured (although neither won)
Overall - an important book from an important and innovative author.
March 14, 2015
This was Gordon Burn’s debut novel; released in 1991 it won the Whitbread Book Award. The novel is based upon a real character, the singer Alma Cogan, who was extremely successful in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Known as, “the girl with the giggle in her voice, “ Cogan was the highest paid British female entertainer in her heyday. In reality, Alma Cogan died in 1966 at the tragically young age of thirty four. However, this book takes as the premise that she did not die, but lived on into obscurity.
This is an extraordinary look at what comes after fame and how to cope with both sides of the coin. Although the fictional Alma Cogan is often dismissive of her life on the road, constantly touring, and more than aware of the seedy side of show business, she obviously also hankers after some aspects of her past life. Having spent much of her youth partying with the famous and jetting off with movie stars, the Alma we meet lives in a small cottage, with her dog for company.
Mixed up with Alma's search for herself are highlighted trips to look at her portrait, her clothes in museums and a visit to a scary and obsessive fan who does not seem to see that Alma herself is the person he is obsessed with. Mixed in with Alma's story is the search for Keith Bennett's body, making this is an even more unsettling read. If you have any interest in British pop music in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, this is a particularly enjoyable read.
This is an extraordinary look at what comes after fame and how to cope with both sides of the coin. Although the fictional Alma Cogan is often dismissive of her life on the road, constantly touring, and more than aware of the seedy side of show business, she obviously also hankers after some aspects of her past life. Having spent much of her youth partying with the famous and jetting off with movie stars, the Alma we meet lives in a small cottage, with her dog for company.
Mixed up with Alma's search for herself are highlighted trips to look at her portrait, her clothes in museums and a visit to a scary and obsessive fan who does not seem to see that Alma herself is the person he is obsessed with. Mixed in with Alma's story is the search for Keith Bennett's body, making this is an even more unsettling read. If you have any interest in British pop music in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, this is a particularly enjoyable read.
June 25, 2008
This short but exhaustingly written novel is undoubtedly a considerable achievement but I wouldn't recommend it to you unless you're obsessive about British showbiz culture, fashion and interior decoration 1950-1965. And I guess it would help to be interested in Alma Cogan, because it's about her, I guess. That might be debatable. Alma was a flamboyant big-lunged Ethel Merman I-don't-need-a-microphone singer beloved by every old fart in Britain in the just before Elvis period (old farts could be as young as 28 back then), and as rock & roll and teenage pop music killed variety, Alma went down with the ship. In real life she didn't have a long and tragic decline because she died at the age of 34 in October 1966 from ovarian cancer. However in Gordon Burn's book, she didn't, she lived on to write this sour, crazily detailed memoir of her life and times. So it's a meandering bone-slow crawl through what John Fahey called toxic memorabilia. And here's a taste of Alma's style:
"The pub he chooses isn't a homey, end-of-terrace local with worn leather and scrubbed lino and goitered old timers and mangy dogs and the glasses arranged upside-down on the shelves on brewery napkins folded to points. (Coronation Street c. 1965).
We drive past several of those to the kind of place popular
with business reps and cricket teams and couples still working out how to let go of the other's hand in a way that feels natural and not rejecting. And also, at this time of year of course, with parties of office workers having their annual bash.
'Don't drink and drive - you might spill some' it says on the
door into the Public, whose molten-look panes are infused with the red of a real fire. We take the other door into a room full of people in paper party hats eating steakwiches and basket meals and Christmas turkey with all the trimmings.
The only seats we can find are next to a cold-cabinet containing an industrial cheesecake and - hiding in a corner - a half-drunk bottle of milk. McLaren holds his half-pint mug by the handle like a tea-cup and immediately seems crowded by the back of a girl who has thrown herself into what could easily be her boss's lap. She has a skinny plait growing out of the shingled back of her hair which sweeps against McLaren's neck when she moves. He tugs at the collar of the 'leisure' jacket he is wearing in place of the
coat he had on when he collected me at the station (it has semi-fluorescent green and turquoise panels like the modern office block where he works) and irritatedly scrapes his chair forward. I should probably ask him questions about his own background, but I don't think I really want to know. (I think I already do: elderly parents almost certainly; father who confined his existence to a shed in the garden; mother who kept him in girls' clothes until he started school.)
The noise-level is kept up by a tape of Christmas songs: that
one by Slade that comes round every year; 'War Is Over' by John and Yoko; the Phil Spector girl groups..."
Many many not-that-interesting scenes from Alma's life are gone over in excruciating detail so that the book becomes an encyclopedia of thankfully-forgotten styles and brand names. And although our Alma was the chirpiest of songbirds (Tom Ewing on Freakytrigger describes her only No 1 hit thus:
'“Yew dreem-boat! Yew luv-abble dreem-boat!” - it’s like Alma is reaching out of the record to pinch all of our cheeks individually. The Girl With A Laugh In Her Voice as her box set calls her - a laugh, yes, and a hop and a skip and a bubble and squeak too, the very dream of enthusiasm. '
Burn presents Alma as a woman of 59 with no good memories. Even when she's congaing with The Queen and drinking with the Rat Pack there's no excitement, no joy, just another fifty details about the room and the clothes and what they drank. Interestingly through the whole gloomy meditation, not one word about Alma's private life - did she have one at all? Was she a closet case? This book doesn't let on. What it does do is disinter a ghastly piece of information about the Moors Murders in which Alma featured (unwittingly of course). And somehow I couldn't shake the feeling that the gruesomeness of this child rape-and-murder imagery, towards which we slowly crawl and which dominates the book's last ten pages (which indicates its significance) is meretricious. However well written this novel is (it is, very) all the points I could glean were, I confess, banal. Kind of like the dreck that Alma herself sang - like this nails-on-a-blackboard dreck here. My friends, listen at your peril
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdbDnl...
"The pub he chooses isn't a homey, end-of-terrace local with worn leather and scrubbed lino and goitered old timers and mangy dogs and the glasses arranged upside-down on the shelves on brewery napkins folded to points. (Coronation Street c. 1965).
We drive past several of those to the kind of place popular
with business reps and cricket teams and couples still working out how to let go of the other's hand in a way that feels natural and not rejecting. And also, at this time of year of course, with parties of office workers having their annual bash.
'Don't drink and drive - you might spill some' it says on the
door into the Public, whose molten-look panes are infused with the red of a real fire. We take the other door into a room full of people in paper party hats eating steakwiches and basket meals and Christmas turkey with all the trimmings.
The only seats we can find are next to a cold-cabinet containing an industrial cheesecake and - hiding in a corner - a half-drunk bottle of milk. McLaren holds his half-pint mug by the handle like a tea-cup and immediately seems crowded by the back of a girl who has thrown herself into what could easily be her boss's lap. She has a skinny plait growing out of the shingled back of her hair which sweeps against McLaren's neck when she moves. He tugs at the collar of the 'leisure' jacket he is wearing in place of the
coat he had on when he collected me at the station (it has semi-fluorescent green and turquoise panels like the modern office block where he works) and irritatedly scrapes his chair forward. I should probably ask him questions about his own background, but I don't think I really want to know. (I think I already do: elderly parents almost certainly; father who confined his existence to a shed in the garden; mother who kept him in girls' clothes until he started school.)
The noise-level is kept up by a tape of Christmas songs: that
one by Slade that comes round every year; 'War Is Over' by John and Yoko; the Phil Spector girl groups..."
Many many not-that-interesting scenes from Alma's life are gone over in excruciating detail so that the book becomes an encyclopedia of thankfully-forgotten styles and brand names. And although our Alma was the chirpiest of songbirds (Tom Ewing on Freakytrigger describes her only No 1 hit thus:
'“Yew dreem-boat! Yew luv-abble dreem-boat!” - it’s like Alma is reaching out of the record to pinch all of our cheeks individually. The Girl With A Laugh In Her Voice as her box set calls her - a laugh, yes, and a hop and a skip and a bubble and squeak too, the very dream of enthusiasm. '
Burn presents Alma as a woman of 59 with no good memories. Even when she's congaing with The Queen and drinking with the Rat Pack there's no excitement, no joy, just another fifty details about the room and the clothes and what they drank. Interestingly through the whole gloomy meditation, not one word about Alma's private life - did she have one at all? Was she a closet case? This book doesn't let on. What it does do is disinter a ghastly piece of information about the Moors Murders in which Alma featured (unwittingly of course). And somehow I couldn't shake the feeling that the gruesomeness of this child rape-and-murder imagery, towards which we slowly crawl and which dominates the book's last ten pages (which indicates its significance) is meretricious. However well written this novel is (it is, very) all the points I could glean were, I confess, banal. Kind of like the dreck that Alma herself sang - like this nails-on-a-blackboard dreck here. My friends, listen at your peril
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdbDnl...
December 7, 2017
I've been meaning to try Gordon Burn for some time now. When I saw a tweet that the always wonderful Backlisted Podcast were going to be discussing 'Alma Cogan' (1991) in November 2017, it was the push that I needed.
I'm delighted that I've finally got round to Gordon Burn. Despite the lack of a plot, 'Alma Cogan' is wonderfully compelling and an extraordinary work of fiction. I say fiction, whilst it's described as a novel it draws very heavily on real people and real events. It imagines how Alma Cogan's life might have played out had she not died in the 1960s.
Gordon Burn reminds me a lot of (the equally wonderful) David Peace (if you haven't read any of his work you should put that right ASAP). Both play with events to create a hybrid world which tells us more about real events and people than any non-fiction.
'Alma Cogan' covers many modern obsessions (celebrity, fame, sex, violence, death, crime etc) and, given it was published in 1991, was well ahead of the curve. Gordon Burn shines an unapologetic and unflinching light upon much that lies hidden in the dark. 'Alma Cogan' is a bravura novel and convinces me I must work though the rest of the late, great Gordon Burn's bibliography.
I often whip through books however, I consciously took my time with 'Alma Cogan' to savour the extraordinary writing. Absolutely brilliant.
5/5
'Alma Cogan' book description....
I'm delighted that I've finally got round to Gordon Burn. Despite the lack of a plot, 'Alma Cogan' is wonderfully compelling and an extraordinary work of fiction. I say fiction, whilst it's described as a novel it draws very heavily on real people and real events. It imagines how Alma Cogan's life might have played out had she not died in the 1960s.
Gordon Burn reminds me a lot of (the equally wonderful) David Peace (if you haven't read any of his work you should put that right ASAP). Both play with events to create a hybrid world which tells us more about real events and people than any non-fiction.
'Alma Cogan' covers many modern obsessions (celebrity, fame, sex, violence, death, crime etc) and, given it was published in 1991, was well ahead of the curve. Gordon Burn shines an unapologetic and unflinching light upon much that lies hidden in the dark. 'Alma Cogan' is a bravura novel and convinces me I must work though the rest of the late, great Gordon Burn's bibliography.
I often whip through books however, I consciously took my time with 'Alma Cogan' to savour the extraordinary writing. Absolutely brilliant.
5/5
'Alma Cogan' book description....
How does it feel to be never allowed to die? In his classic début novel, Gordon Burn takes Britain's biggest selling vocalist of the 1950s and turns her story into an equation of celebrity and murder. Fictional characters jostle for space with real life stars - from John Lennon to Doris Day and Sammy Davis Jnr - as Burn, in a breathtaking act of appropriation, reinvents the popular culture of the post-war years. As beautifully written as it is disturbing, Alma Cogan remains a stingingly relevant exploration of the sad, dark underside of fame.
May 16, 2015
Alma Cogan was a very big star in the fifties and early sixties. This book is an imagined memoir. The real singer died in 1966, but the author has her career fading and her then retiring to a country cottage. In her fifties there is a renewed interest in her from several sources, which leads Alma to look back at her life.
It is very well done, with some light humour and good treatment of the ups and downs of celebrity. I don't know how true the character's thoughts would be to the real Alma's, but that hardly matters.
Another 'face' of the sixties is also in the news twenty years later, when Myra Hindley is taken to Saddleworth Moor to try to find the graves of children murdered by her boyfriend Ian Brady. Fame and infamy are not treated as differently as we might like to think. The juxtaposition of Alma and Myra does not work all that well in my view, but I can see what the author was doing with it.
It is very well done, with some light humour and good treatment of the ups and downs of celebrity. I don't know how true the character's thoughts would be to the real Alma's, but that hardly matters.
Another 'face' of the sixties is also in the news twenty years later, when Myra Hindley is taken to Saddleworth Moor to try to find the graves of children murdered by her boyfriend Ian Brady. Fame and infamy are not treated as differently as we might like to think. The juxtaposition of Alma and Myra does not work all that well in my view, but I can see what the author was doing with it.
March 29, 2015
This book is how they imagined a memoir would be if Alma Cogan the very successful singer of the 1950's -60's had lived longer and not died as she did at such a young age (34yrs old). If you have an interest in this age of pop music then I'm sure you would enjoy this book however I read it for my book club and found my mind wandering off but I did like some descriptions which set the scene well so you could imagine the time and place. I rated it a three out of five.
May 15, 2025
I had no idea who Alma Cogan was until a chance conversation with my dad recently after which her name popped up a couple of times including a book tuber mentioning and praising this book.
Looking at Gordon Burns bibliography I realised that he’d authored the true crime novel “Somebody’s Husband Somebody’s Son”, which I read way back in the day.
I was suitably intrigued by this novel’s scenario.
Burns establishes a tone of high calibre prose, although at the same time I found the writing style quite difficult to penetrate and I felt often like I was picking through the words, never quite able to get into a flow. There were actually a couple of sentences I flat out couldn’t make sense of. Also there were references to cultural touch stones and vernacular of the time period that went over the top of my head. Not the authors fault at all, but it added to the sense of disconnect that was creeping up on me that I was trying to ignore because I was supposed to be enjoying this book I'd rushed out and bought.
The story is written in the first person and the overall style and tone reminded me a bit of John Fowles The Collector. Both books share a fairly dark tone, especially in this story as the Myra Hindley sub plot gradually emerges.
At times I did start to doubt Cogan's voice because her descriptions and inner monologue were so literary. It felt more like the voice of a highly skilled writer than that of an ex-performer and show biz celeb, now middle aged and with a slightly broken story to tell.
It was around a third of the way through that I started to struggle proper. While there were flashbacks and reminiscences regarding the protagonisits old showbiz life, most of the present day narrative that dominated the page seemed to consist of very long and detailed descriptions of the characters surroundings and day to day routines such as walking her dog. Nothing necessarily wrong with doing that, but I felt like I was wanting the narrative to move forward, it’s not until half way through the book that she actually has any dialogue with another character.
I considered giving up on it, although I'm glad I didn't, because at a certain point I started to feel more involved in what was happening again and the narrative felt like it was coming in to focus. This may have been due to the present day story requiring the protagonist to interact with other characters which is what I felt the story really needed by then and as the threads of her past and present life began to merge into one another the whole thing started to feel like it was starting to pay off.
So all in all I did find this book a rewarding experience, it is rigorously written and is a compelling character study with some deep observations about celebrity, the passing of time, the transient nature of success as well as an authentic social commentary both of the 1950's and early 60's and the mid 1980's setting that the rest of the story is based in.
At the same time, and this could just totally be me, I found it a quite difficult read in terms of the writing style and despite it's short length, I found chunks of the book very slow, almost glacial in pace.
A unique and curious novel all the same.
Looking at Gordon Burns bibliography I realised that he’d authored the true crime novel “Somebody’s Husband Somebody’s Son”, which I read way back in the day.
I was suitably intrigued by this novel’s scenario.
Burns establishes a tone of high calibre prose, although at the same time I found the writing style quite difficult to penetrate and I felt often like I was picking through the words, never quite able to get into a flow. There were actually a couple of sentences I flat out couldn’t make sense of. Also there were references to cultural touch stones and vernacular of the time period that went over the top of my head. Not the authors fault at all, but it added to the sense of disconnect that was creeping up on me that I was trying to ignore because I was supposed to be enjoying this book I'd rushed out and bought.
The story is written in the first person and the overall style and tone reminded me a bit of John Fowles The Collector. Both books share a fairly dark tone, especially in this story as the Myra Hindley sub plot gradually emerges.
At times I did start to doubt Cogan's voice because her descriptions and inner monologue were so literary. It felt more like the voice of a highly skilled writer than that of an ex-performer and show biz celeb, now middle aged and with a slightly broken story to tell.
It was around a third of the way through that I started to struggle proper. While there were flashbacks and reminiscences regarding the protagonisits old showbiz life, most of the present day narrative that dominated the page seemed to consist of very long and detailed descriptions of the characters surroundings and day to day routines such as walking her dog. Nothing necessarily wrong with doing that, but I felt like I was wanting the narrative to move forward, it’s not until half way through the book that she actually has any dialogue with another character.
I considered giving up on it, although I'm glad I didn't, because at a certain point I started to feel more involved in what was happening again and the narrative felt like it was coming in to focus. This may have been due to the present day story requiring the protagonist to interact with other characters which is what I felt the story really needed by then and as the threads of her past and present life began to merge into one another the whole thing started to feel like it was starting to pay off.
So all in all I did find this book a rewarding experience, it is rigorously written and is a compelling character study with some deep observations about celebrity, the passing of time, the transient nature of success as well as an authentic social commentary both of the 1950's and early 60's and the mid 1980's setting that the rest of the story is based in.
At the same time, and this could just totally be me, I found it a quite difficult read in terms of the writing style and despite it's short length, I found chunks of the book very slow, almost glacial in pace.
A unique and curious novel all the same.
August 20, 2025
I was not aware of Ms Cogan's songs but was familiar with the murderer Myra Hindley who rather tastelessly shared the cover. It's a very interesting period much of it is set in, the end of variety shows and dawn of rock and roll in 50s/60s UK.
It portrays Cogan as a witty at times caustic has - been in her 50s. She really died from cancer at 34 and her family I understand her family weren't keen on the book, she has 2 siblings that weren't mentioned. It also didn't mention she wrote some of her songs. There are some memorable scenes eg a performer getting maimed on stage.
My main gripe is the lack of story. Cogan seems bored by her life and nothing much happens on the present. It might have been better as a short story combining flashback and comments on the 80s, maybe 10 to 20k words imo. It's a great voice but no story to grip you, imo.
Spoiler _ there is tension with possibly a malevolent stalker in the modern day but nothing happens. There is an I am Alan Partridge interaction with a superfan which is funny/awkward then in an extremely tasteless but chilling few pages takes a turn towards the moors murderers (but not in a way that involves actual peril to Alma or that is resolved through more than a perfunctory confrontation).
Overall a great voice and window into a time of change but barely anything happened, a short book felt overlong by 100 plus pages.
It portrays Cogan as a witty at times caustic has - been in her 50s. She really died from cancer at 34 and her family I understand her family weren't keen on the book, she has 2 siblings that weren't mentioned. It also didn't mention she wrote some of her songs. There are some memorable scenes eg a performer getting maimed on stage.
My main gripe is the lack of story. Cogan seems bored by her life and nothing much happens on the present. It might have been better as a short story combining flashback and comments on the 80s, maybe 10 to 20k words imo. It's a great voice but no story to grip you, imo.
Spoiler _ there is tension with possibly a malevolent stalker in the modern day but nothing happens. There is an I am Alan Partridge interaction with a superfan which is funny/awkward then in an extremely tasteless but chilling few pages takes a turn towards the moors murderers (but not in a way that involves actual peril to Alma or that is resolved through more than a perfunctory confrontation).
Overall a great voice and window into a time of change but barely anything happened, a short book felt overlong by 100 plus pages.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 19, 2019
An elegantly constructed book. Written in 1st person from Alma’s POV, but it is intelligent and lucid in a way that I suspect Alma never was, and yet it works. It draws you in to this make-believe memoir, based (I presume) on real facts.
A great cover with a Peter Blake painting of Alma and that iconic photo of Myra Hindley. Alma Cogan’s link to Brady & Hindley is tenuous (I won’t give the spoiler), but with the cover and the constant air of menace, this is a great read. It is sometimes odd, sometimes confusing and yet overall a really memorable and fantastic read. It will linger, long after you've finished reading.
Recommended
A great cover with a Peter Blake painting of Alma and that iconic photo of Myra Hindley. Alma Cogan’s link to Brady & Hindley is tenuous (I won’t give the spoiler), but with the cover and the constant air of menace, this is a great read. It is sometimes odd, sometimes confusing and yet overall a really memorable and fantastic read. It will linger, long after you've finished reading.
Recommended
May 5, 2020
Burn's debut novel is an unflinching look at the creepy, dark undertow of fame and the flipside to supposedly innocent and wonderful post-war Britain. After being disappointed with Graham Swift's Here We Are earlier this year, which is set in the same world of 50s show buisness and seaside town entertainments, Burn's is a much braver and more visionary novel. Deeply disturbing but utterly convincing, Alma Cogan is a freely styled and wildly imaginative masterpiece.
February 14, 2025
I read somewhere that no musical vibrations are ever lost: that even though they are dispersed, they will go on vibrating through the cosmos for eternity.
I imagine I hear screams coming from the cars when I am standing waiting to cross at the curb sometimes, but it's only Orfeo ed Euridice, Madonna, B.B. King and Lucille or some other electric ghost trapped in the tape shell, the transport mechanism, the spatial dynamics in which two solitudes promiscuously approach one another.
I imagine I hear screams coming from the cars when I am standing waiting to cross at the curb sometimes, but it's only Orfeo ed Euridice, Madonna, B.B. King and Lucille or some other electric ghost trapped in the tape shell, the transport mechanism, the spatial dynamics in which two solitudes promiscuously approach one another.
October 8, 2022
It really is as extraordinary and unique as I’d long been told, through retrospective reviews when he died, countless recommendations from other authors, the backlisted discussion etc… the book Hilary Mantel wished she’d written. It’s buzzing prose, bringing the faded seedy nature of fame in 50/60s England to life.
October 19, 2020
Possibly four and a half? I absolutely loved the writing, and the whole feel of it will stay in my head for a long time. There's an element of it that feels like a formal exercise, which I loved the writing enough to wish that it wasn't, but I very much admire what he put together.
July 15, 2017
This is not for me. I tried it but I don't see where it's going. It merely seems like a trip into nostalgia. Some of the descriptions are excellent and I recall the era but only 2 stars for me.
April 15, 2019
A frustrating read, made more difficult by the fact I don’t know anything about the British celebrity scene/showbiz culture it references.
December 6, 2021
I have loved all the Gordon Burn books I have read this is no different.
January 15, 2024
Initially a bit mystifying, the ending is an evil object. Gordon, god damn.
December 22, 2019
Gordon Burn, who died in 2009, was an influential writer from the North East who was probably better known in his lifetime for his non-fiction work. This is is his first novel, and deals with Burn's favourite themes - fame and celebrity, and the effect it has on both the famous and the fan; and serial killers (we'll come back to this).
The subject of the novel, and its narrator, was a hugely successful singer in the 1950s, who died of cancer in 1966, by which time the Beatles had just about swept away the style of music that gave her her fame. Burn imagines that Cogan didn't die, but survived into long and (reasonably) comfortable obscurity. There isn't really much in the way of plot here, but the evocation of Cogan's past and present is brilliantly done, as is the visit to the obsessive fan, who reveals the tenuous but chilling link between her and Brady and Hindley.
The subject of the novel, and its narrator, was a hugely successful singer in the 1950s, who died of cancer in 1966, by which time the Beatles had just about swept away the style of music that gave her her fame. Burn imagines that Cogan didn't die, but survived into long and (reasonably) comfortable obscurity. There isn't really much in the way of plot here, but the evocation of Cogan's past and present is brilliantly done, as is the visit to the obsessive fan, who reveals the tenuous but chilling link between her and Brady and Hindley.
October 5, 2008
It's rare to find a book that does something utterly different from most novels. This is one such book.
I knew nothing about Alma Cogan before I read this, she was little more than a name on my old music radar. I'm not sure I know much more about her now, in a truthful, biographical way, as that is not what this novel is about.
Instead Burns uses Alma's eyes to see beyond the scope of her natural life, to give us an impression of fame and the culture of celebrity and notoriety from the 50's through to the 80's. We take in music, art, tv, newspapers, the countryside vs the city and murder on the way. All of which is as valid today, if not more so, as in Cogan's day or when the novel was written.
I'm not sure I altogether understood the point of the novel, but still found it enthralling and highly readable.
I knew nothing about Alma Cogan before I read this, she was little more than a name on my old music radar. I'm not sure I know much more about her now, in a truthful, biographical way, as that is not what this novel is about.
Instead Burns uses Alma's eyes to see beyond the scope of her natural life, to give us an impression of fame and the culture of celebrity and notoriety from the 50's through to the 80's. We take in music, art, tv, newspapers, the countryside vs the city and murder on the way. All of which is as valid today, if not more so, as in Cogan's day or when the novel was written.
I'm not sure I altogether understood the point of the novel, but still found it enthralling and highly readable.
April 28, 2024
A suffocating, disquieting and queasily fascinating excursion into the twilight zone between biography and biographical fiction. It's like a book-length screed by a brilliant but demented diehard fan – tracking the dreamlike afterlife of a star whose fame has faded like a 50s rayon frock. A truly original piece of fiction.
September 25, 2009
I should've liked this more... I expected to. There's some amazing writing in there, but I was just not convinced by the narrator's voice - did Alma Cogan herself think in such a literary way? And i found the overall plot and esp the denouement a bit 'so what'?
July 28, 2011
Very odd book which somehow juxtaposes the eponymous Miss Cogan with Myra Hindley in ways which I can't quite remember anymore! The author is nothing if not versatile, I remember for example reading a book about snooker he had written, and several others whose titles escape me now.
May 15, 2016
Need to be listening to her while you read for the full experience.
October 27, 2011
Fine descriptive writing. I think I'll see more on a second reading
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