Iain Rowan's Blog, page 8

Happy Christmas

Family routine, Christmas Eve. Girls go get hair done at some ridiculously early hour. We drive through to Durham, pretending to the kids that we're not going to the panto that we've been to every Xmas Eve for the past six years. They pretend to be fooled. We sit in the front row, and this year get covered with shaving foam, and repeatedly harrassed by a man dressed as an elderly woman (my son, grasping for the correct panto terminology of dame, simply described her as 'the ladyboy'), and have a great time. Then we go to the same Italian restaurant we've been to every year, eat big, late, lunch, marvel that it's actually Xmas Eve already, and where the hell did December go anyway? Then drive back home, sort things out, settle down. Which is what I'm about to do now. Things are done. Things are sorted. I am knackered. We are all knackered. But things are ready.

So that's me done. See you on the other side, thank you to everyone who reads this, and I hope you all have a great one.

December catch-up

Been on travels a little bit - Yorkshire for a few days, and down to London for a couple of days to have family reunion. Good times. Had tour of parliament courtesy of my sis, and we sat in on a debate in the House of Lords, only to be taken a little by surprise when Floella Benjamin stood up to speak. No Lord Cant, though, or Lady Hamble.

My books have been getting some love recently - Nowhere To Go has featured in a couple of best of the year lists over at Luca Veste's Guilty Conscience, and there's a lengthy and lovely review of Ice Age by Eva Dolan. As an experiment we've put Nowhere To Go into Amazon's new Select program, and made it free for a couple of days as a promo...at one point in the Amazon UK short story charts free category Nowhere To Go was number one and One Step Closer was number six.

I liked this set of New Year's Resolutions by Woody Guthrie. Speaking of Woody, I also really enjoyed last week's This Is England '86. The characters feel like a bunch of old mates now, and Woody most of all, because he reminds me of someone I knew in real life.

Gone all CBGBs this weekend

Time for another music post. Here's some of the soundtrack to the last few days.

Television - Days 

I love the guitar on this, it's just beautiful.


Richard Hell and the Voidoids - Love Comes In Spurts


There is nothing you could change that would make this song better, even the flaws.




Talking Heads - A Clean Break.
The Name Of This Band Is...is a fantastic album. Youtube fails me on this one, so here's a link to the audio on Songzilla. And here's a picture of David Byrne channeling Anthony Perkins.

Introducing Penny Dreadnought

I mentioned a little while back an exciting new project that I was involved with. It's now burst into life, with the first in a projected series of books: Introducing Penny Dreadnought, Insidious Indoctrination Engine of the Abominable Gentlemen.



From the malignant minds of the Abominable Gentlemen comes the first volume of Penny Dreadnought.

Within these pages you'll find the following seeds of madness:

"Lilies" by Iain Rowan
"Cargo" by Aaron Polson
"First Time Buyers" by James Everington
"Invasion of the Shark-Men" by Alan Ryker

Introducing Penny Dreadnought, Insidious Indoctrination Engine of the Abominable Gentlemen is approximately 22,000 words, or 88 paper pages, and can be purchased at:

Amazon / Amazon UKBarnes & NobleSmashwords


Great things are planned for the future of the series, and I'm delighted to be keeping the company of such talented writers.
The Abominable Gentlemen will also be blogging. 

Bank robbers

"HSBC, Britain's largest bank, has been slapped with a £10.5m fine by the Financial Services Authority for selling unsuitable products to almost 2,500 elderly customers…In many cases the five-year investment period for the bonds was longer than the individual customer's life expectancy…a review of a sample of customer files found unsuitable sales had been made to 87% of customers."

(Guardian, 5th Dec)

So, let me just take a minute to get this right. On massive scale, a subsidiary of HSBC has been making a fortune mis-selling a financial service to vulnerable, elderly people near the end of their lives. The service is intended to help people pay for their long-term care, but in many cases the investment period for the bonds exceeded the fucking life expectancy of the people to whom it was sold.

Am really struggling here. If someone preys on the elderly via a doorstep fraud, or a bogus roofing job, chances are they'll get sent to prison. The difference here is..?

I can't see it.

And the fine? Big fucking deal. I know £10.5 million sounds like a big deal, but this is a company that made a profit of £12 billion in 2010. Put it this way, it's like someone on £20,000 a year being fined £160.

That'll show 'em.

(I've just heard that the fine is less than the commission that would have been earned on the investments. Words fail me.)

Now That's What I Call Music

A Month In Music

A Month In Music is my favourite discovery of the last few weeks.

The author has thirty days of music in his iTunes collection, 10,513 songs. He switches iTunes to shuffle, and presses play. The result is a very well-written, sweetly melancholy blog that riffs off the songs played across the month to talk about music, and memories, and how life turns out as it goes past. As you read on, you realise that the blog tells the story of the end of a marriage, and the songs that soundtrack first meetings, time together, time apart, time done.

Good photography, good music, good writing. Check it out.

Rich, powerful and pompous

One of the best comments so far to come out of witness testimony to the Leveson Inquiry, and it was from Charlotte Church:

I don't want to single out [Daily Mail editor] Paul Dacre at all. Just in terms of editors and people who are high up in tabloid papers – he [Dacre] said that there were many journalists who were exposing the misdeeds of the rich, the powerful and the pompous. 

It just struck me that Mr Dacre themselves and other editors are probably rich, definitely powerful; I'm not sure about pompous, but if they were subjected to the investigative journalism, maybe they would come out whiter than white, but if they weren't then their misdeeds are much more in the public interest as rich and powerful people than me as a TV presenter/singer or my friends.

'Scuse me while I kiss this guy

When Luca Veste invited me to contribute to the charity anthology Off The Record, we argued for a while about whether I could include 5-6-7-8 by Steps, but settled in the end on Purple Haze, an old favourite of mine. To celebrate, here's a few versions of the song, from the sublime, to the...well. Watch the videos.

Definitely the best version of all time, which takes you to the frontiers of psychedelic innerspace on a trip that even Hendrix could only have dreamed about:


A strong contender for second best:



What appears to be a mashup between Purple Haze and the Seinfeld theme tune:


WUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUB - it's dubstep Purple Haze:


We're lost in a purple haze, again and again and again and again. The Cure:





Chamber music, from the Kronos Quartet:


But finally, what better way to stay true to the spirit of the original, than by this version brought to you by a choir of very elderly people. Actin' funny, but don't know why? It's because you forgot to have your bran for breakfast this morning, dear.

Off The Record

Off The Record is an charity anthology edited by Luca Veste, featuring stories from a host of excellent authors, with each story inspired by a classic song track. It's been launched today, and is available on Amazon now (UK | US). Thirty-eight stories for just £2.29, it's a bargain, and all the royalties go to charity - the National Literacy Trust in the UK, and the Children's Literary Initiative in the US.

There's a new story in there from me, too. Purple Haze is a story about people getting out of their heads, and out of their depth.

Grab a copy now, get some great reading, and contribute to the development of child literacy too. Full contents list:


1.Neil White - Stairway To Heaven
2.Col Bury – Respect
3.Steve Mosby – God Moving Over The Face Of Waters
4.Les Edgerton - Small Change
5.Heath Lowrance - I Wanna Be Your Dog
6.AJ Hayes - Light My Fire
7.Sean Patrick Reardon - Redemption Song
8.Ian Ayris - Down In The Tube Station At Midnight
9.Nick Triplow - A New England
10.Charlie Wade - Sheila Take A Bow
11.Iain Rowan - Purple Haze
12.Thomas Pluck - Free Bird
13.Matthew C. Funk - Venus In Furs
14.R Thomas Brown - Dock Of The Bay
15.Chris Rhatigan – Shadowboxer
16.Patti Abbott - Roll Me Away
17.Chad Rhorbacher - I Wanna Be Sedated
18.Court Merrigan - Back In Black
19.Paul D. Brazill - Life On Mars?
20.Nick Boldock – Superstition
21.Vic Watson - Bye Bye Baby
22.Benoit Lelievre - Blood On The Dancefloor
23.Ron Earl Phillips - American Pie
24.Chris La Tray – Detroit Rock City
25.Nigel Bird - Super Trouper
26.Pete Sortwell – So Low, So High
27.Julie Morrigan - Behind Blue Eyes
28.David Barber – Paranoid
29.McDroll - Nights In White Satin
30.Cath Bore - Be My Baby
31.Eric Beetner - California Dreamin'
32.Steve Weddle - A Day In The Life
33.Darren Sant - Karma Police
34.Simon Logan - Smells Like Teen Spirit
35.Luca Veste - Comfortably Numb
36.Nick Quantrill - Death Or Glory
37.Helen FitzGerald - Two Little Boys
38.Ray Banks - God Only Knows


Also includes forewords from UK writer Matt Hilton, and US writer Anthony Neil Smith.