Here he talks about growing up in working-class Ayrshire, going against the grain and the spirit of 80s post-punk. E very teenager, or every teenager who is lucky, has a Keith. Keith is the friend who jokes and dresses with more swagger than anyone else, who looks out for misfits and makes them feel understood, who is the scourge of bullies and bigots and the master of revels, who can conjure laughs from thin air on nights when you are bored and skint.
He died in aged The book is in two halves. It is there, armed only with a glass of scotch, that he gets the call from Tully with the fateful news. When the party is less fun because your mate is the party. I must say I like that immoderately.
We are both of that generation that came of age between national service and social media. In between was that moment when you made half your friends at bus stops with people who had the same mission as you: heading into town to buy the new Smiths record. That story is more poignant, I suggest, because their friendship already had a happy ending — they both, in different ways, had made good on their pact of deliverance. The most dramatic ways out of childhoods like mine were boxing, a pools win, or making it in a band.
My grandfather was a boxer, who died at For our generation the most reliable was music. We could watch all those brilliant scallies like, say, Echo and the Bunnymen , become genuine heroes, creative, political, articulate.
They showed us that it could be done. Having three older brothers helped him survive. But they were quite tough my brothers, so kids left me alone. His eventual saviour — who assured him that there actually were places in the world where he would not seem deviant or worse for quoting Edith Sitwell — was an English teacher who persuaded him to stay on at school and try for university. Reading the London Review of Books on the way home from one of those outings to the South Downs, he saw an ad for an editorial assistant and applied.
