Blood Relatives starts in 1975 in Leeds, which for me was the nadir of the decade. The country was all but broke. The fashion was for clunky square cars, wide shirt collars and trousers with flares that always got sodden in the rain. Girls in tent dresses with fluted collars and knee length boots.
By ‘75 glam had descended into the nursery rhyme farce of Gary Glitter and Mud, prog rock was coked out and washed up; disco and punk hadn’t yet made inroads. So it was Abba or Status Quo. But it was also the era of dub reggae and U.S. funk and real R & B. Older siblings would tell you smugly that nothing would be as good as the sixties ever again and you felt miserably that you’d been born too late. Read more…
The impetus to write John the Pupil hit me when I was sitting in the British Library reading about the medieval Franciscan and magus Roger Bacon, who is often described as the first ‘modern’ scientist. I was researching writing something about bomb-making when a byway took me into a biography of Bacon, who had rediscovered gunpowder. The book contained the following footnote: ‘In 1267, Bacon sent his pupil John to Italy with two companions to deliver his book, the Opus Majus, to the Pope.’ Read more…
