I want to share with you the novel’s conception. Let’s be under no illusions, this book wasn’t something I knocked together in a few months in a coffee bar or in a nice posh conservatory as I imagine some cosy millionaire authors might have, and I have nothing against conservatories. My granddad had one, but it wasn’t a posh one. It had a corrugated transparent plastic roof under which he used it to store his fishing equipment and motorbike. No this book took me ages. It was far from being a romantic conception. The process began properly in late 1993 with an idea I had in Leigh Bus station waiting for the 658 to Wigan following one of my rehearsals for ‘The Wakefield Mysteries’. (I played a sheep thief)
Life in 1993. Most people I knew couldn’t type let alone had PC’s. We had to make do with the Open Learning Centre at college, a computer suite staffed by a lady with a permenant forced smile called Beverly and a computer bod who had been directly cloned from a mouse called Gordon. In 1993 most of my fellow students were either pretending to be into grunge or hip hop, while geeky me listened to Jean Michel Jarre, Abba, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Enigma and euro dance (a hangover from my DJ-ing days and my work at The Princes nightclub in Wigan…), wathced arty films and science fiction TV programmes. The tories were still in government. Middle aged women had an unhealthy obsession for The Chippendales and people were making do with four channels until the joys of Cable and Sky became affordable. I was an incredibly sensitive, uptight individual, at least 5 years older than my peers, but with 5 years less experience, who wondered about in a thick brown leather jacket and Pepe jeans. I wanted to be an actor or a playwright. I wanted to make films. I wanted to make a pop album.
Things however never really took much shape until a pointless relationship came to an end in mid-January 1994 and also because I wanted to impress as many people as possible, partly because it was the next best think to sleeping with them, but perhaps not as disappointing, From there it developed into a short story for a student magazine. My earlier short story wasn’t technically good. It was full of all kinds of terrible errors, although I didn’t often transcribe it for the magazine in its original version, as I couldn’t really be fussed teaching myself how to type until mid 1994. In fact one of my then English tutors, Mr Campbell, (Eddie) pulled me up one day in front of my fellow students and brusquely told me that it was ‘Rubbish!’ and ‘No in the least grammatical!’ Far from discouraging me to chop my hands off and never write again it only made me more determined to stubbornly press ahead strong in my own convictions.
Over the next couple of years, I worried, I studied, I worked, got drunk, felt miserable, made compilation tapes, and in between this I wrote what I could, believing it at the time to be better than anything that had ever, or would ever be written. That’s the cruel thing about hindsight, it stops you one day to call you a twat and to slap you hard. It grabs you by the chin hard and forces you to look long and hard at your face in the mirror and reflect upon all the shit things you’ve done.
The genesis of the book really does have an odd history. The first seed came about in the summer of 1992 when I saw a Sixty Minutes interview with Woody Allen during the whole furore with Mia Farrow and Soon-Yi, his then adopted daughter. According to Allen, Mia apparently wanted to arrange someone to gouge his eyes out. He quipped that she’d always been interested in Greek tragedy. For some reason this concept intrigued me, especially when I eventually discovered its origin in the Sophocles plays. (I later played Creon in my first year A-level production) If only something like this could be set in modern times, and re-located, (both ideas probably done of course). If only rather than re-writing the story of Oedipus I could not re-write the story of Oedipus or indeed have any reference to Greek tragedy. Bingo! It was to be a Dutch tragedy without it being particularly tragic and only marginally Dutch.
The next seeds came about in late autumn 1993 shortly before the title came to me in Leigh bus station. I recall that I had been watching a couple of episodes of Wild Palms the Oliver Stone produced mini series that involved brainwashing, science fiction, drugging and virtual reality, set in the year 2007. The idea, themes and structure of this series was closer to Red Cloggs (I gace it two g’s in those days for more emphasis) than anything else I was influenced by at the time, and it had an eye gouging scene. To some Wild Palms was seen as an inferior version of Twin Peaks. Despite appreciating the tone and atmosphere of both programmes I never could quite get involved in them. Never had the same problem with The Prisoner.
Add to this a story my mum used to tell me when I was a child, a scary tale involving red clogs. I don’t know if it’s a Wigan thing or not but I was told that red clogs was a girl or a person who lived underneath the canal (presumably the Leeds to Liverpool) and dragged people in and drowned them. I can’t recall much more about it or even if it’s something I may have just made up myself but the ‘red clogs’ image seemed to have obviously stayed with me. Of course much of these influences are daft. But I was interested in representing the uncanny or the unheimlich, as the proper term is. But not essentially in a serious way. So all these foundations got me thinking. And so I conceived an idea that would involve a fairytale, spy-like, sexy, thriller sort of thing. I wanted to incorporate lots of eye gouging, preferably mass eye gouging, tooth extraction and sexy, hilarious people. I wanted to involve Henry Kelly (but that’s another matter. Maybe I could persuade him to read the audio book.) Importantly I wanted it to be European.
The very first part of the short story appeared in the student magazine ‘The New Deal’ in January 1994. It was a remarkable achievement insofar as it managed to slip past the editor full of punctuation errors and spelling mistakes. The reason I left it on a cliffhanger was because I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I had a few weeks to come up with something. Which enabled it to get more ridiculous but in a sense more focused. But far, far away, in terms of style and language from where it is now. I have no idea how it was really received. Me being me, I guess I expected it was being lapped up, although very few people were declaring my genius to the world. In any case it didn’t stop me that summer putting together all the parts into a ten page pamphlet for my friends. (That was another habit I had in those days. If I write something, a collection, short stories, fairytales I’d get them printed into pamphlets irrespective if they’d been proof read or not-they weren’t- and give them out to friends, teachers and people I worked with, so convinced I was in my own great expectations.) As you can expect that whole period just inspires fist-biting embarassment.
That summer also my good friend David Brunt wrote a sequel in the form of a screenplay called ‘Red Clogs From Beyond The Stars’ which was intended to be filmed. After a false start trying to film it, I eventually serialised it for the New Deal, between 1994/1995. Then there was a spin off called ‘Springtime Bud’ I put together based on a character he’d created. Then in 1995/1996, my final year at college, ‘Rebel Without a Clog’ serial. What David brought to this unlikely franchise was a new mythology, a refreshing flippancy a shared affection for Jan Van Der Mann and his world.
At the risk of him going all Ian Levine or MJ Simpson on me, I started everything again from scratch in late 1996 during my ‘gap’ year, I suppose you could call it, the aim being to write a prequel. (You see in the mid 90s you were always reading something about sequels, trilogies and prequels. It was inescapable.) But mine wouldn’t be so much a prequel as a fresh start. In effect I had a foundation, early drafts and some concrete ideas to get something I’d been developing for the past couple of years, together in a proper novel with loads of pages an everything. There was even an abandoned film version and a short film version of it as well but that’s a whole new blog. So 1996. Year zero.
