Backlisted - Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn - Rerun

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

In a special edition recorded earlier this year live at the Durham Book Festival, John and Andy are joined by writers Adele Stripe and Ben Myers to discuss Gordon Burn's debut novel Alma Cogan. The 'What Have We Been Reading?' slots are occupied by Pevsner's guide to Durham and The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. *If you'd like to support the show, join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, it's Nicky. Hi, it's Andy. Thanks for tuning in and going to Bat Listed. We've got another show today from our archive. This one was recorded in October, 2017 and went out in the early weeks of November. And it's about the novel Alma Cogan by the late Gordon Byrne, the late and very great Gordon Burn. It was recorded live at the Durham Book Festival with Ben Myers and Adele Stripe. And Nikki, I went back and listened to a bit of this in preparation for Tallinn.

talking about it now. And I was really struck by, first of all, everybody sounds very young and hyped up because they're in front of an audience. The tone of voice is quite a lot higher. Everyone seems to speak lower now. Have you noticed? Yes, I have. I did think that. Or it was recorded on double speed. I'm not sure. Clearly, the sheer adrenaline of talking to a small room full of people was enough. Anyway, it struck me. Alma Cogan is a novel that I read in the early night. I absolutely loved it at the time. I like it a lot now.

I was so pleased that we got to make that show. But I think in some ways it has dated, not in a way that would put you off reading it, I hasten to add, but in retrospect it seems to be a novel that is very, very much of its moment. The late 80s, early 1990s. and if we were making the show again now, I think we would make it a bit differently.

I think talking about the book in 2017, it was still within almost recent memory, whereas now going back to it in 2026, I'd want to say more about the social context and political context. But people can find that out for themselves. We're not going to do that. Just enjoy the trip back to 19. 1991 or two via us in 2016.

Brilliant. The book itself and now the recording itself are of their time. What we're doing is we're both against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past, if you will. Yeah, there's also other stuff we're doing because we're doing reruns because we paused our kind of new output on the main feed for a bit. But we are doing some classic books for the patrons, aren't we? We've done some really great stuff. I'm just on a recording, in fact, of three men in a boat. We have.

We've just done a show on Three Men in a Boat by Jerome Came Jerome, which was so much fun. And we did our backlisted posh bingo booker prize winners first show, didn't we? What was that? Yeah, yeah, that was great. That was on the first ever Booker Prize winner, something to answer for by P.H. Newby. And at the end of it, you drew out of a hat. You drew out what the next book is going to be, which is a real backlisted favourite, isn't it? Yes, the next book we'll be talking about on that exclusively on our Patreon.

with between the three of us and all our lovely supporters is Penelope Fitzgerald's offshore and Nikki you were looking at the switchboard as it were when that title came out of the hat. What happened? I mean they all went, the patrons on the chat, they were very, lots and lots of positive thumbs up and smiles. Good. Smiley faces all round.

Yeah, yeah. So we're looking forward to that. So if you'd like to join us for those, it's a live show, but it'll also be on demand. come to patreon.com forward splash, forward splash. Forward splash. Forward splash. Forward slash, backlisted. And now on with the show. Enjoy, Alma Cogam. Welcome to this special episode of Backlisted, the podcast that brings new life to old books. We've transplanted the show, Lockstock and Barrel 260 miles north, perched on the banks of the River Weir to the gala theatre in the beautiful Cathedral City of Durham. We're here as part of the Durham Book Festival, which, as it was founded in 1990,

is one of the country's oldest book festivals. I'm John Mitchinson and... I'm Andy Miller and joining us on our trip to the north are the following guests. Hello to Adele Stripe. Adele Stripe is a poet and novelist whose first novel Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile about the playwright Andrea Dunbar was shortlisted for this year's Gordon Burn Prize at the Durham Book Festival. According to experts, including me and John Mitchinson,

it's a bloody great book. In Adele's personal life, she is married to the writer Ben Myers. We're also joined by the writer Ben Myers. Under duress. He is a writer. That's not what you said in your email, Ben. Ben is a writer and journalist whose third novel, Pig Iron, won the Golden Burn Prize in 2012.

He has also won the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers Award. He's the author of seven novels. to this year alone. Incredible. John talked about one of them, the Gallo's poll on an episode of Batlisted earlier this year,

and the other, these darkening days, was published a few weeks ago and according to experts, including John Mitchinson, it's bloody great too. In his personal life, Ben is married to the writer

Lionel Shriver. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry, Adele Stripe. Sorry, bloody Wikipedia. That is all. old news. That is fake news. Fake news. Andy Miller.

Fake news. Jackuse, fake news. Why don't we give them a round of applause to the hell of it? Yes, these darkening days I reviewed elsewhere somewhere other than this podcast. But I did, I know Ben was happy with this, coined the phrase Elroy in a flat cat. I love that. Which is, because it's a gritty thriller set in the north. The novel we're going to talk about today is Alma Cogan by Gordon Byrne, winner of the 1991 Whitbread Prize for fiction.

But before that, before we get into Gordon Byr, as it's traditional on this podcast, I look across the table and say, to you, Andy, what have you been reading? Well, I've been reading this week. In fact, what I've been reading in the last couple of days yesterday and today is the Pevsner Buildings of England guide to County Durham. I'm just, if anyone doesn't

who know what the Pevsner guides are, they were a wonderful series that was created in the early 1950s by Sir Nicholas Pevsner, and the County Durham volume, which is a guide to the architecture of the area, was one of the first ones that Pevsner wrote and one of the first ones that was published.

It was published originally, I think, in 51 or 53. And these volumes of architecture, architectural guides are regularly updated. The Buildings of England series is now owned by Yale University Press. And they publish new editions every 10 to 15 years or so because, of course, buildings rise and fall. If we look out the window at the venue here, we can see buildings of some of the buildings that presumably put up here in Durham in the 1980s. 60s. 60s being taken down. But I just want to read the opening of what Pevsner himself wrote about Durham, because he was passionate about this city. He says, and I should say this volume covers County Durham,

the section on the city itself is 100 pages long. I mean, it's a book within a book. And he says, he wrote, Durham is one of the great experiences of Europe to the eyes of those who appreciate architecture and to the minds of those who understand architecture. The group of cathedral, castle and monastery on the rock can only be compared to Avignon and Prague and by circumstance and planning, the old town has hardly been spoilt and is to almost the same degree the visual foil to the monuments that it must have been 200 and 500 years ago. The river Weir forms so close a loop that the town is surrounded on it by three sides. On the land side, the two medieval bridges are a bare 900 feet from each other. The position was ideal for a fortress

and it is ideal for the picture of a town. For a cathedral, it is as unusual as for a monastery. Avignon and Prague have been mentioned, but what distinguishes Durham visually from them is again something exceedingly English. The pictures of the buildings on the hill which one remembers all have foregrounds of green. The most moving one from the Pre-Benz Bridge, in fact, shows the cathedral rising straight above the tops of the venerable trees up the steep bank, as if it were the vision of a Casper David Friedrich or a shinkle. verdure mellows what would otherwise be too domineering, domineering the castle, domineering the site of the cathedral,

domineering the architecture of the cathedral, and domineering inside the cathedral, the throne of the bishop raised on a higher platform than the shrine of the saint. Now, I think the thing that's so wonderful about that and what's so wonderful about this series of books is that is inspired. Yeah?

That writing is inspired writing in the true sense that Pevner was able to come here he got his wife to drive him because Missive Pevesner did all the driving and made the sandwiches before they set out. So she'd drive him around all day and then he would stay up until two in the morning typing in their bed and breakfast. And then she'd make sandwiches in the kitchen the next morning and they'd set off again. And out of that industry and her sacrifice came this brilliant series of the important,

wonderful, beautiful books. It's one of those glorious things that, I mean, which not... unique to this country, but I've put Pevsner alongside the Oxford English Dictionary and the Ordnance Survey. It's just this sort of desire to kind of, to sort of taxonomic desire to pin things down and to create these incredible reference books. But when I'm, my former life as a reference publisher, Pevesner was always the standard bearer because what you want is reference books that are written by people, real people who've got engagement with what they're doing, not sort of faceless panels of American academics, which a lot of reference books have become.

but his voice shines through all of the and my story about that particular book is when I grew up in the North East and then we emigrated to New Zealand when I was quite young and when I was about 15 in a second-hand bookshop in Auckland in New Zealand I found a copy of Pevner's Durham and it became a kind of sacred object to me

because I could reconstruct not just bits of sunland, bits of the whole of the North East that I remembered from my childhood from reading the Pevesterner And when I came back when I was 18, it was a book that I took everywhere when I came to retrace my steps. So there are probably bits I could recite from heart. The other thing I saw, there, Ben, the other thing that I love about Peves and a lot, and unfortunately, in some of the recent editions, they've started smoothing this out.

But he's very grumpy. You know, he loves Durham. But if you've ever read Matt, our producer was telling me earlier, if you ever read his account of Cornwall, he's furious that Cornwall is so big and so full of nothing of interest he there's a little bit here sometimes he's hated i mean they're absolutely hated i mean there's a bit here stand first he does this thing that he does the sections of the books have a thing called a perambulation where you can walk around the city with your pebs and the guide in your hand with him as your guide saying look at this building look at that building and here's a bit from

the Durham perambulation two stand first on fram Gate Bridge and look south to the incomparable view of the river Gorge with only castle and cathedral above the trees and the pre-Benz bridge closing the vista at the bend of the river then look north at the disappointing jumble of relief road bridge banal yet self-assertive 1960's office block and 1940 ice rink and I sort of I think the 1940 ice rink has gone I was looking for it yesterday it's not there anymore so even that you know the nostalgia for the things that he didn't like when you pick these are now You think, oh, that's a shame. That carbuncle is no longer there. Sorry. Well, I grew up in Durham as well, and I haven't read any of that. But it's interesting that he talks about these banks of greenery

that sort of evoked Caspar David Friedrich. I know exactly what it means. There are these big ivy-covered banks when I was 15 or 16, me and my friends. We didn't see the kind of aesthetic artistry beauty of it. We saw it as an opportunity to climb up. and halfway up, about 100 feet up, there's a little ledge where we're able to sit and drink underage

every Friday night out of the way of, you know, the risk of getting beaten up by the tufts from the villagers. So the very banks he's describing, we used to climb up, and then we'd fill a carrier bag full of our empties hang it from a branch.

He hasn't described that. This is the Bevsner got in here. It's very golden burn, though. I love that. Yeah, yeah. Juxtaposition. I must also say, I asked you, John, what you've been reading. I have been reading this morning. I was very

fortunate. I was approached. I did a talk here at the Durham Festival yesterday called author Confidention. I talked to a bit. I talked a bit about my mum's favourite author. My mum's favourite author is the novelist Alan Titchmarsh. And my mum will never hear this, so it's fine. And so I was saying how whenever I write a book, she reads it and then says, well, it's all right, Andrew, but when will you write something more like Alan Titchmarsh. And so I was out and about yesterday and a gentleman called Lee, who is here in the audience, Hello, Lee, approached me in the street and said, I really enjoyed the event, I've got something for you.

And he's bought me a copy of the novel Mr. McGregor by Alan Titchmarsh. So I've started reading it, Lee. I've started reading it. It's no good. You've made a bad thing worse with my mum. But anyway, John, what have you been reading? reading The Very Giant by Kazu Ishiaguro. The reason I've been reading it is I started it and I didn't finish it and then he won the Nobel

Prize and like a lot of people I was pretty confident that Margaret Atwood was going to win, which would have been a very, very good thing. But if Margaret Atwin wasn't going to win it, then I hadn't really thought about Ishiguro. But it made me think how many Ishaeguro books I had read and loved and how I think he has done something almost unique in writing in kind of writing in a different genre for each book. He's the publisher's worst nightmare. He writes a completely different book each time. You know, you have the kind of downtown abbey

of the butler in the famous one, which I took the ruins of the day. And you've got, the famous one, never let me go, which is sort of sci-fi. But buried giant is, and I have to say, I think it's a really very fine book. And I was amazing.

I've actually finished reading it this morning and were very, very moved by the ending. I mean, it's, it has a sort of weirdly appropriate feel to Durham. I don't know. It's, I don't know if you know the book is set in a kind of imaginary England in the first, in the first millennium, between the departure of the Romans and the kind of the, the Saxons are just beginning to arrive, but there are still ogres kind of on the edges of of, of, of villages. and life is hard.

And it turns out that the main character, an old man called Axel and his wife, Beatrice, wake up one morning with this strange presentment that they need to go on a journey and they don't quite know why. And it turns out the book is quite long. I mean, as everything Ishaeguura does, it's exquisitely written.

But it's like a sort of pale medieval tapestry the way it evolves. They discover a broken old knight, Gawain, who is part of the old British past. you know, the heroic past of King Arthur. And then it turns out that the book is, all their memories have been, have basically been put on hold

by the breath of a she dragon and without giving you the plot away. I mean, it sounds mad. I hear as myself saying these words, I think, why would anyone want to read a book like this? But you should, because he is, he's got this amazing ability to tell these stories of fables. I was trying to think what it reminded

me of and I suppose like I say it on one level it has that kind of that medieval sort of saints life feel to it but the other thing suddenly struck me it's like a it's like it really is like a sort of samurai movie you know it's kind of broken samurai going on a journey they're trying to find it turns out they're trying to find their lost sun and again you know without giving spoilers away and the resolution at the end is incredibly beautifully done it's so unlikely that ishiguro would be writing this And yet, again, when you read it, you think it's all the Isiguro stuff is there, memory, time, the kind of class. Because basically the Saxons are rebuilding Britain, and the Britons are sort of clinging onto the past. And it's really interesting.

How many, can I ask the audience members for a show of hands? How many of you here have read one or more novels by Kazuo Ishiguro? Now, I think that's pretty great for a Nobel Prize winner. Yeah, I'm really happy that he's won it. I think he's a brilliant advertisement for fiction. I've read one, and I think maybe, I think I've read one and a half novels by Casua Ishiguro. How about you, our guests, Ben and Dale.

You know how many were made. Why else would I ask? Between us, we've read zero. But you can ask us about any other author. I will. I have to say, you are two of the most, I love, you're very good at putting up on Instagram things, the books that you're buying.

And I just think you've got the most, I mean, the range of books that you read and that you get through, it's almost in the Miller class. No, they're far above me. I'm interested, though. We talked about this a bit earlier. Does Isiguro winning the Nobel Prize for Literature make you more or less likely to read one of those novels?

Well, actually, it makes no difference to me because he has been recommended to me before by people who I trust. and never let me go is the one that has always popped up. So I think perhaps I will try at some point to purchase a copy. Do you think you are more or less likely to read one as a result of the prize being awarded? I would. I think so. Yeah, I would want to find out why him. I mean, I know a lot about him. And the book John mentions Barry Giant. I've read so much. I mean, this is the problem is sometimes you read so much about a novel

that you don't read it because you know the plot. You get all the different opinions. It was mildly controversial. Ursula McGuin came out viciously against it, saying that it was not fantasy. And it seems to me to be a bit of a sort of paper target because I don't think he'd ever said it was fantasy. And in fact, I think what he's doing is perhaps a bit more interesting.

But that made her cross because there is this thing, if you're going to do fantasy, you do it properly and take it seriously. And she felt it was somehow insulting to fantasy writers, which I don't really understand that. I just think it's like all good writers, at some point you have to just relax into their vision of reality. You just have to go with it. Yeah, well, that is appropriate to what we're here to talk about,

the writer's vision of reality. So we're here to talk about a novel that was published, as John said in 1991, called Alma Cogan by the late Gordon Byrne. And I'm going to start the discussion by asking, Ben, I think, as I do on these occasions, where were you when you first heard about Gordon Byrne or heard about this book or read this book or whatever? Well, I've been thinking about this quite a bit and it's hard to pinpoint exactly because it seems like it's kind of drifted in and out of my consciousness over the years. But I think, as I said, I grew up here and I was studying just about to start failing my A-levels when the book came out.

And I remember reading about Gordon Burn in the local press. There's some good sort of free local arts magazines in Newcastle. Because it was less about the book and more about him. It probably sounds naive now, but I wasn't aware that there was, that writers really came from the North East at the time. There's Pat Barker, but at the time age 16, I read about this guy who's from the west end of Newcastle. I don't know how much you know about.

His upbringing was pretty humble, you know, outdoor toilets and poverty, basically. but he decided to be a journalist, which is what I wanted to do at the time, and in fact still am to some extent. And he went to university, but he had no formal journalistic training, and he basically went and interviewed someone and sold the article to the local paper,

which then sold to the Times, I think. And then he was away. And I read this story about a guy who went, right, I'm going to go to Newcastle, and he didn't smooth off his Jordie Edge. I think he used it to his advantage, his sort of confidence, and his brashness and his sort of bullshit detector, I suppose.

He writes brilliantly about art, but he does it without pretension. So I read about this guy who, you know, London seems a long way away from Durham when you're kind of a teenager. So I became aware of him and this book that he'd written called Al McCogan about some sort of faded, you know, primetime music star that I'd heard about. But actually only probably read it about 10 years ago. I wrote a novel called Richard about the disappearance of Reuters. Richard Edwards from the Manick Street Preachers.

So it was a novel about a real person. But it was, I remember about Al McCogan. It was just a book that feels haunted all the way through. It's like one big exercise in foreshadowing. There's something bad is coming. And I kind of wanted to do something similar with Richard because we all, the reader would know that this guy is about to disappear. So I've read it about three or four times over the years.

And it just seems to have been there since I was about 16. Adele, when did you, can you remember when you first read the novel? It was probably Ben gave me it when we were living in Nunhead. So I think that was probably about 10 years ago. But I first came across Gordon Byrne when I was living in a rat hole in Leeds, a back-to-back. And I heard about on the way to work, which was his book that he wrote with Damien Hurst. And I was interested in that book because it was the stories,

it was interviews with Damien, but Damien was talking about his life in Leeds quite extensively in that book. And there is a picture of Damien in there and he'd been into the Leeds mortuary and there's a dead guy's head that Damien has pushed his face up against and he's about 16 years old

and he's dossing about with the corpses. and it's awful. It's awful, but it's also quite funny. So that was where I first came across Gordon Byrne was that book. It's another upbeat episode of... Death memory. Death memory. I mean, it's worth saying that this is a novel,

but we should explain a little bit. I mean, should we do... Would a blurb be a good... Yeah, I think it would be useful for the audience to... at home and here, if we can just position the book for people because it's quite an unusual premise. It's quite an unusual premise.

And Gordon himself was known, I guess he was kind of influenced by the new journalism, by, I mean, I think reading the executioner song by Norman Mailer when he was young, really influenced what he did. So he started writing kind of non-fiction. And he's fond of quoting John Burgess. It's quite a good background to the idea

of why his fiction isn't much like a lot of, of other fiction. He said there was a quote by John Berger that I had in mind that imagination is not, as most people think, the ability to invent. It's the ability to disclose what already exists. So already you've got somebody who's thinking about fiction in a rather different way. And a lot of his references, fictional references, are to writers who don't write. W.G. Zobalt was one of his favorites, again, who write novels that could almost be non-fiction. But here, on the of the Faber edition, which doesn't have, I think, a particularly great cover. We talk about the iconic covers in a minute, but it has a reasonable blurb.

How does it feel to never be allowed to die? In his classic debut novel, Gordon Byrne 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, Jr., as Byrne 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. And we'll just so, I'll say a little bit about Alma Cogan. So she was born in 1932 and she died in 1966. The idea of this novel is that, in fact, she didn't die in 1966, that she's still alive, and she narrates the novel from the late 1980s. It's written in the late 1980s. And she was known in her era.

She was very popular in the 1950s as the girl with the giggle in her voice. And Gordon clearly felt that she represented a kind of pre-Beatles, pre-rock music era that he wanted to write about. So, yeah, and insofar as there is a plot in Alma Cogan, Alma is, she's a hyper-articulate woman in her 70s looking back on her life. And she goes to London where she meets a couple of her old friends and has a meal.

And then travels to the house of a collector, an obsessive collector who has basically gathered at an archive. She got rid of all her. She lives in a small cottage in a small coastal village. Adele, I wonder if you got something that you could, We've set up so people understand what the premise of the book is. Have you got something you could read that might give us an idea of how Gordon then tries to carry that into prose? I'm going to read a small section from the opening page of the book. And I think it actually tells us quite a lot about Burns' descriptive observational style of prose.

He uses litany quite a lot throughout the book. and I think that's one of his great skills actually being able to do that in a compelling way so I have chosen a particularly visceral section so I will give it a go I can't do it in Alma Cogan voice I'm afraid I can hear a giggle in your voice

you're going to have to forgive me I think the giggle without giving too much about the novel the giggle has gone by the time she's narrating this book So here she is actually describing her fans. And of course, this is a book about celebrity and fame. So I will begin. The women pressed close, smelling of dandruff,

Candlewick, camphor and powdered milk, thinly disguised by a top note, as the perfume manufacturers put it, of evening in Paris, or Cote, Leomont, or some other cheerful, rapidly evaporating technical a stink from Woolworths. Despite the fact that they were wearing their best clothes, the men gave off stomach heaving waves of dog and diesel, boot-dubbing, battery fluid, pigeon feed, dried cuttlefish,

cooked breakfasts, rough tobacco, weak old hair oil, and belched-back beer. They were odours that I unwillingly, but instinctive, associated with scenes of domestic mayhem, children scalded, wives abused, small dogs dropped from high windows. And of the time when the scraps of paper being so urgently thrust forward for my signature would be found curled up in the back of some sideboard drawer

or dustline wallet. I can remember, I remember, I became a, I started as a bookseller in December 1990, I remember sitting in the tea room at Waterstones in Brighton and reading the publishers catalogue for basically the first time ever and seeing this book described and a proof copy had arrived at the shop, a proof coffee is when they send them to booksellers and journalists early to attract interest. And Adele, I can remember the bit you've just read.

I remember reading it on my tea break. You know, that terrible, grubby, seedy thing. And after that first paragraph thinking, I'm in. You know, that it's so wonderful that. It sets the scene so perfectly in terms of both the milieu that he wants to write about and the tone of voice. But again, the fact that he describes people as smelling of small dogs dropped from windows.

It doesn't make sense, but it does when, like Adel said, it's a litany of details. And I think the entire book is an accumulation of details and observations and ephemera and artefacts and memories. I think John was almost generous in describing the plot because there isn't really a plot at all, is it? And there isn't really any characters as such, but they're the kind of ghostly figures in particular one

who I'm sure will get to who appears at the end of the book. But it's a book that every time I read it, I get a bit more from it each time. But primarily it seems to be about, fame and celebrity which is something that Byrne was actually ahead of his time in discussing really because Celebrity now is a word that has come to take on a new or to take on no meaning at all really and I think he was fascinated with The idea of fame. I mean it's described on the the edition I've got is the American edition and it's described as a dream memoir but I would describe it more as a nightmare biography

or a haunted portrait perhaps. Yeah, I think the The obsession of a celebrity, which kind of he wrote brilliantly about, both, I mean, the celebrity on one hand of famous sportspeople, one of his early books was a brilliant, inserted himself into the world of professional snooker, a book called Pocket Money, but also of, you know, people who commit crimes. He famously, obviously, wrote the definitive book on Peter Sutcliffe. And again, Happy Light Murderers on the West's. Really, really difficult books to read. but brilliant because of the way that he did his research. He was interested in the fact that he says something about celebrity, which I think is quite, he says celebrity is a thin, weightless thing and mostly exists as a series of electronically generated pulses and pixels.

Often it is literally without foundation or substance. It is an inevitable fallout of the galloping and still ongoing process, which has seen the electronic society of the image, the daily. bath we all take in the media, replace the real community of the crowd. And this idea of community, he said, you know, communities where nobody used the word community, but everybody

was part of one. It's more than just the North-South divide. It's about a moment in history, I think, where things change. And that, you know, from Alma Cogan to the Beatles, and we'll talk about some of his other books in that connection. He strikes, I've read this book again this week, I hadn't read it. So he's It's the first time I've read it since 1991, so I was 23 when I read it.

I'm 49 now. So a significant gap of time and life have occurred to me in the intervening period. Exactly the same for me. I was also a book sell. I also read it. And weirdly, I couldn't, I'm amazed how little of it I remembered. I remembered that we'll talk about the big reveal at the end. The difference is, one of the differences is, because Gordon sadly is no longer with us,

and you can see his work as a whole, which you couldn't then. It struck me coming back to it and having read some of his other books in the interim. He was a journalist whose work in both fiction and nonfiction and sort of sliding backwards and forwards between the two. Journalism is often his subject, the relation of journalists, and the things that journalists, British journalism is obsessed with. Celebrity, true crime, sport, news. And then into that pot, you also focus,

it strikes me, Ben, something you've written about. There's two other things going on. And they are art, because he was a brilliant writer about art and knew a great deal about art and the North. He's a great, as you said, northern writer. So you've got this interesting stew of all these things that you tend to find in various mixtures in each of his books, whether it's a novel or whether it's non-fiction.

and whether it's something in between. Yeah, and I think some of it predates the sort of current obsession that we have now with, particularly with fame and celebrity. There's a great quote from that he has Alma, Cogan, say, very early on in the book, which applies today more than ever. She says, to be famous is to be alone, but without feeling lonely. And I think that's what a lot of, you know, the big brother era of celebrity. I think that's what a lot of people crave.

They want the adoration of fame and celebrities so that they feel less alone. I mark that passage too because it always reminds me of one of the bits of the Beatles anthology that stuck in my mind. I can't remember which one of it is. They would be booked into the whole floor of a hotel when they were touring. And it always end up in one or other of the bathrooms, you know, laughing and drinking. And it's just that sort of weird sense of, you know, the idea that, you know, four friends would want to have this vast, kind of space to themselves. It's completely misunderstood the notion,

but that thing of being, being alone, but not being lonely. It's really, it's a key to this book, I think. Adele, did you think that, how do you feel the book stands up as a book about celebrity written before the internet? Well, Michael Hurd describes it as a ruthless antidote to nostalgia.

And I think that's right, because there is always this kind of worry when writing about the past that we try and look at it through the rose-tinted glasses and see it in a different way. She is kind of aware of her own celebrity and fame, but she's walked away from it. And she's now living in when she is speaking in the book. She's reflecting upon it and trying to piece together her past as a celebrity. So she's living quite an isolated existence. She's living in a cottage surrounded by other people's things. And it's quite strange. Like how was she ended up there? What happened to her? Did she lose all of her money? It leaves you with all of these questions about this character of

Alma Kogan. But then there are sections in the book where she is almost, it's quite clever. And I kind of describe it as a Russian doll effect. So she goes. to the tape gallery and she looks at the portrait that Peter Blake has made of her and there is a catalogue an official it looks like an official

tape catalogue listing of the Peter Blake Alma Cogan portrait and he's written it in a style that is you would not you would think that that actually existed but it's a fiction but that is a biography within

a memoir because it's kind of fictional memoir, really, Alma Cogan. So it's really clever how he does it. Well, we've got a clip here of Gordon talking about why he wanted to write about Alma Cogan specifically and what Al McCogan represented to him in terms of the subjects that he returned to write about. So if we could hear that now, popular culture, as we now know it, but we didn't know it 35 years ago, is newness, sexiness, newness, the two are interchangeable. So television coming in the people's homes and British post-war homes, obviously was the most exciting thing that had happened, probably since the war. And in a way, it seemed like her life, her only life, was in front of a theta audience or a

television camera. And in a way, when her celebrity was taken away from her in the early 60s, after the Beatles and the local stuff all happened, she almost stopped living in a fairly kind of essential way. Something about her life had kind of seeped out of her. and that being robbed of the television camera and being robbed of large audiences somehow robbed her of a part of herself that she felt she needed to go on existing as this media person.

You know, and she died when she was very young, 34. People feel that their own small lives are in some way compensated for by these large lives. That's the role that celebrities play in post-war life. So he actually made. Alma Cogan. And when Gordon was a teenager, he was an autograph hunter, which is not surprising. Brilliant. I didn't know that. That's great. And he met her in Newcastle off the train, and he carried her suitcase to the hotel. And he must have only been 14 or 15. So that's where his kind of

obsession with Alma began. Oh, my, well, that is amazing. I didn't know that. That's mind-blowing. I'm going to, there's a, the reason why that's mind-blowing is that it's really good to hear, though, because you can't, you couldn't right about the obsessive, the obsessive details of fan. Well, he never mentioned that in any of the, as far as I can tell, in any of the press. But it's in the, I want to, sorry everybody, spoilers to some extent. In the final chapter of Alma Cogan, I read this last night and I was scratching my head. I couldn't, I couldn't make head nor tail of it without giving too much away. There's a scene at the end of the book where the narrator, who we assume is Alma,

is driven up onto Saddleworth Moor and buries a couple of mementos on the moor and the last lines of the book are I cut a small grave for the door plaque with the words Alma's Room and the crinoline lady that I am carrying in my pocket I will pack the peat around it with my fingers and close the lid of turf

and make certain before I leave it that the moor has been put back in its original state. And I read that and I thought, why would Alma Cogan do that? And then I thought, well, Al McCogan wouldn't do that, but Gordon Byrne would do that.

And the last chapter, it suddenly occurred to me, I had this little revelation of thinking, he's done a brilliantly Gordon-Burnish thing without telling you that I, who has been Al-Mocan for the majority of the book, has switched in the final chapter being I, Gordon-Burn.

So what you've just told me... Well, there's more, that you can, Adele, can share, perhaps about their hair. Yeah, well, Gordon had really, like, a strange hairdo. So he was bald, but he had, like, this skullet thing going on where it was, like, really long at the back. Should we explain what a skullet is for anyone, doesn't it? Yeah, well, a skullet is a mullet, but the skulls show.

Yeah, it's a sort of, like, well, I don't know, medieval executioner haircut from, you know. And that was his look when he was writing Alma. And apparently he grew his hair out because he was channeling Alma's hair and he used to back comb it out and comb it out in a morning. And that was the look for writing the book. But there's a piece at the time,

for his second book, The Guardian, did a big profile and they describe him turning up for the interview and he's wearing sort of beige trousers, which they described as, been looking as if he'd made them himself. And he'd grown his skullet out into kind of oily ringlets. And this was for the, and this is a guy with a very keen, artistic eye turned up,

and I think maybe slippers or something, or some awful slip on shoes. And this is for his... And a couple of carrier bags. Carrier bags full of booze. Yeah. And this is a journalist who's turning up for probably his first major profile. So I think that just sort of shed some light.

I mean, maybe he was doing it. and kind of stars in their eyes, Alma Cogan in the entire book was, as you said, Andy, channeling. Well, I was just going to say he was that thing, I'd met Gordon, I mean, several times, and I always liked him, but I liked him because he was completely uncompromising. And you never quite knew what you were going to get from me. He could be incredibly friendly, or he could be fantastically blunt.

I mean, a couple of things he said to me were kind of blood-curdlingly to the point. You can't really, no. I can't really know. Excellent. Press your red button now. In the bar afterwards. The thing is he, for a lot of people, I think, for anybody who had any background in the north, he had this talismanic quality because he wrote, when he wrote the Sutcliffe book,

and he lived for three years and he went out drinking with Sutcliffe's brothers most evenings. I mean, the degree of immersion that he got into to write that book, which is still... It's called somebody's husband, somebody's son. And it puts him on a map of the... I mean, it's still a classic... It's impeccably written. I just kind of think it's one of the definitive books on Sutcliffe. I've read many of them.

I still go back to Gordon Byrne. I think he nails West Yorkshire and the community and the culture and the life that Sutcliffe had, the family life that he had. Because Gordon Byrne kind of understood. that world, he was accepted in Bingley. He wasn't seen as an outsider whilst he was living there. He wasn't, I don't think to the Sutcliffe family he was a writer or journalist poking about. He was a guy who was drinking with them who was probably going to write something.

You know, that's how embedded he was. Yeah. And I would say the same about... He was completely immersed. The Fred and Rose West book, Happy Like Murderers, which I've read twice. And it's a punishment of a book. But I mean that in the best possible way. I think it's the best crime book I've ever read.

He felt he'd been chosen. You know, there was nobody else who could write it. But he, I remember him, he said to me, you know, I wish I hadn't had to go there, really. But he, I mean, I think. The idea of being haunted that you talk about. He felt haunted by the stuff that he had to look at for that book. Yeah, it affected him so we've been told. Yeah, I mean, nightmares, which kind of, and the kind of psychic punishment that you go through as a writer

to have to write that kind of book. The material, he went to the West trial, and you just wondered kind of what he had to take on in order to write that. Well, it was while he was covering the West trial that he wrote his second novel, full of love, you can tell. Partly as a way of just offloading some of the trauma of sitting there listening. There's probably no coincidence that that book is ostensibly

about the disintegration of a kind of middle-aged journalist who's falling apart, partly about, you know, I imagine there's a lot of him in there or his career on a slightly different path. I just want to go back to Alma Cogan for a minute. I want to say two things about reading the book again. And one of them, I'm going to slightly play devil's advocate, is when I was reading the first half of the book again,

somebody on Twitter who I think may be here today had said, when I'd revealed that we were doing this book, they said, oh, yeah, yeah, I like that book. I had no problem with Alma Cogan still being alive. What I couldn't understand was why she talked like Don DeLillo. And so the first half of the book, I was reading it thinking, oh, that's a heavy burden to bear. There is evidence of Delillo in the prose, right?

Because in my opinion, clearly Gordon loved as a massive fan. I think, you know what I think it is? I think, what is this reminding me of? Hyper-articulate, lonely woman looking back and trying to make sense of a life that has been disappointing to her. Yes, it's Anita Brookner. It's Anita Bruchner that I'm suddenly failing, but through a strange Delillo kind of, you know, filter. You've managed half a podcast without a mention Anita Bruey. I did. I suddenly thought, Alma Cogan is a Brooklyn, Mitch, not me. For the records. Alma Cogan is a Brooklyn heroine. I'm sorry. But what I was going to say was,

my memory of reading the book in 1991 was that when it came to the last 50 pages of the book, and we're slightly skirting around what happens in the last 50 pages. We should talk about that. It was the last 50 pages that I remembered as the whole book. And so any reservations that I had about the voice early on kind of get left behind in that final fugue of 50, 60 pages. Particularly, and this is relevant to the second thing I want to say. John, you mentioned there's a character called Francis McLaren

who is a collector of Alma Cogan memorabilia. And towards the end of the book, Alma goes and stays in his... his house in one of the most unpleasant and creepy scenes imaginable. Okay? Very awkward. Awkward, but brilliant. So, when Al McCogan was published in Hardback, as authors do, Gordon did several events to promote it, one of which was at Waterstones in Charing Cross Road.

Don't look for it. It isn't there anymore. I remember coming up from Brighton and I went specifically, because I love the book so much, two Waterstones in Charing Cross Road, to see Gordon read from it and talk about it. And when he came out onto the little stage where we are now or the equivalent thereof, you could see him look in the audience and mutter something to the chair and shake his head slightly. Anyway, so Gordon reads from the book, he answers questions from the chair, and then the chair says, and now it's time for questions from the audience.

And a man immediately puts his hand up in the front row and says, Gordon, I'd like to ask you why you came to my house to look at my Alma Cogan memorabilia and then you put me in your novel. Oh my God. And Gordon went, well, it's a character, you know, it's not really. And you were so helpful to me. And I saw Gordon in the pub afterwards.

That's not what he was saying in the pub afterwards. That's all I'm going to say. But he skirted very close in his books as a journalist would. And this is one of the thing I want to talk to you about, Ben, as a journalist would in terms of his relationship with characters who he then fictionalised or didn't fictionalise. Yeah, I think Gordon Byrne showed that you can merge the two. I mean, again, perhaps he was ahead of his time because there's so much discussion now

about truth in journalism and factual accuracy. And I believe it's all storytelling. Journalism is storytelling and so is fiction. and I think you can use fiction to tell. I mean, this is probably better than any biography you would read about Al-Macon because... It's probably quite factually accurate.

Al-Macon's sister is extremely kind of upset by it. The problem is that, yeah, if you adopt the approach that he did, they're often victims, I guess, or people who maybe don't appreciate the artistic intent of a book like this. I mean, there's no point in skirting around. The central kind of collision in the book is that the reveal is that when Ian Brady and Mara Henley were torturing Leslie Ann Downey, the song that was playing in the background was Alma Cogan singing the little drummer boy. But actually it wasn't.

It wasn't. It was the Ray Conniff singers. It was the Ray Conniff singers. Because I had to check. That's right. And that's in the book as well. Yeah. But she had to check.

The character in the book, the quest is to find that is to find that out. And obviously, so what he's doing is Gordon's bringing together the two things that really interest him, celebrity and the celebrity of famous people and the seedy underbelly. I mean, the book is, the point is it's not that things all went to Helena Hancock in the 60s. It's that in the 50s, although it looked like the girl with the giggle and the voice, and it'll all look, but there's terrible scenes of sort of sex on buses. And that kind of 1950s TV entertainment was every bit, possibly even more seedy and degenerate than anything. that came after it. And it's just that she can't make the transition. She is as a sort of a

fictional character because she is a fictional character, you know, being sort of consumed by the audiences. So that, bringing that together is what gives the book its kind of power. And it's, no doubt what, you know, that's why the original cover, which has got a picture of Amar Kagan and the iconic picture of Myra Hindley. And that, I read it. You have a theory about Alma and Myra, why he used them. the thing that I take from the book is that really it's about two sides of one woman, you know, the yin and yang of the human personality or female personality. So you've got someone who's very outwardly, very wholesome and represents the good times of post-war Britain.

And then you've got a woman who tortured and murdered children. And they've both got, they've got powerful haircuts, they've got strong eye makeup, They're both icons of their time, but they both seem to me to represent the kind of two sides of one coin. One represented innocence, hope in the future. And Myra Hindley, as most people would probably admit, sort of represented the death of something in Britain, not just the literal death, but the death of innocence. You know, she, in the same way that Peter Sutcliffe has totally cast a shadow across Yorkshire and the north, the murderers killed something in the psyche of the north of England.

Gordon, the famous quote from Gordon, is almost everything I have written has been about celebrity and how for most people celebrity is a kind of death. And I mean, the thing is we were talking about this. There is no way, I suspect, that a book would come out with this cover now. And yet the cover is so good for telling you what the book is about. The book is about how if you achieve a certain kind of notoriety, fame, celebrity, all different, slightly nuanced. things, that plus the passage of time, means your actual deeds will be forgotten. And you come to represent, as the pictures on this cover show, an almost warhol-like flash frozen moments.

And actually, who is the most famous of the two women on that cover? Is it Alma Cogan or is it Myra Hindley? And that probably tells us something about who we are and how history records, you know, the perpetrators of crimes. There's something he said about novelists. He wrote another novel where we're talking about news and journalism, where he wrote the news as a novel, which is, I can't remember. Was the year 2007, born yesterday?

Which he talked, born yesterday, which is, again, another really original book. But in that book, he writes about Gordon Brown, for example, he writes about the McCannes. Anyway, this is what he said about novelists. Novelists, he says, the lucky ones, have the time and are or should be unaligned. They are able to make connections between the visible and the invisible world that maybe aren't immediately apparent, how the sight of a prime minister so clearly uncomfortable in his own skin, or the rolling story of two middle class parents who've been

named official suspects in the disappearance of their daughter, can breed a wider underlying unease which finds its way into the dream life of those of us on the ground. And that just seemed to me, that idea of this seeping into our dream life. Yes, brilliant. It's sort of what great fiction does do to us. And I think, I'm not sure whether Alma Cogan is his best book, and I'm not sure whether even you might say it's a, it's a success for all the things you serve. But it's like nothing else. I think that's the thing when you reread Gordon, Byrne.

I also think there's a really strong poetic element to this novel. And there are lines on every page that are golden. They just jump out at you. There was one in particular that I wanted to read one short paragraph. And it's just a description of hands, and he does it so well. My hands, as it happens, are the part of me that has altered most. From being porky soft and mottled, they have turned Spartan and squared off, like the hands of market traders and old landladies that I admired.

Women who thought nothing of going into a chicken up to the elbow to haul out the giblets or into a stop lavatory to the shoulder, who unflinchingly saw to the corpses of family and neighbours and rose well before anybody else in the house to lay fires on chilly misty mornings. Brilliant. We would like to mention briefly, John, wouldn't we, that we both recently read, I read last week,

a book called one of Gordon's other books called Best and Edwards, which is a book about football, that um fay celebrity celebrity all those things but john john you we were talking about last night you made us such a good point about it i mean i i dislike sport very much and i i i dislike books about sport very much and you don't have to like sport to it oh it's such a wonderful book um but you were making the point about it it's almost like he wrote it 15 years after he wrote almer cogan and it's almost like the themes of alma cogan revisited with the benefit of hindsight the great duncan Edwards, who would have gone on to Captain England, would have been, died in Munich. And he represents a

kind of, in a way, that sort of community culture, football before the money happened. And then George Best is the kind of the, he's like the sort of, he's the beginning of celebrity football culture and who famously, you know, where did it all go? Where did it all go wrong? I mean, drinks himself into an early grave and it's the book the book is is is brilliant meditation I think on on on on on on on exactly the same themes as Al McCogan but done from it done done where Edwards represents Al McOgan Almer Cogan and best represents yeah the 60s in the Beatles it's the same it is basically the same the same passage and and of course what he does like Hindley and thing on the cover he just makes that juxtaposition really one

the thing it's brilliant book as is Al McCogan and And I think had he, you know, would he still be alive now? I think he would have... He'd have written a book about Jade Goody. Well, yeah, he was fascinated with Jade Goody. Because he was obsessed by her. And he had all of her books. He has them.

I mean, do you think, I mean, I feel strongly that he was a massive loss, that he would have gone on to write other, maybe even better than you. Yeah, I mean, we never met him. We never knew. And we've kind of, we've got this odd position in that because I won the first Gordon Byrne Prize, the actual prize was getting to go and temporarily live in his country

cottage in the borders in Scotland. His partner, Carol, sort of... Yeah, they've very generously set up of trust and Damien Hurst is involved and, you know, they want to encourage writers and artists and they often choose people like us who have no money and very little profile.

And do you go and stay amongst Gordon's stuff? Just like in Al McCogan, where she goes and lives in somebody else's house, surrounded by their things, you go and are surrounded by Gordon's things. And it's literally notebooks and post-it notes. We've literally slept in his bed. My last three novels have been edited at his desk surrounded.

This is in no way unsettling. It's so Gordon-Bern. It's brilliant. Yeah, so I reread Al McCogne this week and thought, well, I've kind of lived that, but without the horrific ending and without the Myra-Hindley connection. but in terms of being surrounded by someone's life, someone who I didn't know, but I admire, and have sort of felt haunted by, but you can be haunted in a good way,

can't you? He can be aware of a presence and inspired by it rather than... But we know him through his words and through his book collection. So obviously, if you pull out books from his shelves, like an English journey, he's full of his post-it notes, for the North of England Home Service, where he was making notes. So he's left you his post-it notes in the book. which is so interesting. It's both interesting and perfect.

There's a book to be written about it. We've got to stop. Thanks to Ben Myers, to Adel Stripe, to our producer, Matt Hall, to the Gala Theatre in Durham and the Durham Book Festival. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight.