91Èȱ¬

Local author Richard Milward's second book, Ten Storey Love Song, is a book written in one long stream of consciousness.

It follows Bobby the Artist's rise to stardom amidst drug taking, Johnnie's bad habits and attempts to lead a better life, and Alan Blunt, a 40-year-old truck driver who spends a worrying amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school. All this covered in the rather kooky lay out of one long paragraph...

Your first book, Apples, was quite a success... Did you start writing your second book because of how well the first was received, or had you already started planning it?

I’d already been writing Ten Storey Love Song for about a year before Apples came out, so I managed to stay well blinkered to all the press and hype and whatnot.

Ten Storey Love Song, the book.

A lot of people talk about the "difficult second novel", but I’ve been writing non-stop since I was eleven, so Ten Storey Love Song was more like my 'fairly straightforward' eighth novel. I had a good idea of what I was going to do with it, even before I finished writing Apples.

Some sections of Apples are just one streaming paragraph, you see, so I wondered if I could write a whole novel like that.

It was exciting, the way the one paragraph structure of Ten Storey affected the story – like the characters had no choice but to flow into and interrupt each others’ lives... resulting in all hell breaking loose.

They do say "write what you know" so all these stories, do they come from real life experience?

Yeah, sort of.

A lot of the situations in Ten Storey Love Song happened to me, I’m not afraid to admit I’ve soiled myself in a nightclub, or eaten pills on toast, or got disillusioned and soured by London.

I’ve never made anyone eat razor blades though, or danced to DJ Alligator’s ‘Lollipop’.

The whole book’s a jigsaw puzzle of real-life and complete imagination, quite a few of the surreal aspects are just things I think up on a whim when I’m writing or daydreaming, like the talking wallpaper.

On the whole though, the book’s mainly inspired by me living in a variety of flats over the course of writing it, I was intrigued by the way you adopt a strange sort of sixth sense living in some flats… the way the walls are so thin, so you can’t help but hear what your neighbours are getting up to, and usually it’s the extreme stuff: sex, arguments, etc. It can literally drive you mad, unwillingly eavesdropping on all this manic behaviour.

The novel’s basically about people going mad in a variety of manners, and how they deal with it.

Have you based any characters on real life people? And if so, have they noticed and asked you about it?

Aspects of people I know keep cropping up in my characters, but for the most part I keep them disguised.

For instance, people think I’ve based Bobby the Artist on myself, which is partly true; he’s artistic, went down to London for a bit, has a moptop, likes the Fall, but more than that he’s a combination of all my pals from Linthorpe and beyond.

Others, like Alan Blunt the racist fellow, are intended to poke fun at certain ignorant folk, whilst also twisting the stereotype by giving these ‘ignorant’ folk a bit of heart, a bit of warmth. He’s not really based on one specific person.

This time you seem a bit more hopeful than you were with Apples, the characters aren't as bleak. Is that a deliberate response to your initial views?

I’m not sure if it’s deliberate, I like to think of myself as a nice, optimistic fellow, so that comes out in my characters quite a bit, probably unintentionally.

As for Apples, a lot of the characters are bleak, but the intention was for that book to be a kind of anti-macho fairytale, the characters are nasty, in order to ridicule or slag off that typical hyper-masculine, aggressive male you find in Boro, and all over the world.

There seems to be a slight obsession with Americano pizzas... why not the humble parmo?

Ah, the infamous Hot Shot Parmo gets a little mention somewhere in the book.

I’m not sure why Americanos keep popping up in the book so much – although saying that, pepperoni pizza boxes mysteriously keep popping up in my flat, too.

Have you started to get some recognition in the area, or do you get more admiration from outside of Teesside?

Yeah, the response has been good from both I think.

The belated launch for Ten Storey Love Song at MIMA went down a treat, it ended up like a mini festival! Lots of bands, readings, White Lightning, sweeties!

There was such a good turn-out.

It’s been nice moving back to Middlesbrough after three years in London, I always knew I’d come back to Teesside, what with its cracking sense of humour, grand pubfolk, and lack of antagonised, robotic tunnel-dwellers.

As for recognition though, it’s best to keep blinkered to it, I reckon it can be both incredibly flattering and frustrating. As long as I’m still writing and keeping my head above water, I’m a happy young man.