Mike Wade

I wrote my first novel - about cars racing at Le Mans - when I was about eight. It was short and derivative yet in some ways superior to anything I’ve since produced, in that it contained drawings in the margins. It was called, rather imaginatively, Le Mans.

Once I’d grown up another ten years or so and - like most of us - failed to become a rock star, I settled down to a career in advertising, which consisted of writing thousands of strategies, papers and presentations as well as actual ads.

A little over fifty years after Le Mans, I wrote my second book: Hole In My Pocket, a biography of Southend rock musician and the guv’nor of the Pub Rock movement, Mickey Jupp. Mickey was, still is, a great singer and writer who mysteriously failed to make it big, despite the expectations of many industry experts.

I thought it would be interesting to for once have a music biography about failure rather than success, and to try to find out why the guy never reached the heights he ought to have.

The book sold many hundreds of copies, which encouraged me to write my first novel, PushMePullYou: an examination of whether one’s loss of youth and wilder ways can be compensated for by the later arrival of some degree of wisdom.

This dilemma is explored through the lens of a pair of twins, each of whom has a very different perspective. As with most first novels, there’s a fair bit of disguised memoir salted away in there somewhere.

Next has come Full of Scorpions, a collection of over thirty (very) short stories – I call them micro-stories - each of which features a pronounced twist or sting in the tail of the tale. They are drawn from many genres, my writing challenge being never to repeat a setting or a plot structure.

The opening story of this volume – Twelve Bar Blues - won the 2019 EarlyWorks short story competition.

My next novel will be a development of that award-winning short story, and will be published in 2021.

Called Twelve Bar Blues, it’s a sweep through post-war popular music culture and the social change it brought about - both in the USA and Europe - as seen through the eyes of a 1950 prototype electric guitar, the value of which oscillates between $50 and a million dollars, depending upon era.

I write for fun and because I can’t not. To paraphrase a quote from Keith Richards, one that I included in Hole In My Pocket, “Creativity is a tap – once it’s on, you can’t turn it off.” Which is fine, because I don’t want to.