Latest news with #JohnNiven
Daily Record
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Author John Niven celebrates 20 years writing with comic Scots parenthood novel
Having already been a guitarist trying to reach the charts and then working for a major record label, John Niven has never been one to make a living from the everyday nine-to-five. Having already been a guitarist trying to reach the charts and then working for a major record label, John Niven has never been one to make a living from the everyday nine-to-five. And when it came to writing his first book, he found himself struggling to balance his fear of failure with his fear of not trying. Twenty years on from having that go and producing his debut, Music From Big Pink, John is one of the UK's best-loved novelists and a successful screenwriter. His 12 books include Kill Your Friends – his big breakthrough title which he also adapted into a hit film starring Nicholas Hoult – as well as Scots golf comedy The Amateurs and his universally acclaimed memoir O Brother. Now the Irvine-born writer and former Sunday Mail columnist is celebrating his 20 years between the pages with new release The Fathers, a darkly comic look at Scottish parenthood. But the 57-year-old admitted the milestone has kind of crept up on him. John explained: 'I'd always wanted to be a writer right through my 20s. but it just seemed like failure was guaranteed. 'Especially as I'd worked in the music industry and seen how many aspiring bands there are, and the odds are the same in writing, film and TV – there's a lot more applicants than there are jobs. 'It seemed to me to be doomed but in the end it was the not trying that was making me more unhappy than failing would ever have made me, so I just had to give it a go. 'Twenty years – it took me by surprise. 'I still kind of think of myself as a sort of fairly new or young enfant terrible novelist, but then you look at the numbers and you're like, 'God, I'm like an old man in the twilight of my career.' 'Twenty years years is the same distance from the mid-80s to when I started publishing novels, or from when I was born to the mid 80s. 'You look at the numbers back and it starts to shock you.' After leaving the music industry, John began writing scripts before turning to books with Music From Big Pink, a fictionalised story set around the legendary American rock group The Band. At the end of 2004, he finally got the email that he was to become a published author. John said: 'I was so broke after a couple of skint years when I got the news that it had been accepted. I was like a drowning man grabbing a life ring. I think that's why I ran quite hard for the first few years of my career, writing eight novels in the first 12 years. 'I felt like I'd kicked the door open and there was no way I was going to let anyone shut it on me.' He followed that well received debut with smash hit Kill Your Friends about murder in the record business. It's an acerbic satire of the world he knew well but the reaction from within the music world perhaps wasn't what he expected. He said: 'The music industry is so ego-driven that people were angry if they weren't mentioned in the book and people who were in it were really pleased. 'But that's kind of why the book worked – it took lot of real-life executives and bands, and sprinkled them through the fictional ones to create this sort of stew where nobody quite knew what was real and what wasn't. 'I never expected that to be a hit – I thought it was too dark, too savage. I doubt very much that it would get published today.' John's work has been consistently well received over the past 20 years but it reached a new level of response two years ago for his heartbreaking memoir O Brother, which included the tragic story of his brother Gary's suicide. He said: 'The release, the publication, the promotion of it was harder than actually writing the book. 'It was received very well, thankfully, and I think I felt relief more than anything else.' And he has stuck with the family theme for his latest title, The Fathers. It's about a successful television writer, Dan, and a lowlife criminal, Jada, who meet when their sons are born at around the same time and soon become increasingly connected. Although the book is fictional, it's still a very personal tale for the father-of-four – he is dad to Robin, 29, Lila, 17, Alexander, seven, and Morty, four. John said: 'I think the character of Jada was my brother blown up, and the character of Dan was me blown up in a hyper-real way. 'But, to be honest, from where I came from, given my time and place, my school, I could have gone either way. I could have been Jada easy enough myself. But one of the fun things to do in fiction is to play with these things.' John is delighted to get his new book out into the world this week, and the chance to share it with readers on a live tour across the UK, including two dates in Scotland. He said: 'I think Kingsley Amis said that if someone has written more than a dozen novels, you have a pretty good idea of who they were. 'As you get older and look at that stack of books – 11 novels and a memoir – and hopefully, touch wood, God willing, more to come, if you leave a shelf of books behind you, for better or worse, it's a fair testament to who you were.' He added: 'Somehow or another, I've got to my late 50s and I've never had a real job. It's been quite the ride.'
Yahoo
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Books of the Month: What to read this July, from a dark satire on war journalism to a memoir told in verse
Summer holidays are a good time to try out new novels, and among the recommended fiction out this month is Connor Hutchinson's sharp debut, Dead Lucky (Corsair), which is set in Openshaw, Manchester. In it, Hutchinson tells the story of an embalmer at a funeral home who is drawn into the addictive world of gambling to pay his debts. The reliably accomplished John Niven's latest novel is The Fathers (Canongate), a witty account of parenthood and masculinity, while Alexander Starritt's enjoyable Drayton and Mackenzie (Swift) is a tale of two old acquaintances who reunite by chance to form an unusual alliance. If you are looking for a twisty crime thriller, try Gregory Galloway's All We Trust (Melville House), a gripping story about hardware store-owning brothers who launder money. Their family squabble quickly escalates into a war between crime cartels. Meanwhile, it seems an apt time to contemplate the plea for sanity contained in Takashi Nagai's The Bells of Nagasaki (Vintage Classics). This slim memoir was written just before his death from leukaemia in 1951. The Japanese physician was there at the moment the atomic bomb was dropped from an American B-29. He describes the flash as looking 'like a huge lantern wrapped in cotton'. Although it's wretched to read a witness account of the 'world of the dead' caused by the nuclear fallout, the book is essentially an urgent call for the bell of peace to sound. And that's something we all need in the demented, dangerous landscape of 2025. My choices for the novel, memoir and non-fiction book of the month are reviewed in full below: A 'vulture' journalist is one who chooses to spend their lives 'in the world's most f***ed-up places', making a living from death and disaster. Sara Bryne, a 'stringer' (freelance reporter) for a British broadsheet newspaper, has decided that Gaza in 2012 is a land of opportunity for an ambitious young journalist. 'This war is there for the taking,' she boasts. The compelling protagonist of Phoebe Greenwood's debut novel is, unfortunately, a dysfunctional, walking chaos zone. Greenwood, who covered the Middle East in the early Noughties for The Telegraph and The Guardian, gives a visceral account of being a war reporter, as she neatly skewers rude news editors, sexually anarchic photographers, and all the minor oddball journalists (including a blogger in a maroon beret) attracted to Gaza's 'mind-bending dimension of misery'. Vulture lays bare how the cynical modern war news industry fails the people whose tragedies fuel it. As we see today, war remains a booming business for the media. Greenwood seems to be even-handed about the culpability of Hamas and the Israelis in the ongoing conflict. When a ceasefire was announced in late 2012, there was still some last-minute bombing. A fictional (perhaps) Israeli general tells Sara that it is 'their last chance to mow the lawn' – a callous remark that seems to sum up how the horror of daily life in Gaza is normalised. The novel contains spiky flashback scenes to explain Sara's background – and wry verbal sparring with her mother. There is a witty line about Dulwich being 'the most aggressively mediocre of London's suburbs'. As Sara's life spirals out of control – not helped by hallucinations and the toxic effects of (gulp) ulcerated genital herpes sores – she makes a dangerous choice that brings on tragedy for others. Vulture is a dark satire with real claws. 'Vulture' by Phoebe Greenwood is published by Europa Editions on 3 July, £16.99 One of the chapters in Mandy Haggith's The Lost Elms is titled 'Death: Elms in the Arts'. Haggith, a writer who is also described as a 'forest activist', states that poems about elms are often poems of grief. Among the novelists who also come into this section are Eugene O'Neill, EM Forster, and Tana French. Gloomy old Thomas Hardy is in there, too, for The Woodlanders. Hardy's character John South is convinced the elm outside his house will be the end of him: 'There he stands, threatening my life every minute that the wind do blow. He'll come down upon us, and squat us dead.' In fact, it is the elm tree itself in danger of being 'squatted dead', a result of the Dutch elm disease that has wiped out millions of trees across the world. Haggith's captivating book is full of personal reflections and anecdotes. It is engagingly written and has important things to say about globalisation, the threat of climate change and the value of biosecurity. The elm, it seems, offers hopeful lessons for how we can save other species. 'The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees – and the Fight to Save Them' by Mandy Haggith is published by Wildfire on 3 July, £22 Although poet and playwright Amanda Quaid does not mention in her memoir that she hails from a famous family – her father is actor Randy Quaid, her uncle Dennis Quaid – there is an oblique reference to her heritage within the witty poem 'Mystery Pain'. In it, she recounts a visit to a male proctologist, stating drolly: 'With his finger in me, told me how much he loved my dad in Independence Day and also I didn't have a rectal tumor.' Very unusually, No Obvious Distress is a memoir in verse. The poems are funny, moving, wise and constantly surprising, as in 'The Curse', where a random stranger on a flight tells her, 'You're nice, but you're unlucky.' These scary words of foreshadowing come just before her diagnosis for mesenchymal chondrosarcoma – a rare and aggressive malignant tumour that originates in bone or soft tissue. Happily, No Obvious Distress concludes with the poems dealing with the diagnosis that her cancer may be gone following 'the scorch of radiation'. Quaid deploys a range of poetry styles – there is even a nifty limerick – and makes clever 'poems' from her redacted medical chart notes. I especially enjoyed the heart-rending 'Telling My Mother' and the deftly tragicomic 'The Oncologist Sexologist'. Anyone who has ever undergone a brain scan will recognise the scary beauty in Quaid's three-line 'Haiku': 'In the MRI I know how the woodpecker must sound to the tree' 'No Obvious Distress' by Amanda Quaid is published by JM Originals on 24 July, £14.99
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Scotsman
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Oasis vs Blur 'Battle of Britpop' to be brought to stage in new Scotland tour
In August 1995, Blur moved the release date of their single Country House to the same day that Oasis issued their single Roll With It Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It is the quintessential 'battle of the bands', when two Britpop legends went head to head to win the most sales in the summer of 1995. Now the story of Oasis vs Blur, billed as the 'greatest chart battle of all time', is to be brought to the stage by an award-winning Scottish writer. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Battle, Ayrshire-born novelist John Niven's first stage work, is to tour the UK next year in an 18-venue run, including performances in Edinburgh and Glasgow. From the chaos of the Brit Awards to the infamous chart war, the play examines one of the greatest rivalries in rock history - between the 'clean-cut, art-school intellectuals from the South' of England and the 'raw and unapologetic lads from the North'. Featuring the legendary personalities of the Gallagher brothers and Blur frontman Damon Albarn amid unforgettable clashes, the play looks beyond the music to the power, pride, and uncontrollable competitiveness of the feud. In August 1995, Blur moved the release date of their single Country House to the same day that Oasis issued their single Roll With It, sparking a feud that culminated in Albarn saying Oasis was 'like the bullies I had to put up with at school'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Mr Niven, who worked in the music industry for ten years before becoming a novelist and screenwriter, said the play recalled a time 'before music splintered into a billion different TikTok feeds'. The Battle will tour the UK next year. | ATG His last book, O Brother, was a Sunday Times bestseller, shortlisted for The Gordon Burn prize and Scotland's National Book Award. His screen credits include Kill Your Friends, The Trip and How To Build A Girl. He said: '1995: a time long before music splintered into a billion different TikTok feeds. When music was so central to the culture that two pop groups could dominate the entire summer, the evening news and the front page of every newspaper in the country. We're going to take you back there. 'I've never written for the stage before, and it has been an absolute blast to do so for the first time, with a producer as supportive as Simon and a director as talented as Matthew.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The play will be performed in Scotland just months after Oasis performs its much-anticipated three-night run at Edinburgh's Murrayfield stadium this summer. Director Matthew Dunster said: 'I remember the Battle of the Bands. I remember the charts that week, Music mattered. I remember being in my 20s in 1995 - what a wild time. Full of energy, naughtiness and hilarity, just like John Niven's play. 'I'm so delighted to be working with John on such a punchy, hilarious and revealing comedy about two of the best bands of all time, Blur and Oasis.' Producer Simon Friend said: 'Throughout my sister's teenage years, she had an enormous poster of Damon Albarn on her wall, and I remember her falling out with friends over which band they loved more. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New comedy about Blur vs Oasis chart battle coming to York in 2026
A new comedy play about the Britpop battle between Blur and Oasis is coming to York. The Battle will be performed at the Grand Opera House from June 9 to June 13, 2026. It is the first stage play by screenwriter and Sunday Times best-selling novelist John Niven. The play is based on the summer of 1995, when the two bands went head-to-head in a chart battle. Mr Niven said: "1995: a time long before music splintered into a billion different TikTok feeds. "When music was so central to the culture that two pop groups could dominate the entire summer, the evening news, and the front page of every newspaper in the country. "We're going to take you back there." The play will be directed by Matthew Dunster, who said: "I remember the Battle of the Bands. "I remember the charts that week. "Music mattered. "I remember being in my twenties in 1995. "What a wild time. "Full of energy, naughtiness, and hilarity. "Just like John Niven's play. "I'm so delighted to be working with John on such a punchy, hilarious, and revealing comedy about two of the best bands of all time, Blur and Oasis." The creative team also includes Fly Davis as set and costume designer, Jessica Hung Han Yun as lighting designer, Ian Dickinson as sound designer, Tal Rosner as video designer, and casting director Claire Bleasdale. Tickets will go on sale for ATG+ members on April 30, 2025, and general sale will be from May 2, 2025 via
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Britpop battle between Blur and Oasis revisited in ‘punchy' new comedy
It was the great Britpop showdown in the summer of 1995, billed as a contest between cheeky chaps and lairy lads. Thirty years on, a new play is to revisit the fierce rivalry between Blur and Oasis when both British bands put out a new single in the same week and competed to grab the No 1 spot in the charts. Some purchased both releases, many couldn't care less, but for a few days it was a decision that defined you: whether to spend £2.99 on Oasis's Roll With It or Blur's Country House? The Battle is the debut stage play of novelist and screenwriter John Niven who said of the era: 'Music was so central to the culture that two pop groups could dominate the entire summer, the evening news and the front page of every newspaper in the country. We're going to take you back there.' These days, said Niven, music has 'splintered into a billion different TikTok feeds'. The Official UK Singles Chart, now based on streams and downloads as well as CDs and vinyl, does not bring the nation together as its Sunday afternoon radio broadcasts once did. The play's director, Matthew Dunster, said of the time: 'Music mattered. I remember being in my 20s in 1995. What a wild time. Full of energy, naughtiness and hilarity. Just like John Niven's play.' The Battle, said Dunster, is 'a punchy, hilarious and revealing comedy about two of the best bands of all time'. The play – billed as 'based (mostly) on real events' – will follow the feud between the two bands preceding the chart battle, including the 1995 Brit awards where Blur beat Oasis to the trophies for best British single, album and group of the year. A year after the chart battle, coverage of a music industry charity football match centred on Liam Gallagher and Damon Albarn tussling on the pitch as the group's rivalry continued to be hyped by the media. The new play will explore how music fans clashed as they picked which band to support. An allegiance to Blur or Oasis could go beyond the tunes and also open up questions about class, fashion, masculinity and the north-south divide. Producer Simon Friend said: 'Throughout my sister's teenage years, she had an enormous poster of Damon Albarn on her wall, and I remember her falling out with friends over which band they loved more. Ever since, this story has been in the back of my mind, and I was delighted that John Niven agreed to write it because there is no more qualified or hilarious chronicler of this world. Combined with Matthew Dunster directing, we have a fearless team recreating the sweaty mid-90s carnage of the Battle of Britpop'. Niven worked in the music industry for more than a decade and drew upon some of his experiences in the Britpop novel Kill Your Friends, which was published in 2008 and then adapted as a film in 2015. Dunster is the director of the hit 2:22: A Ghost Story, is currently reviving Dealer's Choice at the Donmar Warehouse and will this summer stage an adaptation of The Hunger Games in London. Casting for The Battle has not yet been announced. The play opens at Birmingham Rep in February. Joe Murphy, the theatre's artistic director, said: 'Our audiences are going to have the time of their lives being taken back to the rivalries, the chaos and the big personalities that made it all so unforgettable.' After it finishes in Birmingham the play will go on tour and have a West End run. As spoilers go, it's not quite up there with The Mousetrap but, for the record, Blur emerged triumphant that Sunday in mid-August. Country House sold 274,000 copies while Roll With It shifted 216,000. On top of their Britpop rivalries, Oasis's Gallagher brothers also feuded with each other for years but this summer they are reuniting for the much-anticipated Oasis 25 international tour. In a joint statement after its announcement, the band said: 'The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned.' The Blur v Oasis battle has also long since abated. 'I like them,' said Blur's Alex James in 2024. 'He's an incredible singer, Liam, and he can't help being a rock star.'
