The Jazz Element (Great Lost Project No. 3)

I mentioned this in my Thank Book For podcast, but the first full length project I was really excited about was for a competition, which may have literally been called the Lichfield Literary Prize. It says more about the size of the challenge than the prize that I can remember they wanted a full-length work of 70,000 words rather than being able to recall if there was any prize on offer other than being published by a local imprint.

Virtually no other competition I’ve ever seen since was after such a staggering amount of work for not very much reward. I’ve seen the odd “up to novel length allowed” contest, but they’re few and far between for the reason that most paid editors probably have a slush pile as high as the ceiling; what some retiree in Staffordshire was going to do with hundreds of pages of thrillers, romances and historical fiction with a vague Lichfield slant is anybody’s guess.

Fortunately, I was white-hot with creativity at the time. I was sixteen, in the first year of Sixth Form, and buoyed by the piss and vinegar of only having to do three subjects and getting to wear ‘smart’ jeans to school. I genuinely haven’t taken a lot from the two years at the top of the Aldridge tree other than laughing uproariously pretty much every day while umming and aahing about asking Jenny East for a date. I didn’t, by the way.

During this period of stupid pranks and drinking nine pints every Thursday and Friday night, me and my mate Rich spent a lot of time seeing how far silly little jokes we made up would go before they stopped being funny. We spent about two years convincing a kid called Hamza that we were fans of a band called Trash, even going so far as to write fake fanzines, print off gig tickets, and put together a compilation tape of obscure b-sides and NME giveaways, which we then renamed into things like ‘Walking Superman’, ‘Great Adventure Cigar’ and ‘Ole Chimpy’. I honestly spent more time on that than reading the poetry of Keats.

Another little line we came up with as a throwaway was when we asked a mate called Alan Rice if he liked jazz. Ricey was a quiet bloke who hailed from Whitehaven, Cumbria. One afternoon, we spent a pleasurable couple of hours firing questions at him just so we could hear him say ‘nuur’ in exasperation. And yes, I’m aware we sound like a couple of pricks.

Ricey’s opinion on jazz seemed such a funny thing at the time that we started riffing on the theme, asking him if he liked Charles Mingus and Miles Davis (and that was our knowledge exhausted). And, over the days and weeks which followed, the joke grew separate from the source as Rich and I amused ourselves, writing jazz poetry about Ricey’s lust for the lifestyle. Rich even bought a cheap book about jazz from Matalan and gave it to him as a Christmas present (yes, pricks. Utter, utter pricks).

Anyway, jazz was very much on my mind when I spotted this competition in Aldridge Library. My idea was that there was a killer loose in Lichfield, stalking the Tudor passageways and neo-Georgian buildings. The X Factor was that he carved a musical score on his victims’ torsos, which the police got a jazz musician in to play. For what reason, I’m not sure, but I think what ended up happening was that he ended up being stalked by the killer.

I made it to about five thousand words before I lost interest in it completely. The project is notable because it’s the first time I told everyone what I was doing, rather than doing it for my own pleasure. Every so often, people would ask me how it was going, and as if getting into practice for my later writing career, I would say, “pretty well”, and then drop the subject. 

The only material I can properly remember is dialogue between the barman of a local jazz bar and a husband and wife clientele. It was execrable, because I didn’t know how to write dialogue, let alone someone from Lichfield using it. There was no plan other than to try and set a mood which I wanted for the football book I’d attempted, of smoky bars and loose music.

An interesting footnote to this is that years later, I was part of a writing group where I was stalked by a jazz musician, and it turned out to be Ricey…not really, though that would have been ace. No, it was that there was an old bloke there who really wanted to write a book set in Lichfield because that’s where he lived, even going so far as to measure foot distances between buildings and such. The only thing he was lacking, he said, was a plot. 

I didn’t give him The Jazz Element. Part of me still likes it, but that’s probably because it reminds me of a time when I could be a complete cock and still think I was a comedy genius.