Interview Elan Kabisch
“I keep coming back here, well periodically anyway. I hate the place because it reminds me of when I was last settled.” We’re at the Coach & Horses pub in Greenwich market, in the company of a colourful cluster of market stalls and cacophony of tastes and smells. English novelist Phil M. Shirley, visiting his former “thinking ground” for a reading from his latest book, the poetry collection The Happening of Magic – his first foray into the “difficult art”, and his tenth published work.
It’s an irresistible read, running the gauntlet from limericks and ballads to free verse and odes and from confessional writing to urban myths and legends. It’s also a deeply personal and thought provoking work largely set in and around the Isle of Dogs, as is his first novel The Rivers That Run Through Us, and full of the author’s trademark darkly comic, and unorthodox style– so the chaotic market hall, a stone’s throw from the River Thames, makes a fittingly immersive interview location. We dart between reviews for The Rivers That Run Through Us, which have been immensely flattering, and the looming “six-zero.”
“I sometimes forget just how much writing I’ve done, in terms of actual published books,” he says, “perhaps because most of them are forgettable.” This is far from false modesty, rather the honest observation of a writer driven by a “deep, unrelenting ache” to get better at “the craft.”
“I’m not prolific, not in the slightest,” he says. “I envy those writers blessed with high speed and high output. I’ve got half-a-dozen works-in-progress, all novels, but I’m slow and the pace of time frightens me. It’s the big six-zero at the end of this year. It’s become much, much less of a big deal than it used to be. I don’t really care anymore. In fact, in many respects, I’m happier, with myself, than I’ve ever been. One good thing about getting older is the option to divorce the ego. I don’t miss mine and without it life is an easier road to travel, although the passage of time is a relentless bastard. The last thing I remember I was writing The Soul of Boxing in 1998 and thinking a six month deadline was a lifetime. The next minute, someone is asking me to consider publishing an updated 25th anniversary edition.”
There was a long break between his last work for HarperCollins, The Soul of Boxing in the autumn of 1999, and his next published work The Rivers That Run Through Us, his debut novel in 2023.
It was lockdown that returned Shirley’s imagination and passion to creative writing. “I consider The Soul of Boxing as one of my better works. It was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. That and Blood & Thunder, which I more or less wrote at the same time, were good to me, in terms of sales and reviews,” he reflects. “But I was burned out. Eight books in three years, plus a huge amount of writing for magazines and newspapers. I went ‘corporate’ for a while, a cog in a propaganda machine.”
In 2019, Shirley was offered a job ghost-writing for an oil company and ended up in East London, by the River Thames with a view of the office, in Canary Wharf, as a daily reminder of “selling out.” And then the oil company went into lockdown after an employee experiencing flu-like symptoms was tested for coronavirus. This was February 2020.
“I was grateful for the pandemic,” he says. “I fell in love with the isolation and the river. And I thought: now I can write again. A lot of other stuff, life situations, had happened. Writing The Rivers That Run Through Us was a cathartic release. Greenwich was my thinking ground and a ghost town, although you could still get a pint outside .”
The Trafalgar Tavern, a Victorian riverside pub where the Thames laps up at the windows, came up with an order-by-text outdoor bar system. “A handful of rebels drinking on the cobbles watching the river, cold and lonely and devoid of any human activity. Only the Gulls and Cormorants to witness the ritual.”
The Rivers That Run Through Us, a wonderfully bizarre and haunting narrative about five tormented brothers who are grappling with love, loss, and existential dread, was initially signed by a well-known New York publisher but the project ran into trouble, some of it Shirley’s own fault and the rest…well that’s another story for another day. “I’m gagged now and was gagged then. But it worked out well, in the end.”
Shirley was asked to re-write parts of the novel to make it “less culturally abrasive.” He refused and, after a lengthy tug-of-war with New York lawyers, wrestled back the rights and found a new home for the work. “Some may call it censorship,” he says. “It is what it is.”
Now 59, Shirley has spent enough time plying his trade for an indifference to politics to seep beneath his skin. A stint “working for Hollywood” confronted him with the “darker forces” of the craft, as both an author and screenwriter. “It was extraordinary,” he recalls. “Very exciting, but utterly frustrating.”
His time as a contracted author for HarperCollins was “the best thing in the world,” he tells me. “It launched my career,” he says. “I was raw and the experience fashioned me into a half-decent writer.”
He longed to be a music journalist. “My dream, as a young writer was to work for one of the music newspapers – Melody Maker, NME, Sounds , but I never received any encouragement (from editors).”
Music remains a passion for Shirley and makes a subtle but decisive appearance in his soon-to-be-released second novel Love Leads to Madness, a dark comedy of sorts, centering on Jim and Darlene, a thirty-something couple, teetering on the brink of disaster in their dysfunctional relationship. Throw in a bit of necrophilia, a love triangle and a completely to-die-for villain Don Spears, a ruthless body broker who profits from the sale of human remains, and you have the makings of a noir classic. Here’s an extract:
The sash window was half open. She heard music, which she instantly recognised. Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto in D major, Op 35. One of her father’s favourite pieces, which he used to play often, much to the displeasure of his wife. Darlene could see it now, eyes closed in complete contentment, whisps of pipe smoke, like clouds in the sky of his thoughts, drifting over her father’s head. Peace and the inevitable shattering off it. “It sounds like a dying cat,” her mother, would shout, before rudely and carelessly disengaging the stylus. The Doctor never complained. Of course, on more than one occasion, he imagined taking the stylus and sticking it into his wife’s eye, or putting a dead cat in her bed. Instead he checked the vinyl for damage before returning it to its sleeve and then to the cover and taking himself and his pipe into the garden with the sweet, yet melancholic music playing in his head.
Darlene could picture the record cover; the strikingly handsome face of the Russian violinist Tossy Spivakovsky on the faded mustard card. She had inherited her father’s love of classical music. Her knowledge belied her tender years, although the irony the of the music now playing in the study was lost on her. Tchaikovsky had composed this violin concerto at a resort on the shores of Lake Geneva where the great Russian composer, a closet homosexual surviving in a homophobic regime, had gone to recover from the depression brought on by his disastrous marriage to Antonina Miliukova. The Universe, as always, appeared to have a sense of humour, albeit at times perverse, if not true: the very existence of a woman contributing to worsening a man’s psychological and physical state.
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op 35. was already nearing the third movement, finale, as Darlene climbed through the sash window and into her father’s study. The Doctor’s body was hanging from the ceiling fan.”
When Shirley was sixteen or seventeen he and some friends had what he calls a ‘contretemps’ while discussing the finer points of rock music. “It was an impromptu summit,” he recalls, “that ended badly, for me anyhow. I used to carry a cassette player around with me. There was a ‘black market’ in vinyl-to-tape recordings at school and I remember paying a quid for a compilation that included some ACDC – Touch Too Much, from the Highway to Hell album, Saxon – Strangers in the Night, Nazareth – May The Sunshine, which was actually the first single I bought and a heavy sprinkling of Black Sabbath.”
According to memory, there was a moderately heated argument about who was ‘heavier’ Sabbath or Motorhead – a band Shirley wasn’t “into” at that time – and, before he knew it, he had a knife sticking out of his wrist. “The Motorhead fan stabbed me,” he recalls, with a smile on his face. “It was a deep wound and I remember my friend saying, ‘that’s real blood, I can smell it.’ I went home and told my mother I’d cut myself practicing shaving – on my wrist, of course. She called my father who was working late. He was angry that he had to leave the office or wherever he was and take me the hospital. He told the doctor to sew me up without local anaesthesia, and maybe give me a haircut at the same time.”
It’s a revealing anecdote, speaking to Shirley’s sense of nostalgia that makes you feel something, but also to his authenticity. The scar on his wrist is still noticeable.
The young Shirley wasn’t deep into literature, but did grow up with a keen interest in writing. He was raised in the town of Kidsgrove, a former coal mining village outside Stoke-on-Trent that gained unwanted notoriety in 1975 when Donald Neilson, a notorious burglar and murderer known as the Black Panther, kidnapped teenage heiress Lesley Whittle and left her to die naked and alone in an underground drainage shaft of a reservoir not far from Shirley’s childhood home. “I was nine or ten and we used to hang around in the same area that Nielson was using to come-and-go,” Shirley recalls. “To be honest, though, I was more scared of Black Shuck the demon dog – a story in a book of myths and legends that ended up in the bookcase at home, courtesy of Reader’s Digest, I think. “
A year after the Whittle murder, something else happened that had a profound influence on Shirley’s life. It was the summer of 1976, the year of the heatwave. The author was ten years old. His English teacher recited parts of Jaws, the novel by American writer Peter Benchley, to an open-mouthed, wide-eyed class of children. “We all wanted to look at the cover. I was impacted by the writing, the storytelling,” Shirley recalls. “It was the moment of the recognition of a calling. I knew right then I wanted to be a writer.
“I must also say that my mother used to read to me. Thomas Hardy and John Betjeman, the English poet. My late father was, I believe a frustrated author. Some years after he left, I discovered some of his writing; a short story about cows, if my memory serves me right. He became a salesman.”
Shirley’s early career in journalism included writing a column for a weekly newspaper and reporting on his beloved, inherited and much maligned football team Port Vale. He began a career in radio after being headhunted at the funeral of the man who had created an urgent vacancy for sports broadcaster after jumping to his death from a multi-storey car park. His career in radio ended after the studio burned down during a recording session with a chain smoking colleague
It’s one of many anecdotes the former journalist turned author regales me with. For over ten years, Shirley was a successful sportswriter for the British national press. “I just couldn’t stand it anymore,” he says matter-of-factly. “In my experience, when things have run their course, you either get out and move in, or die inside.”
It has also been his experience of reading, with great appetite and desire, works of fiction by writers rather than life situations that has most influenced Shirley. John Steinbeck, James Herbert, Cormac McCarthy, Arthur C. Clarke, H.P.Lovecraft, W.P. Kinsella, and the English poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats. “Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias made a huge impression on me as a young writer”, he says, “as did the first poetry book I ever read – H’m by the Welsh writer and son of a sea captain R S Thomas; handed to me, along with a copy of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album, by the guy who ran the school youth club. One of those life changing happenings.”
In his introduction to The Happening of Magic, Shirley writes: (writing and publishing this work) is akin to a human giving birth to a monkey. What perversion has been done ? What madness unleashed on the world? What possessed one to experiment in such a way? Poetry… the Frankenstein of writing. A monstrous undertaking indeed. Poetry is a hard discipline to master. I shudder to think how many rules I may have broken in my clumsy attempt to create rhyme and reason and form. But, if there is beauty, humanity and nobility in standing in the wreckage of a screwed up life and telling true stories about how it all came to ruin, then there is some honour in having a go, as a writer, at poetry.
“I probably broke every rule in the book, for which I apologise,” he says. “I had little choice in the matter of whether to write it – I just had to capture it all, contain it somehow and draw a line under the whole episode.”
The “episode” he refers to is a period of two or three years in his life when he “learned to live in the light again” after some particularly “dark moments.” He chooses not to expand on this, saying only “bad choices have consequences, whether you accept them or not. It’s easy to say, ‘no regrets, only mistakes.’ It’s harder to take responsibility for those mistakes and accept the reality (of them) as it is, staying centered and no longing swinging from one polarity to the other like a pendulum.”
If poetry acted as a conduit for some kind of truth, welcoming belonging, and beckoning ears for the stories that have been difficult to tell, the music of jazz legends Bill Evans and Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays is a soothing balm in the aftermath. “It’s heroin-esque music,” Shirley says. “The compositions of Metheny and Mays, particularly As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls and September 15 (a tribute to pianist Bill Evans), got me through some very dark times and, now, this music keeps me very centered. It’s my meditation. I’m also a huge Bill Evans fan. Some of his (piano) playing is like getting an instant shot of peace. Gary’s Theme, from the album You Must Believe in Spring, is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.
