Stu Hennigan is a writer, poet, editor and musician from the North of England. His non-fiction book, Ghost Signs (Bluemoose, 2022) was shortlisted for two major literary prizes in the UK, including Best Political Book By A Non-Parliamentarian at the Parliamentary Book Awards in 2023. His debut novel Keshed, published in February this year by Ortac Press, was praised by the TLS as “An exceptional debut. Difficult, original and revelatory,” and by The Irish Times as “exhilarating yet heartbreaking.” His short fiction, essays, poetry, criticism and other work has been featured widely online and in print by Prospect, Broken Sleep Books, Tangerine Press, White Rabbit, 3:AM, minor literature[s], Lune, Lunate, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Visual Verse and many others. His next book, Disappear Here: Bret Easton Ellis’ America, is forthcoming in 2027 with Ortac Press. He also plays guitar in the rock band Kamień.
Keshed is available now from all the usual high street and online retailers in the UK. If you’re overseas and think this might be up your alley, Blackwells UK have copies available with minimal international shipping so that’s your best bet. And if you fancy checking out my band, we have a charity single available on Bandcamp or there’s a great recording of most of our headline set at The Brewery Tap in Idle in December on my YouTube channel. We’re back in the studio in a couple of weeks, so if you like the idea of an English Stevie Nicks fronting early Sabbath, watch this space.
What’s that old thing about writers being failed rock stars? I’d fuckin love to say that was the case with me; cos for one thing it’d imply it might have been a real possibility once but never quite got there. But while that’d tap into a whole bunch of romantic Replacements fantasies shooting up fabulous musical disasters and glorious self-sabotage in the name of punk rock n roll, it’d be a bullshit narrative. Yeah, I’ve played in a band or two, still do, and hopefully always will, but they’ve only ever been local concerns, done for the sheer hell of it and the unspeakable pleasure of making a racket with my mates – why the fuck else would you do it? – but none of it was ever gonna go any further than that, and that’s fine. Some kind of writing “career” – not that I like the ‘c’ word – was always far more realistic, and that’s where most of my creative energy has always been focused.
Between full-time work, full-time writing and raising two kids in their early teens, I Do Not Have Fucking Time To Be In A Band Right Now; but I don’t have a choice. Music is what I do to switch off, by turning on something else. Band rehearsals are pretty much the only time when I don’t think about writing. When I’m performing – whether that’s playing onstage or recording stupid fucking covers in my bedroom – it’s a state of transcendence where words, and just about everything else, lose all meaning in the blissful high-gain churn of the noise and the sweat and the now. I quit drinking five years ago and without that release I’d be fucked. It’s totally legit, then, when most of my interviews have a question asking if there’s any link between my writing and music, or if the two creative processes are related. The short, and boring, answer to the second part is no.
Writing is my life. It’s infinite graft in the frozen silence of space, perpetual study, ceaseless learning, a pathological obsession pursued with such laser-focus it ruins my physical and mental health and sometimes personal relationships too. It’s surgical, forensic, microscopic, sub-atomic attention to detail, all about precision, mastery of forms, styles, voices, techniques and obtaining and maintaining the highest level of control, constantly, forever. Music is spontaneity, energy, release, freedom, screaming, noise, bleeding fingers, banging something out and meaning it, three chords (or two, or one), the truth, and what little I know about technique can go and get fucked. As a mode of expression it’s the diametric opposite of writing in terms of how I approach it, why I do it, what I get out of it, and how invested I am in the quality of the end product. I’m bipolar and have ADHD so I’m a shit or bust kinda guy in everything I do, and I guess this is all just part and parcel of that whole trainwreck-slash-occasional-superpower; and none of it means music has no place in my written work, just that it’s not part of the process.
I talk a lot about music on my socials. A big part of my online network is made up of music peeps – whether they’re musicians, labels, or “just” fellow travellers, incurable obsessives who listen to music like most people breathe and live their lives to a soundtrack that’s created minute by minute, day by day, in the jukebox of their brain whether they’re actually listening to anything at a given time or not. I love chatting shit with those folk, wherever they are. How the hell else would an upper-lower-tier English writer come to be writing a blogpost for an independent record label in Boston (a city which, incidentally, is home to the Bouncing Souls, one of my very favourite bands)?!
Even before Keshed was published I said a film version of it would be scored by Mogwai and Joy Division, and the OST would be full of songs by Elliott Smith, whose lyrics speak more profoundly to the text (and me personally, for decades) than any other artist you could throw at it. Mogwai’s doomy atmospherics are perfect for the novel’s shifting moods, the undercurrent of creeping dread, downbeat by default, splinters of occasional beauty, light and respite obliterated by sudden detonations of howling dissonance.
A similar vibe to Joy Division, sans vox. Few bands have a sound the embodies a sense of place like JD; an entire chapter of Keshed set in Manchester is named after my favourite song off Unknown Pleasures, their music so instantly visual to me the novel even contains the line, “Silhouetted against the gunmetal grey of the sky, the cityscape looked like a Joy Division song.” When I was interviewed recently on a local radio show I was asked to choose two songs related to the book in some way. New Dawn Fades was one of them; the other was A Fond Farewell by Elliott Smith, which starts to play in my fantasy film version as soon as the credits roll.
Someone in the chat at the online launch wanted to know how much of a presence music is in Keshed and I said I didn’t think it was, noticeably. My writing can be, and often is, full of pop culture, with music at the top of the mix, but only when the text warrants it – there’s nothing worse than a fully grown adult trying to shoehorn lists of their obscure record and/or movie/book collections into a novel like a teenager trying to score cool points. It’s fucking ridiculous and is guaranteed to make me wanna hurl a book out the window.
The protagonist of Keshed is into music in an implicit way – there’s talk of gig-going in the drunken old days and he wears the odd band t-shirt, but it’s not a prominent part of his character as far as the narrative goes so there wasn’t a lot of need for widespread namedropping. On reflection, there’s a bit more in there than I first remembered, as much in terms of background music for scenes in bars and stuff like that, and a few people said they liked the idea of a soundtrack when I first started talking about the imaginary film one, so here it is, of a fashion.
These are mostly songs/artists that are specifically referenced in the novel; occasionally I’ve chosen something that fits a vibe where a scene might mention a specific genre of music is playing, for example, ambient techno. Tracks 3 – 5 are by three of the bands that were active in the amazing north Leeds DIY scene of the early noughties, which is alluded to in the second chapter, but without any specific acts being named. [Incidentally, a whole bunch of stuff from that scene was put out by Squirrel Records, well worth investigation.]
Before we get into all that, it’s probably a good idea to introduce the novel. You can read what some writers with far higher public profiles than me though about it here, but here’s what it says on the back.
In the derelict shell of what was once his family home, a dying man surveys the wreckage of his former life and drinks himself senseless, haunted by the chain of events that led him there. Dark, complex, and visceral, Keshed is an unflinching character study exploring class, belonging, fatherhood, and conflicting ideals of modern masculinity. At heart, it’s the story of a relationship struggling to cope with the impossible pressures of raising a child under late-stage capitalism; but it’s also a love letter to the working-class North, from the grinding poverty of Thatcher’s ’80s to the present day.
It starts with a tableau of a dying man in a living room, narrated in a hallucinatory, disorientating, fractured voice which recurs sporadically and isn’t the easiest to describe; to save me trying, you can read the first part online thanks to minor literature[s]. And while you’re doing it, check out Pure Misanthropia by Stalaghhh, which would score all five of the short sections in the book that use this voice, including the ending, and is about as close to the experience I was trying to recreate on the page as it’s possible to get. If that’s too much, Diamanda Galas’ Plague Mass will do instead, whatever headfucked psychosis best floats your boat.
And the rest? Goes something like this……
1. Rockaway Beach – Ramones
2. Jet Boy – New York Dolls
3. Misery City – Manhattan Love Suicides
4. Nailbomb – That Fucking Tank
5. The Fuckover – Bilge Pump
6. Sunday Morning – Velvet Underground
7. Ancient Lights – Shorelights
8. Rose Parade – Elliott Smith
9. Temptation Or Restraint – Madball
10. Tourettes – Nirvana
11. The Shy Retirer – Arab Strap
12. Under Sad Stars – Crooked Fingers
13. None A Jah Jah Children No Cry – Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus
14. Kill the Hostages – NOFX
15. My Perfect Cousin – Undertones
16. Skulls – the Misfits
17. New Dawn Fades – Joy Division
18. Raw Power – Iggy + Stooges
19. The End – the Doors
20. Strawberry Gashes – Jack Off Jill
21. Black No.1 – Type O Negative
22. Common People – Pulp
23. Spooky – Dusty Springfield
24. Tears Dry On Their Own – Amy Winehouse
25. In A Darkened Room – Skid Row
26. Angel Of Death – Slayer
27. Just Like Heaven – the Cure
28. Waltz For Aidan – Mogwai
29. A Fond Farewell – Elliott Smith
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