Bomb Culture

Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall. Perhaps not his finest book but the most famous and much easier to get hold of than some of his flimsy books of poetry and biographies. Although I didn't study literature at UEA I was lucky enough to do my thesis on Nuttall who was also a performance artist, jazz musician and actor. To this end I conducted a long drunken interview with him in Todmorden wearing pyjamas and sporting bright green hair (me, not him). I was going through a punk phase and very much into anarchic counter-culture. I was there when Malcolm Bradbury's History Man went into TV production (and recognised some of the thinly disguised characters in his satire on modern universities). Unfortunately I never met Kazuo Ishiguro who was studying there at the time with Malcolm and Angela Carter. Ian McEwan and Anne Enright (the latter I'm reading at the moment) had just left and were starting to make a name for themselves.