Writer Lucy Nichol was shocked by the death of her teenage idol, Kurt Cobain. She tells David Whetstone why she revisited it for her first novel, The 27 Club.
Kurt Cobain, shaggy, impish frontman of American grunge band Nirvana, took his own life on April 8, 1994.
Fans were deeply shocked. For Emma Barclay, the main character in Lucy Nichols’ debut novel, it was “the day the music died”.
Lucy was affected too.
“I was 16 or 17 at the time so a lot younger than the character but I remember my parents telling me over breakfast that Kurt Cobain had died – and then I heard about the 27 Club.”
Cobain was 27 when he shot himself, the same age as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison of The Doors and Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones when they took their leave in shocking circumstances.
Years later, in 2011, Amy Winehouse would tragically join the ‘club’.
Possibly there are enough late music legends to bolster a case for the perils of 25 or 29. But 27 would seem to be the front-runner in the danger stakes and it’s the one people know about.
The 27 Club is Lucy Nichol’s debut novel
For 26-year-old Emma, who struggles with the idea of death and feels oddly responsible for the fate of others, it is an ominous age which is approaching too fast.
She sees herself “catapulting towards the year of ‘do or die’ with Kurt’s death reminding us that an early death at 27 was becoming more and more plausible”.
As we enter her troubled world, she is “starting to panic”.
You might imagine that Lucy’s first venture into fiction, The 27 Club, is a grim read but it’s far from that.
Emma, who admits to stupidly dabbling with “the very things that put your health at risk, simply to stop me worrying about my health”, gets into hilarious scrapes with lifelong friend Dave.
They like grungy pubs and rock music, an escape for Emma from her anxiety about death and her dull job with a caravan company. And at home for solace there’s Trevor, a rescue whippet with a bowel condition.
The laughs make the pages turn but so does the clear impression that Lucy knows what she is talking about.
Familiar in some circles as a PR professional, many others know her as a passionate mental health campaigner, blogging and submitting articles to websites and newspapers.Her first book, non-fiction but full of bitter-sweet personal revelations, was called A Series of Unfortunate Stereotypes. Published in 2018, it set about debunking common misconceptions about mental illness.
So why a novel this time?
“Because I thought I’ve got nothing else in my own life I can talk about. I’ve kind of laid myself bare already so I thought, why don’t I just make it all up?
“What I really loved when I was writing non-fiction was the nostalgia.
“Breaking the stigma around mental health means a lot to me and I know about anxiety because I’ve had it. Still take the meds for it.
Lucy doing her thing in the nineties
“I thought I could use my experience of that and also my love of music and nostalgia and bring it together, but go wherever I want to go, be whoever I want to be, go to the gigs I went to in 1994 but was too shy to dance at.”
The novel is set in Hull, where Lucy grew up, although there’s a Geordie love interest. Much of the action takes place in The Angel, a fictional pub but based on one her friends will recognise.
Lucy laughs knowingly, recalling convivial nights in this “sticky carpet kind of place”.
You can be sure the gig backstage bits of the book are authentic because Gigsy, roadie for Senseless Things, a favourite band that features in the novel, kindly agreed to run his eye over them.
Emma, says Lucy, as well as being older than she was in 1994, is “a bit cooler than I ever was”. But she is afflicted by Lucy’s panic attacks which is why that number 27 weighs so heavily on her.
Lucy can now look back on her 27th birthday as a survivor of some years standing.
In fact, 27 was a good age for her. It was when she met her own Geordie love interest, actor Chris Connel, at Hull Truck Theatre Company where she was a press officer and he was on stage.
And Chris – they got married in 2011 – is an important part of the story of The 27 Club for he is turning it into a play which he will direct when conditions allow.
A bursary from Newcastle’s Live Theatre and funding from the Arts Council have made possible the move from page to stage and a wish list cast of Rachel Teate, Trevor Fox and Dean Bone have said they’d love to be in it.
Chris can’t wait. Although best known as an actor, he loves directing when he gets the chance.
“The theatre’s magic,” he says. “You can do anything you want as long as you remember not to follow the rules. If you follow the rules it doesn’t work.
“With The 27 Club being such an expansive story with so many characters… well, you can’t encompass all of that.
“You have to do something completely different. It’s all about movement and pace and timing. The way I see it is a bit like Bouncers (Hull Truck’s most famous play).”
For the play, the story will be set in Newcastle.
“Of course, I know the places Lucy talks about because I worked in Hull. It’s easy for me to say, ‘Oh, I know where the equivalent would be in Newcastle’.”
In his mind’s eye the fictional Angel in Hull is the old Prince of Wales on Shields Road.
Lucy with husband Chris
“It became the Tap and Spile and then the Ouseburn Tavern. It was a rough pub which had a sort of cultural buzz because there was folk music in the back and pool and darts at the front. There was a sense of community about it.
“It’s now the frozen food department at Morrisons, or at least that’s where it was.”
Lucy will be musical director, she says. They both laugh. Nirvana and Senseless Things were Lucy’s 90s musical preferences, along with Pixies, The Breeders, Sonic Youth and their ilk.
“I was the counter-culture to Lucy,” says Chris. “In the 90s I was on the rave scene with my paper boiler suit and glow sticks.
“I was the person Lucy would have absolutely hated and I wouldn’t have particularly liked her grimy, slightly underground kind of person.
“There will be a lot of music and I’ll stick some of my own 90s stuff in.”
The preferences of the various musical tribes are a thread running through Lucy’s novel, helping the narrative gallop along.
She worked hard on it, initially soliciting help from a professional author to ensure she was on the right track and then discussing with her agent the best path to publication.
The novel recalls a time not too far distant but without smartphones, social media, iPods or Spotify.
It’s my guess that under lockdown it’ll evoke nostalgia not just for the 1990s but for the simple joy of congregating in pubs and clubs.
On a serious note, it deals with Emma’s all-too-common mental health issues, showing how headlines and glib generalisations can prey on people’s often deep-seated fears and anxieties.
The 27 Club, already available on Amazon, will be launched on March 3 at an event hosted by Forum Books of Corbridge and also featuring Guy Mankowski, whose novel Dead Rock Stars was published last year, and Karl Whitney, author of Hit Factories: A Journey through the Industrial Cities of British Pop. Get tickets here.
Meanwhile Lucy has developed a taste for fiction. Asked if we can expect a second novel, she says: “I’ve written one. It’s in second draft and is with my agent.” Not a sequel, though. Emma’s tale is told.