Electric Picnic, Free Sex Chocolate, Jude in London, etc.

OK, a slightly messy blog post, catching up on a few things. I'm reading (or mud-wrestling John Banville, it hasn't been decided yet), at the Electric Picnic at 5pm, Sunday 5th, with Greg Baxter. Feel free to come up and give me a big kiss. I'll be around for most of the weekend, and so may well pop up at other events too.

My Electric Picnic reading will probably be from Jude in London, which was due out, oooh, roughly today. It isn't. Why? Because, rewriting it this year, I disappeared up my own hole in search of perfection. Perfection turned out not to be found up there, but in the meantime (warning: we are now changing metaphors, mind the gap), I went through my deadline like a freight train through a sheet of crepe paper. So, my lovely publisher Ben and I have decided to postpone publication till next year. But, on the upside, we’re using this delay to add drawings, in the manner of Alice in Wonderland. (These pictures will not only be lovely in themselves, but will also help make it clear to new readers that Jude in London is, er, not a standard literary novel.)

Thus, I've asked Gareth "Napoleon" Allen to throw a bucket down the well of his subconscious, and haul up some demons. Gareth may be known to some of the more elderly hipsters out there as the artist who designed the sleeve for Toasted Heretic's first album, Songs for Swinging Celibates, back in 1988. (A sleeve which was, more recently, at the centre of a highly entertaining legal battle with Tayto Crisps.)

Oh, and my darling poetry publisher Jessie, who lives on the Cliffs of Moher, would like me to tell you that Free Sex Chocolate: Poems & Songs (published by the great Salmon Poetry!) is now out. It contains all my poems (most of them from the past few years in Berlin), and all the Toasted Heretic lyrics. Putting the book together, I was startled at how many of my favourite lyrics hadn’t made it onto the albums, so I’ve included B-sides such as Food for Breakfast (always popular live), unreleased tracks like Satellite Dishes and (perhaps my favourite lyric) Pregnant (which I once set, rather illegally, to Leftfield’s Melt, under the name The Piggy Back Gang – never legally released, but Dave Fanning would have played a bootleg of it a few times, back in the day.)

Anyway, you can buy Free Sex Chocolate from Jessie directly, or from Amazon in the UK, or Amazon in the US. (Makes a lovely Christmas present for Toasted Heretic fans, hint hint.) If you're the sort of wild and crazy person who likes to live on the the edge, you could even get your local bookshop to order it. Should you be into signed copies, I signed a few in Easons on O'Connell Street last time I was over, and if Des Kenny has his way (and he usually does), I'll probably sign a pile of them in Kenny's in Galway next week... I'd say the copies in Charlie Byrne's might get a good seeing-to as well...

And I'll wrap up with a quick Q & A:

Q: Where was I for the last six months?

A: Thailand, Vietnam, Ireland, Berlin, Edinburgh.

Q: And what was I doing?

A: Writing a film. Writing a book.

Q: And why didn't I blog?

A: Because the reaction to my last blog post got a little out of hand, so I decided to keep my mouth shut for a while, and get on with my writing. Also, I have been expending my precious blogging fluids over on Twitter, which leaves me sated and drowsy.

OK! If you’ve any more questions, or comments, stick them in below. If it’s too private, personal, or perverted, feel free to mail me at the button down there on the right, or just send it to JulianGoughsSecretEmailAddress at good old gmail dot com.