Simon Rattle was opening a programme of contemporary British music with Oliver Knussen’s popular (though in the circumstances, one hesitates to use that word) Coursing, when someone in the audience decided to append an obligato rape alarm. It was an anti-modern-music protest, and the protester was duly punished by being forced to hear the whole piece played again That’ll teach him. But it does look as though our old friends the Hecklers might have resurrected from whichever land of the living dead they’ve stalked in recent years I’m sharpening my stake in readiness.. The answer is no, absolutely not, as any fool can see. The question, posed on the skyline of a tabloid newspaper recently was, “Is this the new Bridget Jones?”
For a start, the author currently spreading garlic on his “rustic bread” at a chic Birmingham restaurant is very much a man, as the waitress seems to have noticed. And contrary to the deceptive photograph on the back cover of his debut novel, Mike Gayle is not the sort of skinny wretch you would expect to keep an obsessive eye on his calorie and ciggie intake Mike Gayle enjoys life.
The 27-year-old has a life-enhancing smile, a vaguely camp Brummie accent and likes a giggle. His book, My Legendary Girlfriend, is an observational comedy of modern manners, which is why some people have mentioned it in the same breath as The Diary of Bridget Jones.
“That’s just lazy journalism,” says Gayle, who used to be a hack himself for teenage magazines, so should know an easy angle when he sees one “It depends what you mean. Is this a novel that is both popular and has something to say about modern relationships? Yeah.”Popular? Time and the book-buying public will be the judge of that, Mr Gayle. But it had better be a good seller, since Hodder paid “a substantial six-figure sum” for two books by the unknown author.”It was totally frightening,” says Gayle, who worked part-time for a year to finish his first manuscript before sending it to an agent “I was just grateful that anyone was interested. If someone had said, ‘Oh, we’ll give you five grand for it,’ they could have had it. So for it to start at six figures and jump …”The auction took place last October.
Gayle was in the car with his wife Claire when the agent called and suggested he pull over before hearing the news “I just didn’t know what to say I was totally gobsmacked It was bigger than either of us had thought. But in the end it also went to the people who were most enthusiastic about it.”He will not say exactly how much the deal was for. “The whole thing about money is that it diverts attention away from whether it’s a good book or not. I come from a music journalism background, and I know you can pay millions for a band but it doesn’t mean they’re going to have a hit. I don’t want to be Sigue Sigue Sputnik.”The Sputniks were fake cyberpunks who signed a record deal for a huge amount and then flopped.
Those were the sort of people Gayle read all about as an obsessive young music fan growing up in the Eighties in Brum. Dad was a business studies lecturer, mum a nurse; one of their three sons, Andy, is a car mechanic with his own garage, while the other, Phil, reads the news every day on The Big Breakfast.Mike studied sociology at Salford University, but also wrote and produced a music fanzine with a friend, which they sold at gigs. After a post-graduate diploma in journalism he got a job as agony uncle on the teenage magazine Bliss.”I didn’t actually do the technical stuff – anything that needed any medical knowledge. Mine was the boy’s point of view: I’d get girls asking me questions like, ‘This boy keeps hitting me Does it mean he likes me?’ I’d always be really positive. To those who had been dumped I would say, ‘Oh, you’re too good for him.
