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My second novel, Ten Storey Love Song, is a little bit like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, if only Jimmy Stewart had taken lots of psychedelic drugs instead of breaking his leg and ending up in a wheelchair. It’s a book for peeping toms.

Chock-full of sex, death and talking wallpaper, the novel unravels over the course of a 300-page unbroken paragraph, following the hedonistic highs and horrors of folk in a ten-storey tower block in the North East of England: there’s Bobby the Artist, a mop-topped painter of such messy masterpieces as ‘Boozy Bastard Bashes Bird’; Georgie, Bobby’s rotten-toothed ladyfriend, who works behind the sweety counter at BHS and obsessively gobbles up the stock; Johnnie, a tyrannous tearaway who knows exactly how to terrorise the townsfolk, but has no clue how to please his girlfriend Ellen in bed; and Alan Blunt, a container driver who spends his free time glued to the railings of the local primary school.

Much of the inspiration for Ten Storey Love Song came from living in cramped flats and bedsits populated by loud loony louts, as well as unearthing many misty debauched memories of Middlesbrough. In a way, the town is like my muse, so full it is of wild, hilarious people and beautiful scenery.

In essence, the book is about people going mad in various hilarious, horrendous ways. From a psychological point of view, it’s difficult living amongst people in chicken-coop conditions. Living in such close proximity to others endows you with a kind of ‘psychic sixth sense’: through no fault of your own, you end up overhearing all the extreme parts of peoples’ lives, for instance the arguments and the sex. The noisy bits. Ten Storey Love Song was inspired by all the things I heard – and thought I heard – going on in flats over the period of two years.

In terms of plot, the novel is like a patchwork quilt; autobiographical sections stitched next to purely fictitious, magical sections, stitched next to stories overheard in the pub, and so on and so on. Bobby the Artist, in some ways, is based on myself: I too went down to London, experiencing a wee bit of ‘fame’ and then intense paranoid disillusionment, and I’ve also been known to dabble in acrylics now and then (I studied painting at Byam Shaw School of Art). I also have a bit of a mop-top.

Art was a huge influence on Ten Storey Love Song; not only in Bobby’s abstract doodles, but in the entire form of the novel. Without wanting to sound too artsy-fartsy, it was an attempt to write a conceptual ‘concrete’ novel. I came up with the idea to write the novel in one continuous paragraph after penning my fruity debut, Apples (some sections of which are also one streaming paragraph). Realising Ten Storey Love Song would appear on the page as lots of continuous ‘blocks of text’, I decided the perfect setting for the characters would be a fictional ‘block of flats’. The device influenced the storyline – in order for the novel to work, characters would have to flow seamlessly into each others’ lives, the same way they do when passing in tower block corridors, or listening in on the flat next door.

With this in mind, I wanted the cover of the book to look like a miniature tower block, which you can pick up and open like a doll’s house, peering in on these characters’ lives. You see, you don’t have to be wheelchair-bound to nose on your neighbours. With Ten Storey Love Song, you can be more like King Kong.

Further reading...

Ten Story Love Song
by Richard Milward
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