Michael
Kenton is a middle-aged man living in middle-class comfort with wife Lisa and
daughters Millie and Katia. Drifting complacently towards retirement, Mike's
world is turned upside-down when he is thrown unexpectedly onto the career
scrapheap.
While Lisa's career sky-rockets, Mike slobs around in his track suit playing guitar, rekindling his teenage love affair with pop music. Knowing Lisa wouldn't approve, he plots a secret 'comeback' at a grimy Crouch End bistro where music executive Ben, desperate and out of time, asks if he can enter one of Mike's songs into the Eurovision Song Contest. With nothing to lose, Mike focuses on Eurovision but quickly finds himself staring down the barrel of low level fame. His crumbling marriage now page five news, he must choose between his musical dream and mending his broken family, a task complicated by the re-appearance of ex-love of his life Faye.
A laugh-out-loud comedy about love, family, friendship and Euro- tack by acclaimed stand-up and comedy writer Simon Lipson.
While Lisa's career sky-rockets, Mike slobs around in his track suit playing guitar, rekindling his teenage love affair with pop music. Knowing Lisa wouldn't approve, he plots a secret 'comeback' at a grimy Crouch End bistro where music executive Ben, desperate and out of time, asks if he can enter one of Mike's songs into the Eurovision Song Contest. With nothing to lose, Mike focuses on Eurovision but quickly finds himself staring down the barrel of low level fame. His crumbling marriage now page five news, he must choose between his musical dream and mending his broken family, a task complicated by the re-appearance of ex-love of his life Faye.
A laugh-out-loud comedy about love, family, friendship and Euro- tack by acclaimed stand-up and comedy writer Simon Lipson.
****
Thank you for inviting me to write a guest
post on your ‘sensual, sassy, sexy’ blog. As I write those words, I realise I’m
sniggering inside, and not because there’s anything intrinsically funny about
them. I’m just your bog-standard buttoned-up Brit who finds the very idea of
physical intimacy a bit embarrassing. So I thought this blog should be about my
approach to…shhh…sex.
This is about the halfway point on my blog
tour and I’m enjoying it immensely. I know it’s not exactly sun, sea, sand and
(ooh-er, missus) sex (there I go again) but it’s been fascinating to discover
so many saucy blogs hosted by perfectly normal, respectable women with large
followings of a similar ilk. This is an entire strand of womenhood I’ve never
encountered before! Not to my knowledge anyway. More’s the pity.
Erotica and fantasy romance are not normally
on my reading list, which is not to say I look down my nose at them. On the
contrary, I’m a live and let live merchant, someone who believes people should
read for personal pleasure, not because some reviewer or that woman in
Sainsburys says a book is worth reading. Each to their own. But I’m curious as
to why so many of the bloggers who have so kindly offered to host my tour run blogs
with erotica/romance/fantasy as their central theme. Song In The Wrong Key is determinedly
realistic. It’s about a man, Mike Kenton, whose life implodes when he loses his
job. Suddenly, his previously sound – if unspectacular – marriage is under
strain, and he risks losing everything he holds dear if he can’t find
respectable employment somewhere else. In the meantime, he is ‘discovered’
singing in a dingy Crouch End bistro and is given a once in a lifetime
opportunity to have his music heard by a massive audience at the Eurovision
Song Contest. Arguably, this is as much of a fantasy as anything you might
encounter in more dedicated fantasy books, albeit I tend to think in this X
Factor age anything is possible.
Meanwhile, as Mike’s marriage crumbles, he rediscovers
an old flame on Facebook and some old feelings are stirred up. Romance?
Certainly, but again of the prosaic it-could-happen-to-anyone variety rather
than knights on white chargers sweeping girls off to caves-cum-castles in the
mountains. The question I had to ask myself was how far could or should I go
when describing the erotic details of the sex act. I realised early on that I’m
not comfortable writing about it with a straight face. For a start, I’ve got
two teenage daughters and I knew they’d get round to reading the book at some
point. And what if I described some sexual act or position unfamiliar to my
wife? She’d wonder where the hell I learned it. But, more than any of that, as
soon as I started writing words like ‘erection’ and ‘nipples’ and ‘lick’ I got
a bit schoolboy-giggly. Pathetic, isn’t it? I’m a grown man. Even so, I toned
it all down, became suggestive rather than explicit, sought out the comedic
rather than the erotic.
Maybe my erotica/romance blog hosts can see
something in Song In The Wrong Key that I can’t. Maybe, amid all my obfuscating
and fudging and joking about sex, they perceive some erotic undertones that say
something about the author! Either way, I hope those of you who decide to read it
aren’t disappointed by the lack of graphic action. It should make you laugh and
maybe even shed a tear. As for knights on white chargers…you may have to look
elsewhere!
Simon
Lipson was born in London and took a law degree at the LSE. After a spell as a
lawyer, he co-founded legal recruitment company Lipson Lloyd-Jones in 1987. In
1993, Simon took his first tentative steps onto the comedy circuit and has
since become an in-demand stand-up and impressionist across the UK, as well as
a regular TV and radio performer/writer. His broadcasting credits include Week
Ending, Dead Ringers, Loose Ends and Fordham & Lipson (co-wrote and
performed own 4 part sketch series) on Radio 4; Interesting...Very Interesting
and Simon Lipson's Xmas Box on Radio 5 and And This Is Them on Radio 2. He is
also an experienced voice artiste who has voiced hundreds of advertisements as
well as cartoons and documentaries. His first novel, Losing It, a thriller, was
published by Matador in 2008. Simon is a columnist for Gridlock Magazine (www.gridlockmagazine.com).His next
novel, Standing Up,
will be published by Lane & Hart in Autumn 2012.
Twitter: @SimonLipson
www.simonlipson.blogspot.co.uk
Buy links – paperback and Kindle:
My
show, The Accidental Impressionist,
is on at the Camden Fringe 20 – 23 August @ 8pm. Everyone welcome! Details and
tickets here: http://j.mp/JDPBnu
No comments:
Post a Comment