Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-star Fantasist - Hardcover

I suspect that promoters of literary events ... nurse a secret desire to be organizing Glastonbury rather than the Ledbury Poetry Festival, or chopping out cocaine on a mirror rather than filling a Tupperware bowl with mini-cheddars, or introducing David Bowie at Wembley Arena rather than Simon Armitage in Marsden Church Hall. Because invariably ... they refer to the contemporay poetry reading as a 'gig'.

From punk to mod to New Romantic, and eventually to acclaimed poet, Simon Armitage writes about a life where music and poetry have been core. And about a place, the village of Marsden in west Yorkshire, where he can stand and look out across a huge circumference of inspiration and influence: Joy Division, the Smiths and The Fall to the west, the Comsat Angels and Pulp to the south, Andrew Marvell and Larkin way out east, Ted Hughes and Plath just to the north. Gig is a warm, vivid, wonderful book about music, poetry, family and ... always ... the North.