Coverdrive Records - 'Tony's Last Tape' (Novella by T.J. Vince)

'Tony's Last Tape and other stories' by T.J. Vince

Coverdrive's John Richards went to see the author of this novella and collection of fourteen short stories. Here's his report: ...

I've known Tim Vince for a while, but as a musician and songwriter so I was surprised when he told me he'd written a book. We agreed to meet up and talk about it, so one Sunday afternoon I found myself in the Bugle, an Irish pub in the backstreets of Brighton. It's a proper Irish pub; by that I mean the beer is kept by a man who deserves sainthood, everyone, regulars and visitors alike, gets a friendly welcome and there isn't a plastic leprechaun in sight. Once we'd stopped singing along to the musicians in the corner we settled down with our pints and got on with the serious business of the day. Here's an edited version of the interview with most of the swearing and pub background noise taken out:

(Original cover illustration by Dan Woods)

JR: So Tim, how are sales going then since we last spoke?

TV: Brilliant, I'm just about to set off an a massive book-signing tour of all the major cities in the U.S.

JR: Really?

TV: Naa, not really. I mean, I wasn't expecting to rival JK Rowling or the Da Vinci Code so I'll just say that sales have been 'broadly in line with my expectations'.

JR: When we first spoke you said you wanted to sell a hundred copies, not including friends and family.

TV: And I still do want to sell a hundred copies! No, and this isn't just an excuse, I didn't write it to become rich and famous, it was more because I had a set of ideas that came out as stories rather than songs. For me a hundred copies will be Silver Disk time or whatever the publishing world equivalent is. Anyway it made a change from music.

JR: I was going to ask that. I know you're not in a band at the moment; have you given up music then?

TV: Performing-wise ... yes, I think I have. I mean you never say never and I'd already 'retired' once and Attila [the Stockbroker] persuaded me to come back for one last hurrah with Barnstormer, but I think I'm done for good now. Barnstormer was the last touring band I played in and I don't think I've been on stage since I left them.

JR: Do you miss playing live?

TV: Yeah, of course. I also miss the fun of touring. Even the bad times were good in retrospect!

JR: So you're not performing then, but what about writing? And as a subsidiary question why are you the only ex-member of Eden that Chris Payne DIDN'T ask to contribute to Celtic Legend?

TV: (Laughs) That's not true! I don't think Janna's done anything for it! No, well, actually when he was planning 'Tristan' he DID ask me if I wanted to be involved, but at the time I was really busy and also I still hoped there would be a second Eden album and I was working on stuff for that. However I hope to contribute something to the next Celtic Legend album but it'll only be on the writing side - I won't become a member of the group. Mainly this is because there isn't a single instrument that I play that Chris can't play ten times better.

JR: But he can't play them all at the same time, what about live? Another comeback beckons perhaps?

TV: Naa, there are some really good musicians in Celtic Legend, they're all better than me. I was never a really good musician anyway, I just tried hard. Although obviously it would be great to be in a band with Chris again as performance-wise we'd have come full circle.

JR: Oh yes, didn't you play in a band together as teenagers?

TV: We did indeed! We started out when we were 17 with a 'jokey-folky' band called Arthur Ha'penny and the Ten Bob Notes; we used to do covers of Fred Wedlock songs! However because Chris and I were both fascinated with medieval and renaissance music we added quite a lot of it to the set with recorders, cornamuse and bassoon. Eventually we dropped the humour, made the sound a bit harder and became a band called Crucible - with the future mega-successful Hollywood film music composer Hans Zimmer as one of the guitarists! We used to play a brand of music which we called 'Medieval Rock' where we had a rock band backline but with medieval instruments playing the tunes. One of our biggest fans was Attila and it's where he got the idea of Barnstormer from, although he fused medieval music with punk as opposed to 1970s prog rock.

JR: How on earth did Chris get from medieval rock to Gary Numan?

TV: Well he's a professional musician, he needed to work. He'd just graduated from music college and he answered an ad in Melody Maker; it was the best move he ever made. I think between us though Chris and I have covered every stage of a band's development: we did the 'school band, local band' thing together; then with Numan Chris did the jet-setting world tour with big venues, limousines and luxury hotels thing. To fill in the gap with Barnstormer I did the touring Europe in a battered transit playing small venues and sleeping on floors thing,

JR: Happy days. Anyway, enough about music; tell us more about the book. Was it hard to get published?

TV: Nope, easy.

JR: Easy? How come? Most first-time authors have tales of woe about the hundreds of rejection letters they received before someone took a chance on them. Why was it so easy for you?

TV: Well I'd like to say it's because I'm a literary genius and my undoubted creative talent shone forth from every page making its acceptance by a grateful publisher a mere formality. I'd like to say that but it would be a lie - I self-published it.

JR: Self published? Is that like vanity publishing?

TV: (Indignantly) No it isn't! It's nothing like vanity publishing! ... Well, yes, ok, maybe it's a little bit like vanity publishing but I prefer to say it's more in the punk rock 'Do It Yourself' tradition. I deliberately turned my back on traditional methods.

JR: Explain.

TV: Well I think most people who use a vanity publisher have already tried to get a proper publisher interested. I didn't even bother.

JR: Why not? Surely it would have been better to have the weight of a proper publishing house behind you?

TV: Oh undoubtedly - but frankly I just couldn't be arsed.

JR: Couldn't be arsed! It's a good job Shakespeare didn't have that attitude! "I was going to publish my plays but frankly I couldn't be arsed!"

TV: (Laughs) Pity he didn't then I might have passed English Literature 'O' level! No, I mention in the introduction that I never set out to be a writer which is true. I wrote the stories a while ago in a weird creative fit when I couldn't stop writing fiction. After it had passed and finding out that publishers aren't keen on short story collections, especially where the stories are in different genres, I just left them to gather electronic dust on the hard drive of my computer.

JR: So why did you dust them down and present them to a wider public view? Rampant egomania finally won out?

TV: Partly! Again I say in the introduction it was kind of a fiftieth birthday present to myself, but there's more to it than that. I probably wouldn't have done it but for the fact that I was in Waterstones in Brighton one day in January 2007. My wife was buying something and whilst I was waiting for her I picked up a book of modern short stories, all by the same author, and started flicking through it. It was TERRIBLE and I remember thinking "Bloody hell my stuff's better than this!" I noted the publisher (who I won't name but they're a well-known company), and when I got home I looked them up on the Internet. I was going to get their address and send them my stuff with a terse note saying if they could publish crap like I had just seen then they'd bite my hand off to accept these stories. However on their web site was a message saying they no longer accepted unsolicited manuscripts in the time-honoured fashion; instead everything had to come through agents. I checked a few other publishers and they said the same. This is where the 'couldn't be arsed' thing came in; after all I had no burning desire to be a published author, I just felt I could do better than this other guy. Consequently I really couldn't be arsed to find an agent, send them my material, wait until they rejected it, find another one, send them my material, wait until they rejected it, find another one, send them my material, and so on and so on. And then even with an agent there was no guarantee I'd get published! Ten or even five years previously I wouldn't have had a choice - if I'd wanted to be published I'd have had to put myself on that treadmill, but fortunately today there's an alternative.

JR: So how did you find out about self-publishing?

TV: I'd read an article a year or so before in the Sunday Times which stuck in my head. It was called 'Publish and be dammed self-reliant' and was written by this guy who'd self-published his book and was raving about how easy it was - and best of all it was free! He'd used a company called Lulu, so I looked them up on the Internet and signed up with them too. A bit of re-formatting in Word, which took me about forty minutes, and voila! One book!

JR: And it was all free?

TV: Yup. I have now paid a small fee for an ISBN to give me international distribution through the likes of Amazon, but if I'd been content just to sell through Lulu the whole process wouldn't have cost me a penny.

JR: But what about stock? Surely they've got to -

TV: (Interrupts) There's no stock, it works on the principle of 'print on demand'. When you order a book they print it for you. It's the future of publishing!

JR: Interesting. What's the quality like?

TV: Fantastic, probably better than a mass-produced book. I was a bit dubious at first but I've been really pleased with the copies I've seen.

JR: So what are the drawbacks?

TV: Well commercially you don't get a team behind you promoting it, it's just me. And I lack both the time and the inclination to go round saying to bookshops et cetera "Buy my book!"

JR: You not being arsed again!

TV: Precisely! Which is why me being here buying you beer this afternoon counts as a major marketing exercise! Also, yes, some people can be a bit sniffy when they find out that Lulu aren't a traditional publisher. However probably the biggest drawback is you don't get an editor. I think that every writer needs an editor and I had to be my own. Strangely when I was writing the pieces originally the editing was the bit I enjoyed best; when I'd finished a story I used to leave it for a few months and then go back and review it. I'd be quite strict and make myself go back and re-write or even take out whole passages, but I think having another person doing it would probably have been better.

JR: Leaving aside the mechanics of publishing and getting on to the book itself - the 'title track' as it were, the novella Tony's Last Tape about a burnt-out musician; that's not autobiographical is it?

TV: No it bloody well isn't! There is one character in one of the other stories who shares my loathing of DIY but that's it as far as any autobiographical content is concerned. Tony himself is nothing like me, although we do both like early Jethro Tull.

JR: So if none of it is autobiographical where did you get the ideas from? After all there's quite a range of subjects and as you say they're in different genres.

TV: Where does any writer get ideas from? Observation, extrapolation, I dunno, a number of sources. All I know is I had the complete idea for each story before I started writing. The first thing I'd write, perhaps logically, would be the opening line. The next thing I'd write would be the last line. Then I simply filled in the gap between the two.

JR: Do you have a favourite?

(Back cover))

TV: Not really. I like the ghost stories because I've always liked ghost stories, ditto the two science fiction ones. Interestingly when I've asked people what they're favourite ones are those ones haven't featured! 'Stands the church clock' seems to be popular along with 'The least I could do'.

JR: As you say you wrote the book a while ago. Have you written anything else since or are you planning to write anything else?

TV: The short answers are 'no' and 'not at the moment'. Again like for playing live you never say never and I do have a couple of ideas, but currently I don't have the time to develop them.

JR: You mention in the introduction that as well as the novella and fourteen short stories you'd also written half a novel. Can't you ressurect that?

TV: Actually I wrote two halves of novels! One eventually got severely cut down and re-surfaced in the book as 'Anonymous, Nondescript' about a dysfunctional loner who thinks inanimate objects are communicating with him. The other one, the one I alluded to in the introduction, was called 'Downloading' and is unsalvagable in its current form. It was about this woman who inherited a computer from her father. He'd worked out a method to enable people to download their personalities and memories onto a computer by a series of questionaires and interviews and the like. Users could then interact with the downloaded personality meaning that people could appear to live on after death in what we'd now call cyberspace. The problem was that you'd never be able to download everything so the program had to extrapolate some information about you from data it already had. Basically this part of the program didn't work properly and the computer actually changed the downloaded personalities causing grief and upset to all concerned - especially as people were interacting with the computer as if the simulations were real. When I wrote it in the early Nineties no one outside of the computer industry had even heard of the term 'downloading' and I wrote pages lovingly describing the technology used, some of which I had to invent. Consequently the whole thing now is as laughably dated as a poor Fifties sci-fi movie. Actually though, just talking about it like that's given me an idea how to modernise it ...

JR: Ok, well before you rush off and write it one final question: leaving aside the fact you'd like to sell millions, what for you would constitute success both for the book and for you as a writer?

TV: To be honest I'd class it a critical 'success' if just one person picks up a copy somewhere, either today or in ten years time, reads even a part of it and says "Hmm, that's not bad; I've read worse; who was this Vince bloke?" That would be great.

2008 Well Played Music Ltd