A FAN

and now for something different:. i first met nick churchill, arts and music journo when he interviewed me for the bournemouth echo in 2006 on publication of ' a blues for shindig'. he has been a fan and a great support ever since. at our first interview he said 'i didn't know old ladies wrote books like this!' i told him he's been mixing wit the wrong kind of old ladies.
i asked him to write a review . this is the result
A Blues For Shindig
Mo Foster

Just in case any teenager – or 20-, 30-, 40-, even 50-something for that matter – was damn foolish enough to contend it was their generation that invented sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, Mo Foster’s A Blues For Shindig puts the needle on the record to set it straight.
In fact, the hep cats and hip chicks of the 1950s Soho she invokes were far too cool for the easy pleasures of rock ‘n’ roll – they were digging jazz, man… with a side order of blues for those comedown mornings.
The titular heroine Shindig makes her luck and earns her crust in the scruffy bars of W1. More likely to be serving Scotch and light ales to sweaty men in cheap suits than cocktails and canapés to coffee bar stars, she’s liked, almost respected even, by a certain type of gentleman who doesn’t appreciate being asked about his business.
When one of their less classy members oversteps the mark and Shindig lays him out, she is propelled on a journey that takes her high and low, very low, beneath the veneer of a capital city emerging from war-time austerity and flexing the muscles that would see it swinging wildly within a few years.
By then, of course, Shindig will be long gone, ahead of the game as usual – as much by luck than judgement – but no more comfortable in her own skin than before.
Shindig makes for a bold and brassy companion in this romp. At once pre-dating the ladettes and It-Girls who’ve since become tediously familiar, yet also touchingly old-fashioned enough to still recognise her own vulnerability, not play on it. Too much.
The milieu will be more than familiar to readers of Colin MacInnes, George Melly and Jake Arnott among many others, but its allure remains undiminished by this racier excursion into its flesh pits and pitfalls which only accentuates the sense that it was a world existing separate from, but adjacent to, what passed for real life outside.
Foster’s lack of linguistic artifice and obvious affection for her deviant subjects keeps the reader’s grubby finger turning the page, each new adventure and episode always well within reach. A Blues For Shindig is a fine testament to youth – yours, hers and mine.

Nick Churchill
WOW
thanks nick