Keith Cullen
"God Save The Village Green"

Keith Cullen was born in Dun Laoire, Co Dublin in 1968. He moved to London in 1985 and set up Setanta Records 5 years later. He is renowned for his maverick outlook and his inspirational and uncompromising work in setting up and developing the label (releasing hit records by The Divine Comedy, Edwyn Collins, Richard Hawley and The Frank & Walters).

"God Save The Village Green" is a vicious portrait of a London-Irish family at odds with itself. An explicit kitchen-sink drama set in Barking, London between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It centres on dysfuntion, lost opportunities and violent, drunken reactions in a family that’s coming apart at the seams.

It is Cullen’s first novel and is published by Setanta.

Keith Cullen in his own words:
I cry during sad films. I always have done. The first time was watching Jaws in the Savoy. Sandwiched between my brother and sister, I inched my head forward in and attempt to hide the tears. I spilt my Opal Fruits (accidentally-on purpose) and spent forever picking them up, it bought me tear drying time before daylight showed up my reddened cheeks. ET...I bawled my eyes out; Billy Elliot...floods of tears; Finding Neverland....a blubbering mess. It’s pathetic!

TV was worse, Rich man, Poor man, Roots...Harrowing stuff for a child who’d just hit double digits. I tried to hold back the blurts, I thought I was made of stronger stuff than that, but it was useless,  I went to my room instead and drew pictures while listening to Echo and the Bunnymen and New Order.

It’s a wonder I moved to London instead of Liverpool or Manchester. The soundtrack to my life of squatting and signing on in the mecca of Peckham was all made way north of the Watford gap. But London it was, and that’s where I got a job, fell in love and saved my money to start a record label.

From my mid teens, running a record label had been my only ambition. Music was an art form that defied the class structure and, besides, I had no talent. I could draw an apple really well but it wasn’t an imaginative apple - it was always round, and green. Instilling self belief in their charges was never high on the Christian Brothers agenda but one of the more humane, non robe wearing teachers, who had a genuine interest in what became of us all when we went out into the big wide world advised me to “get the hell out of the country, if you want to find any work’ . He was right, Ireland was fucked.

Becoming a bicycle messenger was my one attempt to blend into the world of ‘normal’ employment. My controller told me where to pick up the package and where to drop it off, end of dialogue. I never was a punk, but I sure as shit hated people telling me what to do. I kept turning the pedals while I started the label, phoning Dingwalls and the Fulham Greyhound in between jobs, looking for gigs for the bands I’d dragged over to London. I broke squats for them and we lived in a bubble of belief, that the great god that was the music would deliver us from starvation. And sometimes it did.

I made enough money from one band’s deal to start paying myself a wage, told my controller to stick the radio up his arse and started running the label full time. As soon as any money was made it was put into signing another artist, making another record. I had no head for business, four of the first five acts I worked with got signed to major labels and I was running my empire on £65 a week from my council squat in Camberwell. But I loved it.

And I continued to love it, for the best part of fourteen years. But the arse was slowly falling out of the music business. A journalist asked one of my artists what kind of music I listened to in my spare time and he said ‘anything without a beat’.  I was losing interest. Trying to build the careers of singer-songwriters on a shoestring in an era when major labels were marketing them to housewives in supermarkets like boxes of Milk Tray. The only angle I had was that my artists were more miserable than theirs, ho hum. The blind enthusiasm was gone.  I started listening to Jazz, and liked it. Those dudes were too busy blowing their horns whilst high on heroin to bother with lyrics. It was an antidote to reading endless ‘we’re better than them’ soundbites in the NME.

What was I going to do? An artist’s manager mentioned a writing course she’d been on. I’d never had any ambitions beyond releasing records and endorsing other people’s art forms, and besides I had no talent. “What the heck,” I thought, “It’ll be a change.” So I signed up for evening classes. A week after the first class my long term girlfriend left me for another man. That was a great kick up the arse! I turned off my mobile phone and wrote like the clappers. I browsed music magazines in the supermarket rather than have them in my house. I had no opinion on whatever bands graced their covers.  I didn’t know what half of them sounded like - Razorlight weren’t in rotation on radio 4; I missed out on Franz Ferdinand. I became a writer.

I shopped my first book around agents and publishing companies. It got some interest, but not enough. I wrote another one but by the time I finished it the publishing world had started suffering a similar fate to the music business. Marketing the sure fire hits had become their lifeblood; developing slow burners wasn’t going to bring home the bacon.

I can totally understand why an agent wouldn’t want to take my book on. I am the miserable record that I play to death but only sells a thousand copies. I choose tragedy over fantasy.  I like to write about miserable things. Christ knows why but I feel happy when a character brings me to tears. It means they’re real!

Rather than wait around, I am publishing the book myself. My main reason for wanting an agent or a publisher had been for someone to tell me that what I’d done was good - just like I’d told all those musicians over the years. So here I am, I’m not very good at cap in hand, but I hope you like it, and I hope to Christ there are no Christian Brothers reviewing it.