Ericland: A Word From The Cunt That Created The Product

I received an email the other day from someone I'd never heard of at Demon/Edsel Records:

Hello,

I hope this email finds you well.

I work for Demon Music Group and we will be reissuing the three Wreckless Eric CDs on the 9^th September.

I was hoping you would be able to post a picture/link and some info re the releases (which I can provide) on your facebook page please to let the fans know?

I look forward to hearing from you.

With thanks,

Lidia

I wanted to reply:

Thank you very fucking much for telling me about this release - are you people always so fucking rude to the artists whose work you’re peddling?

But I didn't - I took control of myself and asked which three Wreckless Eric CDs she might be talking about, as there are rather a lot of them.

Turns out it's the first three: Wreckless Eric, The Wonderful World Of... and Big Smash - and only on CD though they might consider a vinyl release later in the year. I wish then luck with that - CD sales are at an all time low. Still, it might be nice if they sent me a box or two to sell at shows, give away to the family, or just to have in the archive. I'm wondering what the chances are - I'm still waiting for Union Square to send me a copy of the last Stiff Records reissue of my catalogue.

I could get quite upset about this kind of thing. No could about it in fact - I do, I get very fucking upset. Nice people - they really know how to treat the cunt that created their product. But there's nothing I can do about it so there's no sense in dwelling on it for too long because it's a waste of energy. Instead I tried to concentrate on what I can do to capitalise on the situation.

For the past few years I've been putting off re-editing my autobiography, A Dysfunctional Success, with a view to making it available as an ebook, and eventually a new print edition.

It's a good time for it to come out again with these latest reissues. You can buy my first three albums and read some of the background, not that I celebrated the hallowed Stiff Records - I think they've already done enough of that themselves.

The book is about being a child in the late fifties and early sixties, about growing up in middle-class suburban England, about not fitting in and searching for some sort of identity. It's about my haphazard and all too sudden rise to fleeting stardom in the seventies and what happened when it all went wrong - squalor, poverty, Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s. It's a pop biography by virtue of being written by a minor pop star but it's a million miles from the smarmy world of pop success. It's a testament to my own personal success - how I survived, came out intact and was even able to write a book about it!

Here are a couple of extracts:
extract 1
extract 2

It took me a couple of years because I moved house three times, possibly in attempts to escape from the writing. It was hard work. Twelve years later I think I might have worked even harder to make it available as an ebook. Now I'm working on another print edition, and if I still have a mind left having achieved that I might even write another book.

I've learned an awful lot about formatting in the past couple of weeks. I crawled over the manuscript, correcting mistakes that went un-noticed in the original edition, and created a lovingly handcrafted digital ebook thing. I cursed at Kindle and Smashwords and I-Books, and at my own inability to understand complicated instructions, but it looks like I've finally done. It’ll be available on September 4th from Amazon or iBooks.

I know some people hate the whole Kindle/i-reader thing - I resisted for years until I realised I could go on tour without dragging a whole library of rapidly disintegrating books along with me. Same goes for the i-pod - I'd love to take my entire album collection with me when I leave home for three months at a time but it isn't very practical. Especially on aeroplanes.

When I’ve got over the shock of publishing my first ebook I’ll get to work on the print edition. In the meantime you can pre-order the ebook and have it automatically delivered to your device at the stroke of one minute past midnight on the morning of Sunday 4th September. I’m not sure that there’s any incentive for you to pre-order except to help boost me into the bestseller lists - and of course that’s going to happen - but I’d be obliged if you would. You’ll be part of the making of my very own dysfunctional success and for that I’ll be grateful. That’s your incentive! Here are the relevent links:

Kindle:

amazon.com amazon.co.uk amazon.ca amazon.com.au amazon.nl amazon.de

i-book:

itunes.apple.com/us/book/a-dysfunctional-success

And because I'm not churlish, and because even though they may not be my products they're my albums, here's a link to the Demon/Edsel reissues: