Jeff Young is a Liverpool-based writer for stage, screen, and radio. He has also written poetry, spoken word, sound art, and for site-specific projects and installations. His memoir, Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay, was shortlisted for the 2020 COSTA Biography Award and long-listed for the 2022 Portico Prize. The follow-up to Ghost Town, Wild Twin, is published by Little Toller. I quizzed Jeff about the two memoirs, his short work for Rough Trade Books, Delíria, and the stage play Bright Phoenix.

‘I was writing a book which is primarily about memory in the room where my dad could no longer remember huge swaths of his life.’

I’d love to hear about your new book, Wild Twin, which I’ve seen described as an ‘Orwellian travel book’ and ‘hallucinogenic’ (making me wonder whether Delíria might be an excerpt). What did you learn from Ghost Town that you’ve applied to the new work? How are the two books connected in your mind?

I think the idea of the book being ‘Orwellian’ comes from (possible) similarities with Down and Out in Paris and London, rather than anything Orwellian in the way we perceive the term.

It’s ‘hallucinogenic’ in the sense that I think I often write about memory in a hallucinogenic way, sometimes with a stream of consciousness tone. A lot of the time I’m trying to suggest the atmosphere of memory, which to me is a dream like state with uncertainty, unreliability and shadowy realms where ‘the facts’ are less important than the imagined. I’m as interested in writing about false memory and memories distorted by repeated telling as the actual ‘autobiographical facts’ which I think are as unreliable as the provisional and doubtful.

What I learned from Ghost Town was that all of this is okay! In the many conversations I’ve had with people who read the book I’ve found that most people perceive memory in similar ways to me. The subtitle of the book is ‘A Liverpool Shadowplay’ and that’s how I see memory – it’s a place of shadows just beyond reality and it’s akin to dream, hallucination and haunting. It’s a Ghost Town. 

Delíria was in a sense a ‘dry run’ for Wild Twin. It could easily fit into the new book as a chapter because it has the same ‘voice’ or style. It is indeed a kind of delirium or fever-state and I feel comfortable writing in that space rather than attempting to write ‘automatically’. I think my background in non-naturalistic theatre has helped me to trust the writing of atmospheric imagery. I can’t possibly remember everything that happened during the events I picture in Delíria but I can convey the potency of images and moods.

Wild Twin and Ghost Town are twins really. They’re about the same person – me – and some of the characters in GT reappear in WT. These characters being family members and friends. 

Wild Twin though breaks out of Liverpool – to Amsterdam and Paris and adventures and mishaps on the road. It frequently returns to Liverpool in its back and forth structure and there are echoes of Ghost Town memories and events throughout. I think in WT I go even further into hallucinatory states and I think that comes from embracing the delirium.

The two books – three if you include Delíria, four if you include my play Bright Phoenix – are related through their readiness to embrace the provisional and the uncertain. I’m a believer in the importance of doubt as a motivating device. I don’t trust certainty. I think Wild Twin goes further into that condition than Ghost Town does and I think it has a wilder spirit.

And Wild Twin is about place and home too. Resisting and searching for place and home. Part Three of the book was written in my dad’s living room as I was caring for him in the last year of his life. He was bedbound with physical problems and he also had Alzheimer’s. I was writing a book which is primarily about memory in the room where my dad could no longer remember huge swaths of his life. This became absorbed into the mood of the book and now that he is dead the room is filled with the presence of his absence and the memories he couldn’t remember. The room is haunted.

I wonder – and this probably applies more to Ghost Town than Wild Twin given what you say about the latter’s further exploration of hallucinatory states – if with greater distance between the moment and writing about it, it also seems to you that the facts become blurrier but the interpretation sharpens? Hindsight, as in attaining a less deluded state through the experience of living, and, with an ever-increasing sense of our own mortality, there being less reason to shield ourselves from once uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

This idea that the facts become blurrier but the interpretation sharpens really interests me. There’s a fleeting moment in Ghost Town where I write about a memory from childhood when I saw a man running down our street waving a shoebox in the air. I was probably four years old and I watched him running, puzzled and fascinated. After a while I realised that just ahead of him, just out of reach, there was a canary and he was trying to catch it – presumably his escaped pet – in the box. I’ve never forgotten this moment and it presents itself to me as a very clear image, vividly lit, slow motion, like a painted animation. It fascinates me that I remember this so clearly – albeit  distorted and probably ‘improved’ in time – when so much else from that time has faded or been forgotten. So the facts, as you say, have become blurrier but the interpretation has sharpened. It’s a memory image of such vivid clarity that it represents a period of childhood, emblematic and resonant. Sometimes I go back to the street where it happened and I can see it all over again like a projected film. This is a very Ghost Town memory moment.

In Wild Twin I write quite a lot about not being the best version of myself that I could have been – in my 20’s, a bit of a deadbeat, directionless and careless. So ‘the uncomfortable truths’ about myself are there on the page and I found it quite easy to write about. No delusions or illusions. I was a fairly hapless dropout, always getting the sack from dead end jobs in Amsterdam and living on the breadline in squats. It felt like I was living the dream but even though I had an amazing time I now question the whole way of life. I’m nearly 67, I have multiple health problems and I am very conscious of mortality so I’m quite open to being quite forensic about my failings in the past.

I’m not sure if this answers the question here! But memory is a shaped and constantly refined and altered construct and what fascinates me is the unconscious selection process. I like it that memory is like damaged Super 8 or a mangled cassette. I like the shadowy and the poetics of that space.

I loved Delíria. It presents a version of yourself inspired to travel and see the world by the Beats, but also draws on Malcolm Lowry, Jean Genet, and Fernando Pessoa as the couple you depict drift around Porto and its environs. What comes across from Delíria, Ghost Town and Bright Phoenix is that you see the city as more than the sum of its parts, and as more than what is immediately visible even to the observant eye; a place where past, present and future intersect. Have you always felt this way, or has that sense developed out of being a non-naturalistic writer, aka someone who’s always inclined to imagine more than meets the eye?

Again, the Shadowplay. I think of the shadow realm as being a place of imagination, memory, ghosts, dreams and visions. There’s a bit in Delíria where I talk about East Berlin in the 80’s and how ‘I remember us as ghosts becoming moths, transforming into haunters of a place lost in time, of the night when we were cinema…’ It’s a fleeting memory of a tram ride through East Berlin late at night and it comes to me as shadowy images rather than realistic event. And I talk about Porto in the night as a fever-dream, as hallucinations. Most of the time I was in Porto I was drunk (I no longer drink) and that drunkenness adds to the fever. I perceive certain places as temporally unstable – past, present and future overlap, there is a drunkenness to the everlasting moment. I actively encourage this. I don’t rationally believe in ghosts but I chose to because the world is more interesting that way.  My background in theatre has enhanced this way of thinking. The type of theatre I used to make tended to use the magical possibilities of the performance space as an invitation to break conventions of representation – anything is possible, ghosts can come to dinner, the dead can speak, people can die over and over again, the past is right here, right now. The idea of making theatre was ‘to imagine more than meets the eye’, to pull down the membrane between this world and the world of ‘imagination, memory, ghosts, dreams and visions’. I think I’m trying to do that in the books and I think the little boy who sat on the front step watching a man trying to catch a canary in a shoebox was already doing that. It’s like a Marc Chagall painting or a moment in a fairy tale. The potency of that is what I’m trying to capture.

About two-thirds of the way through Ghost Town, in the chapter ‘Underground Republic’, you say, ‘‘In a dirt-cheap flat in a Georgian mansion I began to write poetry and plays.’ In a sense, the whole book up until then has been an exploration of what makes someone become a writer, but I’m curious as to what tipped you over the edge or gave you the confidence to move from being a reader to a poet and playwright?

Wild Twin explores this further. I’d been living in Amsterdam and had started writing character sketches, poetic fragments about the squat scene and the people I knew there. Before living in Amsterdam I’d tried to write a novel but didn’t really have any ‘territory’ to write about. So, these bits and pieces I was writing started me thinking about actually trying to be a writer instead of just dressing like one! On returning to Liverpool I did a few gigs on the poetry circuit, which seemed to get a decent response. I was writing poems about bedsit life, Liverpool 8, pub characters and so on. And then one of the poets on the bill one night asked me if I’d ever considered writing a play. The thought had never occurred to me. I didn’t come from the sort of background where that was even remotely possible. So, I wrote a play and gave it to him. He was a playwright as well as a poet and I went to see a play he had on and I was blown away. His name was Mark Davies Markham and he died last year. I’d occasionally been to the theatre – Ken Dodd in Twelfth Night, Ken Campbell plays, large scale work by Dogtroep in Amsterdam – but I’d not seen a play like Mark’s, which was a 50 minute,  lunchtime play in a room above a pub. Lunchtime Theatre. Mark passed my play onto the company director, Paul Goetzee, and after a series of workshops and rewrites they staged it. It got panned! But I’d written a play. And then they asked me to write another one…I was actually doing what I thought I would never be able to do. I was a writer.

In the same chapter, you describe some of the writers, performers, musicians, outsiders, dropouts and freaks with whom you rubbed shoulders, but also say that you kept your secret society membership to one. What stopped you reaching out to these potential fellow travellers?

I was always an observer. In the Liverpool punk and post-punk era I was aware that other people were forming bands, publishing fanzines, making stuff happen but I didn’t know how to do all that. In my bedroom I’d mime along to records but forming a band was beyond me. I made a ‘zine called Burning Issues and sold it through the back pages of Sounds and Melody Maker. I wrote about music, Lenny Bruce, included collages, poems, a short story. I didn’t have the confidence to take it to gigs and sell it so most of the copies stayed under the bed. Although I had friends I was a bit of a lost soul and didn’t know how to make connections. The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream & Pun was a venue and arts centre run by a visionary called Peter O’Halligan. If I had my time over again I’d go into his building and ask if I could get involved, but at the time I was so in awe of the activities in and around the place that all I could do was watch.

All your learning appears to have come outside of school. Do you retain any anger at a secondary modern school system which essentially seems to have written you and many others off? Or could what you felt you needed to learn only ever have come from self-tutelage?

I can’t think of anything beyond rudimentary English skills and a sense of Geography that I learned from school. Some books. I read Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for A Knave because it was featured in a book club magazine that you could buy a book from once a month. That book – as featured in Ghost Town – changed my life. From there I went on to Stan Barstow, John Braine, Keith Waterhouse, Nell Dunn, Shelagh Delaney, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and so on, and that was my first wave of ‘book crushes’. I didn’t get there via school, I got there through junk shops and street markets. Just about everything I’ve ever learned I got from curiosity, from conversations with friends and strangers, from travelling and exploring. The secondary modern school system gave me nothing. And yet… if I’d gone to a better school or had a grammar school education, my imagination might have been formed by a more rigid system and I might not have discovered the riches of the world. Shit school and the dole created me, and the same thing happened to lots of my generation who left school in the early 70’s. Most of those people in Liverpool post-punk bands came though the same route. So, self-tutelage, the auto-didactic route worked for me. I’ve had a life-long messy self-education and I benefited from going to a mediocre school.

You’ve worked across a varied range of forms, but scripting whether for stage, screen or radio seems to have been your mainstay. What occasioned the shift to memoir?

I got ill! I spent 30 years working in theatre and radio and I did a lot of collaborative work with artists, musicians, choreographers and so on, stuff in unusual spaces like a power station, a submarine dock, derelict houses, boating lakes. My approach to theatre was always collaborative and rather than just send the script in, job done I’d always be in rehearsals and in collaborative conversation with the creative team. I worked in TV drama for two years but hated it, wrote film scripts that got optioned but never got made. And then, due to a series of traumatic life events I became ill and unable to work. I couldn’t even type. I had a few ongoing, outstanding projects on the go for radio and it became increasingly obvious to everyone that I wasn’t going to be able to finish the scripts. So, I passed the work on to other writers. I’d done six Essays for BBC Radio 3 and these reached Adrian Cooper at Little Toller Books. Adrian could see a book in them and so I reworked some of the radio essays and then expanded them to tell other stories, and that became Ghost Town. Because I couldn’t work in theatre anymore and because my radio work had come to an end I found that whereas I’d always been ‘in the room’ with collaborators I now had to work out how to write in my office at home alone. And then Covid happened and I spent two years in the house, shielding. Ghost Town came out the week before lockdown. And when the bookshops opened again it started selling, got really good reviews, nominated for awards and so on, and I was a memoirist!

Alongside numerous photos, Ghost Town also features pages of artwork mixing collage with hand-written text. Do you see writing and art as indivisible or separate but allied forms of expression? How important is the look of the printed page to you?

I’ve always kept scrapbooks and notebooks as part of my creative process. I just find that making images is a way of visualising the atmosphere I’m trying to create on the page – or on the stage. I used to mainly keep the notebooks to myself, just part of the process, but I started showing them to students when I was teaching Creative Writing and they became my ‘thing’, I was the writer who made collages in notebooks. When I joined Twitter and Instagram – which I’d resisted for years – to promote Ghost Town I started posting images from the notebooks and they got a really good response. The first edition of Ghost Town incorporated photos, the paperback edition also included notebook pages. I think writing and art are indivisible. I think in images, make images, try to capture images in words. When I was writing for theatre I used to write the images we would see on stage. I think visually and therefore write visually. Now I’m making the transformation to exhibiting the work with a couple of exhibitions in the works. Wild Twin will include notebook collages, echoes of the words, shadows of the atmospheres I’m trying to evoke.

Reflecting about its sense of ways of life disappearing, Ghost Town reminded me of Tomás O’Crohan’s The Islandman, written about life on the Great Blasket Island at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century. O’Crohan’s purpose was ‘to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again’. Did you have a similar purpose in mind with Ghost Town?

I love that book! All the works that came out of the Blasket Islands are important to me and I made a pilgrimage there some years ago to pay homage. I hope I go some way towards setting ‘down the character of the people’. The phrase, ‘the like of us will never be seen again’ is something I’ve carried around in my head for decades. The shadows of my ancestors are visible in the pages of Ghost Town, glimpses of them moving through its pages. It is indeed – hopefully – a shadowplay, and because my family history, like many peoples, has never been written down I hope Ghost Town at least gives a glimpse of their presence in the history of this city.

‘Even as a child I was aware that the city was being imaginatively reduced.’ How palpable now is this sense of your city – Liverpool – being a ghost town? Would you say that this is a feeling held in common by large sections of the population? How did audiences respond to your play, Bright Phoenix, which asks (and provides its own answer to) the question, ‘Who owns the city?’

The elements that make great cities are not property development, surveillance systems, private land and Freeports. Cities are made by artists, human movement, leisure, music, meeting places, communal gatherings, silver screens, quiet corners, places to sit and dream and observe, stories being told and listened to, architecture, weather, sunsets, food, drink, birds and animals, trees, the seasons, dissent, argument, memory…many other things in the spaces in between the buildings.

Great cities aren’t made by property developers, business journalists and lobbyists, corrupt politicians, shit newspapers, theme hotel spivs, retrospective planning permission, quangos, growth parasites – these are the forces that ‘imaginatively reduce’ the city, often to their own benefit. Shit buildings do not enhance the city, mindless ‘growth’ reduces us.

The idea of the ‘ghost town’ was really meant to encourage people to look beyond the idea of property and growth as being the things that make a city. City as haunted space where its own memories are still in process. If you treat the fabric of the city badly you kill the ghosts and it becomes the wrong sort of ‘ghost town’ like the song by the Specials. It becomes a hollowed out, soulless place – or rather Non-Place. I want the city to nurture its ghosts rather than kill them.

‘The city is an aquarium of stone sea creatures; there are merman above us, waiting for the waters to rise.’

I think the title is a bit ambiguous. During lockdown the city did feel like a ghost town in the desolate ruins sense. My feeling about the phrase is warmer, haunted, atmospheric, memory infused.

Bright Phoenix was one of the starting points for Ghost Town. A lot of the ideas in the book began in the play. Because its mainly focused on one street – Liverpool’s Lime Street – and one building in particular – the Futurist Cinema – it gave me a crucible to cook ideas in about dereliction, abandonment, ‘regeneration’, development, marginalised characters, art, dissidence. I found it gave me a way to voice dissident ideas that I couldn’t air elsewhere. I wanted to have a pop at the Council and at all those people I mention above – the property developers and so on – without resorting to agit-prop. It’s a poem really, a sort of urban, 21^st Century folktale about a gang of kids called The Awkward Bastards who meet up again when they’re still disaffected adults and decide to save the derelict Futurist from death. Sadly, they fail. But they fight like demons and grow. ‘Who owns the City?’ is the question and the graffiti. Their answer is WE DO, not you fuckers.

It was very well received and reviewed and we had after-show discussions with the audience about the themes where people voiced their anger and contempt for the corruption in the Council and the dirty tactics of developers. I had great, heated conversations with representatives of the other side of the argument. For months, people would stop me on the street or come up to me in bars to talk about the ideas and how they were presented in the play. Of course, the characters in the play lose the fight and in the real world the Futurist was demolished as was most of Lime Street to be replaced by a soulless strip of meaningless units that look like something from a giant’s shit kitchen. Maybe you can’t beat the powers that be but you can have a good go. The play was about the value of community gathering places, and of course the powers that be don’t want the community to gather.

You manage to put together two iconic songs from the late 70s / early 80s in the title and subtitle of your memoir – was that intentional or a happy accident? Music certainly seems to be a presence in your life, spilling over into the text in certain chapters, and  informing your development; was it as important as the books you found your way to?

This was a complete but happy accident! Maybe a subconscious instinct? Music is a huge part of my life, part of my imagination. I’ve worked a lot with musicians over the years and it’s been a way of feeling like I’m in a band. I collected records from an early age and amassed a library of vinyl and CDs – pop, punk, jazz, blues, dub reggae, folk and so on. I write to music, find the mood of the piece by adjusting the type of music I listen to. Music is there in the writing – Fado in Delíria, Mingus and Kevin Coyne in Ghost Town, Sun Ra, Beefheart. Wild Twin has Nico, Television, The Gun Club, The Modern Lovers and all kinds of other wonders. When I can’t write I listen to music, when I’m writing I listen to music. It is the soul.

• Wild Twin is available from Little Toller Books
• Delíria is available from Rough Trade Books