Outsideleft is closing out our year with Shaun Hand Week. Shaun is the author of four acclaimed books, a renowned musician and a popular podcaster and DJ. One of the hardest working men in those showbusinesses then. He was born in the Selly Park student town area of Birmingham but maybe didn’t get born until, tired of drifting, he completed a creative writing degree at the University of Wolverhampton and since, has rarely looked back. But when he does look back, he scans a landscape of marginally wasted youth… Banned from every music rehearsal studio in Birmingham, with his band, Iasonic, I’d say, is a musical statement par excellence. A subsequent band, Bluebeat Arkestra, were destined from great things and featured on the main stage of the esteemed Mostly Jazz Festival. And toured everywhere. The wash cycle nature of the music biz shrank Bluebeat Arkestra into FABRIK in 2015. Shaun made two albums with the band - City Islands and Impermanence - again, critical acclaim didn’t lead to commercial success, and the band finally washed out during Covid. Shaun currently records as Birmingham Library Music, singular, instrumental EPs that move the listener far from Brum. The sounds are mesmerising and sometimes enchanting, with a frequent undercurrent of unstated menace, it’s taciturn, it’s almost always there, I’d have to say, but you know I know nothing about music.
He dj’s all over the city at night, drawing on a 30 year record collecting habit of mainly liberated charity shop finds.
As a writer, Shaun’s book’s include Pop Art Poems: The Music of the Jam - which we featured in earlier in the year here (https://www.outsideleft.com/main.php?updateID=3166). I read nothing quite like Pop Art Poems in 2024 when I got to it. Shaun literally unpicks every single recording by the Jam. Ever.
His first novel was,‘The Sadness of King George’ — a stark coming of age and coming to terms with stasis in a world that never stops shifting around its axis, for some. Remember who it was now who told you if you lowered your standards, you’d be busier? But added, that subsequently it would be important to at least appear to like the people you were sleeping with? When those characters have nowhere left to go they end up in a Shaun Hand novel.
In 2024 Shaun published his greatest work to date, The Strange Deaths of White Working Class Men, a strange trip to the tip of a town, Presley, in the equally brutal and brutalised and vividly real West Midlands. It’s a surreal and savage satire with a restless and unrepentant momentum. It’s a remarkably funny and astute novel of where we are as a culture without being writ large. Who wants to know about that? We’re too busy evolving ever deeper into fantasy denial. As Shaun says of ‘The Strange Deaths of White, Working Class Men,’ “rejected by everyone possible. Self-published in 2024. Was too dispirited to promote it. Flopped.” Shaun sounds so much like part of Outsideleft already.
Essential Info
It's Shaun Hand Week in Outsideleft
1. It's a Week of Shaun Hand in Outsideleft - Writer, musician and DJ, Shaun Hand takes us all the way to 2025
2. Notes on the Twilight World of Birmingham Music Library
3. The Happy Shopper
4. A Bunch of Five
5. Three Big Questions For Shaun Hand
6. Teethgraters... Five records Shaun would go to the Ends of the Earth to Never Hear Again