Celebrate Mike Gayle's 25th year of publishing with this special anniversary edition of his first ever novel! Something was happening, and bigger singles, bigger albums, bigger concerts and bigger moments were all ahead, but it all has to start somewhere. There’s his best friend, Alice, who remembers his birthday; Simon, his oldest friend, who he may not be speaking to anymore; Martina, the one-night stand who won’t go away; Kate, the former occupant of his hovel; and Aggi, the one who got away, his legendary girlfriend, the one he has been pining over for the last three years. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the book, I still found the occasional part laugh out loud funny, I was still rooting for Will to sort his life out. I never would have found Mike Gayle had it not been for my flatmate insisting I read one of his books.

He obsesses over her day and night, and beats himself up trying to figure out what he could've done differently. Here comes the male Bridget Jones' -- Mirror 'Full of belly-laughs and painfully acute observations' -- Independent on Sunday 'Touching and funny' -- Mirror --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. In his decrepit flat where he can't even manage to cook spaghetti hoops without setting off the communal smoke alarm, his lifeline is the telephone.Mike Gayle, previously a contributor to FHM and Just Seventeen magazines has dipped his pen in the inkpot of universal experience and written a comic novel underpinned by rejection and the ripples (or tidal waves) it continues to produce for years afterwards. Here are the night-time wanderings of Blue Glow and Being Followed Home, the breathy monologue of Goodnight, the separated lovers of Separations – but all tied together into a compelling, vivid story.

There’s much more about the thrill of the early nineties indie scene and the excitement of Britpop waiting to happen in Higher Than The Sun, the story of Foxbase Alpha, Loveless, Screamadelica and Bandwagonesque and how Creation Records took on the world and nearly won. Apparently it was a nightmare to make, but on the plus side Jarvis’s comments offer us a rare glimpse into the world of Pulp in 1991 – “There were quite a few false starts on this one. I was also born in Birmingham — in my humble opinion the greatest city in the world with the nicest people too. When Hodder Books offered the Squadpod an exclusive and limited PR run to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Mike Gayle’s debut novel I jumped at the chance to be part of it.Nothing deeply profound, and it invoked more wry smiles than belly laughs, but a nice little story nonetheless. I get the impression this was meant to be a mans take on the Bridget Jones style kind of diary; however this is the furthest from that example in my opinion. So much so, in fact, that it left us momentarily speechless, as indeed did the uncomfortable awkwardness that it had provoked for reasons we were maybe not quite as amenable to the idea of expressing as Jarvis Cocker and company, and most importantly the overall unexpected fabulousness of the song itself. After a heart break it’s quite common to live a period of “can’t live with her (him), can’t live without her (him)”.

U. (Gone, Gone) as the encore, something that it is difficult to imagine happening only a matter of months later – and as we stepped out into the bracing spring air, drifting into the general direction of the train station, you stopped, smiled that gigantic smile and said “…something’s happening, isn’t it? In some ways it is nice to read a male perspective when it comes to love although I don’t think many men would admit to ever behaving like a love sick teen like Will does through out. Over the three years of its existence we interviewed many bands and artists including: Smashing Pumpkins, The Cranberries, Pavement, Bill Hicks and Blur.All of this was also very much true of Razzmatazz, which followed in February and whether by accident or design shared its name with a glossy ITV pop show, and came accompanied by the equally remarkable narrative suite Stacks, Inside Susan and 59 Lyndhurst Grove which followed the same character from excitable teenage mischief through to unhappily married boredom and a yearning to find that fire inside herself again. A hilarious, original story for anyone who has ever been dumped, or lived in a dump, ‘full of belly-laughs and painfully acute observations’. It’s been three years since his heartthrob, Agnes, wrecked his life with a chat that started, “It’s like that song.

Mike became a full time novelist in 1997 following the publication of his Sunday Times top ten bestseller My Legendary Girlfriend, which was hailed by The Independent as ‘Full of belly laughs and painfully acute observations,’ and by The Times as ‘A funny, frank account of a hopeless romantic. It's been three years and he still hasn't gotten over the day his ex-girlfriend Aggi dumped him - on his 23rd birthday - without rhyme or reason. It made me think, "When will all this whining over a girl who doesn't deserve his 'great love' ever end?

In retrospect, it’s not difficult to see how he would end up ‘saying’ something even more unsayable at a certain awards ceremony only a short while later. Before you continue reading, please have a listen here to the intro (the first 50 seconds or so) – the bass, the rhythm, the muttered vocals, the ‘we got it together’, sound at all familiar? Andrew Lincoln reads Mike Gayle's hilarious, original and Number One bestselling story for anyone who has ever been dumped, dumped or lived in a dump. After a decade of control it’s almost shocking to hear the pants and groans he puts into the performance. Like an outrageous celebrity interview on The Word or a savagely pointed comment on Have I Got News For You, it seemed to step dangerously outside the unspoken consensus that there were certain limits that were not to be – as laughable as it might seem now – tested lightly.