What this is all about.

Hello, I'm your friendly author. What follows, in 25 installments (plus a front cover), is the text of Making History, my novel for 2009's National Novel Writing Month.  It is just over 50,000 words and appears here in a completely unedited form, so if it's not very good, well, at least I warned you.


With that said: Making History is the oral history of a very unusual, and completely fictional, rock band called Knave of Hearts.  Knave of Hearts is four kids from London (Alan, Emma, Lane, and Tom), and from 2007-2008 they rose to fame from out of nowhere and just as quickly and suddenly disappeared, amidst bizarre circumstances.  This account will attempt to tell the story as objectively as possible, and leave you to draw your own conclusions.  Please enjoy.

Making History

introducing the band

Pete Davies (musician): Every band wants to change the world.

I remember it well; ah, yes, very well. Being in school, learning how to play guitar, practicing your Mick Jagger poses in the mirror and thinking you were very cool, thinking you were going to be able to get all the girls – but no, no, it wasn't about girls, it was about the music, the expression, and you were going to start a band and be just so – so brilliant that you'd be playing the Albert Hall and there would be fans screaming and fainting around you. And you'd be very nonchalant, signing autographs on people's T-shirts and riding around in your limousine drinking scotch with ice, that sort of thing.

queen of diamonds

Madeleine Marx: Edwin and I always knew it would be better to raise a child in England. Wales was so many dead-end streets. In England there was work for us, and our children could be exposed to much more culture. I think, coming from a small town as does Edwin, we always found that Londoners were more open-minded. We felt that the girls and Charlie would grow up much more well-rounded than we did. They teach us things every day.

Edwin Hall (executive, Hall Publishing): Emma was our second child, and our second daughter. She was born in '89, and I wish I could say that's the most trouble she ever gave us.

i am not what i am

Theresa Hawk (student): Alan Léonin is...beautiful.

He's a beautiful human being. I think if angels are real, Alan is what they would be like. He looks like a marble statue. He has the most intense eyes. (laugh) I feel like no one really speaks to what it means to be a teenager in the modern world the way he does. It's not all happiness and fun, you know! I'm really glad he's there for me, even if the band's broken up—I'm glad his words are there for me—and I feel like I really understand the meaning in all of the music.

James Lewis (student): Being gay my whole life, we had this ideal in the community of a man who was really fit, like physically fit, not like he's attractive fit, someone who went to the gym and lifted weights and looked really strong. Because he's trying to hide the vulnerability that people associate with the gay community, right? But Alan Léonin never tried to hide that, well, men are human beings too, and have a lot of the same insecurities that women do.

spaces in between words

Lane Kennedy: Ooh, I'm the Quiet One. (laugh)

Sean Kennedy (architect): I'll admit, I never thought I'd end up giving an interview for a book about a rock band. We're just a very average single-parent family. We're all a bit artistic I guess, but we never expected to make a lot of waves, we just wanted to get by.

Ben Kennedy (student): I always thought Lane's art was what she'd be famous for. I didn't even know she played the bass. I guess she doesn't talk a lot about her accomplishments, she's pretty modest.

we keep the beat

Emma Marx-Hall (reading from the lyrics to "My Little Army" by Knave of Hearts): We are the pulse, we keep the beat. The numbers signaled our defeat. We aren't the army – we just keep the beat.

Tom Thorogood: I just really like music. I always have.

Molly Webster (pianist): Oh, it's absolutely a family tradition. Thomas's father was a musician too, for a short while. He was a tenor actually. I met him because I was his accompanist for a recording. It's almost cliché, that story. Though he manages a factory now. That's a bit less romantic but it pays the bills!

emma marx-hall tells the story of knave of hearts' fourth concert

Emma Marx-Hall: Well, technically we weren't called Knave of Hearts then. We were called Prince of Darkness, which we chose because it's both a little glamorous, and a little "fuck off". I was never really sure about it because for one thing, it sounded a bit goth, and for another, Lane hated the Satan reference.

But anyway.

things started to change

Lane Kennedy: I wasn't meant to be in the band—be in any band. I was doing design at uni. I was living with mates and shit went down, as they say. So I moved in with someone in my degree program—his name is Paul, we still keep in touch actually.

I met a very shy boy in my second year. He was in his first year and he had come to the art studio to do sketching. At first I thought he was doing an arts degree as well but he said Anthropology and Sociology, so I thought, oh, that's different. I don't know why I kept talking to him because it seemed like he was trying to tell me to piss off. He always had his hair over his eyes—you can see it in the early photos, how his one eye is always covered! (laugh) And he didn't talk much. You know I didn't either. We just chatted a bit, and we'd go and draw things or he'd write.

why not choose us?

(excerpt from an interview, 9 December 2007, with Peacecraft magazine)

ºEmma Marx-Hall: My American friend Frank rides in a van with a picture of an abortion on the side. I think what he's trying to say is fucking trash, but I think the whole world should be like a cigarette package, we have to remember that truth is loud and hideous and dangerous and it's a photo of black lungs and we have to embrace that we are all smokers. And Frank is an inspiration in that way.

ºAlan Léonin: Our drug is social interaction, rather than nicotine, but it's still filling our lungs with tar.

ºPeacecraft: Sure, but is your friend and his van actually going to change anyone's mind? Wouldn't he do better to try reasoning with people?

real live celebrities

Emily Alexander: I was out of work and totally miserable. I'd had a wonderful six months with Pete Davies, who you probably know as the lead singer of the Blood Roses back in the 80's, and who was my first ever client and also a great friend. But I felt like the fact that we were working together was just out of an incredible stroke of luck, and it was really hard to find clients again after the album started getting bad reviews—Pitchfork, if you're listening, you know Pete didn't really deserve that 6.5. Come on guys, you can't expect everything a Blood Rose touches to be All Saints Day, can't you give us a little slack? Anyway, we were in bad straits, and by we I mean I, and it was out of sheer desperation that I agreed to listen to this demo tape Pete sent me.

scotland

Emma Marx-Hall: I think it's actually true that Marxes and Halls live everywhere in the world, because my mum and dad are from Wales, my great-grandparents were originally from Germany, my aunt and uncle live in New Zealand, and my cousin Greg lives in Edinburgh. More importantly, Greg heard we had a band and offered his flat as a crashing place.

Tom Thorogood: I guess Emma's cousin Greg Hall was in the habit of letting people sleep on his floor, because he let us stay in his flat in Scotland and when we got there he was telling us all about the interesting people who had stayed there before. Artists, actors, people who just preferred to wander.

making it happen

Tom Thorogood: Especially because we were moving on to bigger and better-known venues, it became our objective to up ourselves with every concert. For me, that meant letting myself go a little, being less of a 'trained musician' and more of a 'drummer in a band'. For Lane, that meant improving her technique, making sure she was always really locked into the rhythm. For Alan, that meant coming up with even more witty things to say and of course getting his harmonies right. And Emma...well you know Emma. For Emma, upping herself just meant being more outrageous. It meant wearing bigger and brighter colored dresses. It meant releasing balloons from the stage, or pouring glitter on the audience, or once bringing her little dog on to run around the stage and bark at people. We weren't allowed to throw paint anymore, because Emily pointed out that some of the people here spent more money on their outfits than we'd made from all our concerts total.

on the road with...

Davina Thewsley: Evelyn and I kept close watch on the Knave Myspace page. The moment we saw they were having a tour, we decided we'd try and catch them at as many stops as possible. Somehow I managed to convince my parents to let me miss a week of school to chase a band around the United Kingdom. Maybe they were just happy I had finally found something that meant something in my life. We took the train to London, crashed with some friends of Evelyn's who we'd met in Edinburgh, and saw them play at a tiny club called the Midway.

the kids are all right

Natalie Leonard: On October 29^th, 2007, at about 10:30 PM, I considered all my options and decided the best was to drink a quart of bleach and hope for a quick death. I was fifteen, alone and miserable with nowhere to go and nothing to care about.

About fifteen minutes later I was vomiting so hard I passed out. The next thing I knew I was in hospital having my stomach pumped. They had me stay overnight and I didn't talk to anyone. I was just stunned: I was such a failure I couldn't even kill myself properly.

in the court of the king

Emma Marx-Hall: We went into intensive recording sessions for the second album. This time it wasn't just Alan who was missing sleep. Marque wanted us to have the second album out by early March, and so we spent all of January writing and recording songs.

Alan Léonin: We were all corresponding with fans throughout the entire recording process. We realized that the only way to combat people trying to leak our new music was to let them in on the process as much as possible, so there wasn't any jealousy. We sent rough drafts of lyrics to the fanzines. We premiered our songs in small, practically spontaneous performances, and even though they were hardly publicized at all, people showed up.

fallen angels

Erik Hell (filmmaker): Emily Alexander and I met at university, where we were quite good friends. We were a bit of an odd pair. She was 'the American girl', I was 'the cross-dresser'. Wore a lot of girls' clothes at the time, makeup and skirts. I certainly wouldn't say we were picked on, but we both got a good amount of gentle ribbing for our idiosyncrasies. So it's only natural we would end up speaking to each other at some point. If I recall correctly, we were out with friends and we were literally shoved together by a mutual acquaintance who decided that it was important that we speak to each other.

Emily was very embarrassed by the drunkenness of our friends, and so the two of us stepped outside for a breather and started talking, whence Emily immediately told me off for doing my eyeshadow wrong. I don't want to impart undeserved gravity to the situation, but I believe it was at that moment when I realized Emily Alexander and I were probably going to be very good friends indeed.

new world disorder

Emily Alexander: I couldn't think straight after that. I had always been a little bit afraid of it, but now that Natalie was there to remind me it was getting too close for comfort. So maybe it was because of that, but something inside me sort of...snapped. I decided that the real reason I was supposed to be there was to protect the band. I mean, because that's what it was. It was the obsessive, cultlike following—however small—that made us stop being aware of ourselves, and how important it was for us to recognize our human failings.

Lane Kennedy: Emily and George were fielding a lot of calls from venues about booking the band, and so all of a sudden there were dates being added to the tour. We had once had days to spend roaming around cities, but, well, it was our job and it was turning into a job.

do you believe in magic?

Alan Léonin (reading from the lyrics to "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Knave of Hearts): Every day I ship myself away / In neat packages with trademark stamps and MSRP / Every day I sign myself away / And every morning more of me is disappeared.

ºSarah Macintosh (television presenter): This is a special news bulletin. Evelyn Porter, age seventeen, went missing from her home in Edinburgh on April 29^th. Evelyn was last seen at the home of a friend after attending a concert, but her parents report that she returned to her house and removed clothing and other items from her room. We will now play a message recorded by Evelyn's family.

everybody loves a defective heart

Alan Léonin: Through a haze of headache and acrimony, I saw Brussels. Burnt through the concert like a match lit to flimsy paper. I really let Emma shine that night, let her do her twirls and kicks and witty banter. When she turned to me I had only other people's words left over. Kurt Vonnegut: "I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over, on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." Richey Edwards: "I know I believe in nothing, but it is my nothing." Whoever it was that said "Life is a disease, sexually transmitted and always fatal."

Emma Marx-Hall: We were interviewed in Brussels and that was the first time that I really started to do some of the talking for myself. I mean, I always talked in interviews, but before we went in for one I'd always beg Alan to tell me what to say, and during the interviews I'd always glance over to him to make sure I was on point.

strange days indeed

Natalie Leonard: The morning after the Japan concert I woke up with about a hundred messages on my phone, and twice as many texts.

Davina Thewsley: I ran to my parents, sobbing. (laugh) I don't think they knew what to do with themselves. I never showed any emotion to them before that I don't think, not since I was a baby.

Alice Hughes: I saw the pictures. It was unmistakeable even from blurry photos taken from someone's mobile phone.

Theresa Hawk: I'd thought it was impossible. I'd thought she'd died.

stop the world

Emily Alexander: It started in early July. I was sleeping. It was about two in the morning. I'm an 'early to bed, early to rise' kind of girl when I've got work to do. I woke up because my buzzer was going off. It took a few times until I finally gave up and went to the door just so I could shut whoever it was up. I don't even remember how she introduced herself, she said she was from the record company or something and there was an emergency. My heart was pounding in my chest. I let her up.

I didn't recognize her, of course. It wasn't a familiar face. But no way was she from the record company, she was just a kid. All skin and bones and unruly hair, dressed in military cast-offs. She stared at me out of these intense grey eyes and calmly told me who she was and what she was doing here. Her name was Rivka Fried, she said, and she felt the only way to deal with me was in person. I was frozen, I was completely certain she was going to try to kill me. She kept talking calmly, backing me into my apartment, her hand in her pocket like she had a weapon hidden there. I wasn't even paying attention to what she was saying.

rivka, standing on the roof of a london high rise with a megaphone, alone

ºRivka Fried ( ): Hello. Hello! Is this working? It must be. You're looking up. My name is Rivka Maidel Fried. Some of you know me as Rivka Starlett. Today I shed my guise. Today I will tell the world who I am.

Perhaps you think – and I understand this has been whispered, passed along the grapevine – that I have gone mad. It is my belief that the world is mad, and I was mad before, and at last I am cured. This is my truth! The truth is surrounding us, and we are only too complacent, no, too afraid to look it in the eyes. Do not be afraid to stare into the sun, London! You fear it because it is beautiful, and beauty is the only thing polite society is still afraid of. You fear the divinity of that pain.

things fall apart

Theresa Hawk: That's when she jumped.

It was terrifying. They were broadcasting it on television live, because people were curious about how she got up there and why she wouldn't come down, and what she was saying. And then she jumped off. Those were her last words, this day will be remembered.

It was July 19^th, 2008. I remember.

for better or for worse

Emily Alexander: I didn't see Alan until toward the end of when he was staying at his parents' house. It was really weird at first, seeing him in that setting. Even back when I first met Alan, and he hadn't really found himself yet, he was still a rock star to me. He had a glamorous life, even if it was dime-store glamour. He was a Londoner, not a small town boy with a ramshackle house by the sea.

And yet there he was. I met him in his kitchen. It was one of those little houses where you feel like you're bigger than normal, or at least you're aware of the size of your body. You bump into the door frames trying to get into the rooms. His mum made us Earl Grey tea. His parents seemed very traditional, very English. His mum asked me where I was from, I said New Jersey, originally, but my family was from the UK. Keeping it simple, you know.

the beat goes on: a chat with james wild and evie holloway

Interviewer: Can you tell me a little bit about who you are, and what it is that you do?

James Wild (musician): I'm James, and this is Evie.

Evie Holloway (musician): We're both musicians. I'm the singer and lead guitarist of a band called New South Wales.

James Wild: My band is called Culture Shock.

making history

Pete Davies: So that's what became of Knave of Hearts, then. They're still four people living relatively ordinary lives, even if they have more expensive shoes than most of us.

But they aren't four ordinary people. I can tell when I look at them, that there's some sort of aura around them. I don't mean that in a new age, 'woo woo' sort of way. I mean that you can see there's something about them that would make you follow them into a burning building. Like even if they don't know where they're going, you're damn sure you're going to enjoy the journey.