Searching for Sun Ra begins with a lost sock in a Wigan laundrette and ends, eventually, with a spacecraft.
That journey takes in unemployment, mental distress, small acts of kindness, bargain-basket records, conspiracy theories, George Clinton, Frank Randle, Sun Ra, black holes and the sort of ordinary places where, if you stay long enough, things can begin to loosen from what they are supposed to mean.
I grew up in a cramped house, five of us, sharing bedrooms, and when winter closed things in there were two reliable ways out: walking and the library. Music arrived through radio shows and whatever could be afforded from the bargain basket in the record shop, where the covers were often stranger than anything happening on the high street. Those scraps mattered. They still do.
This book comes from that same instinct to make something from what is there. To see what happens when a laundrette becomes a spacecraft, when a slag heap becomes a mountain range, when the things we are told are small, local or disposable turn out to contain whole systems of thought.
You do not have to lose your accent to talk about big things.
Sometimes the difference between a black hole, where reality collapses, and a laundrette where you are trying to make sense of your life is mostly distance.
And perhaps oxygen.
The search begins here.
The marketing department has spoken.
Searching for Sun Ra is now out in the world: laundrettes, lost socks, Wigan, black holes, bargain-bin records, grief, escape, George Clinton, Frank Randle and the occasional attempt to leave the planet.
Joe Shukie has been appointed Head of Marketing after decades working the ice cream van around Ashton. Frankly, there is nobody better, the operation is now much smoother and comes with an optional flake (hence the 99 in the price!).
£12.99 from Big White Shed.