There was a time in the 90’s, pre-Oasis, when, unencumbered by an Epiphone guitar nor deafened by a Marshall valvestate amp, my cultural dalliances were more literary than musical. It was that brief period when I felt being a failed writer was way cooler than being an unsuccessful rock star.

Stepping into this long-lost world where Kerouac played John the Baptist, a wordy messiah inspired my creative bursts. Martin Amis.

As I was then (the unpaid) editor of the in-house Amex magazine, a bibliophilic colleague thought I’d appreciate a book he’d just finished – Amis’ bedazzling Money. How very right this perspicacious telephone customer service rep was! A fresh and exciting world opened out to me like a welcoming but insatiable lover; time became meaningless if denied the tap, tap, tap of fingers on keyboard, without the blissful agony of creation. Suddenly – briefly but oh so vividly – my writings switched abruptly from vengeful fictions of my own life – full of dead prose, funereal plots – to sharply drawn vignettes of urban life; violent, acutely observed, colourfully rendered into long phrases heavy with pretentiousness.

I’d become an Amis clone.

This feverish phase lasted probably no more than three years and two girlfriends – perhaps just the time between Nirvana and Oasis’ Reading Festival appearances and no more than that. But, as with all youthful experiences, what is now merely a glancing blow, then cut oh so deep.

My conceit was flattered early, I won a literary competition with the first creation under my new guise, an arrogant would-be masterpiece, a short story set in Brighton. Reading it now, I can observe clearly the heavy Amis influence. But I was pleased to see my name in print, that my florid musings had been published to the wider world, and perhaps even more so – that in those broke post student times – I’d received a £500 cheque for my efforts. I was a paid writer!

Gradually though, my Amis imitation quietly exited stage left from my life. Long sentences full of masterful phrases were just that, all dislocated show with little overarching plot. I grew weary of my own pretensions, of etiolated constructions and moved my creative energies to a guitar led sub-Oasis wall of sound to bored South Coast pub audiences.

And my writings shifted promiscuously over to Irving Welsh homages (or at least that’s what discouraging editors would accuse me of in terse, to-the-point, three-line rejection slips).

I haven’t read an Amis book for over twenty years.

So, when he died recently, my initial thoughts were somewhat neutral; yeah, I knew Amis’ work, liked it once, but not for me now. And then, on walks, in the bath, cooking meals, on reflection, the memories came back about how deeply he’d affected my youthful life. Like a lover, forgot but achingly remembered years later through the passing scent of a stranger’s perfume, I began to reminisce, more felt than forced. Where I was when I read his books, who I was with, the stories I then wrote.

Let me say this simply; Martin Amis was an immensely talented writer. One of the best. He could turn a phrase like nobody else and certainly better than his pale copyists (step forward Will Self and, way, way down, Tim Robson). His masterpieces – London Fields, Money, The Rachel Papers, The Information, Time’s Arrow – defined an era in both the Anglosphere’s high literature & popular circles, but also in my own development. I now realise we respect the paths that lead nowhere because, certainly when young, they ultimately lead somewhere and not necessarily where we planned to be.

Thank you, Martin, for those short years of fevered writings when I ached to create, to be a better writer, to aspire to be an Amis. That time has long gone but the debt remains. And way more than five hundred quid’s worth of plagiarised success!

RIP Martin Amis.

“She reached me now. I stuck my foot out and tripped the bitch up. Boy you should have seen her fall! She was running so fast that when I nicked her ankle she sprawled and stumbled almost twenty yards before finally succumbing to that knee-to-pavement feeling in a bone crunching kerfuffle of angry pedestrians, despoiled prams and outraged grannies. I grinned and walked on.”

— Tim Robson - Grainy Images 1994

** BTW. I’m too lazy to sift through his books pulling out quotes to demonstrate my point. If you’re curious, read them yourself - start, as I did, with Money.