So today is publication day for Welcome to the Heady Heights which makes me even happier to be hosting the blog tour on today of all days. 🙂
One of the things I love about independent publishers such as Orenda Books, is the sheer variety of titles they publish and, because they are small and generally filled with the most passionate of book lovers, you know that they are all about quality. Welcome to the Heady Heights is a great example of this. This novel is an impressively written, gritty, 70’s infused dark comedy and I loved it.
Archie Blunt is a man with big ideas. He just needs a break for them to be realised. In a bizarre brush with the light-entertainment business, Archie unwittingly saves the life of the UK’s top showbiz star, Hank ‘Heady’ Hendricks, and immediately seizes the opportunity to aim for the big time. With dreams of becoming a musical impresario, he creates a new singing group called The High Five with five unruly working-class kids from Glasgow’s East End. The plan? Make it to the final of Heady’s Saturday night talent show, where fame and fortune awaits… But there’s a complication. Archie’s made a fairly major misstep in his pursuit of fame and fortune, and now a trail of irate Glaswegian bookies, corrupt politicians and a determined Scottish WPC are all on his tail…
A hilarious, poignant nod to the elusiveness of stardom, in an age when ‘making it’ was ‘having it all’, Welcome to the Heady Heights is also a dark, laugh-out-loud comedy, a poignant tribute to a bygone age and a delicious drama about desperate men, connected by secrets and lies, by accidents of time and, most of all, the city they live in.
Now I know the we shouldn’t really talk about gender but I do feel the edgy, tough 70’s story line will definitely appeal to a male readership. Of course women will love it too. I especially loved it’s references to 1970’s Glasgow. The music and TV playlist that David scattered throughout certainly added to the mix brilliantly. I can still hear the theme tune to the Sweeney playing in the back of my mind.
Now the dialect took me a moment or two to adjust (I am very much a delicately spoken south east girl) but it wasn’t long before I was in the full swing of it. Welcome to the Heady Heights has a dark but hugely entertaining humour which I thoroughly enjoyed. This novel would be perfect for adapting for the TV. Amongst the humour there is a darker side to this story and a part of me hopes that a sequel is in the pipeline. I’d like to know more about what happens next for some of these characters and there were one of two that I certainly would like to see…. Well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. Go read it, it’s fab. Enjoy the grit, the rudeness and the fabulous seventies setting.
About the author
David F. Ross was born in Glasgow in 1964 and has lived in Kilmarnock for over thirty years. He is a graduate of the Mackintosh School of Architecture at Glasgow School of Art, an architect by day, and a hilarious social media commentator, author and enabler by night. His most prized possession is a signed Joe Strummer LP. Since the publication of his debut novel The Last Days of Disco, he’s become something of a media celebrity in Scotland, with a signed copy of his book going for £500 at auction, and the German edition has not left the bestseller list since it was published.
