All Neon Like Love Press Biog 

Dan Gennoe is a London based writer and novelist. A former music journalist, he began his professional writing career in 1998 when he co-founded underground music magazine Flipside - an excitable culture clash of dance, indie, pop, rap and R&B, which from its mouse infested office in The Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, East London, quickly established itself as a byword for cool, style and cutting edge writing, and for a brief moment defined London’s pre-millennial youth culture.

As with all things, cool, stylish and cutting edge, it wasn’t to last, and one year and a million pounds later, when the magazine finally went bust, Dan started out on a 15 year freelance career writing interviews and cover features for Esquire, GQ, The Independent, The Mail on Sunday, Q, Mojo, Seven and various other magazines and newspapers. Among the highlights of his time writing about music were getting a business lesson from Jay-Z, flying to lunch in Jamiroquai singer Jay Kay’s helicopter [piloted by Kay], learning the meaning of humility from Foo Fighter Dave Grohl, and getting tips on posing for pictures from Sia [head to the side, chin down, eyes up]. He also, unexpectedly, ghosted the memoirs of a TV chef for HarperCollins.

“I loved writing interviews and I still do, but I love doing big, in-depth pieces and there are only a handful of subjects, music or otherwise, who can carry those. And I’ve done most of them,” he says of why he eventually decided to start writing fiction. “Now everyone is so media trained, so careful about what they say, they rarely actually say anything and certainly not enough for you to know who they really are, which isn’t much fun. Ghosting the TV chef’s autobiography seemed like the obvious conclusion to that period. I’ve been asked to ghost other books since, but none that excited me enough to actually do them.” Not that he’s entirely ruling out a return to ghosting in the future. “There are a couple of genuine music icons I would love to help tell their story, and they know who they are. But until they feel the time is right, fiction is a much more interesting place to be.”

Dan’s debut novel, All Neon Like Love, centres around a nameless, disillusioned music journalist who finds himself lost in the grey area between love and obsession as he tries to trace the woman he believes to be the love of his life that he let slip away. Is the book at all autobiographical?

“All fiction is autobiographical to a point,” he says. “But him being a disillusioned music journalist certainly isn’t the most autobiographical thing about it. The story is about being isolated and alone in London, and Paris, and any city for that matter, and how that isolation can make you obsessive and prone to grab onto things like your life depends on it. That’s probably the more autobiographical part. That’s what 15 years of being freelance, sitting in a room by yourself, with no one to talk to, will do to you. Not that I developed the stalkerish tendencies of the character in All Neon Like Love, but the point of the book is that it’s a fine line and which side of it you’re on is as much about how the object of your obsession feels about you and your attention.”

Perception is another strong theme in the book. “That was definitely informed by my own experience being around famous people, especially the ones I spent extended periods of time with. When you get to know people who are in the public eye, you see that they are, for the most part, pretty ordinary people dealing with a pretty extraordinary situation, and the more you get to know them as people, the more you forget their public persona. So it suddenly seems strange, almost shocking, when a fan comes up to them and completely goes to pieces over being in their presence. The fan is seeing one thing, you’re seeing another, and what the fan is seeing has got so much to do with their own wants, needs and expectations - what they image this famous person will be like, what they imagine meeting them will be like, how they somehow have a connection with this famous person even though they don’t know each other - that their reaction to meeting their idol has almost nothing to do with the person they’re obsessing over. And that’s what happens in the book. His obsession is more to do with him than her.”

London and Paris also play a major part in the book, both at times acting as characters in the story and at others as escapes for the nameless protagonist. “I’m a dedicated Londoner, so I think the city will always play a big part in my writing,” he explains. “It’s as much who I am as where I am. With London, it doesn’t matter where you actually live, you’re always a Londoner. Hemingway described Paris as a moveable feast, because you could always carry it with you, with London it’s more that you can never leave it behind.” Not that he’d want to, he assures. “I was born in London. When I was a kid my dad ran a clothing company that had menswear shops on the King’s Road, so if I wasn’t at school I was always somewhere around town with my parents.”

And Paris? “Paris is an escape. It’s my escape. It’s where I go when I can’t be in London anymore. I go to Paris A LOT! So it was natural that it would be the same for him in the book. Paris is a beautiful place to escape to and with that beauty comes a darker underside, so it also made sense that when things take a darker turn in the book, they should take that turn in Paris. If you’re going to have a breakdown, it might as well be somewhere beautiful, in which case it has to be Paris.

“I’m fascinated by people, why they are the way they are, which is why I love doing interviews, or at least interviews with fascinating people who are willing to let you in. And cities are essentially collections of people, individuals affected by all the other individuals around them, their stories all in some way dependent on others, even when they don’t really interact with anyone, as with the main character in All Neon Like Love. So it’s no surprise that if I like writing about people, I’d like writing about cities and all of the interesting and exciting things that go on in them, and how easy it is to get lost and be lost in them. I can’t ever imagine not writing about cities. Being alone in the country and being alone in the city are two very different things. There’s nothing more isolating than watching everyone around you living the life that you think is passing you by. That’s really what the book is about.”

All Neon Like Love is published in the UK on April 23rd 2015.