Gordon Burn: Rewriting the past

The fact that Burn knows how to joke may come as a surprise to those still bracketing him as a gritty true crime writer who dissected the flawed life and murderous career of Peter Sutcliffe in Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, dragged Ian Brady and Myra Hindley into the Whitbread Prize-winning Alma Cogan and, most notoriously, got deep under the skin of Gloucester couple Fred and Rose West and their many victims.

"I remember Tony Parsons when they reviewed Happy Like Murderers on Late Review saying something like, Yes, Burn's a brilliant writer but he's always got his nose stuck into a body bag.' It hit home in a way, but I just can't write about happy stuff, about nice relationships, though the Wests' book was such a horrible thing to write about, and I'd never do thatagain.

"Iwasinterestedinthe Madeleine case but not in terms of writing about it. I've kept on hoping and hoping that she'd reappear somewhere, but I don't think I could delve so deep into a case like that again."

Delving, though, is what Burn does best. Whether he is writing fiction, non-fiction or the fertile zone pitched somewhere in between, he is always on the move both psychologically and physically, visiting places for their atmosphere, meeting people for their angles.

The exhaustive and painful research he undertook for Happy Like Murderers may ultimately have led Burn to turning his back on true crime but in later books - The North of England Home Service, and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion - he still walked a million miles in pursuit of tiny incidents, artefacts, details and coincidences that seemed to add up to a vast, brooding and significant whole.

In Born Yesterday, his research (culled from24-hourrollingTVchannels, newspapers,internetreportingand information that he gathered himself on site) produced an enormous pile of weird littlesynchronicitiesbetweenthat summer's "players".

Here'sasamplebatchaboutthe McCanns alone: the Glasgow Airport attackers and many of the Tapas 7 being in the medical profession; the image of Tony Blair, over-tired and late in from work slumping on son Leo's bed, linked to Kate McCann, lonely and bereft, seeking some crumb of solace by lying on Madeleine's bed; the fact that Leo and Madeleinesharedidenticaltoysand plastickitchensets;theMadeleine- alike on YouTube distraught because her hero Blair had been replaced by Brown; the bizarre optical connections (Madeleine's identifiableiris,suspect Robert Murat and newPMGordon Brown both having one fully working eye each); Heather Mills comparing herself to Kate McCann, while Burn recalls Paul McCartney, his first wife Linda and their daughter Heather causing a media scrum when they visited Praia da Luz in the late 1960s: after Madeleine's disappearance, Kate McCann's parents flew out to Portugal from the John Lennon Airport.

InApril,whenNewsnightReview returned to analyse Burn for the first time since Happy Like Murderers, a brief referencewasmadetotheselinks, while host John Wilson wondered, considering he had put himself into it as a bona fide character, whether Gordon Burnshouldhave mademoreofthe closenessofhis name to the current occupant of No 10. The truth is, he very nearly did.

"I'd read The Book ofDanielwhere Doctorow has sent-ences going from first person to third person," recalls Burn when we meet at one of Soho's media haunts, the French House.

"I thought about writing in that way but in the end decided that the idea was postmodern enough. It would be larding it a bit to add too many tricks, which is why I never call myself Gordon Burn in it. When I first went to North Queensferry, I asked the cops where Gordon Brown's house was and they asked me my name and why I was there. And when I said I just wanted to see it and told them my name, they were acting like, We've got a John Lennon thing where Brown is the impostor and this guy is the real Gordon Brown' but in the end I left that out."

The real Gordon Burn was born in 1948, an only child raised in Newcastle. His father was a car paint-sprayer who did odd jobs for the local GP at the weekends and his mother worked at a department store.

She lived in permanent fear that a colleague or one of Burn's schoolmates would visit and discover that their toilet was outside in the backyard. Burn had relatives who lived in the same two-up two-down terraced area and would spend time hanging around with them at the market or outside St James' Park trying to nab a Toon star's autograph, while Saturday mornings were spent with an uncle and his pigeons.

When it came to reading, there were few books in the family home, so he'd trot off to Newcastle Central Library devouring everythingfromEnidBlytontoDH Lawrence, who first made the young Burn realise that people like him wrote books too. At school, Burn was "keen but clueless" though he still managed to get the 11-plus, allowing him to head for grammar school.

"My family realised that a gulf might open up and I might drift away, which is what happened. I'd be reading beatnicky literature and my dad would be doing the pools or reading the Daily Mirror. Later, I'dbelisteningtoJoniMitchelland Leonard Cohen and my dad would say: Listening to that rubbish again?' Though they liked one Joni Mitchell song, Ladies of the Canyon. There was a line where she sings She is another canyon young lady', but they thought it was She is a canny young lady'."

Burn's writing has been incisive of the celebrity culture that ordinary people devour and the famous are channelled through. His own first brush with the superstar lifestyle arrived when his cousin, Eric Burdon, made it big with The Animals.

"He'd come round to the house with some records and all the little kids in the back lane would be waiting to get his autograph. To know someone who was on the telly and in the papers made it seem like that world wasn't just an abstract but it was possible to get into somehow."

When Burdon relocated to LA, a youthful Burn spent a summer out there. "John Mayall lived next door, Mick Fleetwood was two doors away, Joni Mitchell lived up the hill. Eric would come back from the Whiskey a Go-Go and start writing a screenplay which, surprise surprise, never really materialised. All he had in his fridge was fruit juice and acid."

Burn's break into journalism came when he wrote a sample piece in a "weird, New Journalistic way" about Vera Lynn. Work with the Radio Times came along, but ended when a straightforward interview with Gilbert and George in 1973 collapsed into drunken disarray.

Other jobs included writing music reviews for Rolling Stone and features for the Sunday Times magazine under Hunter Davies' stewardship. "He's in his mid-70s now but is really tireless and keeps whacking them out: it was him who got the Prescott bulimia story. He has a genius for getting the little details of people's lives."

It's a gift that Burn has inherited and a passion that he doggedly pursues. After an intense period of research spanning six months and a whirlwind eight weeks of writing, Burn completed Born Yesterday in Rome having received a three-month fellowship at the city's British School. He has since returned there to research a new book with the working title of The Sixteenth Chapel.

"I like the fact that it sounds a bit Da Vinci Code," he laughs, though the name is actually based on a mishearing of The Sistine Chapel.

"I learned that John Cheever, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly were all in Rome at the same time in the 1950s. I'm not sure if they all knew each other but I'm interested in the gap between what Rome stands for and what their work represented. But I'm not absolutely sure what I'm going to do with the novel yet; I'm working on the links." If anyone can find them, Burn can.

Born Yesterday is published by Faber, £25. Gordon Burn will be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Thursday 21 August, 4.30pm.