Come back to your local for a night of two halves, when on Thursday 11th December, we welcome the return of the Deserter duo with their new book Deserter Stories, plus the author Justin Lewis with his latest book, Into the Groove: .
It’ll be a night of amusing slacker stories, music, anecdotes and memories – and we’ll also be raising a glass to Jon. Tickets are £10 which include a couple of bevvies and the evening will be split into two halves, allowing you to fill up your glass in the interval.
Deserter is an aspirational lifestyle website for those with a predilection for doing fuck all. Largely set in those parts of London south of river, it is both a guide to urban cocking about and a compendium of techniques to get more out of life by doing less. Deserter was founded in 2014 and is published by Andrew Grumbridge and Vincent Raison, mainly from pubs.
Deserter Stories is their new book and features ten unsettling tales of the flawed and the floored, laced with humour and uncommon characters. The latest book is something a bit different: a fiction collection. Stories dealing with mortality, masculinity and outsiderness are leavened with trademark humour and off-beat perspectives, all loosely connected by South London settings. It follows the success of Today South London, Tomorrow South London (Unbound, 2018) – London Evening Standard Comedy Book of the Year – and 2022’s hit self-help book Shirk, Rest and Play (Unbound, 2022).
In this book, a simple fool travels back in time to Camberwell to discover he remains an idiot, two brothers enjoy an unexpected and revealing day out in South Norwood, young love blossoms during a drugged-up Blackheath weekender and a publican blots out personal trauma to relive his recent past through a pub crawl of some of London’s finest pubs. There are gamblers, dossers, dreamers and drunken deities. Something for everyone.
Justin Lewis grew up in South Wales and, after a spell in London, is back there now. He is an author, editor and artist. He specialises in material about music, broadcasting, comedy, popular culture and social history. He is fascinated by the past, but wouldn’t want to live there for too long, so he’s not a nostalgist who thinks it was all better back then. He sometimes writes in the third person. He last came up the hill with 2023’s Don’t Stop the Music which traces 40 years of pop history by offering bite-sized facts for every day from January 1st to December 31st, jumping randomly from year to year.
Into the Groove: is Justin’s new book and a tale of pop and circumstance. It charts the global story of pop music month by month from January 1980 to December 1989, highlighting a variety of events and tracing the career paths of many noteworthy pop acts around the world, including Annie Lennox, A-ha, Roxette, Prince, Madonna, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Whitney Houston, Sugarcubes – and many more. It celebrates genres of all kinds – the enduring and the faddish, the mainstream and the underground, from post-punk to acid house, from heavy rock to electronic, from hip hop to teen pop – showcasing many of the decade’s key recordings, figures and events, while also revealing plenty of intriguing lesser-known stories to create a wry and diverse musical tapestry.
Justin will be interviewed by journalist, and witty pal, Clair Woodward.
Tickets: https://booksellercrow.co.uk/event/deserter-justin-up-your-local/