My fondness for rock, for Jagger, Bowie and Perry led me down this bloodstained path and it has been a wild ride. I was never a groupie, this book is probably as close as I will ever get to that, but it has been a wild ride, that’s for sure. I loved writing every word of it. I hope you enjoyed it.
Make sure you follow Adrian and I for the next two books in the Vampires of Rock series.
Follow me on Facebook to get the latest news on my book releases, sales and fan events. You can visit my website at MLBullock.com to purchase autographed copies of my books. Please add your name to my mailing list (also at my website). It’s free and totally private. I usually send emails at least once a month with behind-the-scenes goodies. If you want more, go to Patreon. I have a fun platform there where I regularly share my ghost hunting trips.
All my best,
Monica Leigh Bullock
Author’s Note from Adrian E. Lee
My parents had little music in the house when I was a kid. But they grew up in London during the swinging 60s and my mother had a few early Beatles albums. I learned to play the guitar to make myself more interesting. I had little going for me as a kid in a giant comprehensive school in the recidivist East London, in an education system where not a single teacher knows your name if you are average. With two thousand students only the brilliant or the terrible are remembered. So, learning the guitar seemed like a good way to gain attention, attract the opposite sex, and massage my delusions of adequacy.
I still remember saving my birthday and Christmas money to buy the cheapest Fender copy called a Marlin Sidewinder, in the music shop in Romford called Monkey Business. I can smell the shop now with its freshly lacquered mahogany racks of multicolored guitars and electricity. I had little clue as to what I was doing. So, things like tuning, amplifiers, and distortion pedals were alien words and no internet existed to aid my quest for knowledge—I asked an older boy at school how to get the whole thing singing. Then I discovered chords and my dad built me a rudimentary amp in a wooden box. I also found that I could plug it into my stereo with the right leads, much to the detriment of my speakers.
This was not my first guitar though. My father brought home a little travel bass when I was ten years old from a colleague who no longer wanted it. Due to its stunted nature, I could play it with my short child arms and fingers. The strings were so thick they could have used them as wires on the Golden Gate Bridge. Several older boys in elementary school needed a bass player and invited me into their band. We called ourselves Mile End. I had no clue what I was doing, and I just plucked away as they did covers of The Stranglers, The Jam, and Elvis Costello. I was a fucking cool ten-year-old in my stay-pressed trousers, Farrah shirts, and neo-punk back catalogue.
My mother had a friend at work that needed help running a disco on a Saturday night for weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries—his father had died, and he couldn’t carry a slate bed Technics turntable up the fire escape stairs of a Co-Op to the function room. I needed the money to pay for my college expenses and jumped at the chance. I grew strong muscles, a healthy bank balance, and a love of 50s and 60s music. His father had bought the top ten every week throughout those decades and it was our specialism. Those records were priceless. Every Saturday night around London I watched girls dancing, raided the buffet, and learned every note of Runaround Sue.
My musical knowledge was then insulted every Sunday morning as my mother worked her way loudly through her Carpenters, Barry Manilow, and Neil Diamond records, as I was trying to sleep after rolling in at 5 am. It raised many questions, like why she had to play them so loudly, why it was so popular, and why do birds suddenly appear…
Living in London allowed me to see many worldwide bands. Who goes on a tour and doesn’t play in London? I saw Gary Moore, Queen, Bon Jovi, Big Country, Status Quo, The Manic Street Preachers, Del Amitri, and many more. I even walked to one gig in Shepherd’s Bush, across the park, to see the late Jeff Buckley and found Jeff Buckley walking beside me stride for stride. I chatted to him and discussed the weather and where he was staying. As we reached the venue a ticket tout asked him if he wanted tickets to see Jeff Buckley, to which he replied, I am Jeff Buckley!
My guitar playing improved, and I joined a band. We drove around Soho in a VW campervan on a Saturday night doing twenty minutes here and there. This was the red-light district with women parading themselves in windows with little clothing. I was the youngest and the rest of the band looked after me… my mother would have killed them if anything happened. Rob, our bass player, told me, when entering Madam JoJo’s with our instruments, not to go near any of the women. After setting up and playing I found myself at the bar surrounded by the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. With perfect skin and killer figures. I was like a lamb’s carcass dangling in a piranha tank. Rob then unceremoniously pulled me away and bundled me into the campervan. I complained bitterly that he’d ruined my chances with at least three of those models at the bar! To which he replied, they weren’t women!
I could fill a book with just stories that are music related and I suspect you could do the same. Music was playing in the background during our conception. Thank you, Barry White! It’s played when we’re in the womb. We make a note of what was number one in the charts on the day we are born. We all remember buying our first single and crying to the background of music when our first love dumps us. We play along to it with tennis rackets and sing into hairbrushes in our bedrooms. We meet our partners at music venues or dances. We make out in cars to the stereo playing—I now cannot listen to Black Velvet by Alannah Miles without getting an erection. We have our first slow dance to it when we’re married and organize the music for our funerals.
It’s omnipresent throughout our entire life’s journey… it’s that important to us.
It is also sexy and sits with the passion and sexuality of vampirism extremely well. As a Brit I have visited Whitby in Yorkshire many times—the landing spot of Dracula in the novel by Bram Stoker. I’ve also had a fascination with vampires as a child from reading the gothic books I collected from the book vouchers my relatives bought me for Christmas. For an English project I once stood in front of the class and discussed vampires, much to the puzzlement of my English teacher. I also sat through the old Hammer House of Horror films on a Friday night at my grandparents’ house. Grandpa sat with a whisky and a cigar until late watching the flickering images of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, as I pretended to be asleep.
And who doesn’t love the nostalgia of the toys, music, and food of the 1970s, although I would keep away from a Chevy Vega. This trilogy is a synthesis between Monica and me, she is such a story smith and brilliant writer. We fitted together so well in our creativity for these books that you can see the result for yourself. When she asked me to add grit, darkness, sex, rock, dystopia, and tension, I thought I’d better go and do some research over the weekend… but she knew I’d spent a lifetime experiencing that world through my guitar playing. She’d come to the right place.
But she is a very astute and clever woman (don’t tell her in case she gets a big head). Keep it real music lovers… peace.
Adrian E. Lee.
PS If you’d like to continue this conversation, follow me on Twitter or YouTube or Facebook. I’m everywhere music lovers and paranormalists hang out. Check out my website the International Paranormal Society.
The Vampire's Song (Vampires of Rock Book 1) Page 18