Ten Storey Love Song

<p><b>''"Hello," says the wallpaper.''</b><br><br>Spanning one torrential paragraph, <i>Ten Storey Love Song</i> follows Bobby the Artist''s rise to stardom and decline into horrific drug psychosis, Johnnie''s attempts to stop thieving and start pleasing Ellen in bed, and Alan Blunt, a forty-year-old container driver who spends a worrying amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school.<br><br>Bobby - the so-called ''love-child of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat'', holed up in a Middlesbrough tower block - works on his canvases under the influence of pills-on-toast, dirt-cheap cider and dream pop. When Bent Lewis, an art dealer from London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a breakneck adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence, their frayed lives and assorted addictions - sex, money, fame, pick-''n''-mix and, above all, love - bleeding together in one glorious, ferocious slab of technicolour concrete prose.</p>