Fiction can give us a distance from stories that we may think we know inside out, helping us experience the familiar in new ways, says Stef Macbeth, author of FOLK, a prize-nominated debut set against a backdrop of free parties and youth clubs in 90s Britain.

It was the summer of 1994 and Jason Templar was my friend. My head only went up to his chin, which apparently already justified the daily attention of a razor.

These words, which I must have written and rewritten a thousand times over the last decade, were the spark that ignited FOLK, my prize-nominated debut novel out this summer on Velocity.

I can’t remember if it was George Saunders, Ali Smith, Nabokov or one of my other writer-heroes who gave me my favourite response to the question ‘What is writing?’

Write a sentence. Write another sentence.

At first glance, it sounds like whoever said it was being facetious. A fuck-off answer to a dumb, unanswerable question. But unpack it a little and there’s beauty here. The point is that you keep going. As a writer, you try to build, contrast, colour, deepen, lighten, flip, twist, distort, invert or repeat-with-variation what’s come before. If the attempt is successful, you hold people’s attention and they will follow you down whatever rabbit hole you send them. You will keep going. Your reader will keep going. That’s writing.

My particular rabbit hole is, at one level, a straightforward coming-of-age story. I reckon most of us have a Jason Templar figure. Someone other who burst into your life at a particular moment, turned everything upside down in both good and bad ways, and then (spoiler alert) left you to pick up the pieces of your shattered assumptions about the world, life and living. Mark’s ambivalence towards this Jason guy, his journey from patronising snobbery to jealousy, ambivalence, guilt and finally recognition that maybe he’d got it wrong, got Jason wrong (and a few other things as well), but that maybe it’s not too late, maybe it’s never too late–this journey is the emotional centre of my novel and what gives the story its momentum.

Setting it around a youth club also gives us a particular lens. I was adamant that I didn’t want to locate my people in the familiar surroundings of a school or a university. ‘Folk’–the youth group of the book–is basically Byker Grove, for those of you who grew up in the UK and remember the TV show. There’s even a Gerry-type character I recall who I am quite sure I modelled my Gerry on, at least initially. I am a passionate believer that teenagers, especially, but actually all of us, need contained communal spaces where we can play and explore in a safe but not completely safe way.

I think it’s one of the reasons so many of us as adults are drawn to clubs and electronic music culture. The friendships and interactions that happen in these places are markedly different to the ones that happen in an office, a family or any other institution. You’re thrown together but you also choose to be together and there’s an element of everyone writing the rules as they go. Beyond whatever else goes on in these social, cultural and sexual laboratories, being an active part of them is itself massively liberating. If Folk is about anything, it’s about the liberation of seeing yourself as belonging to a bigger communal project which we might grandly call ‘society’.

That’s why I decided to include Margaret Thatcher’s famous denial of the existence of such a thing as ‘society’ in the epigraph. My book is sort of an answer to that.

At a time when we are arguably more atomised and isolated from one another than we have ever been, it feels right to revisit the legacy of the Thatcher government: the rampant individualism, sure, but also its manufactured culture wars (a few of them are referenced directly in FOLK) and the casual cruelty that feels horribly prescient to now. Today’s versions are in some ways a reboot, in other ways a continuation, and those undercurrents run through FOLK.

No coming-of-age story is complete without a killer soundtrack and FOLK’s will be familiar to many Velocity Press readers. Mark’s musical awakening doesn’t quite follow my own (having an older sibling I was exposed to more adventurous music quite early on, plus I’m a bit younger than Mark) but his initial hostility to what he derides as ‘Jason music’ corresponds to the reaction of so many middle-class indie kids hearing rave for the first time.

Of course, by 1994, most people who were part of the scene agree that the whole acid house second of summer of love moment was well and truly over. Yet in the wider culture, the revolution was just getting going, as evidenced by the last 30 years. Folk would be a very different book if Mark and his friends had come of age in 1989. That sense of being a bit late to the party adds to the bittersweet, provincial feel and reflects a feeling a lot of us of that generation describe–of being something of a lost generation: too young to identify as Gen X, yet not quite young enough to be a Millennial.

In 1995, aged 14, I went to Glastonbury for the first time. Back then, my mates and I were more into watching Pulp at the Pyramid stage (which was great by the way) than diving into the edgier parts of the festival, although we definitely bought some cakes from a dreadlocked hippy up at the Stone Circle and at one point I recall wandering around the site, stoned and thoroughly lost, with no idea where my friends were. Standard Glasto, obviously.

But what I remember the most about that year is the feeling that a parallel festival was taking place around me, one where guitars had been usurped by 303s and it wasn’t about getting to the stage early to bag a decent spot to see some headliner play a song you’d heard on the radio. Everywhere you went, every minute, 24 hours a day for all five days, you could hear a beat coming from somewhere. When you were walking around, especially during the twilight hours when the mood was shifting from day to night, unseen voices from the shadows were literally asking if you were ‘sorted for eez and whizz’. Jarvis Cocker wasn’t making it up. Something was going on.

FOLK is my attempt to capture those cadences of youth. The thrill of discovering things for the first time. The feeling that you, or at least someone you know, will change the world. The self-mythologising. The disappointments, but also the joy of shaking free from received norms and setting out into the dawning of a new day, falling and then bouncing back, as we become the people we become. As such, it’s a deeply personal story, if not an autobiographical one.

Fiction can give us a distance from topics that we may think we know inside out, helping us experience the familiar in new ways. It can also give an intimacy and urgency to stories that have been consumed and appropriated by the dominant culture. FOLK is a tribute to the power and courage of youth, however that looks, wherever you are, whatever the bpm. A piece of fan fiction for a world that’s gone but has left its traces everywhere you look.

I leave you with Mark’s final words from the book.

‘Did you know about this?’ I ask, but whatever his reply is, I never hear it, because at that moment the whole place erupts into cheers as the music kicks back in, and I realise suddenly that this isn’t about Merlin’s sculpture, or Jason’s exit, or the DJ, or any single link in the great chain of hands that conspired to make this moment happen, and that we, all of us, are no more and no less than a delicate balance of elements, moving through space, dancing our dance, the dance that never ceases to amaze: no ends, only transitions.