Grant’s story begins properly in January
1995 while he’s sitting on the side of stage next to Billy Duffy’s guitar tech
as Ian Astbury and the rest of The Cult shake their collective money-makers in
front of 40,000 people on a hot day in Sydney, Australia. In the midst of a distinguished
six year stint on the road that included meeting Jeff Buckley and getting
stoned with Evan Dando on a rooftop in Christchurch he would come to realise
that you can do pretty much whatever you want with your life if you’re prepared
to put in the hard yards. On that summer’s day long ago along with Ian Astbury
and Billy Duffy there was also Mark Lanegan, Al Jourgensen and Bobby Gillespie
on hand to inspire Grant with their free-spirited and wholehearted approach to
life. You can read whatever you want into that. We all know what those guys are
about.
Jump forward fifteen years and for
his sins Grant finds himself living in Belfast, Northern Ireland. We can only
assume that his sins were extremely serious and that hell was never going to be
good enough for him. The sudden death of a dear friend back in New Zealand brought
about the realisation that life can end any time it feels like it and that the
time to do what you really want to do with your life is now. It’s always been now
but in this painful instance the word hit home with a new and pressing urgency.
So it was finally time to stop fucking around and write that book that he’d
always wanted to write.
So now we jump forward one more
time to the here and now and not only is Grant living in Iceland - the land of the
midnight sun, 24 hour party elves and cartons of milk covered in magic mushroom
eating Yule Lads - but he’s put his head down, done the hard yards and
published a novel and a novella. ‘On A Small Island’ and ‘The Mistake’ have
made quite a name for themselves in the world of Iceland Noir and he’s just about
to publish his third book ‘A Place To Bury Strangers’ with Fahrenheit Press.
It’s beginning to look a lot like he was right all along.
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