Hey there, O reader of the blog.

A quick but cool update to tell you that two more of my books are now FREE for Amazon's Kindle Unlimited readers! These books are as follows:

AUTO REWIND
My disturbing retro-thriller, featuring Doctor Who, the Atari 2600 console and a nail gun. A child of the 80s takes ever more extreme steps to protect his family. 

TAKEN OVER BY SOMETHING EVIL FROM THE TV SET...
A collection of my horror journalism including essays on video nasties and John Carpenter's The Thing, plus interviews with Rob Zombie, Sean S Cunningham and horror FX legend Tom Savini.

You can find handy Amazon links on my site pages for Auto Rewind and Taken Over By Something Evil...

Hope you enjoy! Please leave a review for these books if you enjoy them, because trust me, it really helps an author like me out. 

What follows is the entire introduction to my non-fiction book From The Front Lines Of Rock.

“YOU LOVE it you slaaaaags!”

The Cult’s Ian Astbury slams his foot on the accelerator pedal.

I’m on the back seat of this car which Astbury is driving so enthusiastically around the Hollywood Hills at night.  Now, I’m sure he’s completely and utterly sober at this point, but the man’s fast and furious driving alone makes you think that this is a very foolish place for me to be.  It’s exciting, though.

Whoosh!  We turn another corner, narrowly missing a tree and hitting a wheelie bin, which goes flying.

Also in the vehicle are a record company press officer, an MTV producer and an unidentified man, right beside me, who is high on magic mushrooms and panicking, his eyes like saucers.  “Man,” he pants, grabbing my leg, “I can’t go to jail again!”

This is circa 1997. And even as I grip my seat, I think how deeply bizarre the situation feels. Only 10 years ago, I was a teenage rock fan, buying The Cult’s singles Lil Devil and Wild Flower on seven-inch vinyl. And here I am in Hollywood, quite possibly about to be killed by their frontman.
 
I never wanted to be a journalist, rock or otherwise. I mean, it was never a childhood dream. No, the childhood dream was telling stories for a living.  A great deal of my young life in Lowestoft, Suffolk consisted of writing fiction, drawing comic strips and reading Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books. I didn’t get into rock music until I was well into my teens.

Europe’s classic single The Final Countdown was the one that hooked me in. Say what you will about that parping gem, but it sucked in a whole new generation of rock fans. It was a gateway drug to the hard stuff. After that, I graduated to Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet album, then to the works of Dio, followed by Metallica, right up to the churning madness of Slayer’s mighty 1986 masterpiece Reign In Blood, which initially just sounded like white noise. I quickly became obsessed with heavy metal, exploring the entirety of its broad church.

I was especially taken with the more extreme end of the spectrum: the subgenres known as thrash metal (primarily fixated on speed and crunchy guitars) and death metal (fixated on morbidity, with a charnel house sound to match, plus glottal, growly vocals.)

One day, in the pages of UK rock weekly Kerrang!, I saw an advert for a new vacancy in the freelancing writing department. Kerrang! had realised they needed a new specialist in thrash and death metal – someone who actually understood that stuff. Over the last couple of years, as those genres gained strength in the marketplace, the magazine’s reviewers had often treated the bands with contempt, much to the dismay of fans who didn’t want to see their favourites dismissed in a ‘comedy’ fashion by snooty journos. Not all of Kerrang!’s writers looked down on thrash – the likes of Xavier Russell and Paul Miller were proper fans – but it certainly happened on a regular basis at that time.

I was still in high school and so hadn’t yet reached the crossroads where I felt any pressure to find a job. Nevertheless, I wanted this one. So I sent a couple of writing samples, as requested, along with an arrogant letter. This letter told editor Geoff Barton that he did indeed need me on board, because none of the other writers knew anything about thrash and death metal.

Obviously, this approach could have backfired, but it didn’t. I was blown away to get a call from reviews editor Alison Joy a few days later, who said she was going to send me a couple of records to review.

“What...,” I stuttered, suddenly not quite so cocksure, “so these reviews will be in the magazine?”

“Yeah!” said the jovial northern typhoon. “We don’t hang around at Kerrang!, matey boy!”

Indeed they didn’t. Within days I was listening to my first two albums for review – a Peel Sessions mini-LP by Birmingham’s rising Bolt Thrower and an album by the super-obscure Mallet-Head, who were destined to split a few years later – and excitedly typing out my verdict. Yes, typing, on an electronic typewriter. I also sent these reviews through the post in physical form. Later, I would graduate to a more hi-tech method.

You know what that new method was?

Faxing. The stuff of dreams.
 
In 1989, I did my first interview for Kerrang! It was a phoner with Morbid Angel, a band I really loved at the time and retain a real fondness for. I’m pretty sure I kept singer/bassist David Vincent and guitarist Trey Azagthoth on that conference call for way longer than the average interview should last. I had no experience at this game, and so no real sense of how many quotes I needed to fulfil the word count. So I just asked everything. Luckily, Morbid Angel were very talkative, being passionate about their craft. They were great first interviewees.

That same year, I made my first journalistic trip abroad, to Copenhagen for Sepultura.  The Brazilian metallers were very much on the rise with their brilliant Beneath The Remains album and I was blown away to get to write about them. My inexperience showed through, though, when my tape recorder didn’t work for some reason – maybe I even forgot batteries – and I had to borrow one off the boys’ tour manager and fellow journo Borivoj Krgin, who went on to spearhead the rock news site Blabbermouth.

1990 saw my first US trip. It was a bumper affair, covering the bands Nocturnus, Carcass, Massacre and Morbid Angel, because Earache Records wanted to make sure they got the most out of their airfare costs (there were no paid-for hotels, so photographer David Willis and I were sleeping on band’s sofas). Hilariously, I was terrified on the first night in Tampa, Florida, having taken Willis’ joke about drive-by shootings seriously. There’s a home video of that first night, in a restaurant, where I look like a rabbit in a headlights, as if I’m expecting Uzi-toting raiders to burst in at any second. 

From that jaunt onwards, the interviews and trips multiplied. In 1993, I moved from Lowestoft to a flat in London’s Queen Park, only slightly unnerved when Alison Joy asked what had made me decide to move (uh... writing more stuff for Kerrang!?)

I was gaining experience, but still pretty green. Whenever I scored an interview that dragged me out of my extreme metal comfort zone, I would feel nervous, but do my best to step up to the challenge. 

I found myself writing cover stories on more mainstream acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Black Crowes. By the mid-90s I was hopping back and forth across the Atlantic every couple of weeks. The photographer and I would enjoy several drinks on the plane, followed by plenty more when we arrived. After a while, travelling around, staying in hotels and visiting nice restaurants and bars without paying for anything, life became slightly unreal – a big, enticing bubble of carefree fun.

The photographer and I would almost always be accompanied by a record company PR, whose credit card would receive a bashing throughout each trip. We didn’t have to work much out for ourselves – airport and hotel check-in desks would be handled by the PR, as we handed over our passports. I suppose I got a glimpse of what it must be like for a rock star, being pretty much permanently ensconced in that lifestyle, with all the fiddly real-life stuff conveniently taken care of.

I used to love interviewing people. The freedom of it! Sometimes, you found yourself sitting in front of a proper rock icon, with your brain screaming, You can ask them anything you want! Do it! I would always try and push the envelope just a little, by hitting them with a surprising question. Something which had never been asked before and might shake them out of the stupor sometimes induced by multiple interviews.

The selection process for this book has been based on two factors. I wanted the pieces in From The Front Lines Of Rock to concern bands most people would have heard of, but I also wanted to represent some of my favourite interviews. So the features gathered here fulfil one or both of those requirements. Maybe one day, if the demand is there, I’ll release a follow-up, perhaps gathering my interview work in the extreme metal department.  For now, in these pages, it’s the bigger-sellers, who often also have the biggest personalities.

This book has taken five years to assemble, on and off. I’ve written footnotes during each feature – sometimes in ‘real time’, as I re-read the piece for the first time in aeons – and then an afterword for each. It’s been interesting to look back and not only remind myself of things I said and did, but also consider how differently I might do things now. Some of this stuff makes me cringe, frankly, but I’ve also really enjoyed most of it.

As tempting as it sometimes was to edit these interviews, I’ve left them as they were upon publication, with the odd exception of some formatting. I couldn’t bring myself to leave titles surrounded by quotation marks. I’ve also removed the asterisks from the swearing, because we’re all adults here and we don’t need protecting.

Because an interview is only as good as its subject, I don’t think it’s immodest of me to say that there are some real crackers here. The Manic Street Preachers in Japan, back when Richey Edwards was in the band. A feisty two-part Pantera interview in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Jon Bon Jovi talking about drugs, the mafia and money in Los Angeles.  Getting arrested by armed guards at the Vatican with Cradle Of Filth. All particularly great fun.

I very much hope you enjoy From The Front Lines Of Rock, whether it’s loud nostalgia you crave, or are leafing back through history as a curious newcomer with a My Chemical Romance tattoo on your forehead. Maybe you’ve read my 2016 novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks and wonder what else I used to write. Whatever the reason: thanks!

Oh, and that ridiculous motor experience with Ian Astbury? Eventually, we came to an abrupt halt, having bumped into a wall – thankfully not too hard. The mushroom-paranoia guy claimed we’d hit the LA sheriff's house. I think this was implausible, to be honest, but would like to think it true. 

Yes, getting into a car with a ludicrous but loveable rock star was a really stupid thing to do. But then rock ‘n’ roll is so often stupid, and I’m glad I had a taste of that bewitching foolishness before moving on to slightly safer pastures in the worlds of prose, film and TV. The whole experience would also help me write a convincing journalist in the shape of Jack Sparks.

A quick word on how Kindle footnotes operate, in case you’ve never encountered them before: tap each number to be taken to the corresponding footnote at the end of the book, then tap the number again to be magically whizzed back to where you were in the text. 

Right, then. Let’s go. Crank your eyeballs up to 11...

Check out From The Front Lines Of Rock, you li'l devil. And please share your favourite Kerrang! memories down in comments right here!

Auto Rewind is my e-book novelette published in 2016.

What's a novelette, you may conceivably ask? It's a story with a word count higher than a short story, but lower than a novel or a novella.

If I had to nominate one of my short-form fiction works as having been somewhat overlooked (or the more positive spin, my best-kept secret!), it would be Auto Rewind. But then, it's probably odder and harder to categorise than, say, Beast In The Basement (twisty thriller) or A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home (ghost story). 

Auto Rewind is also probably even harder to discuss openly than the notoriously tricky Beast In The Basement, without committing major spoiler sins. 

Suffice to say, Auto Rewind is about a child of the '80s who takes ever more extreme measures to protect his family's lifestyle.

I still really like this book and believe it to be quite emotionally powerful by the end.

It also features Doctor Who VHS, a nail-gun and a man being beaten to death with an Atari 2600 video game console. Pretty retro. 

Cover note: the one on the right above is the finished cover, while the one on the left is an alternate version which was ultimately discounted because I really liked the white purity of the design. Actually, I wonder if it might look too bright and 'un-horror' for some folk? That would certainly be ironic, seeing as it might be my most violent book, second only to The Last Days Of Jack Sparks.  

If you're solely into the scary supernatural elements of my novels The Last Days Of Jack Sparks and Ghoster (thank you!), then the grittier nature of Auto Rewind may not quite be for you. But if you like the sound of a punchy, twisty, freaky and ultimately melancholy tale, then I'd really appreciate you giving this one a shot. In some ways, it might be my most personal book.  Step this way and take a look. 

Have you already experienced Auto Rewind? Let me know how you liked it in comments here. Thanks!

An earlier version of this piece was first read last month by subscribers to my newsletter The Necronoppicon, which brings my readers updates at the end of each month. Oh, and you get a free book when you sign up!

Hello! Here are some things I've learned about how the YouTube algorithm works, during my time as a creator there.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. Creators should approach it accordingly.

The more niche a video, the better the algorithm likes it, so it can show your videos to people likely to be interested. YouTube will like you more if each video is about one thing and one thing only, because this makes searchable keywords easier too.  A title like How To Wrangle Geese is stronger, SEO-wise, than How To Wrangle Geese AND Make Them Sleep. (Do geese sleep? They must, surely.)

An ideal video title has a searchable keyword in its first half, perhaps then followed by an enticing non-searchable phrase if you have the stomach for that. For example: How To Wrangle Geese - EVERYTHING You Need To Know!

The algorithm looks at the title (the first half especially), then at your video description (bonus marks if the main keyword in your title, i.e. How To Wrangle Geese, is repeated here.) Then it looks at your video tags, where the main keyword should be repeated once again, among various other related keywords.

As soon as YouTube feels confident that your video is about something, it shows your video to potentially interested parties. If the click-through rate (the percentage of people who click your video thumbnail - so make it good!), watch time (percentage of video viewed before viewers switch to a cat video instead) and viewer engagement (likes and comments) are decent, it will show the video to a bigger bunch of people, and so on until virality ensues. Hopefully.

So, how are we supposed to know how to optimise our YouTube videos, to maximise views and watch time? I strongly recommend that creators use a desktop browser app called TubeBuddy - and not just because I can offer you a 20% discount.

Using TubeBuddy, you can work out what the best keyword(s) will be for any given video. Using the Keyword Explorer tool (see interface below), you type in a potential keyword phrase and TubeBuddy gives you a score out of 100, based on several factors, such as how many people search YouTube for that keyword and how much competition there is. You can do this in the free version, but a subscription gives you an added advantage, because the result is 'weighted' to your channel, i.e. specific to your own channel's strengths.

There's a free version of TubeBuddy that you can check out and see how you like it. If you choose to join me in subscribing, be sure to use my special coupon code ARNOPPBUDDY for a huge 20 PER CENT off! Furthermore, TubeBuddy offers a special Rising Star discount to YouTubers whose channels have fewer than 1000 subscribers. 

Full disclosure: I'm a TubeBuddy affiliate, and so if you sign up using my link, then decide to subscribe, I receive a commission at absolutely no extra cost to you.

Lastly, look out for my new goose-wrangling channel, coming soon! *

My newsletter subscribers read this article first, getting it straight to their inboxes. Consider joining them.

* Lies, obviously.

Where is my mind?
 
See, I don’t know about you, but I feel like I used to be able to focus on one thing for hours on end, without my thoughts snaking off to other stuff.

Okay, maybe not hours on end, but at least for ten goddamn minutes.

One preoccupation shared by my novels Ghoster and The Last Days Of Jack Sparks is this: what has the internet done to our brains? I love the online world and yet I also fear its power. I fear its ability to warp, reshape or downright damage our puny human grey matter. I fear its potential to make dopamine slaves of us all.

During the mid-to-late Nineties, I was living in London and had a fun Saturday routine. This routine, as you may be able to tell, probably developed when I was ‘in-between girlfriends’.

I would get on the tube to East Ham, then head to the marvellous Who Shop there. I would buy a couple of back issues of Doctor Who Magazine, and possibly some other stuff, usually including a VHS tape, then head off to some café or other for lunch. And over lunch, I would read those magazines from cover to cover, with few or no distractions going on in my head.

Happily, The Who Shop still exists! I must return, for a heady dose of nostalgia. This week, though, I did recreate some of my old routine. It wasn’t a Saturday and I wasn’t in East Ham, but I am ‘between girlfriends’, so at least something remained constant. While visiting Brighton’s wonderful indoor retro market Snooper’s Paradise, I found a whole load of back issues of Doctor Who Magazine for £1 each. And I thought, “Ah, let’s try the whole Who Shop/lunch thing of yesteryear! How many issues will I need for lunch?”

Seeing as DWM was a slimmer mag back then, I bought two, picking issues with Cybermen on the cover, because I love Cybermen. Issues 97 and 98, for the curious. Then I headed a few doors along to the lovely vegetarian café Wai Kika Moo Kau, ordered an all-day breakfast and settled down to read Issue 97.

Here a timeline of how that went:

PAGE 3
This is the Contents page. I actually switch off my phone. Oh yes indeed, that’s how seriously I’m taking this leap back through time. I also manage to resist the ingrained urge to press my forefinger down on the page to click where it says Turn To Page 26. So far, so good.

P4-5
Letters page. One letter, from Jeffrey in North Carolina, is all about the evolution of the Cybermen and mentions their home planets Mondas and Telos. My brain pipes up with, “Hey, those look a bit like Monday and Tuesday, don’t they? Maybe there’s a days-of-the-week joke in that – ooh, maybe one you could tell on Twitter dot com!” So I stop reading and mentally go to work on the gag, while absent-mindedly sipping my tea. And now I’m switching my phone back on. I’m heading over to Twitter to post the joke. Pray for me.

P6-13
Truth be told, these pages aren’t incredibly gripping, but in any case I’d hardly know, because I’m switching back to Twitter to (a) see if anyone found the Hilarious Cybermen Planet Joke hilarious; and (b) adding a second pun-based joke-tweet to the mix, just for good measure. Sweet Jesus. ”BLOCKED AND REPORTED,” my fellow DWM writer Benjamin Cook tweets at me, and he’s almost certainly within his rights.

P14
This is the On Target page, all about the Target Books range. Cor, nice. I’m into this. As I start to read, I realise I should switch my phone off and keep it off. However, my brunch hasn’t arrived yet and I want to take a photo of it. I have no photos of any of the ‘Who Shop lunches’ I ate in the mid-to-late Nineties and yet this photo inexplicably feels important. So the phone stays on.

P16-17
I literally miss an entire piece about the making of Revenge Of The Cybermen, because now I’m thinking about this piece I could write for this newsletter. “Ah yes,” I muse, “I could turn my lack of focus into the main article for this Sunday’s newsletter!” This does, at least, mean that I’m no longer concerned about what to write for the newsletter, but once again it also means I’m not reading this damn magazine properly.

P20-23
A Q&A with Colin Baker. Brunch arrives and so I take the photo for this piece that my brain is now somewhat preoccupied with dreaming up. Suddenly I’m aware that I should try and remember the process of reading the magazine and the distractions that struck me. So instead of simply enjoying my lunch and reading a magazine, I’m now the star of my own documentary. A Tinder notification certainly does nothing to improve my focus.

P26-29
An interview with Who director Michael Briant. I’m annoyed with myself by this point, and so turn the phone off again. Finally, I am eating a nice lunch while reading a magazine. Why does this somehow feel like an achievement? I still find it hard to fully focus, though, because I’ve had quite a testing week on a personal level. Twenty years ago, it’s arguable that I probably had fewer distracting issues to think about and also less work stuff, because I was ‘just’ a rock journalist. Oh, for those simpler days. Still, I do read this Briant interview in full and to the end. It’s a good one, because the man helmed great stories like Robots Of Death.

P35-38
Another relatively in-depth piece about whether Doctor Who is unsuitable for children. Right up my alley! And I do read this… while being slightly distracted by the time, because I need to be back home working in about half an hour.

And that’s the end of the magazine. Turns out I didn’t need two issues after all, thanks to all the online dicking around. So I switch the phone back on, obviously, and cycle through the loop of email, text, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and, yes, Tinder, before paying my bill and heading home.

Yeah, that was pretty far removed from my simple experience of the mid-to-late Nineties, back when I had a phone that may not even have been capable of text messages! Back in those days, the odd phone call might have interrupted my reading, but that would have been about it.

So, here’s the real question. Which version of the ‘Who Shop magazine café’ experience was better? I feel like I enjoyed it more back then… but did I really? As Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner once said, the memory cheats. Perhaps I felt lonely in that café in 1997. Disconnected from the world. While I do have a memory of overall contentment, I can’t remember for sure.

Social media certainly means never having to be alone – and there is a real, undeniable pleasure in being able to share what you’re doing with others, whether in a jokey tweet or an article for a newsletter. But there should also be pleasure in simply doing stuff for yourself, by yourself, only for yourself. If a tree falls in the forest… do you really have to tweet a picture or video of that event, in order to fully appreciate it? Me, I’d probably be happy to have not been crushed by a falling tree… but you can bet I’d probably write about the experience here, or perhaps make a YouTube video about the whole affair on a new channel called Jason Arnopp’s Terrifying Near-Death Experiences.

My novels may come across as damning indictments of social media and the online world in general, but really they’re explorations. Scary question marks. Cries for help, even.

Where are we going with all this hyper-connectivity – and wherever that place may be, will it be better than the place we came from?

Are we happier now? If not, then how exactly do we feel these days?

Where are our minds?

My novel Ghoster, which deals with some of these thoughts in a scary fictional way, is out now. 

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