{"id":77,"date":"2015-02-10T12:01:14","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T12:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/?page_id=77"},"modified":"2015-03-09T18:48:47","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T18:48:47","slug":"knight-crew","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/knight-crew\/","title":{"rendered":"Knight Crew"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"knightcrew500\"
\nPaperback: 272 pages
\nPublisher: CBEditions
\nYear: 2009
\nISBN: 978-0956107329<\/p>\n

\"CBEditions\"<\/a>
\nKnight Crew<\/em> is published by the extraordinary, award-winning and TINY independent press \u2013 CBeditions<\/span><\/a>. If you would like to buy a copy, please support them by purchasing a copy here<\/a>.<\/div>\n

\n

A<\/span>fter a gang feud claims its first life, violence escalates. But then the prophetic words of a strange old baglady start to hit home, and Art and the girl he loves have one chance to make good, one chance to bring honour and peace to a murderous world.<\/p>\n

Fierce tender and unflinching, Knight Crew breathes the passions of ancient legend into a contemporary wasteland \u2013 passions that can create or destroy.<\/p>\n

\n
A story for this generation\u2026written with love, passion and intelligence.<\/em>
\nBenjamin Zephaniah<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Y<\/span>oung people get a very bad press these days. According to the newspapers, there are a lot of scary kids out there \u2013 the hoodies, the gangs, the knife carriers. These people are evil, unredeemable. I began to wonder about that. And I wondered about the nature of goodness itself and that bumped into thoughts about modern-day \u2018respec\u2019 versus old-fashioned \u2018honour\u2019, and then the legend of King Arthur started to whisper in my ear. I took a tour to the Bemerton Estate behind the Holloway Road in London. I met a boy \u2013 let\u2019s call him Lee \u2013 who told me about his life. His father was a \u2018puff-head\u2019 who abandoned the family when Lee was still a toddler. His mother had had a succession of different men, some of whom had abused Lee. He stopped attending school, starting TWOCing, getting into fights. At 15 he was thrown out of home. Pretty soon after that he was arrested, and you can probably guess the rest. I asked Lee, if I could wave a magic wand and give him one wish, what would he ask for? In my prejudice I thought he\u2019d ask for something material \u2013 a fast car maybe; what he actually said was \u2018to be away from here \u2013 give me some calm\u2019. Then I asked him what qualities, in his view, made a man. \u2018That he stays with his woman,\u2019 Lee replied instantly. And what makes a woman? \"talisman_knife\"\u2018The same, innit, she stays with her man\u2019. Simple really. Stability, a place to lay your head, to breathe. And I began to think, then, that a lost soul really isn\u2019t and that what if there was a boy, let\u2019s call him Art, from a very difficult background who nevertheless contained the seed of goodness and who could shape something new and beautiful from the rage of the estates and people around him. And so Knight Crew began.<\/p>\n

This is the talisman I had on my desk for Knight Crew. Actually I didn\u2019t have it on my desk, I kept it in a drawer because it was so scary. The long indentation is called \u2018the blood gutter\u2019.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Knight Crew was staged as an opera at Glyndebourne<\/a> (see also Stage\/Film<\/a>) with a cast of young adults (libretto by Nicky Singer, music by Julian Philips) \u2013 Glyndebourne\u2019s first ever commission from a teen novel. The making of the opera was documented by the BBC in a three part series \u2013 ‘Gareth Malone Goes to Glyndebourne’.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paperback: 272 pages Publisher: CBEditions Year: 2009 ISBN: 978-0956107329 Knight Crew is published by the extraordinary, award-winning and TINY independent press \u2013 CBeditions. If you would like to buy a copy, please support them by purchasing a copy here. After a gang feud claims its first life, violence escalates. But then the prophetic words of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"fullwidthnoheader.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-77","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry","6":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P5JE8T-1f","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":638,"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77\/revisions\/638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickysinger.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}