I'd stay up all night - reading Troilus and Criseyde."After graduating, Nicholson got a job as a sales assistant in Harrods. "I once sold Joan Collins a white leather settee," he says, perking up "Actually it wasn't white leather. But you feel it should have been." Selling sofas to starlets wasn't too demanding, then? "Furniture - it's a nice little number," Nicholson says, smiling.In Everything and More the hapless university graduate, however, is employed as a furniture porter - the lowest of the low. His colleagues are intent only on skiving, pilfering and sabotaging the smooth running of the shop "The porters were a wild and crazy bunch.
In Everything and More, for example, it's: what if someone found a way of living in a department store? I wanted to take the idea of a store and turn up the volume, turn up the colours, amplify it."Nicholson is a large, bespectacled man, the kind you expect to find beavering away in the stacks of a university library. "I'm interested in ordinary people in extraordinary situations rather than extraordinary people in ordinary situations Speculative is the word I'd probably go for. A composer shouts computer generated messages using the musical letters ABCDEFG ("'EGAD', he shouts. 'GEE! ACE! FAB!' A misty incomprehension settled over the audience.. 'DEAF?' he enquired of several in the front row 'DEAF? DEAF?.. DEAD?'") And Jenny Slade has no ordinary instrument. Tan coloured like soft flesh, Slade's guitar has "growths of hair bursting out in thick black tufts and.. blemishes that look...
disturbingly like nipples".Obsession, voyeurism, fetishism are staples in Nicholson's darkly comic novels. "I was Geoff Nicholson and The Flesh Guitars," says the writer. "Even as it was happening I laughed and thought it was a funny idea." That idea has found its way into Nicholson's new novel Flesh Guitar which includes cameo appearances from Frank Zappa, Robert Johnson and Kurt Cobain. Its heroine - Jenny Slade - is part Suzi Quatro, part Jim Hendrix. She calls her band The Flesh Guitars and cites her influences as Willa Cather, Margaret of Anjou and Pamela Des Barres. Nicholson brought us consumerism and terrorism in Everything and More, his surreal novel about a department store, "shrimping" (sucking toes) and stilettoes in the best-selling Footsucker (now to be made into a film) and in Bleeding London a businessman determined to walk all the streets in the A-Z.In Flesh Guitar we plug in to a world where guitar solos consist of pouring motor oil down the guitar neck, exploding fireworks between the strings or attaching a dog's tail to the guitar's whammy bar to see what happens. City Museum and Mappin Art Gallery, Weston Park, Sheffield S10 2TP (0114 276 8588), until 22 February.
