Black Roses

"I find this a very difficult book to talk about. It’s about the appalling murder of Sophie Lancaster in 2007. Her murder brings many of the issues that we have been talking about right up to date, in the most terrible way. It raises questions of identity, self-expression, fashion, and personal style—how you dress, and how you have your hair. Dick Hebdige has written about the tribal qualities that subcultures have had in the past. We might think of the Mods and Rockers fighting at Brighton sea-front, for example. But since then, we haven’t often thought of youth culture as being a matter of life and death. Certainly, Sophie Lancaster can be described as someone who dressed as a Goth. Indeed, this is how the Sophie Lancaster Foundation—which is a very important charity—describe her. Yet journalists such as Catherine Smith resist the attempt to categorize her entirely in these terms. It’s more a sense of one’s individualism being under threat. In this case, the threat came not from where one might have imagined—from faceless institutions of power—but from a gang of youths in a Lancashire town. When one’s a teenager, one plays with aspects of self-presentation and rebellion, and questions difference and otherness through style. Many people continue to do so much later on in life. To have this play met with lethal violence is shocking. Simon Armitage’s poetry sequence Black Roses is heart-rending. In these poems, he comes close to articulating the anguish that so many people felt about this dreadful event. As a poet he helped to give voice to what many of us have found impossible express."