Dave Spence Interview Published on: 08, Oct 2024

In the ‘70s and ‘80s I grew up in Sale, a leafy suburb six miles to the south of Manchester city centre; privet hedges, striped lawns. My family lived opposite the entrance to Walton Park, my childhood playground.

I work in advertising as a creative director, designer and copywriter. Marketing is a fickle world: convincing people to buy stuff they don’t need. One weekend my fiancee Angie and I were in the supermarket when I spotted an interesting new condiment: ‘Barry Norman’s Pickled Onions’! Barry Norman was famous for being a movie film critic on the TV in the UK at the time, so the fact he was marketing such an odd provision immediately caught our interest and we had to buy a jar for a laugh! The pickles lived up to our expectation so I immediately went on Facebook to ‘like’ my preferred pick of pickles but sadly no such page existed. So, having quaffed a few glasses of wine whilst chomping I created a fan page for Barry Norman’s Pickled Onions! For the next few weeks I added images, videos, jokes... Anything remotely connected to pickled onions; the page started to grow building quite a cult following (hundreds as I recall). Always on the lookout for relevant content, next time I was in Sainsburys I saw a point of sale showcard advertising a pickled onion competition! Huge UK conglomerate ‘Garners’ were looking for ‘the Nation’s biggest pickled onion fan’ and the prize was a trip to the pickled onion hotel in Mexico! We thought this was hilarious and had to enter. Time went by and we soon forgot about the competition until returning from a weekend in London, I was updating Barry’s fan page on the train which reminded Angie to look up the Garners competition deadline. Sadly the deadline was just one day away! I sent Garners’ marketing department a pleading email, asking if I could have an extention to the deadline – which they very kindly agreed to and so, over the next couple of nights I wrote my sweet and sour application. A few weeks later I received a phone call from Garners’ PR company telling me I had won the competititon! It was at this point Angie said I have a talent for writing and ought to write my memoires, having regaled her with many anecdotes. Barry’s PR company contacted me again, asking if they could get involved with the Facebook page. I had done all I could with it so I gladly gave it up to them, with one provision (sic)... I asked for a signed jar of Barry’s pickles!

I took my fiancee Angie. We managed to wangle a night’s hotel in Cancun on arrival as well as a week’s car hire. We drove 200 miles down the Yucatan and had a wonderful time visiting the Mayan citys of Uxmal and Chichen Itza then (not part of the prize) drove to a 5 star hotel I paid for myself on the Mexican Riviera Caribbean Coast.

The PR company arranged for some publicity photos at the Belmore Hotel in Sale. Because I’d mentioned in my entry that Angie and I met over a wedding buffet (pickled onions on the spread, obvs.) and were now engaged, they wanted to create a wedding cake made from pickled onions! They used 3 polystyrene tiers and covered them in pickled onions on cocktail sticks. The hotel stank!

That rush of feel-good enporphins, squirming at someone else’s trials and tribulations as you’re taken on a rollercoaster ride, hoping for true love to prevail seemingly against all odds.

The eighties was the best decade for music, movies, fashion, technology and to be a teenager. I was so shy around girls. To re-live those painfully naive, excrutiatingly embarrassing and hilariously awkward first crush encounters was a challenge I embraced honestly and whole-heartedly. Combining heartwarming romance with heartbreaking tragedy, my reader gets to experience a plethora of emotions. Willing-on my protagonist, seventeen year old Nick Hopper to make new friends in his attempt to become popular through tears and laughter. Although Nick and his friends make many questionable decisions I hope my reader empathises with them and grows to love them.

I started writing Gate-Crashers first person, but found this far too emotionally challenging, given that the storyline is based on my own real life experiences. Like my protagonist Nick, I met the girl of my dreams the day my father died and I didn’t reveal my tragic news until the end of the night. It is not a cliche to say writing this novel was cathartic: Angie would come home from work and I’d be in tears or buzzing with euphoria. I loved reliving this unique yet John Hughes-esque ‘unpopular-boy meets popular-girl’ emotional journey. I treated Nick’s father’s mental health with the utmost respect and knew Nick’s stupid friends were the ocassional antidote to the tragic backbone of the story.

My workload as a creative director goes seasonably quiet over Christmas and during the Summer. It is during this time I channel my creativity and focus on writing my memoires, revisiting past experiences and anecdotes as Nick.

Social media! I have a Facebook page where I have posted the videos to every song mentioned in Gate-Crashers and used a lot of old photographs to recapture moments. I also regularly update Instagram, Twitter/X, Threads and TikTok (all @‌DaveSpenceAuthor). I like to post reviews and AllAuthor keep these pages moving.

My (Nick’s) story continues, I recently finished writing the sequel to Gate-Crashers and readers will be delighted to know all the characters are back. I write about all of my friends’ experience of the dating game, your reader wil be intrigued to see what happened next.

I write truthfully, from the heart, my characters are experiencing many emotions for the first time. Set nearly 40 years ago, I know what will happen to each person and I don’t write what I think ought to happen, I write what actually happened, believe it or not!

My mother was a professional writer, working in public relations, writing press releases. She was nothing like Nick’s mother, she was very loving and supportive. My number one fan is my fianceé Angie.

As you now know, I am officially the UK’s reigning and undisputed ‘biggest pickled onion fan!’ The competition has never been run again since 2012.

Know your characters and be true to them. Don’t follow a formula - the romance happens when it happens, not always when you expect.

Gate-Crashers is available to purchase via Amazon, The Book Depository, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, WH Smith etc. as well as all major online retailers worldwide. I would love it to be available in more book shops... Shakespeare and Company in Paris have a signed copy! Closer to home, local independent bookshop ‘B For Butterfly’ in Sale stocks Gate-Crashers and I pop in regularly to sign copies. AllAuthor keeps my social media fresh and hosts an audience of thousands of like-minded writers and readers.