James Moffat

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James Moffat

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Moffat used the pen name "Richard Allen".
His book "Suedehead" is suggested as an inspiration:

Len: "For starters, surely 'Suedehead' has something to do with Richard Allen's pre-punk seminal trash novel of the same name? Yet there's no mention of suedehead(s) in the lyrics?"

M: "No, I'd noticed that. Does the song have anything to do with the title? Well, I did happen to read the book when it came out and I was quite interested in the whole Richard Allen cult. But really I just like the word 'suedehead'."

Len: "So it's not even based on an episode from Suedehead?"

M: "No, not really."

Len: "And it's not about anyone in particular?"

M: "Yes, it is, but I'd rather not give any addresses and phone numbers at this stage."

Excerpt from the Len Brown Morrissey interview in NME (February, 1988)

Wikipedia Information

James Moffat (27 January 1922 – 8 November 1993) was a Canadian-born British writer who wrote at least 290 novels in several genres under at least 45 pseudonyms".Moffat produced many pulp novels for the United Kingdom publishing house New English Library during the 1970s. Moffat's pen names included Richard Allen, Etienne Aubin (The Terror of the Seven Crypts) and Trudi Maxwell (Diary of A Female Wrestler). Moffat's pulp novels mostly focused on youth subcultures of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as skinheads, hippies and bikers. In particular Moffat wrote a series of popular and commercially successful books featuring what came to be known as his most famous protagonist, the skinhead antihero Joe Hawkins. Moffat often expressed admiration for his subject matter and commented on social issues, mostly from a right-wing perspective. The collected works of Richard Allen were reissued in a six-volume set by ST Publishing in the 1990s. A BBC TV documentary about his life, Skinhead Farewell, aired in 1996. Mark Sargeant wrote a feature in Scootering Magazine titled The Richard Allen Legacy. An interview titled The Return of Joe Hawkins with publisher George Marshall was in issue seven of Skinhead Times (1992). Under his own name Moffat wrote at least two science fiction novels: The Sleeping Bomb (New English Library, 1970; US edition 1973, The Cambri Plot) and a Queen Kong (1977) a movie tie-in to the low-budget 1976 movie of that name.