Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Teddie Dahlin: Writing isn’t about punctuation and how you lyric the text. It’s about the story you’re trying to sell. So never ever think that you’re less than just because you can’t string a sentence. There’s always somebody who can help you. Your story, that’s the important thing.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Teddie Dahlin, was born in Norway and graduated from business school in Gothenburg, Sweden with a degree in international marketing and economics. She’s worked as a freelance music journalist for several magazines in the uk, most notably Viva La Rock, and she’s written five published books.

In 2012, after a bad experience with a UK publisher, Teddie established New Haven Publishing to put out her book, A Vicious Love story, remembering the real Sid Vicious, which is her account of being the 16-year-old translator for the Sex Pistols during a leg of their 1977 Scandinavian tour. It was New Haven’s first book.

A Vicious Love Story takes us through Teddie’s unique encounter with Sid Vicious and The Sex Pistols, including a fascinating cast of characters surrounding the band such as Neon Leon, Eileen Polk, Peter Gravel, Kenny Gordon, and Howie Pyro. I’ve read A Vicious Love Story and can tell you I was thoroughly engrossed by Teddie’s description of what it was like for her at such a young age to be tossed into the middle of a fairly wild scene with such dynamic punk rockers, especially as she became quite close to Sid Vicious.

Since 2012, new Haven Publishing has grown substantially, now representing 200 authors with a catalog of 250 books that are heavily anchored in the music and entertainment industry. New Haven also has several imprints, Phoenix Press Kids, Viking Press comics, Portland Press novels, and in the United States New Haven Publishing US.

For the record, Teddie and I have known one another for several years, as I’ve had the privilege of interviewing numerous New Haven Publishing authors, including Tim Quinn, Jimmy Ryan, John Kremer, and the one and only Susie Quatro. To hear those episodes, please check them out at storybeat.net. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s a great pleasure for me to welcome the author and publisher Teddie Dahlin to StoryBeat today.

Teddie, thanks so much for joining me.

Teddie Dahlin: Hi.

Steve Cuden: It’s great to have you on board. Let’s go back in time a little bit. Teddie, how old were you when you first fell in love with writing and writers and books?

Teddie Dahlin: Very young. I was very young. I started reading at a very, uh, early age, like Charlotte’s Web, and I remember getting immersed in the war of the worlds and like sitting for a whole week smelling sweaty, just trying to get through the book.

So I’ve always been a reader, but it isn’t until I got a little bit older that I started writing.

Steve Cuden: Hmm. How old were you when you started to write?

Teddie Dahlin: The thing was, I, I knew I could write, but I didn’t have the outlet. So in, uh, 29, I think I was a mother of three with a family in Oslo, like just a suburban mum.

And this author in, uh, Norway was writing a book about the Sex Pistols. And he, he had heard that I was involved back in 1977. So he contacted me asking if I would be interested in telling my story, and I agreed to do so in a low key capacity. Right? And when I’d, you know, like written the pieces for him telling the story, um, I got so much good critic from the editors and it kind of just gave me like a stamp of approval.

She, and write. So that’s when I decided to do my own book.

Steve Cuden: And so you didn’t go to school to learn how to be a writer then?

Teddie Dahlin: No, I was, uh, marketing and, uh, economics. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Well, obviously that degree has held you in good stead as you moved into the world of publishing, that’s for sure.

Teddie Dahlin: Absolutely.

Steve Cuden: Yeah, absolutely.

Publishing’s all about marketing and economics, isn’t it?

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah, but it is, it’s also created journey as well. You’ve got to sort of see that you’re representing a product. Not just, you know, like, uh, marketing something like phish fingers.

Steve Cuden: Well, there’s a big difference between phish fingers and books, that’s for sure.

Uh, so I’m curious, where did you learn to speak such excellent English? Clearly you have a great vocabulary and you’re very clear in what you’re saying with a very mild accent. Where did you learn to speak English? So well,

Teddie Dahlin: um, I was, as you said, born in, uh, Norway. My father was Norwegian, but they got divorced quite early and my mother met an Englishman and I was four years old when we moved from Norway to the uk.

Mm-hmm. And I grew up in a remote Yorkshire village for 10 years, and we didn’t actually move back to Norway until I was 14 years old.

Steve Cuden: So thereof, the bilingual. So were, was it then difficult to speak in the Norwegian language at that point?

Teddie Dahlin: Oh my gosh. It was so bad. It was really bad, but it turned out that it was like latent in the back of my brain and then things started coming out and I was so lucky to have these really good friends in the town that I was living in, in, in, uh, Norway.

And they were quite fluent in English, so I was like, uh, using English and Norwegian words, uh, you know, like every other sentence. And then I kind of got it. So now I’m like bilingual, two languages.

Steve Cuden: And you also speak other little bit of other languages too? Yes.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah. I speak Swedish and a little bit of French

Steve Cuden: and, yeah.

Well, that’s very, very helpful in the business you’re in. So I’m, I’m curious at this point, do you think of yourself more as a publisher who occasionally writes, or do you think of yourself as a writer who publishes?

Teddie Dahlin: When I started out, I wanted to write. Mm-hmm. It was all about, you know, like. I told my story, as I said, partially for the book that was written by a Norwegian author and then a road manager from back in 97 of the Sex pistol, uh, Scandinavian, which I was a small, tiny, it’s a bit support of, he said, write your own book.

And I did that. And then I thought, I’m a writer, so I would work for English, uh, music magazines and write articles. I did several four page leaders in several large, uh, English magazines.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm.

Teddie Dahlin: And then things started to change for me. A vicious love story came out. So I ended up doing a vicious love story and then another book about a famous person in Europe that I knew was a good friend of mine, and then three fiction books, until I realized that’s not my role anymore.

I’m a publisher.

Steve Cuden: So you think of yourself now mainly as a publish.

Teddie Dahlin: Absolutely. I am a 100% a publisher. I haven’t written a book in years and years.

Steve Cuden: So when you, when you take on a client or a a, an author and you know you’re going to be publishing their work, are you thinking about their work in terms of how it’s written in your head?

In other words, are you thinking about the writing aspect of it at all?

Teddie Dahlin: No. No, not

Steve Cuden: at all.

Teddie Dahlin: No. I have a team where I have a really good editor and she was a UK Barister and a lawyer. She’s called Sarah Healy. You can find her online if you need an editor. Highly recommended. She’s worked for me for. At least 11 years, and that’s, that’s actually a message I want to get out there.

Writing isn’t about punctuation and how you lyric the text. It’s about the story you’re trying to sell. And then you can get people like Sarah who are proficient in getting the text to be a hundred percent perfect to tell your story. So never ever think that you’re less than just because you can’t string a sentence.

There’s always somebody who can help you, your story. That’s the important thing.

Steve Cuden: So I think that’s really valuable advice for a lot of people to hear. It really is about your story. Yeah. And somewhat your voice. Can you tell that story in a unique way in your own voice?

Teddie Dahlin: Absolutely

Steve Cuden: agree. Absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. So when did you know, at what point after you started New Haven, at what point did you think to yourself, I’m pretty good at this publishing thing? How long did it take before you felt really confident about it?

Teddie Dahlin: Um, uh, I think I slipped into it on a banana skin. To be honest, I never had, I never had any thoughts of, uh, doing this.

What it was was, I, I’ve just got a very short backstory and that is that when I was 16 years old, my stepfather was asked to do the sex pistol Scandinavian tour ’cause he was from Liverpool, and, uh, he was asked to go on the tour. But then John Rotten and Paul Cook, the drummer from the Sex Pistols got badly beaten up.

So the tour was delayed and there was nobody else. And at the time there weren’t very many people in Scandinavia who were as good at English as. We were obviously. Mm-hmm. Right. So my parents were told that the band was called the Pistols and gave them false security that this was like a, a country and western unit.

So they felt safe in that they had no idea and I didn’t say anything, so, so I was there to be the translator. And later on, as I said, this author in Norway in 2008, 2009, 2010, wanted me to, uh, contribute to his book. And I did that. And then I wrote my own book. And then I had a really bad experience with a UK publisher I signed.

I was lucky enough to sign with a publisher, and that’s probably because of the high profile of the Sex Pistols and Sid Vicious, in particular, whom I knew, and I just fired them. I got to a place where I thought, and it was like three months in, I realized that this is just not good. I had two ways to go.

I could either self-publish where you have no distribution, you have no nothing, or. I could do it seemingly not self-publishing, and that’s the way I decided to go. So it was just for my own book, A Vicious Love story. Back in 2012, I incorporated a company in the UK called New Haven Publishing Limited, and it was for my book.

Just seemingly not be self-publishing. But I still had no distributor, I still had nothing, and I was still working on a freelance basis for the, um, UK rock and roll magazines, writing, you know, like articles, trying to keep my face in the media, trying to get, you know. And I was so lucky that I had, uh, decided I wanted to interview Suzy Quatro, you know, like the rock legend.

Steve Cuden: Indeed.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah. So I found out that I had somebody who knew her sister. Her sister, Patty Ericson Quatro and I begged for an interview and she agreed and we just got on like a house on fire. I interviewed her and the article came out and we just kept in touch. Then long story short, she’d told me she’d had a poetry book out in Australia and she was looking for a publisher and she saw that I had a vicious love story out and she says, do you wanna publish my book?

And, you know, I, I basically told her that I’m like a one man band with the drum on my back and the symbols between my knees. But she’s really great. And so she says, yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s do this. Suddenly I got an email from Waterstones, uh, what Stones in the UK is one of the biggest, uh, like book stores, uh, overall.

And it basically said, hi, we’ve got orders for your book from Suzy Quatra, who’s your distributor. And I’ve been knocking doors for like a couple of years by then and nobody was talking to me. ’cause I had like three books and I said, I don’t have this distributor. And they said, well choose one. And there was two larger distributors in the UK and I just chose one and the rest is history.

Wow. You know, that’s like the start. You’ve gotta open that first door.

Steve Cuden: So, so you really did slip on a banana peel right into it?

Teddie Dahlin: Yes, yes. Everything,

Steve Cuden: obviously you worked your butt off at it, but at the same time there was a degree of luck involved in getting where you’ve gone.

Teddie Dahlin: Oh yeah. ’cause the thing is, if you self-publish, you’ve got nothing.

You’ve got the work that we’ve done in your book, and then you are knocking doors and nobody wants to talk to you because they want you to have, let’s say, 25 books, uh, under your belt before we’ll talk to you or a hundred books before we will distribute you. And then just having Susie come to me and like join our publishing company, it just opened those doors straight away.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. How has self-publishing on the internet changed that a little bit like with Amazon where you can self publish today?

Teddie Dahlin: Oh yeah. It’s changed a lot. Uh, when I was starting out, the self-publishing thing was just beginning, but it wasn’t taken seriously. And still today you don’t get taken seriously.

None of the distributors will sign you. You won’t get any deals. And the change, I think the biggest change came during COVID as well. We went from like, let’s say, a certain amount of self-published books on worldwide basis to several million books. And what that does is it takes away the focus on the books out there because there’s such a huge market that getting noticed is really difficult.

Steve Cuden: Oh, well that’s for sure. It’s, it’s a little bit like doing a podcast like this. There are now 5 million podcasts and it’s hard to get noticed. And so you have to figure out what I think is probably your specialty is how do you market those books? How do you get eyeballs on them? Yes.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah. The thing is marketing also changed during COVID.

It’s like, when I started out, I would, uh, as I said the said magazines in the uk and I, I did something for the US as well. Um, I would say, you don’t have to pay me, but I want an ad in your magazine. I want you to pay me with, this is my latest book coming out, not mine. Maybe Susie’s or maybe somebody else’s.

And that would be, that would be fine. But then COVID, there were no magazines. Nobody was buying anything. Everything was just like, stop. Everybody was at home, nobody was doing anything. And everything changed. Everything was suddenly digital. It wasn’t a cost, it was free. So you just have to go online and you just have to use whatever you can to get the attention of the readers.

Steve Cuden: So what do you then do, uh, today to, to get those, that attention? What do you, do you have any special techniques or anything that you can share?

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah. What we do is we’ve got a database where we contact every single manager of every single Waterstones and every single, uh, Bon and Noble in the whole world.

Um, in addition, we have our list of magazines, and most magazines now are also digital. So we can get in there if there’s anything special that they’re wanting to focus on. We can also get like articles and marketing in there, but everything has changed, absolutely everything.

Steve Cuden: Do you wind up selling to folks like Barnes and Noble and those sorts of distributors as well?

Those outlets?

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah. I’m, I’m lucky enough that I have been able to get. I get a contract with the world’s largest print on demand, which is Ingram, and they distribute to 40, 50,000 online sellers worldwide.

Announcer: Wow.

Teddie Dahlin: And I also, I also work with the UK’s largest distributor, which is gardeners books. And they get books into stores also, uh, mainly in the uk, but they also work internationally.

Getting the books and the titles and stuff out there is is not a problem. The thing, the trick is getting people to know that go on to Amazon or go on to Barn Noble or Fish Pond or wherever you are to order the book.

Steve Cuden: Well, obviously you have to have people going to some outlet, whether it’s your New Haven site or whether it’s an actual dealer of some kind.

You’ve gotta get them there in the first place. Isn’t that right?

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah, I think people are more into ordering online these days as a, uh, as opposed to going into a store and browsing. They know what they want. They’ll go in and they’ll order it and it’ll be delivered home to them. So everything’s digital.

It’s just taken off.

Steve Cuden: I think that that’s absolutely true, but at the same time, I’ll tell you in the last year, I’ve been in a number of bookstores here in the, in the United States, in different places in the United States, and it’s amazing to me how busy they are. There are lots of people in those stores, so, uh, I think that you can take some comfort in that.

Teddie Dahlin: I don’t really work towards that segment to be honest. I was in, I was just in London now recently, and I went into the Waterstones Piccadilly store and it was basically me and a few people that work there. There are people can’t be bothered. Yeah, I think it is just become C, certain things you can order online and you get them home to you and you don’t have to think about it.

And I think books is absolutely, and we’re also digital with eBooks and digital magazines and kids books. So we’re everywhere.

Steve Cuden: Yeah. Well, and you’ve built a nice, uh, empire there in, in, uh, Norway. Um, what made you decide to focus, and I’m, I think it’s a great thing that you did, but why did you decide to focus on music and entertainment?

Teddie Dahlin: Again, the banana peel thing I slid in. Yeah, because, um, I did the Sid Vicious book and when that came out I got quite a lot of, uh, promo for it. I was the guest at the, uh, large world’s largest punk convention in Blackpool. And I got to know a lot of people that were there back then. They got into contact with me as, uh, like Eileen Polk.

She was there when Sid died. Howie Pyro also. So Neon Leon, he was arrested. The first person arrested when Nancy Sponge was, uh, stabbed to death. These people got back into contact and we sort of started, and then Neil Leon wanted to publish his book and it just sort of became, you know, like the place that I knew,

Steve Cuden: I called it home.

It kind of came to you, you were, you didn’t seek that out as a way to go.

Teddie Dahlin: No, no, no, no, no. I, what I sought out was a publishing place for my own book, but it just rolled on from there. You know, like people coming to me and saying, hi, I’ve written a book. ’cause it’s very difficult in the publishing business now because back in the day, and really, uh, a lot of them are still doing this and that is that the publishers, they will print out a whole warehouse of books.

Let’s say that you’ve got 5,000 examples of this book. And they send them out and they flood the stores. Then they sit there for like three to six months, and then they get everything back that they have to pulp. And then there was COVID, but everything was closed. So people were ordering online and I think that just became the thing.

Really? Mm-hmm. It is just easy.

Steve Cuden: It is easy. I buy lots of books online.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah, me too. And then they just didn’t go back to it. We are still available in stores and you can go into any store anywhere in the world as long as you know the title. You can order it, you can pick it up at the store if that’s, you know, like if that’s what you wanna do.

But most people just order it online and get it to them and they order it where they normally order their books like Amazon, Barnes and Noble Fish Pond, whatever. We there.

Steve Cuden: Well, it’s, it’s certainly, um. Far cry from when, like you say, that people would have to hoard stock in a warehouse somewhere or in a store, and then it would get remaindered.

Now you can print on demand and you’re not holding any stock.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah. We, we do have to hold some stock because our distributors don’t work in that way.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm.

Teddie Dahlin: But yeah,

Steve Cuden: if you’re in a, in a store, you’ve gotta have the books on the shelf. So,

Teddie Dahlin: yeah. But you also have, uh, the possibility of printing the book that you want on a printing machine in the store.

Some stores have them. Mm, I believe New York and yeah.

Steve Cuden: Wow, I did not know that. So you can, there are stores where you can walk in now and say, I’d like a copy of X book, and they’ll just print it on demand.

Teddie Dahlin: Yes. There’s this huge, uh, machine and I, I can’t remember what it’s called, but you can go in and the machine is there and you just, you know, like, type in what you want and it will print it for you.

Steve Cuden: Wow. I did not know that. I’m, I’m glad to hear that. I think that’s, that’s kind of interesting and cool. You now at this point, do you have. Authors mostly coming to you to be published or do you seek out authors?

Teddie Dahlin: Oh, I don’t seek out to authors. No, they

Steve Cuden: come to you?

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah. Yeah. ’cause the, the market is as such and I think that’s a good thing as well, because I think you should try to get with, you know, like the biggest, uh, publishing companies that you can first, or the biggest agencies that you can first, and then.

You kind of scroll back and then the end station is self-publishing. That’s if you can’t get anything else, then you do it yourself. ’cause you’ve got to believe in what you’ve written.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s for certain. Absolutely. You must believe in what you’ve written. Otherwise, how do you sell it? How do you even.

Tell people about it. And we’re, we’re gonna get to a vicious love story in a moment, but I want to continue on with, with, uh, the publishing business while, while we’re talking about it. Um, what would you say are a few things that a, an author needs to do in terms of the way that you look at authors to get a deal with you?

What, what are the tips?

Teddie Dahlin: Okay, so. The first thing you need to do is to find out that the publisher that you’re contacting actually does these types of books. Because you, you, you’re either not gonna hear anything or you’re gonna get a no because they don’t do kids books or we don’t accept fiction and it’s a waste of time.

Announcer: Right?

Teddie Dahlin: So find a publishing house that accepts the type of book that you’ve written. You need a sub NOIs, and then you need to break down the chapters to tell the publisher what it is you’ve written. And then you need a sample chapter so that we can see what sort of writing you do. That’s all I need.

Steve Cuden: And so you don’t need to read the manuscript itself.

You need a synopsis to start.

Teddie Dahlin: I can’t read all manuscripts. I’ve got 250 titles and 200 author and I can’t possibly, actually, that’s one of the down things with being a publisher. I used to live in books always. And since I became a publisher, I don’t read books because it’s work. So I, I, I do this and then I pass it on, and then my editor will tell me if there are any red flags or if there’s any liable, or if this is just not good.

Steve Cuden: Well, how do you make a decision on whether you’re gonna publish someone just based on the synopsis itself, not on the quality of the finished product.

Teddie Dahlin: No, because I’ve got an editor who’s bloody brilliant.

Steve Cuden: Mm.

Teddie Dahlin: So yeah, so she can make anybody sound perfect.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Teddie Dahlin: So it’s the idea behind the book, it’s a, let me give you an example.

I was contacted by a journalist from the BBC, and he’d done a kid’s book. And the kid’s book was based on a story that I’ve been in the press several years ago, I believe. About a walrus who had gone out from Greenland and then suddenly found himself in a place where he couldn’t be in his. He’d written the book, the Epic Adventures of Wally, the Walrus.

And the whole thing was, you know, like in the synopsis, telling the story that this is based around this and we’ve made this, and he is gone and he’s trying to get back to Greenland. And then when he gets back to Greenland, he runs to his walrus family and his grandfather doesn’t recognize him and he rugby tackles him.

You know, like these sort of things. I love it. I know. I don’t care what the writing’s like. The writing was brilliant by the way. But you know, it’s the story and the presentation. You have to get it across

Steve Cuden: and obviously you have to, you personally have to feel something about that book or that author, I guess, um, to say yes.

You have to have a feeling about it. Yeah.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah, I, uh, I, you know, like the dollar stops with me. If I don’t believe in it or I don’t like it or whatever, then we’re not doing it. Mm-hmm. Because at the end of the day, it’s my money. I’m paying for everything. So it’s my decision at the end of the day. And I will sometimes go back and ask, you know, like several times for more information, but I have actually put in a clause in our contract, which says that if I can’t work with you.

It’s not gonna happen. I’m gonna, you know, like pull out, I’ve got like a, a back door, get out of jail free card. If, if it’s, uh, if it turns out to be not what I expected. Or if the author is difficult,

Steve Cuden: and I assume you run into some difficult people here and there. Oh

Teddie Dahlin: yes, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: You’re saying that authors aren’t all, uh, total angels.

Teddie Dahlin: Oh no, don’t get me started.

Steve Cuden: Uh, I think it’s very interesting that you have taken this on mainly by yourself. You don’t have a big staff, do you?

Teddie Dahlin: No, I’ve got a team of three, and then we just buy into whatever we need when we need it.

Steve Cuden: Hmm. That’s, I mean, that’s pretty amazing. So you’re able to run fairly lean and mean then?

Teddie Dahlin: Oh, absolutely. It’s, it’s probably one of the reasons why we’re still here.

Steve Cuden: I, that makes sense because, uh, the, that business is so highly competitive. It, it is kind of interesting. And since you’ve brought folks to me, which has been a number of years now, I noticed that your catalog has grown and grown and grown and that you’ve taken on far more authors than when I first.

So, uh, I think that that’s really a positive and, and excellent position that you’ve, you’ve gotten yourself in. Let’s talk about, um, uh, a vicious love story for a moment, because I think that this is a very interesting book on a, on a group that I barely knew anything about. Before I read your book, I really didn’t know very much about the Sex Pistols.

Punk has never really been my main music focus, but I, me neither, but I’ve, I’ve heard enough of it to know, okay, I like this and I don’t like a lot of that. Um, tell the listeners a little bit more than we’ve already said about a, a vicious love story. What was the point in your writing the book? Why did you want to get that out to the world?

Teddie Dahlin: I was in a place in my life where I was at a crossroads. I didn’t know what to do. I’m married, I have three children. We were gonna be moving house, and I think I just, it’s probably classic midlife crisis. This Norwegian author contacted me not like sporadically, and if he had done so the year before, I would never have talked to him at all.

’cause I was a very private person. But because I was there and I was looking and thinking, what do I wanna do? I’m doing stuff that I don’t wanna be doing, uh, career wise. So when he contacted, I thought, you know, why not give him some tidbits and some information? And, and not reveal myself so much. You know, I, I kind of told him the rough idea about what had happened back in 77, but not the whole story.

And the funny thing was, nobody, not a one person in Norway talked to the press. The journalists in the uk, they had contacted my family in the uk. They also contacted the guy who brought the sex pistol, Scandinavia, and he was living at the time in Malta, and he contacted me and he says, you’ve got to write your own book.

You can’t, you can’t be doing this. Everybody wants to know more. So that was the background of it really, that I had to sit down and decide, shall I tell all, and people were really salacious. They wanted to know every single detail down to what did you eat, what did Steve Jones eat? What did Sid Vicious Did Sid Vicious ask you to cut up his food?

Which he did, by the way. And it, it was just like, okay. I’ll tell all I don’t care.

Steve Cuden: Well, from, from being a shy, reserved person reading the book, you certainly exposed a lot of your experience with them, and it was very personal, very personal.

Teddie Dahlin: It was absolutely, I was, I’d known the guy who, uh, organized the concepts.

You know, Norway was a bit of a black hole at the time. We didn’t have many international stars coming to Scandinavia. And the guy, he had organized concepts for Demi Rousseau, who was an, an opera singer and, uh, a couple of other like crooners. So it was very sort of before the rock bands and stuff started coming.

And he just like, again, slid in on the, the Sex Pistols coming to Norway and they were gonna do like a few concerts. And I thought if I do this, uh, I agreed to do it. I wasn’t punk. I was very disco. I loved Donna Summers. I was very conservative, absolutely not into that at all. And I thought if I do a good job with the Sex Pistols, then I’d get other opportunities and you would hire me to do, ’cause I knew we had, um, what was that band?

What Rod Stewart came. And, uh, Dr. Hook. Oh, they were so fun. They were really funny. They were great. So that was the main thing with it. I just like helped with the translation for the Sex Pistols and then would do more and I’d make a career of it.

Steve Cuden: So in the book you talk about you did not really know who Sid Vicious was when he first walked in the door.

Am I right?

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah, no, I had no idea because at the time I could, because of my English background, I’m not English by the way. I’m very Norwegian. I would like to read the English newspapers, but it took like three or four days before we had them back in the seventies. So the, uh, posters and everything that was going on with this much publicized concerts in Norway and Sweden.

Were featuring Glen Matlock because he was the original bass player.

Announcer: Mm-hmm. But

Teddie Dahlin: what I didn’t, yeah, what I didn’t know was that he’d been fired and then they’d hired this other guy. So I had no idea who he was. I just knew that I had to be careful with the Sex Pistols because they were really scary. And I’ll tell you how I met them.

Um, the guy who organized the, the tour is called Tour, and I’d known him since I came to Norway, age 14 years old because my stepfather used to work at the cinema and some of the cinemas were used for rock concerts. So they would work together. Concert. So he was the original person who was going do this, and then they came and we were late because my mother, she’s a chef, she insisted that set for lunch when he came to pick me up and promised to bring me back by 10:00 PM and we were late.

So we got into the hotel where they were supposed to be checked in, and they were really angry. They were pissed off. I think we were about half an hour late. You

Steve Cuden: you’re talking about the Sex Pistols were pissed off.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah, they were pissed off. They were sitting in the hotel reception and Tu and I were running in, you know, like flustered and there was a guy asleep on a sofa in the reception.

It was a red sofa. And I realized he had his boots on the sofa and I was thinking, oh shit, we’re gonna get into trouble. And there was this guy sitting in, you know, like in my line of sight, he, he stood up and he was red in the face. He was pointing to his watch and he says, what fucking time do you think this is now?

That was, that was Stephen Connolly. He was the original Sex Pistols roadie. And he also, so he would do both. Uh, we called him. And we were supposed to get them checked in. Then it turned out that the hotel wanted the sex pistols away from the other guests, and there was only one suite. So this huge argument broke out between John Den Johnny Rotten, and Steve Jones’s the guitarist.

So I was bored with the whole thing. So I went to sit on the sofa, the end of the sofa, where this guy was asleep, and I didn’t recognize him at all. And I, I, I don’t smoke, I haven’t done since then, but I did at the, at the time I was 16. ’cause it was cool

Steve Cuden: that that’s, that’s interesting. I wanna remind the listeners that, that Teddy was all of 16 when this happened.

So Carry on. Yes.

Teddie Dahlin: I was 16 and a few months and totally naive. And this guy was lying on the surface and he was asleep and he woke up and he sat up and the first thing he saw was me. I had a cigarette and he said, can we share that? And I thought, can’t be worse than talking to the two guys, arguing in reception about the suite.

So we just started talking and I simply assumed that this was a roadie. I didn’t recognize that and I was sitting there for a while and you know how obnoxious 16 year olds can be. I would never do that. Now today I was extremely rude. I got so fed up with the arguing, oh, you are the there and then you the sweet there.

So I worked over to reception. I said, um. Can we just stop this now? This is stupid. Let’s toss a coin. Now John and Steve will toss a coin and the one who gets it right will get the sweet and the one who gets it wrong will get the sweet when we get stock on. And there was just so taken aback. And then I looked over and the guy who had pointed at his watch, uh, rodent, the rodie, he was smiling from ear to ear.

And then I looked over the guy who was asleep at the sofa, and if he didn’t have ears, his smile would’ve gone all the way round his head and they went, okay. So I tossed a coin and uh, John Leiden got the sweet and that’s that. It’s done. Alright, check in. What the fuck? Get this, I’m not. And that was my first meeting with the Sex Pistols.

And it’s kind of weird because I was just in London now, uh, like about a week ago, and I make sure that I meet rodent, the roadie when I’m in London, you know, just to, we go up, we have a glass of wine with my husband and you know, like in the pub. So all these years later you’re still

Steve Cuden: in touch with them.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah, uh, uh, well, not all of them. Um, I’m still in touch with Broden. I dunno why we met after like 35 years when I was writing my book. I got into contact with them and because we share this, we share this experience. So we contributed a lot in my book and we are just really good mates. He’s, he’s a fantastic guy.

He does absolutely different things. Now. He is, uh, in a completely different role. Uh, still in the music business, but you know. So, yeah, I’m, uh, I haven’t been in contact with Paul Cook since back then. He’s a lovely guy, by the way. I’ve heard good things about him, and I felt good things about him when he was there.

Can’t stand Steve Jones. Steve, I hate you. He’s, he’s totally blocked me on social media because I had, I happen to address his shirtless photo and John’s people contacted me when my book came out actually. Who sadly died now contacted me, um, to say I couldn’t write my book, which I told him to sort off.

It’s my story. It’s got nothing to do with you, which was fine. And I’ve been in contact with Glen, who wrote the actual album. I’ve interviewed him several times and for some reason he’s decided to ghost me for the tons of rock tour, which is going on in Norway now. But it’s fine.

Steve Cuden: So, alright. So did you know as you were going through this experience in which you spent approximately a week with them, correct?

Teddie Dahlin: No, no, no. Just a few days. Just a few days. Just a few days, yeah.

Steve Cuden: So as you were going through this experience, did you ever think to yourself, I can’t imagine at 16 you did, but did you ever think to yourself, maybe someday this will make an interesting story that I could put into a book? Did that ever occur to you?

No. No. So you, no. Never. Were you, you, were you taking notes? Did you journal about it or anything like that?

Teddie Dahlin: No. The thing is, when I moved to Norway from England, the first year, I had to intensively learn back Norwegian ’cause I wasn’t fluid, uh, fluent, sorry. And then after a year, I found out I struggled with English.

So I started to journal. But it wasn’t something that I thought I would keep for prosperity. Absolutely not. And I dunno if I would’ve ever come out with the fact that I even knew the Sex Pistols if it wasn’t for that first author. Writing about them and telling me, kind of telling me intensely they’re really significant.

And I didn’t feel they were, ’cause it wasn’t my type of music.

Steve Cuden: So, so you actually didn’t think much about the experience other than you had it, you weren’t thinking about it as something that could be written about or, or sold?

Teddie Dahlin: No. Interesting. No. Um, and I think that’s a good thing because, um, I was talking to Eileen Polk now, Eile Polk was a photographer who was in and around the New York scene, and she was also in the UK scene with the Rolling Stones.

And when Neon Leon went over to the uk. People, you’ve got to read my book. This is so interesting. It’s so connected. It’s interesting. Anyway, yeah. Anyway, Eileen Po was there the night, got the heroine, which killed him, and so was Peter Gravel. And these people got into contact with me again, and the thing was, she said, you should be very glad you put that aside because it would’ve stopped you from any addictions or anything that could have happened to you.

And I think I did the right thing. I think, you know, at the end of the day when the Scandinavian tour was over, the Sex Pistols went back to England. Then I didn’t hear anything for like about a month or two. Then I started getting messages from the musicians that I knew who were also in London saying, you know, like telling me Sid says this, and Sid says that.

And then they were going on the American tour. So I was told that we’ve made a new Scandinavian tour because Malcolm McLaren wanted to get sit away from Nancy’s Funn. And he thought that maybe a good way was to go back to Scandinavia and I was invited to meet them in Stockholm. Um, but that never happened.

And when the Sex Pistols kind of went to pieces. It wasn’t me that Sid contacted, it was Nancy, and that, I think that speaks volumes.

Steve Cuden: So what we haven’t really said, that’s all throughout the book. In fact, the book is mainly about, is that you had a romantic relationship with him while they were in in Norway.

So. Yeah. How, I’m trying to figure out how all those years later you remembered everything that happened because it must have, do you have just that kind of a memory? You’ve got a very good

Teddie Dahlin: No, no, no. So how did you remember all

Steve Cuden: this to write it down?

Teddie Dahlin: Okay, so Sid and I was 16, Sid was 20. And you know how it, what it’s like when you just connect with somebody and it, he was a really, really nice person.

He was a really smart, really nice kind person and the heroine of it all hadn’t started yet. Um, he’d met Nancy a few months before he went on the Scandinavian tour and he was really angry. He was so angry ’cause he’d been able to get a, a flat in London in, uh, an area called Maita Vale. And he’d been on tour with the pistols, and Nancy was allowed to stay in his flat and it was a very much offer on sort of thing, and he came back early and found her in bed with his worst enemy.

Now, I can’t remember who the person was. The only thing I remember in telling me about it was that this person played an instrument that was not normal in a band, like a violin or something. I have no idea. And he was so angry with her and it was just like not a topic that he wanted to talk about at all.

Then. He went back and when the tour happened, he didn’t want her. I heard later that he didn’t want her to turn up at the concerts. They had like the spot tour Sex Pistols on tour secretly when they got back ’cause they were banned. So they weren’t allowed to like announce it and she would just turn up and, and that was the reeling in of their Johnny Thunders and all the heroin epidemics that happened at the time.

So I think it was a good thing that I didn’t write. Sort of pursue it. And the second thing was that as soon as my mother, who’s a chef, got a phone call on the night saying, your daughters with the sex pistols at this disco in town, and this is not good. She stole my passport. And as a 16-year-old, you can’t just wander into, you know, like get a passport.

So there’s no way I was gonna the UK. And I think it’s a good thing, but how I remembered it was wasn’t on my own. I remembered bits and parts of it. Of course I did. And then talking to Eile Polk, talking to Neon Leon, and then especially Rhoda, and we’ve got, oh, remember we met Abba at the airport. You know, it was like lots of things, uh, coming to me that I’d actually forgotten.

So the book that I’ve written is really just like a small part of what I was in, and then it was a much bigger part of what everybody else was doing. And these were people that were there. They were there, they knew what happened. It’s not like second.

Steve Cuden: So your, your research, if that’s what you want to call it, was in talking to people that were there at the same time.

Teddie Dahlin: Yes

Steve Cuden: you did. You didn’t go to a library and, and dredge up old articles or anything like that?

Teddie Dahlin: No. What I did was, uh, I got into contact with people who were there, people that I knew, and then they put me into contact. Like Eileen says, oh, you’ve got to talk to Peter Gravel. ’cause he was the guy who got the heroine.

And then, oh, you’ve got to talk to how pyro, because he was there when we were gonna scatter the ashes and he actually sniffed the ashes. Yeah, I know. And then it, it just kind of went from there until I sort of built up this based on people’s truths. The people who were there. And you know, like I did the book.

Steve Cuden: So you gathered all this information from talking to other people in your own memory, obviously, and then when you’ve decided, okay, you’re gonna sit down and write this book, did you outline what you were gonna do first? How did you approach writing the book?

Teddie Dahlin: Um, the way I write all my books, it’s that I don’t outline anything at all.

I start writing and then I write until I’m empty. And it’s like, it’s a really weird process ’cause you can start writing and then suddenly you think, what’s that smell? You stink. ’cause you’ve been there for two days, you know? And then you go away from it and you leave it alone for a little while. Then you go back and read what you’ve written and then you continue writing.

And that’s the way I think I, I was writing for about

Steve Cuden: a year. A year. And did you do a lot of rewriting of the book or once you were done, you were done?

Teddie Dahlin: No, I just did what I did, you know, like, uh, writing, going back, rewriting, going back, and then just like progressing and progressing, getting comments from other people, getting people to, you know, like, allow me, can I use this comments in the book?

I mean, peach Gravel and Eileen PO have written, you know, like huge chapters, androgens and, and other people who were there, just getting them, putting it in the book and then thinking, what did we do that day? That day we went to a museum. People are surprised. The Sex Pistols went to a museum. They, we had a day off and you know, it’s just like trying to paint the picture of Sid Fishers was not the punk rock poster boy that Malcolm McLaren wanted to have out there.

Of course, he became that when he was, you know, on the heroin and, you know, like deeply retraumatized and whatnot. But they’re just people.

Steve Cuden: Well, well, when you take on the names Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, it has a connotation of being nasty in some way. So that’s where that comes from.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah. But that was just like what I.

Called, it was pistols, modus. So we would go, John Leiden is one of the most intelligent and most funny people I’ve ever met in my life until he threw me against the wall. But it was, it was like very creative people, very funny people. And then we’d go out to a restaurant and we’re sitting at the restaurant.

And then suddenly they’d start throwing food at the other tables and shouting and stuff. And that I was mortified and I was saying to say, whatcha doing? He says, it’s expected. We’ve got to do

Steve Cuden: this. It’s their reputation.

Teddie Dahlin: Yes. So absolutely orchestrated to sort of play into what they were and take the, uh, spitting the spitting thing.

Was not something they, well, Sid thought it was really funny and so did Steve. John hated it. And at the concert there was, uh, somebody, I think it was sad who’s into the audience, but what he didn’t think of was that you’ve got hundreds of people. Gonna spit back. You see what I mean? And John, John Knight was going, stop, stop.

I’m walking off stage with your spit anymore. And everyone’s going, huh? What? So it was like, um, yeah, it was surreal. I think this is true for a lot of celebrities is that you are either inside or you’re outside. They have like a, a wall where they have like their persona that’s outside and then they have like the inside where they can be themselves.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm.

Teddie Dahlin: And I think I was very much inside. That’s

Steve Cuden: really common to have, uh, somebody who’s a celebrity of some kind to have sort of two different lives, one in the public ly and one one in private. Absolutely. Uh, you know, there’s been one major movie of, uh, Johnny Rotten being Sid Nancy, um, which is a well-known movie.

I think this would make a really interesting movie too, if you tried to sell. Um,

Teddie Dahlin: no, I haven’t. Um, because it’s, it’s so short and it’s such an, an insignificant part of their journey. It would have to be, and also there are so many stories about it. You’ve got lots of, like, um, Alan G. Parker did, he used to be with, uh, Sid’s mom.

Who was also there. She uh, I think she was the one who put the heroin when he overdosed. When he died. That was there. I don’t, I don’t see this as being significant. I was 16, he was 20. It was just a few days. It was a fling. We thought we were in love. That was really weird. We were talking about Sid moving to Norway and you know, like how he could get back to the UK to do his music and if he had, he’d probably still be alive today.

But sadly. It is what it is.

Steve Cuden: I, I’ll disagree with you only in the sense that I think that there is an, a movie in there and that I think that if it were brought out, I think it would be a very interesting movie of one little, tiny slice of time in just that few days in, in, uh, dealing with this group, which was a, a seminal group in the punk rock movement.

So I’ve been having just a lot of fun today. Speaking to Teddy, Darlene, uh, the publisher and author. We’re gonna wind the show down a little bit right now, and I’m just wondering, um, beyond the, the advice that you’ve given in the show, do you have a solid piece of advice or a tip that you give, like, to give to people who are just starting out in the business or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to the next level?

I’m talking about writers, publishers, et cetera.

Teddie Dahlin: Yeah. Uh, getting a publisher to look at your book is an eye on impossible, and what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to develop a really hard skin because even though you get a thousand nos. There’s not anything in those. No, thank you. That reflects on your book.

It can be so many different reasons. We don’t like kids books. We don’t take fiction there. We’ve got other books out on the same topic, et cetera, et cetera. You’ve just gotta keep going. You’ve got to believe in yourself and you’ve got to think. Try and contact the publishing houses. Many of them do not Talk to authors.

Find out which agents are the agents that are in the know or that are let in at the different publishing houses. If you’re contacting like the big four, used to be the F five. Sidebar, did you know that Simon and Schuster? The Simon in Simon and Schuster’s, Carly Simon’s dad?

Steve Cuden: I did know that.

Teddie Dahlin: Did you? Oh yeah, I knew.

Well done. And not many people knew that. ’cause we’ve got the, uh, uh, a book written by her guitarist, uh, Jimmy Ryan

Steve Cuden: and her sister Lucy was a very fine composer.

Teddie Dahlin: Oh, was she? I did not know that there. Mm-hmm. You see uhhuh? Yeah. So you’ve got to take the nose and just roll with them and keep going. And then you get to a state where there are so many nos that you’ve got to think.

Shall I self-publish? Now, if you self-publish, you don’t have the distribution, you don’t have the help in getting your book out, but your book will be out. And I know if you do it on like Create Space or if you do Ingram Spark, there is also a distribution. Although you don’t have that control of it, you can get it out.

So don’t give up.

Steve Cuden: That’s a very, very wise advice. Um, I, I can’t thank you enough, Teddy, for spending time with me on the show today. This has been a lot of fun for me and I, I really appreciate your, your energy and your wisdom that you’ve shared with us today. Thank you.

Teddie Dahlin: Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Thank you for having all my authors on your show as well.

Somebody is.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s story bead. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you are listening to. Your support helps us bring more great story beat episodes to you. Story Beat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tune in and many others.

Until next time, I’m Steve Den and may all your stories be unforgettable.

On today’s story, beat writing isn’t about punctuation and how you lyric the text. It’s about the story you’re trying to sell. So never ever think that you’re less than just because you can’t string a sentence. There’s always somebody who can help you. Your story. That’s the important thing. This is Story Beat with Steve Cutten, a podcast for the Creative Mind.

Announcer: Story Beat Explores how Masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host Steve.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on Story Beat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Teddy Darlene, was born in Norway and graduated from business school in Gothenburg, Sweden with a degree in International Marketing and economics. She’s worked as a freelance music journalist for several magazines in the uk, most notably ViiV La Rock, and she’s written five published books.

In 2012, after a bad experience with a UK publisher, Teddy established New Haven Publishing to put out her book a Vicious Love story, remembering the real Sid Vicious, which is her account of being the 16-year-old translator for the Sex Pistols during a leg of their 1977 Scandinavian tour. It was New Haven’s first book.

A vicious love story takes us through Teddy’s unique encounter with Sid Vicious and The Sex Pistols, including a fascinating cast of characters surrounding the band such as Neon Leon, Eileen Polk, Peter Gravel, Kenny Gordon, and Howie Pyro. I’ve read a vicious love story and can tell you I was thoroughly engrossed by Teddy’s description of what it was like for her at such a young age to be tossed into the middle of a fairly wild scene.

With such dynamic punk rockers, especially as she became quite close to Sid Vicious. Since 2012, new Haven Publishing has grown substantially now representing 200 authors with a catalog of 250 books that are heavily anchored in the music and entertainment industry. New Haven also has several imprints, Phoenix Press Kids, Viking Press comics, Portland Press novels, and in the United States New Haven publishing us.

For the record, Teddy and I have known one another for several years, as I’ve had the privilege of interviewing numerous New Haven publishing authors, including Tim Quinn, Jimmy Ryan, John Kremer, and the one and only Susie Quatro. To hear those episodes, please check them out@storybeat.net. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s a great pleasure for me to welcome the author and publisher Teddy Darlene to Story Bee Today.

Teddy, thanks so much for joining me. Hi. It’s great to have you on board. Let’s go back in time a little bit. Teddy, how old were you when you first fell in love with writing and writers and books? Very young. I was very young. I started reading at a very, uh, early age, like Charlotte’s Web, and I remember getting immersed in the war of the worlds and like sitting for a whole week smelling sweaty, just trying to get through the book.

Teddie Dahlin: So I’ve always been a reader, but it isn’t until I got a little bit older that I started writing. Hmm. How old were you when you started to write? The thing was, I, I knew I could write, but I didn’t have the outlet. So in, uh, 29, I think I was a mother of three with a family in Oslo, like just a suburban mum.

And this author in, uh, Norway was writing a book about the Sex Pistols. And he, he had heard that I was involved back in 1977. So he contacted me asking if I would be interested in telling my story, and I agreed to do so in a low key capacity. Right? And when I’d, you know, like written the pieces for him telling the story, um, I got so much good critic from the editors and it kind of just gave me like a stamp of approval.

She, and write. So that’s when I decided to do my own book. And so you didn’t go to school to learn how to be a writer then? No, I was, uh, marketing and, uh, economics. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, obviously that degree has held you in good stead as you moved into the world of publishing, that’s for sure. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: Publishing’s all about marketing and economics, isn’t it? Yeah, but it is, it’s also created journey as well. You’ve got to sort of see that you’re representing a product. Not just, you know, like, uh, marketing something like phish fingers. Well, there’s a big difference between phish fingers and books, that’s for sure.

Uh, so I’m curious, where did you learn to speak such excellent English? Clearly you have a great vocabulary and you’re very clear in what you’re saying with a very mild accent. Where did you learn to speak English? So well, um, I was, as you said, born in, uh, Norway. My father was Norwegian, but they got divorced quite early and my mother met an Englishman and I was four years old when we moved from Norway to the uk.

Teddie Dahlin: Mm-hmm. And I grew up in a remote Yorkshire village for 10 years, and we didn’t actually move back to Norway until I was 14 years old. So thereof, the bilingual. So were, was it then difficult to speak in the Norwegian language at that point? Oh my gosh. It was so bad. It was really bad, but it turned out that it was like latent in the back of my brain and then things started coming out and I was so lucky to have these really good friends in the town that I was living in, in, in, uh, Norway.

And they were quite fluent in English, so I was like, uh, using English and Norwegian words, uh, you know, like every other sentence. And then I kind of got it. So now I’m like bilingual, two languages. And you also speak other little bit of other languages too? Yes. Yeah. I speak Swedish and a little bit of French and, yeah.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s very, very helpful in the business you’re in. So I’m, I’m curious at this point, do you think of yourself more as a publisher who occasionally writes, or do you think of yourself as a writer who publishes? When I started out, I wanted to write. Mm-hmm. It was all about, you know, like. I told my story, as I said, partially for the book that was written by a Norwegian author and then a road manager from back in 97 of the Sex pistol, uh, Scandinavian, which I was a small, tiny, it’s a bit support of, he said, write your own book.

Teddie Dahlin: And I did that. And then I thought, I’m a writer, so I would work for English, uh, music magazines and write articles. I did several four page leaders in several large, uh, English magazines. Mm-hmm. And then things started to change for me. A vicious love story came out. So I ended up doing a vicious love story and then another book about a famous person in Europe that I knew was a good friend of mine, and then three fiction books, until I realized that’s not my role anymore.

I’m a publisher. So you think of yourself now mainly as a publish. Absolutely. I am a 100% a publisher. I haven’t written a book in years and years. So when you, when you take on a client or a a, an author and you know you’re going to be publishing their work, are you thinking about their work in terms of how it’s written in your head?

Steve Cuden: In other words, are you thinking about the writing aspect of it at all? No. No, not at all. No. I have a team where I have a really good editor and she was a UK Barister and a lawyer. She’s called Sarah Healy. You can find her online if you need an editor. Highly recommended. She’s worked for me for. At least 11 years, and that’s, that’s actually a message I want to get out there.

Teddie Dahlin: Writing isn’t about punctuation and how you lyric the text. It’s about the story you’re trying to sell. And then you can get people like Sarah who are proficient in getting the text to be a hundred percent perfect to tell your story. So never ever think that you’re less than just because you can’t string a sentence.

There’s always somebody who can help you, your story. That’s the important thing. So I think that’s really valuable advice for a lot of people to hear. It really is about your story. Yeah. And somewhat your voice. Can you tell that story in a unique way in your own voice? Absolutely agree. Absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. So when did you know, at what point after you started New Haven, at what point did you think to yourself, I’m pretty good at this publishing thing? How long did it take before you felt really confident about it? Um, uh, I think I slipped into it on a banana skin. To be honest, I never had, I never had any thoughts of, uh, doing this.

Teddie Dahlin: What it was was, I, I’ve just got a very short backstory and that is that when I was 16 years old, my stepfather was asked to do the sex pistol Scandinavian tour ’cause he was from Liverpool, and, uh, he was asked to go on the tour. But then John Rotten and Paul Cook, the drummer from the Sex Pistols got badly beaten up.

So the tour was delayed and there was nobody else. And at the time there weren’t very many people in Scandinavia who were as good at English as. We were obviously. Mm-hmm. Right. So my parents were told that the band was called the Pistols and gave them false security that this was like a, a country and western unit.

So they felt safe in that they had no idea and I didn’t say anything, so, so I was there to be the translator. And later on, as I said, this author in Norway in 2008, 2009, 2010, wanted me to, uh, contribute to his book. And I did that. And then I wrote my own book. And then I had a really bad experience with a UK publisher I signed.

I was lucky enough to sign with a publisher, and that’s probably because of the high profile of the Sex Pistols and Sid Vicious, in particular, whom I knew, and I just fired them. I got to a place where I thought, and it was like three months in, I realized that this is just not good. I had two ways to go.

I could either self-publish where you have no distribution, you have no nothing, or. I could do it seemingly not self-publishing, and that’s the way I decided to go. So it was just for my own book, A Vicious Love story. Back in 2012, I incorporated a company in the UK called New Haven Publishing Limited, and it was for my book.

Just seemingly not be self-publishing. But I still had no distributor, I still had nothing, and I was still working on a freelance basis for the, um, UK rock and roll magazines, writing, you know, like articles, trying to keep my face in the media, trying to get, you know. And I was so lucky that I had, uh, decided I wanted to interview Suzy Quatro, you know, like the rock legend.

Steve Cuden: Indeed. Yeah. So I found out that I had somebody who knew her sister. Her sister, Patty Ericson Quatro and I begged for an interview and she agreed and we just got on like a house on fire. I interviewed her and the article came out and we just kept in touch. Then long story short, she’d told me she’d had a poetry book out in Australia and she was looking for a publisher and she saw that I had a vicious love story out and she says, do you wanna publish my book?

Teddie Dahlin: And, you know, I, I basically told her that I’m like a one man band with the drum on my back and the symbols between my knees. But she’s really great. And so she says, yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s do this. Suddenly I got an email from Waterstones, uh, what Stones in the UK is one of the biggest, uh, like book stores, uh, overall.

And it basically said, hi, we’ve got orders for your book from Suzy Quatra, who’s your distributor. And I’ve been knocking doors for like a couple of years by then and nobody was talking to me. ’cause I had like three books and I said, I don’t have this distributor. And they said, well choose one. And there was two larger distributors in the UK and I just chose one and the rest is history.

Wow. You know, that’s like the start. You’ve gotta open that first door. So, so you really did slip on a banana peel right into it? Yes, yes. Everything, obviously you worked your butt off at it, but at the same time there was a degree of luck involved in getting where you’ve gone. Oh yeah. ’cause the thing is, if you self-publish, you’ve got nothing.

You’ve got the work that we’ve done in your book, and then you are knocking doors and nobody wants to talk to you because they want you to have, let’s say, 25 books, uh, under your belt before we’ll talk to you or a hundred books before we will distribute you. And then just having Susie come to me and like join our publishing company, it just opened those doors straight away.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. How has self-publishing on the internet changed that a little bit like with Amazon where you can self publish today? Oh yeah. It’s changed a lot. Uh, when I was starting out, the self-publishing thing was just beginning, but it wasn’t taken seriously. And still today you don’t get taken seriously.

Teddie Dahlin: None of the distributors will sign you. You won’t get any deals. And the change, I think the biggest change came during COVID as well. We went from like, let’s say, a certain amount of self-published books on worldwide basis to several million books. And what that does is it takes away the focus on the books out there because there’s such a huge market that getting noticed is really difficult.

Steve Cuden: Oh, well that’s for sure. It’s, it’s a little bit like doing a podcast like this. There are now 5 million podcasts and it’s hard to get noticed. And so you have to figure out what I think is probably your specialty is how do you market those books? How do you get eyeballs on them? Yes. Yeah. The thing is marketing also changed during COVID.

Teddie Dahlin: It’s like, when I started out, I would, uh, as I said the said magazines in the uk and I, I did something for the US as well. Um, I would say, you don’t have to pay me, but I want an ad in your magazine. I want you to pay me with, this is my latest book coming out, not mine. Maybe Susie’s or maybe somebody else’s.

And that would be, that would be fine. But then COVID, there were no magazines. Nobody was buying anything. Everything was just like, stop. Everybody was at home, nobody was doing anything. And everything changed. Everything was suddenly digital. It wasn’t a cost, it was free. So you just have to go online and you just have to use whatever you can to get the attention of the readers.

Steve Cuden: So what do you then do, uh, today to, to get those, that attention? What do you, do you have any special techniques or anything that you can share? Yeah. What we do is we’ve got a database where we contact every single manager of every single Waterstones and every single, uh, Bon and Noble in the whole world.

Teddie Dahlin: Um, in addition, we have our list of magazines, and most magazines now are also digital. So we can get in there if there’s anything special that they’re wanting to focus on. We can also get like articles and marketing in there, but everything has changed, absolutely everything. Do you wind up selling to folks like Barnes and Noble and those sorts of distributors as well?

Steve Cuden: Those outlets? Yeah. I’m, I’m lucky enough that I have been able to get. I get a contract with the world’s largest print on demand, which is Ingram, and they distribute to 40, 50,000 online sellers worldwide. Wow. And I also, I also work with the UK’s largest distributor, which is gardeners books. And they get books into stores also, uh, mainly in the uk, but they also work internationally.

Teddie Dahlin: Getting the books and the titles and stuff out there is is not a problem. The thing, the trick is getting people to know that go on to Amazon or go on to Barn Noble or Fish Pond or wherever you are to order the book. Well, obviously you have to have people going to some outlet, whether it’s your New Haven site or whether it’s an actual dealer of some kind.

Steve Cuden: You’ve gotta get them there in the first place. Isn’t that right? Yeah, I think people are more into ordering online these days as a, uh, as opposed to going into a store and browsing. They know what they want. They’ll go in and they’ll order it and it’ll be delivered home to them. So everything’s digital.

Teddie Dahlin: It’s just taken off. I think that that’s absolutely true, but at the same time, I’ll tell you in the last year, I’ve been in a number of bookstores here in the, in the United States, in different places in the United States, and it’s amazing to me how busy they are. There are lots of people in those stores, so, uh, I think that you can take some comfort in that.

I don’t really work towards that segment to be honest. I was in, I was just in London now recently, and I went into the Waterstones Piccadilly store and it was basically me and a few people that work there. There are people can’t be bothered. Yeah, I think it is just become C, certain things you can order online and you get them home to you and you don’t have to think about it.

And I think books is absolutely, and we’re also digital with eBooks and digital magazines and kids books. So we’re everywhere. Yeah. Well, and you’ve built a nice, uh, empire there in, in, uh, Norway. Um, what made you decide to focus, and I’m, I think it’s a great thing that you did, but why did you decide to focus on music and entertainment?

Again, the banana peel thing I slid in. Yeah, because, um, I did the Sid Vicious book and when that came out I got quite a lot of, uh, promo for it. I was the guest at the, uh, large world’s largest punk convention in Blackpool. And I got to know a lot of people that were there back then. They got into contact with me as, uh, like Eileen Polk.

She was there when Sid died. Howie Pyro also. So Neon Leon, he was arrested. The first person arrested when Nancy Sponge was, uh, stabbed to death. These people got back into contact and we sort of started, and then Neil Leon wanted to publish his book and it just sort of became, you know, like the place that I knew, I called it home.

Steve Cuden: It kind of came to you, you were, you didn’t seek that out as a way to go. No, no, no, no, no. I, what I sought out was a publishing place for my own book, but it just rolled on from there. You know, like people coming to me and saying, hi, I’ve written a book. ’cause it’s very difficult in the publishing business now because back in the day, and really, uh, a lot of them are still doing this and that is that the publishers, they will print out a whole warehouse of books.

Teddie Dahlin: Let’s say that you’ve got 5,000 examples of this book. And they send them out and they flood the stores. Then they sit there for like three to six months, and then they get everything back that they have to pulp. And then there was COVID, but everything was closed. So people were ordering online and I think that just became the thing.

Really? Mm-hmm. It is just easy. It is easy. I buy lots of books online. Yeah, me too. And then they just didn’t go back to it. We are still available in stores and you can go into any store anywhere in the world as long as you know the title. You can order it, you can pick it up at the store if that’s, you know, like if that’s what you wanna do.

But most people just order it online and get it to them and they order it where they normally order their books like Amazon, Barnes and Noble Fish Pond, whatever. We there. Well, it’s, it’s certainly, um. Far cry from when, like you say, that people would have to hoard stock in a warehouse somewhere or in a store, and then it would get remaindered.

Steve Cuden: Now you can print on demand and you’re not holding any stock. Yeah. We, we do have to hold some stock because our distributors don’t work in that way. Mm-hmm. But yeah, if you’re in a, in a store, you’ve gotta have the books on the shelf. So, yeah. But you also have, uh, the possibility of printing the book that you want on a printing machine in the store.

Teddie Dahlin: Some stores have them. Mm, I believe New York and yeah. Wow, I did not know that. So you can, there are stores where you can walk in now and say, I’d like a copy of X book, and they’ll just print it on demand. Yes. There’s this huge, uh, machine and I, I can’t remember what it’s called, but you can go in and the machine is there and you just, you know, like, type in what you want and it will print it for you.

Steve Cuden: Wow. I did not know that. I’m, I’m glad to hear that. I think that’s, that’s kind of interesting and cool. You now at this point, do you have. Authors mostly coming to you to be published or do you seek out authors? Oh, I don’t seek out to authors. No, they come to you? Yeah. Yeah. ’cause the, the market is as such and I think that’s a good thing as well, because I think you should try to get with, you know, like the biggest, uh, publishing companies that you can first, or the biggest agencies that you can first, and then.

Teddie Dahlin: You kind of scroll back and then the end station is self-publishing. That’s if you can’t get anything else, then you do it yourself. ’cause you’ve got to believe in what you’ve written. Well, that’s for certain. Absolutely. You must believe in what you’ve written. Otherwise, how do you sell it? How do you even.

Steve Cuden: Tell people about it. And we’re, we’re gonna get to a vicious love story in a moment, but I want to continue on with, with, uh, the publishing business while, while we’re talking about it. Um, what would you say are a few things that a, an author needs to do in terms of the way that you look at authors to get a deal with you?

What, what are the tips? Okay, so. The first thing you need to do is to find out that the publisher that you’re contacting actually does these types of books. Because you, you, you’re either not gonna hear anything or you’re gonna get a no because they don’t do kids books or we don’t accept fiction and it’s a waste of time.

Announcer: Right? So find a publishing house that accepts the type of book that you’ve written. You need a sub NOIs, and then you need to break down the chapters to tell the publisher what it is you’ve written. And then you need a sample chapter so that we can see what sort of writing you do. That’s all I need. And so you don’t need to read the manuscript itself.

Steve Cuden: You need a synopsis to start. I can’t read all manuscripts. I’ve got 250 titles and 200 author and I can’t possibly, actually, that’s one of the down things with being a publisher. I used to live in books always. And since I became a publisher, I don’t read books because it’s work. So I, I, I do this and then I pass it on, and then my editor will tell me if there are any red flags or if there’s any liable, or if this is just not good.

Well, how do you make a decision on whether you’re gonna publish someone just based on the synopsis itself, not on the quality of the finished product. No, because I’ve got an editor who’s bloody brilliant. Mm. So yeah, so she can make anybody sound perfect. Wow. So it’s the idea behind the book, it’s a, let me give you an example.

Teddie Dahlin: I was contacted by a journalist from the BBC, and he’d done a kid’s book. And the kid’s book was based on a story that I’ve been in the press several years ago, I believe. About a walrus who had gone out from Greenland and then suddenly found himself in a place where he couldn’t be in his. He’d written the book, the Epic Adventures of Wally, the Walrus.

And the whole thing was, you know, like in the synopsis, telling the story that this is based around this and we’ve made this, and he is gone and he’s trying to get back to Greenland. And then when he gets back to Greenland, he runs to his walrus family and his grandfather doesn’t recognize him and he rugby tackles him.

You know, like these sort of things. I love it. I know. I don’t care what the writing’s like. The writing was brilliant by the way. But you know, it’s the story and the presentation. You have to get it across and obviously you have to, you personally have to feel something about that book or that author, I guess, um, to say yes.

Steve Cuden: You have to have a feeling about it. Yeah. Yeah, I, uh, I, you know, like the dollar stops with me. If I don’t believe in it or I don’t like it or whatever, then we’re not doing it. Mm-hmm. Because at the end of the day, it’s my money. I’m paying for everything. So it’s my decision at the end of the day. And I will sometimes go back and ask, you know, like several times for more information, but I have actually put in a clause in our contract, which says that if I can’t work with you.

Teddie Dahlin: It’s not gonna happen. I’m gonna, you know, like pull out, I’ve got like a, a back door, get out of jail free card. If, if it’s, uh, if it turns out to be not what I expected. Or if the author is difficult, and I assume you run into some difficult people here and there. Oh yes, absolutely. You’re saying that authors aren’t all, uh, total angels.

Oh no, don’t get me started. Uh, I think it’s very interesting that you have taken this on mainly by yourself. You don’t have a big staff, do you? No, I’ve got a team of three, and then we just buy into whatever we need when we need it. Hmm. That’s, I mean, that’s pretty amazing. So you’re able to run fairly lean and mean then?

Oh, absolutely. It’s, it’s probably one of the reasons why we’re still here. I, that makes sense because, uh, the, that business is so highly competitive. It, it is kind of interesting. And since you’ve brought folks to me, which has been a number of years now, I noticed that your catalog has grown and grown and grown and that you’ve taken on far more authors than when I first.

Steve Cuden: So, uh, I think that that’s really a positive and, and excellent position that you’ve, you’ve gotten yourself in. Let’s talk about, um, uh, a vicious love story for a moment, because I think that this is a very interesting book on a, on a group that I barely knew anything about. Before I read your book, I really didn’t know very much about the Sex Pistols.

Punk has never really been my main music focus, but I, me neither, but I’ve, I’ve heard enough of it to know, okay, I like this and I don’t like a lot of that. Um, tell the listeners a little bit more than we’ve already said about a, a vicious love story. What was the point in your writing the book? Why did you want to get that out to the world?

Teddie Dahlin: I was in a place in my life where I was at a crossroads. I didn’t know what to do. I’m married, I have three children. We were gonna be moving house, and I think I just, it’s probably classic midlife crisis. This Norwegian author contacted me not like sporadically, and if he had done so the year before, I would never have talked to him at all.

’cause I was a very private person. But because I was there and I was looking and thinking, what do I wanna do? I’m doing stuff that I don’t wanna be doing, uh, career wise. So when he contacted, I thought, you know, why not give him some tidbits and some information? And, and not reveal myself so much. You know, I, I kind of told him the rough idea about what had happened back in 77, but not the whole story.

And the funny thing was, nobody, not a one person in Norway talked to the press. The journalists in the uk, they had contacted my family in the uk. They also contacted the guy who brought the sex pistol, Scandinavia, and he was living at the time in Malta, and he contacted me and he says, you’ve got to write your own book.

You can’t, you can’t be doing this. Everybody wants to know more. So that was the background of it really, that I had to sit down and decide, shall I tell all, and people were really salacious. They wanted to know every single detail down to what did you eat, what did Steve Jones eat? What did Sid Vicious Did Sid Vicious ask you to cut up his food?

Which he did, by the way. And it, it was just like, okay. I’ll tell all I don’t care. Well, from, from being a shy, reserved person reading the book, you certainly exposed a lot of your experience with them, and it was very personal, very personal. It was absolutely, I was, I’d known the guy who, uh, organized the concepts.

You know, Norway was a bit of a black hole at the time. We didn’t have many international stars coming to Scandinavia. And the guy, he had organized concepts for Demi Rousseau, who was an, an opera singer and, uh, a couple of other like crooners. So it was very sort of before the rock bands and stuff started coming.

And he just like, again, slid in on the, the Sex Pistols coming to Norway and they were gonna do like a few concerts. And I thought if I do this, uh, I agreed to do it. I wasn’t punk. I was very disco. I loved Donna Summers. I was very conservative, absolutely not into that at all. And I thought if I do a good job with the Sex Pistols, then I’d get other opportunities and you would hire me to do, ’cause I knew we had, um, what was that band?

What Rod Stewart came. And, uh, Dr. Hook. Oh, they were so fun. They were really funny. They were great. So that was the main thing with it. I just like helped with the translation for the Sex Pistols and then would do more and I’d make a career of it. So in the book you talk about you did not really know who Sid Vicious was when he first walked in the door.

Steve Cuden: Am I right? Yeah, no, I had no idea because at the time I could, because of my English background, I’m not English by the way. I’m very Norwegian. I would like to read the English newspapers, but it took like three or four days before we had them back in the seventies. So the, uh, posters and everything that was going on with this much publicized concerts in Norway and Sweden.

Teddie Dahlin: Were featuring Glen Matlock because he was the original bass player. Mm-hmm. But what I didn’t, yeah, what I didn’t know was that he’d been fired and then they’d hired this other guy. So I had no idea who he was. I just knew that I had to be careful with the Sex Pistols because they were really scary. And I’ll tell you how I met them.

Um, the guy who organized the, the tour is called Tour, and I’d known him since I came to Norway, age 14 years old because my stepfather used to work at the cinema and some of the cinemas were used for rock concerts. So they would work together. Concert. So he was the original person who was going do this, and then they came and we were late because my mother, she’s a chef, she insisted that set for lunch when he came to pick me up and promised to bring me back by 10:00 PM and we were late.

So we got into the hotel where they were supposed to be checked in, and they were really angry. They were pissed off. I think we were about half an hour late. You you’re talking about the Sex Pistols were pissed off. Yeah, they were pissed off. They were sitting in the hotel reception and Tu and I were running in, you know, like flustered and there was a guy asleep on a sofa in the reception.

It was a red sofa. And I realized he had his boots on the sofa and I was thinking, oh shit, we’re gonna get into trouble. And there was this guy sitting in, you know, like in my line of sight, he, he stood up and he was red in the face. He was pointing to his watch and he says, what fucking time do you think this is now?

That was, that was Stephen Connolly. He was the original Sex Pistols roadie. And he also, so he would do both. Uh, we called him. And we were supposed to get them checked in. Then it turned out that the hotel wanted the sex pistols away from the other guests, and there was only one suite. So this huge argument broke out between John Den Johnny Rotten, and Steve Jones’s the guitarist.

So I was bored with the whole thing. So I went to sit on the sofa, the end of the sofa, where this guy was asleep, and I didn’t recognize him at all. And I, I, I don’t smoke, I haven’t done since then, but I did at the, at the time I was 16. ’cause it was cool that that’s, that’s interesting. I wanna remind the listeners that, that Teddy was all of 16 when this happened.

Steve Cuden: So Carry on. Yes. I was 16 and a few months and totally naive. And this guy was lying on the surface and he was asleep and he woke up and he sat up and the first thing he saw was me. I had a cigarette and he said, can we share that? And I thought, can’t be worse than talking to the two guys, arguing in reception about the suite.

Teddie Dahlin: So we just started talking and I simply assumed that this was a roadie. I didn’t recognize that and I was sitting there for a while and you know how obnoxious 16 year olds can be. I would never do that. Now today I was extremely rude. I got so fed up with the arguing, oh, you are the there and then you the sweet there.

So I worked over to reception. I said, um. Can we just stop this now? This is stupid. Let’s toss a coin. Now John and Steve will toss a coin and the one who gets it right will get the sweet and the one who gets it wrong will get the sweet when we get stock on. And there was just so taken aback. And then I looked over and the guy who had pointed at his watch, uh, rodent, the rodie, he was smiling from ear to ear.

And then I looked over the guy who was asleep at the sofa, and if he didn’t have ears, his smile would’ve gone all the way round his head and they went, okay. So I tossed a coin and uh, John Leiden got the sweet and that’s that. It’s done. Alright, check in. What the fuck? Get this, I’m not. And that was my first meeting with the Sex Pistols.

And it’s kind of weird because I was just in London now, uh, like about a week ago, and I make sure that I meet rodent, the roadie when I’m in London, you know, just to, we go up, we have a glass of wine with my husband and you know, like in the pub. So all these years later you’re still in touch with them.

Yeah, uh, uh, well, not all of them. Um, I’m still in touch with Broden. I dunno why we met after like 35 years when I was writing my book. I got into contact with them and because we share this, we share this experience. So we contributed a lot in my book and we are just really good mates. He’s, he’s a fantastic guy.

He does absolutely different things. Now. He is, uh, in a completely different role. Uh, still in the music business, but you know. So, yeah, I’m, uh, I haven’t been in contact with Paul Cook since back then. He’s a lovely guy, by the way. I’ve heard good things about him, and I felt good things about him when he was there.

Can’t stand Steve Jones. Steve, I hate you. He’s, he’s totally blocked me on social media because I had, I happen to address his shirtless photo and John’s people contacted me when my book came out actually. Who sadly died now contacted me, um, to say I couldn’t write my book, which I told him to sort off.

It’s my story. It’s got nothing to do with you, which was fine. And I’ve been in contact with Glen, who wrote the actual album. I’ve interviewed him several times and for some reason he’s decided to ghost me for the tons of rock tour, which is going on in Norway now. But it’s fine. So, alright. So did you know as you were going through this experience in which you spent approximately a week with them, correct?

No, no, no. Just a few days. Just a few days. Just a few days, yeah. So as you were going through this experience, did you ever think to yourself, I can’t imagine at 16 you did, but did you ever think to yourself, maybe someday this will make an interesting story that I could put into a book? Did that ever occur to you?

Steve Cuden: No. No. So you, no. Never. Were you, you, were you taking notes? Did you journal about it or anything like that? No. The thing is, when I moved to Norway from England, the first year, I had to intensively learn back Norwegian ’cause I wasn’t fluid, uh, fluent, sorry. And then after a year, I found out I struggled with English.

Teddie Dahlin: So I started to journal. But it wasn’t something that I thought I would keep for prosperity. Absolutely not. And I dunno if I would’ve ever come out with the fact that I even knew the Sex Pistols if it wasn’t for that first author. Writing about them and telling me, kind of telling me intensely they’re really significant.

And I didn’t feel they were, ’cause it wasn’t my type of music. So, so you actually didn’t think much about the experience other than you had it, you weren’t thinking about it as something that could be written about or, or sold? No. Interesting. No. Um, and I think that’s a good thing because, um, I was talking to Eileen Polk now, Eile Polk was a photographer who was in and around the New York scene, and she was also in the UK scene with the Rolling Stones.

And when Neon Leon went over to the uk. People, you’ve got to read my book. This is so interesting. It’s so connected. It’s interesting. Anyway, yeah. Anyway, Eileen Po was there the night, got the heroine, which killed him, and so was Peter Gravel. And these people got into contact with me again, and the thing was, she said, you should be very glad you put that aside because it would’ve stopped you from any addictions or anything that could have happened to you.

And I think I did the right thing. I think, you know, at the end of the day when the Scandinavian tour was over, the Sex Pistols went back to England. Then I didn’t hear anything for like about a month or two. Then I started getting messages from the musicians that I knew who were also in London saying, you know, like telling me Sid says this, and Sid says that.

And then they were going on the American tour. So I was told that we’ve made a new Scandinavian tour because Malcolm McLaren wanted to get sit away from Nancy’s Funn. And he thought that maybe a good way was to go back to Scandinavia and I was invited to meet them in Stockholm. Um, but that never happened.

And when the Sex Pistols kind of went to pieces. It wasn’t me that Sid contacted, it was Nancy, and that, I think that speaks volumes. So what we haven’t really said, that’s all throughout the book. In fact, the book is mainly about, is that you had a romantic relationship with him while they were in in Norway.

Steve Cuden: So. Yeah. How, I’m trying to figure out how all those years later you remembered everything that happened because it must have, do you have just that kind of a memory? You’ve got a very good No, no, no. So how did you remember all this to write it down? Okay, so Sid and I was 16, Sid was 20. And you know how it, what it’s like when you just connect with somebody and it, he was a really, really nice person.

Teddie Dahlin: He was a really smart, really nice kind person and the heroine of it all hadn’t started yet. Um, he’d met Nancy a few months before he went on the Scandinavian tour and he was really angry. He was so angry ’cause he’d been able to get a, a flat in London in, uh, an area called Maita Vale. And he’d been on tour with the pistols, and Nancy was allowed to stay in his flat and it was a very much offer on sort of thing, and he came back early and found her in bed with his worst enemy.

Now, I can’t remember who the person was. The only thing I remember in telling me about it was that this person played an instrument that was not normal in a band, like a violin or something. I have no idea. And he was so angry with her and it was just like not a topic that he wanted to talk about at all.

Then. He went back and when the tour happened, he didn’t want her. I heard later that he didn’t want her to turn up at the concerts. They had like the spot tour Sex Pistols on tour secretly when they got back ’cause they were banned. So they weren’t allowed to like announce it and she would just turn up and, and that was the reeling in of their Johnny Thunders and all the heroin epidemics that happened at the time.

So I think it was a good thing that I didn’t write. Sort of pursue it. And the second thing was that as soon as my mother, who’s a chef, got a phone call on the night saying, your daughters with the sex pistols at this disco in town, and this is not good. She stole my passport. And as a 16-year-old, you can’t just wander into, you know, like get a passport.

So there’s no way I was gonna the UK. And I think it’s a good thing, but how I remembered it was wasn’t on my own. I remembered bits and parts of it. Of course I did. And then talking to Eile Polk, talking to Neon Leon, and then especially Rhoda, and we’ve got, oh, remember we met Abba at the airport. You know, it was like lots of things, uh, coming to me that I’d actually forgotten.

So the book that I’ve written is really just like a small part of what I was in, and then it was a much bigger part of what everybody else was doing. And these were people that were there. They were there, they knew what happened. It’s not like second. So your, your research, if that’s what you want to call it, was in talking to people that were there at the same time.

Yes you did. You didn’t go to a library and, and dredge up old articles or anything like that? No. What I did was, uh, I got into contact with people who were there, people that I knew, and then they put me into contact. Like Eileen says, oh, you’ve got to talk to Peter Gravel. ’cause he was the guy who got the heroine.

And then, oh, you’ve got to talk to how pyro, because he was there when we were gonna scatter the ashes and he actually sniffed the ashes. Yeah, I know. And then it, it just kind of went from there until I sort of built up this based on people’s truths. The people who were there. And you know, like I did the book.

Steve Cuden: So you gathered all this information from talking to other people in your own memory, obviously, and then when you’ve decided, okay, you’re gonna sit down and write this book, did you outline what you were gonna do first? How did you approach writing the book? Um, the way I write all my books, it’s that I don’t outline anything at all.

Teddie Dahlin: I start writing and then I write until I’m empty. And it’s like, it’s a really weird process ’cause you can start writing and then suddenly you think, what’s that smell? You stink. ’cause you’ve been there for two days, you know? And then you go away from it and you leave it alone for a little while. Then you go back and read what you’ve written and then you continue writing.

And that’s the way I think I, I was writing for about a year. A year. And did you do a lot of rewriting of the book or once you were done, you were done? No, I just did what I did, you know, like, uh, writing, going back, rewriting, going back, and then just like progressing and progressing, getting comments from other people, getting people to, you know, like, allow me, can I use this comments in the book?

I mean, peach Gravel and Eileen PO have written, you know, like huge chapters, androgens and, and other people who were there, just getting them, putting it in the book and then thinking, what did we do that day? That day we went to a museum. People are surprised. The Sex Pistols went to a museum. They, we had a day off and you know, it’s just like trying to paint the picture of Sid Fishers was not the punk rock poster boy that Malcolm McLaren wanted to have out there.

Of course, he became that when he was, you know, on the heroin and, you know, like deeply retraumatized and whatnot. But they’re just people. Well, well, when you take on the names Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, it has a connotation of being nasty in some way. So that’s where that comes from. Yeah. But that was just like what I.

Called, it was pistols, modus. So we would go, John Leiden is one of the most intelligent and most funny people I’ve ever met in my life until he threw me against the wall. But it was, it was like very creative people, very funny people. And then we’d go out to a restaurant and we’re sitting at the restaurant.

And then suddenly they’d start throwing food at the other tables and shouting and stuff. And that I was mortified and I was saying to say, whatcha doing? He says, it’s expected. We’ve got to do this. It’s their reputation. Yes. So absolutely orchestrated to sort of play into what they were and take the, uh, spitting the spitting thing.

Was not something they, well, Sid thought it was really funny and so did Steve. John hated it. And at the concert there was, uh, somebody, I think it was sad who’s into the audience, but what he didn’t think of was that you’ve got hundreds of people. Gonna spit back. You see what I mean? And John, John Knight was going, stop, stop.

I’m walking off stage with your spit anymore. And everyone’s going, huh? What? So it was like, um, yeah, it was surreal. I think this is true for a lot of celebrities is that you are either inside or you’re outside. They have like a, a wall where they have like their persona that’s outside and then they have like the inside where they can be themselves.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. And I think I was very much inside. That’s really common to have, uh, somebody who’s a celebrity of some kind to have sort of two different lives, one in the public ly and one one in private. Absolutely. Uh, you know, there’s been one major movie of, uh, Johnny Rotten being Sid Nancy, um, which is a well-known movie.

I think this would make a really interesting movie too, if you tried to sell. Um, no, I haven’t. Um, because it’s, it’s so short and it’s such an, an insignificant part of their journey. It would have to be, and also there are so many stories about it. You’ve got lots of, like, um, Alan G. Parker did, he used to be with, uh, Sid’s mom.

Teddie Dahlin: Who was also there. She uh, I think she was the one who put the heroin when he overdosed. When he died. That was there. I don’t, I don’t see this as being significant. I was 16, he was 20. It was just a few days. It was a fling. We thought we were in love. That was really weird. We were talking about Sid moving to Norway and you know, like how he could get back to the UK to do his music and if he had, he’d probably still be alive today.

But sadly. It is what it is. I, I’ll disagree with you only in the sense that I think that there is an, a movie in there and that I think that if it were brought out, I think it would be a very interesting movie of one little, tiny slice of time in just that few days in, in, uh, dealing with this group, which was a, a seminal group in the punk rock movement.

Steve Cuden: So I’ve been having just a lot of fun today. Speaking to Teddy, Darlene, uh, the publisher and author. We’re gonna wind the show down a little bit right now, and I’m just wondering, um, beyond the, the advice that you’ve given in the show, do you have a solid piece of advice or a tip that you give, like, to give to people who are just starting out in the business or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to the next level?

I’m talking about writers, publishers, et cetera. Yeah. Uh, getting a publisher to look at your book is an eye on impossible, and what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to develop a really hard skin because even though you get a thousand nos. There’s not anything in those. No, thank you. That reflects on your book.

Teddie Dahlin: It can be so many different reasons. We don’t like kids books. We don’t take fiction there. We’ve got other books out on the same topic, et cetera, et cetera. You’ve just gotta keep going. You’ve got to believe in yourself and you’ve got to think. Try and contact the publishing houses. Many of them do not Talk to authors.

Find out which agents are the agents that are in the know or that are let in at the different publishing houses. If you’re contacting like the big four, used to be the F five. Sidebar, did you know that Simon and Schuster? The Simon in Simon and Schuster’s, Carly Simon’s dad? I did know that. Did you? Oh yeah, I knew.

Well done. And not many people knew that. ’cause we’ve got the, uh, uh, a book written by her guitarist, uh, Jimmy Ryan and her sister Lucy was a very fine composer. Oh, was she? I did not know that there. Mm-hmm. You see uhhuh? Yeah. So you’ve got to take the nose and just roll with them and keep going. And then you get to a state where there are so many nos that you’ve got to think.

Shall I self-publish? Now, if you self-publish, you don’t have the distribution, you don’t have the help in getting your book out, but your book will be out. And I know if you do it on like Create Space or if you do Ingram Spark, there is also a distribution. Although you don’t have that control of it, you can get it out.

So don’t give up.

Steve Cuden: That’s very, very wise advice. Um, I, I can’t thank you enough, Teddie, for spending time with me on the show today. This has been a lot of fun for me and I, I really appreciate your, your energy and your wisdom that you’ve shared with us today. Thank you.

Teddie Dahlin: Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Thank you for having all my authors on your show as well.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s story bead. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you are listening to. Your support helps us bring more great story beat episodes to you. Story Beat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tune in and many others.

Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.