Parson mellows into success

'Stay close to the things you love. And take a baseball bat to the rest.' So ran Tony Parsons's advice to wannabe journalists in his first collection of writing, Dispatches From The Front Line Of Popular Culture.

It's certainly stood Parsons in good stead over 25 years as a scattergun patter merchant for hire, from covering the 'punk goldrush' (his phrase) for NME in the 1970s - right up to the present.

Though punk's battle cry was Live Fast, Die Young, very few did and Parsons today - dressed in comfortable slacks, sipping tea and passing round pictures of his baby daughter - is best known as a mellow, middle-aged, best-selling novelist, mining the same ' blokelit' seam of sensitive modern-day maleness as Nick Hornby.

Yet, Parsons's latest novel, The Family Way, a tale of three sisters and their different roads toward motherhood, sees him changing tack and writing from a woman's perspective. 'It would have been a lot easier for me to have written this book from a male point of view,' he admits.

'You know, the guy that gets a woman pregnant accidentally; the guy whose wife can't get pregnant; the guy whose girlfriend doesn't know whether she wants to be pregnant or not. To me, that would have been copping out because once we've done our 30 seconds' worth, Mother Nature's finished with us, really.'

Music clearly still courses through Parsons's veins, however. Next up, he plans to write a rock'n'roll novel about writers and musicians in the late 1970s, followed by another set in Hong Kong. 'I love Hong Kong,' he says.

'But when people write about Hong Kong, they tend to try to encapsulate the whole history: Japanese occupation, mass immigration, all that. And that's fine. But I'd like to take it to the other extreme and have it set over one night, like a sort of Far East American Graffiti.'

Tony Parsons appears at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday. www.edbookfest.co.uk