Swan songs

"Unfortunately making the greatest rap album of all time was to be put on hold as the insidious Job Centre advisors had finally had enough of my shit.

I would be forced to sign up to one of the town's two recruitment agencies, or I would be starved of weed money."Leonard Swanson lives in an obscure north-western town - the kind that "has a knack for swallowing you whole".

He is supposed to be making the greatest rap album of all time, Swan Songs, but instead is forced to work in one of the town's factories, "picking things up and putting them down for twelve hours in a giant white room".

Swan Songs follows Leonard as he works, quits, signs on, and travels the country, playing in small capacity venues for even smaller capacity audiences, for which he gets "paid in booze, drugs and a night on a bed bug-ridden mattress somebody dragged in from the street", all the while making the album he thinks will change hip-hop forever. Part Alan Sillitoe and part William Burroughs, UK rapper Lee Scott's debut novel, partially based on his own experiences of becoming a rapper in Runcorn, is an experimental and humorous modern satire about the perils of being a hip-hop visionary far from the beaten track...