This book was the first to appear about Carlisle United for five years when it was published last month. It filled a void in the market and is destined to be a big-seller for its 40-year-old author, Neil Nixon. Singin' The Blues is the Cumbrian answer to Nick Hornby's ground-breaking Fever Pitch, a tale of one man's passion for his team, and that team in this instance is Carlisle United.

Its 288 pages are divided up into a series of thirteen Blue Nightmares and a matching set of chapters. The Nightmares are Neil's way of putting into perspective some of the absurdities involved in following a small club who spend most of their time infuriating their hardy band of followers. He celebrates the special characters he saw wearing the blue of Carlisle and relates them to his own evolving lifestyle which saw him move to the South of England but never that far away from his first love.

Young Neil focused his attention on unorthodox striker Stan Webb, a sort of early 70's version of Carl Heggs. Webb was the first player that Neil was fully able to evaluate and discuss with confidence in the school playground. He recalls this development in the book:

I wasn't exactly smart enough to work out what it was about Webb that was so unusual, but I was sharp enough to listen to the old timers on the edge of the Warwick who would scream, pass comments, and casually impart wisdom that was snapped up eagerly by some of the youngsters in front. As I recall it, the main difference between Webb and several of the others was that Stanley's slips were often greeted with gasps of despair along the lines of 'Fuckin' Pillock'. You might get the same abuse hurled at someone else, but on the rare occasions that Frank Barton lost the ball in the same circumstances, it might be 'Barton , you fuckin' pillock'. The difference - and it matters here - is that people were hacked off with a skilful player like Barton because they figured he could help it. Webb, and for all I know the guy is about to win a Nobel prize for a great discovery, was given the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that he couldn't help it.

Unusual and gangly centre forwards were clearly Neil's favourites, as another player he latched on to later in his supporting life was Paul Bannon. Bannon, as older fans remember, wore a droopy moustache and had a highly impressive scoring record despite his seemingly low skill quotient. Bannon's prodigious height was his main weapon, allowing him to knock in goals rather in the manner of a giraffe nibbling leaves off the tops of trees. Neil was quick to appreciate Bannon's rather morose demeanour as well:

Paul Bannon on the other hand. What was great about Paul Bannon was his rather mournful look. He looked like some world-weary police constable jogging around his beat in the total certainty that life's darker side would present itself at any second. A natural athlete only up to a point, Bannon oozed character in a subtle way. I'd managed to miss him the previous season. He came on as a substitute for the new wonder boy, Gordon Staniforth. Staniforth had the Keegan perm, the obligatory tache and a sense that the cameras were on him all the time. Bannon had the tache, the long hair and a totally different aura - he was the anti-Gordon Staniforth. It all came clear to me, still trying to get up to speed on the new faces, when Bannon jogged on as sub and somebody close by shouted out, 'Smile you miserable twat, you've got a game.'

That's what I like about this book. Neil is a keen observer of the game of football. Not just the obvious things like great goals and trendy players, but also all the goings-on around the periphery. Although he wasn't always a regular at United games, he had a keen sense of where the club was at, in a broad sense. The book meanders its way through the 80's and 90's as Carlisle meandered up and down the league and, although Neil had a variety of jobs to keep him busy, he managed to catch enough games to see just about where his favourite club was heading.

Towards the end of the book, we see a first glimpse of that modern wonder, the Internet. This is the first CUFC book to be written in the post-Internet era, and Neil manages to capture some of the bizarre rumours and heresay that have done the rounds on this newest of communications carriers. Yes - he dropped into this site on occasion and sampled the rumour mill and the latest transfer stories. As Carlisle diced with death in each of the last two seasons, Neil's book was being hawked around cyberspace. That it came out at all might be seen as a minor miracle in itself. I for one am glad it did.

What was your main motivation for writing your book?

Telling it the way I wanted to. The book started life when the publisher - who was just starting Terrace Banter at the time - rang me and asked me if I'd do it. I said yes for several reasons. On the laudable side I cared to the point that I knew I could write a book from the heart. On the less laudable side I'd only got one other book deal on the table and that was for a book that was already complete and required only minor editing.

What were the main obstacles to overcome in order to get the book written and/or published?

I was offered the deal and it was a genuinely good contract. That bit was easy. On the downside the publisher is very small time and most the problems have revolved around that. In truth I've repped it around Southern shops myself, done almost all my own publicity, including organising interviews with radio and television and generally done the kind of things that other publishers would ring up and tell me were already organised.

The biggest obstacles - aside from having to make things happen myself - were the year's delay and some of the mistakes. Both of these come down to me and the publisher being worked off our feet and operating somewhere in the GM Vauxhall Conference of the book world. The book should have been out in August 1999 and the reasons for the delay are explained in the book.

There are highlighter pen markings all over my copy in the hope that we can revise the whole thing to clear out some mistakes - stuff as blatant as missed names. This happened because I ended up sending two final manuscripts to the publisher. One in 1999 and one about 6 weeks before the damn thing finally came out. In the intervening time I corrected the major mistakes from the first draft and sent the corrections to the publisher. Somewhere in the tangle of final drafts the corrections appear to have vanished. Frustrating, but oddly it doesn't seem to have harmed people's enjoyment of the book, only mine.

Writing it was as easy as writing can be when you've got a family, full-time job, addiction to a team who get above 90th place one week in every fifty, heavy coffee habit, lack of sleep from those endless early morning hours listening to the wife sleep as you wonder why the fuck you ever left Cumbria and how you could talk the rest of the family back.......you know, normal distractions.

Would you go through it all again (a book about CUFC I mean) ?

Too damn right I would. If I'll pay money to watch Billy Wright, Eric Gates......well, there are more painful things than writing books.

Is there a fortune to be earned by writing about CUFC ?

The obvious answer is no. In reality it isn't that simple. For starters, my book had a great first month in Carlisle. I'm not gonna retire on it but - to date - we've exceeded our most ambitious hopes.

I genuinely tried to make my book an autobiography that had some overlap into the market for works like Fever Pitch and many of the reviews have picked up on that. So, because Carlisle United during my lifetime is a great story there is certainly the potential to use it as a backdrop to something else which would make money. But it is still a long shot in market terms.

Melvyn Bragg and Margaret Forster have tried similar things writing about Cumbria and their books sell everywhere.

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