Paul Byrne, who used the pseudonym Frank Key, was a British writer, illustrator, blogger and broadcaster best known for his self-published short-story collections and his long-running radio series Hooting Yard on the Air, which was broadcast weekly on Resonance FM from April 2004 until 2019. Key co-founded the Malice Aforethought Press with Max Décharné and published the fiction of Ellis Sharp. According to one critic, "Frank Key can probably lay claim to having written more nonsense than any other man living."
Life
Frank Key was born Paul Byrne on 29 January 1959 in Barking, Essex. His father Francis Byrne was a history teacher, communist, and Labour councillor; his mother Lydia Brusseel was Belgian, a Flemish-speaker from Ghent, who had met her future husband when he was stationed in the city at the end of the Second World War. Key grew up on the Marks Gate council estate in Dagenham "in a home where Catholic faith and Socialist politics were the twin pillars of a moral life". He attended the Campion School, a Roman Catholic grammar school in Hornchurch and went on to study Art History at the University of East Anglia. After university he returned to London, working as a human resources and welfare officer for the London Borough of Islington. But a period of heavy drinking disrupted his creative, professional and family life, a decade he often referred to as his "wilderness years." A revival came in 2003 with the launch of the Hooting Yard blog, and in the following year he began regular broadcasts on Resonance.fm, which ran until his death. Key was divorced and had two sons. In later years, he referred to a muse, Pansy Cradledew, who occasionally took part in Hooting Yard broadcasts. He died on 13 September 2019. In March 2020 a retrospective exhibition of his graphic work and writing, crowd-funded by friends and fans and curated by Pansy Cradledew, was held at the Menier Galley in Southwark.
Writing
Prior to 2006 Key's published work consisted almost entirely of short-run, self-published pamphlets. All of these original printed releases are out of print. Some of these books have become collector's items which have traded at many times their original value. In 2009 Key began re-publishing stories from his small-press releases. We Were Puny, They Were Vapid, included the short stories The Phlogiston Variations and The Book of Gnats, which were originally published in the Massacre anthology series. In 1986, inspired by the postpunk DIY ethic, Key founded the Malice Aforethought Press with Max Décharné. Over the next few years they published a large number of short-run pamphlets. In 2003 Key launched "Hooting Yard", originally intended as an internet archive of his writing. In addition he released six volumes of stories which originally appeared on his web-site. These were published by Hooting Yard and made available as paperbacks and eBooks via Lulu. In 2014, Key published By Aerostat to Hooting Yard - A Frank Key Reader, a selection of 147 previously published stories, with an introductory essay by Roland Clare.
Broadcasting
Resonance FM
Key broadcast weekly on Resonance FM, since 14 April 2004 when his show Hooting Yard on the Air was first commissioned. The programme was broadcast live from Resonance FM's studios and consisted almost entirely of Key narrating his own short stories and observations. Hooting Yard is the longest continuously running series on Resonance FM, with only the ClearSpot Show having existed on the schedules for longer. Resonance has broadcast a number of Hooting Yard special episodes. In December 2007 Key and the performance artist Germander Speedwell performed the whole of Jubilate Agno, an epic devotional poem by Christopher Smart. This was the first and only time that this poem has been performed in its entirety on live radio. The entire performance was in excess of three hours. Key appeared in Episode 3 of Resonance FM's Tunnel Vision, a series recorded entirely in the sewers under London.
's literature columnist Sam Jordison described Frank Key as one of the most prolific living writers of literary nonsense. The Guardian's David Stubbs wrote that Frank's prose "reminds of Max Ernst engravings gone Bonzo Doo-Dah". The SF critic David Langford wrote "Frank Key's lumbering machinery is like nothing since Ralph 124C 41+ and other pillars of SF's wooden age, only more decrepit. He may even conceivably be writing steampunk.". In a review of Twitching and Shattered, John Bently concluded, "It isn’t surrealism, it isn’t satire, it’s just not like anything else." Edmund Baxter, the director of programming for Resonance FM wrote "Frank Key is one of the most important writers in English today".
