Ahead of its anticipated release, Barton spoke to us about the biography’s inception and how he got involved. “I’d been in contact with the family going back to 2018,” said Wayne. “After I did the Jimmy Murphy book, I was invited down to St Francis’ [Church, in Dudley]. They were having a memorial service down there for Duncan and the other Babes. That’s how I connected with some of them – Keith [Edwards, first cousin], Lawrence [Brownhill, second cousin]. There were other family members too, but they are the ones who are most prominent in the media.
“Over the following years, they’d make it known in conversations that there was a wish in Duncan’s family [to do a book]. There’s obviously been books on him before, and rightly he’s had this legendary, mythical status. But they just wanted some sort of record on him that portrayed him as a normal, every-day lad, and the person they knew. That was how those conversations started. I went down to Dudley a few times and I was talking to different people, and everyone that’s been to Dudley will know the regard that he’s held in. It seems like there’s something about him on every street corner. There’s a lot of pride down there. The penny started to drop in terms of how they wanted to portray him in a different way. Yeah, he’s this mythical son and they are so proud of him; they want the local kids to know that it’s aspirational; that a local ordinary lad did this.
“But once I knew the angle they wanted to go at, and that it was something different to the way that the story has been told before, I was excited. But also a little bit apprehensive, because it’s Duncan!”