Books
Sort Your Head Out
(Constable, coming Feb 2023)
'By my thirties I had a successful career, my own house, a lovely wife and two incredible kids. I was respectable. I had everything I had ever wanted. My whole life seemed to be on track. Until it wasn't.'
Sam Delaney was Jack the Lad. He was confident, loud and funny; an absolute legend, to be honest. Or at least that was what he pretended to be.
But when he reached his thirties, work, relationships and fatherhood started to take their toll. Like so many blokes who seemed to be totally fine, he often felt like a complete failure whose life was out of control; anxiety and depression had secretly plagued him for years. Turning to drink and drugs only made things worse. Sam knew he needed help - the problem was that he thought self-help was for hippies, sobriety was for weirdos and therapy was for neurotics.
Keeping it all inside was what nearly dragged Sam under. Then he began to open up and share his story with others. Soon his life started to get better and better. Now, he's written this book to help you do the same.
Covering his complex upbringing, fast paced career, struggles with addiction and recovery, and detailing lessons he's learnt along the way, Sort Your Head Out is Sam's startlingly raw, compassionate and hilarious account of why opening up is the first step to sorting your head out.
Mad Men And Bad Men
(Faber, 2015)
How did a bunch of unelected, unaccountable admen end up running British politics?
What happened when a rag-tag band of scruffs and smart-arses invaded Westminster, sprinkling creative fairy dust over earnest politicians? How much did snappy slogans and simplistic soundbites influence election results and even government policies?
Sam talks to the people at the heart of it: Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Tim Bell, Maurice Saatchi, Norman Tebbit, Neil Kinnock - and many more. Everything is here - the moment Margaret Thatcher met the Saatchi brothers, the famous 'Labour Isn't Working' poster and the infamous 'Demon Eyes' campaign. Here, too, are the stories they didn't want you to hear: the man who snorted coke in Number 10, the fist-fights in Downing Street, the all-day champagne binges in Westminster.
Dark, revealing and frequently hilarious, Mad Men and Bad Men is a hugely entertaining behind-the-scenes tour of the election campaigns of the last four decades.
Night Of The Living Dad
(John Murray, 2009)
A mop of black hair, wrinkled skin, a blueish-grey complexion and pretty, open eyes that dart around the room. You could call her scary and weird-looking I suppose but I quite like her.
Sam Delaney is happy: he is a new dad. He plans to be a caring, wise and reliable father.
Except he worries he might be none of those things. He worries that he might be an idiot. His nieces and nephews see him as a lovable buffoon. He is a clumsy oaf and sporadic binge-drinker who doesn't have a proper job and cites 'Teen Wolf's dad' as his biggest role model. Is he really fit for this new position of responsibility? There's only one way he'll be able to find out.
Follow Sam in his first year of fatherhood as he tries to figure out what a good dad should be, and, even more importantly, what sort of dad he should be.
Get Smashed
(Sceptre, 2007)
Between the 1960s and the 1980s some of the most influential men in the country spent most of the day in the pub and got paid more than the Prime Minister.
They were responsible for transforming a lifeless advertising industry into something exciting and extravagant. They came up with the idea of selling lifestyles. They changed what we ate, how we dressed and who we voted for and celebrated with fast cars, private jets and champagne.
GET SMASHED is a story of ambition, obsession and excess and how the ads that began by reflecting British culture came to define it.
Purchase a signed and dedicated book
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