When the pop group The Boo Radleys split up in 1999 after ten years of international fame and success their lead singer, Sice, retired to the country to be a house-husband and novelist.  The first product of that new career is the novel 'Thimblerigger', a huge, sweeping saga set in the criminal underworld of Victorian Liverpool.  

 

Lockton Leather is no ordinary patient. Physically and mentally scarred, he looks back from extreme old age to a remote past as a Thimblerigger among the criminal underworld of Victorian Liverpool. It was a life fraught with hardship and danger; one which returns to threaten everything he holds dear. But how can this be, when he is telling his story in 1999? Drawn ever deeper into Lockton's life history, Dr Sam Stockwell, the psychologist assigned to work with him, finds it increasingly hard to extricate reality from fiction, till he finally begins to suspect that the old man may actually be telling the truth

 

In 2005 Sice, Simon Rowbottom went back out onto the stage with his new band, Paperlung he has since made a very successful career change and works as a counselling psychologist.