"My name is Billie Morgan. And I am a murderer." Although Bradford novelist and poet Joolz Denby has not murdered anyone, in her latest novel she looks back to her own past when she rode with the Bradford biker gang, Satan's Slaves.

Joolz's latest novel, Billie Morgan, is the story of a Bradford woman and moves from the 1970s when she gets involved with the biker gang, Devil's Own, to the present day where she has settled down to what seems to be a very different life as the owner of a jewellery shop. From the beginning we know somewhere along the way Billie has killed a man and now it looks as though her secret will be found out.

Joolz does not pretend that her depiction of Billie's life with the Devil's Own gang is anything other than her own story: "I regard my past and the past lives I've had as a creative resource - what I've done, and what I've been, and what I'm experiencing. I'm not a nostalgic person. I don't really live in the past. I have a friend who who describes me as high status, high maintenance, high velocity. It's all forward-motion. I'm only interested in what I'm making now but it would be foolish to ignore what you've experienced.

The fictional Billie Morgan rides with the bikers' gang, The Devils Own

"Some people try and escape their past and I don't think you can escape it. I think you have to deal with it. Things have happened to you which will impinge on your present life - for example, some people if they've had a bad childhood they carry it with them always. My attitude is that you are not that child anymore, it's not going to happen to you anymore - take comfort from that - but you have to know what it was that happened to you and see how it impinges on your current life."

Joolz has moved on, she is not the same person she was at 19 nor is she Billie in the book and, as she says: "I didn't murder anyone. But, if I had, would I tell anybody?"

So, why does she now want to revisit her experiences as a biker? "By chance I happened to have had quite a varied life and in that variety there is a rich vein of interest and authentic experience, and I get very tired of reading books about bikers and bike culture which are basically exploitative and very inaccurate and use the shock-horror element and they range from books by certain Canadian lady novelists of the forensic school who wrote a very bad book about bike culture. To have the men I know described as knuckle druggie Neanderthals by a woman who has no knowledge whatsoever of this culture, I found deeply patronising and insulting. Not everyone of them was the brightest button in the box but, on the other hand, and I still know them, there were a lot of intelligent interested counter-culture men, and also women, who didn't feel particularly part of what we call straight society but who were seeking to find a different way of life and that was, remember, the 1970s. Everything's changed. There are different gangs on the street but I can only speak for what it was when I was there. It was something, I tell you, riding through Bradford"

I watched how they spoke, walked, drank, acted with each other and, most importantly, towards the big man who was obviously their leader. In a weird parody of Da Vinci's 'Last Supper,' he took the place of Christ, his men on either side of him, talking in his ear, his deep-set, sloe-black eyes full of a Machiavellan intelligence...

From Billie Morgan

Joolz says that being a biker at that time was not necessarily an easy ride: "It was very difficult. We didn't have a very good relationship with the police. If anything happened you knew you would immediately get the blame. There were only certain places you could go. We had a lot of power on the streets so I was Little Queen - I just went where I liked and did what I liked because I had a lot of protection. We had a lot of power but you were definitely marked out. Bike culture is very hierarchic and patriarchal so obviously I wasn't in the Satan Slaves. My husband was in the Satan Slaves. I was married to him and that's quite a distinction. As a woman you can't be in those gangs. It may have changed now but I doubt it."

Despite, or perhaps because of this, Joolz thinks the bikers gangs provided a ready family for their member's: "It was very much a family structure with the patriarch - Carl in the novel. He's the king if you like and his courtiers sit around him; his serjeant-at-arms, his treasurer, his various men around him. At one point in the book I describe him sitting at a long table like Leonardo Da Vinci's great painting, The Last Supper, with Carl in the place of Christ and other men around him as he speaks to them and that really is a good symbol of how it was.

"It's hierarchic down to the new would-be members, the Prospects as they were called, who wanted to be in it and were serving their apprenticeship and the women folk were the structure who held it together. My husband actually became treasurer so I was quite high-up in the hierarchy at one point."

Now Joolz rides a scooter, not a bike, but she still sees some of the people from those days: "Some of the men are still my friends and it is a wonderful thing to have a friend for over 30 years now. I know there are people out there who will go, ' I don't know how you can say that about that sort of person.' I can in all honesty say they're lovely men, they are kind and protective."

Joolz: "It was something, I tell you, riding through Bradford"

Now Joolz performs poetry, writes, and works as an illustrator as well as touring with the Bradford band New Model Army but she can see some similarities with her life as a biker: "Rock 'n' roll's not so very different really because working with New Model Army, that's also got a very family-type structure. I think we would say Justin Sullivan takes the place of the king really in the family structure, and his men around him in the same way. I think I've only really swopped one family for another. I think it's something we don't think about but we replicate the same things in our lives over again."

Not only will she shortly set off with New Model Army on their winter tour (working as crew) but a major 25-year retrospective of her work as an illustrator designing album covers, and other art work for the band, opens at Cartwright Hall Museum and Art Gallery on December 11th. She is already working on a design for their forthcoming album. Her new novel, too, has many musical references.

Asked if she has a particular soundtrack to her life Joolz says she is usually plugged into her iPod while she writes: "My choice is very eclectic. I do actually love New Model Army and I do play them all the time but, for example, at the moment I am working with a new young Bradford band called New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attack and they are a new Punk-Goth type band and I work with the frontman on his lyrics because he's a poet as well and they're great because they're young and energetic, and you can see them unpicking everything in their heads to make it new so it's fantastic to work with new bands."

She thinks people may be surprised to find she likes pop music, "goodtime music," and reels off some of the many other types of music and artists she loves including Latin pop music, Bulgarian folk music, Santana and Miles Davis but she returns to the music now coming out of Bradford: "I'm investing as much as I can in new, young music from Bradford."

Joolz also thinks that what she sees as the long fallow period of dance music is coming to an end - new bands are now searching for ways of putting the politics of their generation into their music but this is more likely to be politics built around single issues.

Violence is an interesting thing, don't you think? I read a statistic in the pepaer th eother day that said modern children are exposed to the details of over a thousand murders, via the media, before they're eighteen. Violence is on the telly, in our homes, day and night.

From Billie Morgan

For Joolz, one of the most important issues facing Bradford is gun crime and the reality and consequences of violence are central to her novel. She says: "I personally would want to start another anti-gun campaign...There is a racist subtext to why there isn't a gun campaign and anyone with anybrain can see that. While it's Asian street gangs are shooting each other there will be hell to pay and it's racism. There's no nice way of putting it but if we don't deal with it, if we don't give Asian youths some reason to invest in a greater society then it will continue. We need to admit that it's happening, not sweep it under the carpet and pretend everything's lovely in Bradford.

"We have to educate people about what it's like to shoot someone. I dealt with it in Billie Morgan because I have a real dislike of the pornography and glamorizing of weaponry. In films people get shot, get up and fight for another 15 minutes but it's not like that in real life. It's life-changingly awful and unless we deal realistically with drugs and with guns in Bradford we'll end up like America is now."

Despite this, Joolz does not see herself living anywhere else than Bradford and has little patience for anyone who is negative about the city: "I love it. It's so beautiful. People forget the geography which gives it the beautiful skies, the light, the buildings, everything. Bradford's addictive, isn't it?

"There are two ways to live in this city. You can live ugly or you can live beautifully. Now it's your choice - you can make a little negative nest to live in or you can go, 'Well, we've got problems but look at the buildings, look at the sunsets.' You can live beautifully and as we have to live here, most of us, then why live ugly?"

For Joolz much of her life is most definitely her work: "Sometimes I have nostalgia for weekends. I have good memories of getting dressed to go out on a Friday night and it was really exciting."

The roof of Bradford's Wool Exchange, now a bookshop, one of the buildings which makes Bradford beautiful.

She certainly has a lot to keep her going. She still does poetry tours, she is working on a book of poems and short stories, and, amongst other things, has been commissioned by the Royal Armouries in Leeds to produce a poem of remembrance, something she feels her background has prepared her for. The poem focuses on "soldiers who have fallen in wars, soldiers at war and about the nature of soldiery and peace and what that means because I'm from a military family and that's something I've thought about a lot."

And we probably won't have to wait that long for the next novel. Following the success of the award-winning Stone Baby, and her well-received second novel Corazon, she found her publisher though her third novel was too political for readers' tastes: "It dealt with a family from Bradford who went to Cornwall and it was to do with the class structure. They didn't want to have it because they didn't want to upset people who aspired to have second homes in Cornwall."

Her new publishers have now bought the book but is it likely that anyone might have a problem with a novel that focuses on class? Joolz has no doubts: "English literature does, full stop. British publishing houses find it very difficult to find something which rocks the boat or in some way examines the status quo."

In the meantime Billie Morgan is both a riveting thriller and a very personal tale!