Rock stars may like to give the impression of being uncouth but some of their coolest songs are influenced by literature.
by: Victoria Segal
Leather trousers; guitar; library card: for all rock’n’roll’s upfront priapism, its back pocket has long contained a battered paperback. It might not have started that way — book-learning is hardly the main concern of Be Bop a Lula or All Shook Up — but by the Sixties pop music was aiming for the head as well as the heart and the groin.
The Beats sparked Bob Dylan’s synapses, the Doors were indebted to William Blake for their name and imagery, and the Velvet Underground, named after a book about sexual subcultures, were inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s whip-cracking book to write Venus in Furs.
There are reading glasses perched on the least likely noses: Iggy Pop might be the quintessential rock warlock, but his 1977 album The Idiot nodded to Dostoevesky’s novel. Last year he reminded people that there was more to him than a kebab-like torso and fondness for car insurance with his Franco-jazz album Préliminaires, his take on the novel by the notorious French misanthrope Michel Houellebecq, La Possibilité d’une île. “I just got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music,” Iggy said, bookishly.
Peter Wilson, the Belfast singer-songwriter who operates under the name Duke Special, understands the strong pull that literature can exert on music. His three-CD set The Stage, a Book and the Silver Screen, out now, contains the music he performed in Deborah Warner’s National Theatre production of Mother Courage and her Children, an EP devoted to Kurt Weill’s songs for his unfinished musical Huckleberry Finn, and The Silent World of Hector Mann, a suite of songs inspired by Paul Auster’s 2002 novel The Book of Illusions.
“I suppose when you are a songwriter one of the most important things is keeping your radar open for any moments of inspiration — a phrase in a conversation, a film that you’ve watched,” Wilson explains. “I was reading The Book of Illusions, about a silent-movie star who led a very colourful life but disappeared at the zenith of his powers in the late 1920s. He leaves behind 12 films and the book describes one of the films in detail, about a man who is given this potion that makes him gradually disappear. I found it a really intriguing scenario. I was in a studio recording a different song, waiting for the engineer to fiddle around, and I started playing around with this concept. A song called Mr Nobody came out. ”
The literary game is a dangerous one. Art schools have long been considered breeding grounds for bands — the Rolling Stones, Wire, Roxy Music — but there are surprisingly few graduates in English on the scene. While a casual allusion is often a safe bet for reflected cool, more sustained homage runs the risk of pretension. Discreet references abound, whether in a band’s name — the Soft Machine, a tribute to William Burroughs — or the one-off song title — Joy Division’s Atrocity Exhibition, from J. G. Ballard.
Brilliant though Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights is, it only gets away with it by the skin of its theatrically bared teeth. Prog-rock also casts a warning shadow over any would-be biblio-rockers. Camel’s 1975 opus Music Inspired by the Snow Goose, based on the Paul Gallico short story, is unlikely to send anyone rushing to their nearest bookshop, while Rick Wakeman has lit-crime form both with Yes (Tales from Topographic Oceans was inspired by Paramahansa Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi) and with his solo works Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, formerly the rhythm section of Galaxie 500 and now the space-folk duo Damon and Naomi, also run Exact Change, a small press specialising in reprints of surrealist and experimental literature (“a looking-glass version of Penguin classics”, as their website exactchange.com has it). “Are books and music natural companions? They are in our house — we live surrounded by both!”
They are aware of the pitfalls. “We’ve stolen bits from literature for songs, but we’ve never attempted something like a concept album based on a book,” Krukowski says. “That would seem to be an invitation for a Spinal Tap-type disaster. I have one in my record collection that I treasure for just that reason: Hamlet Hallyday by Johnny Hallyday. Although the title pretty much says it all, you really have to hear it in its entirely to appreciate its ... scope.”
Wilson thinks differently. “I think the cliché is that rock’n’roll is this lesser art form,” he says. “I’ve been learning a lot about Kurt Weill recently and often he put things to music that were already works of literature, whether poems of Walt Whitman or adapting books for opera. There’s a danger of the audience thinking, ‘Uh-oh, alarm bells, concept album’, but you have this really rich vein of material and I think the songs have every chance of coming out really well formed and accessible.”
Krukowski ponders books that he would like to see turned into music. “I’ll leave it to Christopher Guest. I would especially love to see him tackle the New Testament.”
For the marriage of rock and reading to work, the book in question must lend itself to ostentatious reading in cafés and at bus stops, a shorthand for cool all by itself. The Lou Reed version of Lark Rise to Candleford, for example, is yet to happen — although he did record a collection of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry on The Raven in 2003.
When the private world of reading and the public world of performance mesh happily, all parties benefit: musicians appearing cerebral, writers appearing hip, readers and listeners feeling smart.
“I sent Paul Auster a copy of the Hector Mann recording and got a really nice e-mail from him saying he loved it,” Wilson reveals. “I told him I was going to be in New York and his assistant set up a meeting in a little deli in Brooklyn. It was very strange talking to him about Hector Mann and thinking this is the guy whose head the character came out of. “It was,” he says with wonder, “like something from one of his books.”
Duke Special is touring the UK and Ireland from May 1 (dukespecial.com)
From: Times
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