Music and Writing

Fats Waller

Our house was filled with books and music. I grew up listening to Noel Coward, Flanders and Swann and the riches of the great American Songbook. George Gershwin and Irving Berlin were as familiar to me as Cinderella and my times tables. In these early years I learnt dozens of lyrics and stumbled through chord charts on the piano with my first step-father, an encouraging and brilliant professional.

At night I sang myself to sleep under the bedclothes, imagining that I was in front of a big band with a flower in my hair.

By the time I was eleven or so, Pooh’s 100 Aker Wood and Du Maurier’s Frenchman's Creek had melted into Here's That Rainy Day and my bucket of Things to Use Later was filling nicely: all sorts of words, all sorts of music. Rock'n'roll thrilled me and skiffle drove me to the guitar and folk, soul and pop.

Yellow Submarine

Eventually, I became a songwriter and even had a small hit with a track on Mary Hopkin's album Earth Song, Ocean Song. When the song Water, Paper and Clay was released as a single in America, Billboard described it as 'a love song analog to Yellow Submarine'. That's probably an insult.

So now I write novels and I'm wondering about the effect that those years of teasing out lyrics and matching them to the tunes in my head might have had on me, not to mention all the wonderful people I've listened to. I'm not conscious of the process but I aim to write sparingly, without too much extraneous 'noise'. I don't like sentiment in prose anymore than I do in a song. I don't want to manipulate the reader with a soupy string section.

When I'm at the desk I always put music on, it's a sort of soundtrack I'm after, something to extend the page.

The Original Dixie Jazz Band

In my first novel, This Time of Dying, the hero, Henry is an undertaker who really wants to be a jazz pianist. The book is set in London during the closing months of the First World War, so I tried to imagine what music Henry would have loved at the time. I listened to his contemporaries, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and piano players like Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines and Fats Waller, who all came slightly later but were still evocative, and seemed to put Henry in the room with me. The background to the book is the flu pandemic that was sweeping the world at the end of 1918 and I chose to listen to Mozart’s Requiem to capture this, the intensity and gravity of the piece echoing the images I had of the mounting dead.

When I was writing my new novel, The Old Joke, I wanted to listen to music that the characters would have in their record collections: Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie. And sometimes Karine Polwart, because she undid something in me that let the voice of the main character Mim speak freely.

As for the next book, I'm still not sure. All I know is that I'm playing Richard Thompson's wild and wonderful album Sweet Warrior several times a day...