I have just finished a book (writing one, not reading one, you fool) and, as ever, I am hoping that it’s good enough and people will like it. Can you ever know? In this respect, and in quite a few others, it’s a little like a band putting out a new album, which they may have been working on for years, which they feel they have put their whole life into, and which goes out there to be judged by others who (let’s be entirely frank here) may not have their best interests at heart. This must apply particularly to someone like Bryan Ferry, who works obsessively for years and years on a record until it gleams in the moonlight, only to have it reviewed by some spotty herbert who listens to it twice and says he much prefers early Roxy Music.
I have spoken to many writers about this, and a few musicians, and their responses are much the same: that you must stop worrying about the product at the end, and concentrate on enjoying the process. Making the record, or writing the book, should be the satisfying bit. Once it is finished, it stops being anything to do with you, although you will have to promote it tirelessly, by playing live if you are a musician, or being interviewed on BBC Shetland’s highly rated Good Morning Shetland show and speaking to single-figure audiences at literary festivals if you are a writer. And in each case you wait to see whether enough people will buy your perfectly honed piece of work to enable you to make another one. One failed record and your record company may drop you. One failed book and your agent may return your calls less frequently and your publisher change his identity to avoid you. The marketplace is our master. Like all slaves, we loathe our master, unless it decides it likes us and buys our work in vast numbers, in which case we roll over like fat neutered cats and wait for our tummies to be tickled.
Both writers and musicians, though, lie awake at night worrying about money and wondering how they are going to make any. CD sales have collapsed, and for anyone under the age of 20, paying for any of the music you download is a sign of hopeless weakness, the indelible mark of loserdom. Writers, meanwhile, start sweating whenever they see anyone reading a Kindle on public transport. Did he pay for that download or did he blag it? No one gives a flying ferret that we might seek to make an honest living out of all this. That man growling in the corner seat: he’s either a starving novelist, or very possibly Sting. We want respect for our work, and we will take unflinching adoration, but what we actually need is cash. In a sack if you have one available.
Each of my books, though, has its own soundtrack. I need a constant flow of music in order to work at all, and certain CDs seem to become lucky charms, repeatedly unlocking something within my head that had previously been securely bolted and sometimes even tied down with chains. One significant album this time around was, indeed, Bryan Ferry’s Olympia (Virgin), whose extreme sonic density initially conceals its manifold charms, for as well as containing some boffo tunes, it is also more skilfully played than almost any new album you will hear today. (Mr Ferry has an almost quaintly old-fashioned, and doubtless expensive, enthusiasm for musicianship.) Another has been the new one by k. d. lang, Sing It Loud (Nonesuch), a looser and rockier item than we have come to expect from her, but all the better for it. There has been some early Ry Cooder, most notably 1974’s Paradise and Lunch, and the 2005 collaboration between Mali’s finest, Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, In the Heart of the Moon (World Circuit), which slides in and out of your ears in the most pleasant way possible (it’s music for listening to without really hearing, if you know what I mean). And finally, an album I have mentioned before, but which has developed awesome staying power: Stackridge’s 2009 comeback album A Victory for Common Sense (Helium). If a clutch of old West Country jokers with a career-crippling predilection for whimsy could ever make a classic melodic rock album, this is surely it.
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