When his latest album is one-starred into an early bargain-bin grave, the rocker's favourite mewl is to reject writing about music - ie what the critics have to say - as futile. But the least successful writing on music isn't criticism, it's the subgenre of the rock'n'roll novel.
The novel, evidence suggests, is a poor vehicle for capturing what it is about a three-minute symphony that leaves us breathless. The best prose has a musical quality, but when it is applied to music - with its viral melodies, street corner poetry and arresting rhythm - fiction struggles to dramatise why we fall for pop. Rock novels - by which I mean fictions centred on stars of the scene, actual or aspiring - are uniformly miserable, betrayals even.
A swift survey reveals roughly two models of rock novel. The first concerns "the rise", wherein a young band of ambitious drunks tour the toilet circuit, normally splintering on the very eve of signing a contract: The Commitments, You Don't Love Me Yet, Owen Noone And The Marauder, Goodnight Steve McQueen. "The fall" covers the other side of the equation. The corporate compromises, the multiple addictions, spiritual wear, faltering muse, "musical differences", the retreat into paranoia: Espedair Street, Great Jones Street, The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
Two new novels illustrate the divide. Doug Johnstone's The Ossians pursues the rise, Toby Litt's I Play The Drums In A Band Called Okay goes with the fall. Both itch with the faults of the genre.
The third-century poet Ossian, historians of hoaxes will recall, was hailed in the 18th-century as a Celtic Homer before the translator, James Macpherson, was accused of having forged Ossian's poems himself. Johnstone appropriately sets his fictional band, the success-cusping Ossians, on a Scottish odyssey, a trans-Caledonia tour climaxing in Glasgow where, their manager assures them, the London labels will be waiting to sign them. Helpfully, frontman Connor delineates the book's themes early on: "It's typical of Scotland that our oldest history and literature might not even exist Everywhere you look, Scotland is made up of stupid myths and romantic ideals, most of which are fake I just thought Ossian was another side to that. People are reinventing an early history of Scotland to be sentimental about."
If only Connor's creator was as allergic to stereotype. Johnstone's tour-bus's eye view of Scotland conforms to newer clichés. So, St Andrews is rendered thus: "The population of St Andrews was made up of rich golfers, rich students, rich housewives and rich English students." In Aberdeen meanwhile: "Expensive executive cars rolled impatiently down the city's main artery exuding the earthy richness that money brings." Not what you'd describe as, well, lyrical.
Unbeknownst to the squabbling Ossians, their singer is delivering parcels of drugs along the way to pay off the debt he owes his vicious dealer. The Glasgow gig, as one has long guessed, is a catastrophe, conforming to the genre template. With characters who are somewhere between daunting and impossible to cherish, The Ossians doesn't do itself further favours with prose that often goes out of tune. When, to select one of several examples, the narrator describes "a thin thread of anger in her voice", the reader stops cold: isn't one of the conditions of a thread its thinness?
The Ossian's self-immolation grows partly from the members' realisation of the impossible pressures of rock, the way that the hedonistic clichés combine to keep the band members emotional juveniles. Ultimately they step away, fearful of how success might warp them.
Litt's book is better. His fictional band, Okay, are commercially successful and spiritually retarded. The two are related. "Us being emotionally adolescent keeps us emotionally relevant to adolescents".
Rock is a gallery of clichés, or if one is feeling kinder, archetypes. Clap, narrator and drummer with Okay, tells his story from the wrong side of a burnt-out quarter-century of touring, recording, snorting and groping, a period in which they deteriorate from skinny Velvet Undergrounders to corporate whores.
As one comes to realise, I Play Drums In A Band Called Okay doesn't merely chronicle but actually is about cliché. "I gave her the speech," he says of one of the many times he's asked about playing in a mid-rank Canadian indie band, "one of the speeches (I think I have about five by now), which I playlist randomly and occasionally remix, cutting from one to the other." When his father dies on the toilet, that event too struggles to be something more than a cliché: "Even if Elvis did it, it's still not very rock'n'roll." To get over it, he flies to Africa to get back to something like his "roots", jamming with locals, but it's too calculating, too "drummer finds World Music. Stewart Copeland. Mickey Hart".
Although the book and the group work their way through a laundry list of on-the-road excess, Litt is delineating something rather more significant than the lives of four overpaid strummers. Take the issue of groupies. Clap tells us at one point that he knows too much about "strangers in hotel bars, strangers in hotel bathrooms". As he continues, you start to see he could be talking about modern love, its transience. What Clap and co experience is what many have only writ much larger: the casualisation of love and sex, and what that does to our reeling hearts. And isn't the bubble of luxury they anxiously exist in a more luxurious version of the lives we pursue in the West? In that respect, I Play The Drums In A Band Called Okay is unexpectedly profound and moving. And depressing.
Good as Litt's novel is, it's a book about the dispersal of youthful ambition; it doesn't capture the sheer blood-fizzing bliss that pop induces, the druggy insatiability it induces in fans and which keeps its practitioners going when indulgence palls.
For that we must turn to non-fiction. Take Dylan's Chronicles or Mark Oliver Everett's Things The Grandchildren Should Know. Neither elides the occasional soul-bartering that comes with working in such a venal industry. But, half-craftsmen, half-poets, they also communicate the joy of creation. They make you want to jam in the garage; in comparison, rock'n' roll novels can only make you want to gas yourself there.
I Play The Drums In A Band Called Okay by Toby Litt (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99).
The Ossians by Doug Johnstone (Viking, £12.99)
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article