Pop! What is it Good For?

Inspiration comes in the funniest places.

I suppose most people would assume that as a writer you get your inspiration from other writers. Well, yes, of course. But it's complicated. I tend to measure my achievements in comparison with my peer group, so that I know that I'm doing well if I'm keeping up with the best. That was fine for grades at school but it's rather more depressing now. I used to come top in my class and I can't any more. The last three books I've read have been: Dickens' Bleak House (actually I'm still only 1/3 of the way through); Peter Carey's Illywhacker; Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. Bleak House probably speaks for itself, of the other two Illywhacker is double-Booker-winner Carey near the top of his game, and Sacred Games is a brilliant 900 page modern Indian epic. These are not good mirrors to look in. In fact, in general I read relatively highbrow literary fiction, and that is not what I write. What I write is the kind of book that the New York Times suggests was put together with fiction-writing software - yes: I'm still sore about that, when I wish I could have got a computer to do it rather than put two and a half years of my own sweat into it. It's hard enough to write the light and the structurally simple, how the hell does anyone manage proper literature? I'm being a little disingenuous here as I think that my book has its own strengths - notably, it is funny, and it sneaks in some intellectualism like a pill in jam - but compared to Dickens it's pretty pale.

Anyway, channel-hopping tonight, I stumbled over the BBC4 Paul Morley documentary Pop! What is it Good For? which, as you might expect, was a smart investigation into pop music for the brainy listener. It was beautifully put together with some really lovely post-modern editing techniques (forgive the pretension - I used to work in TV docs back in the day), a decent clutch of interesting interviewees and, unsurprisingly, a cracking soundtrack.

Some way into the programme, Paul Morley started talking about the Kinks. As I listened to the wonderful Waterloo Sunset, something in me started to stir, and as he moved on to Lola, I thought: that's it! that's what I'm trying to do! If Gods Behaving Badly were a pop song, I'd like to think it would be Lola:



It's such a great story and it's clever and cool and it makes you want to sing along and you're already there within seconds. It is probably better than Gods Behaving Badly but I definitely felt as if I was comparing like with like. Which is not how I feel when I'm reading Bleak House.

Then a little while later into the documentary, Morley was interviewing Peter Blake who was talking about his development as an artist in the sixties. He says, and I can't remember it exactly, that you get classical music and pop music, and what he was doing was the equivalent, pop art as opposed to classical art. Here's a bit of Peter Blake:

I thought: Yippee! Maybe I don't have to be a classical novelist. Maybe I can be a pop novelist. Maybe I can be like Ray Davies or Peter Blake. They're no lesser because they aren't Mozart or Michelangelo. They are doing something else.

By the time Simon Armitage was dissecting the poetry of Morrissey and This Charming Man I was bouncing off the walls with excitement.



I want my novels to be like listening to a really great pop song. A song that makes you smile (or cry) and makes you think and makes you dance and it's over in three minutes and you never forget it.

Other books can only provide you with so much inspiration, sometimes you have to look somewhere else. I'd forgotten about the joy that comes from a song so perfect and simple and true that it becomes a part of you without you even having to try. That moment of instant recognition when a pop song goes right for your soul. As transient and delicious as a kiss, or a really good chocolate. That's what I want to write, only as a novel. Just once would be enough.