Rhythm.

“ToNIght on this programme, you will heah gaspal! And rhythm! And blaues! And jayzz! But ahl these are jahst laybals! For we know that Music IS Music!” Primal Scream, Come Together.

‘What shall we listen to?’ Clare asked one time I popped in for a meal on my way back from Birmingham to South London.

‘We always listen to Station to Station when Dave comes round,’ joked Stu, flicking through his vinyl.

‘Or London Calling.’

Despite being woefully talentless and possessing a sense of rhythm and melody that brings new depths to the term minimal I find that music penetrates every aspect of my life. And not just pop or rock music, but everything from bluenote jazz to Creole blues, from Irish folk to African funk, from Sinatra swinging to drum and bass beats. It plays nearly constantly in the background at home, when I’m writing, in the car. Even when I am far away from speakers, be it in the office or on foot somewhere, the jukebox inside my head will almost inevitably pick a tune to play that either fits the mood and moment neatly or offers an intriguing contrast.

My friend and I half fell through the front door of her west London flat and stumbled into the lounge. We placed the bags down on the tiny window-side table.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘we have food and more wine and cigarettes and what else do we
need? Ah, music.’

She picked up a remote control and pointed it at the large screen on the wall. A series of menus opened and closed as the cursor whizzed around the screen.

‘Something folkly and acousticy I think.’ The cursor moved more frantically. ‘I know there’s a playlist in here somewhere. Gah! Sometimes I just want a CD player again like normal people.’

This obsession is not a private thing. It is at the core of several friendships. It is part of how I interact with others and the world in general. Consequently, like alcohol, it tends to frequent my fiction writing. Music plays in the background to characters, the lyrics or the tunes pierce conversations, it acts as a counterpoint or a subtle red herring to the fiction at large.

What feels like a lifetime ago, we lay on the old stone steps under the Italian sky, the remains of a bottle of cheap red local wine and two paper cups nestled between us as the opera reached its climax. I reached across, in the silence behind the volume, and squeezed her hand.

Unlike booze, though, I do write to music. I spend time carefully choosing a record that reflects the tone or pace of what I’m trying to write. I find it helps the words to form on the page if a rhythm already exists. If I pick the wrong record and don’t realise then it can result in forty minutes wasted wondering why everything coming out is so rubbish. It’s almost a sub-conscious thing. If I try to force it to work, it won’t. I just have to go with the flow.

I’ve taken to listening to music in bed. Or rather, given that going to bed no longer involves a room change, leaving the music playing. Especially if it’s something sleep inducing, something gently harmonious. Richard Hawley or Sigur Ros or Kenny Burrell. But in these circumstances I miss having classical music. My knowledge of classical music is appalling. I would struggle to name anyone, but I used to have access to some wonderful stuff that I think would carry me blissfully into the night. All I have left is a Rachmaninoff record; beautiful but not for sleeping to.

Regular readers of DavidMarstonWrites will be aware of not only the ‘Listens to’ box on your right, but the regular references. The crackling vocal from a sand ravaged throat played in the background and sang songs about heartbreak and despair or the thrashing angular guitars sounded like steel against an anvil as the landscape blurred with anger. That sort of thing. And frequently those references are linked to other websites which will play the song, giving you and the piece a mini soundtrack and the words a particular emotive backdrop.

But isn’t that cheating?

Or if not cheating then at least being lazy, getting someone else to write the hard bits for me?

Well, okay, so maybe it is a little bit, but the idea of a fictional world where music isn’t present seems so weird that I can’t bring myself to create one.

‘You’re looking rather trendy,’ said Stu back when the Intrepid Fox was still in Soho. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. I was wearing overly baggy jeans and a loose shirt. Without really being aware of it I’d drifted into a bit of a hip-hop phase. I was new to the big city and all around were the beats of garage crews and Jay-Z and Emimen and dropped lines over crashing remixed bass beats.

Infusing music into my writing it is fraught with danger for two reasons. Firstly, it presupposes the audience’s knowledge of the music in question and that whilst even if the lyrics are provided, they can fill in the blanks of melody themselves. Secondly, it presumes that the reader’s association of the music is the same as mine. And that probably isn’t the case. Even with something as stereotypical as, say, the Beach Boys, not everyone is immediately going to think of sun-splashed twinkling oceans and sexually charged teenagers. For some, Help Me Rhonda might be the sound of carpet burns being scarred across their elbows as the elder brother drags them roughly around the house by the ankles.

A decade ago and pulsing electric cords swirling neon lights and sweaty smoke drifted around as Michael and I danced (well, tried to dance, in my case) to trance beats in northern clubs.

I have plenty of unusual musical associations. For example, the Thrills doesn’t give me images of hot California dust bowls and vagrant motorcycles idly drifting down highway one. No, the Thrills always remind me of playing pool in a Danish summer house on a holiday where the most common sound was actually endless cackling laughter. The Libertines don’t suggest grotty Hackney canals and gas cylinders and run-down housing estates populated by idyllically romantic drug fiends. The Libertines first record brings forth images of a pitch black Texas night, the stars hidden by evil cloud, the desert cold and sparse, my girlfriend of the time fast asleep in the passenger seat, my eyelids desperately trying to close as I failed to change the CD in the blackness. The Rumble Strip’s raucous ska-pop-punk for some reason makes me think of a lazy Sunday morning; Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks not anguished heartbreak, but closeted relationship comforts of jigsaws and whisky and snugly warm winter’s evenings in the gap between Christmas and New Year; The Clash’s Ruddie Can’t Fail with the line about drinking booze for breakfast, a Sheffield roundabout; similarly Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing a different Sheffield roundabout. With a Little Help from my Friend, not comrades in arms at the end of some drunken night of revelry, but sitting alone stuck in traffic in Alfreton; Bob Marley, Derbyshire and plastic door frames; 1 Giant Leap’s multicultural soundtrack to world harmony, Chelsea Bridge; again and again odd associations because I haven’t control over how and when the song will affect me, over where I will be when that spine tingling, chest warming, epiphany chooses to overcome me.

Three years ago at a party to celebrate our new home and the onset of January I tried to disc jockey putting on northern soul records and Dexy’s Midnight Runners and the all the sounds I normally can’t help but dance to. No-one moved until my girlfriend took over and everything went a bit Blondie and Pulp; indie guitar pop bounce and we flounced our way through the night with heavy shoes slamming down on the wooden floors for hours and not a care whether the neighbours wondered who’d invaded the road.

So, perhaps I should try to account for the fact that everyone will associate certain songs in certain ways and not stop doing it? For surely it’s only undermining my own writing if I include lyrics from a song that for me suggests aching loss, when for someone else if could be the soundtrack to falling in flounderingly in love, to watching the sun dip over the Tuscan skyline, to riding a bike around Sydney, to Christmas morning woken in a tent in the jungles of Columbia?

It is, however, worth remembering that I cannot write for, nor anticipate, everyone.

Like fiction itself, there is music for every moment in time, for every mood. Drunk music, hung-over music, fight music, night music, sunny afternoon music, Sunday morning music, driving music, sleeping music, loving music, dirty fucking music, angry young man music, friends forever music, shiny happy people music, crying music, dancing-dancing-dancing music, music for every single moment every single facet of life.

(I wonder what happened to all those themed compilation tapes I used to make?)

‘Listening to this album,’ said Clare the other evening as Muse crashed through whatever song it was squealing guitars and falsetto vocals about alien presidents and twirling galaxies inside time warps, ‘makes me feel happy to be alive.’

Which says it all, really.