Writing what is essentially a rock novel and trying to avoid all the clichés is, without a doubt, the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. In a post Spinal Tap world the very idea of not finding pouting men in platform boots laughable, is laughable in itself. So the first thing I did when I began this arduous task was to go back to some of the novels that had attempted to get it right, and see where they had come unstuck.
So, here are a few that spring to mind:
Don Delillo - loved Underworld, but Great Jones Street is stagnant and opaque. And then you go and call your rock star, Bucky Wunderlick! What was he thinking? And then there's the dreadful over-literate fake song lyrics (opens the book at random):
Tell me tell me tell me
Time weather seasons
Story tell
Lesson give
Maiden words to learn.
Then there's Iain Banks who also chose a Street to name his rock novel after: Espedair Street. I didn't mind it when I first read it 15 years ago, but found it irritating and unconvincing on a recent return visit, and couldn't much further than 30 pages in.
Jonathan Coe effort The Dwarves of Death (that's the name of the band) has its moments but there's still something missing.
Louise Wener didn't do too badly with Goodnight Steve McQueen, but then she was the lead singer of Sleeper and that background experience certainly helped. But, in the end, this effort was marred by over sentimentality and unconvincing attempts at laddish humour.
My theory is that readers only want to read about rock stars if they're real rock stars that they happen to be fascinated by. Fictional pop stars are usually little more than cartoon characters going through the motions of the real musicians they are vaguely based on. A long-haired, ill-mannered drug addict is not someone you want to spend a great deal of time in the virtual company of, unless you loved their first three albums.
Sometimes fictional pop stars are convincing in movies, but often only if they are played by real pop stars - so that the audience can tell themselves they are watching the downfall of David Essex, not Jim Maclain, when they get drawn in to That'll Be the Day and Stardust.
Also, none of the books I've mentioned tackle what is really exciting about pop culture. It's not the bands or musicians themselves, it's the thrill we felt as teenagers in awe of the bands and musicians. The real drama isn't in the back of the tour bus with the bored-shitless band, it's in the suburban home where the excited teenager is, for the first time, carefully sliding his or her favourite band's latest 45 from its flimsy sleeve. The writer needs to spend more time with the wide-eyed fan, than the dead-eyed rock star, to give a truer sense of why pop music is such an important part of our lives.
My rock star, Zachary B, functions is a kind of black hole at the centre of things, around which the more interesting satellites of my (and his) supporting cast revolve.
And as I tidy up my third or fourth draft (hard to be more precise as editing has been an on-going process) my rock novel had ended up receding to become just one strand (taking up, say, 40% of the book) in order to make way for the bigger picture and the bigger themes. Perhaps this is my subconcious acceptence of failure; I am gradually acknowledging that it is in fact impossible to write a decent rock novel that is 100% rock.
Anyway, if any of you lot can point me in the direction of a good or even average rock novel I'll one-click order it immediately from Amazon.
I've learnt an awful lot about what not to do from the books mentioned above, but it might still be useful to read something where the writer's got it at least half right.