“I didn’t write the songs but I ended up having to write the lyrics. Many of the scenes are ways out of the tight spot that writing a novel about music put me in.” There’s one scene where a friend suggested that you can’t hear the music but you can describe the faces of the people hearing it. If you try to describe music, however inventive a writer you are, it’s a bit like a description of someone else’s dream: you’ve got about four sentences and then it starts to get boring. “A lot of my scenes come from the fact that novels don’t have speakers. That seemed to me the opposite pole of the five-minute-long narratives that I could have composed on the back of an envelope.” So Utopia Avenue are a relatively drug-free, relatively professional, relatively harmonious band. Then on the way down it’s uniformly dull. Even if you don’t like the band that much, the first two-thirds of a memoir is always interesting: where they’re from and their ascent to the peak of Mount Fame. “The long, slow, messy decline is essentially quite dull narratively unless you’re a hardcore fan. I wanted the book to be a portrait of the scenius that enabled Utopia Avenue, and The Who and the Stones and so many of them, to happen in that time in that place. Otherwise they would have stayed in ephemeral forms in the upstairs room of a pub somewhere. The producers, the managers, the engineers, the session musicians, the publishers… Everything that made those songs happen. It’s a portrait of the scenius – to use Brian Eno’s term – of Soho in the 1960s. There’s a great book in the impact of that TV show on British culture.” It was the only thing on TV where you could see Marc Almond or Culture Club or what we now call the LGBTQ spectrum exist, not as a joke but as they wished to be projected. It was a cabinet of curiosities, containing other ways to be and think – other possible identities. “I would watch Top Of The Pops and be impressed in both senses of the word – admiring of, but also marked by, the more eccentric moments.
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