Interview Alan Bissett

http://www.alanbissett.com

Alan Bissett once had the pleasure of teaching me English at the finest secondary school in Elgin. He is now perhaps Scotland’s best young writer and recently collaborated with Malcolm Middleton of Arab Strap on the critically acclaimed Ballads of The Book CD project. Here he answers some of our questions on music and in the process confirms we aren’t the only people in Scotland who are listening to Blonde Redhead!

HOLV: Both your books Boy Racers and Adam Spark are laced with cultural
references. Do you find music and film as inspirational as written word?

AB: I think anybody working in any art form is not only inspired what people have done in their own field, but in others as well.  So I've taken as much from music and film as I have from literature.  I consciously wanted Boyracers, for example, to feel like a Bruce Springsteen album transposed to Falkirk!  Because I was writing about teenagers I had to acknowledge what a massive influence music has at that age.  When I was about 16 my world was dominated by the bands I was into and, being of the 'MTV generation', our lives were absolutely saturated with pop culture.  You kind of construct your own identity, find out the kind of person you want to be, partly through the cultural choices you make.  So dropping music and film references in wasn't just a cute gimmick it was absolutely intrinsic to who these people were.  Almost anyone between the ages of 13 and 33 can communicate with each other through references to things like Star Wars, Friends and The Simpsons.  It's almost like a global language now that crosses age, race, class, gender, nationality.  So in the novels I was just depicting what I saw.

HOLV: You made the hero of your last novel a Queen fan . . . that was a bit
cruel was it not!?

AB: Kind of!  Queen were the first band I ever got into as a kid so in order to create Adam Spark's childlike mentality I borrowed from my own childhood a bit.  Queen and Marvel comics are part of the bizarre, colourful fantasy world that Sparky disappears into when things get too tough and that wouldn't have worked if he was into Kings of Leon or something.  There's a bit of a cartoonish, larger-than-life aspect to Queen which suited the character's imagination.  It was either going to be Queen or Meat Loaf.  Had to pay them £350 to use the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody, right enough.  Whereas Paul Buchanan of Glasgow's The Blue Nile let me use four of his songs for free.  What a gent.

HOLV: So what sort of music have you been listening to lately?
 
AB: I have noticed that, as I get older, you have to make more of a conscious effort to keep up with what's coming out.  I've stopped doing that so much but sometimes it just finds you.  Some stuff that has impressed me in the last couple of years is: Sigur Ros, Interpol, Isobel Campbell, Arctic Monkeys, Sons and Daughters, Arcade Fire, Cat Power, Blonde Redhead and Goldfrapp.  But to get me into the frame of mind for the new book I've been listening to a lot of darker music: Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Mogwai, Slint, Godspeed You Black Emperor, stuff like that.  I also still listen to Dark Side of the Moon far more often than is healthy.

HOLV: You were involved in the Ballads of The Book album, how did that come about?
 
AB: I actually met Malcolm Middleton in 1993 when I was still at school in Falkirk.  He was in a grunge band called Pigtube and they knew I did a bit of writing and asked me to write lyrics for them.  I wrote a song called 'Tarantula Tarantula' and, because I had long hair and was trying to look like Jim Morrison, they asked me to audition as singer.  I thought about joining them but they were pretty heavy and I kind of wanted them to sound a bit more like INXS or U2.  So it was never going to work out really!  But Malcolm went on to form Arab Strap and I became a writer and neither of us looked back.  I didn't see him again until last year, after an Arab Strap gig in Brooklyn, and suggested to him that we work on a song for Ballads.  The Falkirk connection made it feel like quite a natural fit, and the stuff we both write about isn't dissimilar either, although stepping into Aidan Moffat's shoes is quite daunting.  I'm quite a fan of both him and Aidan.  I think Malcolm's one of the best songwriters in Britain.  So there you go, 13 years after the rehearsal we finally recorded something!  Maybe we'll do 'Tarantula Tarantula' as a B-side one day.   

HOLV: Has featuring on an album with so many great Scottish musicians given
you food for thought career wise?

AB: Definitely.  I went on tour with two excellent new indie bands, Y'all is Fantasy Island and Zoey Van Goey.  They performed their sets and in between I did readings, backed by their music.  It was terrific fun.  So now it's given me the idea of doing more spoken word/music stuff, whether live or recorded I don't know yet.  Ballads has opened up this new area to audiences.  Aidan Moffat's gone into spoken word and the novelist Kevin Macneil has even released a single of his readings with music which did really well.  So I think there's a lot more to be done.  And it's much more fun than being locked indoors making your wee fictional people talk all day.  You start to feel a bit like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.  So it's good to get out and engage a music audience for a change.

HOLV: Lastly off music, when can we expect the next Alan Bissett novel?
 
AB: Sometime in 2008 I think.  I'm currently on the home straight with it.  It's called DEATH OF A LADIES' MAN.  It's been fun (sometimes!) exploring the psyche of a total shit for a change

Interviewed By Hammond