Roddy's Doyle's The Commitments ... where the band novel made its first fully successful leap from pulp to literary fiction. Photograph: PR
For some reason, 2008 is the year of the band novel. Completely independent of each other, writers including myself, Drew Gummerson, Toby Litt, and Doug Johnstone have all had novels published in the past few months whose stories centre on a rock band of some description. Why has this happened? Coincidence? Zeitgeist? Something more sinister involving group telepathy, mind control and the Illuminati? Who knows?
This is not to say, of course, that the band novel is a new invention. It has quite a long history, going back as least as far as Jenny Fabian's novel Groupie (1969), in which the author presented a fictionalised version of her own experiences in the London music scene. In the 1970s, exploitation author Richard Allen, of Skinhead and Suedehead fame, applied his sensationalist, ultra-violent narrative style to the rather incongruous subject of glam rock, in his appropriately titled novel, Glam.
It was in 1987, however, that the band novel made its first fully successful leap from pulp to literary fiction with Roddy Doyle's The Commitments, about the rise and fall of an Irish soul group of that name. Here, an assured and accomplished writing style captured the vividly emotional experience of both listening to and making music. It was something of a breakthrough, perhaps anticipated by the essays of rock critic Lester Bangs.
More band novels followed. Kevin Sampson found a home for several years' worth of rock'n'roll anecdotes, accumulated while managing the Farm, in Powder, while in 1999, Salman Rushdie created a magical realist alternate history of rock in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in which Jesse, the still-born twin of Elvis, is alive and famous, Art Garfunkel's a woman, and U2 are good.
So what attracts writers to the subject now? I asked Drew Gummerson what led him to write Me and Mickey James, a novel about a pop duo, one half of which is a hunchback with an attitude problem. He told me: "I didn't start off thinking, 'I want to write a book about a band'. I had the idea of writing about a hunchback. He hates the way he looks. Put him in a band, I thought. Then people will always be looking at him.
I quickly realised I could put [the band] into any situation because music opens doors. So they go off to Iraq to entertain the troops, they get employed on an ocean liner, do a stint at Ho Chi Minh's Rock City."
As for me, my novel Flying Saucer Rock & Roll features a band, following them from their teenage years into their mid-twenties, in part because I was interested in the group dynamics. Being in a band is like being in a gang when you're 12 - either you're a member or you're not. You can get chucked out and be replaced, which is quite an odd social situation to find yourself when in your early-twenties.
The great thing about writing a band novel though, is that you can work in collaboration with the reader to actually make music. By giving the merest of details of what it is your band sounds like, you can set the reader's musical imagination going and have them soundtrack the book in their head. Each will hear a different song, unique to them. The writer will never get to hear it, but it's enough to know that it exists, if only within someone else's thoughts.
