For a Man Booker winner, listing much-loved music on Sunday lunchtime radio is one of the prize’s perks: you typically undergo a mild grilling by Desert Island Discs’ Kirsty Young or Private Passions’ Michael Berkeley a few years after winning, and a selection unfolds that tends to be either all classical (eg AS Byatt), a mixture of classical and jazz (Julian Barnes), or similar but including one or two token pop or rock selections (10cc for Howard Jacobson, the Platters for Margaret Atwood) as if to prove that you were young once.
The way Marlon James, Jamaica’s first winner, handles the opportunity is markedly different as he presents 6 Music’s Paperback Writers – a solo DJ set, rather than an interview-based programme, already available online – less than a month after collecting the award. Not only are there no jazzmen or orchestras, but he strongly leans towards guitar bands (“ultimately I’m a rock kid”) rather than music with lyrics and voices uppermost.
After opening with Bob Marley’s “The Heathen” – James’s winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, centres on the attempted assassination of Marley in the 70s – the lineup of favourites continues less predictably with heavy metal (Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void”), krautrock (Can’s “Mushroom”), grunge (Nirvana’s “Come As You Are”), hard rock (The Cult’s “Phoenix”) and post-punk (Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing”). More conventional choices for literary musos do occur – Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, Fairport Convention’s “Fotheringay”, Nick Drake’s “Things Behind the Sun” – but are outnumbered. It’s a notably polarised list, with no mainstream music between the doomy rock and the melancholy acoustic numbers, the grinding guitars and the singer-songwriters – and also striking is the absence of hip-hop.
What James says about the tracks is no less intriguing, as he talks of Marley’s use of patois “changing the way I use language”, describes playing bands like Can through headphones when he writes so as to be “in a sort of suspended space”, and admits to being such a “devotee” of Prince (“our virtuoso, our genius” for “kids of the 80s” like James, who singles out “Joy in Repetition”) that he used to “stalk” him and was caught “breaking into his house”.
Among previous Booker winners who’ve revealed their sonic selections, a few have departed from the classical-dominated norm. Kazuo Ishiguro, for example, plumped for Dylan, Leonard Cohen and three country songs as well as Gershwin and Chopin; Peter Carey went for Dylan (twice), Elvis, Talking Heads and “folk-punk” pioneer Tom Frampton; Kiran Desai listed world music artists such as Cesária Évora and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. You’re more likely to find authors outside the Booker elite prepared to declare their main or co-equal musical diet is pop and rock, however: the likes of JK Rowling (including the Beatles, the Smiths, REM, Marianne Faithfull, Jimi Hendrix), Ian Rankin (Mogwai, Belle and Sebastian, Van Morrison, Joy Division, Rolling Stones) or Zadie Smith (Dylan, Madonna, Prince, the Notorious BIG).
But in his taste for the darker, noisier end of rock James lacks literary soulmates. Desert Island Discs’ archive reveals that no castaway has yet picked a Black Sabbath, Can, the Cult or Sonic Youth track, and only two (neither a novelist) have opted for Nirvana songs as potential companions for the rest of their lives.
