Songbook by Nick Hornby

Author:Nick Hornby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

17 ‘A Minor Incident’

– Badly Drawn Boy

‘You must be excited about the film coming out,’ a friendly and well-meaning acquaintance remarked at the end of 2001, a few months before the movie version of About A Boy was released. (Those weren’t her actual words. Her actual words were, ‘You must be excited about About A Boy coming out.’ I changed them because, prose stylist that I am, I wanted to avoid that double ‘about’. I’m sick of it. My advice to young writers: never begin a title with a preposition, because you will find that it is impossible to utter or to write any sentence pertaining to your creation without sounding as if you have an especially pitiable stutter. ‘He wanted to talk to me about About A Boy.’ ‘What about About A Boy?’ ‘The thing about About A Boy . . .’ ‘Are you excited about About A Boy?’ And so on. I wonder if Steinbeck and his publishers got sick of it? ‘What do you think of Of Mice and Men?’ ‘I’ve just finished the first half of Of Mice and Men.’ ‘What’s the publication date of Of Mice and Men?’ . . . Still, it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

I smiled politely, but the supposition mystified me. Why on earth would I get excited? There had been interesting, sometimes even enjoyable bits along the way – selling the rights to the book for an unfeasibly large sum of money, for example, meeting the people responsible for the film version, seeing the end product, which I liked a lot. I’d be very suspicious, however, of any writer who was actually excited by any of this process, which can be on occasion distasteful (About A Boy ate up a director and got spat out by another film company even before it was made) and stupefyingly prolonged; indeed, the time before, during and after a film’s release is positively unpleasant. You get reviewed all over again; you discover that half your friends never read the book in the first place; the bits of the film people like the most turn out to be nothing to do with you.

But the first time I heard the soundtrack to the film really was exciting, in the proper, tingly sense of the word. Seeing one’s words converted into Hollywood cash is gratifying in all sorts of ways, but it really cannot compare to the experience of hearing them converted into music: for someone who has to write books because he cannot write songs, the idea that a book might somehow produce a song is embarrassingly thrilling.

Like a lot of people, I spent a large chunk of 2000 listening to and loving Badly Drawn Boy’s The Hour of the Bewilderbeast album. It’s one of the very few English records of recent years I’ve had any time for; it’s thoughtful, quirky without being inept (despite my earlier presumption that the name of the artist was somehow indicative of the ramshackle nature of the

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