Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell: these four albums changed my life
IN THE BEGINNING, music is a thing that happens to you. The shouty hooks of The Wheels on the Bus sink into your wide-open brain at kindergarten, uninvited, and snag you. There’s nothing wrong with “hooky” music; music is “for” many things, including nothing at all. Yet, as we enter our teenage years, music acquires another function: it answers the fraught question, “If I’m not a kid any more, who am I?”
In my early 1980s boyhood, youth tribes were music-based. You could be a mod, a rocker, a punk, a new romantic or a goth, simply by swearing public fealty to certain bands, and dressing like them for the Upton-upon-Severn Saturday disco. “Hookiness” still played a role, and many a sworn mod would have surrendered to Abba’s Super Trouper in the privacy of his or her own bedroom, but you didn’t disgrace your musical badge in public.
Finding an identity in music is fine, if it doesn’t calcify into a conservatism that says, “I’ll only listen to it if it’s the kind of music I listen to.” Class rears its ugly mug, too: at my comprehensive school a boy once declared a fondness for Chopin’s Nocturnes. What ensued was a scene a lot like the hunting of Piggy in The Lord of the Flies, but without the swift death.
Enjoying the hooks and vaguely identifying as a Rush-Genesis-Yes sort of kid – not the coolest – was the limit of my relationship with music until our neighbours, Tom and Ros, offered me the job of child-minding their five-year-old every week so they could go to their squash club. I was 14 and would have been useless in a crisis, but no doubt Tom and Ros reasoned that I could just yell for my parents through the window if anything serious happened. Three quid a night was good money in 1983 so I accepted the offer. The most permanent aspect of the arrangement, however, was access to Tom and Ros’s record collection. Telegraph readers with a 4, 5 or 6 in front of their ages will recall that before the internet and Spotify, avenues to new music were fickle and few. Radio DJs were in thrall to the Top 40 – John Peel and Annie Nightingale being two shining exceptions – and Radio 3’s Late Junction did not yet exist. Top of the Pops served up something astonishing on special occasions, but for the most part it obeyed Sturgeon’s Law: “90 per cent of everything is crap.”
In this cultural desert, Tom and Ros’ record collection, acquired in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was a diamond mine. I’d like to tell you about four of these diamonds. None is obscure. Three are seminal masterpieces. All are very white and only one features a woman, but all four records answered the questions, “What is music for?” and “What can music be?” in new ways, for me. Making art is making myriad decisions, and some of the decisions I make as a writer are influenced by these LPs I got to know while my neighbours were out playing squash.
THE FIRST DIAMOND, THEN, IS Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). I knew the Beatles’ cuddlier numbers, and I was familiar with this album’s cover from my deep trawls of Our Price Records, but I’d never played an entire Beatles album from start to finish. Reader, it blew my mind. I was no stranger to concept albums – thank you prog rock – but Sgt. Pepper’s is the progenitor of that line. Unlike its descendants, it is taut and subtle. The concept it presents eschews easy definition, but its songs form a unified whole in a way that Revolver or The White Album do not. Psychedelic flashes of the circus recur in the title track, its reprise and Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite. The album swings between quotidian McCartney numbers and trippier, more vinegary Lennon songs; the sound of the summer of love, and also of the future. George Harrison’s sitar-and-tabla driven Within You Without You was my first exposure to what two decades later would be called “World Music”.
I loved it. I loved how it ends in an exotic shimmer; which segues into the homely clarinet of When I’m Sixty-Four. This was my first exposure to Holloway’s Law which states, “When one right thing is placed next to a second right thing, a third thing is created by propinquity.”
I was struck by how the album saves its most audacious act until the end. A Day in The Life is an “encapsulator” of the whole LP in a single song. A slice of trippy Lennon; a slice of quotidian McCartney; a second slice of Lennon; then an atonal orchestral crescendo, a 40-second piano chord and a looped run-out groove of madcap gibberish. It could have been pointless rubbish, but the Beatles’ artistry matched their aspiration, and it was extraordinary.
Encapsulators happen in literature, I would later notice: “The Mousetrap” play-within-a-play in Hamlet, or the “Book of Psalms” in the Bible. I made a Note to Future Self, too: it read, “Don’t let the ending be a fade-out: let the ending be a farewell kiss, or a question, or a half-open door.”
DIAMOND NUMBER TWO WAS Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). My brother had The Wall, and while its highs are Himalayan, only hardcore fans would consider Roger Waters’ anti-fascist, psycho-autobiog LP brilliant from start to finish. The Dark Side of the Moon is. The songs are as varied as those on Sgt. Pepper’s – On the Run is an avant-garde whirlpool, Money is in jolted 7/4 time, Breathe is spliff-spaced and languid – but they are more of a seamless whole, all orbiting one dark globe of existential angst.
The muted disillusionment of the lyrics reminded me of the First World War poetry I had acquired a fondness for, as many bookish teenagers do. Take this, from Time: “Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time/ Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines/ Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way/ The time is gone, the song is over/ Thought I’d something more to say.”
I loved how the lyrics and the music worked for, not against, the other. On Time and Money, David Gilmour’s guitar solos soar and rail. Throughout, a blurty tenor sax propels and meanders. Blasts of gospel-textured female vocals let in air and stained-glass light. The Great Gig in the Sky is the album’s Within You Without You – the band’s tertiary songwriter stealing the show – on which session singer Claire Torry improvises a wild lament. The Dark Side of the Moon is a masterclass in meta-composition. It’s one thing to write great songs: it’s another to write great songs that work with other great songs to take the listener on a musical journey. One day it would be my job to write scenes that would need to work with other scenes to add up to a worthwhile story, that would need to work with other stories to make a novel, through which a reader could journey. It was The Dark Side of the Moon, not Bleak House, that first got me thinking along these lines.
DIAMOND THREE IS the 1970 album Déjà Vu by the original supergroup, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. None of these names was familiar to me, and I didn’t know what déjà vu was. The brown-and-white group photo on the album cover, with guns, braces and dogs, might have been a Wanted poster from the 1890s. Was it a country and western LP? No. When I lowered the stylus onto Carry On, an acoustic guitar bounded along with airtight vocals, a sinewy weaving lead guitar, then – whoa! – a four-part harmony sunburst? Serpentine organ chords? Nothing like this happened on Top of the Pops. The next song, Teach Your Children, is C&W-inflected, but the singer – Graham Nash – sounded like a Lancashire lad. Which, it turned out, he was. Next up: a jagged lumbering rocker called Almost Cut My Hair sung by one David Crosby whose voice was dark silver. Then, for the first time in my life, I heard Neil Young’s ramshackle Marmite voice, singing Helpless. Luckily, I love Marmite.
Side two opens with Crosby’s jazz-flecked song of reincarnation Déjà Vu; then Nash’s Our House – had I heard that on a TV ad? Still’s solo acoustic 4+20 is followed by Young’s Americana operetta Country Girl, before the whole album is washed down with a Stills-Young singalong.
As a teenager, I played Déjà Vu more than any other album. Why did it strike such a chord? (All printed puns are intended.) Déjà Vu is not obviously a novelistic LP. There is no unifying concept, no strong narratives. Only when Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young harmonise do they sound like a band. Déjà Vu is both polyphonic and confessional. Singer-songwriter fare about feelings (and feelings about feelings) appealed to the foetal novelist I was, but even good LPs by a solo act – say, Leonard Cohen’s Songs from a Room – can feel like being trapped in a bedsitter with the man. A quartet of songwriters is a party. Polyphony, I later discovered, is also handy for chunky novels. It is mimetic of life. People speak differently.
THE FOURTH LP TOOK the longest for me to recognise as a diamond: What We Did on Our Holidays, by Fairport Convention, released in 1969. The name was forgettable, and the cover – a cartoon-doodle of the band on a blackboard – amateurish. I didn’t know that Fairport Convention were pioneers of English folk rock; that vocalist Sandy Denny owned one of the most poignant voices ever captured on vinyl; and that Richard Thompson, even at the tender age of 19, was one of the most accomplished guitarists our Sceptred Isle has ever produced.
I struggled with the folk-rock sound, folk chords and folk harmonies. I was baffled by the songs: two covers of little-known Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs; folk standards Nottamun Town and She Moves Through the Fair; a fragment of Blind Willie Johnson; an iffy blues stomper; and originals by the band. Of these, Denny’s lilting crepuscular opener Fotheringay and Thompson’s ode to the afterlife Meet on the Ledge were stunners: the others really weren’t. Which was the real Fairport Convention?
Something brought me back to the album every few months, however, until two light bulbs clicked on. Firstly, Fairport Convention was all versions of Fairport Convention; and secondly, a cabinet of curiosities can be as valid a structure as a journey or a thematic concept. I also got my “folk ear” in, much as I’d had to get accustomed to 19th century English before I could value Jane Austen or Mary Shelley. Acquiring any language is work, but the rewards are commensurate. Finally, I saw that even the weaker compositions played a role: a dash of Salieri sets off Mozart to the advantage of both.
Music is the primary art, encountered in utero to the bass track of our mothers’ hearts. Music is pre-verbal language. Music is gloriously diverse, as the Magnetic Fields’ song The Book of Love points out: “The Book of Love has music in it/ In fact, that’s where music comes from/ Some of it’s just transcendental/ Some of it’s just really dumb.” The dumb stuff is easy to find, but in the 1980s it took a well-curated record collection to point me to the transcendental.
My babysitting job lasted until I left for university, by which time Tom and Ros’ son was old enough to insist on it being called “boy-sitting”. Most nights, after they got home, Tom and Ros would talk with me about politics, music, school, possible futures, anything. Looking back, they were my teachers. Teachers don’t necessarily work in schools. Teachers can be any adult who converses with your teenage self as an equal. Teachers can be musicians you’ll never meet. Teachers can be discs of vinyl and the songs pressed into them when warm.
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell is published by Sceptre at £20. Call 0844 871 1514 to order a copy from the Telegraph for £16.99
