My book doesn’t have a soundtrack, but if it did these songs would probably be on it. A few appear in the book (one of them over and over again), but each one captures either musically or lyrically something that seems to me to be present in one part of the book or another.
I don’t listen to music when I write, but sometimes it’s in the back of my mind. I like the spareness of songs. The best of them don’t strive to make sense, or give a complete picture. That suggestiveness was helpful to me.
1) ‘Road to Nowhere’ by Talking Heads
Alex is listening to the Talking Heads as he sets out on his trip across America. The song has a winning feeling of chipmunk-like cheerfulness in the face of futility and certain doom. Just the attitude we should all be adopting.
2) ‘Sanctus’, from Requiem Op 48 by Gabriel Fauré
Fauré’s ‘Sanctus’ knocks me clean out of my socks every time I hear it. The circling motif underneath it, doodling its way mournfully up to the sudden dazzling whoomph near the end, brass coming out over the top like light exploding out of all the windows of a building all at once. In an ideal world, this is the noise the Coincidence Engine would make when it’s building planes or bringing about the end of the multiverse.
3) ‘Mote’ by Sonic Youth
Like many Sonic Youth tunes, this song creates a complete world if its own, and the first two lines have always haunted me: sparrow through the meadhall with a scouring rock soundtrack. He’s more melancholy, but lyrically this is surely Banacharski’s signature tune.
4) ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)’ by the Eurythmics
A song from Alex’s childhood. I love the chilly grandeur of the Eurythmics: the sense that Annie Lennox is telling you about something fascinating and seductive and sophisticated that doesn’t give a damn about your happiness.
5) ‘Mad World’ by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules
Funny/sad. And those dreams. Bree can empathise. Bree has those dreams too. And where ever would she be without her sense of humour?
6) ‘Nowhere Man’ by the Beatles
More than just a riddle song, ‘Nowhere Man’ fleshes out the whole business of nonexistence. The Coincidence Engine is full of nowhere men – and an infinite number more are pressing to be admitted. ‘He wasn’t there again today. I wish I wish he’d go away.’
7) ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ by Bob Dylan
I can’t very well leave Dylan’s sinister, angular story-song out of the list, can I? My Mister Jones is less likely to have a pencil in his hand, though, than a cigarette.
8) ‘Minor Place’ by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
I love this mysterious, sour-sweet song: half elegy and half lullaby. If ‘minor’ means a chord, as I think – among other things – it does, the place is as much a mood as a location. I think Nicolas, one way and another, is constantly travelling to his minor place.
9) ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash
Trent Reznor’s song was just waiting for Johnny Cash – who by then sounded about five thousand years old, and like he’d been through the mill a bit to boot – to sing it. Sunt lacrimae rerum, pals.
10) ‘Johnny Barleycorn’ by Frank Black
Cheer up: here comes the certain hope of resurrection… sounding like the hoedown at the end of the universe. ‘John Barleycorn’ is an allusion to whisky, which has a part to play in this story, and a folk image of the chthonic gods of death and resurrection. (He also plays a part in Jeff Noon’s Vurt mythos.) What goes around, this song tells us, comes around.
11) ‘Like A Hurricane’ by Neil Young
This song ends up being the device’s theme-tune. Not exactly sure why, except that I like it, and that it’s a love song and it involves (ha ha) a hurricane carrying a bit much metaphorical weight. The sense of a human relationship set in a cosmic scale, and of an identity being effaced ‘I’m getting blown away’ is in there too. Plus I’m a sucker for the way Neil Young’s voice struggles through that feedbacky guitar line.
12) ‘Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons’ by Pixies
Another song that creates its own world – a phantasmagoria somewhere between the Mojave and Mars. Years ago I drove through the desert playing Trompe le Monde over and over again. There’s no better driving music for the middle of nowhere. It makes you feel like you could have left Earth and not even know it had happened. And that would be the best thing ever.