I need a quiet place to write, a near-silent environment. I can just about take the low hum of a refrigerator, or the laptop’s electronic whirr. But a ticking clock will drive me up the very wall on which it hangs, a buzzing fly can have my concentration broken in mere seconds. Outside jackhammers, thunder claps, or even heavy rain will allow no chance for me to get a concentrated word on the page. Tough gig, isn’t it?
Music has always been a great passion of mine, but there is no way I’ll have it on while I’m writing. It’s just too bloody interesting. I can’t even play a soothing Eno ambient album, nothing by The Caretaker, William Basinski, or anything classical, one note is all it takes to catch my attention and keep it.
Strange, then, how music is such a part of my writing, invading my silent rooms. My novels are filled with tunes and even music makers. Lyrical sentences too (I hope) have their own music in my prose, their own rhythms, thrums, lilts, and even when I set out to not have any music in my work… it all starts to creep in anyway.
My debut novel, Killarney Blues, featured an Irish amateur guitarist, Bernard Dunphy, and his obsession with American Blues. His heroes were Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Son House, and as I wrote the scenes my feet were tapping to the soundtrack in my head, even though the room I had been working in was as muted as the morgue.
The Dark Manual, which became the re-published novel and TV series Sunny, was full of songs that protagonist Suzie had in her head, and she even remembered her grandfather as a staunch Leonard Cohen fan who had a huge influence on her. “Sonny don’t go away, I’m here all alone” was a refrain in the novel that Irish readers will certainly recognize.
My Perfect Cousin (the title itself taken from a song by The Undertones) is set in the 1980s and even the section titles were lyrics from famous songs of that era – I won’t list those titles here; you can go and test yourself on your pop knowledge. The main character in that novel was as obsessed as Killarney Blues’ Bernard, but Kevin’s tastes were more modern; he was a full-on fan of alternative music (before it was even called that) and post-punk, and Siouxsie Sioux was his dark dream girl.
My latest novel, Maiko Moans, is perhaps even more steeped in music than all the rest, given that the titular character is a Japanese singer-songwriter. At a self-imposed retreat in the woods with her two foreign bandmates, their musical lives, as well as their own sanity, are tested to the limits. I recently described this new work as my “sex, drugs and rock n roll” novel, jokingly inquiring as to what could possibly be more interesting – these were the themes I was perhaps destined to write about, and well, here they are, available now in paperback or in digital form, and even with an accompanying Spotify playlist which might give the reader a flavour as to the mood and themes of this most intense work.
Music has been a passion since I was very young, and continues to be the motor behind a lot of the writing I do. Even a silent room cannot stop the tunes from filling my head. Maybe in my next novel I will challenge myself to have no musical theme whatsoever, but I doubt I’ll succeed – I’m sure somewhere within those hypothetical pages there’ll be someone singing his or her pain, and if they aren’t going as far as that, they might still be whistling a tune, or tapping a foot, it can’t be helped, it just can’t, so, here we go, one, two, three, four…
Betimes Books 
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