A couple of weeks ago I did an interview by email with my friend Gary Dalkin, Editor-at-large for Cadence Publishing, for Cadence’s Timepieces substack. With his permission, I’ve reproduced it here. Visit Gary's own website here.

 

Steve Couch is the author of three novels, Dead Man Singing, Foul and Fair, and now his latest release, Imogen Imagine, which is published on 28 September. He was the co-host of the Beneath the Page podcast with Sophie Beal, director of Cadence Publishing and founder of Timepieces.

Gary Dalkin: Hello Steve, and welcome to Timepieces.

Your new novel, Imogen Imagine, is your third book, and following your debut, Dead Man Singing, the second in which music is central to the story. In your first novel, the main character is a singer-songwriter, and I’ll come back to later, but for Imogen Imagine you’ve gone a step further and actually had the song that causes all the trouble in the book professionally recorded. Readers can listen to it right now on their streaming platform of choice (YouTube link). 

So, Steve, tell us something about Imogen Imagine, the novel and the song.

Steve: Well, the book came first – although even that was started by a song – and it tells the story of Immy, a 20-year-old woman whose life is derailed when her ex-boyfriend has a massive hit with a song about their breakup. Even worse, he uses Immy’s name in the song’s title – ‘Imogen Imagine’ – meaning that everyone thinks they know her story. When she tries to get her side of things out into the world… well, you’ll have to read it to find out, but it doesn’t go the way she thought it would.

I’m not a songwriter, but I realised as I was writing the book that I needed to flesh out the snatches of lyrics I was including, so I decided to complete the words for the song. It was part of the worldbuilding for the novel, and a way of engaging with the two main characters, Immy and Carl. The song is entirely from Carl’s perspective, and I wanted it to be something quite sweet and inoffensive, so that Immy’s anger doesn’t make sense to people who don’t know her story. As readers go further in the book I hope they will begin to understand just why Immy finds the song so triggering.

Why did you decide to have a recording made of the ‘fictional’ song? How did you make it all happen?

Even though the song’s main purpose was to serve the book, I felt strongly that it had to work on its own terms too. My good friend Olly Hopper-Pay, singer-songwriter with the OHP Band, offered to put my words to music, and he was really the driving force in turning it into more than just part of a novel. Olly understood what I needed it to be – a modern, commercial-sounding pop song with enough hookiness to be believable as a breakout hit single – and he knew how to realise that. We ran a crowdfunder to raise the money to record it, drew on Olly’s contacts to hire some great local musicians and went into the studio. The end result is genuinely beyond my wildest dreams when we started talking about the idea. I’m so grateful to Olly and everyone else who was involved in making the record.*

Music is really important to you. But as a novelist, what do you see as the differences or similarities between crafting a song lyric, which is obviously very condensed, and telling a story at novel length?

The best songs are hugely condensed, but with a wealth of depth and complexity hidden within a simple structure. One of my favourite singer-songwriters is Richard Thompson, and some of his songs are great examples of this. To pick two of his songs almost at random, 'Beeswing' tells a whole life story in just five minutes and is incredibly moving. 'Dimming of the Day' is more about a moment, an emotion, but there’s so much conveyed without ever being explicitly spelled out. I think something similar goes on in novels; they are, as you say, much longer works, but so much has to be condensed in order to fit an entire story, sometimes an entire world with years of history, between the pages. Songs and novels are both expressions of a similar creative urge: to communicate story and emotion to someone else, to share something of what it means to be human. When they work well, we don’t necessarily notice the craft because we’re so caught up in the magic of it.

I think, if I’m honest, I might not be the right person to talk about songwriting in that regard: I approached writing the words of ‘Imogen Imagine’ as an author, shaping the song into what I needed it to be in the world of my book, rather than as a songwriter per se. I’ve tried writing other songs since, but without the scaffolding of the back story I had already created for Carl and Immy. And without their respective personalities to shape the narrative, it just hasn’t worked. Bob Dylan once described a song as ‘something that can walk for itself’, and none of my subsequent attempts got that far! As proud as I am of the song ‘Imogen Imagine’, it’s not the beginning of a new direction for me.

You mention Richard Thompson being one of your favourite singer-songwriters, something you have in common with the main character in Dead Man Singing, a novel based around a brilliant ‘what if’: what if a fading musician faked his own death, but then became his own tribute act? Thompson’s music is referenced several times in the novel, as are many other real songs, but how do you approach the particular challenges of writing about songs, evoking them in words, especially when - for copyright reasons - you can’t quote the lyrics? 

With Dead Man Singing, I wanted to use the music Dave played as a central part of the narrative, for the themes and motifs in the songs to inform the plot and, at times, to drive it. Sometimes using the title alone (which is allowed) was enough to do the heavy lifting – you don’t need the lyrics of a song called ‘Withered and Died’ to have a sense of what it suggests thematically! With other songs, a certain amount of description or explanation was needed. In chapter one, Dave goes to see Richard Thompson in concert and hears him play a song called ‘Now That I Am Dead’, which is where he gets the idea of faking his death (and where I got the idea for the book). It’s a song – written by John French, incidentally, rather than Richard Thompson – sung from the perspective of a musician railing against the success he’s enjoying in death after years of being ignored when he was alive. I had to convey that to the reader by way or paraphrase and description. It was a song that I saw Thompson play live a couple of times, but he never – as far as I know – recorded his version of it. If anyone is interested, it’s on YouTube.

The most important thing with using music like that was that the book had to work for readers who didn’t know any of the songs. Everything the reader needed had to be there on the page. If you know the songs, that’s a bonus and potentially another layer of enjoyment, but I knew it couldn’t be a prerequisite. I did a Spotify playlist for the book, essentially a soundtrack, so curious readers could follow up the music if they wanted.

Some of the songs I describe in the book don’t actually exist, of course. With Dave’s own songs, I wanted the reader to at least have a feel of the song. For example, a song called ‘Midnight Rolling’ (now there’s a good generic 70s song title!) is described as ‘a treat for the old fans, but with enough swagger to get the attention of the unconverted’. That gives an idea of the sound, as well as the nature of Dave’s audience these days. Elsewhere ‘Double Down on Love’ is ‘a rootsy runaway train of a song with lyrics inspired by Dave’s licentious on-the-road antics back in the day’, which again offers something musical as well as a snapshot of Dave’s character. It was fun to construct Dave’s entire back catalogue, and to invent new songs to fill the gaps as and when the narrative required.

Inventing songs and a musical history for Dave does sound fun, and Dead Man Singing is a terrifically entertaining read and I’m looking forward to Imogen Imagine. Do you have plans for more novels with a musical theme? Even if you write about something else - your second novel, Foul and Fair has a football setting - is music something you'll always come back to?

My current work-in-progress isn’t as music-focused as Dead Man Singing, but there’s certainly a whiff of music to it. I won’t go into detail other than to say that it’s set in London in the late 1960s. There’s a little bit of music in Foul and Fair - another of my favourites, Billy Bragg, crops up a couple of times - but with that book I leant more into literary references. The main character was an English teacher, so it felt like a more natural fit for the material.

I don’t see myself as someone who writes books about music, or books about football. I write books about people. I’m sure that music will continue to crop up in my writing, because it’s something that has always occupied a big place in my life, but it has to be a natural fit for the characters. Of course, my interest in music means there’s always the chance that I’ll stumble across a story idea that lends itself to sending me in that direction.

To slightly broaden the question, I love it when authors make use of popular culture to help create the world of their novels — Jonathan Coe’s most recent book, The Proof of My Innocence, is a dazzling recent example. When it’s done well, it helps to anchor the fictional world into the lived experience of the reader; it gives us landmarks to recognise where we are and helps us to settle in and get beyond just words on a page. Whether I’m including music in a book or not, I think I consciously try to dig into the appropriate cultural background when I’m creating the fictional world, for myself and for the reader. I suspect that most writers are happiest when we’re writing the kind of books we enjoy reading, and that’s certainly a trait that I enjoy in other writers.

I know you love supporting other authors - you were the co-host of the Beneath the Page podcast with Timepieces’ founder and Cadence Publishing director Sophie Beal - so to end I was wondering if you could give us two or three recommendations from your recent reading?

Beneath the Page was so much fun to do! One of the best parts of it was getting to dig deep into books and their themes with the authors. Every now and then I read something new and wish we still had the chance to get the author to open up about it.

One of those is the just-released Daughter of Ilithian by Bronwen Leigh. It’s a speculative fiction novel set in a world where, for some reason, far more boys are born than girls. Bronwyn is a friend of ours, and part of the Bournemouth writing community, but the premise intrigued me and the writing is fabulous. If a friend has a book published, I tend to buy it to support them, but any of their subsequent releases only get bought on merit; I’m on board for the rest of this series, regardless of the fact that I know the author. As well as being a good read that swept me along (I read it in a couple of days), there are lots of themes to thoughtfully chew over.

I recently read The Mix Tape by Jane Anderson. It’s five or six years old, but I came across it in a bookshop having not heard of it before. It’s a ‘former lovers reunited’ story with music right at the heart of the action — it felt like the kind of thing I wish I’d thought of first. As well as loving the music references (there’s a track listing at the beginning of the book, and when I saw - to name just a few - Blondie, Belle and Sebastian and Nick Drake, I was already making my way to the till). Beyond the music, I liked the way she didn’t gloss over the situation with the main characters’ existing partners: one of them elicits no sympathy from the reader, but with the other one it’s not quite so clear cut. I loved the journey, and I thought about it for some time after I had finished.

You asked for two or three, so I’ll give you four! I’ll finish with books by two of my absolute favourite authors that I recently caught up with: Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know and H.G. Parry’s The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood. I’ve loved McEwan for years, and his latest is speculative fiction, set nearly a hundred years in the future where climate change has made the geography and lifestyle of the world very different to today. The main character is an academic researching an infamous poem that was read once in 2014 and then lost to posterity. McEwan is one of my favourites, and this is right up there with anything else he’s written (except, perhaps, Atonement — that’s still his masterpiece for me).

Parry is a New Zealand writer who I stumbled across a couple of years ago with her wonderful Shadow Histories books. She’s now joined McEwan and a few others in the ranks of authors whose name alone is enough to make me buy a book. Her latest - which I’m halfway through as we do this interview - is set in 1941 Britain, with a dark undertow of Arthurian legend woven throughout. I did a module on early Arthurian texts as part of my English degree, so this is another one that ticks a lot of boxes for me, and in Parry’s hands it’s irresistible.

I’m not sure how representative that selection is - two speculative fictions, one fantasy/history and only one contemporary fiction - they are just the standouts from the last couple of months. I’ve always read a lot and read widely rather than sticking to genres, but that’s a lot more fantasy/speculative than I usually choose. I used to read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, but in recent years I’ve become very picky with those genres. Unless there’s a particular idea at the heart of the book that grabs my interest, I tend to avoid them. To be fair, that’s probably how I choose most of the books I read, not just sci-fi and fantasy. For me it’s all about the story and the characters, and if you can lure me in with a hooky concept, I usually bite.

 

*Lee Rasdall-Dove (lead vocals), Olly Hopper-Pay (acoustic and electric guitar, backing vocals), Chris Payn (piano), Duncan Petrus (bass), Mic Harrison (drums), Hannah Gadsby (backing vocals), Ben Jones (production, engineering, plus additional synthesizers).

Visit Steve Couch at his website here. Gary Dalkin is Cadence Publishing’s editor-at-large. You can find out much more about him on his website at To The Last Word, and contact him to discuss editing your book, or subscribe to him on Substack.