Crime Plays: Writer Ian Rankin On His 13

Favourite Albums
http://thequietus.com/articles/10753-ian-rankin-
favourite-albums-rebus-baker-s-dozen

Luke Turner , November 21st, 2012 07:37

Ian Rankin talks to Luke Turner about his life in music, and how he'd like to write novels based on Joy
Division and David Bowie albums
A D D Y O U R C O M ME N T

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Next

I think I first heard them when I was about 13. The first album I heard by them was Next, it was a cassette
that a friend of my sister's had. What got me at 13 was there were songs on there about sex, the title track is
basically about a brothel, and that's very interesting to a 13-year-old male. Also there were songs about
violence, gang violence, and that was something I was very aware of growing up in the early 70s, stuff like
Vanbo Rools, you used to see the phrase "Vambo rules OK" spray painted over buildings. This was a character
that Alex Harvey had created who was the leader of a gang. When I went to see the band in concert in
Edinburgh when I was still at school I was absolutely blown away by the showmanship, there was cartoon
violence, there were great songs and great catchy riffs, with a really tight band behind them. It wasn't just
about Alex, everyone in that band was a great musician. Although I first heard it in about 1973, I could
happily play it today, and I'd be singing along with 'Last Of The Teenage Idols'.

Hawkwind - In Search Of Space

It's not much of a contrast with the Alex Harvey Band. It's heavy, not quite heavy metal, but quite propulsive
riffs, with a comic book storyline behind it. They used comic book imagery quite a lot as well as science fiction
imagery, and the Alex Harvey band did that as well, they'd dress up like comic book characters. So there's
showmanship, there's vaudeville, all sorts of things going on there. I was a great reader of comics, so
anything that had that kind of vibe to it. I'd bought 'Silver Machine' when it came out when I was about 10 or
11 from Butlin's Holiday Camp in Ayr - it had a record shop. I think I bought that and 'School's Out'. We had
an old Dancette record player that I believe my parents had saved up cigarette coupons for. Anybody who
says smoking is bad for you is factually incorrect because it brought a record player into our house for the
first time. I credit Embassy cigarettes for bringing me the joy of music. Hawkwind are another band I still
listen to, and if any version of Hawkwind come on tour to Edinburgh I'll try and get along there. There's a
fascinating history of the band that was written a couple of years ago, and their roots were in anarchy and
protest movements and doing free concerts and living in squats, they were really right on. By the time I got
round to seeing them in the flesh, which would have been about '78, '79, it was basically just a hall full of
Hell's Angels, and I felt really sorry for the support act that night. he was a punk poet called Patrick Fitzgerald
who basically got bottled offstage. I went and bought his album.

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

This is the leap from high school to University. I grew up in a small town, and I was the kid who'd hide in his
bedroom writing poetry and not telling anyone he was doing it. Suddenly when I got to University I was
surrounded by people who wanted to be poets, writers and musicians, and I could relax a little bit, I didn't have
to pretend any more, I didn't have to pretend to be one of the gang who hung around on the street corner with
their Doc Marten boots on. I could say 'yes, I'm going to write poetry, and be in a band and try this and that'.
Punk was great for that, because punk said 'it doesn't' matter what school you went to, or if you've got money,
just get out there and try it'. I was scribbling stuff down and sending it off here there and everywhere. I was
sending stuff to the Radio Times and there was a cat in hell's chance they were going to publish one of my
short stories, but I thought what the hell, I'm going to get myself out there and see what happens. So when
some people asked if I wanted to be the singer in their band I said 'yeah fuck it, why not?' We were actually
playing a gig in Cowdenbeith in Fife the night that we heard that Ian Curtis had topped himself. I remember
going onstage and saying 'this concert is dedicated to Ian Curtis'. I don't think anyone in the audience knew
who Ian Curtis was - we were the support band to a heavy metal group who had a laser. I think the only reason
people were in the room was to see a laser.
When I got to Uni it was the dark clothing, the black mock leather jacket - I couldn't afford a real leather jacket
so I got a PVC type thing - lots of doom and gloom. The poems I wrote got a lot darker, and I was listening to
a lot of Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle and Clock DVA. One of my huge regrets is that one of my friends
came to my digs one night and said 'hey, I'm going to see the Buzzcocks, they're being supported by this band
Joy Division'. I said 'nah I've got an essay to do, I won't go'. The next day I got intrigued by Joy Division and
that was when I bought the first album and thought they were really good. Then I heard they were coming back
to Edinburgh to headline a small club, so I bought a ticket for that and of course they never made it. I could
have gone to the venue and got my 50p back, but I held onto the ticket. I've still got it.

To me there's almost a narrative running through Unknown Pleasures. I'd love to write a novel that'd take lines
from the songs. It's be about an assassin who's sent to a city that he can't make sense of. It's nighttime and he's
wandering through the city and he doesn't know exactly who it is that he's going to kill. I've actually gone
through the lyrics and plucked out lines from the various songs that you could string together as a story.

Throbbing Gristle - D.o.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle
At that time, a lot of the bands I liked had this mythology around them, like Throbbing Gristle. Their music I
was introduced to by a guy who was a radical poet at the university. He was a Throbbing Gristle fan and said
'you've got to listen to this band, you've got the join the fan club'. Because I looked up to him, whatever he told
me to do I'd do. So I got my signed photograph of Cosey Fanni Tutti, I would send away for the private
pressings that they'd do of their albums, and get the newsletter. I'd be sitting in my tiny student bedroom with
the curtains shut listening to this very intense, urban soundscape. Why I didn't top myself I don't know.

It's about transgression, isn't it? I remember being in the lift at Uni wearing my Throbbing Gristle badge,
which is the lightning flash through the red background with the black stripes, and a member of staff said
'that's a fascist badge, are you a fascist?' I never thought of them as fascists, it was about transgression. They
wanted to challenge you. There was a uniform that Throbbing Gristle fans tended to wear, and I think it was all
part of being transgressive, to shock you out of your malaise or shock you into a strong feeling about
something. They might hate me for saying it, but there's a lot of Hawkwind about that - a grouping that comes
together because of beliefs of what art can do, or should do, or music should do. There was a strong sense of
why they were doing it they weren't just doing it [adopts sarcastic American accent] for the bread, man.

Clock DVA - Thirst

In the Throbbing Gristle newsletters they'd mention bands that they felt and affinity with, and one of them
was Clock DVA. Thirst was the album that I bought at the time. There were a few tracks on that that I found
completely propulsive and hypnotic. You'd sit there in a trance as you listened to it, these quite razor blade
edge vocals and bits of brass coming through this wall of noise and very heavy bass. The rhythm took you out
of where you were to somewhere else. It was music of alienation, and like a lot of young people of a certain
age and a certain disposition, I felt alienated. I didn't really feel part of any particular group, I felt I was
presenting a face to the world that wasn't necessarily the real me. It was cold and it was dark a lot of the
time, I seem to remember, and you were shoving ten pence pieces into the gas meter to get the little fire in
your room to work. I was studying all this stuff at University that made very little sense to me. I'd gone to Uni
because I liked modern novels, and for the first two years at University I was having to go through all this
Thomas Hardy and William Wordsworth, and this isn't why I came here. Meantime I was busily scribbling
down poems called 'Euthanasia' and lyrics about mega cities where Judge Dredd hangs out, trying to write
comics, just kind of experimenting. It was quite experimental music, and it was unlike anything any of my
peer group were listening to at the time.

John Martyn - Grace & Danger

Let's have some sublime music. This is one of these things about music, right. When I was about 15 one of my
really good friends at school was a huge John Martyn fan. I'd go round to his house and listen to it, and
thought it was a bit folky and I didn't get it. I wasn't too far away from liking Alex Harvey. But I liked the cover
of the album, and him being a good mate I bought the album and put it away. By the time I was in my 20s I
just picked it up one day and just started to get it, I started to get that this was a really interesting musician
with an interesting take on what popular music could be. There was a bit of jazz in there, folk, blues, this
wonderful interplay with his bassist Danny Thompson. There was all kinds of good stuff in there that I hadn't
properly seen. I hadn't taken to his vocals at first, I thought they were slurred and muddy and I wasn't sure
what was going on, but later in life I got it. I was down in London years ago to do Desert Island Discs and
'Solid Air' was going to be the one track I couldn't live without. I was having lunch with my agent in West
London, and we heard this garrulous conversation going on at one of the outside tables. As we left, there was
John Martyn sitting with a few bottles of wine and a couple of mates. I thought I should go up to him and say
the reason I'm in London is to go on Desert Island Discs and say your record is the one that I can't live
without, but I bottled out of it. I've learned my lesson now, I don't bottle out of anything these days.

The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed

My sister's boyfriend at the time was a huge Stones fan, so when this came out which would have been,
what, '69, he bought it and brought it round and played it on our Dancette, and I thought 'this is rubbish,
what are these fiddles, why is it suddenly country, what are these monkeymen he's singing about, and what
does it mean 'you can bleed on me'? But there was something about it, and it drilled its way into my
subconscious and stayed there. A few years later I bought it on CD, and it blew me away, and I thought 'this is
one of the great rock albums of all time'. It was just dripping with all the mayhem of the late 60s, it was the
perfect storm of stuff that was happening then. Serial killers like The Boston Strangler, the fact that rock stars
had got pretensions and were living in mansions and looking down on the little people, drugs, violence, the
Vietnam War, all sorts of great stuff was in there. It's one of the albums I'll never tire of listening to. They
were looking around themselves and writing about what they saw, and it was a very interesting time, '68, '69.
It's hardly any Stones' fans favourite Stones album, but it is for me. It's a lot better than Exile On Main Street.
The Blue Nile - A Walk Across the Rooftops
I left university, moved to London, got a job on a hi-fi magazine so I was concentrating too much on the
hardware. We were writing these essays on this amplifier, that cartridge, and it took away from the music
somehow. I kind of went off music for a while. Then I moved to France, because my wife had persuaded me
that if I was going to be a full-time writer we'd have to move. There wasn't much music around, there was a
supermarket 30 miles where you could occasionally get Bowie and Cure albums but that was about it. When
we moved back to the UK after being six years in France and four years in London before that that's ten
years when music hadn't been that important to me. But when we moved back I just got straight back into it,
and everything had changed. Suddenly there were all these Scottish bands that I didn't know anything about,
like Mogwai, Boards of Canada and the Blue Nile. Blue Nile were the first ones because we used their first
album as a reference, because it had been put out by Linn, the hi-fi manufacturer, to show off their systems.
It was otherworldly, you couldn't tell what had influenced it. It was quite exciting to me that quite a number
of these bands were Scottish.

Mogwai - Ten Rapid

Mogwai I think I read about in a newspaper article. Someone was talking about all these amazing new
Scottish bands like Mogwai and Arab Strap, and I went oh ok, never heard of them, jotted them down as I do,
and went to the record shop and started buying their stuff and listening to it. The first Mogwai album I got
was a CD called Ten Rapid, a collection of their early EPs. It's just absolutely brilliant, a distillation of all their
brilliant noises. I found I could write to it with them playing in the background, and this is what happens with
a lot of these bands that I've discovered latterly, I find this is music that I can play as I work. Mogwai featured
on my Desert Island Discs, and Sue Lawley said 'I don't believe you can work to this'. I think I chose 'Rage
Man', and I went for the quieter, softer bit of the track so a Radio 4 audience wouldn't be freaked out. No
'Like Herod'. Sue Lawley was freaked out as it was, thinking 'you're supposed to be on a desert island, pal,
what are you doing with that?' When I put this album on I start to see pictures in my head, I start to visualise.
It's like a film soundtrack but I get to decide who the characters are and what's going on. Whenever I'm
writing and thinking of dark mean streets, maybe a fight, maybe a confrontation, I want some tension in it, I
stick Mogwai on and you get all the tension you want, the sense of impending doom and impending
judgement. The music is saying that something terrible is happening just around the corner.

Boards Of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children

Boards Of Canada. Who the hell are they? They're a mystery band. I couldn't believe it when I read that they
lived in the Scottish Borders. Where did they come from and where do they go? Nobody seems to know.
They burned brightly then went, but the albums they put out If my writing's not going so well, I can put
on Music Has A Right To Children and then I'm in a good place again. The writing seems to go better when
they're on, I'll put them on a loop and it'll play for five or six hours. It drives my wife crazy. It puts me a
bubble, and blocks out the noises of the everyday, outside world. I once had 'Rage Man' by Mogwai on for 12
hours.

David Bowie - Outside

It's the David Bowie album that nobody likes. What I liked about it is it's a murder mystery. At it's heart it's a
very noirish private eye story. A murder has happened and it's to do with the art community and art galleries,
it's in an alternative universe that isn't quite our universe. Bits of narration come in, different characters. It's
almost like a rock opera or a film. But it doesn't tie up at the end - apparently there's supposed to be a part
two, but I don't think he's ever going to make it. It's an open-ended mystery. I went through the lyrics with a
fine toothcomb trying to work out what is the plot and whodunit and the rest of it. I've not worked it out. I'm
waiting for the call. It does have a couple of absolutely superb tracks, it's got 'Hallo Spaceboy' and 'The Hearts
Filthy Lesson', which I think was used as the closing music for Se7en. It shows that after God-knows how
many albums he's still stretching himself. Whenever he was getting comfortable he went somewhere
completely different. I love that restless quality that has always been in every part of his career. Pick one
record and it'll be a fascinating listen.

Jackie Leven - Creatures Of Light And Darkness

I thought Rebus would be a fan of Jackie Leven's music. Songs about hard working class men who aren't really
in charge of their emotions. I didn't know that he was a fan of the books he was reading one of the books
on an aeroplane when he was on tour, and went 'Jesus, that's me'. So he got in touch with my publisher, we
eventually got to meet and ended up working together. We did an album for Cooking Vinyl, then last year
around about this time somebody said to me 'you know Jackie's not very well'. The next thing I knew he was
dead, it was shocking and unexpected. The new book is dedicated to him, and the title is a mondegreen, a
misheard lyric. He's got a song where the chorus talks about standing in another man's rain, and I misheard it
as "standing in another man's grave", so I called the book Standing In Another Man's Grave. The first thing
that happens is Rebus goes to a funeral, he gets back to his car, puts the CD player on and there's Jackie
Leven, and Rebus mishears it. Each section of the book starts with a different Jackie Leven song. Creatures Of
Light And Darkness is such a great title, and that's what I write about in my books, that all of us human beings
contain within them light and dark, and the question that crime fiction continually asks is why do we keep
doing bad things to one another? Nature, nurture, the seven deadly sins, is it society, capitalism, immediate
gratification and wanting what someone else has got so you take it from them if you can?

The Cure - Disintegration

It's the only album with lyrics that I can write to. It's a great album, but it took me a while to get it. In the
early days of The Cure I tried the early days of The Cure, and thought it was fine, though I loved 'A Forest', I
thought that was an amazing track, but the albums didn't always do it for me. I found them a bit cold, there
was something quite dry about the sound. But then you get to Disintegration and it's got so much emotion,
it's got all these washes of sound. For an album that's quite bleak at its heart, it's insanely beautiful. I think
that Robert Smith is completely in control of his material. He knows how he wants this album to sound, he
knows how he wants it to look, he really feels the lyrics as he's singing them. It's a completely immersive
experience. Again there's a film playing in my head as I listen to it.

Jason
NOV 21, 2012 3:32PM
Big fan of Bowie's Outside - thought I do listen to a copy without the narrated interludes.
Some real quality songs on there.
It sits with Diamond Dogs, Low and Station to Station as my Bowie favourites.
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Lodger
NOV 21, 2012 4:48PM
one of the best Bowie albums for sure...like Lodger, Low, Scary Monsters, Station to station...
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Orishe Olugbo
NOV 21, 2012 5:00PM
Ian Rankin please leave my idea alone! I have been working on my 'Joy Division' novel for a long time and I
did exactly as you did. Beginning with 'New Dawn Fades' and ending in 'Interzone' I feel that I have a great
tale. Don't rain on my parade.
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bob the slob

NOV 21, 2012 8:44PM
its dansette not dancette mp3 heads tsk tsk tsk
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NOV 21, 2012 10: 44PM

Another engaging selection in this always interesting feature. Some of the choices won't come as a massive
surprise to readers of Rankin's fiction but his love of early industrial music is not so well documented as his
other enthusiasms.
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RobW
NOV 22, 2012 1:08PM
Started listening to Jackie Leven right after reading this. Absolutely magnificent.
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Robin
NOV 22, 2012 2:24PM
Served him a few times many moons back when I worked in a record shop in Edinburgh! A gentleman who
loves his music! Can't remember what he bought though! Sad to read this on the same day I find out that
Avalanche are shutting down in said city...
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FokkoJan
NOV 22, 2012 3:49PM
wonderful piece! Great to see someone with a real heart for music and a way of telling so too. Really enjoyed
it. Guess I have to start reading the books now ...
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Robert
NOV 26, 2012 4:32PM
I was at that Buzzcocks gig at the Edinburgh Odeon, when the support act was Joy Division. And I had a ticket
for the next Joy Division gig that got cancelled after Curtis' suicide. And, yes, I went and got my refund on the
ticket...unlike Ian Rankin!
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Alan Ferguson
NOV 30, 2012 10: 21 AM
Jackie Leven is the Robert Burns of our times - such poetic and thoughtful music in a generous serving - true
genius ! Just ordered the whole catalogue... Get it while you can !
Thanks to Ian Rankin I learned about Jackie's existence , alpha to omega. the Jackie Leven RIP dedication in
Standing in Another Man's Rain filled me with such grief I couldn't read it for 12 hours. It took the release of
Ian's in NZ , nearly a year after Jackie's death to reach me, and on the anniversary I was pleased to have a
conversation with Ian in a Scottish Bar in Dunedin - not the Bonny Earl of Moray though :-)
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branwell Johnson
DEC 20, 2012 3:40PM
Interesting - I actually want Hawkwind's Lord of Light or Ejection played at my cremation (latter for
amusement's sake if you know the lyrics...).
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