Now, we've been discussing character.
But it's important to remember that any character
you and me included
we are inevitably a product
of the place that we originated from
and the time in which we originated.
So, let's discuss those in order.
Let's first talk about place.
Place is incredibly important
to a story, to a writer.
To me, it has recently become almost the most important thing.
An understanding of place will...
greatly help your story, it will help you to understand
where your characters are coming from psychologically
the world in which they spend their lives
that has its effects upon them.
Place, if you're talking about a real place
that you wish to write about
the method for investigating that
is perhaps a little bit complex and time-consuming
but it certainly pays off.
This would be some variant
of the popular term "psychogeography".
Which is, as Iain Sinclair put it
"walking with an agenda"
which is a pretty good description.
A particularly good example
of how to construct a real place
for purposes of literature or performance
would be the...
thing that I did during a string of
what I was terming "magical performances".
These would be one-off performances
that would never be repeated
that would be performed
in a certain location at a certain time.
And part of the performances
would be a conjuring of that location.
Now, we had been invited to perform down at a club
the Highbury Garage, upstairs at the Highbury Garage.
And so I started to research
the whole of Highbury and its history
for my piece, which was called "The Highbury Working"
"A Beat Seance."
What we did was we looked into the history of Highbury.
We found out everything about it.
We found out that Highbury Hill
was originally a Roman garrison...
where Roman cavalrymen
would have been bivouacked.
And we found out that also, being Roman cavalrymen
they would probably have been worshipping the goddess Epona
who is the goddess of horseracing
and also the goddess of the mysteries of death.
We found out that under the Holloway Road
is the double-headed Hackney Brook.
This is an underground river that rises from two sources
so it's a river with two heads.
We found out that when Highbury Hill
was one of London's pleasure hills
it had a spectacular place called the Highbury Barn
which boasted a million lights
and had all of the most exotic acts of its day.
These included Chang and Eng
who were the world's first conjoined twins
or what was called then Siamese twins.
It was the first place where the cancan
a scandalous new dance from the continent
was practised in England.
It was where there were
freaks like Namatar the man-frog.
There were...
all sorts.
There was Monsieur Léotard
the acrobat in his remarkable revealing costume
from which we get our word "leotard".
All of these things.
I found out that, in more recent times
the very venue that we were performing at
had been a club in the '60s
that was run by an East End entrepreneur called Freddie Bird
who had connections with a lot of the villains of the East End.
Now, he was putting on
the famous 1950s performing artist
Dorothy Squires.
Who, at that time, was, I believe
married to the actor Roger Moore.
Dorothy Squires did have a bit of a problem with drink.
This was towards the end of her career.
One night, when she was appearing at this club
who should come in
but Kray Brothers' associate Jack the Hat McVitie?
He started an uproar, I think he jumped up on a table
dropped his trousers
and immediately an immense fight or riot sparked off
and it was this...
because of the Kray twins' immense respect for celebrities
that was possibly one of the things
that signed his death warrant.
Now, when you've soaked up enough of these stories
you start to see which bits of them fit together.
Like we noticed that...
Yes, so you've got the Kray twins.
You've got the double-headed Hackney Brook.
You've got Chang and Eng, the first Siamese twins.
There's something about twins here, isn't there?
There's something about things with two heads
that seems to be underlying the landscape of Highbury.
We found out that the incredible record producer, Joe Meek
who invented the mixing desk
who invented most of modern recording.
Before Joe Meek, all bands
were four guys standing around a single microphone
and performing their numbers.
It was him who suggested
separating out the various instruments
and it was him who went spectacularly mad.
He believed that...
At one point, he foretold Buddy Holly's death
and warned Buddy Holly about it.
Yes, "Don't do anything around Christmas time
because I've had a premonition that you're going to die."
Buddy Holly said
"No, I'm not going to be, so don't worry about it."
And, indeed he didn't.
And a whole year passed
during which Joe Meek had been having sinister dreams
that he would wake up from in terror
that were showing men's hands
shoving dirty shirts into a suitcase.
And he'd more or less forgotten about this prophecy
until the exact date a year later
when Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash.
The reason why Buddy Holly was on the plane
was that him and The Crickets wanted to get to the next town
earlier than the car that they were planning to travel in
because their stage costumes were dirty
and they wanted to have time to launder them
so they crammed all their dirty shirts into a suitcase
and they got on the plane and they were all killed.
So, this fed into the strange world of Joe Meek
who eventually
killed his landlady and himself.
One episode was that he would do
readings, fortune-telling readings
by placing a key in a Bible.
Upon one such occasion, the key had apparently
turned in the closed Bible with no one touching it.
Now, this reminded us that Epona
as the goddess of horse races and the mysteries of death
was depicted holding a handkerchief in one hand
to start a horserace
and holding a key to death's mysteries in the other.
So, Epona's key...
Joe Meek's key in the Bible.
We found about a horse
a scrap dealer's horse that had died
when they were taking backfill
for the creation of the Highbury Stadium.
The horse had died
and they decided to bury it upon the spot.
This accounts for the legend of a skeleton horse
buried somewhere under the Highbury ground
which fitted in rather perfectly
with this underworld horseracing goddess
with her key in one hand
with her handkerchief in the other.
All of these things suggest a kind of poetry of place.
It's one thing that seems to rhyme with another.
Chang and Eng, the Kray twins.
These things, the iron key, Epona.
When I actually went down to visit the neighbourhood
with my friend Steve Moore
we saw many things that you would have missed
if you'd not actually been on the ground.
Yes, research is fantastic
and you can find out all sorts of things
but we noticed that there was a dance club
in the neighbourhood called Po Na Nas
which is almost the same as Epona.
There were these wonderful little connections
that you could only spot by being on the ground.
Now, sometimes that won't be possible.
Sometimes you can't get on a train or a bus
and go down to visit Highbury.
Sometimes you'll be writing about things in other countries
that you perhaps have no prospect of visiting.
I recall that when I was starting the Swamp Thing series
for America
one of the first questions that I asked the comic company
I said, "OK, you want me to write this book Swamp Thing.
So, which swamp is he the Thing of?"
And they looked at me blankly
because I don't think any of them
had actually asked that question before
because they didn't really consider
place or location to be a big thing.
They told me that, "Well, it might be the Florida Everglades
might be Louisiana."
I thought Louisiana
because I like the music from Louisiana.
So I started to research the place and it doesn't take much.
All I needed was a local phrasebook
a book of local slang
a map of the state
perhaps with maps of individual towns if necessary.
I got a record of jukebox hits
to give me some of the musical culture of Louisiana.
I read about its history
I learned about what sort of plants grow there.
Spanish moss and water hyacinths, for example.
I learned about the birds that they have down there
the blue herons.
You don't need very much
and you will already know more about the place
than most of the people that are living there.
Most people have no awareness at all
of the landscapes in which they are living.
If they had more of an awareness of place
I suspect that they might find that they enjoy places more.
If we walk down a street
and all we see is grey terraces
that are devoid of any meaning
we might start to think
that we're living in a bit of a rat trap.
And you do that for long enough, and you're going to think...
"I'm living in a rat trap.
I'm probably a rat, aren't I?"
It's going to soak in.
Because to some degree, we are the places that we live.
Whereas if you're walking down a street and you know its history
if you know all of the rich circumstances
that have led up to that place
it will be like walking down a street from the Arabian Nights
it will be like walking down
a fantastic avenue
of glory and mythology
and you will think, after a while
"Hey, I'm living in a mythological landscape!
Maybe I'm a mythological being."
It works both ways.
The places that we live, they can degrade us
and they can make us feel like completely...
empty, useless individuals
in an empty and useless landscape.
Find out about places.
And make them burn with meaning and significance again
and you will find that the people living in them
will burn with meaning and significance.
Now, in some circumstances
the place can be almost the most important character
in a narrative.
In the recent feature film
that I wrote and took part in, The Show
we were lucky enough to have
the collapsed, bankrupt township of Northampton
which was, at that point, so desperate
for anybody to pay any attention
that we were given access to the whole town
all of its amazing architecture, its amazing sets
its secret places.
We were working from the old council offices
which was great because it was like
being in KGB offices from the 1950s.
But one of the areas adjacent to that office
was an old square
where they used to have the gallows
where they used to have all of the hangings.
And we had got a dream hanging
in our film, in someone's nightmare.
So we actually were able to set it in the actual place
where these executions had taken place.
And all the way through, we're showing these shots
of these extraordinary buildings that Northampton has
which are unique to the town.
And, in a way... Yeah, very definitely
the landscape becomes the most important character.
The same thing is also true
of, say, books like Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.
Where the castle Gormenghast is a physical presence
that is altering the lives
of all of the characters in the book.
It's hanging over them, it is probably
the most important character in that trilogy.
Yes, any place
if you look at it deeply enough, I am convinced
will have a spectacular story to tell you.
Some places would seem completely devoid
of anything interesting in their history, in their appearance
but I'd advise you to look again.
I believe that there is absolutely nowhere
that a deep enough investigation
could not unearth something of incredible interest
and fascinating mystery.
The author Émile Zola, the writer of Nana
which was regarded as being
one of the first socially-realistic novels.
He saw, in the rings of sedate redbrick suburb
that were radiating out from London
Émile Zola saw a fantastic dreamland
that was completely outside his experience.
He imagined the endless novels that he might write
about such a surreal landscape.
So, wherever you live, wherever you are looking at
there is something sacred, there is something fascinating
about that ground where you are standing
and your duty as a writer
is to excavate the meaning from that ground
and to convey it to your readers.