As I was mentioning earlier...
whatever kind of writer you want to be
you can improve yourself immensely
by trying other forms of writing.
One of the things that I've always enjoyed
is songwriting.
I cannot play a single musical instrument
but I am lucky enough to have known quite a lot
of really good musicians and collaborated with them.
Now, songwriting can teach you an awful lot of things.
For any writer, it will teach you
that supposedly flowery and decorative metre and rhyme
can actually be used
to carry an awful lot of condensed information.
You can get an awful lot of story and plot over
in a few lines of verse.
That is why most of the great epics
are told in verse.
But there are other benefits
to actually being able to write a decent song or two.
One of those is that in any of the works
that you might be doing
you will find that
if you're trying to suggest a culture
a background culture
for your characters and events to happen against
then putting a few pop songs in will let you know
what the people in your world are listening to.
It will tell you a lot about their psychology
and their taste and the kind of culture
that they belong to.
When I was doing the series Top Ten
that I was mentioning earlier
as an example of how to create a place
one of the things that I did
was to come up with a number of songs
of different types
to be played upon different radio stations
or to appeal to different characters.
But you can use the songs to add tremendous atmosphere.
Just out of the blue, somebody switches on a radio
and all of a sudden you get song verses coming out of it
that will add immeasurably
to the atmospherics of the scene.
This was something that
when we were doing our film recently
we decided that
because we didn't want to hire in music
already recorded music from outside
we thought that the cheaper, skinflint option
would have been for me to write all of the lyrics
to all of the songs myself
and then we'll turn them into proper songs
and we'll drop them in
on the jukeboxes and on the radio.
This is fantastic.
It really fleshes out the world that you're trying to build.
In terms of actually performing...
performing your work in front of an audience
that is always going to be a lot more stressful
and a lot more anxious.
But it will pay enormous benefits
because to be in front of a few dozen people
on a stage, at a poetry reading, say
being able to captivate an audience
of a couple of dozen people who you can see
and who you can make eye contact with
that can be scaled up
to captivating a few thousand people
that you cannot see
and who cannot make eye contact with you.
The same skills can simply be applied to other media.
You will notice in my performance
an immediate reaction from the audience.
This is very welcome
because in a normal writer's career
you will write what you think are the most perfect
permanent lines of your life
yet you will get no response to them.
You'll maybe get a review in a couple of months' time
or perhaps a letter from somebody
which is always very welcome
but it's not the same as being able to tell in the moment
whether your material is working or not
whether your delivery is working or not.
That's invaluable.
And in fact, I would say that
whether you are in front of an audience or not
it is usually important to always read your work aloud.
Perform it as if there was an audience there
even if you haven't got an audience.
Because you'll be able to work out
which bits work and which bits don't.
So I would say, if you get the chance
it might just be a form of showing off
but if you get the chance
to actually get up there on a stage in any capacity
and actually perform your work, please, please take it.
This piece was something that I wrote
for the first-ever public performance
by the newly reformed Northampton Arts Lab.
The idea was that there has been some total cultural collapse
and that all the art in the world has died overnight.
And into this art vacuum arises...
a brutal art fascist mandrill.
Yes, perhaps you had to be there
but if you could imagine that I am dressed as a mandrill
with wonderful, mandrill-like make-up
while I'm reading this.
OK.
In times of national demise, speaking historically
the mulch of crumpled dream and culture
is a laboratory that breeds outrageous saviours
and monsters without warning.
Cromwell, Hitler, Josef Stalin.
Jeremy Corbyn.
Emerging from a broken world to find a hole they can fill.
Cometh the moment.
Cometh the mandrill.
This greed and gore emporium is not how life was meant to be
with franchises and fads reheated from a previous century
and nothing new. A neutered future
on the retro record deck that's stuck
and endlessly repeating in a fire-bombed discotheque.
Your TV's in a coma and you can't get it to wake up.
What you need is a dictatorial baboon in make-up.
Aggravated, overstated and horrifically mutated
here to see that you're berated.
What's the last thing you created?
All those logos on your raiment
brand-name badges of enslavement
drip-fed, passive entertainment
was this your intended statement?
When you have nowhere left to stand
then you must take one.
When there's no culture in the land
then you must make one.
Psychopathic, charismatic
I could go on but don't need to.
As the higher primate
it's my long-awaited fate to lead you.
You have no choice but me, so please do not suggest so.
Hear now the poetry of my mandrillifesto.
The light of burning corporations
will repaint the sky in grenadine.
There'll be billions of banners
and Art Nouveau butterfly bombers
like this world has never seen before.
We'll march on ugliness and stupidity.
We'll make loveliness compulsory
and the roar of our orchestra engines
will soar evermore
in a glorious, annihilating symphony
for the tyranny of beauty is our god-given duty.
Every child at birth is to be issued with a ukulele
given their own flag and granted absolute and utter sovereignty
and as long as it's coloured in nicely and has an old woman on
make their own currency.
And we'll turn every urban address
into a dripping Rousseau wilderness.
And we'll keep advancing
until there's nobody not dancing.
We'll put politics in the pillory
put the "art" back in "artillery".
We can weaponise wonder...
and our voice shall be as thunder.
From times of national demise arise new apes like me, with
in our leopard-scaring eyes, manifest destinies.
I'll lead you to a fluorescent utopia
if you'll let me, love me, worship me, obey me.
But never pet me.
If we can't build a future
then we'll be its human landfill.
So, cometh the moment.
HE SNARLS Cometh the mandrill.
Of course, one of the benefits of performance
is that you will actually be in a room with other people.
Because otherwise, the life of a writer
is a very, very solitary thing.
Not for every writer, perhaps, but largely for me.
I have known writers who can, in some manner
actually go and sit in a coffee shop and create.
I could never do that.
If I'm trying to actually compose something
inside my head
I'm afraid that I have to have pretty much complete silence
and nothing going on
and I don't like to be interrupted.
Which leads to a condition
of pretty much permanent isolation.
And in fact, I can remember when the pandemic started...
after a few months of it, I suddenly realised
that no, the coronavirus definitely wasn't created
in a laboratory
as part of some sinister conspiracy.
No, I know that that is definitely not true.
However, if that was true
the first person I'd be looking at would be a writer.
This is...
This is life as normal for writers
or at least it is for me.
Never seeing your friends, never going out.
Hearing from people over the phone intermittently.
All of this stuff, this is a writer's life.
This is our existence.
Being in a room on your own, in complete silence, in my case.
Because I used to enjoy listening to music
when I was a cartoonist
because that's a different thing entirely.
Cartooning can be done by, I don't know
some sort of vestigial brain that you have in your wrists.
And you can listen to the John Peel Show
back in the days when you could listen to
the John Peel Show
and it won't affect your cartooning at all.
However, once you start writing, that all changes.
I suddenly realised
that I couldn't listen to anything with lyrics
because that was interfering with the words
that I was trying to write.
So I thought
"OK, I can listen to purely instrumental pieces."
You know?
Then I was halfway through...
an album by Mahavishnu, John McLaughlin
when I suddenly realised
"No, this is beautiful music.
This is interfering with the rhythms
that I'm trying to write in."
The only thing that I could listen to
would be ambient music.
That lasted for a couple of months
before I realised that that was affecting the atmospheres
that I was trying to create.
There are some of my comic scripts
from that period where there's huge captions
just talking about the way things sound.
And that was all because I was listening to
a lot of Brian Eno and Harold Budd.
So eventually I opted for complete, tomb-like silence
which is the way that I write to the present day.