Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist best known for the Inspector Rebus series of crime novels set in Scotland.
On the island
Eight records
The first one is is the first single I bought, first pop record I bought, and I'm pretty sure I bought it only because it was number one in the charts and because my sister had just got a record player.
I work to music. I always have music playing in the background while I write. And there's one, it's an EP, it's not even an album, it's only 20 minutes long by a Scottish instrumental noise artist, Mogwai. And I can stick it on repeat, and somehow I can listen to that for 10 or 12 hours at a stretch.
Solid AirFavourite
At track number three takes me back to my teenage years at high school. I was introduced to the music of John Martin by a mate of mine, Jock Scott, and after all these years I'm still listening to it, and I'm still listening to what I think is his best album, Solid Air, and this is the title track.
I was a huge Joy Division fan, they were very dark, very gloomy. Their lead singer committed suicide. I was appearing on stage with my own punk band when we heard the news. But very beautiful music and I never got to see them live.
Well this is actually going back to when the panic attack started in London and I was advised to take some time off. So I jumped on a train, got as far as York, got off, looked at the notice board, saw Scarborough and thought I'll go to Scarborough. And I walked up and down the beach in out-of-season Scarborough listening to lots of Van Morrison and he was a great balm and healer.
You Can't Always Get What You Want
I have nicked stuff from the Stones throughout my writing career, mostly titles for books. Black and Blue is a Rolling Stones album. The younger of my two sisters, Linda, one of her boyfriends, was a big Stones fan. And when I was 10 or 11, he introduced me to this album, and I hated it because I was a T-Rex fan at the time. And then. When I grew up a bit, I thought it's one of the greatest rock albums of all time.
I've tried to sneak as many Scottish artists into this list as I possibly can. ... And Belle and Sebastian did this fantastic breakthrough album, I think, The Boy with the Arab Strap. And again, trying to sneak extras into my desert island. This was also the theme tune to the Channel 4 series Teachers, which I was a great fan of, especially in its early years.
Jackie Levin. And we started working together and we took a show on the road. It was a long, short story of mine, which I would sort of read out, and he would play songs that were thematically relevant. We grew up in the same part of Fife at much the same time from much the same background. And so I've chosen a song. It's not a typical Jackie Levin song, but it's about where we grew up and it's about the 50s and the 60s.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:29Have you always been an outsider looking in?
I think so. I mean, when I was a small kid growing up in a coal mining town, I knew I was different from the other kids. You know, I would sit in my room and uh try and write poetry or song lyrics or whatever or strip cartoons. But I I had this kind of knack of looking like I fitted in.
Presenter asks
2:49How much of you is there in [your detective character] Rebus?
Oh, quite a lot. Quite a lot. You know, sitting in his chair late at night, staring out of the window or going for long night time drives through the streets of Edinburgh. That's me. His musical taste these days is me. The junk food, yes, guilty. He smokes, I've never smoked.
Presenter asks
9:29Were your parents aspirational for you, or did they think you would go down the dockyard like your dad?
English was always my favourite subject at school. I loved writing essays. I loved reading books. ... I was the first member of my family to go to university. ... And I suddenly realised, do I want to go to university for four years to study something just for the money at the end of it? No. So I had to break the awful truth to them that I would study English.
The keepsakes
The book
Anthony Powell
I just love that the the way that life is a dance to the music of time. Characters come and go, we see people, we meet them, we get to know them, they disappear, they come back into our lives again. There's that wonderful flow that you get in that book that hopefully you get to a certain extent also over the Rebus series, where characters come and go and incidents reverberate through time.
The luxury
I've given this a lot of thought and I think it's got to be something I haven't played for years, pinball. I'm going to have a pinball machine.'Cause at university I played pinball and when we moved to France the local bar had a pinball machine and I never quite mastered it.
Presenter asks
12:46What was wrong with [your mother]?
They said she had a stroke and then they said it was multiple sclerosis, but I've got a feeling on the death certificate that said some kind of cancer, so I'm not sure that she was ever properly diagnosed.
Presenter asks
18:39There's a link between the birth of [your son] Kit and [your breakthrough book] Black and Blue, isn't there?
There is. ... fairly soon after he was born we noticed that he wasn't uh making much progress ... and eventually after much toing and froing he was diagnosed with a thing called Angelman syndrome ... I would climb the rickety ladder into the attic, draw it up after me, shut the trap door, and suddenly there was me and a computer and I would dump all this stuff on Rebus. ... The anger, the rage, the ... frustration of why me, all those big questions ... it made the book a better book. It made it a huge, angry book.
Presenter asks
27:22Will you kill [Rebus] off, or will he just retire?
At the moment if you ask me today, I'll say no, I can't I couldn't possibly kill him off. I've spoken to Colin Dexter about this because Colin Dexter famously did kill off Morse. And he said the reason he did it was that fans would keep besieging him to if he'd just given them a happy goodbye and I'm out of here. ... to make
“I do think that we we look at the world and we we we suck the soul from it for our characters. Muriel Spark puts it very nicely. She says we loiter with intent. ... And I think that's just about right. You know, it's just short of a criminal activity.”
“I'm the only crime writer I know who wasn't a fan of crime fiction before they started writing it. I became a fan thereafter. But at the time, I thought I was writing a dark gothic psychological Scottish novel in the tradition of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, but updating it to contemporary Edinburgh.”
“Look, writing, I think even if writers say it isn't, writing is therapeutic, there's no doubt about it. It's cathartic, it's exorcising your demons, which is why a lot of crime writers are such well balanced individuals in real life, is because we got all the dark stuff out on the page. It's the romance writers you've got to watch out for.”