Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer who creates fantastic alternative realities beneath the everyday world, best known for 'Sandman', 'Coraline', and 'American Gods'.
On the island
Eight records
I was always a sucker for words. I loved words and I loved stories. So I fell completely in love with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars because it felt like there was a story. There was even if I didn't know the details. And the song that it always ended on was Rock and Roll Suicide.
The Nightmare Song (from Iolanthe)
John Reed and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
I was taken by my aunt Diane, who would die at a very young age of leukemia a couple of years later, to the King's Theatre to see Iolanthe … I would have been three years old, and the words became almost a kind of invocation if I would get too upset or too troubled, I would sing it to myself, and it's the nightmare song.
It's an evocation of of Soho in the nineteen sixties, but the Soho that I came to as a young writer in the early nineteen eighties wasn't that much removed … from the Soho that Al Stewart was singing about. And it was one of the very few times that I actually felt, ah, I'm I'm in my place, this place, this weird Denmark street, a long gone pub called the Cafe München in which all of the people interested in comics would hang out. That was where my people were and that was where my life wound up being centered.
Len Cariou and the original Broadway cast of Sweeney Todd
In about 1992 or 1993, the National Theatre put on a production of Sweeney Todd. And I just moved to America and I had the kind of flight where your flight is delayed and then it's delayed again and then the plane they were going to fly you out on didn't work … and you have this flight to the UK and you land and I just remember being so tired, so sad, so hungry and then going to see Sweeney Todd at the Cottesloe sitting in the front row getting splashed by blood and thinking this is the best thing that's ever happened to me in the theatre. This makes up for everything.
This song was actually where I found my daughter Holly's name. And years and years later, when Holly was at college, she said to me, you know, I wish you'd play me some of those songs that used to be on playlists and on cassettes when we'd go for a drive. What about Walk on the Wild Side? … And I played her Walk on the Wild Side. And as it finished, she looked at me and she said, so hang on. She said, I'm named after a trans person in a Lou Reed song. And I said, well, yes, yes, you are. And she looked at me and she said, oh, Dad, I do love you.
I was at the San Diego Comic Convention in 1991. A young man named Rance Hoseley came up to me, handed me a cassette, and said, It's by a friend of mine, and she sings about you on one of the tracks. Please don't sue her. And I played it through and then put it back on and played it through again. So I called her and said, You're brilliant. And that was Tori Amos. And the song that she sang about me on, and more importantly that she sang about the Sandman comics which she'd encountered and loved, was called Tear in Your Hand.
Bees in TreesFavourite
As I get older, there are more and more musicians, songwriters that I find it difficult to listen to because I stop and listen to the words more and more. So I find I need instrumental music … Some of my favourite music for the last thirty years has been Michael Nyman's film scores … I can put one on and it's just bliss. I smile and I start to write. So this is a track called Bees in Trees, and it's from Drowning by Numbers, which is one of my favorite films.
Like most of the songs, I think I love it because it's a story and because the edges feel permeable, and I can wonder who the people in the story are, and I can wonder about whether or not it's a love song or a ghost story, whether it's about comfort. I love the idea that there aren't really any answers there, but it always makes me wonder.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:01So much of your writing features secret doorways or magical portals to somewhere else. What are you searching for, or should it be running from?
I think it's more of a searching for than a running from, a search for infinite possibilities.
Presenter asks
3:09One of the few forms you haven't attempted yet is an autobiography, although your novel 'The Ocean at the End of the Lane' infuses a fantastic adventure with details from your own early life. Why did you take that approach?
I loved the freedom of making things up, and I loved the fact that you can draw conclusions in fiction. You can take things to places that you can't ever really take them in real life because … You never get closure in real life. … I also think sometimes you can get truer in fiction than you can in real life. Partly because fiction needs to be convincing and real life doesn't need to be convincing.
Presenter asks
5:02By your own account, you were scared a lot, and fear often stalks your stories as an adult. What were you frightened of as a little boy?
The keepsakes
The book
Gene Wolfe
it's a book that gets deeper and wiser and stranger as I come back to it older
The luxury
an antique accounts ledger and a fountain pen with unlimited sepia ink
I would obviously need a pen... and I'd like an unlimited amount of ink, preferably a sort of a sepia colour
You name it. I can uh you know, what have you got? Definitely the dark? shadows, witches, anything that really did exist, and anything that didn't.
Presenter asks
22:47You wrote your first children's book, 'The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish', in 1997. Where did the idea for that come from?
The idea, like most of my children's books, was stolen from one of my children. In this case, my son Mike, he would have been four, maybe five years old. … And I'd said something to him that he didn't like, like possibly suggesting to him that it was actually possibly his bedtime. And he looked up at me with a fury that only a small boy can generate. … And he just said, I wish I didn't have a Dad. He said, I wish I had. … And then he paused because he hadn't thought that through, and and then he said, I wish I had goldfish and he stomped off. And I just thought that is brilliant.
Presenter asks
26:54You're married to the musician Amanda Palmer, and the two of you have an open marriage, and you've been very open about that, but do you have any regrets about that honesty?
Oh, all the time, yeah. … We both have boundaries. … They're not in the same place. So, you know, I think she's had to pull in from where her natural boundaries would be, in which she would love to be telling everybody everything. And I've had to walk several hundred yards beyond where my boundaries end into a world of going, okay, well, I guess I'm going to have to talk about this stuff, which, as far as I'm concerned, is private life, and I don't really want to talk about it, but Amanda is, so I have to too. … I'm really glad that we did. Because I think it's probably very good for me to be dragged out of my comfort zone over and over.
“I used to r genuinely envy kids who didn't have imaginations, who weren't populating the shadows with things. I knew I couldn't switch it off, and I thought of that as my big weakness, and did not realize that one day I'd grow up and that will be my superpower.”
“The great thing for me was you always felt on the outside of everything. It's not a bad place to be when it comes to religion or when it comes to anything for a writer. You know, I loved religion. I still do. I love religions. I love myths. I love systems of belief. And I can love them without ever feeling that I'm 100% a part of them.”
“Particularly in the 80s, the biggest appeal was the idea that you had an art form which was mostly untouched. That there was this amazing art form, but people had written it off as being solely for children or sub-literates. And there was something gloriously perverse in the 80s about going, I think I want to do, I want to become a writer and I want to do it in comics where nobody's looking. I want to be... This isn't even gutter literature. This is way below the level of the gutter. We're looking up and we can see the gutter above us. And this is where we want to make art.”
“I was definitely worried about disappointing people. … A sort of feeling of going, well, I'm I'm not very interesting, but I think I'll be somebody who wears dark glasses in a big leather jacket so that at least people have an idea in their heads of what a Neil Gaiman looks like, and he can wear dark glasses in a big leather jacket.”
“Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared. Being brave means you're scared and you go on and you do the right thing anyway.”
“I read Robinson Crusoe at a very young age and Swiss Family Robinson and several of those books. So I think I assumed by the time I was seven or eight that at some point in my life I would definitely get cast away on a desert island. I used to make sure that I traveled with a tiny book that I picked up in a second-hand shop called Survival, which was the US Air Force Guide to surviving if you were shot down, whether it was on Arctic tundra or in on a desert island or in Africa or whatever, and it showed you how to harvest breadfruit.”