JOHN CONNOLLY TALKS TO GINGER NUTS: PART 3

When you die, Jim, we’re going to stuff you and put you at the front of the bookstore. People will rub your head as they’re coming in for luck.


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All good things have to come to an end, and with this in mind we bring you the final part of out three part interview with the amazing John Connolly.  In this interview we discuss music, book selling and why life just ain't what it used to be.  And we also discover that Charlotte has some seriously bad taste in music.  

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​Parts one and two of our extensive interview with John Connolly can be found by following the two links below 
​

John Connolly Interview Part One 

​
​John Connolly Interview Part Two 
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JM: You’ve said that music is important when it comes to other writers to inspiring your own writing. How did the music of Two Tone, and especially The Specials, inspire your writing?

JC: Two Tone is a curious area for me because I do a radio show. That radio show came out of a belief that between 1976 and 1981 is maybe one of the most fertile periods in British Music ever. It explodes in so many different directions. It goes off like fireworks and then that energy gets transferred. Some of it kind of peters out and dies; then some of it goes through phases. And that Two Tone period was quite brief when you think about it, but then it got picked up slightly later by the second generation in the United States. It’s more the kind of US music that just makes my heart sick. The Untouchables is about the best of them, and then after that they’re just awful.

JM: You mean like Big Fish and No Doubt?

JC: Oh, wild stuff.

CB: [said very quietly] I like No Doubt.

JC: Oh yeah? Well, we’re just going to pretend you’re not here [general laughter]. So that particular section is just personal affection, it’s like my personal affection for early electronic music. The connection to the books comes about when there are pieces of music or lyricists who will do in two lines, or a songwriter will do in four minutes, what I’ve spent 150,000 words trying to get. That can be so frustrating, to listen to somebody like Jim White, this great wrong-eyed Jesus, this great American folk god, and these pieces of gothic American folk, which were five minute things that I was struggling to fit into 120,000 words. And that’s the reasons for the CDs: to show people that actually we all draw from the same cloud. We’re all pulling ideas from the same environment; some of it gets channelled into film, some of it gets channelled into music, and some of it gets channelled into books.

Those points of connection are interesting. I remember seeing the video for “Ghost Town” on Top of the Pops, and what I remember about watching The Specials was that it was Ireland. Ireland in the late seventies and early eighties was the grimmest place to grow up; it was just dismal and hopeless with massive unemployment. There was this idea that clubs closed – we didn’t have any clubs to close down! You guys, at least you had a club, you know?! Just the awfulness, that sense of a generation that was being forgotten. But then it refused to be forgotten and found all of this rage. It’s the same reason why I love Duran, Duran and Spandau Ballet. Now I know it doesn’t seem like the same thing, but in the late seventies and into the early eighties, to come out of Birmingham and decide, “I am going to wear pastels, I’m going to dress in kilts, I refuse to be bowed down by the fact that I live in these grim, midland cities where there seems to be no hope, when Thatcher came in and decided that actually England kind of stopped after Oxford”. And they  said, “You have no interest in any body beyond that, and actually, we refute all that. What you would like is for all of us to be like something in a Hovis ad, you know? Where it’s grim up north and we’re all going to be covered in coal dust and wear caps; I’m not going to do it.” To me, that was as much an act of rebellion, to create glorious happy music in the face of that kind of indifference. I have a huge amount of respect for that. It may not all be great and it may not all be as visceral and life-changing as, certainly, that second Specials album (which is just wonderful) but it is all part of a reaction that came around in the same very small period of time. It had a lot of the same stimulants, it’s just that people chose to express it in different ways.

JM: Do you think that we’re ready for another explosion like we saw then? Do you think that we’re getting to that same sort of political climate?

JC: You know, the climate’s there, but a lot of people clearly voted it in again. I don’t think we will, because what you had then was containment. You had people who were drawing their listening and their viewing from a very, very small pot that was the same as everyone else. So if you saw “Ghost Town”, it was because it was on Top of the Pops and x-number of million kids also watched that same video. Then they were talking about it the next day, at precisely the same time. That’s all diffused now, you don’t have that. And what I think you need is that spark to come along at the same time and not to be shouted out by a whole load of other white noise. I don’t think we’re ever going to have that again, that concentration, that sense of kind of claustrophobia, that sense of a shared experience occurring right at the same time with no other distractions. Because now I think you can just move on too easily to something else.

JM: You can always escape the mundane today with just a single click.

JC: Yeah, you can turn on a computer and see anything else. I’ve done a little limited edition which is coming out next year which is all about music. But if you want to access a piece of music now, it’s instant; it’s there at your fingertips. You don’t really have to fight to do it. My son, who’s twenty-three, might argue, “Well actually, I do have to go looking for things, it doesn’t just arrive on my doorstep.” But I say to him, “Well, you can do a search, you can find anything.” I remember that once I’d heard “Ghost Town” listening to the radio in the hope that somebody would play it again. [nostalgic nods and murmurs of agreement from us] There was no other way to hear it. In the same but a slightly different way, I used to buy “Look In” magazine, which was a junior TV times. I remember “Look In” would have huge features if they were showing a James Bond film. I remember cutting out pieces on “You Only Live Twice” and “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, which, by the time ITV got round to showing it, must have been 14-15 years old. But this was the TV premiere! There were people who had been born and gone through primary school with no access to these films, because there was no way to see them. And they become a big to-do because people were like, “Oh my god, this thing is on”. I remember “Alien” being shown on television, or “Deliverance”, these things that you had heard of but just couldn’t see. Now anybody can see them, easily. When you have a big state funeral or when there is something that happens, like a disaster (like for my kids it would have been the tsunami) those are the moments where everybody is experiencing these things at the same time. Those are very, very rare now and don’t really happen in popular culture. I think perhaps you need those incendiary moments to create the kind of movements that you’re talking about. But maybe that it’s just I’m old. I’m not that old, you know, and I buy more music than my kids do, god damn it! But age may be part of it.

JM: It feels as though they’ve just lost the sort of rite of passage which we had. You know, we had to go out to the record shop and hope that the record shop had something worth buying-

JC: Yeah!

JM: -whereas now it’s like, “If you listen to this, you might like this”. There’s no effort any more.

JC: No, and no investment in it. You’re not paying for something. I remember (this will make me sound like I should be sitting at the old fart’s table [puts on cranky old fart’s voice] “I remember when- Get off my lawn!”) that because a piece of vinyl was expensive, I couldn’t afford it. To buy a record I had to save for it. So you’d actually think long and hard about the record that you were going to buy because it was a considerable investment that you made. And when you bought it, you listened to the bloody thing until the groove was worn down. There are CDs in my house that I’ve never listened to, I’ve never even taken the plastic off. That would never have happened before; there was an effort involved. There is something to be said for it that, like “the love you get is equal to the love you take.” The effort you put into finding something and acquiring it is equal to what you get out of it. Now my kids would say, “Well we don’t want to own things.” And you know, that plays a part in the next book. What I often do is put things that annoy me into books. I think that you have to actually be in a position of wealth and privilege to have the choice to say, “I don’t want to own things”. There’s a guy in the books called Shaky; this old guy is getting his first apartment because he’s been living on the streets and he’s filling it with all VHS and vinyl. Somebody comes along and says, “Why do you want all this stuff? We’ll get you a Netflix password.” He goes, “But I’ve never owned anything and I’ve never had anywhere to put the things that I’ve owned and now I like the fact that I can surround myself with things.” My kids are like, “No, I don’t need to own that, because I can access it instantly, so I don’t need to own it.” But… but… I don’t understand that [he becomes slightly speechless at this strange concept].

JM: But it’s something that’s not really happened to the same degree within fiction, I don’t think. I know you can get your illegal sites, but there’s still a passion for reading and people still want to own books.

JC: But reading was always a niche. There’s no point in comparing it to music and cinema which were done by huge numbers of people. In reality, bookstores are kept going by a relatively small number of people who buy an awful lot of books. There was a period when books were expensive, so you went to a library. Nobody bought hardback books; it was untold. But I remember that every house, even those with people who didn’t read very much, would have a library in their house. It wouldn’t be a big library, but it was important to display the fact that you knew the value of a book, to show that you weren’t like the oiks down the street. You wanted to show that you were educated to some degree and you understood the importance of having such things in a house. We went through that phase of idiots like Joe Konrath and others just appalling – the worst thing to happen to books since the burning of the library at Alexandria! Just a dreadful human being, completely self-interesting and saying, “This is all going to come to an end, we’re all going to be reading e-books; self-publishing is the future and let’s ignore the big five.” He’d be saying these ridiculous statements and applying these ridiculous labels but he ignored a whole lot of things. For example, that actually a very small number of people kept bookstores going, because people who appreciated books wanted to be surrounded by them. They actually want to have books in their lives, and they hold onto books that they love. They don’t hold onto every book; some books they’re quite happy to read as an e-book because it’s the one you would have put in the Oxfam box if you’d bought it as a paperback. But there are books that you are given, there are books that you want to keep, and there are people who want that environment.

I’m about to start doing a one year lectureship in Liverpool which I’ve never done before and it’ll probably be the only year I’ll ever do it. But I wanted to try it and see what’s it like. I take a very holistic view of the trade. I accept the fact that if I were to publish through Amazon I would get £2-3 for every copy of the book that I would sell, but Amazon has no interest in supporting other writers. It would be an entirely selfish thing that I would do. I would just do it to get more money. If you look at people like idiot Konrath, there’s no discussion of the quality of the work, it’s simply about how much money you can earn. “I’ve earned this!” It’s like pyramid selling, and the only way that actually Konrath can keep getting the kind of money that Amazon give them, is by getting a whole lot of other rubes in at the bottom who are never going to sell half as many books as them, or even a fraction of it. Right at the top, just as in regular publishing, will be a couple of guys earning a lot of money. The difference with regular publishing is that it is trickle-down economics. In this industry, 90% of books never make any money but they’re published by people who are passionate about them. I know that somewhere between 40-60% of the cover price of every book that’s sold goes to the bookstore, that’s where most of it goes; I am happy that the bookstore gets that cut. I am happy that of the rest that my publishers get, I get 10% and a lot of it gets put back into the company; I know that the people coming up are going to get that money put in. Okay, so not all of these advances are going to work out, and not everyone is going to turn out to be publishable, but there is an interest in supporting those writers coming up. I would rather that than the alternative. So, that’s a long answer to – how did we get onto that? Or was I just ranting? Oh yes, music. But it is interesting, and the comparison with books and bookselling.

I think the worst has happened to the book trade, that some bookstores have already closed. But we lost some bad bookstores as well. We lost places like those ones I used to go into on Hay-on-Wye, where they looked at you oddly for even touching a book.

“Why are you disturbing the books?
​The books are sleeping. Don’t go messing with the books.”

I think that has already happened and the future is largely a kind of version of Waterstones which will be central buying but bookstores that almost behave like independent entities; they will have a core stock that you will be able to order. The idea that every Waterstones will look like a Tesco’s didn’t work. You put different things in the window, you put different things at the front. But I think certainly the future for the big chains like Barnes and Noble in the States doesn’t look great, but that’s to do with America. You know, the idea that the American market and our market are exactly the same is just ridiculous. When it comes to culture, we’re actually very, very different from the Americans. The idea that in ten years’ time a country which will probably have 300 million people in it, won’t have a national chain of bookstores, says more about America than it does about the book trade. So I’m kind of optimistic. And then you come to something like this, people passionate about books, passionate about reading. I mean, you sort of wish that not all of them were trying to write as well, because you don’t really need the competition, you know? [general laughter] And some of you at least, just be readers, okay? That would be great. But it gives you cause to hope.

JM: Well, I’m just a reader.

JC: God bless you!

JM: I have no desire to write.
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JC: When you die, Jim, we’re going to stuff you and put you at the front of the bookstore. People will rub your head as they’re coming in for luck.

JM: You see, unlike a lot of people, I know my limitations. I know I don’t have a book in me. There are people who write books who, in my opinion, shouldn’t even be allowed to write a shopping list. Yet so many places still praise them and if you praise the mediocre, you’re never going to push the genre any further. When people who generally don’t read the genre come into Amazon (which is really the only place where casual buyers will go) and say, “Oh, I fancy a ghost story because it’s Halloween”, they will pick up what is sitting there at number one which is a pile of nonsense.

JC: Yes, which is at the top because it’s free, or 99p.

JM: Exactly. Then they’re going to go, “I’m not going to do that ever again. That was a complete waste of my time”.

JC: I’m like that with music though because I’m not musical in any way. All I do is buy music and listen to it. I know that if I tried to do it, it would be hopeless, it would be like someone tuning up, you know, whereas I just love the fact that I can immerse myself in it with no fears or guilt or thinking, “Yeah, I could do that”. No I couldn’t. No idea how you do it at all.

And that concludes our interview with teh fabulous John Connolly, it is always a huge pleasure interviewing a writer that is so passionate about his craft, and such an amazing conversationalist.  If you haven't read any of John's works please foillow the link below to John's Amazon author page.  

John Connolly's Amazon Author Page

Parts one and two of our extensive interview with John Connolly can be found by following the two links below 
John Connolly Interview Part One 
​John Connolly Interview Part Two