TIM'S BOOK CLUB #7

From KM.com,

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

I have talked about this in interviews before, but it's so good that I couldn't not mention it again here. In fact, I think it's probably my favourite book of all time. It's a fictional compilation of a guy's diary from throughout his whole life. The style develops through the book as you would expect it to with a person writing their diaries. So, he starts off writing it at school and it's all very schoolboyish. Then it focuses more on his dreams as he becomes a man and starts to go off and do things with his life. And then he gets much more cynical and becomes an alcoholic. But it's just such a human story about a normal guy being buffeted around by strokes of fate. There are high points and lighthearted points, but also some incredibly dark and sad passages.

It's one of those books that really makes you think about your own life - that anything could happen at any moment that could send your life on a complete tangent. This guy starts off as a schoolboy in South America and then he ends up in London, then he's a prisoner of war in Germany, then he goes off to New York for a bit, before heading to Africa. And I think he eventually ends up in the South of France. I can't quite remember. I'm making a point of not reading it again for a while, so that I can really get back into it when I do. I don't read books twice very often - in fact, almost never - but this one is just so, so good. If I had to recommend one book to anyone, it would be Any Human Heart.

Tim

For more info on William Boyd, click here to visit his official website.

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From KM.com,

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

I read this quite a while ago, when I was writing songs for the second album. It's a very heavy family epic that follows a guy called the Swede. He runs a successful business in New York City and has a lovely family, and it basically charts the disintegration of his family and his values. I'm sure there have been lots and lots of books written about that kind of thing, but this particular one stands out because it's so psychologically complex and you never know what is going to happen next.

The character does everything that you think would be the right thing to do. You don't have that sense you often get with a film or maybe a less dense book, where you can see the mistakes being made and you think "Oh God, that's going to go wrong." He has as much intelligence as you could ask him to have. He attempts to do everything sensitively and tries to be a good parent and husband. But the twists and turns of the way that it all works out are really complex. It's essentially just a totally unglamourous story that could be happening to any of us really. But from a human and psychological point of view, it's incredibly interesting. It's also really quite depressing.

The book definitely shares some of that darkness that runs through Under The Iron Sea. Songs like Atlantic are probably closely related. And, actually, at one point Crystal Ball was called American Pastoral, after the book. The lyrics of that song were actually based around the phrase "American Pastoral" and some of the story, for quite a while. I can't remember why I changed it in the end.

I think my influences as a songwriter come from far and wide, but especially from books. I'm quite a slow reader, and I think I really engage with a book emotionally. Often a book will really be a big part of my life for however long it takes me to read it. Sometimes I'll be dipping into it for weeks and months, reading a few pages at a time, because I have a terribly short attention span. And when I'm not reading it, I'll find myself thinking about it, and talking to other people about it. I think all that does definitely come out in my songwriting.

Tim

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From KM.com,

The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho is one of those writers that intellectuals can be a bit sneery about, because he writes these very wide-eyed books about spiritual adventures and everything is always a metaphor for some kind of spiritual discovery or philosophy. And he's also quite religious in places. But I was recommended the book - by Jesse, actually - and I really enjoyed it.

It's a very interesting read. It's based on Coelho going on this journey where he wants to become part of some kind of spiritual brotherhood. The book starts with him failing his initiation test to get into this brotherhood, then in order to make up for this failure, he's sent on a pilgrimage through Spain. He and his guide, who's also in the brotherhood, have to walk hundreds of miles through the mountains, and all along the way there are these tests that he has to do. Each challenge takes up a chapter of the book. There's one where he has to pretend that he's being buried alive, so that he experiences what it's like to face your death. Then there's another where he has to pretend that everything is happening much more slowly than it is, in order that he loses the sense of time. By facing all these challenges, he's trying to attain some kind of particular spiritual purity, wisdom and power.

It's not the sort of thing I've ever read before, but I loved it. It does make you think about the way you live your own life. And I felt that I actually learned a lot from it. Coelho will have achieved something at the end of each chapter, and learned things about himself that are really fundamental and important to him on his journey. It's nice to be able to flick back through the pages and think about what did he did, what he said, and what the thought process was that he went through. And it is amazing how much you find yourself identifying with the character.

The book left me with a sense of wanting to try to apply some of those crazy adventures to my own life. We're all slaves to the same obsessions and limitations and fears and dreams and so on. There are all these common threads that link pretty much every person on the planet and a lot of them are talked about in this book. That makes it feel quite universal. So, it's really, really interesting and very inspiring. One of those books which makes you feel that you could potentially be a better person.

Tim

Click here to read the prologue of the book at Paulo Coelho's website

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From KM.com,

Bit Of A Blur by Alex James

I read this book when we were recording Perfect Symmetry in Berlin and I found it to be very, very funny and inspiring. Alex James is the bass player from Blur and I really liked the juxtaposition of his very throwaway gung-ho approach to being in Blur and living it up, against his more serious insight into the working process of a band. I actually found it very inspiring. He has some quite interesting ideas - one philosophy that he keeps mentioning is that being creative is so much about confidence and that the things you do quickly without really thinking about them are normally the best things. That was a really interesting creative inspiration for me.

Reading the book made me go back to Blur. I've always been a huge fan of theirs, but I guess I hadn't actually listened to them that much recently. It was really nice to hear the albums again in the context of being reminded about all the excitement around that time, be it related to Blur themselves, or the wider context of politics and art and everything. And they really have made some brilliant records.

It's great being able to get inside a musician's head in the way that a book like this lets you. Getting people to open up like that and talk seriously about their life and their music can be almost impossible, unless you get to know them really, really well. But that seems to change when someone writes a book. I wouldn't be surprised if Alex James has gone through his whole life without ever expressing half of the stuff that he wrote in that book. There seems to be something about writing a book that makes you write as if nobody's ever going to read it. I guess that's why confessional things often come out in books, rather than in interviews or any form.

I'm not sure whether I'd like to write a book myself. I don't feel like I've got quite enough wisdom to share just yet. But I'll keep hoping...

Tim

Buy Bit Of A Blur from Amazon UK / USA / Canada / Germany / France / Japan

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From KM.com,

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

I read this in the summer of 2009, while we were out on tour. I read quite a lot when we're touring, partly because I hate flying so much and I find reading on planes is quite a good distraction. I found the book really, really inspiring. I had a similar feeling when I read another Kerouac book, On The Road. There's something about his writing which really appeals to me. It's probably quite a male thing, actually, that yearning to jump on a flat-top train carriage and lie in the sun all the way from one coast of America to the other, or some sort of romantic dream.

The book is based very closely on Kerouac's life, with pretty much every character based on a real person. So there's a character called Ray Smith which is him and his friend in the book, Japhy Ryder, is based on a poet called Gary Snyder. Plus Allen Ginsberg makes an appearance and that sort of thing. They're all a bunch of poets and amateur Buddhists and they spend a lot of time reading poetry, getting drunk, talking about Buddhism, writing these crazy spiritual haiku and going on big walks up mountains. They're basically drifters, but poetic, philosophical drifters.

It's a very romantic story, I suppose, but it also has a lot of very interesting thoughts about the way we live our lives and what matters and what doesn't matter. All of the characters have different opinions on those things. So it's quite an intellectually stimulating book as well as being set against the backdrop of the great outdoors and Kerouac going on these directionless adventures. He goes on a couple of great train journeys and also hitchhikes back and forth across the States. And it ends with him going off to a fire lookout station on top of a mountain in Washington State. He has to stay in this little hut for several months, all on his own, thousands of feet up. He just sits there looking out for fires and thinking about the world.

I would say that my character and beliefs have been shaped by reading books like this. I'm not the kind of person who'll take anything that's been handed down to me and I don't really feel that I've adopted any sort of belief system directly. But I'm interested in people's philosophical approaches to life. I guess the only thing I really believe in is people and it's always interesting to experience the psychological studies of people that you get in a really good book. I find that definitely shapes the way I think about myself and the way I think about other people.

With the Dharma Bums, some of the Buddhist stuff is quite rambling and almost nonsensical, although some of it is very beautiful in its approach to worldly things. But I don't necessarily subscribe to it all. A lot of the book is about each of them thinking the other person's point of view is nonsense and that debate goes on throughout, which is interesting in its own right. But for me, personally, I was almost more interested in the characters of the drifters and what happened to them during their adventuring through the American badlands, the people they meet, and what it means to roam like that. It definitely awakened in me a sense of wanting to go somewhere. I don't know where. But just to go on an adventure, meet people and have no idea where you're heading.

Tim

Buy The Dharma Bums from Amazon UK / USA / Canada / Germany / France / Japan
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From KM.com,

Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles

I read a lot of music books. I've got a pile of them called things like Tips From Great Record Engineers, which will be endless stories of what microphone they used on the snare drum and stuff. They're specialist to say the least. I've been trying to get back into just reading for pleasure and I suppose also for inspiration, and not trying to get quite so hung up on the technical side of things.

But this book offers the best of both worlds. It's the autobiography of Geoff Emerick, the guy who engineered a lot of the Beatles' most important albums. Being a lifelong Beatles fan, I've read pretty much every book on them that there is. I don't think this one is massively well-known, but I've found it, as a musician, much more insightful, exciting and atmospheric than pretty much any of the others. It's got so much about the creative process of the Beatles. It was interesting to read about the way they spent their time in the studio. You always have this sort of image of the Beatles turning up in a chaotic mess, recording a masterpiece in about three hours, and then speeding off in an E-type Jag to some trendy club. But it really gives you an impression of how hard they worked and how much time they put into their writing and pre-production before they started recording stuff, working out harmonies and polishing up songs. For instance, he talks about sitting there with Paul McCartney all night working on a bassline note by note. I found it quite encouraging, because you always imagine that these guys had an almost supernatural talent to put down these amazing songs and productions without even thinking about it. It's kind of reassuring to know that they had to work really hard for it too.

It's a very, very interesting book if you're into learning about the actual creative process of a band. And this kind of book really does help you as a musician. I was actually reading it while I was writing songs for Perfect Symmetry, and I remember finding it very exciting and having that feeling of being in a room while great music is being made, which is definitely inspiring. It makes you think, "Oh, I could sit at a piano now and try and write a song like that." You get this surge of excitement and a feeling that you can do it too. And that's always a really, really great feeling.

Tim

(This book is not currently in print, but you should be able to find it on eBay or through Amazon sellers)

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