About time and place: Quickfire Q+A with Peter Irvine

Join us as Peter Irvine, author of Crossing the Sound, takes part in our series of quick-fire Q&As!
What is a quick-fire Q&A?
We have our interviewee pick a number at random and we ask them the general question listed next to it.
Shortly after we switch to asking book-specific questions, to give you a brief insight into our wonderful writers and their books.

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What attracted you to writing in this genre?

Though to me I was writing a book about a specific time and place in the wider world, with reluctance I agreed that Crossing the Sound would sit in the music genre. My reticence was because I didn't see this just to be a book about musicians, about bands – I wanted it to have a much wider scope. But publishers and agents told me that it had to be categorised. It had to belong to a genre. It was Ian Rankin who suggested to me that it was an informative, entertaining book of the music genre. There are of course many people who love contemporary popular music, who go to lots of gigs, follow bands. Debut writers are often told to write about what they know, and I have been associated for many decades with the music world in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Scotland, and then elsewhere organising and designing new festivals, working with bands, venues, careers at all levels. So that is in the background of my tale, but it’s also a wide-ranging novel with characters who are not the usual band stereotypes and makes points, scenarios and revelations in the context of late 20th century cultural life and events – from the 60s to 1990. And the great music of those times.

How did you choose the setting for the story?

That wasn't too difficult because I'd travelled the world a lot: exploring experiences in the exciting early days before the hordes arrived. All of my adventures were still in the background when I began to realise there was a new cultural wave gathering momentum and about to break here in the UK and I wanted to ride it. There were few concerts at that time or venues, so I was able to get into a music scene and help to build it, first in Edinburgh, then Glasgow. We were on a roll that started with punk, then post-punk bands and everything that came after, first in clubs and dancehalls, then larger spaces (we ran concerts at Glasgow Barrowlands for years) arenas (we opened the Playhouse in Edinburgh and the SEC in Glasgow, the first concerts at Edinburgh Castle. We worked with most of the notable Scottish bands and brought international artists to Scotland for the first time (Dylan, Talking Heads, REM, Leonard Cohen, Frank Sinatra, Kylie, many more). So writing a book in the music scene, but decidedly as part of the wider changing world, was a no-brainer. I wrote about what I knew. My hindsight was far-reaching, settings that stretched from the Isle of Raasay where the young guitar genius lives, to London and the UK where his phenomenal rise is mapped out, then Europe, New York, LA, Ibiza (when club culture and mass tourism was taking off), and to settings where world-changing events were occurring: Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, the poll tax marches, the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, the launch of Glasgow’s European City of Culture.

What's your favourite thing about being an author?

Crossing the Sound is my first novel, but I also have a guide to Scotland, Scotland the Best which is now in its 14^th edition. It’s a visitor and lifestyle guide to Scotland and all the great things about it, ranging from hotels like Gleneagles to country inns and hostels, eating places from fine dining to fish and chips, ice cream to artisan bakers, ruined castles to waterfalls and all kinds of walks. Opinionated entries are written up in as few words as possible – succinct with information and highly selective to save both tourists and locals time, It gets me around (the best of) the Scotland I love. It’s also reaffirming to discover new places and hopefully they will benefit from the recommendation. My fiction book is entirely different, but equally rewarding. I can create a new world with a new landscape and new characters who gradually became themselves. I enjoy seeing them develop and evolve, and speak for themselves. It starts from nothing then becomes a big all-encompassing immersive project affecting my whole life for a while. And I get to play God.

Where's your favourite place to write?

To write I need space, light, privacy, a view (through a window) and somewhere where nobody can get to me. These are my prerequisites, but to write a book, I also need open-ended time: no social commitments or other limitations. As in the Sandy Denny song (in the book’s Playlist) ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’, I want ‘time’ to just disappear. The window is important so I can look up from the page or the laptop or whatever, and see the world outside (with or without people in it). Crossing the Sound starts on the Isle of Raasay, an island I knew. The island is both on the page and was there in actuality. I stayed at Raasay House. I could sit on the bench and look over the lawns to the mountains of Skye, the Cuillins, writing notes. With the realisation that I wanted to write a book, I started there and then the first chapter – Thom’s arrival on Raasay, a random island where he had gone to escape – was there on page! I had made a start that day in May, the rest followed in stops and starts. The novel now is hugely different from the first messy draft. But coming back from Raasay, I remembered a village north of Barcelona on a serenely beautiful coast and I drove there to write. I lived in a lighthouse, in a room that looked down on a mystical cove. My summer-long routine was that I would write, ideally in the morning, go down to the cove in the afternoon and swim, lie on the rocks in the sun, and think about where my fledgling novel was going. Then come back and do a rewrite before supper. There were no distractions, visitors were booked in with restraint. Mostly I was in my own little bubble floating around in what was Salvadore Dali’s surrealist landscape (he lived down the road). That was certainly a favourite place.

Pen and paper or laptop?

Pen and paper – actually pencil and paper. I love pencils, easy to delete or amend what you’ve written, blowing the rubbery shreds away. When I started writing in the room in Raasay House all those years ago, I had a pencil and notebooks picked up at a gas station. There were no laptops or mobiles then. You were left to your own devices. When I got to the lighthouse in Spain to write in earnest in big notebooks, I was wearing many rubbers away. Writing all summer, going over it all again when I got home, then giving it to a friend, an ace typist, to convert it into a manuscript on a word processor, I found that I’d written 115,000 words – by hand.

What motivates you to keep writing?

I strive for perfection. I seem to do that in everything that I do: concerts, events, festivals, my Scotland the Best series of books, cooking dinner for friends, planning a holiday. Of course, you can never achieve ‘the perfect’ anything, but I aim to get close to it. I guess this is why the novel has had so many rewrites: restructuring, honing descriptions, nuances, dialogue, looking for the right – the perfect – word. And then when the structure is largely in place, I’d go on an amendments-marathon. In truth, I could have probably tweaked the manuscript forever. I was on that journey right up to the day it was sent to the publisher. It helped that I had not one but two great editors, one for the work in progress and one from Luath for the final version. Both had to face my terrible punctuation.

Are any of the characters based on real people?

Yes. This is a book firmly in the category of autofiction. Inevitably it's partly autobiographical. Of course there's elements of myself in it, people that I know, people I’ve met. But all the characters are combinations of people, often different aspects in one character. Perhaps it helps that my memory of people can be blurred, I’m recalling impressions. In this debut novel like so many, I'm writing about a world I know over many years. When I started, I was writing in real time: observations were in the here and now. When I found the manuscript again after many years, I could work in a bigger framework – painting pictures, creating set scenes in great detail, aided by an eidetic memory (which I discovered I had) as well as a broader brush with the benefit of hindsight. The autofiction medium was liberating for me, fun to play with and given my subject (the music and media world in the eighties), unarguably appropriate. For example, there’s a scene where Thom, the main protagonist, runs into Tilda Swinton and John Byrne, the artist (now deceased), on the corner by the Café Royale in Edinburgh where they are going to dinner with a notable London agent (one of the characters drawn quite closely to a real person). It’s a few days before Christmas, everyone’s going to a highly anticipated concert where ‘the band’ (now the hottest band of the year) are playing at the Playhouse Theatre. I’ve met all these characters, but the band themselves are all fiction.

What themes were most important for you to explore?

Deliberately, I picked the 1980s: the decade where greed, opportunism and exploitation became rife, even acceptable, almost a measure of success. The playbook of the music/ record company and supporting media industry contrasted with life on the island of Raasay where the main protagonist hails from. Though harbouring many problems, not least unemployment, Raasay was uncharted territory largely unspoiled with few tourists. It still is, to a large extent, a natural haven. The contrast between this quiet, beautiful island where Thom goes to escape, and London and Soho, the heart of the music biz, where young artists UK wide had to go to ‘make it’, is ironic and apparent. What we are observing is the power and the lure of late 20th century capitalism and the irresistible attraction of fame and celebrity. This theme is explored through the implacable attitude of the charismatic, idealistic and prodigiously talented young Eliot who eschews all attempts to lure him into emerging celebrity culture. He doesn’t want to hang out with superficial movers and shakers, or meet record company people or journos and he's very sure about what he will and won’t do. Moulding this artist is a big challenge for Thom whose career was built in the uber manipulative advertising and marketing industry. But he sees within his artist’s intransigence, an opportunity both for their own success and to disrupt the record company game. What’s at stake is that most fragile and precious of qualities, integrity.

Which character's voice came to you most naturally?

I guess the ‘easiest’ inevitably, was Thom’s voice. The main character is Thom. It’s his story, but he offloaded it to someone else, a journalist with The Guardian newspaper, partly because he didn’t have the time, largely from vanity (here’s what an amazing guy he is!). So the omniscient voice is not actually me, the author of the book, or Thom; this is explained in the Foreword. There are other reasons for this narrative device as will become clear. One of the main characters is Rhona, an artist who lives on Raasay and is becoming a successful artist in her own right. A key player in the novels triumvirate of protagonists, her feminine viewpoint and astute observations are a counterpoint to the masculine attitudes of most of the other characters and the general misogyny of the music and media world of the eighties.

Other voices that became more distinctive and seemed almost to write themselves were Eliot and Knox. The voice of the enigmatic guitar player, Eliot, is quiet to begin with, distinguished by his uncompromising attitude to what he has let himself in for, but when we hear more of his backstory we recognise how special he is. It’s not so surprising, but still shocking how the endgame plays out.  He loves nothing better than being on the island on his own and he made a promise to his grandfather that he would take his music, his prodigious talent, as far as it could go and never squander his talent. He himself, and we the reader, begin to recognise not just his talent, but his power and his integrity. 

How do you balance entertainment with deeper meaning or commentary?

I did want the book to be entertaining, to be a page turner. It is set in the world of ‘entertainment but I didn't want to be stuck in music biz. It’s more than that I hope.

I do have scenes set in many locations in London, Paris, Ibiza, and in New York, they are portrayed in detail. very visual and drawn from memory.  Different times and locations move the narrative along and they enable me to make commentary and both political and social history observations. Thom lived through the 60s and 70s, went to demos, got his share of drugs and ‘the good times’ and travelled the world extensively, but he loses his resolve and the intensity of his principles as he’s carried away into the labyrinth of the music business. Ultimately the novel is an allegory. We can perhaps decide whether Thom is a good guy or a bad guy, a strong guy or weak. Does he get his just desserts?

Crossing the Sound is out now.