Chris Connelly Interview

You have had a very prolific career as a musician but what some people might not know is that you’re also an author. Your first book was Confessions of the Highest Bidder. Can you tell us a little about its content?

Confessions was basically a collection of songwords, starting from around 1982, which is when I was in my nascent stages as a songwriter, I suppose, it follows me through my move to the states and through several subtle stylistic changes as a writer-that being said, to the outside reader (i.e. someone who is not me) I think it is apparent that several things in my writing are constants. I also published a number of pieces in this book which were not songwords, they are simply poems, some of them later became songs.

With the perspective of time, what is the piece from that book that you’re proudest of? Why?

Oh, that’s hard-I actually am looking at it right now, and my answer cannot be concrete-sorry, I am not a contrarian, but writing for me carries with it the perspective of my own abstraction so, to answer your question, there are pieces in there that are very visceral and intuitive, the bits where I am writing about nature or the asymmetry of nature perhaps, that’s when I feel I have bypassed the human and am writing instinctively.

Your next book was Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible and Fried: My Life As A Revolting Cock. What’s the most valuable lesson that you’ve learnt from that period of time?

Well, what I learned about the time I lived it was that I was an idiot, a time wasting fool who VERY FORTUNATELY managed to squeeze out a few pieces of music that are of some worth, I realized in hindsight that I probably wasted other peoples’ time as well as my own, that drugs and drink never have helped my creative process in anyway at all, I realized how lucky I was to have a very strong support system that helped my from destroying myself completely. As far as the writing process goes, I realized that my greatest asset is probably my sense of humour!

A few years ago you wrote your first novel Ed Royal generating lots of very positive reviews. Can you tell us about the plot?

It was a great exercise for me. The plot in the book is definitely not the plot I started with, but I found that as I wrote more, more opportunities arose within the plot, different avenues to follow dictated by the levels that the characters operated on, all of which were fictional, but definitely influenced by hybrids of people I have known. I am a huge reader of crime novels, both modern and old, I love writers like Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, Highsmith, James m Cain and many modern crime writers too like Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin, etc...

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Ed Royal portrays Edinburgh in the 80’s, a city clearly divided by class. Do you think that the current economic and social situation can be compared to those days?

I can’t really speak for Edinburgh, but I suspect that nothing ever changes anywhere too much-at that time, the character in the book has aspirations to rise above his class, I definitely had these aspirations as a teen, and as a kid, because I had so many friends who were from a very free thinking left leaning but affluent background-have you ever read The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kareshi? This alludes to a similar situation in certain ways, but also throws race into the pot as well.

Did you follow any methodology when you wrote Ed Royal? Can you give any advices to the aspiring writers out there?

I was very green when I wrote it, I had my writing of songs as a tool, which was a bit like taking a butter knife into a dense forest, but I do have to give credit to my own reading of endless pulp fiction crime novels, it was that that gave me an appetite for it, kind of in the same way that I’ll listen to record and need to run off and write my own song!

Over the years, you have written several literary styles like poetry, song lyrics, a memoir and a novel. What was the inspiration for each case?

Well-I mentioned the literary one, that’s just my appetite for crime fiction! Lyrically I love Bowie, which is no secret, but also people like Colin Newman from Wire, Billy Mackenzie from The Associates, more recently Rap. For my memoir, it was a couple of books The End which was a book about Nico written by her keyboard player which was hilarious & touching,  The Prettiest Star by Nina Antonia, and let’s not forget the amazing Disco Bloodbath by James St.James.

Can you name your top 3 all time favorite books?

1. London Fields by Martin Amis

2. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan

3. The New Confessions by William Boyd

As a musician and an author, is there any book you’d like write a soundtrack to? How would it sound? 

London Fields! it was be lush, orchestral but also have a kind of mid-eighties soul/jazz twist to it, something that kind of paints a picture of the rumblings of the arrival of yuppies against the underbelly of London’s crime scene.