“I owe Iron Maiden an English A level!” The great literature our writers discovered through pop music | music

Penelope Farmer Trans Therapy

I first heard Charlotte’s song The Cure Sometimes when I was a teenager, and it was like waking up from a dream. With a dissonant guitar ringing like church bells and vague lyrics about getting ready for bed, it jolts a childhood memory of reading Penelope Farmer’s ghostly 1969 book of the same name. As a child, I found it surreal: on Charlotte’s first night at boarding school, she wakes up to find herself 40 years in the past, in someone else’s body, with an unfamiliar moon in the sky. But as a teenager, when I reread the story at Robert Smith’s recommendation, it served as a mirror to my growing sense of self-doubt. To hear Charlotte’s confusion through the unsteady bass and Smith’s stunning, doubled vocals was strangely comforting. Emphasizing that growth has always been like time travel. Knowing that the band recorded it exactly 10 years ago, before I was born, was another clue: my cosmic connection to past lives. Katie Hawthorne

Oscar Wilde via The Smiths

I bought Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in my youth because Morrissey mentioned him in The Gates of Smith’s Cemetery (“Keats and Yeats by thee / While Wilde by me”). Also, I desperately wanted to impress a Morrissey nerd in Hull with whom I was communicating, and who was coming to visit. I had acquired Alan Sillitoe’s glorious book Saturday Night, Sunday Morning – referenced in Vicar in a Tutu – for similar reasons, and hoped that my combination of a vintage cardigan and a 1930s typewriter from Leeds Market would convince her that I was a Yorkshire Moser. Unfortunately, we were so nervous that day that our initial interactions involved leaving each other messages on the typewriter, but she eventually felt confident enough to dance around the living room to Oscillate Wildly. The mostly long-distance romance ended shortly after the Smiths split, but we’re still friends on Facebook and I still have both books. Dave Simpson

Joe Orton via Adam Ant

I was in my final year at university, writing a thesis on Joe Orton, and leafing through a collection of terrible plays from the 1940s and 1950s that, if nothing else, gave you an idea of ​​how gay men were portrayed on stage before Orton unleashed his entertainment serial Mr Sloane. I was suddenly struck by the idea that I was doing all of this because of Adam Ant. At the height of his fame, he rarely missed an opportunity to talk about Orton. I was a 10-year-old loyal fan, and I filed the name away; Years after Adam’s star had faded, I saw a paperback containing Orton’s memoirs and belatedly purchased it on his recommendation. It was really funny and shocking and led me to his plays and John Lahr’s autobiography Prick Up Your Ears. Unlike a lot of the books I loved as a teenager, I still adore Orton’s work, and I still find it funny, surprising, and thought-provoking: I can lift even the bleakest mood a little by leafing through his diaries for the umpteenth time. A passion that has lasted 40 years, for which I owe Adam Ant a debt of gratitude. Alexis Petridis

John Berryman via Nick Cave

While Charles Bukowski was a refreshing, late-breaking literary voice for the working class, capturing the grime of everyday Los Angeles life amidst the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, he was also a difficult figure with undeniable issues about women. Even my young, naive mind, in its period of romanticizing the vulgar starving artist, couldn’t shake off watching footage of him drunkenly kicking his wife in a documentary. Nick Cave then suggested another troubled alternative. “Bukowski was an idiot,” he declared in the rousing 2008 song “We Call Upon the Author.” “Berryman was the best. He wrote like wet pulp.” I had never heard of John Berryman, so I looked him up. He and Bukowski had many similarities: extremely traumatic upbringings, alcoholics, and both had a ravenous ego named Henry. But stylistically they diverged, and Berryman’s 77′ Dreams was a revelation. A beautiful, indistinct whirlwind of words and sounds that spread out hazy and clear – like a dream – and contained all the pain, anguish, and darkness a young man could crave. Daniel Dylan Ray

Samuel Taylor Coleridge via Iron Maiden

I owe Iron Maiden an English A level. I was 14 when I picked up a copy of their album The Number of the Beast, knowing that it was a must-hear for metal’s flourishes, and not anticipating how much its attention-demanding grandeur would soothe my anxious mind. It sparked a lifelong obsession, especially with the most flamboyant ending to the Maiden canon – and it rarely got more glowing than Powerslave’s 13-minute The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a stark retelling of Coleridge’s epic poem. I studied the song as if I had to give it a test, from its walking verses to the creaking bridge and hallucinatory lyrics. It has no chorus and I can still read it word for word. Coincidentally, the original romantic masterpiece, about a sailor who learns to appreciate nature after being cursed to live forever, was on my college curriculum soon after. I barely attended class and passed the exam. Thanks, boys! Matt Mills

Grace Paley Transnational

With somewhat resounding inevitability, I discover a lot of books through the National, which are almost always described as ‘literary’. It was through singer Matt Berninger (whose wife is a former literary editor at The New Yorker) who mentioned “Play It As It Lays” that I first heard Joan Didion; I think it’s also how I discovered Richard Yeats. When Berninger sat down for an interview with The Guardian reader three years ago, several people who knew his good taste asked what he was reading: As a result, I picked up Amy Bloom’s Great White Houses. But my favorite discovery that Berninger led was a bit different from those strains of melancholy. He said Boxer’s lyrics were partly inspired by Grace Paley’s interconnected short story collection Massive Changes at the Last Minute, about working-class New Yorkers stumbling in and out of the same apartment buildings and beds. Her use of colloquial language is uplifting, funny, and tells vivid stories about domestic life. If I started over, I could see myself committing to a lifelong study of her words. Laura Snaps

Saul Bellow voiced by Fionn Regan

Like most people, I used to think that describing a band or artist as “literary” is the most brutal compliment you can pay – portraying them as a false, sexless enemy of pop’s primitive pleasures – and I usually wince when I hear a song whose name drops the title of a book. So I should have run a mile when I heard Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan’s debut single, “Put Benny in the Hole,” which commits the sin not once but twice. But since the song is such a gem — a satirical ode to lost love written from the perspective of a lovestruck ex-lover, nostalgia, and a very beautiful piece of finger-picked folk — and I was in the middle of a modern American fiction unit in college at the time, I even followed one of its recommendations, and picked up a copy of The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow’s rambunctious novel about the adventures of a young Jew in Depression-era Chicago. It was a fascinating entry point into one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors, a technician who seems to manage a little magic prose trick with every sentence. But strangely enough, I never followed the recommendations of the other book from the song: Timbuktu by Paul Auster. I should, since Reagan hasn’t steered me wrong yet. Gwilym Mumford

Antonio Gramsci via Scrittipoliti

It took a while for me to fully warm up to what Scritti singer Politti Green Gartside described as the “distorted breakdown” sound of the Peel Sessions EP, but there was a lot going on inside the splintered racket — and the heavily slanted lyrics hinted at new worlds of ideas. The aesthetic philosophy in particular is deepened: “At your university, the pages are in French / And they help you find your way in any English city.” This really provided me with a rudimentary idea of ​​cultural capital. And hegemony, driven explosively by Italian anarchist Antonio Gramsci’s framing of dominant culture—“Here is the splendor of popular control”—essentially brought me into radical politics, even as its basis in the English people sailed above my ears. The arrival of The Sweetest Girl not long after was a sonic shock, but Scritti’s danceable ideas—with clear references to Derrida, Foucault, and others—launched my path to a master’s degree in Continental philosophy. Gartside said he met a few guys (always guys!) after gigs carrying academic volumes inspired by his recordings. I didn’t write a book, but my secret helped me find my way. Lindsay Irvine