Free Songbook by Nick Hornby Page A

judiciously from all sorts of folky, rocky things I like (Damon Gough is an early-Springsteendevotee), it doesn’t show off, it is un-English in the sense that it wouldn’t be much use to Ibizan clubbers or boozed-up football hooligans, it has soul. It also sounds cinematic, with its little snatches of orchestration (it begins with a brass-band instrumental that would not have sounded out of place in a gentle sixties comedy) and its range of moods. It seemed to me that Damon could write a wonderful film score, and I would have suggested him for About A Boy had I not known that writers have less chance of influencing film adaptations of their books than they do of changing the weather. And then, the first time we met, Chris and Paul Weitz, the co-directors, told me that they had already asked Damon to provide all the music for the film. This struck me as being troublingly neat – could it really be possible that the music in my head was the same as the music in theirs? – but anyway, here I am, in my office, listening to a whole lot of new Badly Drawn Boy songs and music cues that very few people in the world have heard yet, and feeling lucky.
    I began writing About A Boy in 1996, the year my son Danny was finally diagnosed as autistic. There were lots of things to think (or panic, or despair, or lose sleep) about, and money was only one of them, but I suddenly went from feeling reasonably wealthy – I was in my fourth year of earning a decent wack from writing, and for the first time inmy life I had some savings – to financially vulnerable: I was going to have to find enough to make sure that my son was secure, not just for the duration of my life, but for the duration of his, and that extra thirty or forty years was hard to contemplate, in more or less any direction. And then, no sooner had these worries begun to take hold and chafe a little bit than this Hollywood money arrived. Until the movie was made, this was the only connection I had forged between the book and Danny. The character of Marcus was nothing to do with him (Marcus is twelve, and brightly voluble, if odd; Danny was three, and five years later is still unable to speak), and I don’t think that Danny would recognize the parenting that Marcus experiences. It’s possible that, if I had been childless, I would have been attracted to a different kind of story, but that’s the only way that About A Boy is about Danny.
    â€˜A Minor Incident’, a sweet, heartfelt, acoustic strummer with a wheezy Dylanesque harmonica solo, refers directly to a major incident in the book and the movie: Marcus comes home from a day out to discover his mother, Fiona, lying comatose on the sofa after an attempt to kill herself, her vomit on the floor beside her. The song is her suicide note to her son. I wrote one for her too, but it wasn’t in the form of a song lyric, and Damon’s words capture Fiona’sdippy depressive insouciance perfectly. But here’s the thing: once I’d listened to ‘A Minor Incident’ a couple of times, it started to make me think of Danny in ways that I hadn’t done when I was writing the book. ‘You always were the one to make us stand out in a crowd / Though every once in a while your head was in a cloud / There’s nothing you could never do to ever let me down’, sings Damon as Fiona, and the lines brought me up short. Autistic children are by their nature the dreamiest of kids, and Danny’s ways of making us stand out in a crowd can include attempts to steal strangers’ crisps and to get undressed on the top of a number 19 bus. But that peculiar negative in the last line . . . How did Badly Drawn Boy know that it’s the things that Danny will never do (talk, read, play football, all sorts of stuff) that make those who love him feel the most fiercely proud and protective of him? And, suddenly, five years on, I find a mournful undertow of identification in the