Free Songbook by Nick Hornby Page B

lyric to the song, because the money from the sale of the film rights has forced me to contemplate my own mortality; like Fiona, I’m thinking of a time when I won’t be around for Danny – for different reasons, but the end result is the same.
    So there we go. That’s where the excitement lies: in the magical coincidences and transferences of creativity. I write a book that isn’t about my kid, and then someonewrites a beautiful song based on an episode in my book that turns out to mean something much more personal to me than my book ever did. And I won’t say that this sort of thing is worth more than all the Hollywood money in the world, because I’m a pragmatist, and that Hollywood money has given Danny a trust fund which will hopefully see him through those terrifying thirty or forty years. But it’s worth an awful lot, something money can’t buy, and it makes me want to keep writing and collaborating, in the hope that something I write will strike this kind of dazzling, serendipitous spark off someone again.

18 ‘Glorybound’
– The Bible
    The Bible are a now-defunct English band who you probably won’t remember. They got good reviews, and they had a near hit in ’86 or ’87 with a song called ‘Graceland’, and towards the end of the eighties they were able to fillmedium-sized venues in the UK, but they split after a couple of albums, to the sorrow of thousands, although possibly not hundreds of thousands; the absence of a more frenzied and universal grief tells its own tale. There are countless bands like The Bible, bands with talent, loyal and discriminating fans and a couple of good albums in them, but the wrong sort of record label, or manager, or haircut, or trousers, or simply the wrong sort of luck. My record collection is full of albums by groups who didn’t quite manage the long haul – Friends Again, and Hot!House, and The Keys, and Danny Wilson, and Hurrah! (avoid those exclamation marks, kids, if you want a long career in music – The Bible had one once, and dropped it, but it was too late) – and all of them, it seems to me, could have gone on to fame and fortune if . . . Oh, never mind. Pop snobs always think that the bands they love have been treated unfairly, that their failure is evidence of a tasteless, ignorant and tone-deaf world, but the truth is that invariably these bands are too quiet, too anonymous, too ugly, too smart and they’ve spent too much time listening to Chris Bell or The Replacements or Bill Evans instead of dressing up, taking drugs, trying out make-up and picking up fourteen-year-olds; I may prize the songwriting craft of Paddy McAloon over the vulgarity of Eminem, but it wouldbe stupid to pretend that I don’t know why Eminem is the bigger star.
    Anyway. I learned to love The Bible because a couple of the band members were friends, or at least, friends of friends – Boo Hewerdine, The Bible’s lead singer and songwriter, worked in The Beat Goes On, a record store in Cambridge, with my friend Derek, so Boo and I were on nodding terms, when Boo could be bothered to nod. (Later I found out that it wasn’t rock-star arrogance that made him look through me when we passed each other in the street, but chronic short-sightedness. His myopia still serves him well – on stage he looks as though he’s lost in his music, when in fact he stares straight ahead because he doesn’t know where else to look, and he can’t wear his glasses because they get steamed up.) I presumed – well, you do, don’t you? – that he and his band would be embarrassingly talentless, and that once I’d heard his first record I wouldn’t know how to keep the pity out of my nods; in fact his first record was intimidatingly good, and I was duly intimidated. I started going to see the band play a lot, in their various incarnations (before they were The Bible! or The Bible