Soon to arrive at a bookstore near you is a collection of short stories that take Mark E Smith song titles as their inspiration. My reaction on first hearing this news was one of deep intrigue mixed with mounting excitement. After all, I yield to no man in my near-obsessional love of the Fall or my fondness for a finely-honed short story. Seeing that the Fall purloined their name from the Albert Camus novel, there's no denying the neat symmetry implicit in the idea of literature levelling the score.
Having not read it, I'm unable to comment on the quality of the 23 stories in Perverted by Language: Fiction Inspired by the Fall. But the portents are not as promising as I first hoped. For starters, when you think about it the history of books inspired by song titles is not exactly littered with gilt-edged triumphs.
Girlfriend in a Coma and Eleanor Rigby surely rank as the most lacklustre of Douglas Copeland's novels, and much the same could be said of Martin Amis's Dead Babies (from the Alice Cooper song) and Bret Easton Ellis's Less than Zero (Elvis Costello). More recently, William Sutcliffe's Are You Experienced? and Mike Gayle's My Legendary Girlfriend (Pulp) have fallen prey to the song or album title/book title curse. It's as though inspiration goes AWOL the moment an author opts to hijack the name of a well-known tune rather than going to the trouble of thinking up an original book title.
Similarly dismal consequences are invariably found when the method is reversed and literary works provide the impetus for songs and albums: Iron Maiden's Brave New World, Lord of the Flies and Where Eagles Dare; grisly adaptations of Poe's The Raven by Lou Reed and Alan Parsons Project; Rick Wakeman's shockingly awful Journey to the Centre of the Earth and 1984. I could continue but I feel a migraine coming on.
If Perverted by Language was merely a one-off project, it might be possible to regard it as a quirky labour of love rather than a cynical marketing gimmick designed to flog books to a captive market. But, worryingly, this Fall-inspired tome is quickly to be followed by similar collections that draw motivation from the works of Sonic Youth, Joy Division, the Velvet Underground, the Ramones and the Smiths.
Pre-publicity would appear to have dashed any hopes that the chosen writers have at least remained faithful to the spirit of the music and not resorted to knee-jerk reductivism. According to editor Peter Wild, "The Fall stories are, for the most part, pretty damn offbeat; Sonic Youth stories are dark, full of sex and violence; The Smiths stories are really twee, lots of lovely love stories." Morrissey must be placing his advanced bulk order as we speak.
Nor does it get any more promising when you read the Amazon synopsis of Perverted By Language: "Mechanical ducks, shark women that taste of liquorice, perverted sexual shenanigans in cramped office spaces, double-crossing Nazi apologists, bald-headed cultural subversives and celebrity deer-culling..."
Pretty damn offbeat and, on that evidence, miles wide of the mark. Miles wide of Mark E Smith too, by the looks of it.
