A wizard and a true star

With his seventh novel Oh, Play That Thing, Roddy Doyle manages the not inconsiderable feat of writing about music and dancing about architecture.

The sequel to A Star Called Henry and the second volume of a planned trilogy entitled The Last Roundup finds its anti-hero Henry Smart fleeing from his Republican bosses to the brave new world of a 1920s America still very much under construction.

It’s a book that rocks and rolls with the rhythms of the cities, a New York of little villages, where the buildings are being thrown up as quickly as the mortar sets, and also the zigzag and hip-shake of the music that came to be known as Chicago jazz, specifically that of Louis Armstrong.

Smart, a rake, womaniser, professional chancer, flim-flam man and all-round Zelig, finds himself through luck and providence acting as Armstrong’s minder, fixer and Virgil in a world of crooked white men. Not unlike Joe O’ Connor’s Star Of The Sea, it is an historical novel that eschews sepia portraiture for raw energy. In Doyle’s prose, the psychogeography of urban America sizzles with the same zing as the dialogue. The author meets hotpress in the Library Bar in the Central Hotel at an hour so ungodly he has trouble remembering the names of some of his favourite authors.

On writing about music

“The way to do it I think is use the language of lay people, don’t pretend that you know more than you actually do or that you’re trying to explain anything, ’cos you’re not. And just try to, I suppose, capture the enthusiasm and the magic of it all. And the physical effort of it. But I’m not a musician, I don’t play any instrument, I’m always the guy in the audience, y’know? It’s inexplicable really why those of us who love it, love it. I’m always puzzled by people who don’t listen to it or seem to attach any importance to music whatsoever. It kinda baffles me.I’m constantly searching for new music.”

On using Louis Armstrong as a character in Oh, Play That Thing

“It was a happy accident for me. I knew that one of the ways to catch the period was the music. In the last year of writing A Star Called Henry I was thinking about what Henry was going to do when he got to the States. I was in the States, and the New York Times Sunday review section, on the front of it was a review of a new biography of Louis Armstrong, and for some reason instead of just skipping over it and looking to see what new fiction was out, I read the first few paragraphs. There was this story about Armstrong leaving New Orleans at 19 or 20 and going up to Chicago, and this nightclub bouncer called Black Benny said, ‘Louis, if you’re gonna make it up there, get yourself a white man who’ll put his hand on your shoulder and say, ‘This here is my nigger’.’ And I thought, well, that white man could be Henry. Why not? He’s already rubbed shoulders with James Connolly and he’s sneered at Padraig Pearse, why not let him meet Louis Armstrong? It seemed apt at the time.
“One of the real ins, as far as getting to know him was concerned, (was) around about the same time as he went to Chicago, Armstrong bought a typewriter and carried it around with him for the rest of his life, and a folding table. So between gigs he would tap away at letters to people, there was a huge wealth of material. There’s a book that condenses some of them called Louis Armstrong In His Own Words. There was quite a disparaging review of it in the Irish Times, something like, ‘Who’d want to read this?’ and I remember thinking, ‘I would!’” (laughs).

On Satchmo’s sound

“It was popular music. I think people came along later and put the walls around it and declared it was jazz and you can’t come in unless you’re cool. He was anything but cool, he was just a hugely popular musician. My images of him would’ve been very much from my childhood, the Andy Williams Show from the 60s, this smiling, very benign person that my parents sat up and watched. On the good nights he’d sing ‘What A Wonderful World’ and on the bad nights he’d sing ‘Hello Dolly’.
“His first recordings in 1924 were in this really primitive filth. By the time he got around to recording with the Hot 5 and the Hot 7, electricity had come up from the street and the conditions were much better, but I really wanted to include the story of the trombonist up on the ladder and Louis himself in the far corner, as far away as they could possibly get him ’cos he was so loud! Generally they went in, did three takes and somebody else decided which one to release. No matter how much they wanted to create the 1927 version of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ they weren’t going to be able to do it in the studio. It allowed me the opportunity then to bring Henry into the studio to kind of mind what was going on, as that mysterious white man in the corner whose presence gave Louis Armstrong the opportunity to do take four, five, six and seven.”

On paying for lyrical quotes

“It can turn out quite expensive, so I’ve invented some of my own. There’s always a little kick then with somebody asking, ‘Have you cleared the rights of this song?’ ‘I don’t have to ’cos there’s only three lines, no melody and I wrote it myself!’ Going back 17 years when The Commitments came out, I didn’t have to actually do the hard labour of clearing them, I had to do the hard labour of putting my hand in my pocket and paying for it. In retrospect it was quite cheap, but since then, I think maybe because of the soundtrack industry, with movies being carried by a soundtrack that have very little else going on for them, it’s become hugely lucrative. Because of that, getting the rights can work out quite expensive. But I’ve never yet changed my mind and deleted something, I’ll always bite the bullet and pay for it.”

On London Calling

“I listen to The Clash a lot, and luckily my kids like them as well. London Calling was the soundtrack of our summer really. It is amazing how rich it is.”

On the freedom to fantasise

“I think (with) Henry, of any of the characters I’ve written, anything goes. I lead a very, very quiet, probably middle class, middle-aged life and yet during office hours I create, as you say, this flim-flam artist, this chancer, this guy that women throw themselves at. Is this a mid-life crisis thing? It’s a long mid-life crisis at this stage, ’cos I’ve been writing about him for eight years and there’s probably another couple of years left in him. I don’t think it’s a mid-life problem; it’s more just a teenage problem that took a while to assert itself! Life is just one long mid-life crisis; you may as well lie down and enjoy it. But it does give you the chance to fantasise to an extent.

On writing about an Irish rake in 1920s America

“In a way it was a reaction to the previous character I’d written, Paula Spencer from The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, where every word had to be exact and truth. Henry’s about embellishing the world as much as anything else. Whereas Paula’s is the world of the kitchen, Henry’s is the world. It’s just one big avenue cutting through America for him, so it’s very lively and vibrant. It goes against the grain of what I did in the past, where I decided I’d take the contemporary world for granted and wouldn’t describe it in any great detail. Here, the challenge was to try and describe things in a way that is often done in a formal, dull kind of a way, and to give it the life that the dialogue has.”

On dialogue

“Capturing the dialogue was great fun at times, although when you’re writing a book for five years on and off, it’s not fun, it’s a pain in the hole for at least two of those years. The dialogue is like the previous six books, but on top of that I had a lifetime of watching movies, all that fiction I’d read. This amazing book about con-artists, The Big Con – it actually became the inspiration for The Sting – is about their language as much as anything else. The glossary alone I could spend the rest of my life going through it: great words, and fantastic names, some of which were so good that I would never use them myself. There was a genuine con artist in the 1930s known as The Sanctimonious Kid. Now the temptation to put it in was extremely strong, but I knew it would be just too funny in the wrong place, too obviously a joke.”

On old New York

“Even though I’ve been to New York many times and I actually lived there for four months earlier this year, the opportunity to look from the eyes of somebody arriving there in 1924 is great, the opportunity to look at old photographs and try to imagine the sheer noise and dirt and newness of it all. If you go out to Ellis Island, and probably Staten Island as well, and you’re on the ferry, you can see what they saw as you’re arriving, this amazing wall. An awful lot of New York days, even in the winter, are very clear blue sky days, and this sheer wall, you can imagine where all the science fiction came from, yet behind the wall are all these little villages on the lower east side. You could cross the street from Little Russia into Little Italy and around the corner into Little Chinatown. Every corner of Europe had its own little corner in New York. Kids knew when not to cross the road, when to run down the street and when they could stroll, and I just thought that was marvellous. Less so in Chicago. When Henry arrives in Chicago he thinks, ‘This isn’t little villages; this is a city.” And it was, it was completely up for grabs.”

On Gangs Of New York and Star Of The Sea

“I haven’t seen the movie yet. I read a couple of Herbert Asbury books, I loved that material. Gangs Of New York strictly speaking was a bit too early for Henry, and people were recommending it to me because of the Irish angle and I wasn’t particularly interested in that, I wasn’t sending Henry to America to meet up with the Irish – in fact the opposite. He’s trying to avoid them at all costs.
“I thought Joe (O’ Connor)’s book was really, really tremendous. It has to be a recurring Irish subject, getting out of Ireland. What I loved about Joe’s book was the sense that it was set in officially the bleakest time in Irish history, and yet it was incredibly entertaining. That struck me as being really brave. What the characters in Joe’s book and what Henry Smart does in my book and what really did happen in the lives of millions of people is occurring now. There are guys hanging underneath the Eurostar trying to get into Britain, people arriving in Ireland in the back of containers, doing exactly the same thing.”

On Nick Tosches’ Where Dead Voices Gather

“I used Amazon and got the recordings of Emmett Miller, the CD of recordings that Tosches talks about, and the voice is absolutely unearthly, it’s absolutely extraordinary. Just that notion of the guy being out of time, a blackface artist at a time when he shouldn’t have been there anymore. The notion that Jimmy Rodgers might have picked up the yodel from Emmett Miller, and there’s the famous ‘Blue Yodel No. 9’ that Armstrong played on, but was never acknowledged. It’s emerged now in the last couple of years that Lil Harding, Armstrong’s wife, may well have been in that studio playing the piano. It wasn’t so much hard information that I got from that book as this notion of a world of musicians and performers who had maybe not left their mark but somehow or another had left their mark.”

On the next generation of Irish writers

“I don’t know how generations are measured and I’ve never paid too much attention to the age of people or where they’re coming from, but in terms of writers writing about Ireland or Dublin today, well, Keith Ridgeway is one of them. The Parts I think is a terrific book. Dublin to me is the triumph there, the outskirts of Dublin, this new city is brilliantly captured. There’s one passage where he lists off the many Dublins, and it’s as poetic and as brilliant and as impressive as anything I’ve ever read. I know nothing about the man; I think he’s probably in his 30s. I’d be eagerly waiting to see what comes next. It was easier when I wrote The Commitments and published it myself; it got space on the tables of all the bookshops because there was very little else happening. Now there’s such a wealth of writing that it’s almost impossible to figure out the people who are really worth reading. But certainly he’s the person I’d be looking out for.”

On Irish films

“Some of these films are really great records of what Dublin’s like. Ballymun won’t be there as it’s seen in Adam & Paul. What I always thought of as Ballymun is now Santry Cross, a big industrial park and office blocks and this huge arts centre down there, and the whole thing is gonna change. Who knows what they’re gonna become? Maybe a good exercise would be a double bill of About Adam, followed by Adam & Paul (which is) absolutely tremendous. And a good reminder that despite our newfound wealth and sexiness, that they’re still out there. You just have to get off at Tara Street station.
“There’s a scene with Adam or Paul sitting on the fridge, crying, just wanting a bit of luck. Heartbreaking, but at the same time it’s so blackly funny. Just give him a fishing rod and he’s a garden gnome. I think there’s only one scene where they’re separated and you know which one is which. I just thought the dialogue was amazing, really extraordinary that the whole thing was carried by about 150 words, saying words again and again and again, brilliantly done. I think my own stab When Brendan Met Trudy was an attempt to capture Dublin as a kind of guilt-free thing. Dead Bodies also is great fun, and that’s what I liked about it – great fun, no attempt to make it something bigger than it needed to be.”

Oh, Play That Thing is published by Jonathan Cape