Beautiful Life

"They thought that at best I was having a mid-life crisis and at worst a mental breakdown!”

Helen Seymour is recalling the reaction of her advertising industry colleagues when, six-years ago, she relinquished a generously-salaried job and moved back in with her parents to write her first novel, Beautiful Noise, an ‘80s coming of age tale with a post-punk pirate radio twist. Not what you’d necessarily expect from a former high-flying Saatchi & Saatchi exec.
“You should have seen their Dublin office,” Seymour laughs. “It had black floors, white walls, high-gloss white furniture. The men were as impeccably groomed and gorgeous as the women. The TV department looked down onto the boardroom and was full of these magical things called VHS recorders. In my previous job the FAX machine had been considered hi-tech!
“The kitchen was straight out of a showroom, and no one ever questioned your expenses. You worked your ass off in return though – in at six or seven in the morning and lucky to get home before 10 or 11. You lived, slept and breathed the business, which I totally adored at the time. Fast-forward, post-Saatchi & Saatchi to 2003, and myself and a business partner bought out this company, Red Star, that I’d set up on behalf of Ogilvy & Mather.”
So what made Seymour turn her back on this Celtic Tigress lifestyle?
“I just had this growing and eventually overwhelming urge to write, which was probably a product of aged 14 coming second in the Penguin Ireland essay competition: when you’ve tasted glory like that you want more!” she laughs again. “At around 30 – I’m 44 now – I started thinking: ‘What’s this about? I’m flogging mobile phones, packets of tea and bars of chocolate. This means nothing’. So I did a charity campaign with Gavin Friday, which raised a quarter of a million for Kosovo – he had this giant pig, which we toured round Ireland raising funds. Then he recommended me to Ali (Hewson), when she started her Shut Sellafield campaign. She and I delivered half-a-million postcards to Tony Blair in Downing Street. Besides coming second in the Penguin essay competition, that’s one of my proudest moments!”
From the Sellafield campaign sprung a close friendship with Ali and her other-half Bono, who has been one of Seymour’s biggest cheerleaders.
“When I left advertising and took a job in a restaurant – I’m still waitressing by the way to make ends meet – they were like, ‘Good on you!’ Then, as I was getting towards the end of the writing process, Bono asked, ‘Would you like me to read it?’ I shat myself giving it to him because, you know, he’s my friend but he’s also Bono. I gave a copy at the same time to Ali and was chuffed when a mutual friend told me, ‘She’s carrying around something that looks like the Golden Pages. She won’t put it down!’ Bono also loved it, which was such a morale-booster.”
Although offered a lucrative deal by Harper Collins, Seymour took the brave – some would say foolhardy – decision to self-publish Beautiful Noise.
“Courtesy of my incredible agent, Marianne Gunn O’Connor, there were a few publishers interested. Harper Collins were the ones to make the concrete offer, but they wanted a series of changes, none of which I agreed with. Looking back now they were right on a couple of points – and I thank them sincerely for that – but I wasn’t prepared to compromise.”
Beautiful Noise had yet to go to the printers when Irish director John Moore (Flight Of The Phoenix, Behind Enemy Lines, Max Payne, A Good Day To Die Hard) snapped up the film rights.
“John was directing TV commercials when I was in advertising, so we worked together and became friends,” Helen explains. “He’s in Hollywood most the time now, but was back home for Christmas. We ran into each other and John asked what I was doing and when I told him, ‘Writing a book about three kids who set up a pirate radio station in Dublin during the ‘80s’, he said he wanted to read it. What I hadn’t been aware of previously is that he’d worked on the first of the ‘superpirates’, Sunshine, out in Portmarnock. I sent it to him and within a couple of days got an email going, ‘I’m less than 50 pages in but I know I want to option this. What do we have to do to make this happen?’ So, I put him in touch with Marianne and the deal was struck. He’s letting me write the screenplay, which is something the author rarely gets to do, so I couldn’t be happier!”
It’s taken her a long time to become an overnight literary sensation, but now that it’s happened, Helen Seymour is loving every minute of it! Wouldn’t you?

Beautiful Noise is out now.