But only to post a link… This is ‘Things You Think’, a video Ben Folds and I made with the wonderful Pomplamoose. I promise you, I do not speak or sing on the forthcoming album ‘Lonely Avenue’. Not for a single second.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G5JaicYuVU&feature=player_embedded
I hope you had a good summer.
So far, 2010 has been eaten away by ‘An Education’, but after the Oscars, it’s back to work. I’m going to concentrate on two or three film and TV projects this year, all of which are at very early stages. I have, however, returned to my ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading’ column in The Believer, I’m happy to say, after eighteen months away. I’m racing through David Kynaston’s brilliant Austerity Britain, almost certainly to the bemusement of the young American readers of the magazine. Serves them right. Meanwhile, Ben Folds is mixing ‘our’ album, which should be out in the spring. And Juliet, Naked is out now in paperback.
I am going to use my Penguin blog to tell you how much fun I’m having, not writing books. The recording for the radio comedy series I co-wrote with Giles Smith, ‘The Richest Man In Britain’, starring Mark Williams and Russell Tovey, finished on Monday; the last episode we recorded featured the great and funny Rosamund Pike. Giles and I laughed, even if nobody else ever does; he laughed politely at the bits I’d written – we emailed back and forth – and I laughed uproariously at his stuff, and at the bits the cast added themselves.
Meanwhile, over in Nashville, Ben Folds is in the studio, recording the songs for “our” album; every now and again my emails take an age to download, and I know that I am within a couple of minutes of being the first person in the UK to hear a new Folds song.
My colleagues at Penguin are always complaining that I make the other things that are going on at the moment seem more exciting and rewarding than staring at a computer screen for years at a time. But really, what can I do about it?
Yesterday, it was my great pleasure to sit in a pub and drink with the legendary Noddy Holder, who was good enough to give a (terrific) performance in our radio sitcom ‘The Richest Man In Britain’. We are now nearly halfway through recording – which is one reason why I haven’t been blogging much recently – and I’ll miss it when it’s over. Is there a higher art-form that the thirty-minute comedy show? I suspect not. I know that some people would make an argument for opera, the symphony, or figurative painting, or even (God forgive them) the novel – but how funny are any of those things, really? I cannot and would not claim that, with ‘The Richest Man In Britain’, we have now reached the pinnacle of human achievement – that was probably ‘Seinfeld’. But there are some very good jokes in our series, all of them made either by my co-writer Giles Smith, or in ad-libs by our wonderful cast – Noddy, Kerry Fox, Russell Tovey, Mark Williams (as the eponymous Dave) and Linda Bellingham, so far, with Rosamund Pike (who has a great face for radio, ha ha) and Phil Cornwell to come. Radio pays nothing, and that makes it incredibly hard for our producer, and we are recording in various far-flung studios at weekends and on tube-strike days … But I really hope we get commissioned for a second series.
Meanwhile, in Nashville, Ben Folds claims that he’s started recording the songs for our collaborative project, and I’m really excited – not least because I’ll soon be receiving mp3s of new Ben Folds songs that nobody else has heard. At the moment I’m being asked to examine recording budgets, and to get myself a music publishing deal, and that’s almost enough excitement on its own.
‘Juliet, Naked’ is finished and comes out in September, in the UK and US.
‘An Education’ is released in September in the US, October in the UK. The screenplay will be published by Penguin later in the year.
I’m currently writing, with Giles Smith, the rest of our radio comedy series ‘The Richest Man In Britain’, scheduled to be broadcast on Radio 4 later in the year.
The Foldsby project (and let’s all hope that this album is five parts Ben Folds to two parts Hornby) is still on course for next year, although I think it’s fair to say that as we speak there are more lyrics than there is music.
And I’ve just been asked to write an introduction to a book of photographs that the amazing Numero Group is publishing, also in September. The Numero Group is a reissue label, although that description hardly does justice to their range of interests, nor to their enviable sense of style: look at their catalogue and you want everything, every album and T-shirt and trading card. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of how McSweeneys works – if you buy into the aesthetic, then you’re prepared to shell out for stuff you didn’t even know you wanted. For one hundred dollars you can become a subscriber, and cool things will just keep coming through your letter box. Anyway, the photos I’m writing about were taken in Chicago South Side clubs in the mid-seventies, and they’re wonderful.
One of the things I like the most about my job is that, for various reasons, I get to see and hear and read stuff before everyone else. Why this should be quite so pleasurable I don’t know: it’s hard to brag, when the person you’re bragging to has invariably never heard of the book or movie or album in question, what with it not having come out yet. I suspect that it’s because I’m both weak-minded and pig-headed, and thus will always react in some way to any chatter surrounding the arts. I like being able to decide for myself, in relative silence.
Anyway. Four things I’ve enjoyed recently that will be coming your way soon:
1) 500 Days Of Summer
I saw this at Sundance, and I would happily watch it again. It’s a romantic comedy for younger people, and yet it completely failed to exclude me: it had great jokes, a good soundtrack, terrific performances, a fresh and imaginative sense of visual style, and, unlike just about every romantic comedy I’ve seen in the last twenty years, it’s true.
2) Ben Folds Presents: University A Capella
I’d be surprised and delighted if I heard a better album than this in 2009. Ben Folds has recorded a whole bunch of top-notch university choirs who’ve been singing his songs a capella as part of their repertoire, and the results are just fantastic. Some of your favourite Folds songs – ‘Jesusland’, ‘Brick’, ‘You Don’t Know Me’, ‘Landed’ – have been re-arranged so that instruments and percussion are replaced by the human voice, and I’m completely addicted. And the lead vocalists put every single Pop Idol entrant ever to shame.
3) One Day – David Nicholls
A big, absorbing, smart, fantastically readable on-off love story that sprawls over a couple of decades. Nicholls is brilliant on the details of the last couple of decades of British cultural and political life, as lived by people who danced at the Hacienda or the Wag Club and who couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be anti-Tory stand-up comedians, or coke-addled Soho movers and shakers. ‘One Day’ is coming out in June, and is therefore the perfect beach read for people who are normally repelled by the very idea of beach reads.
4) Butterfly – Sonia Hartnett
I read Butterfly a while back, but I now see that it was published on April 2nd, so you could actually go to a bookshop and buy this book. That kind of defeats the point of me including it in this list: you could make your own mind up, and we don’t want that. Anyway, you should buy it, because it’s beautiful. ‘Butterfly’ is a dreamy, lyrical, sad novel about the relationship between a lonely girl and her equally lonely next-door neighbour in the Australian suburbs. It’s exquisitely written – you end up re-reading sentence after sentence – and unforgettable.
…so it must be true: I’m writing the lyrics for a Ben Folds album, which he’s recording in Dublin in December. I wasn’t going to mention this, on the presumption that it will never happen, but my writing partner seems confident enough to have talked about it already, and if he thinks something will come of it, then (deep breath) so do I. At the moment it feels rather as if I have several half-finished cryptic crosswords on the go: there are bits of paper lying all over the place, and sometimes I have a stab at a couplet while making the tea, or watching Arsenal beat Bolton. I suppose that’s what Dylan must do, although I have no idea who he supports.
Ben, as you may know, is quite capable of writing his own lyrics, but I think he fancied a rest, and anyway he, like me, wants to have as much fun as he can in his chosen medium while there’s still fun to be had. Ben got in touch after I’d written about Smoke in 31 Songs/Songbook, which is how I ended up contributing a song to ‘Has Been’, the mad and great William Shatner album he produced. (Someone, I have no idea who or why, made a nice animated video accompaniment to ‘That’s Me Trying’, which you can see here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJmY_qCBX58
The potential for ignominious failure, however, is so much greater on this new collaboration.
