Gather around the campfire and tell a tale of Popular Beat Combos who have been inspired by a book to create their own Magnus Opusesesss.
e.g:
Led Zeppelin – May Dick
Lana Del Rey – Lolita
Marillion – Grendel
Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights (Ms Bush has a few )
Eurythmics – 1984
Over to you reader
Iron Maiden are repeat Offenders – Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Dune to name but two, and I’m sure bigger fans than me could nominate more.
Which Iron Maiden songs reference Dune?
To Tame a Land on Piece of Mind, but Frank Herbert refused to let them use the title. I saw them on that tour and Bruce Dickinson said something to the effect of Herbert not liking rock, long hair, having a good time and so on.
Edit – there’s some information here https://norselandsrock.com/to-tame-a-land-iron-maiden/
Thank you.
Brave New World is another Iron Maiden title, courtesy of Aldous Huxley.
A Toyah single as well.
And a Strawbs title.
A pedant writes: The Strawbs album was Grave New World
But the reference is pretty obvious.
Children Of The Damned
Murders In The Rue Morgue
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Lord of the Flies
And probably a few more – he does like a bit of a read does Steve Harris
Then there’s Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End – apparently inspiring both Pink Floyd and (in “Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End”) Van der Graaf Generator…
And the inspiration for Genesis’s Watcher of the Skies.
Also used by Marillion, which may or may not be directly related (although Fish had a habit of peppering literary references, or maybe he was just back-referencing Genesis?)
Probably – everything else they did back-referenced Genesis – it only stopped when Fish left… (ooh, controversial!)
Another Lolita reference is in Don’t Stand So Close to Me – “just like the old man in that book by Nabakov”.
Is it, or is it Mr Sting showing off about the books he has read?
Wasn’t Mr Sumner an English teacher before he started wearing a stripy jumper?
True – I believe it was a Primary School / First School.
Un-used lyrics for Don’t Stand So Closer To Me:
“He reels away in pain, just like the old man in that book about Peter and Jane”
“One last look and he’s gone, just like the old man in that book called Janet and John”
@fentonsteve
Sadly never quite made it out of the B stream
Indeed he was, he was there at training college in Newcastle at the same time as my wife.
In theory, she could have perhaps had a relationship with him. I bet she was pleased to dodge that bullet. He’d be a right pain as a boyfriend – good looking, rich, talented, 5 hour sex sessions….
Yes. In Cramlington.
May Dick should of course have been Moby Dick (ahem)
Bill Ryder-Jones – If…
Imaginary soundtrack to an Italo Calvino novel.
The very book I have in my bag in the bus I’m currently riding, the sort of detail Calvino might have put in one of the linking chapters.
Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Rick Wakeman comes to mind…
Also Afternoons and Coffee Spoons by Crash Test Dummies, which riffs on The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot, and also manages to get a reference to Sartre in too.
The first three songs on Laurie Anderson’s 6th album ‘Life On a String’ refer to Moby Dick, about which she had previously performed a (fantastic, I saw it in London) musical, complete with musical harpoon.
Gravity’s Angel as well.
A thread for which there can, as sure as eggs is eggs, only be one winner.
you beat me to it. I adore this song.
The cough for Katherine Mansfield & the ‘WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!?’ for Franz Kafka. Mr Hannon at his best
Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Nuff said.
Sympathy For The Devil inspired by The Master And Margarita, Marianne’s book.
Golden Hair by James Joyce from pommes penyeach was sung by Syd.
See also Golden Slumbers sung by McCartney.
Pedant alert Kate was inspired by a TV dramatization of the book rather than the book itself
How many rock stars ready the whole book what they reference. I wonder.
Read not ready
Under Milk Wood
“Starless And Bible Black”
and there’s a band too.
1984
The Cure – Killing An Arab.
Lyrics reference The Stranger by Albert Camus.
More Dylan Thomas
Cindererella Man from A Farewell to Kings is a narration of Mr Deeds Goes to Town, A 1936 American comedy-drama romance film directed by Frank Capra and starring Gary Cooper:
The same Album also has this :
Sorry, cocked that up a bit
;
and Tom Sawyer of course.
Try The Bookshop Band. All the songs are inspired by a book and they play in bookshops!
https://www.thebookshopband.co.uk/about
And Pete Townsend produced their latest album and no they don’t sound like The Who
The Retrospective Soundtrack Players were masters of this kind of thing, too.
Three albums inspired by Cool Hand Luke, The Catcher In The Rye, and a mashup of It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol.
Here’s Catcher In The Rye:
Nik Kershaw – Don Quixote
Broooooooce’s The Ghost of Tom Joad is of course an idea based on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit is lifted from Alice in Wonderland.
The mighty Horslips created a whole album, The Tain, based on the ancient Irish mythological epic of the same name. God, I loved this album back in the day.
Magazine’s A Song from under the Floorboards is practically a cover version of CaPH Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella, Notes from Underground.
I assume Iggy Pop pinched the title of The Idiot from Dostoevsky too, but I’m not quite sure whether there was any more to it than that.
“and I know how Robert Browning must have felt”
Eric Clapton reading The Beano?
Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds
Rick Wakeman – Journey To The Centre Of The Earth
Alan Parsons – I Robot
Hawkwind – just about everything Michael Moorcock ever wrote probably appears somewhere
Leonard Nimoy – The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins
Kate Bush – The Sensual World, inspired by and referencing James Joyce’s Ulysses
From one of my favourite shows and book Struwwelpeter Heinrich Hoffmann
Saw the Shockheaded Peter show years ago at the Hammersmith Lyric theatre, a magnificent spectacle and hugely enjoyable. Loved the Tiger Lillies’s music ever since.
I saw it first at Leeds Playhouse at its debut, enjoyed it so much I took my son who was nine at the time. He adored it and we still see the Tiger Lilies when we can.
I saw Shockheaded Peter six times in the end including once at the Lyric.
Camel – The Snow Goose
Thanks @Twang, amazed I had to scroll down this far before it got a mention!
Colin’s thread up the page reminded me of Jean Jacques Burnel’s Ozymandias, which was on the B side of Freddie Laker (Concorde and Eurobus).
Well the Go-Betweens were named after a novel. And reference Kerouac, who seems VERY popular for some reason (I am of the school that it is typing not writing – as Truman Capote said)
More Kerouac links include 10 000 Maniacs (Natalie doesnt seem to rate him)
and Bob Weir/Greatful Dead Cassady, who apparently is a real person and also a character in Kerouac’s books.
Jackie Leven and Ian Rankin – the influence actually went in the opposite direction but always
good to get Jackie’s name out there
Loads and loads of Van Morrison songs.
Obligatory Thompson post.
I believe there’s another song called Layla but I believe the Thompsons pronounce the name correctly.
Layla and Majnun is an epic poem written by Nizami, and is considered to be a classic work of Sufi literature.
Sensational Alex Harvey Band – Tomahawk Kid.
Taken from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”
Joy Division – Dead Souls (Gogol’s masterwork) and Atrocity Exhibition after JG Ballard.
Bit of a Nietzsche band. The Pop Group – She Is Beyond Good And Evil
Heavy Fuel by Dire Straits.
Inspired by Martin Amis’s novel ‘Money’. A portrayal of the self destructive amoral and immoral central character John Self.
If my ugly big car can’t climb this hill
I’ll write a suicide note on a hundred dollar bill.
Australia’s electro-glam-pop duo Empire of the Sun took their name from the J.G. Ballard novel that became a 1987 Steven Spielberg film.
The Born to be Wild Hitmakers were originally called The Sparrows.
Renaming themselves, Steppenwolf, after the cult novel by Herman Hesse, was a very wise move.
And then their songs were used in the Easy Rider soundtrack ……
One I never knew about until just a few minutes ago:
“A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” written by American composer Manning Sherwin and English lyricist Eric Maschwitz, who borrowed the title from a 1923 short story “When A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” by Bulgarian-born author Michael Arlen.
There are a few good versions linked from the article below.
https://londonist.com/london/music/a-nightingale-sang-in-berkeley-square-best-versions?fbclid=IwY2xjawJP3CRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXnMukhn2A2TuxP3qJNL0zK82k0qqL9Wphi_wHWiGl-YZr5O0SrK4JYZ2Q_aem_tvpGNWhG59EbXTMHhhjKbg
“I’m perfectly willing to swear” that my favourite version is this purely instrumental one.
Ian Hunter does a lovely version of this on a live album circa 2000
Talking of Ian Hunter, Mott The Hoople were named after a novel by Willard Manus
The Van der Graaf Generator song, White Hammer, references the Malleus Maleficarum…
…which is nice…and When She Comes (from World Record) references La Belle Dame Sans Merci…
Bill Nelson – La Belle Et La Bête
Composed and recorded for a production of the play of that name (based on an old French fairytale).
Both Moloko and Heaven Seventeen drew their names from A Clockwork Orange.
Also inspired the name for record label Korova – home of Echo & The Bunnymen
And the short-lived Milky Bar Kids
I can’t believe we’ve got this far without a mention of Steely Dan…
While not directly a literary song I thought this belonged here. Patti Smith in Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage.