Long before Joanne Harris was awarded an OBE for services to literature, the author of Chocolat, The Gospel Of Loki, Runemarks and other novels was playing flute in a prog band she started at school. In 2018 she looked back on how Genesis, Pink Floyd and others had influenced her.
“Music links you back to the past like nothing else, and prog takes me to Barnsley in the 80s. My mother was French so there was a great deal of chansonnier – Jacques Brel and that kind of thing. My grandfather was a big influence; he was classical through and through. I became a classically-trained flautist.
I didn't have a radio or turntable, but I had a cassette player so I found things on my own. My first boyfriend introduced me to The Wall. It was the only interesting thing about him. I played it for six months.
Then I met these two guys at sixth form college who were always in the hall playing the piano: a geeky, plump one, Paul Marshall, who never took his duffel coat off and who clearly wanted to be Rick Wakeman; and a geeky, skinny one, Kevin Harris, who was hyperactive and drummed on everything.
I married the skinny, hyperactive one, and we all formed The Storytime Band, which we’re still in today. At first we were called The Garden Wall, after Genesis. We did an end-of-term concert that was astonishingly audacious – trying to do half of The Wall, half of The Six Wives Of Henry VIII and half of Wind & Wuthering. The bass player was our rather young and trendy Latin teacher. We were all terribly socially awkward, but we did pretty well.
That was my proper induction to the world of prog; the first cassette I’d had was Grieg’s Peer Gynt, and a lot of prog sounds orchestral and narrative in that way to me. Suddenly I had this influx of prog into my life, and I said to Paul and Kevin, ‘I like this – what else have you got?’
From Floyd I got into Genesis. Foxtrot is the perfect Genesis album to me; every piece is strong, surprising and pure prog. There’s so much drama, musical theatre, humour, subversion and parody. We were listening to these records at the very beginning of the video age.
For a long time personalities like Peter Gabriel and David Bowie hadn’t been happy being themselves, so they’d assume another personality, pushing the narrative somewhere else. I later named a book, Coastliners, after a track, and Supper’s Ready is in it, of course.
I like to hear Genesis’ influence in bands such as Mastodon. My daughter inherited a great number of my older tastes and got me into her new ones. She wasn’t familiar with The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway so I took her to a Genesis tribute show and she said, ‘Ah yes, Mastodon!’
In 1985, Kevin and I moved into a house in Barnsley; we were still trying to be a band, but we needed to earn money and eat. I ended up discovering everybody’s record collection, and the Kingdom Come album Journey. I loved its over-the-top exuberance.
Look at Arthur Brown on the sleeve – he’s painted gold, got his hair in bunches and he’s wearing this V-necked leotard thing. He’s wonderful! He’s got the most magnificent voice and he creates little word palettes like the poet Apollinaire did.
Joe’s Garage by Frank Zappa is like the other side to Arthur Brown. It’s like a space opera subversion of Nineteen Eighty Four with this slightly twisted central scrutiniser. Zappa invents language too – he’ll do things like use violin as percussion with no anxiety as to whether people will understand or accept it. It’s a mad story full of humour and characters. Zappa, Ian Anderson and Arthur Brown are the Goons of prog!
Van der Graaf Generator are extremely dense. Still Life is my favourite, partly because of Childlike Faith In Childhood’s End. Sometimes Peter Hammill’s lyrics are skirting the edges of my tolerance, but he’s a very good writer and a very good lyricist.
I used to have a bass teacher who played with them and he said, ‘They were really loud – the loudest band I ever played with.’ They’re extremely raw; but there’s a really lyrical quality underneath. The use of sax is very interesting, taking the role of the lead guitar in a raunchy, howling way.
Peter Hammill’s solo stuff is very confessional. Some of his best stuff is on Over – Autumn is the most perfectly-constructed song with wild violins and a perfect lyric. We won’t mention Marillion and whether they lifted anything from it!
The albums that have stayed with me are the ones I’ve had to work hardest at getting
I’m not as drawn to instrumental bands in general, but some of Tangerine Dream’s Stratosfear is strange, evocative and beautiful, with a language of its own. The first thing I heard was The Big Sleep In Search Of Hades, which has the spookiest piece of solo Mellotron work.
It sounds so old and wrecked and haunted. I used to listen to music with cans on, and I could not listen to The Big Sleep at night – it was like something creeping up behind you. Part of my enjoyment of music isn’t about prettiness, but pushing you and how it makes you feel.
Back to Floyd: Animals is a dry run for The Wall. I liked it because there was a simple narrative and a visual element that reminds me of a school trip to London. I was sat next to Paul as we went past Battersea Power Station, and he explained what it was.
Animals is so bleak and pure with a strong literary strand running through it. It’s a more manageable concept than The Wall, but still quite hard to get into. The albums that have stayed with me are the ones I’ve had to work hardest at getting. It’s similar to reading a dense literary novel.
I picked up on The Kick Inside from a friend at the all-girls school I went to in Wakefield. Carol was extremely into Kate Bush. People pick up on different things – she liked the vocals, visuals and the sound. Paul likes the chords and the construction. I like all of it.
Kate Bush is very good at storytelling and theatre, and has a fabulous voice that she does strange and interesting things with, just as Ian Anderson does with his flute, beyond the range of normal techniques. I was always a bookworm and wrote lyrics even before being in a band. I like how she uses fairy tales, folklore and classic literature. This is music to be deconstructed.
Al Stewart is a perfect singer-songwriter and a phenomenal lyricist. He fits my theatre narrative and goes beyond the standard three-chord song structure. Year Of The Cat is what people remember commercially, but it’s also a story; a lovely song, and it’s worth looking at how clever the writing is. Broadway Hotel is my favourite. Everything paints a picture with him and he can write about anything, such as the female aviator of Flying Sorcery.
Year Of The Cat is still fresh. There’s a gentle, folky element to his work that’s almost easy listening – but it’s deceptive, and deceptive things are always worth listening to again. You’ll discover how you relate to it at different times of day, and different times in your life, and compare what’s happened to you with it as a soundtrack.”
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