It’s always difficult to talk in terms of straight drafts, since the onset of the word processor, because the whole process has become more organic, more a case of osmosis, I guess, with one draft kinda merging freely into the next. I’ve just had a look in my computer’s files, and I find there four seperate folders have been created, all to do with novels based on the basic premise of liquid music, and Manchester’s pop history. Each folder would be me starting a different novel based on the idea. So we can assume that four different novels have been considered.
The first folder, entitled MANC MUSIC was created on Sept 2nd, 1997. It contains three files, MANCHESTER MUSIC NOV, ORIGINAL MANCH, and GLAM001. Each file contains a different attempt at the same novel. The earliest file is MANCHESTER MUSIC NOV, created on Aug 26th, 1997. (That’s two and a half years before Needle was eventually published.) Here’s the opening paragraph, completely unedited:
It took her twenty-five minutes to find the keys. She’d left them in her other jacket, in the bedroom. Somehow, the jacket had crawled under the bed. She was tempted, sorely tempted by the bed and its deepness and its dirty-sheeted beauty. She actually lay down, just for a second or two, then jumped back up. Head so dizzy with the sudden movement, she almost blacked out. Maybe she should’ve done. But no, how dare they lock the door on me, the creeps! Bet they’re just pissing about down there. Bet they’re playing the old songs, just for the fun of it. Jamming. Enough of the jam, where’s the fucking bread? Pissed off, and grandly, and for no good reason other than the stuff she’d smoked and the stuff she’d swallowed, and the money that was being wasted, Madison grabbed the keys, more or less slid down the stairs, more stairs, more stairs, stairs to the cellar. Down. Here. Now. Let me. Just get this key in. Now. Shit! Get the fuck in, baby! Shouldn’t have taken so much. There we go. Turn. Turn and push. Turn. Turn and push. What’s wrong with it? Wrong key? No. Must have put the bolt on it. Was there one? Turn! Turn and push, you fucker!
Hmm, kinda embarrassing, I guess. But it brings back memories of what I was actually considering. Madison is the manager of the band. They’ve locked themselves in the cellar, which is their recording studio. This group is actually very famous, but now past their prime. They’re supposed to be recording their comeback album, using the latest technology (Liquid Music). When Madison finally gets into the studio, they’re all dead. One of them’s gone nuts, blown the band away witha shotgun, and then turned it on himself. There’s a recording machine running, and Madison pockets the globe from there, without telling the police. This globe contains the band’s final moment’s, shotgun blasts and all, and screams and all that, just what went wrong down there, as well as the final music they were playing. (Which idea eventually ends up in Needle, as evidence against 2Spot’s father.) Of course, in this earlier version, with the globe being constantly shaken, the music and the murder, and the reasons for the murder get all mixed up together. I’m not sure what Madison was going to do with this, but I imagine at some point she would have injected the liquid. Of interest, we see that the band is already called Glam Damage, witness the third file (attempt) GLAM001.
So that’s three attempts up to now. I’ll call them attempts, I think, rather than drafts.
The second folder is called TOOP, created Nov 14th, 1997. This title has nothing to do with David Toop, who I hadn’t even met at that point, rather with the main character, a teenage girl called Tupelo (Toop for her nickname). This folder contains the following files: GD1.1, GD1.2, GD1.3, GLAM1.001, GLAM1.002, GLAM1.003, SPEED DAMAGE and TOOP1.001. The novel is now definitely called Glam Damage. The earliest version (GD1.1) opens with a letter, here it is:
from John Norte, Somewhere City, 29/07/2013. To The Features Editor, UK Jive Mag, Manchester.
Hey Josephine, (Now what a song that would’ve made!) Here’s the shit on the Damage. As I explained on the phone, I’m finished with it. I can’t do anymore, I really can’t, and I hope you see why when you read it. It’s the lot, nothing left out I promise. Taped interviews, some written testament, some news reports, other shit. Most of it was told direct to me, some I’ve gathered long the way. Some of it I’ve just plain made up of course, or should I say imagined, out of the scraps. And then just stuck the jigsaw together in more or less chronological order, with Salvador Dali in charge of clock design. I have circled around the corpse of a great beast, taking notes. Call it an autopsy. Yeah, why not. The Autopsy of a Pop Group. I’ll take the advance payment, and delivery of first draft, after that, it’s all yours. Get some other sucker to tart it up, let them fuck up their life. So take my name off it, you hear?! I mean it, Jo, I really do. Whether you believe any of it, none of it, all of it, or else just hand the whole thing over to the cops¾that’s your game, because I am well and truly…Out of here! Johnny (P.S. Where you goin’ with that unedited manuscript in your hand?)
The first section of the book is called Looking for the Vibegeist, the first arrival of that word. It’s set in 2013. Again, it focuses on a famous band, past their prime, telling the story in a seres of interviews, reviews, clippings etc, with most of the info coming from this Toop girl, who’s an innocent figure, dragged into this world of rock music and liquid music. One interesting thing, is that this version of the novel contains the first dub fiction effects. Here’s the first one, (from GLAM1.001):
LIQUID BRAIN DAMAGE. INJECT Gunshot human-BANG! Screeching effects, stolen from Jesus. Like snare shot, bass shot, line shot, river shot. Jazz-BANG! bullets. Electric tone-flesh, like stretched rattle. In the glass-raw screaming BANG! of volume… AAARGHHHHHH!!!!! Jumping shot, bed shot; out of the drum, shooting blood patterns. Stings of bass, thuds, to noise-match the deep. Cheap and nasty three times. Cheap and nasty three times. I said cheap and nasty three times. Then the guitar, making tinny. Stutter up. A biscuit tin of chords, liquid in the mix, heartbeat pumping speed through the veins erratic. In sheets of howl-fast. Cries madness of broken, so bitter, choked, spat rapid, crippled, thrown aside. Words in bullet-garble. Blurred to the brain, in chorus of bass damage. Upwards! Guitar damage bullet crash! Drum damage! Brain crash! Collapsing song. Gone. Crackle-panic. EJECT
Okay, so here we have the idea of the murder mixed up with the music making. But it’s obvious I took stuff from here for the final Needle remixes, right? This is a prime example of the osmosis effect I mention, all the versions blending together. So here we have another three attempts (GD1, GLAM1 and TOOP1), to add to the Manc Music versions. Six attempts up to now.
The third folder is called GLAM DAMAGE, created on July 4th, 1998. It contains three files: GLAMX.001, GLAMXR and LIQ1.01. All three are versions of the same idea. It starts with the first verse of a poem by Abraham Cowley (1618-1667):
Awake, awake, my Lyre! And tell they silent master’s humble tale, In sounds that may prevail; Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire: Though so exalted she, And I so lowly be, Tell her, such different notes make all thy harmony.
Obviously, this is the inspiration for the eventual Bass Instruction Manual poem. Here’s how the book proper starts:
The place is a stonecold hangover with a look of shock on its face, the kind that happens when nocturnals get caught in the daytime. Check that feeling. Something about turned-off neon always does it for me, turns me on I mean, gets me thinking about maybe getting myself a shine refit. That kind of romantic arse shit. Like it should’ve been raining, like it should’ve always been raining.
Okay, we’re getting close now. Note however, that at this stage, the punctuation is entirely normal. And look what happens after the club’s door is opened:
The door’s opened by this creep champ, this thin-lip smile for hire.
Crew-cut, moustache, glued-on tan, the whole parade; dressed in a mustard suit that peels the eyes, and when he speaks¾ ‘Good morning!’¾I’m thinking the door-grille mechanism wasn’t that faulty after all.
‘Oh my, didn’t we have a good night?’
‘It’s too early.’
‘Ha! We always come in first thing on Sundays. Damage control, don’t you know?’
‘I could do with some of that.’
‘Ha! Yes. Quite. This way please. I’m Kingsley, by the way. Kingsley Smart. Publicity manager. So…Tony, isn’t it? ‘I think so.’
‘Donna tells me you’re quite the funketeer.’
I shrug, as you do, and then he says, ‘You want some help with that?’
The guy’s referring to my beat-up guitar case. I give him the back-off look.
‘Oh don’t get tough, please,’ he mutters. ‘I’ve had tough for breakfast. Quite literally, as it happens. Careful now, the cleaners haven’t reached this far.’
Cleaners? My shoes are sticking to the floor so much, feels like I can carry on walking, right up the walls, make out like a fly for the day. I’m being led around the panoramic dancefloor, where a couple of old ladies are sweeping up the plastic glasses, the cans, the swill, the vomit, the debris. ‘Morning, Gladys,’ says the man. ‘Morning, Ida.’ The bomb squad look up and smile, and wave, like a mirage. The club has that glazed ozone feel, like the air has been cooked. Molecules of evaporated sweat and perfume hang in clouds, clogging my sockets. Again, the voices haunt; all the thousand and one come-ons still lingering, sticky ghosts of young desperate sex.
As if on cue, a teenage girl is sitting on the edge of the dancing area, reading a hardback book. Kingsley ruffles her hair as he passes, and she looks up to smile at him. But somehow, and despite her age, she looks totally out of place in the setting, far too clean. I want to say something to her, but Kingsley is urging me to follow.
Again, all a bit ( a lot!) embarrassing. I’m still struggling with the idea of the group being famous and all that. The narrator (Tony, not yet called Elliot: that name would only be invented when I found out that his name had to begin with E, to make the Needle bass-string puzzle work). This Kingsley character takes Tony to meet Madison, the manager. (Who became 2Spot’s mother in Needle, I guess, a distant off-stage character.) The figure of the young teenage girl is still there; she vanished from the final version.
Okay, that’s another three attempts, making nine altogether. I should note here that none of these earlier versions were completed, they were all abandoned after a number of pages. I think the longest reached something like 75 pages. That’s why I’m calling them attempts, rather than drafts.
The fourth and final folder is called NEEDLE GROOVE, created on Oct 17th, 1998. The title of the book has changed. There was a lot of talk at the time of the Glam Rock revival, and we decided the original title might be misinterpreted. NEEDLE GROOVE contains these files: LIQUIDGROOVE, NEEDLE BITS, NEEDLE BLURB, NEEDLE SONGS and NEEDLE.3. Really, it’s just one file, because all except NEEDLE.3 are just places where I keep extra bits, ideas etc. So NEEDLE.3 is the business. What’s interesting is that I haven’t bothered keeping the two earlier versions of Needle (NEEDLE.1 and NEEDLE.2). This tends to happen only when I’ve definitely hit upon something; I then destroy all earlier attempts. It’s a way of forcing myself to commit to the one vision, as in, “Right, that’s it, there’s no going back now.” NEEDLE.1 would be my first mad, crazy rambling attempt, which I would be constantly revising along the way. NEEDLE.2 my considered revison of this, creating a proper book out of it. Which I’d then send off to my editor. NEEDLE.3 would then incorporate any changes coming out of discussions with the editor. According to my computer, NEEDLE.3 was last modified on Aug 18th 1999. If the opening of the folder is taken as a guide to when I started it, then Needle in the Groove (final version) took ten months to write, from first words to last. (There was, I remember, a few months between drafts 2 and 3, as I waited for my editor to get back to me. During this period I was working mainly on Cobralingus.) Of course, we also have to take into account all the work from previous versions that eventually found its way into the final one. The first ever file was created on Aug 26th 1997. So that’s exactly two years from first idea, to final draft. Adding everything together, we have twelve attempts at the same idea.
It never gets any easier!
The first folder, entitled MANC MUSIC was created on Sept 2nd, 1997. It contains three files, MANCHESTER MUSIC NOV, ORIGINAL MANCH, and GLAM001. Each file contains a different attempt at the same novel. The earliest file is MANCHESTER MUSIC NOV, created on Aug 26th, 1997. (That’s two and a half years before Needle was eventually published.) Here’s the opening paragraph, completely unedited:
It took her twenty-five minutes to find the keys. She’d left them in her other jacket, in the bedroom. Somehow, the jacket had crawled under the bed. She was tempted, sorely tempted by the bed and its deepness and its dirty-sheeted beauty. She actually lay down, just for a second or two, then jumped back up. Head so dizzy with the sudden movement, she almost blacked out. Maybe she should’ve done. But no, how dare they lock the door on me, the creeps! Bet they’re just pissing about down there. Bet they’re playing the old songs, just for the fun of it. Jamming. Enough of the jam, where’s the fucking bread? Pissed off, and grandly, and for no good reason other than the stuff she’d smoked and the stuff she’d swallowed, and the money that was being wasted, Madison grabbed the keys, more or less slid down the stairs, more stairs, more stairs, stairs to the cellar. Down. Here. Now. Let me. Just get this key in. Now. Shit! Get the fuck in, baby! Shouldn’t have taken so much. There we go. Turn. Turn and push. Turn. Turn and push. What’s wrong with it? Wrong key? No. Must have put the bolt on it. Was there one? Turn! Turn and push, you fucker!
Hmm, kinda embarrassing, I guess. But it brings back memories of what I was actually considering. Madison is the manager of the band. They’ve locked themselves in the cellar, which is their recording studio. This group is actually very famous, but now past their prime. They’re supposed to be recording their comeback album, using the latest technology (Liquid Music). When Madison finally gets into the studio, they’re all dead. One of them’s gone nuts, blown the band away witha shotgun, and then turned it on himself. There’s a recording machine running, and Madison pockets the globe from there, without telling the police. This globe contains the band’s final moment’s, shotgun blasts and all, and screams and all that, just what went wrong down there, as well as the final music they were playing. (Which idea eventually ends up in Needle, as evidence against 2Spot’s father.) Of course, in this earlier version, with the globe being constantly shaken, the music and the murder, and the reasons for the murder get all mixed up together. I’m not sure what Madison was going to do with this, but I imagine at some point she would have injected the liquid. Of interest, we see that the band is already called Glam Damage, witness the third file (attempt) GLAM001.
So that’s three attempts up to now. I’ll call them attempts, I think, rather than drafts.
The second folder is called TOOP, created Nov 14th, 1997. This title has nothing to do with David Toop, who I hadn’t even met at that point, rather with the main character, a teenage girl called Tupelo (Toop for her nickname). This folder contains the following files: GD1.1, GD1.2, GD1.3, GLAM1.001, GLAM1.002, GLAM1.003, SPEED DAMAGE and TOOP1.001. The novel is now definitely called Glam Damage. The earliest version (GD1.1) opens with a letter, here it is:
from John Norte, Somewhere City, 29/07/2013. To The Features Editor, UK Jive Mag, Manchester.
Hey Josephine, (Now what a song that would’ve made!) Here’s the shit on the Damage. As I explained on the phone, I’m finished with it. I can’t do anymore, I really can’t, and I hope you see why when you read it. It’s the lot, nothing left out I promise. Taped interviews, some written testament, some news reports, other shit. Most of it was told direct to me, some I’ve gathered long the way. Some of it I’ve just plain made up of course, or should I say imagined, out of the scraps. And then just stuck the jigsaw together in more or less chronological order, with Salvador Dali in charge of clock design. I have circled around the corpse of a great beast, taking notes. Call it an autopsy. Yeah, why not. The Autopsy of a Pop Group. I’ll take the advance payment, and delivery of first draft, after that, it’s all yours. Get some other sucker to tart it up, let them fuck up their life. So take my name off it, you hear?! I mean it, Jo, I really do. Whether you believe any of it, none of it, all of it, or else just hand the whole thing over to the cops¾that’s your game, because I am well and truly…Out of here! Johnny (P.S. Where you goin’ with that unedited manuscript in your hand?)
The first section of the book is called Looking for the Vibegeist, the first arrival of that word. It’s set in 2013. Again, it focuses on a famous band, past their prime, telling the story in a seres of interviews, reviews, clippings etc, with most of the info coming from this Toop girl, who’s an innocent figure, dragged into this world of rock music and liquid music. One interesting thing, is that this version of the novel contains the first dub fiction effects. Here’s the first one, (from GLAM1.001):
LIQUID BRAIN DAMAGE. INJECT Gunshot human-BANG! Screeching effects, stolen from Jesus. Like snare shot, bass shot, line shot, river shot. Jazz-BANG! bullets. Electric tone-flesh, like stretched rattle. In the glass-raw screaming BANG! of volume… AAARGHHHHHH!!!!! Jumping shot, bed shot; out of the drum, shooting blood patterns. Stings of bass, thuds, to noise-match the deep. Cheap and nasty three times. Cheap and nasty three times. I said cheap and nasty three times. Then the guitar, making tinny. Stutter up. A biscuit tin of chords, liquid in the mix, heartbeat pumping speed through the veins erratic. In sheets of howl-fast. Cries madness of broken, so bitter, choked, spat rapid, crippled, thrown aside. Words in bullet-garble. Blurred to the brain, in chorus of bass damage. Upwards! Guitar damage bullet crash! Drum damage! Brain crash! Collapsing song. Gone. Crackle-panic. EJECT
Okay, so here we have the idea of the murder mixed up with the music making. But it’s obvious I took stuff from here for the final Needle remixes, right? This is a prime example of the osmosis effect I mention, all the versions blending together. So here we have another three attempts (GD1, GLAM1 and TOOP1), to add to the Manc Music versions. Six attempts up to now.
The third folder is called GLAM DAMAGE, created on July 4th, 1998. It contains three files: GLAMX.001, GLAMXR and LIQ1.01. All three are versions of the same idea. It starts with the first verse of a poem by Abraham Cowley (1618-1667):
Awake, awake, my Lyre! And tell they silent master’s humble tale, In sounds that may prevail; Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire: Though so exalted she, And I so lowly be, Tell her, such different notes make all thy harmony.
Obviously, this is the inspiration for the eventual Bass Instruction Manual poem. Here’s how the book proper starts:
The place is a stonecold hangover with a look of shock on its face, the kind that happens when nocturnals get caught in the daytime. Check that feeling. Something about turned-off neon always does it for me, turns me on I mean, gets me thinking about maybe getting myself a shine refit. That kind of romantic arse shit. Like it should’ve been raining, like it should’ve always been raining.
Okay, we’re getting close now. Note however, that at this stage, the punctuation is entirely normal. And look what happens after the club’s door is opened:
The door’s opened by this creep champ, this thin-lip smile for hire.
Crew-cut, moustache, glued-on tan, the whole parade; dressed in a mustard suit that peels the eyes, and when he speaks¾ ‘Good morning!’¾I’m thinking the door-grille mechanism wasn’t that faulty after all.
‘Oh my, didn’t we have a good night?’
‘It’s too early.’
‘Ha! We always come in first thing on Sundays. Damage control, don’t you know?’
‘I could do with some of that.’
‘Ha! Yes. Quite. This way please. I’m Kingsley, by the way. Kingsley Smart. Publicity manager. So…Tony, isn’t it? ‘I think so.’
‘Donna tells me you’re quite the funketeer.’
I shrug, as you do, and then he says, ‘You want some help with that?’
The guy’s referring to my beat-up guitar case. I give him the back-off look.
‘Oh don’t get tough, please,’ he mutters. ‘I’ve had tough for breakfast. Quite literally, as it happens. Careful now, the cleaners haven’t reached this far.’
Cleaners? My shoes are sticking to the floor so much, feels like I can carry on walking, right up the walls, make out like a fly for the day. I’m being led around the panoramic dancefloor, where a couple of old ladies are sweeping up the plastic glasses, the cans, the swill, the vomit, the debris. ‘Morning, Gladys,’ says the man. ‘Morning, Ida.’ The bomb squad look up and smile, and wave, like a mirage. The club has that glazed ozone feel, like the air has been cooked. Molecules of evaporated sweat and perfume hang in clouds, clogging my sockets. Again, the voices haunt; all the thousand and one come-ons still lingering, sticky ghosts of young desperate sex.
As if on cue, a teenage girl is sitting on the edge of the dancing area, reading a hardback book. Kingsley ruffles her hair as he passes, and she looks up to smile at him. But somehow, and despite her age, she looks totally out of place in the setting, far too clean. I want to say something to her, but Kingsley is urging me to follow.
Again, all a bit ( a lot!) embarrassing. I’m still struggling with the idea of the group being famous and all that. The narrator (Tony, not yet called Elliot: that name would only be invented when I found out that his name had to begin with E, to make the Needle bass-string puzzle work). This Kingsley character takes Tony to meet Madison, the manager. (Who became 2Spot’s mother in Needle, I guess, a distant off-stage character.) The figure of the young teenage girl is still there; she vanished from the final version.
Okay, that’s another three attempts, making nine altogether. I should note here that none of these earlier versions were completed, they were all abandoned after a number of pages. I think the longest reached something like 75 pages. That’s why I’m calling them attempts, rather than drafts.
The fourth and final folder is called NEEDLE GROOVE, created on Oct 17th, 1998. The title of the book has changed. There was a lot of talk at the time of the Glam Rock revival, and we decided the original title might be misinterpreted. NEEDLE GROOVE contains these files: LIQUIDGROOVE, NEEDLE BITS, NEEDLE BLURB, NEEDLE SONGS and NEEDLE.3. Really, it’s just one file, because all except NEEDLE.3 are just places where I keep extra bits, ideas etc. So NEEDLE.3 is the business. What’s interesting is that I haven’t bothered keeping the two earlier versions of Needle (NEEDLE.1 and NEEDLE.2). This tends to happen only when I’ve definitely hit upon something; I then destroy all earlier attempts. It’s a way of forcing myself to commit to the one vision, as in, “Right, that’s it, there’s no going back now.” NEEDLE.1 would be my first mad, crazy rambling attempt, which I would be constantly revising along the way. NEEDLE.2 my considered revison of this, creating a proper book out of it. Which I’d then send off to my editor. NEEDLE.3 would then incorporate any changes coming out of discussions with the editor. According to my computer, NEEDLE.3 was last modified on Aug 18th 1999. If the opening of the folder is taken as a guide to when I started it, then Needle in the Groove (final version) took ten months to write, from first words to last. (There was, I remember, a few months between drafts 2 and 3, as I waited for my editor to get back to me. During this period I was working mainly on Cobralingus.) Of course, we also have to take into account all the work from previous versions that eventually found its way into the final one. The first ever file was created on Aug 26th 1997. So that’s exactly two years from first idea, to final draft. Adding everything together, we have twelve attempts at the same idea.
It never gets any easier!