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Was I really that horny? Oh wait, yes, I was. With fame with beauty but mostly with sex. Listening back, it’s startling how obsessed with sex the songs are. By night, I wrote lyrics saturated in that literature, and that philosophy (name-checking Isherwood, Aristotle, Nabokov, Yeats…) And also saturated in the hormones of youth.

These days, I write novels (like Connect), and children's books (like the Rabbit & Bear books, illustrated by Jim Field), and oddities like the End Poem (the peculiar narrative that ends the computer game Minecraft).īut I learned how to write over 30 years ago, as the singer with Toasted Heretic.īy day, I studied English literature and philosophy in UCG (since rebranded as NUI Galway).

And rushing back with the songs come memories memories that came just as close to getting lost forever. These complicated, multilayered sounds, into which we had all poured so much of our young selves, had come perilously close to ceasing to exist.īut now the great global corporations have silently switched my youth back on. By the time our drummer and producer, Neil Farrell, tracked down the original dusty reels of magnetic tape, to remaster the album for rerelease, even I no longer had a CD or vinyl copy. The last time I saw a second-hand CD of the album for sale on Amazon, it was priced at an absurd $902. To understand how that feels, you must understand that it has been impossible to buy these songs new, to hear these songs on demand (however intense your desire), for over 20 years. On the launch date, I log into the Spotify for Artists app (where musicians have private access to the streaming statistics for their works), and I can see Another Day, Another Riot begin to roll out around the world, timezone by timezone: "Released in 19 out of 178 countries…" I check in throughout the day. As Heraclitus would undoubtedly have put it, had he had the music streaming service Spotify on his iPhone "You cannot listen to the same stream twice for you are not the same person, and it is not the same stream." And so, now, I find myself both Cervantes and Menard, one foot either side of this 30-year-wide abyss. The effect those words have on the reader has been completely transformed by the passage of time between the two Quixotes. In the great Borges story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, an early 20th-century writer and polymath, Pierre Menard, writes Don Quixote again, word for word: and, though every word is the same as Cervantes' original, it is an utterly different book.

The results of the experiment are occasionally unsettling.