Despite distinguished forays into the arts (including presenting BBC2 s Late Show and making documentaries on Brian Eno, New Order and Reeves and Mortimer), Paul Morley is probably still best known in pop circles as co-founder of The Art Of Noise and ZTT records; the man who helped design and hype Frankie Goes To Hollywood; and one of the last pop journalists that mattered.
What is lesser known about Morley is that he s the son of a suicide. His new book Nothing is an attempt to write his way out of the hole created or rather uncreated by the loss of his father. It s a heavy tome, both in size and subject matter, less the speed-writings of a pop-culture junkie than a serious work in thrall to the likes of Sartre or Camus.
Morley senior s demise coincided with a bleak season for rock n roll, one characterised by the deaths of Marc Bolan, Elvis Presley and Ian Curtis. In fact, the first dead body Paul Morley ever saw was that of the troubled Joy Division singer he never set eyes on his father s remains.
There were two things that I needed to do at the beginning of the book, Morley explains. One was announce very blatantly that it wasn t going to be an ex-NME/Frankie Goes To Hollywood autobiography kind of thing. Secondly, for those expecting the Joy Division book that people might have expected me to write, I wanted to set that up and then completely go away from it. Like one guy said to me, God I thought I was getting 400 pages on Joy Division and then suddenly you went back to school! And I liked the idea, rather perversely, of having to begin the book with a dead body.
At the kernel of Nothing is one of the most interesting paradoxes about pop music: that it s often perceived as an escape from real life , but is at its most potent when addressing themes such as grief, infirmity, isolation, divorce. Morley s writing highlights the gulf between the undeniable glamour of rock n roll s death cult and the everyday pain of bereavement. This isn t Diet Coke material.
No, it s not! he laughs. Nicky Campbell said to me this morning on the radio, Not the kind of book I ll be reading on the beach, Paul. I said, No, but it ll be great when it rains. One of the funny reactions from people still steeped in rock and pop culture is they re staggered by how long it is, and they say, I just haven t got the time to read it in my life.
I was very pleased when I reached a certain point in the book that I could safely call it Nothing, he continues, because the only way the title would really work is if the book was long, because in a way there s an expectancy of a certain type of writer that they ll just deliver the flimsy slim volume to pretend they are an author. There s enough of that going around and I really wanted it to be, for the want of a better expression, a real book .
What is definitely of immeasurable worth is that, after the two decades of the silence, amnesia and incomprehension precipitated by Morley Sr s death, Paul found a way to re-establish lines of communication with his family through the writing of the book. By interviewing his mother and sisters, Morley found a way of making sense of the riddle, the question mark imprinted on their lives by the absence of the father/husband.
In that sense it s been quite a breakthrough, he admits. We talk about it now, it s out in the open and we ve kind of gotten over that strange 20 year gap of silence and autism. We never talked about it, and then suddenly it s gone to the other extreme where I ve tossed me dad s name and life out into the world to be picked over in newspapers and magazines for a couple of weeks. But I figured it was worth it, because at the heart of it was the fact that I wanted to bring him back to life above and beyond him being a suicide. And in the sense that he s now entered the world, even in this slightly diabolical and sad way, he still becomes alive. It s as if he existed now, whereas for a long time it was if he hadn t.
Nothing is published by Faber and Faber at #11.99 sterling.