Going again to the daybreak of civilization, tales had been songs: Homer’s celebrated epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, had been initially carried out to the lute and function the bedrock of the oral custom; solely later had been they written down and printed in a few of the world’s first books. By then, songwriters had widened their scope, transferring away from non secular mythology to retell folks tales and move on the information – generally merely taking newspaper headlines and turning them into songs.
As rock music got here of age, so its ambitions grew, with huge concepts in literature influencing huge concepts on file. When The Beatles recorded “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the epochal closing monitor to their Revolver album, John Lennon had in thoughts a guide by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Expertise: A Handbook Primarily based On The Tibetan Guide Of The Lifeless, which suggested readers to “turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.” Seven years later, whereas recording his fourth studio album, in 1973, Lennon had one other consciousness-raising publication at hand, Robert Masters and Jean Houston’s Thoughts Video games: The Information To Interior Area, which might go on to tell his album’s title monitor.
That very same yr, David Bowie had bold plans of his personal, hoping to show George Orwell’s 1984 right into a reside theatre manufacturing. Although the Orwell property refused him the rights to the story, remnants of the thought discovered their means into Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Canine, notably the second aspect’s “We Are The Dead,” “1984” and “Big Brother.”
Although it’s truly Orwell’s earlier novel, 1945’s Animal Farm, which has straight impressed extra songs (R.E.M.’s “Disturbance At The Heron House,” Hazel O’Connor’s “Animal Farm” and Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals amongst them), dystopian futures the likes of that are depicted in 1984 have frequently resonated with musicians from a wide selection of genres. Gary Numan was closely into Philip Ok Dick’s sci-fi work, significantly Do Androids Dream Of Electrical Sheep?, when he wrote his new wave/electro-pop basic “Are “Friends” Electrical?,” and New Wave Of British Heavy Metallic behemoths Iron Maiden recast Aldous Huxley’s Courageous New World as a six-minute epic on their 2000 album of the identical identify.
Seemingly pure bedfellows, prog rock’s ambitions are ably fed by literature’s lofty beliefs. Take Rush, as an example, whose side-long title monitor to the game-changing 1976 album, 2112, was loosely based mostly on Ayn Rand’s guide Anthem (with Rand’s “genius” receiving an acknowledgment within the album’s sleevenotes), setting the scene for a bleak idea suite of novelistic proportions, through which the world is managed by the Monks Of The Temples Of Syrinx. Light Big appeared to an much more obscure supply for “Pantagruel’s Nativity,” the opening monitor to their 1971 outing Buying The Style, taking inspiration from François Rabelais’ collection of novels, The Life Of Gargantua And Of Pantagruel – a group they might return to later of their profession.
However why cease at one aspect of vinyl, when you may have a complete album at your disposal? Or double-album in case you’re Jeff Wayne, whose dramatization of The Warfare Of The Worlds set Earth’s destruction to suitably theatrical music (and included a UK High 5 single within the form of “Forever Autumn,” sung by The Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward). Rick Wakeman, in the meantime, took a Journey To The Centre Of The Earth in 1974, with the London Symphony Orchestra in tow and Jules Verne’s 1864 novel as a information; the next yr, Camel launched a largely instrumental tackle Paul Gallico’s 1941 novella The Snow Goose.
Camel’s determination got here off the again of their earlier album, Mirage, for which they’d recorded a collection, “Nimrodel/The Procession/The White Rider,” based mostly on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings. They weren’t the primary band to seek out inspiration in Tolkein’s fantasy trilogy, although: Led Zeppelin had based mostly “Ramble On,” from their 1969 sophomore album, on Frodo’s wanderings, earlier than returning to the Rings trilogy for “The Battle Of Evermore,” a duet that appeared on their second album and which featured Sandy Denny on vocals.
Elsewhere on the prog spectrum, the title monitor to Genesis’ 1976 album A Trick Of The Tail was written by Tony Banks and based mostly on William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors – not the one music to take inspiration from a Golding novel. Certainly, U2 have returned to his work at the least twice: “White As Snow,” from 2009’s No Line On The Horizon, took Golding’s Pincher Martin for inspiration, and “Shadows And Tall Trees,” from their 1980 debut, Boy, was named after a chapter in Lord Of The Flies.
From Rings to Flies… these cult classics have formed generations of youngsters, so it’s no shock that they continue to be lodged within the minds of a few of rock’s greatest stars. A Clockwork Orange has influenced everybody from Bowie to Rob Zombie, each of whom drew upon its imaginative teenage slang, Nadsat, for “Suffragette City” and “Never Gonna Stop (The Red Red Krovvy),” respectively; Sting referenced Humbert Humbert, “the old man in the book by Nabokov” (that guide being Lolita), in The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close To Me;” The Treatment tapped into the existentialist angst of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger for his or her controversial debut single, “Killing An Arab.”
For a lot of songwriters, quick tales are excellent fodder for the three-to-four-minute music – significantly within the horror style. Metallica took a lot inspiration from HP Lovecraft, whose “Cthulhu Mythos” informs early thrash classics akin to “The Call Of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be,” whereas the work of one other early pioneer of each horror and short-story writing, Edgar Allen Poe, has additionally been the topic of many musical reimaginings. Alan Parsons Undertaking’s 1976 debut, Tales Of Thriller And Creativeness, set his tales and poetry to music, as did Lou Reed’s 2002 double-album, The Raven. (All the time drawn to life’s darker aspect, Reed had beforehand introduced sadomasochism into the rock world when “Venus In Furs” appeared on The Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut, drawing upon Austrian creator Leopold van Sacher-Masoch’s guide of the identical identify.)
With many songwriters being deemed poets themselves, it’s solely pure that they might gravitate in direction of different like-minded souls. Ryan Adams wished he “had a Sylvia Plath” on a music named after the beloved American poet, whereas on The Smiths’ “Cemetery Gates,” Morrissey pledged allegiance to “wild lover Wilde,” drawing a line between himself and people who sided with John Keats and WB Yeats. Elsewhere, within the period of the last word “rock poet” Bob Dylan, the likes of protest singer Phil Ochs set extant poetry to music (Alfred Noyers’ “The Highwayman”), and 60s hitmakers Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich used Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” as the premise for his or her 1968 UK chart-topper, “The Legend Of Xanadu.”
Given the plethora of struggle poetry that’s been written, it’s a style that has remained comparatively untouched by musicians (although PJ Harvey, whose 1998 music “The River” is predicated upon Flannery O’Connor’s story of the identical identify, has channeled the likes of Wilfred Owen lately). Warfare novels have, nevertheless, offered ample supply materials for the likes of Sensational Alex Harvey Band (“Dogs Of War,” impressed by Frederick Forsyth’s novel of the identical identify) and, as soon as once more, Metallica, who turned to Dalton Trumbo’s World Warfare I novel, Johnny Received His Gun, for inspiration for the lyrics to “One,” and Hemingway’s Spanish Civil Warfare basic, For Whom The Bell Tolls, for his or her music of the identical identify, taken from their landmark 1984 album, Journey The Lightning.
From the proof, Metallica can justifiably declare to have taken extra inspiration than most from novels, with the title monitor to Journey The Lightning referring to a death-row inmate in Stephen King’s basic The Stand. A giant shock, nevertheless, is that pop legends ABBA additionally tapped into King’s horror epic, basing a Souper Trouper album monitor “The Piper” on the novel’s research of fascistic leaders. An evil-minded chief of a distinct stripe offered the main focus for Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Grasp And Margarita, which imagined what would occur when the Satan paid a go to to the Soviet Union… At the very least one end result was The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For The Devil,” whose lyrics had been penned by Mick Jagger after Marianne Faithfull gave him a replica of the guide.
A few years earlier, one other blues-influenced British rock group, Cream, had flexed their very own literary muscle tissues, recording “Tales Of Brave Ulysses” for Disraeli Gears; bringing us properly full circle, the music took Homer’s Odyssey for inspiration. In actual fact, fittingly, for one of many bedrocks of recent civilization, the story has influenced a plethora of artists, amongst them additionally Steely Dan, whose “Home At Last” appeared to the Homeric epic for its material.
Extra not directly, The Odyssey was additionally an affect on Kate Bush’s 1989 single “The Sensual World,” for which Bush had initially wished to learn Molly Bloom’s monologue from James Joyce’s Ulysses, the groundbreaking modernist novel that used The Odyssey for its personal framework. The Joyce property initially denied Bush the rights to make use of textual content from the novel, however relented in 2011, when Bush re-recorded her music as “Flower Of The Mountain,” utilizing passages from Joyce’s guide for lyrics.
In fact, that wasn’t the primary time Bush had been drawn to a feminine voice in a basic novel. Her first single, 1978’s “Wuthering Heights,” was launched when Bush was simply 19, and retold Emily Brontë’s 1847 story in a mere 4 and a half minutes. With its unforgettable video, the one effortlessly topped the UK charts. Introducing Bush as an idiosyncratic expertise with a novel worldview, “Wuthering Heights” additionally arguably stays the definitive music based mostly on literature.
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