In Dead Man Singing – memories of a prior self
Steve Couch isn’t taking his new career sitting down. He’s a novelist now, racing from this book – his first – to a second and third. I met him among a group of authors who occasionally discuss writing and publishing. The sessions that are often full of tips but mainly of complaints about the state of an industry that seems to have little regard for the inputs the industry needs to stay alive.
Frankly, it’s a matter of supply and demand. Since the invention of the typewriter – turbo-charged by computing – the supply of manuscripts vastly outstrips demand from readers. Who would set out to be a writer now? Everyone would – and does. Steve’s one of them. One of us. Hey, ho!
His 2023 novel spins out from a premise with promise. It’s called Dead Man Singing, set in 1990s England. Here’s how Steve pitched it when we spoke:
The protagonist, Dave Masters is a singer-songwriter, a lead guitarist who once achieved modest fame. He is a rock semi-star, a star dwarfed by the acts he once supported in the 1970s – Paul McCartney and Wings, Faces, Traffic, Free. He had some modest hits with his own songs, but his band’s albums and gigs involved a lot of covers of other writers’ songs.
Twenty years on, however, the gigs are fewer and smaller. His band has disbanded. He accompanies himself on an acoustic guitar. His new songs fail to catch fire. His record label won’t produce his latest album, despite being under contract to do so.
Dave lives off royalties from the old songs, but they’re growing scarce. His marriage has broken down, too. He’s selling his big house south of London so he can give his ex her half of its value. He doesn’t have to. It’s his house, not hers. But he wants to. Guilt. His recurrent road-trip philandry is what caused the split.
Listening to a tribute band performing one night, he gets an idea and floats it to his manager. What if we fake the death of Dave Masters? Maybe there would be work for a while playing clubs and bars as the tribute group “Dave ReMastered.” Maybe the canceled album might come out for a final pop at the charts. People might even pay now to hear this dead man sing. The manager jumps at the chance. What could go wrong? Plenty.
I liked the idea. Steve’s even built an online playlist of the tunes mentioned during the novel. I could see someone wanting to make this story into a movie, maybe a six-part television series.
So, I bought the book. It’s fun to read. A crisp opening, perhaps a bit self-indulgent in the middle, with a clever ending that’s maybe a bit too clever. A nice rainy-day beach-read.
But that’s not why I’m writing about it. The reason it that the implausible plot and the plight of the protagonist show how a work of fiction can open your mind to memories and the larger questions they beg you to answer.
This is a story about identity, that sense of self that is both fixed and moving, steady while being yanked about, reasserting itself even when you have tried to kill your self off and start over. That makes it a story about fraud – financial, aesthetic, and personal. Fraud that isn’t fraud, not really, whatever “real” means through a story about the little lies that band together to make a gigantic lie. Being a story of fraud, it’s also a story about justice. A subplot – about a second tribute act – echoes these themes. The outcome sets the world to rights, except it doesn’t, not quite. For all to be right with the world, you have to have forgotten the other character who dies along the way – a piece of the collateral damage the plot leaves behind.
We’ve seen a lot of talk about identity in contexts much larger than a fun bit of fiction like Dead Man Singing.
Probably without its author thinking about it – and perhaps a novelist ought not to think about it – this book asks us questions. We contemplate what constitutes a good life, as the philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) said, echoing the philosophical writings of the novelist Iris Murdoch (1970). That’s certainly not the life Dave Masters lived in the 1970s and 1980s, as appealing as it all seems, or seemed at the time. Time is another theme.
As I started to read, to hear, Steve’s Dead Man Singing, I remembered when I got my first guitar, taught myself to play the first few chords, got good enough to play a couple of gigs before realizing I would never realize even the modest fame of a Dave Masters. I identified with a music of that period. It lives with me, inside me, even when I don’t think about it. Muscle memories of a younger self is still present in the fingers. Just. Never mind all the other identities I have assumed, no, embedded, in layers, over decades and geographies of space-time.
And a note to Steve: You may not have intended this reading of your text. But that doesn’t matter one jot. Readers create their own stories. They don’t just passively absorb yours. This one is there in your novel, for me, at least. And that’s enough. That’s plenty. Thanks.
Murdoch, I. (1970). The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Inspiration comes to a writer in many forms and disguises, errant thoughts and wild realizations, and from other writers. In my sense of this, all serious artists--novelists, let's say--are reaching for essentially the same thing, an idea or impression floating out there in the cultural ether, a message somewhere out there in the network of consciousness. We can only reach it, and make it our own, by writing our way to it. Often we find it's a less intriguing premise than we first thought it to be. The way to turn it into a full blown work of art escapes us. But sometimes, every so often.....it's just that we can't ever tell whether an inspiration will work without writing our way there. That's what writing fiction is, a lot of damn writing, most of it dull workmanlike stuff, but all of it necessary. And frequently, we discover a much better inspiration along the way. Writers are laborers, perhaps skilled, but essentially miners, carpenters, masons. A finished house, a work of Art, comes from daily dedication to the trade. This is the reward. Fame? Ha!