‘Breaking Wave’ Developments…….From Steve Drury’s Earthlogs…….
by Bernie Bell - 09:26 on 04 June 2025
‘Breaking Wave’ Developments…….
Commitments 5, All the Rest 0
or, mine and Roddy Doyle's one degree of separation
In 2011, Julian Barnes won the Booker for The Sense of an Ending. I was watching the ceremony, so I heard Barnes thank his editor Dan Franklin at Cape for his continuing support. This rocked my world, somewhat, because only that morning I’d received an email from Dan Franklin, offering to publish ‘A Hero for High Times.’
This pleased me greatly, as you might imagine. What neither Dan nor I had foreseen was how hard ‘Hero’ was going to be to write. By the time I submitted the manuscript, it was 2016, and Dan was semi-retired. ‘Hero’ was pretty much the last book he published. One of the first books he published when he was at Heinemann was The Commitments.
Roddy Doyle had originally self published the novel, and sold 2000 copies in that state, so I guess Dan wasn’t taking too big a punt, especially since he is a pop music nutter and knows a good thing when he sees one. He was also the most important editor of books about the counterculture in the UK - ‘Hero’, he told me, was the culmination of this part of his publishing life.
When I started writing The Breaking Wave, which will also be ‘self-published’ in its first state, (because my time is limited, and I need to see the thing to hardback publication), one of the things that motivated me was the sense that no-one other than Roddy Doyle had pulled off writing a good novel about a rock and roll band. What have you got? I enjoyed Ian Banks ‘Espadair Street’, but who the fuck has heard of Frozen Gold? No-one. So why haven’t we heard of one of the ‘biggest bands of the 1970’s?’ I mean, we’ve heard of Fleetwood Mac on whom Frozen Gold were modelled. Why haven’t we heard of David Mitchell’s ‘Utopia Avenue’? Why have we never heard of ‘Daisy and the Six’?, also very Mac-alikey. Above all, why does none of their material or their careers ring even slightly true?
Pop literate types (ahem) don’t need to read novels about bands, because we read biographies. We are steeped in our strange histories - what novel could top the stories of Fleetwood Mac, or the Beatles, or the Stones? Doyle was the only person who got it right - in order to get a bit of verisimilitude into a novel, no one can of heard of the band. The band, in short, need to have failed. 'Giles Smith’s ‘Lost in Music’ covers the subject - but it’s not a novel, but another biography.
Doyle, rather than trying to write shit made up lyrics, wrote about soul. The Breaking Wave might have shit lyrics (though I don’t think so!), but they play songs that I co-wrote and performed in the 1980’s. They are real songs; what’s more, the model for the Breaking Wave failed utterly, in ways I describe in the book.
I haven’t read ‘The Commitments’ in years, or seen the fillum since it came out. But, the third draft being away with my editor, thus stopping me from fiddling with the book, I watched it today, on iPlayer - here’s a link if you’ve never seen it. It’s right good. It captures perfectly the spirit of what it was like to be a young musician with hopes and dreams. It’s great on how to get the band together, how to rehearse, what it’s like to get your first gigs, sexual tension within bands, seething resentment, letting your big break slip through your hands, and so forth. It brought tears to my eyes, actually, because of how true to the real experience of being in a band it comes.
In a way, I guess, The Breaking Wave is a companion piece - what might it be like to put The Commitments back together after forty years? Who is dead? Who is dying?Who is still a wanker? I really really hope that Roddy Doyle isn’t currently working on such a thing!
I should say that, all being well, we’ll publish The Breaking Wave, in a limited edition of 250, in the early autumn.
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Jun 1
My response was….
‘The Commitments’ was on the telly recently and we’ve recorded it (do you know, we still say ‘tape’) and will watch it when in the right mood.
‘Have you any Rock Salmon?’ ‘No , we only have Soul’.
We’ve got the C.D. and listen to that …when in the right mood.
To my shame, I didn’t know there’s a book – or, I might have forgotten – I’m having many discussions about short-term memory loss at the moment, not with Medics, just with aging chums.
I’ll now order a copy.”
When we went to order a copy, we found that there’s a trilogy by Roddy Doyle - the Barrytown Trilogy…
https://biblio.co.uk/book/barrytown-trilogy-commitments-snapper-van-roddy/d/1610065323
I suspect that the contents of the three books were joined together to make the film – but I won’t know until I read them.
Thanks Ian – we’re always looking for new things to read!
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From Steve Drury’s Earthlogs…….
https://earthlogs.org/2025/06/02/arsenic-an-agent-of-evolutionary-change/
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