Media>Special#2

  

A MINOR INCIDENT     by Nick Horby 

Like a lot of people, I spent a large chunk of 2000 listening 
to and loving Badly Drawn Boy’s The Hour of the 
Bewilderbeast album. It’s one of the very few English 
records of recent years l’ve had any time for; it’s thoughtful, 
quirky without being inept (despite my earlier presumption 
that the name of the artist was somehow indicative of 
the ramshackle nature of the music, a presumption that 
stopped me from listening to him for a while), it’s melodic, 
it borrows lightly and judiciously from all sorts of folky, 
rocky things I like (Damon Gough is an early-Springsteen
devotee), it doesn’t show off, it is un-English in the sense 
that it wouldn’t be much use to Ibizan clubbers or boozed - 
up football hooligans, with its little snatches of orchestration 
(it begins with a brass-band instrumental that would not have
 sounded out of place in a gentle sixties comedy) and its range 
of moods. It seemed to me that Damon could write a wonderful film 
score, and I would have suggested him for About A Boy had 
I not known that writers have less chance of influencing film 
adaptations of their books than they do of changing the 
weather. And then, the first time we met, Chris and Paul 
Weitz, the co-directors, told me that they had already asked 
Damon to provide all the music for the film (...)
’A Minor Incident’, a sweet, heartfelt, acoustic strummer 
with a wheezy Dylanesque harmonica solo, refers directly 
to a major incident in the book and the movie: Marcus 
comes home from a day out to discover his mother, Fiona, 
lying comatose on the sofa after an attempt to kill herself, 
her vomit on the floor beside her. The song is her suicide 
note to her son. I wrote one for her too, but it wasn’t in the 
form of a song lyric, and Damon’s words capture Fiona’s
dippy depressive insouciance perfectly. But here’s the 
thing: once l’d listened to ’A Minor Incident’ a couple of 
times, it started to make me think of Danny in ways that I 
hadn’t done when I was writing the book (...)
So there we go. That’s where the excitement lies: in the 
magical coincidences and transferences of creativity. I 
write a book that isn’t about my kid, and then someone
writes a beautiful song based on an episode in my book 
that turns out to mean something much more personal to 
me than my book ever did. And I won’t say that this sort of 
thing is worth more than all the Hollywood money in the 
world, because l’m a pragmatist, and that Hollywood 
money has given Danny a trust fund which will hopefully 
see him through those terrifying thirty or forty years. But 
it’s worth an awful lot, something money can’t buy, and it 
makes me want to keep writing and collaborating, in the 
hope that something I write will strike this kind of dazzling, 
serendipitous spark off someone again.