Author and journalist Patrick Freyne told David Hennessy about his debut novel, Experts in a Dying Field.
Patrick Freyne is well known as a journalist with The Irish Times and he also previously published the non-fiction book, OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea.
This summer he published his debut novel, Experts in a Dying Field.
Experts in a Dying Field deals with themes of lost youth and unfulfilled potential.
The band The Heathens marketed themselves as ‘the 1000th best band of all time’.
But then their tour van crashed and one of their members died.
It is twenty years later and the various surviving members of the band have all gone separate ways but are brought back together with several reunions and a few surprises.
Patrick Freyne took time to chat to The Irish World about his debut novel.
The Commitments, The Frames and Glen Hansard were mentioned in the conversation but the interview took place before the news of Glen’s sad passing.
Do you remember where the inspiration for Experts in a Dying Field came from?
“Not entirely.
“I do know a few years ago I tried to write a Dublin novel.
“I really love this city and I love the way there’s all these different Dublins, these different worlds kind of overlapping.
“I do a lot of writing for the paper where I go out and about and talk to people on the street.
“There’s a way of talking here.
“But that (book) didn’t really work, it was too vague.
“It just occurred to me to write from the perspective of something I knew.
“I know the music scene really well and I was in bands so it just made sense to tell this Dublin story but start with a band and that scenario.
“I just thought the idea of a famous-ish rock star coming back to do a documentary but then in the periphery of that, there’s two people meeting for the first time in 20 years who used to be very close and haven’t seen each other in a long time.
“That’s where it started and then it kind of becomes the Dublin novel.
“It’s about those people and what happened to them and how they reconcile their lives but I also try and have them walk around the city.
“There’s a lot of interactions with different people and there’s high and low, there’s street people and there’s financiers.
“All that stuff I’m interested in, the way these people all exist in the same place.”
You’re also a musician. How much of you is in the character of Snoopy? Is he your self insert or is there parts of you in different characters?
“There’s a remix kind of going on.
“I’m remixing different things.
“In a way Snoopy is probably least like me.
“Snoopy and Maggie probably.
“I’m probably most like some combination of Joss and Burton, the ideologue and the poser because that’s what I would have been like.
“I realised recently that Rex Casey, the slightly annoying rock star character, is a version of what I’d have been like if I’d been a successful musician.
“I was representing all these people I’d been in bands with, no one directly, and people I knew in the music scene.
“There’s a slightly sardonic put upon fixer that exists in every music scene.
“We used to tour the UK a lot and you’d meet these guys and girls who ran gigs and were constantly running after these wayward bands.
“Snoopy and Maggie are more like those type of characters: Very steadfast, talented but not showy.
“I was a bit of a show off when I was in my 20s.
“I was shy but a show off whereas now I’m less shy and probably less of a show off although I have a book out so that’s kind of showing off.”
Did you have anyone in mind when writing Rex Casey? Is there some big Irish musician you were thinking of for him?
“People have been asking, ‘Who’s he meant to be?’
“Actually one of the things I’ve been having fun with is trying to write some of the songs from the book.
“There’s descriptions of The Heathens’ music in the book and so people have been writing what they think the song might sound like.
“I find it easier to write Rex Casey songs.
“I think it would be fair to say Rex Casey is what I’d have been like, even musically, if I’d been a successful musician.
“I think if I’d become a successful musician in my 20s, I’d have become a try hard show off so he is actually more a portrait of the worst of me, even though he’s not the worst.
“He’s not a bad guy and also, as Maggie keeps saying, he’s probably a good musician, he’s just been promoted beyond what anyone expected.
“But no one in the book is based directly on anyone.”
With his success, Rex has lost the run of himself. That must be something you have seen time and time again..
“As a journalist, you interview people who’ve been successful.
“I do think that fame and money are like bad drugs.
“They do a number on people.
“This doesn’t always work but I think the later someone becomes successful at their thing, the better because they realise there’s an element of luck involved.
“I do think sometimes if somebody has success very early in their life, they put it all down to their own brilliance and I don’t think that’s ever true.
“I think it’s a combination of talent but also timing and luck and all these things.
“When you meet people whose success came a bit older, they seem to have more of a head on their shoulders, a bit more perspective.”
There is the character of Joss who died tragically in the band’s bus crash when he was too young, something that has haunted all members of the band since. There have been many stories of musicians dying too young, I wondered if you were thinking of stories like Mic Christopher who died aged 32 just as his career was taking off..
“I knew a lot of people who knew Mic.
“I never really knew him myself but I remember him in the scene.
“Actually our friend Paul, who was in the band with me, died quite young.
“He died at 35.
“I have another friend who died very young so the circumstances in the book are made up but it’s more specifically about that thing that happens when you hit my age where you look out and people are missing, people are gone.
“I was at the funeral of another great Dublin musician who died recently, Glenn Keating.
“He was my age.
“He played with HousePlants, Paul Noonan from Bell X1’s band.
“He played with a lot of bands I used to play with back in the day.
“He once filled in in my band.
“He was a lovely person that fit right into everyone’s band.
“Rock music is such a young form, you feel old playing rock music by the time you’re 30.
“There’s just something about all those people now being middle aged that brings an automatic melancholy and pathos.
“Even in the car park after Glenn’s funeral it was just filled with people who used to be, and some still are, musicians and in bands and loads of people who looked like me and drove shitty hatchbacks that you can fill with gear.
“Part of what the book draws on is the kind of tragedy and sadness of that.
“I tried to make it funny too but there’s also just a built-in thing about age.
“I love Terry Pratchett and he has a great quote in one of his books where he goes, ‘Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened’ and I think the more I age, the more that’s true.
“I wrote a piece for The Guardian a few weeks ago about being a 51-year-old debut novelist and about how when I don’t pass a reflective surface, I sometimes just go, ‘I’m a young hip novelist, I’m a young kid on the make’ and then I see myself in the mirror, go, ‘Oh no, I’m not. I forgot I’m a middle-aged man’.
“And a lot of the book is dealing with that too.
“Maybe that’s my arrested development but I think everyone has that, everyone deep down still thinks they’re 22.
“I do think that inside everyone has a mental image that’s framed 20 years earlier.
“The book is uplifting ultimately.
“It’s also about how stuff gets passed on so you’ve got a younger generation of characters in the book who are making art and continue to make art being influenced by these older artists.
“Me and my wife do a lot of folk singing and we go to sessions and stuff.
“One of the things I really like about those sessions is they’re cross-generational.
“When you’re sitting in those things, there’s people who are 18 and there’s people who are 75 and there is a sense of continuity.
“The other thing I wanted to put in the book is the idea that this small, shitty little band could still have an influence on the world, which I think is true.
“I remember Martin Hayes, the fiddle player, saying when I interviewed him a few years ago that he’s still most influenced by fiddlers in Clare in their 70s who’ve never played to more than five people in a kitchen and that when he goes out and plays concert halls around the world, he’s channelling some of those guys.
“I do think there’s a weird thing in which any bit of art can have an influence on the culture that the person writing doesn’t even know about.
“I love the idea that everything is potentially positively influencing the world, even a crappy little band.”
The story shows that in that as much as Snoopy and Maggie might think The Heathens’ music is completely forgotten, they find that a young woman from a different country has looked it up (for her own reasons of course). You never know who the art will affect, do you?
“It’s really important that people don’t think of art in terms of success, failure, that you think of it in terms of something you want to create and you throw it out in the world.
“Once you make it, how it does is none of your business.
“You put it out there, you do the promotion, you talk about it but it’s not really your business.
“I mean, at 51, I have a very nuanced view now of what success and failure is.
“I think everyone knows there are people who look like successes on the surface and deep down they’re deeply miserable and there’s people who look like they haven’t succeeded and they’re flying.
“When you meet them you go, ‘Oh my god, they’ve got it totally sorted out’.
“That’s a difficult thing to see when you’re 20 but when you’re my age, you see it.”
Interviewing musicians I’m always interested in how some know what they had the minute they wrote their biggest hit and others didn’t at all..
“Blur’s biggest song by far is Song 2 and that was written as a joke.
“They were taking the piss out of grunge and when they showed it to the record company people they said, as a joke, ‘We’re thinking of this as the single’.
“And the record company people went, ‘Yeah’.
“And they went, ‘What?’
“So they didn’t have a clue that that was as powerful a song.
“There’s so many stories like that.
“One of my favourite songs is Wichita Lineman, the Jimmy Webb song that Glen Campbell did.
“He (Jimmy) sent that in unfinished.
“He sent it to his publisher and said, ‘Yeah, I think there’s something here. Let me know and I’ll finish it’.
“And he rang them a few weeks later, ‘I guess you didn’t like that song…’
“They said, ‘Oh no, Glen Campbell recorded it last weekend’.
“And he went, ‘What? It’s not finished’.
“They went, ‘Well it’s done now’.
“I love those stories because I think nobody knows anything about what makes a success, makes a failure.
“Sometimes you know and sometimes you don’t.”
You were in London for a special Bloomsday event and Ulysses has an episodic quality that also applies to Experts in a Dying Field..
“Yeah, totally.
“Actually I reread Ulysses before that event and I had totally forgotten that he puts musical staves in Ulysses at different points.
“There’s a point where he talks about a song and then he puts the musical notation and in my book there’s musical notation which was, I guess, influenced by Ulysses but I had totally forgotten.
“I came away going, ‘Jesus, it’s better than I remembered’.
“I knew it was good because it’s James Joyce but I’d read it when I was in my 20s and I don’t think I quite grasped how good it was but there’s so much in Ulysses that it’s influenced everyone.
“There’s stuff that I thought I’d invented that he was doing 100 years ago.
“And Ulysses is a very funny book, as I kept saying because people forget that.”
I couldn’t help but think of The Commitments reading the book as well..
“And obviously Roddy Doyle was a huge influence as well.
“There’s a few great band books.
“There is something about music as a form because it’s really hard to write about music.
“There’s something weird and magical about it as a phenomenon so there is a real resonance when you write about a band, you write about people making music because I guess it’s the closest we get to magic in real life: When somebody comes up with an amazing melody or you sit there listening in a small hall to somebody play something absolutely beautiful.
“Music just does something that other art forms can’t.
“There is just something in music which is why I think Roddy did The Commitments.
“I think a lot of writers would say they’re frustrated musicians,
“I’m friendly with John Carney, the filmmaker.
“He used to be in The Frames with Glen Hansard.
“All of his films are music but a lot of what he’s exploring is the fact that I think deep down he wishes his film talent was musical talent.
“He’s an amazing filmmaker and writer but a lot of it is just him working through the fact that he can never be Glen.
“They’re looking at really skilled musicians and going, ‘That’s magic, that’s a magical talent, that’s not earthly power’.
“One of the things I wanted to keep vague in the book is whether The Heathens are brilliant or sh*t, I wanted to keep it vague.
“When you’re in a band, no matter how good or bad the band is, there’s moments when you feel like you could be brilliant and there’s moments when you feel like you’re crap and every band, I think, has that.
“I wanted to have that feeling with The Heathens in the book: That maybe they’re brilliant, maybe they’re good and so part of the thing is I want different people to cover them because I don’t want people to really know what The Heathens sound like.
“It’s also why I find it easier to write Rex Casey songs, because I want The Heathens to be a bit mysterious.
“I want people to read the book and maybe have a sense in their head what they’re like, which would be maybe destroyed if I released a bunch of Heathens songs.
“If anyone reading wants to read it and then write Heathens songs and stick them up on Spotify, I’d love to hear them.”
I hope it won’t take you another 51 years to follow up your debut book. Are you already working on a second novel even if it’s at an early stage?
“I want to write about some of the characters in the book again because there’s an ensemble cast so I’m thinking of taking a couple of those and making them the centre of the next book which won’t be a book about a band but will include characters from this book.
“I like people who do these kind of interconnected universes and I did really enjoy writing this and want to write more.
“I do highly recommend people become a debut something in their 50s.
“It’s fun to do something absolutely new.
“I do want my 50s to be as interesting and creative as my 20s were, maybe with less anxiety and less alcohol but otherwise creatively rich.”
Experts in a Dying Field by Patrick Freyne is out now on Sandycove.
