There is a link, a creative axis between Australia and Berlin.
Many artists have shuffled along this passageway, with Ned Collette recently slipping between Melbourne and Europe. Now settled in the German capital, the artist has gradually turned his own expectations on their head.
Gravitating away from experimental music towards traditional songcraft, new album ‘2’ finds Ned Collette on daring form. Mixing some rather sedate moments with unexpected flourishes, the Australian is brimming with idiosyncrasies.
The latest artist to enter Their Library, Ned Collette recently opened up to ClashMusic about his literary influences.
– – –
What is your favourite book and why?
Oh you know that is almost impossible. Apart from Roberto Bolaño’s ‘2666’ – which is the book I’ve most recently added to my all time list – I guess the thing that always comes to mind is Beckett’s short story ‘First Love’: It’s painful, visceral, dirty, condescending and incredibly moving.
What other authors do you like?
I love Dickens almost above all (though maybe not Orwell). Milan Kundera, Bukowski, Susan Hancock, Agota Kristof. Bolaño, as mentioned, really is my favourite thing for the last couple of years. There’s a tribute to him on our album. Who wrote the Miles Davis autobiography? (Yes, I know how that sounds…) Charles Mingus wrote a great book called ‘Beneath The Underdog’. I love Morton Feldman’s critical writings, and Jonathan Franzen’s essays. I’ll leave out all the obvious giants in case I sound too old fashioned.
What draws you to certain books?
Family and friends’ recommendations mostly, or following lines of association or respect between authors, much the same as with music.
Have you ever discovered a real lost classic? What is it and why?
I suppose nothing’s ever lost to people who know about it, but new to me was Karel Capek’s novel ‘War With The Newts’. It’s amazingly silly but a prescient warning about the potential perils of all sorts of extremism – from Nazism to segregation to the worship of Hollywood celebrity. And published in 1936, as dystopian satire it’s impossible not to see it influencing Orwell.
Do your literary influences have a direct impact on your songwriting?
Oh yeah. I’m always writing down lines from books or poems I read in the same notebook in which I make my own notes for songs, so they become part of an overall personal text that everything springs from. Characters and ideas and themes all get mixed up, which I’m pretty sure is the way it’s supposed to work. The man in the “locket round her neck” in our song ‘Stampy’ is Robert Louis Stevenson, after a true story a friend told me.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’ve been reading Bolaño’s ‘The Savage Detctives’ for a while now. I’m quite an obsessive reader – ie. I tend to pore over things – but it hasn’t revealed itself to me as much as ‘2666’ did. It sort of seems like a simpler version of his perpetual idea. Also recently Agota Kristof’s Notebook Trilogy, Huxley’s ‘Grey Eminence’, ‘Pedro Páramo’ by Juan Rulfo and ‘The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao’ by Junot Díaz, which I thought was hilarious and good.
What is the first book you remember reading as a child?
Probably the Narnia books.
Did you make good use of your library card as a child / teenager?
Fairly good, though both my parents taught literature so I grew up in two houses full of books; there was no shortage of material there. Probably why my tastes lean so unfashionably towards the canonised.
Have you ever found a book that you simply couldn’t finish?
Plenty. And I stop reading before I start skipping.
Do you read book reviews?
Not really. Maybe if that section is sitting around and I’m waiting for fish and chips. The two rarely seem to coincide.
Would you ever re-read the same book?
I think every book I read is the same book. It’s all part of the same song. But yes, all the time, though why I’ve read Graham Greene’s ‘The End Of The Affair’ three times I’ve never quite worked out.
Have you ever identified with a character in a book? Which one and why?
A lot in ‘Kundera’, which may not be entirely healthy.
Do you read one book at a time or more than one?
Generally just one, because I am lazy and if my attention is grabbed by something else or something less challenging I will whip through that and never really get back into the rhythm of the other.
Is there an author / poet you would like to collaborate with?
I fear collaboration except with people I seem to have accidentally been collaborating with for a long time.
– – –
‘2’ is out now.
