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News: Five Questions With Louise Wener
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5 Questions With... Louise Wener
(Beatrice's brisk conversations with book people)
Posted by editor at May 7, 2005 01:04 AM
Louise Wener is known to many as the lead singer of the 90’s UK band Sleeper, but in recent years, she’s taken up a new career: author. "The biggest hurdle was admitting to myself that I wanted to do it," she says. "It's quite intimidating when you first think of it, but once I started it was so enjoyable, I couldn't stop." In her latest novel, Goodnight Steve McQueen, a young guitarist named Danny (but who was born Steve McQueen) is spurred on to musical success after his girlfriend gives him a deadline for success or she’ll leave him. What neither of them bargains for is that the long-struggling musician and his shambling bandmates will actually wind up hitting the big time. Wener emailed special Beatrice correspondent Rachel Kramer Bussel from her UK home to discuss writing in a male voice, band life and the status of women in rock.
GOODNIGHT STEVE MCQUEEN (UK) (Aug 2002)
How did you first get into writing? What are the differences for you in writing songs and writing longer material, whether articles or novels?
I'm not sure how I got into writing in the first place, it just feels like something I've always done, be it poems, lyrics, articles or just keeping a diary. Towards the end of the band I think I became frustrated with the constraints of the three-minute pop song. There are only so many lyrics you can cram in there. My songs were always character driven and the idea of expanding them into a novel seemed like a logical next step.Goodnight Steve McQueen took about six months to complete and The Perfect Play a little under a year. With GSM I had all the research in place and was able to draw on my experiences of playing and touring with a rock band. The gigs, the venues, the smell of the tour bus, the characters were all right there in my head. With The Perfect Play, I did a lot of additional research. It's set in the world of poker and gambling, so I had to learn how to play poker properly and spent a lot of time in casinos; losing money and learning from pro players, studying their mannerisms and behavior.
Goodnight Steve McQueen is told from Danny’s point of view. It also focuses on Danny and his friendship with his two male bandmates, so you have a lot of male banter and their viewpoints as well, all of which were done incredibly well, in a way that was authentic but alienating. It didn't feel like a guy's closed off club, but more like Danny was just an average, humble but ambitious guy struggling with his love of music and his love for his girlfriend. Was it challenging to write in a male voice and why’d you decide to structure it that way?
I think some women might find that male world unfamiliar, but I don't think it should feel alienating. I liked writing in a male voice, because it was a challenge and I didn't want the book to get too autobiographical. I also think there is a lot of crap written about the way men and women behave. How many magazine articles do you read where they say men are less emotional than women and that men's friendships aren't as deep as women's? I've spent so long on the road with groups of guys and I've not found that to be true. Men have different ways of expressing themselves, but they're just as vulnerable as women. I wanted to create male characters that were funny, neurotic, flawed and emotional, because that's the way I’ve experienced them.How much of your own musical experiences are in Danny’s? There’s a real kind of hope that he has about making it big. He’s not jaded but he also doesn’t necessarily know what he’s getting into, which winds up serving him pretty well because he has the guts to do things people with more experience might not do.
I think that's certainly true. You have a lot more courage at the beginning. I think Danny's experiences are reminiscent of mine at the beginning of my Sleeper days. At the start I didn't care what anyone thought. I didn't worry about the consequences of things, I just went out and did them and hoped for the best. That sort of wears off as you get more successful, and it's replaced with an increased sense of self-consciousness. I think that's why I chose to write about a band at the beginning of their career . . . it can be a blissful honeymoon period.Are you still playing music?
I play with friends, for the fun of it. I do some spontaneous gigs, here and there in London, but just for the joy of playing. Writing is far more integral to my life now. Some people in the UK still remember me for the band, but it's amazing to have people recognize me more as an author now.You wrote a recent article for the Guardian, in which you claimed, "The truth is, the world of indie rock was then, and still is, a doggedly macho environment, notoriously unforgiving of female interlopers," and went on to lament the absence of those such as Kim Deal and Courtney Love in the rock world. I'm curious about what you think can be done to bring the bad girls back into rock, as well as how this lack of female icons in modern music affected your decision to write from a male POV in Goodnight Steve McQueen.
I think it's always been hard for women to be respected as musicians, especially in the UK. They are frequently over sexualized and packaged, and often their talent is belittled. It's a very male dominated industry. There are few women in positions of power within the record companies and music publishing companies, and I think, to some extent, that female musicians are worn out by the battle of it over here. There are no female fronted rock bands in the UK any more. I wrote GSM from a male perspective, simply because I wanted to avoid writing my own story. It felt liberating to write as a male character, it meant I could let my imagination off the leash.
