Spotify Sundays: Jon Courtenay Grimwood on Thrilling Cities
By Jon Courtenay Grimwood
September 2022
As hordes of Festival-attending visitors finally relinquish his adoptive city of Edinburgh, award-winning novelist Jon Courtenay Grimwood considers ten boltholes where he’s lived or spent time and the songs that echoed through whatever garret he was scratching out words in at the time. (With apologies to Singapore, Marrakesh, Venice and Mexico City who’d make the cut if he had to choose any other day.)
PARIS
The Rolling Stones - Street Fighting Man
Boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers. Nights in the bois de boulougne in my mid teens, nights sleeping under bridges a few years later. It’s a city I visited as a child, have endlessly gone back to, and lived on and off for a while in a ramshackle studio in the attics of Cardinal Richelieu’s old palace, doing the publicity for the French edition of The Last Banquet, writing Moskva, the first Tom Fox novel, and working on fable about a war between cats and crows.
The city looks the same and feels different; and looks different and feels the same. Decades of memory overlaying each other until I struggle to keep them separate. I’d live there if my partner’s memory of Paris wasn’t darker and different.
The island I lived on was fifteen kilometres outside Oslo, reachable by a bridge, with an island beyond reachable by a chain link ferry. The island hut I retreated to at weekends was well beyond that, and reachable by a speedboat with all the structural integrity of a kicked yoghurt pot. I worked kitchens and a warehouse, walked the streets, water skied and snow skied, went to gigs I couldn’t afford; desperate to paint like Edvard Munch, write like Knut Hamsun and have a love life as fucked up as Strindberg’s. I applied to do fine art at Oslo university. Sensibly they turned me down, saying they‘d rather take a refugee. Hard to argue with, really.
BERLIN
David Bowie - Heroes
A friend lived here in the days of the Wall, when the city was still divided, you couldn’t get into Cafe Adler without a trench coat and a secret handshake, and check point Charlie was still functioning. Decades later, when I spent time researching Nightfall Berlin, the ghost of the wall was ever present, and you could still see the divide between East and West in the shops, the quality of the buildings, the dress of the Berliners. My hotel was a Soviet era relic, but all around it the classically East German plattenbauten, concrete clad blocks were empty, fenced off and coming down. It was psychogeography heaven.
VALLETTA
Jozef Van Wissem & SQÜRL - Only Lovers Left Alive
A couple of years ago I found myself back in Malta for a literary festival and discovered I could still navigate its capital from memory. Although born early following a skiing accident, in a small house on Valletta’s walls, and looked after by nuns as I was expected to die, the house I remember is a stucco 19th century villa on St. Paul’s bay, long since replaced by a hotel. (Finding myself shipped to a grim and grey English prep a few months later was not a great introduction to being six.)
I stopped off at a cafe during the festival to order Bragioli/Maltese Beef Olives (contains no olives), stayed for another beer and ended up writing a poem. Somehow that sparked both a childhood memoir, and my decision to research at St Andrews for a PhD.
TOKYO
The Enemy - You’re Not Alone
About fifteen or twenty years ago, I made so many trips to Tokyo in such a short time that Japanese immigration officers decided I must be living there illegally. I wasn’t, I‘d simply worked out that if I booked hotels nearly a year ahead I could get a suite for the same price as a single room booked the month before flying. Plus, I liked the city, felt weirdly at home and had End of the World Blues to write. Quite why a song about Peugeot's Coventry factory closing down with a massive loss of jobs soundtracked walking through Akasaka I don’t know, but it did and it still makes me think of Tokyo.
There’s a brutality to the speed with which city turns into countryside once you’re outside Seoul’s sprawl. And Seoul itself is a dozen cities where money, organised crime, slums and US military bases overlap. A place where people do handbrake turns on eight lane duel carriage ways because there’s no central barrier, and cars are left outside shops with keys in the slot and engines running because being caught by the police if you steal it is the least of your worries. I made multiple trips over eight years and barely scratched the surface. This track was blaring out as the person driving me ran speed cameras, safe in the knowledge the fine was roughly the price of a London beer.
NEW YORK
R.E.M. - Everybody Hurts
Michael Stipe arguing a friend out of suicide, in a melodic track with lyrics that were comprehensible? It was barely recognisable as R.E.M. It does, however, bring back 1993, the year I got married in New York, when the Algonquin still had its faded grandeur, CBGBs still existed, and Meat Packing had biker bars and was authentically grimy.
(As for the marriage itself… Queue here. Take a red Formica chair. What name would you like on the marriage licence? Best $25 I ever spent.)
LONDON
Pulp - Common People
A friend sent me a bootleg tape of this and I had it word perfect within days. So did everyone else at the frankly mesmerising Pulp gig I went to a year or so later. From sleeping on a mattress in an empty flat in South London (reasons) to chichi North London, via a decidedly not chichi flat bordering Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, the early 90s were interesting times, in the Chinese sense. In my head, this was their sound track and is my personal choice for the new national anthem.
REYKJAVIK
EMA - 3Jane
Site of the world’s best crime fiction festival (well, certainly the coolest). I’ll be back this autumn, to the kind of place where the country’s PM takes time out to chair an event and the street art is higher end than the average offering at the RA Summer Exhibition. They probably wouldn’t take it as a compliment if I said Reykjavik reminded me of Oslo in the 1970s. As for the track, it’s a riff on 3Jane, the cloned heiress to the Tessier-Ashpool fortune, from Bill Gibson’s MonaLisa Overdrive, the best of his Sprawl novels and possibly the weirdest. (All opinions personal. You might have others.)
EDINBURGH
10,000 Maniacs - Verdi Cries
After a publishing party at the Royal College of Physicians in Queen Street, I spent the night on a park bench with the girl who was understudying the lead in a suitably grim, suitably traumatic play about misogyny, fascism and torture in Latin America. It was the Edinburgh Fringe, the end of the 80s. What did you expect? Having married in the early 90s, we went back to Edinburgh a few years ago to live, as we’d said then we would. I hadn’t expected it to take us that long!
