GUEST POST When Syd Barrett met Nick Drake

Rob Chapman on the genesis of his novel about Syd Barrett and Nick Drake - and what happened next.

My self-published novel, Unsung Unsaid : Syd and Nick in Absentia, emerged from what was initially a whimsical tweet:

Greatest music bio-pic never made. Nick Drake and Syd Barrett sitting in a café in the summer of 1974 discussing their final ill-fated attempts to make a record.

I realised very quickly that this was in a fact a brilliant idea and that I should turn it into a novel. With the 50th anniversary of these events fast approaching I had no doubt that publishers would engage in bidding wars to sign my book, with film or TV rights inevitably to follow. I hastily deleted the tweet in case some other bugger nicked it and set about my task. 

It turned out to be the easiest, quickest and most enjoyable book I have ever written. Based on a lifetime of enjoying the slim body of work produced by these two men the thoughts flowed out of me. Unfortunately, publishers did not beat a path to my door. The film offers did not arrive. 

It turned out that no one was remotely interested in taking my great idea further and so the greatest bio-pic never made remains never made. Undeterred I decided to publish it myself, a decision that seems to have been vindicated as it has sold getting on for 600 copies now and received several glowing Amazon reviews. 

I can’t account for why everyone turned it down. Publishing is in a very parlous state of late. I think it is advantageous to already be a well-established writer if you want to secure a book contract these days, or famous perhaps in another field entirely, a TV chef perhaps, or a comedian or chat show host who was reasonably funny several years ago. 

Or perhaps it was that spectre of the dreaded bio-pic that put publishers off. Where I saw potential perhaps they only saw cliché and caricature. Certainly, that’s that most bio-pics are. As much as anything else I suspect I was damned by other people’s low expectations. 

Having previously written a well-received biography of Syd Barrett, I am on fairly good terms with the Barrett Estate. I did once tentatively sound them out as to the potential for a Syd bio-pic. Rather than offering me the outright dismissal I was expecting, they made it clear that they remain open to the idea of a good one. “But we get sent scripts all the time” they warned. “And they are uniformly awful.” 

This I can well believe. I’ve seen a few myself, have even been sent a few. They are full of laughably wooden characterisation and clunky dialogue. Syd becomes a mere cipher for his songs and subsequent mental collapse. 

“Oh, look Syd, a scarecrow” someone will say. “That gives me an idea for a song” Syd will say, and a song called Scarecrow will magically appear. In the next scene Syd will go walking past a house late at night and see a cross dresser stealing women’s clothes from a washing line. 

This is the kind of vacuous reader insulting stuff I resisted at every turn while writing Unsung Unsaid. Instead, I tried to get inside the heads of the central characters, and give a multi-faceted view of their lives (both fictional and actual) to do in fact what most conventional biographies can’t or won’t do, not just because of the constraints of the form but because of the limits of the writer’s imagination too.  

This I realise now was a huge mistake on my part. I think I did too good a job of writing plausible believable protagonists. I won’t make that mistake again. Next time I’m going to write a novel about Freddie Mercury. In one scene he will get the rest of the band to stamp out the rhythm of We Will Rock You, the moment it spontaneously occurs to him. They of course will comply with choreographed perfection. 

Oh, no wait, sorry. I keep forgetting. It’s already been done hasn’t it? Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.

• You can order Unsung Unsaid : Syd and Nick in Absentia from Amazon UK.

Rob Chapman is a writer - see his website for more on his books and music journalism.