Music has taken a bit of a backseat in my life of late. I’m still always keen to hear from music-obsessed mates about the latest, greatest band and the gigs they’re going to. But it seems to be something which I have, for the moment, literally relegated to the background.
That said, a track shared by a friend months ago (thanks, Hoppo!) recently wormed its way into my consciousness with its recitation of over seventy great writers and tongue-in-cheek comments about each. A perfect marriage of literature, music and wit.
Take it away, Mr Neil Hannon…
“this book deals with epiphenomenalism, which has to do with consciousness as a mere accessory of physiological processes whose presence or absence… makes no difference… whatever are you doing? “
Aphra Benn: Hello
Cervantes: Donkey
Daniel Defoe: To christen the day!
Samuel Richardson: Hello
Henry Fielding: Tittle-tattle tittle-tattle…
Lawrence Sterne: Hello
Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindicated!
Jane Austen: Here I am!
Sir Walter Scott: We’re all doomed!
Leo Tolstoy: Yes!
Honoré de Balzac: Oui
Edgar Allen Poe: Aaaarrrggghhhh!
Charlotte Brontë: Hello
Emily Brontë: Hello
Anne Brontë: Hellooo…?
Nikolai Gogol: Vas chi
Gustav Flaubert: Oui
William Makepeace Thackeray: call me ’William Makepeace Thackeray’
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The letter ’A’
Herman Melville: Ahoy there!
Charles Dickens: London is so beautiful at this time of year…
Anthony Trollope: Good-good-good-good evening!
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Here come the sleepers…
Mark Twain: But I can’t even spell ’Mississippi’!
George Eliot: George reads German
Emile Zola: J’accuse!
Henry James: Howdy Miss Wharton!
Thomas Hardy: Ooo-arrr!
Joseph Conrad: I’m a bloody boring writer…
Katherine Mansfield: [cough cough]
Edith Wharton: Well hello, Mr James!
DH Lawrence: Never heard of it
EM Forster: Never heard of it!
(Chorus) Happy the man, and happy he alone who in all honesty can call today his own;
He who has life and strength enough to say ’yesterday’s dead & gone – I
want to live today’
James Joyce: Hello there!
Virginia Woolf: I’m losing my mind!
Marcel Proust: Je m’en souviens plus
F Scott Fitzgerald: Baa bababa baa
Ernest Hemingway: I forgot the….
Hermann Hesse: Oh es ist alle so häßlich
Evelyn Waugh: Whoooaarr!
William Faulkner: Tu connait William Faulkner?
Anaïs Nin: The strand of pearls
Ford Maddox Ford: Any colour, as long as it’s black!
Jean-Paul Sartre: Let’s go to the dome, Simone!
Simone de Beauvoir: C’est exact present
Albert Camus: The beach… the beach
Franz Kafka: What do you want from me?!
Thomas Mann: M’am
Graham Greene: Call me ’pinky’, lovely
Jack Kerouac: Me car’s broken down…
William S Burroughs: Wowwww!
(Chorus)
Kingsley Amis: [cough]
Doris Lessing: I hate men!
Vladimir Nabokov: Hello, little girl…
William Golding: Achtung Busby!
JG Ballard: Instrument binnacle
Richard Brautigan: How are you doing?
Milan Kundera: I don’t do interviews
Ivy Compton Burnett: Hello
Paul Theroux: Have a nice day!
Gunter Grass: I’ve found snails!
Gore Vidal: Oh, it makes me mad!
John Updike: Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run…
Kazuro Ishiguro: Ah so, old chap!
Malcolm Bradbury: Stroke John Steinbeck, stroke JD Salinger
Iain Banks: Too orangey for crows!
AS Byatt: Nine tenths of the law, you know…
Martin Amis: [burp]
Brett Easton Ellis: Aaaaarrrggghhh!
Umberto Eco: I don’t understand this either…
Gabriel García Márquez: Mi casa es su casa
Roddy Doyle: Ha ha ha!
Salman Rushdie: Names will live forever…
- The Booklovers, Promenade by The Divine Comedy
For reference, the chorus is apparently taken from Horace’s Ode to Man (thanks, Wiki!).

Some of my 'to read' pile