by Nick Webb
Incidentally, his next generation stereo went solid state. Douglas got irritated by the frequency with which he had to replace valves, and the nearly ubiquitous use of a digital sound source had come to favour amplifiers specifically designed to cope with it. The speakers changed to the large Nautilus design whose intriguing tapered rear-facing cones and snail-like Fibonacci coils mop up the reaction energy from the speakers so completely that the sound emerging from them suffers almost no interference, and is thus exceptionally unmuddied. The amplifier, CD player, turntable and radio were all housed in a large free-standing cabinet of considerable stylishness and incorporating every imaginable technical goody. The CD player looked as if it was carved out of a solid lump of slate and titanium.
But none of this kit could match the delight of live performance. Douglas wanted to hear live music in his own house and so set about getting to know some world-class musicians. One of them was Robbie McIntosh, known in the music world as the guitarists’ guitarist. His touch combines precision and passion. Here’s what Douglas said about him:
Robbie McIntosh is one of the world’s best guitar players, and also one of its most incompetent human beings, as anyone who has watched him trying to buy a shirt will tell you.
We first met years ago when he walked up to me in a bar and said that one of his best friends knew my grandmother very well. Good opening. It was Wix he was talking about, or Paul Wickens as I knew him when we had the same piano teacher at school. Robbie and Wix were both in Paul McCartney’s band at this time (no, not that one).
Before that, Robbie had been lead guitarist in The Pretenders, and has also played for Talk Talk, Tears for Fears, Paul Young and even Cher. When he’s not jetting round the world playing vast stadiums, he tends to sit at home in Dorset looking after his goats and chickens, and tinkering. Actually, let me correct that last sentence. When he’s not jetting round the world playing vast stadiums he tends to sit at home in Dorset being looked after by his goats and chickens, and tinkering.
I asked him what he’d been tinkering at, and he showed me. I should mention at this point that I am myself a passionate, though not very good, acoustic guitarist, so Robbie decided to play me some of the acoustic guitar pieces he’d been tinkering with down in Dorset. I was transfixed. It was some of the most mesmerizing music I’d heard in years. Most of the pieces were original, but some of them were arrangements of old folk tunes, Elvis Presley, Chopin, blues . . . What they all shared was an apparently simple melodic surface with a wonderfully rich internal life of harmony and counterpoint, which meant that each piece grew and grew in your mind with every listening. It’s technically complex, but there’s no showing off. All the technique is there just to serve the music. It’s not folk, it’s not jazz, it’s not pop, it’s not classical, it’s just pure, pure music. The real stuff. Complex. Simple. Breathtaking.
I played the tapes Robbie gave me incessantly, and it quickly became one of my favourite-ever albums. People would sit in my car and say “What is this?” Over a period of years I gradually coaxed and nudged Robbie into making an actual CD of it and letting my company, The Digital Village, release it. It took an astonishingly long time, but it is astonishingly good. The reasons for both of these things are contained in my opening paragraph.
There’s one more thing I should add. Robbie McIntosh is one of the nicest people in the world.* 127
Another famous rock musician that Douglas befriended was Procul Harum’s Gary Brooker, now a drily amusing silver-bearded chap in his fifties. Margo Buchanan, who knew him well, had arranged an introduction following a meal during which Douglas had banged on about how much he loved Gary’s music. Douglas had played Procul Harum’s Grand Hotel again and again while writing The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. This was a pattern with him: whenever he was chained to his keyboard with a book, Douglas would play certain pieces with demented repetitiveness, almost as if he were deliberately trying to induce some state of fugue or trance in which he would be exulted enough—or mad enough—to write without pain.
For those of you under a certain age, Procol Harum was a band famous for a song called A Whiter Shade of Pale which dominated the singles charts (a Deram label EP—remember those?) in the summer of 1967. It was music to get stoned to; it was slow enough to smooch to if you were lucky. It’s a great song, with strange, poetic, slightly anxiety-inducing lyrics by Keith Reid and a piercingly atmospheric, almost hymnal melody that Gary Brooker admits to having been inspired by Bach’s Air on a G-String. The song is so evocative, so arcane, so downright enigmatic, that there is a minor scholarship industry, active on the net, dedicated to working out what the hell it means. Procol Harum, though some of its personnel changed, went on to produce a lot of good music, but A Whiter Shade of Pale just caught a moment. (Once, indeed, it was used in a Dr. Who episode, but not one written by Douglas.) AWSoP, as it’s known to the buffs, is a classic that will always haunt them, and by and large there are worse things to be haunted by than a song.
From time to time Gary Brooker reformed the band, and he also had his own group, The Gary Brooker Ensemble, that played with many of the biggest names in the business (Stevie Winwood, Eric Clapton and so on). Rather than attempt to encapsulate his career, here are Douglas’s own words from a speech he made introducing the sell-out Procol Harum and London Symphony Orchestra concert that took place in the Barbican on 8 February 1996:
I have loved Gary Brooker and Procol Harum ever since nearly thirty years ago when they suddenly surprised the world by leaping absolutely out of nowhere with one of the biggest hit records ever done by anybody at all ever under any circumstances. They then surprised the world even more by suddenly turning out to be from Southend and not from Detroit as everybody thought.
They then surprised the world even more by their complete failure to bring out an album within four months of the single, on the grounds that they hadn’t written it yet. And then in a move of unparalleled marketing shrewdness and ingenuity they also actually left A Whiter Shade of Pale off the album. They never did anything straightforwardly at all as anyone who’s ever tried to follow the chords of A Rum Tale will know.
Now they had one very very particular effect on my life. It was a song they did, which I expect some of you here will know, called Grand Hotel. Whenever I’m writing I tend to have music on in the background, and on this particular occasion I had Grand Hotel on the record player. This song always used to interest me because while Keith Reid’s lyrics were all about this sort of beautiful hotel—the silver, the chandeliers, all those kind of things—suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral climax that came out of nowhere and didn’t seem to be about anything. I kept wondering what was this huge thing happening in the background? And I eventually thought, it sounds as if there ought to be some sort of floorshow going on. Something huge and extraordinary, like, well, like the end of the universe. And so that was where the idea for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from—from Grand Hotel . . .
Given a choice of venues, Margo says that musicians love small, intimate ones like pubs; you can see the whites of the audience’s eyes and get instant and gratifying feedback. There’s nothing like it. But pubs don’t pay anything, and hiring a van to move the equipment means that the musos are often out of pocket. It’s not worth the hassle. She was lamenting this one day in Douglas’s company, and he just went quieter and quieter while the cogs turned. “Well,” he said eventually, “I’ve got this great idea. You should come and play in my house. It’s a good room, and quite feasible . . .” And so began a legendary run of parties.
All through the nineties, until their departure to California, Douglas and Jane threw some wonderful parties in Duncan Terrace. Once or twice a year they’d organize the added draw of live music, and these were called Douglas and Jane’s Partially Unplugged evenings (a reference to Paul McCartney’s “Official Bootleg” Unplugged album).* 128
These evenings were magical. First there would be champag
ne—lots of it, gallons and gallons in fact. Jane Belson has a rule to serve only champagne or white wine. Though they wreak havoc with the higher cognitive functions, they do less mischief to the surroundings than red wine. A suave local caterer would provide delicious little nibbly things on sticks; this company made superior party food and seemed to have a policy of only employing sexy young things who looked good in black. Douglas and Jane were exceedingly generous hosts; that kind of entertaining is expensive.
The guests were the brightest and the best from the media and the law. The term “élite” is frowned upon these days. Some people find it to be triumphalist and implicitly snotty, but this useful little word undoubtedly describes the guests at the Partially Unplugged parties. You couldn’t move for actors, film people, writers, stand-up comedians, barristers, telly presenters, scientists, technology billionaires, even a publisher or two . . . You found yourself forever on the point of greeting someone as a long-lost old friend, one whose name had just slipped through a lacuna in your brain, until, waking up, you’d realize that the familiarity of the phizzog was not friendship blurred by time but the spurious intimacy of telly. Jonathan Porrit would be chatting to Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins to Clive Anderson, Clare Francis to Lenny Henry, Kathy Lette to Terry Gilliam, Melvyn Bragg with Ben Elton. Salman Rushdie was often there, radiating intelligence and looking very dapper for a man under siege from a fatwah. His Special Branch minder would blend in almost invisibly. There was the odd, very rare spliff, but dope was not a feature of Douglas’s parties. Douglas said that he’d tried it once and didn’t like it very much and Jane would not countenance the house being used for anything illegal. When the guests were truly warmed up, the lights would dim and the music would begin.
Of course, there were people present who would not have stopped flirting, or talking shop, even if Horowitz had been playing a duet with God himself. This was a crowd of people quite pleased to be in each other’s company. Fortunately the house was quite big enough for the party to continue on different floors with people drifting in and out as the mood took them.
For those who favoured the music the evenings were bliss. It was a privilege to hear musicians of the calibre of Robbie McIntosh, Wix, Margo, and Gary Brooker doing their stuff in a setting of such warmth and intimacy. Sometimes Michael Bywater would show off his virtuosity at musical parody on the big piano. Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd would occasionally join in, improvising with Robbie McIntosh with the ensemble precision of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on a good day. (Douglas knew Dave Gilmour through two connections: Nick Mason’s wife, an actress, who was working on a show produced by a friend of Douglas’s, and Dave’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, knew Jane.)
Hearing such musicians enjoying themselves in a friend’s front room was like being allowed to eavesdrop on something very special. The music was intimate and lyrical; the sort of music to liberate the imagination. The musicians performing in Duncan Terrace were not just a bunch of mates having fun; they were the rock aristocracy having fun. You had to pinch yourself sometimes to remember that these were the finest in the business. It was as incongruous as having some violinist bear down upon you in a Hungarian restaurant—and realizing it was Nigel Kennedy.
Dave Gilmour was famously able to return the favour. Douglas and Jane held a particularly extravagant party for Douglas’s forty-second birthday in March 1994. This had a special significance—though Douglas’s tongue was lodged firmly in his cheek on the issue—because of the cultish preoccupation with the number forty-two.
Dave Gilmour’s imaginative present to Douglas was in the form of a permit that, with suitable flourishes and calligraphy (is there a font called School Diploma?), empowered Douglas to appear in concert with the Floyd and play one guitar solo. As the Pink Floyd had a gig coming up in the giant Earl’s Court venue in the autumn, this was a gift of more than academic relevance. Douglas was thrilled beyond measure. When the time came (28 October 1994), Dave Gilmour invited him onto the stage to warm applause, and Douglas played a solo at Earl’s Court with Pink Floyd backing him artfully and atmospherically as only they can. By all accounts he had practised and practised this number until the household could scarcely bear to hear it again. On the day itself he did not participate in any of the high-spirited backstage messing about beforehand, but holed up rather anxiously in a corner, and practised again. He was good, and played the piece with great skill. He finished—not that anyone minded—just half a beat behind the band.
The following year Douglas gave an interview in which he reported that he’d heard that someone in the audience had asked: “Which one is Douglas Adams?” His companion had replied: “The old, fat, balding one.” And the first bloke said: “But which old, fat, balding one?”* 129
At this time the Floyd had just recorded what was to be The Division Bell, one of their most subtle albums; as yet, however, they had not decided what to call it. Dave Gilmour was agonising over this; nothing struck the musicians as quite right. Even when you are as big as Pink Floyd, so the name of the band rather than the album is the brand, you still want an engaging title.* 130 According to legend, Douglas told Dave Gilmour that he had the title, but that Dave had to write a cheque for £25,000 on the spot made out to the Save the Rhino Foundation before Douglas would tell him. After some muttering, Dave agreed. “The title’s right there in the lyrics,” said Douglas—hence The Division Bell.
Those musical evenings in Islington, surrounded by family, friends and celebrities, gave Douglas enormous joy. He’d sit close to the musicians with an ecstatic grin, moving only to fetch someone who he felt should share the pleasure. He always felt bereft if someone he loved was missing out on something wonderful. Sue Adams tells a story of staying in the house in Santa Barbara when Douglas and Jane had driven down to Los Angeles for a Paul McCartney and Dave Gilmour concert. In high excitement, Douglas phoned her from the auditorium. “Listen to this,” he said, holding his mobile phone above his head. “Just listen.” And Sue listened to a wall of sound relayed through the tiny microphone of a mobile.
Of course, it was gratifying to Douglas’s ego that he could persuade such artists to come to Islington. He would have to have been exceptionally free from vanity (he wasn’t) not to have felt at such times like a patron of the arts, the Cosimo di Medici of Islington. But anyone who saw him could not doubt that his was the joy of genuine musical appreciation.
He felt music deep in the heart of him, and his sensitivity to it was inextricably linked with his sensitivity to the cadences of language. Music was a passion that lasted all his life.
EIGHT
Whooshing By
“Farnham (n)
That feeling you get about four o’clock in the afternoon when you haven’t got enough done.”
The Deeper Meaning of Liff
“You write with ease to show your breeding, But easy writing’s vile hard reading.”
SHERIDAN,
Clio’s Protest
When The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy went straight in at number one in the charts (number one with a bullet, as they say in the music world) and stayed there, two things happened. First of all Douglas, laughing hugely at his own self-indulgence, went out and bought his short-lived Porsche 911. The second was that, unsurprisingly, Caroline Upcher and Sonny Mehta at Pan wanted a sequel, and soon agreed terms, for much, much more money, with Jill Foster and Douglas for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.* 131
Meanwhile the success of Hitchhiker’s had attracted the attention of publishers around the world. They all keep an eye on the charts and a lot of them in major markets, especially London and New York, employ scouts whose literary noses are trained to sniff out goodies for their clients. You can be sure that the phones were humming, and dear old postie was burdened with much excited correspondence. (The fax machine was not in general use in 1979 even though it is quite old-fashioned technology.) Germany,* 132 France, Italy, Scandinavia, Japan, Spain, Greece . . . all the major markets of the world
bought translation rights, followed smartly by the smaller ones. Estonia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia (as it was then), Hungary, Israel, Poland, Serbia . . . Pretty soon there was scarcely a country in the world with a local publishing industry in which Douglas didn’t appear.
A blessed by-product of all these deals was, of course, a trickle, then a stream of money. Yen, Deutschmarks, francs, drachma, zlotys and whatnot, all came sloshing through the system in Douglas’s direction—but quite slowly. (Actually the smaller markets usually have to buy in US dollars.) Those of you unfamiliar with publishing might imagine that if, say, a German publisher buys the rights to a work for 100,000 Euros, then the author fairly promptly receives 100,000 Euros, perhaps minus the agent’s fee of 10%. Not a bit of it. First of all the acquiring publisher will disburse the advance using a schedule of payment that usually divides the total into at least two stages (signature of the contract and publication). Then a sub-agent in the relevant territory will take a 10% commission for executing the deal and deploying his or her local knowledge. Sometimes tax-exemption procedures can be glacial without someone on the spot. Then the proprietor—in Douglas’s case it was Pan handling foreign rights sales—will take the agreed percentage from the sale of those rights (typically 25%). Only if the original advance has been earned out will the balance then be passed on to the author’s agent, and probably not until the next royalty accounting date of which there are two per annum. The agent will deduct the 10% or sometimes these days 15% for his or her services. Only after the money has been transmitted down this long chain (no single link of which is motivated to be very speedy) does the author receive a share. It can take many months.
You can see that Douglas would not have been overwhelmed by spondulix, and this is just as well as he would only have spent it instantly. However, he now had a significant income from foreign sales, and in March 1980 he would also have received his first, and rather awesome, royalty cheque from Pan.