We caught up with Ian Rankin at our launch event in The Caves.

Ian has a vague notion that Let’s Get Lyrical is all his fault! He wants to try and get especially teenagers interested in writing. “We’ve got problems, in Scotland especially, with teenagers not reading. They think they are for primary school, not secondary school.” The idea is to try and get 12-18 year olds into writing and talking about words. Song lyrics seem a great way to do this as we don’t always realise when we’re listening to music that we’re listening to words.

“I became a novelist by accident. I started life wanting to be a singer in a band – I just couldn’t find a band.”

He was also glad to be at the launch because of a set from King Creosote, one of his favourite singer-songwriters who happens to be from the same part of Fife as him. When he was growing up there wasn’t really a music scene in his part of Fife but now there is with lots of different voices – with their own record company and musical festivals.

Ian started life wanting to be a singer in a band. He used to write song lyrics when he was a wee kid and would listen to pop music on Top of the Pops. He made up a band in his head called the Amoebas where he would write all the lyrics and take them on tour! Those song lyrics became poems and then he started writing stories, entered a short story competition and, before he knew it, prose became a natural thing for him. “I became a novelist by accident. I started life wanting to be a singer in a band – I just couldn’t find a band.”

We also talked about Ian’s Get Lyrical choice, ‘The Falls’. He bought it in New Zealand and was struck by the great songwriting and lyrics. At the time he was writing a story about several small coffins that had been found on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and was impressed by a line that said there must always be a “story behind all that”. He realised this is what he was trying to do – to find the story behind this real thing that had happened, these small coffins. Seventeen had been found and there were various theories – and there must be a story behind this story. Because of this inspiration, he named his novel after the song.

Read on with Ian Rankin’s Get Lyrical story on ‘The Falls’ by the Mutton Birds.

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