INTERVIEW:Setanta Records boss Keith Cullen's new career as a novelist isn't that much of a departure from his rock'n'roll day job, he tells BRIAN BOYD.
‘MOST PEOPLE WHO run indie labels are outsiders, they’re weirdos – and they tend to take a quirky view of everything,” says Dublin novelist Keith Cullen. He should know. In the 1990s, Cullen ran the Irish but London-based independent music label Setanta Records from a squat in South London – “I was running my empire on £65 a week” – and unearthed some amazing musical talent in the shape of Divine Comedy, Richard Hawley (who went on to win the prestigious Mercury Music Prize), Edwyn Collins, A House and The Frank and Walters.
Bloody-minded, with no real business sense but with a maverick spirit that informed most everything he did, Cullen was, peculiarly, in it for the music. Whatever money he made was ploughed straight back into more bands and more records. “I never had any ambitions beyond releasing records and endorsing other people’s art forms,” he says.
Heading towards his 40s, though, Cullen saw how the music industry was changing. The bands he was interested in took years of development and a few albums before they made any sort of breakthrough (if at all), but in this new, instant Pop-Idolworld, where the music had slipped into second place behind presentation and PR, he found himself more and more quietly disillusioned – "the enthusiasm was slipping".
A friend suggested a writing course. He didn’t know what he was going to write about but he did know it would involve dysfunction, lost opportunities, violence and sad, pathetic characters.
The book he wrote, God Save The Village Green, a smack-in-the-face kitchen-sink drama about lives ruptured and brutalised, has a bleak brilliance about it. It details the experiences of a London-Irish family in a working-class area of London over a 20-year period. It's the sort of scenario that Ken Loach would turn down as being "too pessimistic". The central character, Phyllis, has just left the rural Ireland of the 1960s and falls in love with Londoner Bill. Their romance is played out to the soundtrack of Kinks records (hence the book's title). The marriage doesn't work, but that is the least of Phyllis's worries.
“I wanted to write it coming from the female psyche, but I didn’t want Phyllis to be a heroine,” says Cullen. “I wanted her to be sad and pathetic. She’s a victim because she allows herself to be a victim and her life disintegrates around her.”
A very dark secret is hinted at early on and played out to its horrifying conclusion. Cullen doesn’t want to give too much away, but his research did bring him into a special wing of Wandsworth Prison.
The book is set in Barking, East London, and to fully immerse himself, Cullen checked into a BB in the area. “It’s a run-down area; there are only two bed and breakfasts around,” he says. “I wandered around the area and talked to people. For the period detail, I came across these two books – compendiums of life in the 1960s and 1970s – and they helped me with the fashions and the brand names of the time.”
Typical of the indie spirit Cullen displayed in his music enterprises, the book is self-published. “I did ship it around agents and publishers because I wanted someone to say to me, ‘well done, it’s great’, the way I used to say to bands I signed to my label,” he says. “But I knew it was a very grim and gritty book, not mainstream at all.”
Many music-scene colleagues who are admirers of the book have expressed surprise that it is a “real” novel and not some sort of semi-biographical account of his life in the music industry. “I might write about Setanta Records in the future, but that would be a very different type of book,” he says.
He’s glad of the change in career, he says. Instead of having a house full of music magazines he now just skims through them in the supermarket. But he still listens to upwards of 10 hours of music a day and writes with his iPod on. Even as we speak, he’s raving about two new music acts he has come across. Setanta is still up and running but for the moment there’s the second book to be getting on with and also a stage play inspired by the music of The Pogues.
“It’s all just a weird coincidence – I got a friend on to the guest list for a Pogues show last December. He sent me a text to say thanks but for some reason I didn’t get the text until a few months later. At the exact moment I got the missing text, a bus went past with an ad for the stage musical about Queen . . . The play is about two people who had to leave Ireland in the 1980s because there was no work. And now they are bitter about the Celtic Tiger economy – the play is set a few years ago. At the moment, I’m looking for a backer.”
Being self-published is no big deal for Cullen – he’s familiar with the territory after running Setanta Records. There’s one problem though. “I’m really bad at selling myself. I can sell artists, no problem. I can big other people up but not myself. I think it’s an Irish thing,” he says.
And with that he goes off to ring up a bookshop in Clonakilty to see how many copies of his book they will take.
‘God Save The Village Green’ is available on www.setantarecords.com