In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Christopher J. Yates’s novel The Rabbit Club is a smart and compelling psychological thriller.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Yates’ winking yarn is both homage and parody of the dark academia genre…Literary references abound, ranging from Shakespeare to Dickens to Nirvana and most notably the overarching motifs of Alice in Wonderland. Secret societies, mysterious documents, and cryptic backstories all add to the richly detailed university setting…Yates is clearly having fun, and readers will too.””
In his own words, here is Christopher J. Yates’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Rabbit Club:
Several years ago, I tried to write a novel about a fictional 1970s English punk band vulgarly named—Spunk. I abandoned the project around the 20,000-word mark because, if you’ll excuse the pun, I couldn’t get the story to sing.
But I remain beguiled by the important role that music can play in a novel, because it plays an important role in my life. Until my voice broke (shattered might be more accurate), I was a church chorister. As a student at Oxford University in the 1990s, I was an ardent mixtape-maker and remember spending a whole week on a creation named: The Best of the Sixties Minus the Beatles. Nowadays, it’s almost too easy to make a playlist and my music library is stuffed full of them.
Then, two years ago, I began work on my latest novel, The Rabbit Club. I knew the opening line right away. It hasn’t changed since I first tapped out the words on my laptop:
“The last time Ali would ever touch down in England it was implausibly sunny and Kurt Cobain had been dead for six months.”
This places us in October 1994. Nirvana’s lead singer is dead. Definitely Maybe has been out five weeks, and Oasis are about to face off with Blur in “The Battle of Britpop.” Meanwhile, Pulp had released His ‘n’ Hers, setting them on the path to megastardom that came with their next album, Different Class.
My character Ali hails from California and gains a place at Oxford University to study English. The fictional college he attends is called Cockbayne—which is pronounced Cobain, just like Kurt! Music swirls throughout the novel, on the radio in students’ rooms, from the speakers of the college bar, and through the walls of the student disco.
But music is important for another reason. Ali chooses Oxford is because he’s determined to reunite with his British rockstar father who abandoned him before the age of two. Ali finds himself in a peculiar position. Because while he’s seen a lot of his father, Gerry McCain of the Pale Fires, it’s only via music videos and chat shows. He’s heard all his dad’s music and even witnessed him—albeit distantly—on stage. But he hasn’t been in the same room as his father since the age of eighteen months.
It all means that The Rabbit Club is a playlist in its own right — paying tribute to the ’90s Britpop my young students listen to, as well as the ’70s rock produced by Gel McCain. This is for readers who may want a different kind of audio version of my book.
Smells Like Teen Spirit: Nirvana
The opening line of my novel features Kurt Cobain, so the opening track of my playlist has to be by Nirvana. Californian Ali has a buttoned-up, privileged English roommate, William Wynne-Goode, a former pupil at one of the fanciest schools in Britain. While Nirvana is playing in their shared living space, Ali finds his roommate grimacing in an armchair, leading to the following exchange, beginning with William:
“Goodness me. Someone in addition to myself appears to be in torrents of pain.”
“Well, the singer actually died this year.”
“Yes, I can hear him expiring right now.”
“Kurt Cobain.”
“Never heard of the chap… Did he happen to foresee his own demise?”
“You could say that.” Ali scratched the side of his neck. “He killed himself with a shotgun.”
“How very drastic,” said William.
Let’s Spend the Night Together: The Rolling Stones
I’ve been asked who inspired my rockstar Gerry “Gel” McCain. He started out in my head as a cross between Mick Jagger and Ozzy Osbourne, with Robert Plant undertones, but soon took on a life of his own. Like Ozzy, Gel is a wild man, famous for setting off actual fireworks backstage while tripping on acid. On his first ever tour of the U.S. he meets Ali’s mother, a Texan cheerleader, and invites her backstage. It’s the oldest tale in the book: sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. What could better evoke a rockstar’s desperation for a sexual hookup than Jagger’s breathless, yearning, lascivious growls and wails on this Stones classic, which was banned by the BBC in 1967.
Supersonic: Oasis
Definitely Maybe, Oasis’s debut album, hit number one three weeks before the events at the beginning of The Rabbit Club. However, Ali’s upper-class roommate William hasn’t heard of them either, and again finds the music unbearably loud. This time around he has the following to say: “First Nirvana. And now Oasis. I suppose irony is much in vogue when it comes to naming rock and roll music bands these days.”
Zombie: The Cranberries
This track, another 1994 release, plays loudly on the jukebox in the college bar in a scene early in the novel. The UK’s lower drinking age makes for a different college experience than in America. Just like my own college bar (my final year at Oxford was 1993) the bar in my novel is full of political discussion, edgy banter, wry humor, dark jokes, conversations about Anglo-Saxon poetry, 19th century novels, flirtation, cigarette smoke, indie music… and gallons upon gallons of alcohol. I have a hunch that the world has moved on from this—and I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.
Violet: Hole
The lead singer of Hole was Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain’s wife, and the album on which this knockout track appears was released just one week after Cobain’s death. Not only was Courtney Love widowed in 1994, Hole’s bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died of a heroin overdose in June of the same year, two months after Cobain’s death. Just like Cobain (and Hendrix, Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Amy Winehouse…) she was 27 years old. The Rabbit Club is not without several deaths and near-deaths, so this track feels appropriate to a tale set in the year of its release.
Girls & Boys: Blur
Another track from 1994. I was 22 years old and living in London in 1994 and the UK felt like the center of the universe. This wasn’t just the narcissism of youth—the United Kingdom was in the early throes of an age labeled “Cool Britannia” when British music, fashion and culture were riding high and there was a sense of confidence that hadn’t been felt in the country since the Swinging London era of the mid-to-late Sixties.
I remember this track as the song of the summer, its distinctive opening synthesizer riff prompting everyone to put down their drinks and jump onto the dance floor.
It’s a song about casual sex on vacation and a satire of Nineties British youth culture—which no doubt led to thousands of soulless sexual hookups after chance meetings of the dancefloor, while this very track was playing. How’s that for mid-Nineties British irony?
White Rabbit: Jefferson Airplane
I could have filled this track list with nothing but music from 1994 (Radiohead, Elastica, Green Day, Pulp, Manic Street Preachers, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Morrissey, R.E.M., Beck…) but let’s move on to something much older and appropriately hallucinogenic, a 1967 hit, written by Grace Slick and inspired by the tales of Lewis Carroll. As I mentioned, my novel is a retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ali is a stand-in for Alice—whose real-life inspiration, Alice Pleasance Liddell, was the daughter of the head of an Oxford college where Lewis Carroll taught mathematics. Once my character Ali has gone down his own rabbit hole, he too lands in a strange land he can’t understand. He meets a “duchess” and a whole party of hatters at the First Week ball of a secret society known as the Saracens. After dinner, these young men in top hats begin a series of toasts, all of them addressed to “White Rabbit.” Later in the novel we learn that White Rabbit is the leader of this dangerous secret society.
Dimples: John Lee Hooker
When Ali makes his way to Gel McCain’s mansion, peers over a wall and first spies the father he hasn’t met since he was a baby. He sees Gel trying and failing to hit a golf ball with a nine iron. The rockstar is also singing this track to his golf ball, because the average one has 336 dimples. Much like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Gerry McCain worships American blues artists and once got to share the stage with Hooker himself. “Me strumming along with John Lee Hooker,” Gel says. “Highlight of my fuhkin life, that was.”
Whole Lotta Love: Led Zeppelin
Let’s finish on a note of controversy. I mentioned that my fictional rockstar has Robert Plant undertones and this song encapsulates that sense. In The Rabbit Club, a song written by Gel McCain in 1976 plays an important role. We learn that the song, called Black Milk, is misunderstood by the world at large.
Now jump to Whole Lotta Love, a controversial track not least because of the lines: “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love” and “I wanna be your backdoor man.”
The first line doesn’t have to be vulgar—but what about the second one, which seems incredibly coarse at first sight? Ah, not so quick. “Back door man” is a phrase rooted in blues tradition, the title of a song written by Willie Dixon and recorded by Howlin’ Wolf. It refers to a man having an affair with a married woman and escaping through the back door before the husband returns home.
Gel McCain’s song, Black Milk, is reinterpreted for the reader by an oddball English professor. It has nothing to do with milk, it’s about liquor—Gerry’s dark nourishment, his painkiller and narcotic. It’s also a song of regret, the tale of a drunken father staring at his baby son, sometime around midnight, before abandoning him and his mother. That baby boy is Ali, the protagonist of my novel.
Frequently in life, and in fiction, things are not what they seem.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Christopher J. Yates’ Book Notes playlist for his novel Grist Mill Road
Christopher J. Yates’s Book Notes playlist for his novel Black Chalk
Christopher Yates is the author of Black Chalk and Grist Mill Road. Black Chalk was an Indie Next Pick that was also named a best book of the year by NPR, and a “must read” by the Boston Globe, BBC.com and the New York Post. He was born in London and studied law at Wadham College, Oxford, and lives in New York with his wife and his dog.