The one who wrote Coraline, and co-wrote the book of Good Omens and made the TV show, also the Sandman comics writer and co-creator who made the Sandman TV show. Quite nice really.
The internet is a wonderful thing. Also soul sucking, evil and vapid to varying degrees, but mostly wonderful.
I am a musician. I say this as an admission of oversized ego and underdeveloped self confidence.
So it should come as no surprise that back in 2001, when my musical career was still in nappies (diapers for those of you across the pond), I was a furious self-googler. I was being written about in national glossy music press a fair bit, so there were always wide and varying ranges of forums discussing the relative merits or otherwise of an overly tall, not particularly attractive, grumpy looking 21 year old Oxford girl who fancied herself as a songwriter.
I liked this. I liked the conversation. I even liked the negativity. It was usually along the lines of ‘do we really need another female singer-songwriter wailing at us when we already have so many like Dido and.. errr.. Can’t think of any others.. but isn’t that enough?’ and this made me angry and angry made me write more.
So it came to pass that, late one night, I was googling and who’s name should come up next to mine but Neil Gaiman.
I knew his name well, I knew his books, I was a voracious Terry Pratchett reader as an early teen so Good Omens was on my shelf, I’d listened to my fair share of Tori Amos and researched who that mysterious ‘Neil’ was in her lyrics.
And that same Neil was writing in his online journal about liking my music.
This was a revelation. Because as much as I loved the music press, as flattered as I was by their attentions, this was a real, living, breathing, proper, legendary ARTIST!
So in an unexpected fit of self confidence, I wrote to him and said hello and thank-you. It seemed only polite. I did not expect him to write back.
He did.
We became email buddies and eventually, after a few years of email ping-pong, met up. I was struck by his stillness. Like a finely crafted watch, deliberate and smooth and precise but the magical mechanisms underneath that make it work, they were beyond me. Even now, when we speak, there is something otherworldly about Neil.
We have been friends for 14 years. In that time, he has been a constant sounding board for my work, a champion and an inspiration. We’ve had daft adventures avoiding unfriendly headline acts in dingy New York dressing rooms, driving the streets of Chicago in his Mini Cooper (no mean feat when his two passengers, my husband Nige and myself, are 6′3″ and 6′ respectively), spending time at BBC radio stations and eating expensive chips (fries people) in badly lit hotels.
So when I came to make this new record (New? Old?) an album looking back and forward, revisiting and re-working old songs with amazing guest musicians (Joan Baez, The Waterboys, Billy Bragg, Joan As Policewoman) and recording some brand new songs for good measure, I thought I’d like someone to write an introduction to it. Someone who knew my career from the beginning, or as near as damn it. Someone who could take a broad and far reaching overview. Someone who was truthful. Someone who ‘got it’. Someone who could write!
You can guess the rest.
The introduction Neil has written for ‘Ghosts & Graffiti’ is beautiful. He has captured the essence of what I always tried to stand for and I don’t mind telling you, even with my tired little skeptics heart, I shed a tear or two. He tells this story (any story) far better than I can, but then, you’d expect that from the king of the narrative page.
So thank you my friend for ‘getting it’ and for lending your unique, kind and open voice to it. I’ll treasure those lines always and I read them now and feel crazily happy that a part of my story was inhabited and told by Neil Gaiman. How many people get to say that?
