FLA 2: Suzy Norman

Painting, photography, acting, poetry, novel writing and singing – Suzy Norman does the lot. We first encountered each other online nearly 15 years ago when both of us had other blogs (don’t look for them, they’re not there anymore), and whenever we meet or talk, we regularly find ourselves discussing music, writing and general creativity.

In April and May 2022, we had a couple of conversations, encompassing not just her First/Last/Anything selections, but also the sound of silence in the big city, the physicality of music, and getting into trouble in GCSE music class. Suzy has an excellent singing voice, and often cannot help bursting into a song at the mention of its title. Maybe this should have been a podcast after all.

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 SUZY NORMAN

I’m interested in how what you’re into develops. At any age. When I was younger, before the age of twelve – I was really into anyone female: Clare Grogan, Toyah, I loved Hazel O’Connor… And then I really, really liked boys, so… Duran Duran, Adam Ant, the handsome ones.. And then, I was just going all over the place, really. Tina Turner and Taylor Dayne, I really loved Cher – ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves’…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The belters.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Yeah. I liked a lot of joyful stuff. But in tandem, I loved REM and even started listening to things like Mudhoney. Mudhoney and Taylor Dayne!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

If you like leftfield stuff but you like chart stuff as well, you can never get bored. I’ve never understood why people take musical tribalism into adulthood… And I didn’t even really understand it at school. The peer pressure thing – never quite got it.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

My older brother’s always had quite a forceful personality, so he’s always influenced me more than my sister – but did he influence me, or is it just that I had to listen to a lot of his stuff? The Jam. Or Madness. The ‘boys’ stuff. Which I still don’t particularly like, to this day – but you just heard it a lot, didn’t you?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’ve come round to The Jam a bit more, I can separate it now, but the people who liked The Jam at school were the ones telling you they were always better than the pop music you were listening to.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Ye-e-es. I loved the Police, though.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I quite liked The Jam, but I liked lots of other groups too. And people were the same with The Smiths for a bit, weren’t they? ‘This is the only group that matters.’ One aim of this series is to remove the remnants of shame of music.

 FIRST: RACEY: ‘Some Girls’ (RAK Records, Single, 1979)

JUSTIN LEWIS

In terms of age, your first record purchase is going to be hard to beat for future guests. Short of them being a baby! You were, what… four?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

This is the weirdest thing. I have corroborated this with my mum and dad, that I couldn’t have been four, and yet I remember buying it, but then I think, do I misremember buying it? But I did buy it. That’s how early I was into music. At that age, you’re not influenced by anyone – it’s just the cheesy stuff that you like. Like Racey.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you went out and bought that yourself? Can you remember where you got it from?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Woolworths, Chepstow High Street. My dad took me. I had money left over from Christmas, I suppose.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Have you heard it recently?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Yes, I listened to it again last week. It’s alright! [Starts singing chorus] I mean it sounds dead old-fashioned, like the fifties.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you know who covered ‘Some Girls’ a couple of years later? Barry Manilow.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Good old Bazza.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Sounds like the same backing track!

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I was also three years old when ‘Mull of Kintyre’ came out, ‘77. And I adored it. My auntie bought it for me, actually, as a little single – I literally wore a hole in it. I remember getting the record, and being excited because it was my first record. My mum says that I was just obsessed with it. I used to be in love with Paul McCartney, when I was about seven, I had delusions I was going to marry him.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

This is the reason I’ve gone with first last anything rather than favourite record. The trouble with favourite record is it pressurises people to think what sums them up. But if you say, What’s your first record, people could fib about it, but on this, I’m not judging anyone’s choices, because it makes for a more interesting chat.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I’ve always liked a lot of old shit! [Laughs]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So have I. I think there’s a lot of truth in that Noel Coward quote, ‘the potency of cheap music’. The things that make memories flood back to you are often quite disposable. ‘Give It Up’ by KC and the Sunshine Band, there’s almost nothing to it, about twenty words in the whole song. But that’s the sound of a holiday I had when I was about thirteen. When you look back on days gone by, sometimes what you remember are records you hated at the time. That mindset of, I like this record, or, I hate this record, gets less simple as you get older.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I think holidays are important to the memory because they’re so visceral. The first time we went abroad, we went camping in the south of France in 1982. And that was when ‘Come on Eileen’ was around – so that song, for my entire family, represents France. Also, ‘Tainted Love’. And the Minipops, which was a single on the jukebox on the campsite.

LAST: KATE BUSH: Aerial (EMI Records, CD, 2005, remastered 2018)

Extract: ‘Aerial’

 

SUZY NORMAN

I just think she’s a genius! And the older I get, the more I think there’s no-one else like her, and there never will be. I love the fact she does kooky stuff. But I wasn’t really into her until I got married, I think Phil, my husband, probably got me into her. We had the Hounds of Love album, with ‘Cloudbusting’ on it, and I think we’ve got another earlier album – Lionheart. I really liked those two, and then it was announced that she had a new album out.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It was her first new one for twelve years. The structure of Aerial is quite similar to Hounds of Love – the 24-hour cycle. I thought of you, when I was preparing for this, because in terms of subject matter and vocabulary, Kate Bush takes all these little bits of inspiration from literature and art and history and music itself. On Aerial alone, there’s references to songs like ‘Little Brown Jug’, ‘Autumn Leaves’ – there’s even a bit of the title track where the laughter echoes ‘The Laughing Policeman’.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I love that laughter and I love the birdsong. And being a visual person, I love the videos, they date brilliantly. They’re fascinating to watch – she’s really interested in dance and choreography.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I get the impression she never wanted to be famous, she just wanted to get to a point where she had a studio to make new music. ‘I don’t have to tour, I can just put out a record whenever I’m ready to, and make sure it’s as good as I can possibly make it.’

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I think, on a personal level, she’s enigmatic, and I like that. I’m really intrigued by people who keep themselves to themselves – like Julie Christie does. I just love people where you don’t know what they do. Do they even do anything?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Supposedly the first disc of Aerial – we should say it’s a double album – is a collection of unrelated songs, but I’m not quite so sure. A lot of it is about family – there’s a song about her son, one about the passing of her mother – but then there’s a song all about the decimal placings of pi. Can you just sing numbers? Can you sing the phone book? And ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’ – a song literally about doing the laundry. Making art out of something apparently mundane.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Can you imagine trying to write a song about our mostly banal days? I can’t. I was listening to Aerial a lot when I was recovering from an operation – and I couldn’t really get out of bed, I was almost paralysed – but I was thinking of movement: acrobats and people dancing and twirling. And I just couldn’t wait to put my leggings on and stretch because I do dance around quite a lot at home, and it’s an important part of my yoga practice as well – I just wanted to stretch, and that album sounds like stretching.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You don’t often hear Kate Bush’s music discussed that much in relation to the physicality of the music. But there’s a lot of rhythm in what she does, always.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I love her song ‘The Dreaming’, the one with the dijeridu on it. I wanted to call my second novel The Ground is Full of Holes ‘The Dreaming’. I was set on that for a couple of years, in fact. So I must have been thinking about her when I was writing that, in a way. But I decided not to do that because it wasn’t original enough. But that was the working title of it for about four years.

 

My first novel, Duff, was initially called ‘The Edge of Rain’, and it was shortlisted for quite a major prize, the Dundee International Book Prize. Which was very encouraging to me. But I went back over it a year later, and I changed a lot of it, made it a lot more light-hearted. The essence was the same, but it turned into a little bit of a romcom, a slightly episodic novel where a man is trying to get his wife back, and to do so, he suggests a road trip from Wales up to Scotland. So that’s the premise.

 

The Ground is Full of Holes is also about a marriage breaking down, but it has a mature theme, I feel it goes deeper. I find first-person writing much easier, much freer – which is how I wrote Duff – but I wanted to challenge myself so this one was third person, omnipresent, or third person close [ie concentrating on one character, but written in third person].

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As we’re talking about music and sound, how do you approach those elements – and maybe even silence – in your writing?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I feel that my books are quite silent anyway. But I do put certain sound under a microscope. For example, there’s a scene in The Ground is Full of Holes when one of the key characters, who’s an anaesthetist, is sat in an adjoining room to the operating theatre and he’s listening to the sounds going on in there. I find that kind of thing really interesting, and I wanted to try and make that come alive on paper because it’s a nice contrast to his isolation. The cut and thrust of his responsibilities next door, which he’s actually ignoring at that point.

 

There’s some semi-autobiographical and musical references in that book, too. I chose The Sundays, ‘Here’s Where the Story Ends’, because it was very evocative of me being a teenager, and I was seeing this guy – and that was the song I remember playing on his radio in his room.

 

My books are very quiet, but I feel that’s intentionally so – because I live in quite a quiet world myself. I live in Central London, but I do my damnedest to make my life as simple and quiet as I possibly can.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What struck me, reading The Ground is Full of Holes, was the feeling of quiet in the big city. With a city like London, you think of bustle and traffic, and a lot of this felt like nocturnal silence.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I think that’s the kind of London I would like to live in. This is what I experienced in lockdown, a beautiful experience, you know. I wonder what it would be like for me to live somewhere quiet. I think I might find that very strange. I think I would rather create my own quiet in a noisy environment rather than the other way round.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s nice to be able to make that choice.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Yes. I feel I have control over how busy I want to be. If I want to step out of my flat into a busy street, then I can. I worry about that option not being available at all, and the feel of the city is very energising. And to take that away might feel a little glum – I’ve never done it as an adult, I’ve never lived outside of a city as an adult. So I feel that a lot of what I create is my own fantasy of silence.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The way that we use music now in the twenty-first century: if we want noise we can find it, but we don’t have to have it. That control of whether it’s on or off. Whereas, years and years ago, where music wasn’t a constant soundtrack – in fact, it was even quite hard to find sometimes. Sure, there was Radio 1 but that was all there was! And the idea of music or noise you wanted on tap. And now, it’s tempting to think, There’s too much noise – but you can choose now.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

You can turn it off.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Just to go full circle with titles: you mentioned you originally titled the novel ‘The Dreaming’, linking back to Kate Bush. But where is the actual title The Ground is Full of Holes from?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

It’s an Edna O’Brien quote. I say ‘quote’ – it’s in a novel of hers. Because Irish literature is my thing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Would your passion for Irish literature extend to Irish music?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Very much so, yeah. I’m not an expert on it at all. But I listen to it rather a lot.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Irish rock, Irish folk?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Oh, definitely not rock, although I love Van Morrison. Yeah, folky stuff. I don’t admit to it, because it’s a bit naff (Laughs) but I love it. The Dubliners, The Chieftains. It’s all fiddle-dee-dee.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you’ve been to Ireland a number of times?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Probably more than anywhere else.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Have you sat in pubs while this music was being performed live?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Yes, I have. In Dingle, and in Galway as well. I love the sound of the music. I love the drums. It’s a romantic thing. It’s an Ireland that doesn’t exist anymore, only exists in pubs. Even though I would never have experienced this Ireland even when it did exist, even if it existed ever. But that’s the power of music, isn’t it? You can imagine an Ireland that’s something else, I suppose. Rather than the reality. The history is another thing I’ve had to educate myself about, partly because we’re not taught about it in schools. It’s the whole picture. They’re highly intelligent, creative people. They have a lovely vocabulary, that we perhaps don’t have over here sometimes. And that might stem back to going to church… The Irish people I’ve met have quite a forcefulness to them, a confidence about the language they use, the diction they use, which is interesting to me.

 

ANYTHING: JESSYE NORMAN: Henry Purcell - Dido and Aeneas: ‘Dido’s Lament (When I Am Laid in Earth)’ (Philips, CD, 1986)

 
 

 JUSTIN LEWIS

It sounds like this was the moment for you when you properly connected with classical music.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I can’t believe how old it is, basically! [It was composed in the 1680s.] But it has this slightly modern tint to it – Sinead O’Connor could record it. And I guess the lyrics are very clear and very raw. And I just thought, What a wonderful thing to have at your funeral. I just love it. Salome Haller’s version, I heard first of all, and I’ve heard many versions since – but Jessye Norman’s is best, for me. She’s incredible. I heard her before I saw her, and I was actually surprised to discover that she was Black. I had no idea.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

She’s been quite a role model for many performers since, especially in the States.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I’d assumed it was mostly a white woman’s game.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think it’s changed quite a bit, especially recently. Why classical music is still here at all is due to people looking forward. One reason it stalled in the public consciousness was that, unlike popular music, which had this linear progression, the popular perception of classical music was: you get to the twentieth century, and… then what? Whereas it’s living and breathing. But you would have to be listening to a fair bit of Radio 3 and attending concerts to know how much is there. If you said to a lot of people, Name ten composers, they might name one or two after 1900. But generally, they’re going to go, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart etc…

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

When I was writing every day, I listened to a lot of Radio 3. I discovered how much I loved opera! But my introduction to classical music is very often through TV drama as well. There’s this brilliant piece of music from The Crown – it’s when Princess Margaret gets married. ‘Dies irae’ by Zbigniew Preisner. That blew me away too. Again, it’s very slow, and very sad. Debbie Wiseman’s Wolf Hall soundtrack… is beautiful, and I listen to that quite regularly. So not so much radio now, but a hell of a lot of TV drama. I’ll hear something, look it up, find out more about that composer or whatever. That tends to be how I do it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But that constant Radio 3 listening was from when you were writing pretty much every day.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And I think when you are doing anything like that, you’ve got a routine in place, you’ve got your writing head on. Radio 3 has this element of surprise about it, but not one that’s going to put you off your stride, when you’re working.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

It’s lovely, it’s like going into a library, and you don’t know what you’re going to get, but something will be on display in the main entrance… that’s what the radio is. You don’t really get that with Spotify because you have to select what you want to listen to. Unless you listen to a playlist, but in general I wouldn’t trust anyone else’s playlists! (Laughs)

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Just on that point of how much you like melancholy music… has that always been the way?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

It depends on the mood I’m in. The last ten years, I’ve probably listened to more upbeat music, quite a lot of pop music, things like Justin Bieber. But before then, it was sad stuff… sad Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Maybe I was a bit sadder then. But now, maybe life’s a bit more to be celebrated, though that said, I am listening to more sad music once again – but because I find it very relaxing and beautiful, for no other reason than that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Recently, I went to see a piano duet recital in Cardiff. They played Schubert’s Fantasie in F, devastating piece it was, almost the last thing he wrote, might have been the last thing he wrote actually. It’s got this finale of doom to it, but as with a lot of sad music, it is life affirming – ‘I am overjoyed to be here listening to this now’.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

It’s: We’re all mortal. And we’re here to reflect on the sadness of life. To be a complete human being – it’s not all fun fun fun.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wonder if that’s why classical music – particularly in the past – slightly failed with a lot of younger people because as you get older, you realise that a lot of this music is about being an adult. Which is not to say pop music can’t be about that.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

You have to have experienced loss, you have to have experienced disappointment. Nick Cave – he’s had a lot of tragedy the past ten years. But it’s still great music. I wouldn’t say it’s better for it. But it’s good enough.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, it’s what you can do with the material that life has given you. And if you’re a real artist, it’s about trying to reflect that as honestly and as imaginatively as possible.

 

 

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SUZY NORMAN

I grew up in south Wales, but for a while, I went to school in Princes Risborough [in Buckinghamshire] which is not far from London. So there were lots of wonderful experiences which I didn’t have in my Welsh school. Things like playing clarinet in the orchestra in the House of Lords, and seeing theatre in London... It wasn’t a great school but they did have a lot of extra-curricular stuff like that. And I really made the most of it, I think.

 

When I moved back to Wales, I dropped the clarinet… but I did choose GCSE Music – for only one year because I dropped out. It’s a shame that happened because I loved it, we studied The Beatles’ Help! as a form, we learned how to conduct a song, that’s when we learned about middle-eights, intros, all that. And I am a singer, so I was a confident singer.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you sing solo?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I did. I remember singing ‘That Ole Devil Called Love’ with the teacher on piano and me singing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’ve heard you sing that informally. But did you ever try songwriting?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

I did actually write some songs in my mid-twenties. I’ve always been creative in that sense. I’d just got back from Australia, where I’d spent a year, and I was staying with my parents while I was saving up enough money to not live with them anymore. So I had a lot of quiet evenings when I just did that. I wrote about four, on guitar, and recorded them on a tape player. But god knows where they’ve gone. I didn’t notate them.

 

But here’s why I dropped GCSE Music after a year. We had a homework task, which was to compose a song, and even though I could play about ten chords on the guitar – which as we know is enough to write millions of songs – could I be bothered? No, I couldn’t. So I took this filler track from a Rick Astley album – one where I thought, ‘Well, no-one’s going to give me an A+ for this.’ It was called ‘The Love Has Gone’. I thought it would go under the radar. I went in and I sang it acapella, and the music teacher took me into a side room. And she said, ‘Suzy I’ve got to tell you – I’m really impressed with this, in fact I think it’s the best one in the class.’ And then she pressed ‘play’ on her tape player… and it was Rick Astley.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That is brutal.

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

It’s malicious! (Laughs) It’s a really sadistic way of doing it. I was mortified. So I never finished the course. My parents never noticed. I don’t think they even knew I’d been doing Music GCSE! So I didn’t have to explain myself.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Parents weren’t involved with their kids that much in those days, were they. They didn’t know what we were doing. Can I put that Rick Astley song on your First Last Anything playlist?

 

 

SUZY NORMAN

Definitely! It’s the story of my life in a playlist…

 

 

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Suzy Norman’s two novels, Duff and The Ground is Full of Holes, are published by Patrician Press. You can find them both here: Suzy Norman books and biography | Waterstones

You can follow Suzy on Twitter at @suzynorman.

 

 

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FLA Playlist 2

Suzy Norman

 

 

 

Track 1

TAYLOR DAYNE

Tell It to My Heart

 

 

Track 2

CHER

Gypsies Tramps and Thieves

 

 

Track 3

RACEY

Some Girls

 

 

Track 4

KATE BUSH

Mrs Bartolozzi

 

 

Track 5

KATE BUSH

Aerial

 

 

Track 6

THE SUNDAYS

Here’s Where The Story Ends

 

 

Track 7

THE CHIEFTAINS & SINEAD O’CONNOR

The Foggy Dew

 

 

Track 8

HENRY PURCELL

Dido and Aeneas, Z 626: Act 3: ‘Thy hand, Belinda… When I Am Laid in Earth’

Jessye Norman, English Chamber Orchestra, Raymond Leppard

 

 

Track 9

ZBIGNIEW PREISNER

Dies irae

 

 

Track 10

DEBBIE WISEMAN

Monstrous Servant

 

 

Track 11

RICK ASTLEY

The Love Has Gone