There are worse reasons to read a book.

A few weeks ago Fish, original lead singer of Marillion and solo artist in his own right, put up a link to a news story from the 1990s. It was part of a regular series (apparently) about how famous people met each other. In this case, the other famous person was author Iain Banks. As a fan of both guys I naturally went to read the article. Imagine my surprise when someone else I love popped up:

Back in 1990, I was walking away from my lawyer’s office in London, disconsolate over the way my foolish litigation against my record company was going. I was drowning my sorrows with the novelist Neil Gaiman, and he asked if I’d ever read Espedair Street, the Iain Banks novel about Weird, a very tall Scottish rock star. I hadn’t, and Neil said: ‘‘You’ve got to read it – the hero of that book is you!’

Naturally I had to read the book, so I downloaded Espedair Street from Audible (not all of Banks’ stuff is available there, sadly) and dove in. It probably never had a chance of living up to the expectations that arose from this particular singularity of my geekdom.

The book is the story of Danny Weir, aka “Weird, bass player and songwriter for a band called Frozen Gold that broke big in the mid 1970s. Weird tells the story in flashback from his life in the 1980s living as a recluse in an old church filled with stockpiled goods from the Eastern Bloc (they don’t really trade in currency, he explains at one point). He has adventures in the modern worlds as he relates the band’s rise and fall.

Since Banks is a great writer the book is a good read just on the basic level of words – there are wonderful words on display here. And Weird is, for the most part, a pretty good guy to hang around with, moderately clever but never taking himself (or his success) so seriously that it goes to his head. Having said that, his story itself is kind of dull. It’s basically a series of anecdotes that could be pulled from any rockumentary kind of thing from that era. Weird comes off as the kind of guy who would be a frequent guest on talk shows because he’s always likely to whip out some tale from the past that’s outrageous enough to laugh at but not horrible. They are, at the least, entertaining.

The problem is that, eventually, things turn serious and the narrative can’t really support it. The band breaks up after one lead singer dies in a stage accident you could see happening to Spinal Tap (or in South Park), while the other is murdered by a Christian zealot during the “modern day” narrative. Weird blames himself for both, even though they weren’t his fault, so he turns into even more of a sulker, until he decides to pursue a long lost love (who, of course, welcomes him with open arms). It just all adds up to a nice read, but nothing more.

And, I have to say, the musical nature of things are more than a bit confused. Weird (and therefore Banks) occasionally drop the word “progressive” in talking about Frozen Gold’s music. There’s even a reference to the band releasing a double-LP all instrumental concept album – which is just about as prog as it gets! But the timeline doesn’t quite fit (the band is just getting signed about the time prog peaked commercially) and when contemporaries are name dropped it’s the standard classic rock fare – Zeppelin, the Stones – rather than, say Yes or King Crimson. Frankly, the idea that a new prog band hitting it big in the late 1970s is as out there as anything that appears in Banks’ Culture novels.

Was the combination of Banks and Fish, with the assist from Gaiman, the brilliance I’d hoped for? No, but it was still a pretty good read. That’s all you should really expect, right?