Saint Leonard is far from a stranger to such happenings. Throughout his varied career as a singer-songwriter and performer, he has deliberately cultivated this blurring of the lines, both by creating live performances that are, as a norm, extremely attentive to the atmosphere and the energy they evoke, and by crafting records which feel, when listened to in their entirety, like intricate exercises in storytelling.
It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that he has now taken a further step with the release of a debut novel, ‘A Muse’, which further blurs those lines between art forms, drawing its reader into the vaguely hallucinatory, intense, at times darkly humorous and frequently disquieting events in the life of a main character who, himself a musician going by the stage name Saint Leonard, may or may not be truly one and the same with his author. Following this protagonist first through an unexpected European tour and then through an increasingly delirious American adventure prompted by a romance with a mysterious songstress, the book offers reflections on the nature of music-making while leading the reader into an increasingly occult landscape, blurring the lines between the real, the imagine, and whatever lies behind the veil. The novel, also a reflection of Leonard’s long-standing interest for all things occult, becomes an exploration of the collision between music and word, of the place where the weaving of a tale and the composing of a song blend together. As fascinating as it is unnerving, it is also an exploration of the magic of music and the strange and dangerous places it might lead its practitioners.
“The blending of the real and the fiction is incredibly convoluted in places,” Leonard admits, as we try to disentangle some of the many threads running through his work. “I’m just beginning to realise how insanely complicated it’s become. It’s like, almost, an alternate reality in there. And some of the strangest things are the ones that actually happened. People will say, oh, I don’t know why you did that sort of strange allegorical bit there, and I will say, no, no, that actually happened. Obviously we all know the phrase, the truth is stranger than fiction, but it was quite amusing when I was having to change reality for the sake of the novel, and then I realised, well, this is already weird and strange enough to begin with. How do I make it even stranger?”.
Part of it, at least in the first third of the story, which starts out as an insider’s look at the erratic life of the touring musician before delving into something much darker and much more complex, is a strikingly effective representation of the descent into madness that is going on tour. “Times have changed now, but earlier in my career, before the rise of the self surveillance that is social media, things could get pretty intense,” Leonard reminisces with a wry smile. “When you’re young especially, and you start touring, you’re very enthusiastic about touring, very committed to giving the fans the best experience even after the gig is over. There’s always a drink to be had, a best bar in town you must be shown, and then for the audience that’s their one big night out that month, but for you it’s on to the next one, travelling to another place you don’t know, over and over again”. Even without the sinister occult undertones that colour the tour in the book, some experiences in his career have happened at the same breakneck speed: “At the very beginnings, I was playing in the Boogaloo in London once, and Carl Barât from The Libertines was in the audience, and he said, would you like to come on tour and open for us? And of course I said yes. Then he’s like, well, meet us here tomorrow morning, the bus will be ready to go. That was quite the experience, playing this acoustic set before The Libertines at practically no notice”.
How does the experience of writing and sharing music, then, compare with that of writing a book? While both are of course, in their own way, forms of storytelling, Leonard finds them vastly different: “Entertaining people with literature is actually incredibly hard work, and isolating, and tiring, and in some ways I wouldn’t wish the process on my worst enemy. It’s the loneliness of the long distance runner. With my music, on the other hand, I never take it that seriously, I never have. Obviously I care immensely about it, and I respect the people I work with, but I go to the studio, put a smile on my face, and try and tell the truth through my music, but if it even begins to feel like really hard work, I do something else for a bit”. Where songwriting and recording felt liberating, writing felt confronting: “Music is like the ephemera of my life, where I’ve done all the working through, and all the turmoil, and tears have been shed in real life, well before I get to actually recording the music. The book was a process of having to confront myself every time in front of the page, going back over difficult emotions, or difficult ways I behaved, or things in my life”.
That is not to underplay the magic and the power inherently present in creating and performing music, which is actually one of the threads holding together both the story of the book and Leonard’s work on his records. There is a passage in which one of the core characters in the novel points out that music is the first ancestral human language, well before words. “It’s still very close to the first origins of what we would conceive of as culture. People sitting as hunter-gatherers around a fire, then somebody started using language to recount and idealise events, and then before you know it you’ve got people dancing, clapping, banging a drum, maybe masks or face paints being worn, flashing, flickering in the firelight… it is almost precisely the same as going to a rock’n’roll concert. The first time you go to a gig, you realise you are partaking in a ceremony that has existed since the birth of what we would call humanity”. He finds it daunting, he admits - scary almost - how far back that feeling reaches. “They’ve found flutes that are forty thousand years old, and the thought will blow your mind, but one of those flutes they found in the Castillo Cave in Spain, if you pick it up, you could hand it to a flautist and they could play ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘Blowing In The Wind’ on that. It has the same intervals. That is such a long period. We think of 200 years ago as being such a long time culturally, we think of William Blake or William Shakespeare as distant ancestors, and they were five hundred years ago at most. Here we have forty thousand years of culture, we have no record and no understanding of what they were. But we know they were making music”.
There is a feeling, both reading the book and listening to the records, that narrative and music come from the same, visceral place: almost under dictation. Songs coming fully formed seemingly out of nowhere are both plot point and at least partial reality. “I wrote my first two albums during the time that the book is set,” Leonard points out. “I’d just sit in a room and wait to feel something, and then it would just feel like it was pouring out of me. One song, ‘Vampire’, I wrote in a dream. I dreamt I was writing that song and singing it, exactly as it sounds, the whole thing. I literally leapt out of bed, scared the life out of my girlfriend at the time, grabbed my guitar, ran into the bathroom and hit record on my tape machine. Whenever I play that song I feel like I’m stepping back into that dream”.
A good number of songs make an appearance, almost Easter egg-like, somewhere between the lines of the novel; one in particular, ‘Always Night’, one of the most haunting tracks out of ‘The Golden Hour’, feels like a key to the final chapters, which are likewise hazy, haunting, and dark. “It is one of the early songs we recorded in Berlin. I was working with Nathan Saoudi and Alex White from the Fat White Family, and I didn’t really have any of those songs, they had not really been conceived before I walked up to the mic and started singing, they are all ad-libbed. They ended up channelling all these things that had happened in my life, and the atmosphere and the state of mind I was in there in Berlin. It did feel with the life we were leading like it was always night - which is thrilling, but also very bad for you”.
Is music, and perhaps also storytelling, bad for you? “It is a dangerous thing, and it can certainly be weaponised. But it can also bring all the joy and the pleasure and the beauty in the world. It’s like splitting the atom, you can power the whole world for free or you can annihilate it. It is the same with music. And anyone who makes music knows that”.
Chiara Strazzulla
Image: ‘The Golden Hour’ Official Album Cover