I have a new novel coming out in September. It's called Rough Music and I'm worried about its reception. Of course, this is a little previous. There might not be any reception. Still, how challenging – how dissonant – can you be these days? If it's not a risk, Annie Ernaux says, then it's not worth doing. But what constitutes a risk? I say this because the novel starts on VE Day. The narrator is what used to be called a roué. Or, more accurately, a would-be roué. He is unasha

Here's an adapted version of a piece that I wrote nearly three years ago: I was twenty-nine before I went to university. In my late teens and early twenties, I was in a band – I was fiercely in a band, the way that some people are helplessly tangled up in a relationship – and then, afterwards, I drifted into pub work. It was only when I found myself becalmed in a proof-reading office that I decided that it was time to go back and do what I should have done when I was younger.

As I've said before, my new novel, Rough Music, is coming out in September. Its launch will be in October, in The Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia. There'll be a string quartet then me; a soirée, but in a boozer. The Wheatsheaf is in the book. I like to think of the launch as being a scruffy version of one of those immersive things they do in galleries, like making you stand in the middle of Van Gogh's sunflowers. No matter how good it ends up being, though, it will almost certainly

This is the first line of John Fowles' Daniel Martin: "Whole sight, or all the rest is desolation." What does he mean? Well, in aesthetic terms, I think he means something like the painting above. Look at that face. Seriously: look at it. There are, as you can imagine, lots of opinions about Rembrandt's portraits. Some people – those with a more historiographical bent – think of them almost exclusively as being a response to the market's demands. Plain performance, in other w

I wrote the following eight years ago: "Nile Rodgers has a system that he calls 'DHM'. This, disappointingly, only means 'deep hidden meaning' but I like what it means in practice. Producers, he says, as well as performers and listeners, have to attend to what a song really is. What is it about? Are the band doing it justice? Does the melody do it justice? Would it sound better – brighter; funkier – if it was played higher up the neck? If you want to listen to something, in o

Today's contentious statement? That actors can ruin films; stars most of all. They're so very much there, aren't they? They're either barnstorming for your attention or they resemble a congealing lump. Warren Beatty's features, for example, are perfectly symmetrical and perfectly bland. In McCabe and Mrs Miller, he's meant to be a gunman: ornery and tough and weirdly innocent underneath. But all he is, really, is a pampered Californian. What he does is mumble, enunciate round

The good, the bland and the druggy? (That should really be "drugly" but it wouldn't make much sense.) Saul Bellow's Augie March says that he will "go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way". A lot of film criticism is really just a high-powered form of feature-spotting, it seems to me: this close-up; that long-shot; an Oscar here or there; the mention of a scriptwriter or a director or an actor and a very brief note about why you

I can't listen to Bruce Springsteen any more. His voice is on the wane. It's age, I know, and soon there'll be "the only end of age". It makes me sad. But it's here, I think, that one has to acknowledge a difference between your attitude to the performer and your feelings about his stuff. I like Bruce. If he ever wanted to pop over and discuss the finer points of Phil Spector or Gary U.S. Bonds I'd be delighted to make him a cup of tea. But I reserve the right to treat his ar