Today is World Book Day, which encourages children of all ages to celebrate the power of reading and explore the pleasures of books. Here are some songs that were inspired by books.
1984 by David Bowie
Nineteen Eighty-Four is the 1949 dystopian novel written by George Orwell that takes place in an imagined future where war, government surveillance and a totalitarian state have taken over. David Bowie was a big fan of the book and compared growing up in post-war Bromley to the grim-living conditions of Orwell’s imaginary Oceania: “You always felt you were in 1984, that’s the kind of gloom and immovable society that a lot of us felt we grew up in…it was a terribly inhibiting place.” Bowie had wanted to create a rock musical production of the novel and used music as the bridge to join his own post-apocalyptic world and the novel. Appearing on a talk show in 1973, he said he was working on a TV adaptation of the novel called The 1980 Floor Show and debuted specifically written music for the soundtrack – however, his dream was not to be. He was denied the rights to the novel by the author’s estate and had to turn his album 1984 into the ‘concept’ album Diamond Dogs, which still references the novel with tracks such as 1984 and Big Brother.
Firework by Katy Perry
It’s been almost a decade since Katy Perry released Firework as part of her multi-award winning album Teenage Dream, but did you know it was inspired by one of grittiest cult classics of all time, On the Road by Jack Kerouac? Perry was introduced to the book by her then boyfriend and subsequent husband Russell Brand, who likened her to the paragraph in which Kerouac describes his favourite people as those ever-burning ‘Roman candles across the night’ who fizz with life and never say a boring or commonplace thing. This resonated with her: “When I heard that I was like, that is who I feel like I am, who I want to be, who I want to surround myself with – those firework people. “It’s just all about you igniting the spark inside of you.”
Ramble On by Led Zeppelin
Ramble On is an early song released by Led Zeppelin in 1969 as part of their Led Zeppelin II album. Written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, the song was inspired by JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and tells the story of Sam and Frodo’s journey as if a woman was the object of the narrator’s obsession, instead of the infamous ring: “Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair, but Gollum and the evil one, crept up and slipped away with her.” Robert’s fascination with the Tolkien series spans further than Ramble On, many of their other songs are inspired by Lord of the Rings (such as Stairway to Heaven) and he even named his dog Strider after the character Aragorn, who is also referred to by this name.
Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush
Probably the most famous of literary-music references, Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush was inspired by Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel. After catching the last 10 minutes of a TV show, Kate Bush decided to read the book and discovered she shared the same birthday as the author. Still unnerved by this uncanny coincidence, some ten years later, she was inspired to turn it into a song and in the early hours of 5 March 1977, when she was just 18, she wrote her own Wuthering Heights (although she’d already written over a hundred songs by this point). The track was released in January 1978 as the first single from her debut album The Kick Inside, and is sung from the perspective of the Wuthering Heights character Catherine Earnshaw, pleading at Heathcliff’s window to be allowed in. It quotes Catherine’s dialogue, including the chorus lyric “Let me in! I’m so cold!” and “Bad dreams in the night”. Bush recorded her vocals in one take. With this track, Bush became the first female artist to have an entirely self-penned number one hit in the UK, spending three weeks at number one.
