Barney Hoskyns is editor of the indispensable rock press archive Rock’s Backpages (www.rocksbackpages.com). A veteran music writer and editor, he is also an author of several well-received popular music titles including Across the Great Divide: The Band and America, Say It One Time For The Brokenhearted: Country Soul in the American South and Waiting For The Sun, a musical portrait of LA and Beneath the Diamond Sky, a reflection on the cultural history of San Francisco.

Until recently U.S. editor of Mojo, he is also a contributor to Vogue, GQ, Rolling Stone, Spin, Harper's Bazaar, and CD Now. In 1995 he published a novel called The Lonely Planet Boy, the item under the spotlight in this edition of C&V’s Retrospect feature. Here he shares a range of thoughts on writing and reading books.

C&V How do you see the relationship between popular music and literature? How do these two different creative practices interact?

BH Generally I think rock has inspired rather silly fiction, as though it couldn’t be taken that seriously. Or else it’s melodramatic depictions of evil svengalis and behind-the-scenes machinations. As with most rock cinema outside of the uncanny This is Spinal Tap, pop fiction isn’t usually over-populated with credible, three-dimensional characters. And then there’s Salman Rushdie’s embarrassing The Ground Beneath Her Feet, of course.

C&V Have you encountered successful examples of this interaction? Is there such a thing as a rock'n'roll novel?

BH I can’t think offhand of a truly good one, though Joseph C. Smith’s The Day the Music Died wasn’t bad. There’s no work of pop fiction that’s as chilling or pathos-strewn as James Young’s book about Nico, Songs They Never Play on the Radio (also one of the great titles in rock literature) and nothing that even borders the ambition of Mann’s great musical novel Doctor Faustus.

C&V What prompted you to write The Lonely Planet Boy? Obviously there’s a strong reference to the New York Dolls in there – why did you choose that title?

BH I was prompted to write by the simple feeling that one should write a novel. The theme of the unhealthy symbiosis between artists and journalists was a no-brainer. I chose the title long before the Lonely Planet travel-literature company came into being, so it now has very inappropriate connotations. The book’s hero Kip is introverted and alienated, and the Dolls song title intimated that.

C&V How hard was it to interweave credible fiction and popular music themes?

BH Depends whether you think it’s credible or not! I haven’t read or looked at The Lonely Planet Boy for almost a decade so I can’t be sure. It was certainly very much a roman a clef, if not a mini-bildungsroman (!), and presupposed a reasonable immersion in trainspotting minutiae on the part of the reader.

C&V How autobiographical was TLPB? Is Mina based on a real artist you encountered and wrote about?

BH The novel drew on specific situations and memories from my “pop life” (to use Prince’s phrase) but couldn’t be said to be directly autobiographical. Mina was, I think, synthesized from various “alternative divas”: Nico, Joplin, Lydia Lunch, maybe even a bit of Madonna. I liked the German band Malaria, who were simultaneously sexy and threatening.

C&V Is there another novel in you or was this simply a one-off?

BH I thought it was a one-off until I started writing a novel just before Christmas. This time it’s “the real thing”, without rock references or settings. Nothing to hide behind, just human beings in all their naked pain and ambiguity. Actually I always intended to have a go at writing “proper” fiction but kept deferring the challenge because of fear that I wouldn’t be able to meet it. I’m meeting it now on a daily basis and it’s going well.

C&V What fiction do you most enjoy reading? What are your favourite books, fact or fiction, musical or non-musical?

BH The writers who most seem to answer to my sense of human experience are Chekhov, Proust, George Eliot, Rilke, Richard Ford, Henry Green, John McGahern, Flaubert, Michel Houellebeq, Eudora Welty, Elmore Leonard and a few others I can’t think of right now. Favourite books? Gosh. Anything by any of the above. Madame Bovary may be the best novel ever written. McGahern’s Amongst Women is the greatest, sparest work of fiction I’ve read in the last 15 years.

C&V How far has fiction shaped either your journalistic or novel writing style? Have you ever tried to emulate the style of a writer you've enjoyed?

BH Yes, but I can’t remember who now. One’s always influenced by anything one’s enjoying when writing. I’m sure the influence of (rock writer) John Mendelssohn’s hilarious and tragicomic novel Waiting for Kate Bush is rubbing off on me even as we speak. In terms of rock journalism, of course I’ve been influenced by Lester Bangs, who wrote with what reads like spontaneous gonzo lyricism, but also by more measured prose stylists. (I’d take Proust before Joyce to my desert island any day.)

C&V How far do you think, what we might call cult fiction – the Beats, Kesey, MacInnes, even Richard Allen -  played a part in shaping rock journalism from the mid-1960s onwards?

BH Picking up from the Bangs reference, obviously the influence of the New Journalism had a huge impact on rock writing: Wolfe, the late great Hunter S.T. I’m not sure the Beats directly influenced pop journalism.

C&V As someone who was part of what might be regarded as a golden age of British rock journalism, through a range of titles, did the New Journalism have an impact on your fiction or non-fiction writing?

BH Certainly in the sense that I thought it was valid to embed the ‘I’ of the observer/interviewer in the story and not feign some spurious disembodied objectivity. But that all seems to have gone now. You feign it or you don’t get work.