Catch a Fire

That Michelangelo Moment

Catch a Fire: That Michelangelo Moment

In Deliver Me from Nowhere, Scott Cooper’s sombre portrait of Nebraska-era Springsteen, there’s a moment where Jeremy Allen White (superbly owning the role of The Boss), hits on the first words for album’s title song after watching Terence Malik’s Badlands on TV and reading about the 1950s teenage serial killer Charles Starkweather. He sits on his sofa, Gibson acoustic cradled in his lap, furiously writing lyrics in marker pen; the archetypal moment of creation which might never have happened, but which most music biopic directors can’t resist. A similar (though bathetic) Michelangelo Moment - where the hand of God touches the earthly aspiring Adam - occurs in the Elton John biopic, Rocket Man, when the pyjama-clad Reg Dwight finds the chords for ‘Your Song’ on his parents’ old upright piano. And another in the Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, where Rami Malik’s preening Freddie Mercury conjures up ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ in his manager’s office after a band argument. Even more bathetically, the Brian May character comments: ‘That’s quite a cool riff, actually.’

And it’s not just music biopics. In Jane Campion’s Bright Star - possibly the greatest film ever made about a writer’s life - we see Ben Wishaw’s Keats composing the movie’s eponymous sonnet under a blossoming cherry tree. In Frida, the Frida Kahlo biopic, we see the great Mexican artist paint The Two Fridas in the midst of her divorce from Diego Rivera.

And so on.

It’s very rare the cameras are rolling for a real moment of divine inspiration. A singular example happens in Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back, where Paul McCartney slumps into work in a yellow pullover and starts strumming chords on his Hohner violin bass, while vocalising a pale imitation of Canned Heat’s ‘Going up the Country’ (a hit the previous summer), until he has the first verses of the film’s title song. It’s an electrifying moment, one in which all the shaky alchemy and indefinable magic of the creative act are conjured, or channelled, in a cold film studio at nine in the morning. It’s Ringo who delivers the most bathetic line of all (in real life, don’t forget): ‘He’s been playing that bass guitar again.’

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It’s been over twenty years since I last wrote a song. For a long time, it was all I did, when fiction and poetry proved elusive in my twenties. For my old band Flamingoes’ first album Plastic Jewels (1995), my co-writer and I (my twin brother) wrote over 350 songs from the age of sixteen onwards. From this, we whittled it down to twelve for the final selection. Maybe they were the wrong choices (we didn’t make Top of the Pops), but it’s significant that I can remember where I was when each of the songs of mine which did make the cut were written.

One, which became our first single, arrived as I was playing along to (shamefully) Aerosmith in the office of the rehearsal and recording studio where I was a keyholder. At the end of my shift, I cycled home furiously and finished the song off on my 12-string acoustic until I’d completed it in the small hours of the morning. I still have the guitar, which is now sadly unplayable as its bridge has lifted off and its headstock is snapped beyond repair. But I can’t bring myself to throw it into the recycling skip as I feel it still holds some ineffable power of creativity in its rusted strings.

Novels don’t arrive in the manner of a coup de foudre. Rather, they gestate and grow organically from an initial seed, often over years or even decades, until you can’t recall the original moment of conception. John Lennon’s advice to George Harrison for songwriting success was to always finish the song off on the same day as inspiration strikes. For obvious reasons, this method doesn’t work with a novel. Although, for me, it often did for a poem, or a short story. There’s nothing like riding the wave of your own imagined brilliance and resourcefulness at midnight, convinced that you’re creating a masterpiece. The morning after often reveals something quite different.

Hanif Kureishi, in his remarkable essay ‘Something Given: Reflections on Writing’, said that writing needs ‘the regularity of work and the inspiration and pleasure of play’. It’s a hard balance to strike. Often, the novelist at her desk, stuck in the doldrums of writer’s block, feels like she’s chasing a sneeze, so tantalising is the promised breakthrough. In Ted Hughes’ poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’, the speaker’s apprehension of the moment of creation is famously likened to a fox sneaking into his garden. The speaker contemplates the blank page until, ‘with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, inspiration ‘enters the dark hole of the head’. Only then can the page be ‘printed’.

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Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Mrs Darwin’ suggests, some great creative breakthroughs are the work of another person altogether. As Mrs Darwin wanders the zoo with her husband, Charles, a number of years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, she casually tells him: ‘Something about that Chimpanzee over there/ reminds me of you.’

The most compelling Michelangelo Moment in a recent biopic arrives in James Mangold’s Dylan film A Complete Unknown. Here, a shirtless Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) fingerpicks a pattern on his acoustic guitar, sitting on an unmade bed, while a righteously stroppy Baez (the excellent Monica Barbaro) makes him his morning coffee.

‘Now these chords I learnt from a cowboy named Wiggleford,’ Dylan says, (or rather Chalamet does, in his approximation of Dylan’s inimitable drawl).

‘You were in a carnival?’ Baez asks, unconvinced.

Not getting any reply (by now realising her new lover has been ‘reinventing’ himself since the moment they met), she adds: ‘You’re so completely full of shit.’

Then, after Dylan tells her she ‘tries too hard’ to write songs, she deadpans satisfyingly: ‘You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.’

Throwing a set of lyrics onto the bed, she demands: ‘Play this.’

Moments later, Dylan is singing his most famous song, ‘Blowing in the Wind’, with all the verses in the right order. An immaculate conception, it seems.

Or is it?

Did Baez do a Mrs Darwin on Bob? The film doesn’t decide either way. As Baez harmonises on the choruses, they both seem to be reading the words from the pages on the bed. Or maybe Bob had the song already, and Baez was very good at picking up a tune. Either way, it’s a delicious suggestion that Dylan really was a bit of a chancer, as well as the songwriting genius who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature many decades later.