One can imagine rehearsals looming. Recording dates. Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No one manages to fix it. And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on.
How difficult can it be? How about this for a suggestion? “La, a ... , a ...”—well, I can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world pulls together on this, we can crack it. And I think we shouldn’t let the century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of disarray.
What else? Well, what do you think? What are the things we really owe it to ourselves to sort out in the next few months, before the digits roll over and we all have a set of brand-new shiny twenty-first-century problems to deal with? World hunger? Lord Lucan? Jimmy Hoffa? Where to put old eight-track tapes so that no one in the twenty-first century will ever have to see one ever again? Suggestions, please, and answers, to www.h2g2.com.
The Dream Team
Sean Connery as God, John Cleese as the Angel Gabriel, and Goldie Hawn as Mother Theresa’s younger sister, Trudie. With a guest appearance by Bob Hoskins as Detective Inspector Phil Makepiece.
My absolute dream rock band no longer exists because their rhythm guitarist was shot. But I’d have their bass player because he is unquestionably the best. There may be more pyrotechnical players, but for sheer musicality, invention, and drive, there’s no one better than McCartney. He’d share vocals with Gary Brooker, the greatest soul voice of British rock and roll and a hell of a piano player. Two lead guitarists (they can take turns to play rhythm): Dave Gilmour, whom I’ve always wanted to hear play with Gary Brooker because they share a taste for huge drama and soaring melody lines; and Robbie Mclntosh, who is both a great blues rocker and an exquisite acoustic guitar picker. Drummer—Steve Gadd (remember “50 Ways”?). By the time you’ve got a band this size, you more or less have to have maestro Ray Cooper in it as well, on percussion, though it would also be very tempting to include the incredible woman percussionist whose name I don’t know from Van Morrison’s band. Strings? Brass section? Royal Philharmonic? A New Orleans jazz band? For all that, you’d need synth wizard Paul “Wix” Wickens. And a large truck.
The Dagenham Girl Pipers. With all due respect and love to my dear wife, there are some things that, however loving or tender your wife may be, only a large pipe band can give you.
Given unlimited financial resources, I would love to fund a major research project into human origins, the transition from ape to man. A couple of years ago I became fascinated by the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, the notion that our transitional ancestors spent a period in a semiaquatic environment. I’ve heard the idea ridiculed many times but never convincingly refuted, and I would love to discover the truth, one way or the other.
Zoologist, rock musician, system software designer.
Intense scuba diving in Australia, out beyond the Great Barrier Reef to the wonderful clarity of the Coral Sea—Cod Hole, shark diving, wreck diving; then to Western Australia to dive with enormous whale sharks, and finally to Shark Bay to dive with dolphins. Then I’d stop off for dinner in Hong Kong on the way home.
Something large and rambling on the beach somewhere, probably Far North Queensland, with lots of wildlife around and high-bandwidth computer connections to the rest of the world. Also a boat and a pickup truck.
If I was told I had to choose the cuisine of one country and eat only that for the rest of my life, I’d choose Japanese.
I’ve already had this, in fact. It was 1968—a friend of mine and I took a day off school, went up to London, and saw 2001 in Cinerama in the afternoon and Simon and Garfunkel live at the Albert Hall in the evening.
I tell myself I can’t have another cup of coffee till I’ve thought of an idea.
Intro for Comic Books # 1
People often ask me where I get my ideas from, sometimes as often as eighty-seven times a day. This is a well-known hazard for writers, and the correct response to the question is first to breathe deeply, steady your heartbeat, fill your mind with peaceful, calming images of birdsong and buttercups in spring meadows, and then try to say, “Well, it’s very interesting you ask that ...” before breaking down and starting to whimper uncontrollably.
The fact is that I don’t know where ideas come from, or even where to look for them. Nor does any writer. This is not quite true, in fact. If you were writing a book on the mating habits of pigs, you’d probably pick up a few goodish ideas by hanging around a barnyard in a plastic mac, but if fiction is your line, then the only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.
I exaggerate, of course. That’s my job. There are some specific ideas for which I can remember exactly where they came from. At least, I think I can; I may just be making it up. That also is my job. When I’ve got a big writing job to do, I will often listen to the same piece of music over and over again. Not while I’m doing the actually writing, of course, you need things to be pretty quiet for that, but while I’m fetching another cup of coffee or making toast or polishing my spectacles or trying to find more toner for the printer or changing my guitar strings or clearing away the coffee cups and toast crumbs from my desk or retiring to the bathroom to sit and think for half an hour—in other words, most of the day. The result is that a lot of my ideas come from songs. Well, one or two at least. To be absolutely accurate, there is just one idea that came from a song, but I keep the habit up just in case it works again which it won’t, but never mind.
So now you know how it’s done. Simple, isn’t it?
Interview With Virgin Airlines
If there’s one man who should know a thing or two about travel it has to be the guy who has eaten burger and fries at the restaurant at the end of the universe. We tracked down author Douglas Adams at his new home in the States where he recently relocated for the filming of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
My childhood holidays were pretty modest. The highlight was a fortnight in the Isle of Wight when I was about six. I remember catching what I was convinced a plaice, though it was only the size of a postage stamp and probably died when I tried to keep it as a pet.