This past week, the Hilliard Ensemble, a quartet of British singers specializing in early vocal music, gave a post-modern Prague Spring performance of Heiner Goebbels’ I Went to The House But Did Not Enter.
The piece combines texts by T.S. Eliot, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett in what Night & Day called “a subtle rendering of the gray ennui and quiet desperation many feel in contemporary times.”
This got the Velvet Violin thinking of what other works of literature and prose have been used in song. Here’s five examples.
1. David Bowie – 1984
No prizes for guessing the book this song’s based on. Bowie in fact wrote a number of songs based on sections of George Orwell’s classic having originally planned a whole musical about the post-apocalyptic tome.
2. Bruce Springsteen – The Ghost of Tom Joad
This track by The Boss centers on John Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath. The 1995 folk track was later covered in a more hardcore style by Rage Against The Machine.
3. China in Your Hand – T’Pau
Few people knew what these 1980s posters were talking about on this particular track, but it nonetheless spent five weeks at the top of
the British charts in 1987 and still gets plenty of airplay today. The lyrics in fact retell the story of the famous monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the title specifically refers to how you can see your hand through a china cup when you hold it to the light. So, that’s settled then.
4. U2 – 40
Perhaps the most memorable song from the band’s great live album and concert film, Live at Red Rocks, performed at the Denver open-air venue in 1983, was Bono’s rendition of this lengthy jam, which is based on the 40th Psalm.
5. Franz Ferdinand – Love and Destroy
This catchy track from the noughties Glasgow indie-rockers is somewhat surprisingly based upon Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1967 work The Master and Margarita. This scathing account of a visit by the Devil to Moscow is considered one of the pre-eminent works of satire on the Soviet regime.
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