J K Rowling: MY ROCK N ROLL YEARS
Don’t tell Dumbledore! Harry Potter author admits to spellbinding teen past – snogging, smoking and hitch-hiking to hippy festival with Dutch boyfriend
interview with ‘Ruth and Martin’s Album Club’, a website on which celebrities are asked to listen to an album that they have never heard before then give their thoughts. Listening to US band the Violent Femmes’s self-titled debut record from 1983, she said: ‘I turned 18 the year this album came out, but I was obsessed with The Beatles at the time.’
However, her unnamed then-boyfriend tried to steer Ms Rowling towards more adventurous tastes. Talking about the Violent Femmes, the mother-of-three said: ‘They could easily have been part of the informal seminars on alternative music I received from the muso I dated in my late teens.’
She reveals that she had shown her own liking for alternative music by naming two ‘very long-lived goldfish’ Guggi and Gavin after members of the band the Virgin Prunes.
Yet Ms Rowling still managed to successfully resist the influence of her boyfriend.
She said: ‘Much as I adored him, I didn’t share Muso Boyfriend’s attitude to music: his scorn for the accessible and tuneful, the baffling mixture of irony and obsession with which he regarded his favourites, and his conviction that if the herd hates something, it’s almost certainly brilliant. I never made much headway arguing about this sort of thing with Muso Boyfriend, though, so after a bit of snogging I’d cycle home and listen to [Beatles album] Rubber Soul.’
Looking back to her tastes of the time, Ms Rowling reveals that Spandau Ballet was ‘a band I never liked’.
She added: ‘Of contemporary bands I really loved, the standouts were The Smiths and the Psychedelic Furs. I loved any band with a great guitarist. I played guitar myself, mostly alone in my bedroom.’
While the author, who finished writing the first of the seven Harry Potter books in 1995, has long left her rock ’n’ roll years behind her, later in life she found a curious echo of her past.
Ms Rowling met the poet Benjamin Zephaniah 20 years after she had seen him at the Elephant Fayre reciting a poem ‘about having the s*** kicked out of him by a policeman’.
However, their second encounter took place in rather different circumstances – with the pair together on a team for a children’s book quiz at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
‘I played guitar myself, mostly alone in my bedroom’