Brendan Cowell
When he first heard Paul Simon’s song ‘The Boy in the Bubble’, Brendan Cowell realised that he wanted to be a writer.
Kate Holden
is the author of winner of the 2021 Walkley Book Award and the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction.
Brendan Cowell is a writer, director and actor from Sydney. He’s known for his roles in Love My Way (2004-7), Noise (2007), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Game of Thrones series 7, and many Australian series and films, as well as a stellar stage career that includes Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir and productions directed by Simon Stone in London and New York. Cowell’s writing credits include episodes of Love My Way and several plays, and he won the Patrick White Playwrights Award, the Griffin Award and the Philip Parsons Young Playwright’s Award. He has also published the novels How It Feels (2010) and Plum (2021).
His recent London performance in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible from National Theatre Live will be streamed in Australian cinemas from March 4.
Cowell elected to speak about Paul Simon’s song “The Boy in the Bubble” from the landmark 1986 album Graceland.
What made this song so important to you?
I think when great art happens to you there’s something almost a little unfathomable about it, like it should be illegal. You think, “This can’t be really happening. Who allowed them to do this? How did they know to do this?” When this album came out, I just couldn’t believe it: the deep South African rhythms; Ladysmith Black Mambazo; Paul Simon’s incredible New York poetry and just this music, with this big thumping, rhythmic middle. It somehow just combined to be the greatest sound I’d ever heard in my life. As soon as I heard “the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart” I lost my mind. The imagery. And the everydayness. So much was possible. That’s when I started writing poetry quite ferociously from the age of 11 to 13.
I was starting to feel a little odd at school, a little impostor, a little weirdo, at a surfing school. Writing poetry galvanised me and made me feel safe and probably saved my life in many ways. At 20 I said to Mum, “I think I might be a playwright. I thought I was an actor, but I think I’m a writer.” And she went: “Have you seen the 200 notepads stacked in the corner? You’ve been writing nonstop for 10 years!” I thought a writer was an academic, that I had to be able to quote the Russians. But I had a voice; I had a voice and I could write.
The other amazingness of the album: it just kept coming through. It’s travelled through my entire life. My storytelling and poetry are at the heart of what I do, and music is probably the greatest force in my day. This piece has stayed with me the whole way.
Simon was in a bad place, his marriage breaking up, his last album a flop. Then he heard the cassette of a South African band and went looking for them. The album is full of his exhilaration.
I love the big announcement at the start, with that amazing accordion player he found in South Africa, that led the whole Graceland album. That great big hit of the tom-tom of “The Boy in the Bubble”, like: this song is here. It’s a statement song.
He thought he should be writing about the atrocities in South Africa but he could only write what he could write, his own truth. This song is about horrors: there’s images of war, terror and despair, people being trapped, technology... Yet inside it is this sense of “these are the days of miracle and wonder”, and he seems baffled by the fact that we’re progressing in one direction so strongly and yet the horror of humanity comes with us.
He saw that juxtaposition, which is the key ingredient of great art. With my novel Plum I have a bashed-up, beaten, ex-footy player, thug, a hard-drinking, psychopathic male who has this poet in him, and lyrics and beauty and poetry start to come out of this brute, and in that conflict comes the art. If you don’t have that, then art’s very literal. If you have a sad scene with a sad song, then I guess it’s just sad. With Paul Simon, it’s this little white guy with his dreamy little Leonard Cohen poetry, over the top of this ancient sound.
He could hear it; he knew it would work. There were a lot of gates he had to get through. Apartheid was at its most disgraceful, brutal and appalling at that point, and this white guy goes in saying, “Where’s this band?” It was kind of preposterous. But thank god he did it, because otherwise Graceland wouldn’t exist.
Simon got in a lot of trouble for going over there, and people questioned the motivation behind his collaboration. On the tour he just kept keeping on, he said, “No, I just want to share this music with everybody.” People were touched by this all over the world.
It doesn’t matter who the artist is, they’re going to be coming from a good place – of curiosity and deep fascination – and they’re going to get in there. An artist has no gender, colour, race or anything: they’re a floating organism of beauty and curiosity; they don’t exist. All the great artists I’ve worked with have been unaware of the fact that they’re not really meant to do what they’re doing. When I see a great piece of art it is because the artist went, “Yeah, I know, but I don’t care. I have to. Get out of the way. Push the trolleys aside. This thing needs to live”. The world should always work like that.
Have you ever seen him play?
I met Paul Simon at Byron Bay Bluesfest.
The people there knew I loved Paul Simon. I think his manager had just died, so he played “The Sound of Silence” and he was sobbing and wailing the whole way through, it was astounding. I went to meet him beforehand and he was there with all the musicians. I said, “Graceland: I can’t explain what it’s meant to me.” He was really gracious. He started telling me about his day, going, “Yeah, we skipped out through the river there, and we came out where the dolphins dip and dive, and then we trickled out around and the sun was setting and we went Oh, what a beautiful day!” The rhythm of how he talked: I thought, “You’re perpetually in a Paul Simon song!” He’s perpetually living in “the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart”. It was amazing. He was really sweet and really present. I spoke with his band too. You could feel the joy of that collective.
But I’ve learnt later all this stuff about his music. It was really just the fact that he said, “boy in the bubble”. It was that sentence that made me go, “I want to write – forever. I want to write words that dance and bounce and mean stuff and confuse me.” It was like, literally run to the notepad and write, write anything. That’s what’s crazy about it, it was just one sentence that made me want to be poet-writer forever.
This one man, he created a lot of chaos and drama, and it mightn’t have worked. I think he was in deep fear. He went on Saturday Night Live with the whole band: it looked preposterous. But then they started playing, and people just couldn’t stop moving. At the end of the day you can’t resist the music.