by Nick Webb
Following this happy coincidence, Douglas and Wix became friends and went on to collaborate on a variety of music. Wix ended up writing much of the music for the Starship Titanic computer game.
Margo Buchanan, as well as singing with heart-piercing clarity, brings a gift of intuition to her friendship with Douglas and Jane. This is her recollection of how, after the McCartney concert, they all ended up in Soho at the Groucho Club.
Douglas was at our table at the Groucho. He was extremely exuberant after the McCartney gig, sitting talking to McCartney . . . He loved the Beatles and Paul McCartney, he really did . . . Douglas was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, once you got through that protective shell that he had. You know the way some people could use intellect as a shield? I don’t think he ever did that because his intellect was just too magnificent and interesting. But he did have a protective front which could be typically upper-middle-class Cambridge graduate, you know . . . And I think the reason for that was because he had a very tender side. Very tender, very vulnerable. And I think that sometimes the world used to bewilder Douglas. I think that when he heard stories of cruelty and war he was genuinely hurt and bewildered . . . There was an innocence—that’s the word I’m looking for—there was an innocence about him that he was very adept at camouflaging. But if you knew him well, you saw it. It was an innocence, and he never lost it.
In his childhood Douglas was also exposed to the wonders of the classical canon. Judith Adams, his stepmother, was musical; she had studied in Paris and played the piano beautifully, as well as singing in a Bach choir. There was a grand piano in “Derry” (the house in Stondon Massey) on which Douglas messed around. (One of the first things he did when he started making some dosh was to buy a good upright piano. By the time he moved to the permanent family home, in Duncan Terrace in Islington, this had become a concert grand.)
Sue Adams also recalls Douglas spending a lot of time as a boy with a local blind man, David James, who played the guitar with the passion of a man possessed. Sue says that he was a big influence. “David was really into the guitar. He and Douglas used to play together for hours and hours.”
The romantic possibilities of music had not escaped Douglas either. Sue also recalls:
We had a young woman at my stepmother’s house—I think she was Austrian and might have been an au pair. Douglas was completely and utterly smitten, and he would spend hours at the bottom of this massive great garden which had these great big circular flowerbeds in it. Down the bottom left-hand corner was this great big tree—and Douglas would spend ages down there serenading her on his guitar . . .
Such was Douglas’s passion for music that it was around this time that he attended a lecture in Vienna by the great Hungarian composer, Gyorgy Ligeti,* 121 despite the fact that he could not understand a word. This probably happened on the same legendary hitchhiking frolic that took him to the field in Innsbruck, but it is possible that it was during one of his high-speed holidays with his father in one of the Aston Martins. Ligeti, one of the most innovative modern composers who extended our sound palate in the most extraordinary way, is best known to the non-specialist public as the man whose Lux Aeterna was deployed to such mind-mangling effect in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ligeti, though Hungarian, gave his lecture in German, a language of which Douglas knew little more than Ja, Nein, and Achtung! Engländer! from his Eagle comic days. Nevertheless, Douglas caught something of Ligeti’s meaning, and certainly understood the musical language. Afterwards Ligeti, who had spotted this huge youngster in the audience, apologized to him for being unintelligible. (For tonto buffs, Ligeti’s Volumina provides the final dramatic chord of the first episode of Hitchhiker’s, and the Kyrie from his Requiem plays quietly at first, but with gathering urgency, as Slartibartfast takes Arthur Dent into the heart of Magrathea in the third episode.)
Douglas’s passion for music and the sensitivity of his ear were manifest in the way he and Geoffrey Perkins, the producer, put together the soundscape of the radio series of Hitchhiker’s. From the first seductive sounds of the opening theme (the Eagles’ superb track “Journey of the Sorcerer” from the album One of These Nights), the care with which the sound effects and the music were married to the spoken voice was clear. The brilliant execution owed much to Paddy Kingsland (the boss), Dick Mills and Harry Parker of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the studio team led by Alick Hale-Munro, whose joy in their work is obvious. They all deserve a mention: Max Alcock, Lisa Braun, Colin Duff, Paul Hawdon, Martha Knight, John Whitehall and Eric Young. On one occasion, recounted by Geoffrey Perkins in his introduction to the radio scripts, they insisted on keeping going without claiming overtime because the budget was so limited. (In the industrial climate of the time, BBC technicians waiving their right to overtime is rather like saying that the speed of light is not constant. It shows a love that passeth all understanding.) Every bit of Hitchhiker’s often irritating technology had its own distinctive acoustic signature, from the leaky steam-valve clank of Marvin to the whosh of those bloody Sirius Cybernetics Corporation doors with their centre-fold voices and relentless cheerfulness. The sophistication of the sound picture had come a long way since “Door Slam, sound of running feet, AAGH.”* 122
Douglas said:
I wanted Hitchhiker’s to sound like a rock album. I wanted the voices and the effects and the music to be so seamlessly orchestrated as to create a coherent picture of another world—and I said this and many similar sorts of things and waved my hands around a lot, while people nodded patiently and said “Yes, Douglas, but what’s it actually about?”* 123
He was certainly aware of how to create a universe in sound—how sound can be used to model the world, and what it must be like if that model breaks down. Breaking down our model of the world is in a sense what a lot of his work is about.
As an easily disoriented mammal, Douglas himself had an ear like Jodrell Bank. The radio series of Hitchhiker’s created the sense of inhabiting a three-dimensional world through the use of sound. (Later even the TV series—despite its clunky effects and the tension between Douglas and Alan Bell, the producer—won several Bafta awards, one of which was for best soundtrack.)
••••••
“Too much Mozart,” Douglas was fond of saying, “is an oxymoron.” But among composers, Bach, he believed, was a genius almost off the scale. His quote about seeing the universe in Bach is interesting. There are so many harmonies and periodicities in the cosmos at large (and at the microscopic scale) that once you see them, you also see their beauty. Every bit of information stands in some relationship to every other bit, and this can be expressed—as Pythagoras believed—in the divine dance of numbers. In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency Douglas suggests that the erosion patterns of the Himalayas might make a flute quintet. Numbers can describe the movement of galaxies, the replication of cells, or even—according to one of Douglas’s engagingly wild ideas on the lecture circuit—corporate accounts. Every corporation could enjoy its unique tune.
A love of mathematics and of music often go together. In Douglas’s case it wasn’t so much the maths that fascinated him, as the patterns—patterns that he found both in the lilt of a sentence and the fractal shapes of the Mandelbrot set. His enthusiasm for scientific connections knew no bounds, and this related to the way he thought. Some people seem to have better pattern-recognition abilities than others. Einstein once described Niels Bohr’s speculations about quantum mechanics as “the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.”* 124 Incidentally, have you ever wondered if Albert Einstein was any good on the fiddle? “Perfectly correct, totally uninteresting,” apparently.
The Voyager 1 and 2 space probes, launched in 1978, are both currently beyond the orbit of Pluto. They are by far the most travelled artefacts ever made by mankind—at distances now measured in light hours. Voyager 2 is almost out of the heliopause altogether. For any alien that may chance upon them, welded to the sides of both craft is a gold-plated copper data dis
k that contains sounds and images of our species and its outstanding achievements. Along with an eclectic collection of African percussion, aboriginal chants, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” a message from Kurt Waldheim of the United Nations (inadvertent truthfulness there about mankind) and so on, Carl Sagan’s team included some Bach—the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 and the Prelude and Fugue no. 1 from The Well-Tempered Clavier. On hearing about the Bach, Douglas remarked, apropos of the potential extraterrestrial investigators: “Won’t they think we’re boasting a bit?”
J.S. Bach fascinated Douglas. For one thing, Bach’s prodigious output of music was limited only by the physical process of getting the notation down. It is scarcely imaginable that something like the Agnus Dei from Bach’s B-Minor Mass (surely the most exquisite noise ever to penetrate the ear of man) could have been composed as fast as Johann could move his scratchy quill over the parchment. Douglas, who could spend a day in anguish over a single line, was in awe of such creativity. His own genius on the page was much more hard won. For all his skill on his guitar, he could not improvise easily like those to whom musical fluency seems to come like the gift of grace—and in the same way he could not spontaneously invent text.
With success, at the improbably early age of twenty-six (just like Dickens with whom there are several parallels),* 125 came fame, and this opened up a new dimension to Douglas’s passion for music. The massive and sudden success of the first book (in 1979) also provided lots of money, and one of the first appetites to be indulged was music. It was at this point that Douglas embarked upon a lifelong quest for the perfect guitar. Ken Follett says:
Don’t forget that guitars are very beautiful. People buy them for their looks as well as for what they sound like, and the last one Douglas told me about was a bass. Because I play the bass he thought I’d be interested, so he said: “I’ve bought a left-handed Hohner bass.” And I told him it didn’t have any significance for me at all—which was of course stupid because that was what Paul McCartney bought in Hamburg in 1961 . . . So Douglas had bought one of these—it can’t have been very long before he died and he was very pleased about it. He was going to learn to play the bass. I’m sure he would have actually.
Douglas ended up with twenty-four left-handed guitars and one right-handed one for visiting right-handed musicians like Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Once, on a lecture tour in the States, he made a special diversion to Austin, Texas, where there is a famous guitar emporium, solely in order to gawp, and then buy another. Undoubtedly he knew a lot about the instrument. He even interrupts the slow mutual seduction of Fenchurch and Arthur Dent for a teasing, but accurate, aside about Dire Straits: “Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff beer . . .”* 126 (And he names one of his characters, Kate Schechter, in the Dirk Gently novels, after a guitar.)
All these instruments, many mounted in custom frames, led Douglas’s friend, Jon Canter, to describe the top floor of the family home in Islington as Guitar Henge.
All his life, Douglas succumbed to gadgets; forever telling himself that one more Sharp IQ, PDA, Casio databank or, above all, a laptop computer would really get him organized. Objectively he was too intelligent to believe this, and he knew that the rate of obsolescence was such that if you dropped the new toy it would probably be out of date by the time it hit the ground. Nevertheless, a new electronic gizmo, murmuring “buy me, buy me, big boy” was hard to resist. He had a special weakness for Apple Macs, and in fairness he understood the implications of Information Technology years before the rest of us. There is something child-like in many men, but most of us do not have the money to be put to the test. We therefore pretend that when we do not buy toys, it is a sign of maturity.
Another of Douglas’s indulgences was all the more seductive because it combined his love of music with his love of gadgets. He bought stereo systems the way Renaissance popes made chapels—expertly commissioned, horrendously expensive, shoehorned precisely into the available space. His sound systems were a thing of wonder, finally achieving perfection in Duncan Terrace.
Duncan Terrace is strikingly light and handsome with some spectacular rooms for parties. On the first floor (the second for Americans) is a rectangular room, maybe forty feet long, with three floor-to-ceiling sash windows at the end facing the street. It’s an elegant space with excellent acoustics. This room was to become home to squashy sofas and a TV large enough for one to expect a woman selling choc-ices to appear in every commercial break. It was also to house one of the world’s great stereo systems.
When Douglas and Jane Belson finally had the family home sorted, after years of building and architectural tweaking, they specified that the loudspeaker leads must be integral to the extent that they run under the polished wood floor.
The first system to be installed had half-inch-thick, vacuum-sealed double-insulated loudspeaker cables, gold-plugged at each end, popping up from the floor boards into the back of two seven-foot-tall, austerely elegant Japanese screens. Only they weren’t Japanese screens at all, but large, flat, state-of-the-art Magnaplanar electrostatic speakers that produced sound by warping and vibrating their entire surface, thus producing, as any buff knows, “a quasi-omnisphere, figure of eight, bi-directional out-of-phase dispersion pattern.” Douglas loved the technical copy, but before spending a small fortune, he thought he’d better listen to the actual speakers first. He, Jane and Rick Paxton, the charming architect of Duncan Terrace, went off to a house in Wimbledon to hear the Magnaplanars in situ. The security in this mansion was so tight that allegedly wild animals selected for their unfriendly dispositions roamed the estate. Anyway, Rick is sure that it was something more exotic than your usual Alsatian.
Douglas and Jane had a fierce spat over these speakers. Douglas fancied them something wicked, but Jane, burdened as she is with taste, thought they dominated the room. It was not quite a matter of choosing between Jane and the speakers, but Rick recalls that the atmosphere became distinctly gelid before a compromise on location was reached.
These monsters required a hefty signal to drive them. Douglas was persuaded that valve-amplifiers produced a warmer sound than solid state machines. Just possibly his ear was acute enough to hear a difference. When he turned the system on needles flickered in distant power stations and there was a slight whoompf, like a far-off mortar, from outside the room. This was the automatic extractor fan coming on to vent the heat from two thousand-watt valve amplifiers, one per channel, that lived in the specially designed cupboard under the stairs. The whole system cost—and this was the eighties—just a tad over £30,000. I remember we had some badinage on the subject:
“Fucking hell, Douglas,” I said wittily. “Thirty grand for a stereo. That’s pretty decadent. Our house in Hackney cost that.”
Douglas blushed, a pretty effect on a surface so large. “Actually,” he said, “honestly, the system was a bit of a bargain. You can spend much more at this end of the market. Besides, the suppliers threw in the phono cartridge—twenty-five hundred quids worth—for free.”
How Douglas spent his money was his choice, after all. He was not a man for floating tupperware gin-palaces or shared legs of race-horses; nor did he belong among the affluent who invest in art so that it can advertise their taste while increasing in value. It was because he genuinely loved music that he wanted the best possible reproduction of it. He possessed an ear (his right actually, as he was a tiny bit deaf in his left) educated enough to appreciate the nuances.
But, you will be wondering, what did this thirty grand’s worth of equipment sound like? Does the law of diminishing returns apply with a vengeance here, as in other areas of conspicuous consumption? A £20 meal may be twice as good as a £10 meal, but can a £100 meal be ten times as good?
In this case, however, the sound was astonishing. It might not have been as loud as the noise made by Disaster Area, t
he heavy metal band in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, for which the ideal listening position was in a concrete bunker thirty miles away, but it approached the pain threshold if wound up to maximum. It also boasted amazing definition and clarity. Beatles albums that I thought I knew acquired new colour. Not a scrap of information imprinted on the original vinyl or CD was lost. In classical music the sheer physical effort of playing was apparent even to the musically uneducated. The friction of the strings, the movement of the bodies, the scrape of chairs moving on concert platforms, the sigh of the conductor making some athletic Guilini-type gesture—all the ambience of live performance somehow materialized around you, only better, for no concert hall boasts acoustics as brilliant as absolutely top-end stereo equipment. You wanted to look behind the sofa to see if Douglas and Jane had cunningly hidden an orchestra somewhere in the room.
Douglas’s record collection—both vinyl and CD (that saviour of the record companies which reissued the back catalogue at twice the price)—was stunning both in number and the catholic eclecticism of his taste. It was large enough to be housed in bespoke CD cupboards of blond wood the length of the wall in that half of the drawing room nearest the street. He could have stocked a medium-sized record shop.
