Alan Moore's Songbook

For almost ten years, I wanted to know what “This Vicious Cabaret” sounded like. The song appeared as the opening chapter to the second part of V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. Moore wrote and (as far as I know) composed the score himself. When I first read the lyrics, way back in 1990, I desperately wanted to know how the music went. I spent almost ten years imagining how the song sounded. Every few years I would stumble upon someone who could play piano and I would ask them to play the sheet music; twice this happened, and twice the people I asked couldn’t play the song, commenting that it was written very oddly. (This may also have to do with the fact that the score sheet was for the vocals, not piano, although I didn’t realize that until many years later.) This, of course, only fueled my imagination further, fantasizing about what sort of insanely brilliant arrangement Moore devised that could confound lesser beings so consistently.

In 1999 a fellow Vendetta fan sent me a copy of David J’s V for Vendetta EP. This was just as the Napster revolution was starting, and still a few years before you could just search YouTube for “This Vicious Cabaret” and find it in 3 seconds, so you still had to put some effort into finding music. You couldn’t just e-mail an mp3, and CD burners were not yet ubiquitous. So to have someone who had a copy of J’s then-out-of-print EP, be able to burn it to CD and mail that copy to me was an extremely lucky and generous act. I remember receiving the CD in the mail and hungrily putting the disc into my CD player to listen to the song—really, finally, listen to it—after so many years.

 Of course it sounded nothing like I imagined it would. The plodding bass, the flighty strings, the staccato piano . . . I never imagined it like that.  While it didn’t take too long for me to enjoy David J’s version on its own terms, it still took some time to accept that what I thought it would sound like was never going to be what it “really” sounded like.

For all of Moore’s accolades as a writer, not many people seem to acknowledge Moore’s musical side. It’s easy to forget he has one, although a quick look at some of his most famous work shows ample evidence of how musically inclined Moore is. Vendetta, Watchmen, The Killing Joke, and The League or Extraordinary Gentlemen all have musical elements, either in referencing the music of others, or in music Moore wrote himself. So it’s not all surprising that there’s a comicbook called Alan Moore’s Songbook, a collection of songs Alan wrote in the mid-1990’s, each one illustrated by a different artist. 

There was a strange sensation of déjà vu when reading the lyrics found in Alan Moore’s Songbook.  As with “This Vicious Cabaret,” when I read these lyrics and looked at the artwork that accompanies them I couldn’t help but wonder: just what do these songs sound like? Is what I see on the page is really representative of the actual songs they’re based on? Does “14.2.99” sound as slick and sexy as Dave Johnson’s techno-erotic pin-up?  Are the guitars on “Chiaroscuro” as contrasting as Dave Gibbon’s artwork? Would “Fires I Wish I’d Seen” have included brass or strings?

I wonder if the artists were in a similar conundrum. These “songs” are not collaborations. In an online interview, Alan Moore stated he had nothing to do with this comic beyond sending the people at Caliber Press his lyrics¹ so I think it’s a safe bet that the artists had no contact with Moore to discuss the lyrics, to divine intent, to understand how the accompanying music factored into the mood of the song. Granted, this wasn’t the first time an artist had to render music into pictures without discussing things with the musician first—sometime in the future we’ll get to Craig P Russell’s adaptation of Wagner’s Ring of Nibelung opera cycle, which may be the most ambitious example of this within my collection—but most of the time the artists has the recorded song to be inspired by. Working in a vacuum, without hearing (presumably) the actual music, makes this more of an exercise in illustrated poetry than music.²

Let’s also be clear about something: this isn’t exactly Moore’s finest work. Given Moore’s comment in the interview I mention earlier, I can’t help but think Moore didn’t think too highly of the lyrics considering that he gave them to Caliber Press without much interest in what they’d do with them. Though mood of the songs are standard Alan Moore (the subject matter tends to be brooding, violent, erotic, seedy, and supernatural) the way those themes are presented are varied:  the morose “Rose Madder”; the slice-of-seedy-life “Positively Bridge Street”; literary-referencing “The Murders on the Rue Morgue” and “Me and Dorothy Parker”; a winking homage to Japanese monster movies in “Trampling Tokyo”.   Some of the songs seem incomplete—like half an idea jotted down on paper but never developed further because –but even when he’s slumming, Moore’s talent for a striking turn of phrase (“Removing first her clothing then her body”) or elegant image (“the sun hangs zebra skins of shadow down below the fire escapes”) gives you a treat worth savoring. 

Even though this is very much a “for the completist” purchase, the material presented is nothing to sneer at. It’s still poetry/lyrics by one of the 20th century’s greatest writers paired with a great cross-section of popular indie and mainstream comicbook artists circa 1998. You’ve got James (The Crow) Owens, Art (Longshot) Adams, Terry (Strangers in Paradise) Moore, Colleen (A Distant Soil) Doran and, well-known Alan Moore friends Dave (Watchmen) Gibbons and Neil (Do I really need to mention which title he wrote?) Gaiman. The variety of illustrators matches the variety of lyrics: Phil Hester’s atmospheric, scratchy images; Bill Koeba’s multi-media collages; Richard Case’s brushwork.  My point is: these artists are not third-rate slouches eager for any exposure, these are accomplished professionals.  While they would undoubtedly have produced different work had they been able to collaborate with Moore on this, they do a fine job interpreting the lyrics on their own, sticking to their own strengths. For example, Jame Owen’s interpretation of “Rose Madder” is drawn in his usual shadowy, gothic style; and Terry Moore draws “Madame October” the way that he usually draws when there’s a lot of prose to represent: he picks a single image and renders a border in the art nouveau style of Alphonse Mucha.

Alan Moore’s Songbook shouldn’t be worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s a cynical attempt by a publisher to cash in on the name of one of the most talented writer’s the comicbook industry had ever seen. It contains work by Moore that he had no real attachment to. And yet, somehow, thanks to the sheer talent of the people involved, Songbook becomes something that still has merit. It entertains and shows that even one-sided collaborations can be worth a look. It's a collection of ephemera but it makes an impression. Like the man says:

We have curiosities to suit your every inclination--demonstrations and displays
 unique sensations and a previous unimagined sexual extremity. . . .
included in the modest cover fee

Next Issue:  Aliens versus Predators versus Chris Claremont! Worlds collide when the man who made The X-Men famous pits two movie properties against a genetically engineered  trophy-wife-turned-warrior because, well, this story is written by Chris Claremont, so what do you expect?

¹Moore talks about the songs and the Songbook at the end of the page of this interview: http://blather.net/articles/amoore/songbook-etc.html. This is a huge, rambling interview from 2000 but has a whole lot of commentary from Moore on his work up until that point, both in comics and outside it.

²If anyone is curious, many of the lyrics in this comic were actually recorded by musicians Moore collaborated with in the 90’s and by others tangentially related.  This LiveJournal page: http://glycon.livejournal.com/3187.html has all the details.