The Irish Times interview Peter Murphy:
When he saw the song title ‘John the Revelator’ on the back of a Harry Smith anthology of American music, it resonated with him immediately. “I couldn’t believe that nobody ever called a book that.” In his neat, sparse kitchen he plays the track on the small CD player on the counter. Singer Blind Willie Johnson rasps the lyrics in deep-bass gravel tones. “Who’s that writin?” he sings. “ John the Revelator”, the high reedy voice of Johnson’s first wife replies over and over again. The recording, from 1927, is almost punk in its rawness, Murphy says.
In a bit of musical serendipity, Angus Cargill, Murphy’s editor at London publishers Faber and Faber, was listening to Bob Dylan‘s Theme Time Radio Hour as he read Murphy’s manuscript for the first time. Dylan played ‘John the Revelator’ as Cargill turned the pages. His editor is among a number of people whom Murphy says “just got it” when they read the book.
[..]
The result is a tale of boyhood in small-town Ireland; an intense friendship with an odd and wildly intelligent boy; a mix of drink, sex, violence and nightmares; and a solidly believable mother-son dynamic shot through with blunt dialogue. There will be comparisons with Pat McCabe‘s The Butcher Boy, a book that came out when Murphy was in his 20s. “There was a sense after that that you could not do what Pat did. You attempted that at your peril because the voice was so distinctive. So in many ways a lot of us of that generation had to metabolise him and get that book out of our system.”
