Books: Inspirations

The Place

I find any stretch of bleak desert wasteland fairly wonderful, in some ways the more anonymous the better, but I'll go for Zzyzx, a former health resort, now a ghost town in the Mojave desert, a few miles outside Barstow, California. It has palm trees, wind-blown sand, curious abandoned buildings and empty swimming pools. It could be sinister, yet I find it totally comforting and reassuring.

The music

Willie the Pimp by Frank Zappa with Captain Beefheart on vocals. This has everything: great lyrics, a fabulous blues vocal and a great skronking extended electric guitar solo. Harold Bloom says that all great art is strange, and of course that doesn't mean that all strange art is great, but there's something about the early stuff of Zappa and Beefheart that still seems as weird and radical as it ever did.

The Film

After Hours by Martin Scorsese. This seems to me an infinitely more honest film than all of Scorsese's homoerotic hymns to violent men who swear a lot. Griffin Dunne wanders around nocturnal New York, pursuing a woman, being pursued by vigilantes, having the sort of edgy, scary, sexy adventures we all dream of having in New York, but are actually rather relieved to avoid. It's a comedy and so our hero survives but you realise how easily he might not.

The Play

Hamlet was the first bit of Shakespeare I ever really understood and enjoyed. It's a great play to discover when you're an adolescent - all that teenage angst, all that beautiful suffering. Every 17-year-old lad who's having trouble with the parents and school and girlfriends knows exactly how Hamlet feels. More than any other play I can think of, I carry my own version of Hamlet in my head and no production is ever as good as that.

The work of art

Le Violin d'Ingres. This is Max Ernst's photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse, who has two f-holes collaged into her naked back. There are years when this seems an unacceptably sexist piece of work, other years when it seems sexy, respectful and playful. We "borrowed" the idea for the cover of my novel Flesh Guitar, but we made the violin an electric guitar and instead of f-holes we had pick ups and a tremelo arm.

Geoff Nicholson's new novel , `Female Ruins', is published by Indigo (pounds 9.99)