‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’
This quote has been variously attributed to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello and countless others, but whoever said it was talking about the pointlessness of music journalism in evoking the emotional impact of a song – saying it was a fool’s errand. Well, maybe, but that didn’t stop me from writing a whole novel about a band.
The Ossians was the first novel I ever wrote, but my second to get published after Tombstoning. In one sense, it’s a book about music, but in another, it’s not. It stemmed from my own experiences of being in indie bands for my whole adult life at that point, drumming in bands with names like Cheesegrater, Little Hopetown Giants and Imperial Racing Club. We’d play crappy gigs in crappy towns to a bunch of like-minded people, and we loved every minute of it. I had never seen that experience depicted in fiction before, bands playing the so-called ‘toilet circuit’ because all the venues were like toilets. So I set out to write it.
It was a vivid world of drink and drugs, elation and dejection, sometimes violence and always laughter. And I poured all of that and more into The Ossians – the story of a band falling apart on a tour of the Scottish Highlands. There are seagull massacres, botched drug deals, stalkers, a radioactive beach and drunken Russian submariners. And that’s not even half of it. The book is, on the one hand, a document of its time. It was written before streaming and social media, when bands still jumped in the back of a van and went out adventuring.
But hopefully the book is also about something much bigger. From the band’s name onwards, this is a book about Scottishness and what it means to be Scottish. There are two epigraphs at the start of the book – one by Robert Louis Stevenson talking about how great Scotland is, the other by Irvine Welsh slagging the place off. The truth is, it’s both great and shite being Scottish, and The Ossians dives into that headfirst, in all its sweaty, drunken glory.
I wanted to look at the big stuff, but I also wanted to make the story a visceral ride, so that the reader was right in the thick of the chaos with the band members. The response to the novel – both at the time it originally came out, and now for its republication – has been incredibly touching, and has suggested that I at least partly succeeded in those aims. Writing about music might be hard, but it’s been worth it for me, for sure.
The anniversary edition of The Ossians by Doug Johnstone, with an introduction by Val McDermid, is published by Orenda Books on 9th April 2026.
