I Credit Iron Maiden for My English A‑Level: The Literature Our Writers Unearthed via Pop Music

Penelope Farmer via the Cure

I first heard the Cure’s “Charlotte Sometimes” as a teenager, and it felt like emerging from a reverie.
The clashing guitars rang out like distant bells while the vague lyrics about getting ready for sleep unearthed a childhood recollection of Penelope Farmer’s eerie 1969 novel of the same title.
When I was younger I imagined it as pure fantasy: on Charlotte’s inaugural night at a boarding house she awakens to discover she has been sent forty years back, inhabiting another’s body beneath an unfamiliar moon.
Re‑reading the tale on Robert Smith’s suggestion during my teens, it reflected my growing, unsettled sense of identity.
Hearing Charlotte’s confusion expressed through restless bass and Smith’s swirling, double‑tracked voice was oddly reassuring; it affirmed that maturing has always seemed like a journey through time.
Finding out the band recorded the track exactly ten years, to the day, before my birth added another layer of coincidence: a personal link to a bygone era.

Oscar Wilde via the Smiths

I purchased Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in my teens after Morrissey referenced him in the Smiths’ “Cemetery Gates” (“Keats and Yeats are on your side / While Wilde is on mine”).
I also hoped to impress a fellow Morrissey fan in Hull with whom I had been exchanging letters and who was due to visit.
I had earlier obtained Alan Sillitoe’s celebrated *Saturday Night, Sunday Morning*—cited in “Vicar in a Tutu”—for comparable reasons, and I imagined that a retro cardigan together with a 1930s Leeds market typewriter would convince her I was a true Yorkshire enthusiast.
Both of us were so jittery that our first exchanges consisted of typing notes to one another, but she eventually gathered enough confidence to twirl around the living room to “Oscillate Wildly.”
The largely long‑distance courtship ended shortly after the Smiths dissolved, yet we remain Facebook friends and I still keep both volumes.

Joe Orton via Adam Ant

In my final undergraduate year I was drafting a dissertation on Joe Orton, sifting through a slew of mediocre 1940s‑ and 1950s‑era plays that, at the very least, illustrated how gay men were portrayed on stage before Orton unleashed Entertaining Mr Sloane.
It suddenly struck me that my entire focus stemmed from Adam Ant’s influence.
During the peak of his teen‑pop fame he rarely missed a chance to discuss Orton.
A devoted ten‑year‑old admirer, I had filed the name away; years later, after Ant’s star dimmed, I spotted a paperback of Orton’s diaries and bought it, finally acting on his recommendation.
The entries were both uproarious and genuinely shocking, steering me toward Orton’s plays and John Lahr’s biography *Prick Up Your Ears*.
Unlike many titles I cherished in adolescence, I still love Orton’s work, still find it witty, startling and thought‑provoking; flipping through his diaries can lift even the bleakest mood for the umpteenth time.