Rock and roll memories give author, Tiffany Murray, inspiration for second novel

7:00am Saturday 30th January 2010

By Philippa May

IT’S been almost six years since Tiffany Murray’s first novel, Happy Accidents, was published and this month saw the publication of her second, Diamond Star Halo, which has already been selected by Hay Festival as its January Book of the Month.

Once again drawing on her Herefordshire childhood, Diamond Star Halo is inspired by Tiffany’s experience of living in a big house in Norton Canon where a lack of money led to her mother putting an ad in The Times offering rehearsal space for bands, specifically stating ‘no heavy metal’.

The first band to arrive at the house was Black Sabbath, as heavy a metal band as you could find in the 1970s, fronted by the legendary Ozzy Osbourne.

“It was a big leap for my mother,” says Tiffany. “She was then invited by Rockfield to be the resident in-house cook and I lived there for a year.”

It’s not hard to see that Rockfarm, the setting for Diamond Star Halo, owes at least its name to the time Tiffany spent at the worldfamous Rockfield Studios “The geography of the farm is the same,” admits Tiffany, “but the characters and the plot are completely and utterly fictional.”

Explaining what prompted the plot of the new novel, Tiffany explains: “I like to write about subjects and characters that fascinate me and I am trying to find something out about. I just liked the idea of domesticating the rock and roll world, so setting it in a recording studio made sense.

“I also knew that capturing the reality of a rock star would be a challenge, but I knew I couldn’t write from the point of view of the star. I wanted to write it from an observer’s viewpoint.”

That observer is five-yearold Halo Llewellyn, who nightly listens to her father’s prayers for the roll-call of the rock ’n’ roll dead, the heroes that inspired him to build Rockfarm, a family-run recording studio in the Welsh Marches.

In the summer of 1977 a shimmering American rock band called Tequila step off their silver tour bus, but when they leave they leave a tangible reminder in the form of baby Fred.

Growing up at Rockfarm, Fred is everybody’s favourite, especially Halo’s, and it soon becomes clear to his adopted family that stardom is in his veins. By 17 his ambition has propelled him out into the world, leaving behind a despondent Halo, who seems unable to get on with her own life.

Tiffany studied at the University of East Anglia and has taught Creative Writing there, as well as at the universities of Bath, Manchester, Arvon and, most recently, Wales.

Her first novel was shortlisted for the Bollinger /Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing, and in 2005 she received an Arts Council Award.