Joanne Harris: Why my latest project is a 21st century Jackanory (with drums)

IT was over music, rather than books, that Joanne Harris fell in love with her future husband, Kevin.

“I was 16 and he was 18 and we bonded over music, writing Pink Floyd lyrics on a desk. It was the early, low- tech equivalent of internet chat rooms,” she says.

They were both students at Barnsley Sixth Form College and when Kevin and a friend of theirs decided to set up a prog rock band, Harris was desperate to join them even though it meant learning to play a new instrument.

“I was a classically trained flautist and I fell in love with the drummer,” she says. “I wanted to join them but there’s not much call for a flautist in a progressive rock band so I bought a bass guitar and taught myself how to play.”

She remembers one of their end of year concerts. “We did a gig in the school hall doing covers of songs by the likes of Rick Wakeman, Pink Floyd and Genesis. Everyone in the audience sat down and listened and drank orange squash during the interval. Looking back it was hysterical.”

The band members then embarked on different careers – the keyboard player became an electrical engineer; the drummer, a land researcher for a building firm and Harris became a teacher before enjoying fame as a best-selling author. But in their spare time the friends continued playing songs and writing their own music.

And it is music that’s at the heart of the Yorkshire author’s latest project. Storytime blends music, song and fairytales – a kind of “Jackanory, with drums” as Harris puts it.

It all started with unpublished stories that she wrote on Twitter. “When I joined in 2010, I didn’t really know what to do on social media so I started writing stories for whatever audience I had. It was interesting because people started interacting with me while I was doing it,” she says.

“On Twitter you can only write at a certain pace and people you can only read at a certain pace and that makes it feel like a live performance and much more conversational. I was curious to create these tales and let them fly away.”

But rather than disappear into the ether like the old folk tales told around campfires in times gone by, her Twitter followers (at the last count she has over 28,000) began posting them back to her. “I realised that they liked the stories so I started collating them.”

She ended up with around 100 stories and started to shape them into a book. The illustrated collection of tales, Honeycomb, is due out next year, but in the meantime Harris was keen to do something with all these stories which is when she hit on the idea of setting some of them to music.

This she has done with help from the Storytime band, which includes her husband Kevin, by turning them into a series of stand-alone songs. Storytime was first performed at last year’s Huddersfield Literature Festival and went down well with those there. “They’ve asked me back so they must have liked it,” she says.

That’s in March, but before then she’s performing with the Storytime band at the University of Bradford next week. The project is still a work in progress – she would like to incorporate jugglers and fire-eaters in the future – and one that is constantly evolving. “The stories are bit like fairytales in the style of the old Grimm tales and there’s enough of them to allow us to do a different set each time.”

She initially planned to do most of the show herself but decided to bring in an extra pair of hands. “I realised I couldn’t play the flute, play bass and tell the stories as well as do all the links without losing something, so I’ve taken a bit of the pressure off by bringing in Matt, our bass player.”

By combining stories and music Harris is returning to an age-old tradition, albeit one that has moved to the fringes of cultural life in this country.

“I think people crave stories but it’s something they feel they have lost. A lot of people have asked me about the show because they haven’t had anybody tell them a story since they were little. Those who’ve seen it have said it’s a bit like listening to Jackanory and that it takes them back to their school days.”

She believes that adding music as well as a visual element can elevate stories so they have a different impact on the audience. “As a linguist and musician it’s interesting because when something is read aloud it brings a different dynamic than when you just read it on the page, it becomes more of a performance.”

It’s perhaps not the kind of thing you would normally associate with novelists, but then Harris isn’t your average author. “It’s never straightforward with me,” she says. “I like doing different things and I’ve never just got one project on the go.”

It’s a trait that has followed her throughout her life. Harris was born in Barnsley, the daughter of teachers. Her father, a Yorkshireman, met her French mother on an exchange in Brittany and brought her back to live above his parents’ sweet shop.

A bookworm from an early age, Harris went on to Cambridge where she read modern and medieval languages and had a brief career in accountancy before becoming a French teacher at Leeds Boys Grammar school.

Then came literary fame. Harris is still arguably best known for Chocolat, which became the must-read book of 1999 and was given a Hollywood makeover starring Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp and Alfred Molina. But her work also includes Gothic tales, French novels, cookbooks and even a libretto, just for good measure.

“Some people know me for Chocolat but I seem to have different kinds of audiences. There are people who’ve only read my fantasy books and people who’ve only read the Rune books, some people haven’t even read Chocolat but are interested in other things I do. I’m lucky to have such a loyal following.”

She was reminded of her diverse audience when she performed Storytime at an event in London last year. “Half the audience were clearly opera goers and the other half had come from a fantasy convention and were dressed as Ewoks or Mad Max. But they all seemed to have a good time, it was wonderful.”

Harris has been enthused by her back to basics approach to storytelling. “I’m cheered by what audiences have said to me. It does seem as though people are taken to a different place which is what we hoped would happen,” she says.

As well as challenging her from a creative point of view it’s also reinforced her belief in the innate power of stories.

“Although the world has changed the things that move us haven’t really changed. We’re still afraid of monsters and we still want love to save us.”

Storytime, featuring Joanne Harris, is on at the Small Hall, University of Bradford, on February 18 at 7pm, and at the Huddersfield Literature Festival on March 4.