The 10 best songs based on books – in pictures

You read it … we'll hum it

Sufjan Stevens

A Good Man is Hard to Find

In the title story of Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 collection A Good Man is Hard to Find, a wandering serial killer known as the Misfit murders three generations of a middle-class Georgia family. You might imagine that a song based on O’Connor’s story would reflect its searing misanthropy and moral pitilessness. But Stevens, a Christian like O’Connor, does what he does best here, exploring human darkness with the illuminating beauty of his gentle voice and affecting melody. For more pleasant songs about mass murderers, see Stevens’s John Wayne Gacy, Jr

Photograph: PR

Joy Division

Atrocity Exhibition

Though the song takes its title from JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, Ian Curtis apparently only got around to actually reading the book when he had already written most of the lyrics. Apart from its unyielding darkness, it doesn’t have a whole lot in common with Ballard’s 1970 treasury of oddities. Regardless, it’s impossible to hear Curtis intoning the words 'This is the way, step inside' without feeling a pleasurable chill of dread. The first song on the band’s final album Closer, this is one of
the great opening gambits in the history of rock


Photograph: Redferns

Nirvana

Scentless Apprentice

German writer Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: the Story of a Murderer is about an 18th century French orphan born with a prodigious sense of smell whose desire to cultivate the perfect scent leads him to become a prolific murderer of virgins. Kurt Cobain was a huge fan and the book inspired one of Nirvana’s most bludgeoningly heavy tracks. Lines like 'Every wet nurse refused to feed him/Electrolytes smell like semen' seem slightly less random if you’ve read Süskind’s book, and this is a stunning reminder of how elemental a musical force Nirvana could be


Photograph: Steve Pyke/Getty

Philip Glass

Company

'A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine. To one on his back in the dark.' So begins Samuel Beckett’s late prose work, Company, as thrillingly bleak and austere a piece of writing as he ever put his name to. Philip Glass’s string quartet in four movements (composed as incidental music for a 1984 dramatisation of Company) is quietly reflective of Beckett’s terse, beautiful prose, but perhaps more by chance than by design. Glass’s trademark elements – recursive arpeggiations and stark, wintry strings – are in place here, and make an apt counterpoint to Beckett’s work

Photograph: Tom Keller/AP

Jefferson Airplane

White Rabbit

Drawing heavily on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this 1967 psychedelic anthem fairly reeks of acid. Just as listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son makes the most mundane tasks – cleaning the oven, filing tax returns – feel like you’re being choppered in for a tour of duty in ’Nam, hearing Grace Slick sing White Rabbit makes you feel as though you’ve taken some psychotropic substance and are about to follow Alice down the rabbit hole. It’s difficult to think of a song more representative of late 1960s freak culture

Photograph: Jan Persson/Redferns

The Velvet Underground

Venus in Furs

The Velvets at their pitch-black best, this takes its name from an 1870 novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whose name the term masochism is derived), and explores the same bleak terrain of sexual cruelty and enslavement. John Cale’s swooping viola and Lou Reed’s eccentric guitar tunings create a queasy backdrop for the elegantly depraved lyrics: 'Taste the whip in love not given lightly/Taste the whip, now bleed for me'. No band has been further ahead of its time, and no subject matter has ever suited them better.

This entry was corrected on 27/9/11 to remove an erroneous reference to the composer John Cage. Apologies for the confusion


Photograph: Steve Schapiro/Corbis

Kate Bush

Wuthering Heights

Bush was 19 when she recorded the song in 1978, and part of its beauty is the way it combines a teenager’s earnestness and melodrama with something far more unfamiliar and unaccountable. After 33 years and countless cover versions (not to mention two separate screen renditions by Steve Coogan), the song still retains its essential strangeness. Bush’s fantastically histrionic vocal performance as Cathy standing outside Heathcliff’s window should by rights be slightly ridiculous but is never less than compelling




Photograph: Rex Features

Bruce Springsteen

The Ghost of Tom Joad

The Ghost of Tom Joad is the Boss at the top of his game. Tom Joad – the hero of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath – is not the only ghostly presence here. Woody Guthrie’s The Ballad of Tom Joad, which draws from the same literary source, is in attendance, and Bob Dylan’s influence is apparent. The injustices of the present – homelessness and police brutality – haunt the song as much as the ghosts of the past. Speaking of injustice, the song has been covered by Rage Against the Machine, but the less said about that the better


Photograph: Gamma/Getty

Mastodon

Blood and Thunder

If Moby-Dick was a rock group, it would be Mastodon. The Atlanta metal band’s music reveals a genuine affinity with Herman Melville’s writing. This is part of what makes their Moby-Dick-based concept album Leviathan such an exhilarating experience. Its opening track is a torrential assault of Ahab-like ferocity. Singer Troy Sanders becomes the monomaniacal skipper as he commands his listeners to point their harpoons at the white whale: 'Aim directly for his crooked brow/And look him right in the eye'

Photograph: PR

The Cure

Killing an Arab

You might, on first listen, suspect this track of casual anti-Islamism. However, the opening lines – 'Standing on a beach with a gun in my hand/Staring at the sea, staring at the sand/Staring down the barrel at the Arab on the ground' – allude to the central scene in Albert Camus’ The Outsider, in which Mersault, half-deranged by the heat of the Algerian sun, murders an Arab for no good reason. Wary of further inflaming anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of 9/11, Robert Smith has taken to performing the song live as 'Kissing an Arab'




Photograph: Rex Features