All is Given: A Memoir in Songs by Linda Neil, University of Queensland Press, 2016

Ed Kuepper’s version of Phil Jones and the Unknown Blues’s If I had a Ticket is a gem. His masterstroke on this track is the use of a single violinist who unearths a sort of eastern atomosphere in the minor key of the song. The garage groove of the original gives way to a desert caravan jam. It’s a remarkable performance. The violinist is an Australian writer called Linda Neil. Her new book is called All is Given: A Memoir in Songs and it’s a gem too.

It feels more like a collection of songs than a linear memoir. There is certainly a narrative thread here but it is largely thematic, like an LP perhaps. Linda Neil is a wanderer and a listener. The book starts with a party where she is, Coleridge style, prevailed upon to listen to a story. We don’t hear the tale but the stage is set for a memoir where her story will be woven with those of the people she meets. This is not a standard musician’s memoir. The ‘songs’ in the title are largely metaphorical. Nick Hornby she ain’t.

The relationship between travel and music is subtle and deeply personal. While listening to a raga musician stumble over a scale and give up, Neil recognizes that she has done the same in music and in life but that travel is somehow the answer. She likens it to ‘the thing in music that shrinks inside the thing that grows’. Music itself is in the background but music as metaphor grounds the narrative as we follow her through China, India, Nepal, Mongolia, Paris and Sydney.

In Kathmandu, she meets Gabriel who will become ‘her Gabriel’ but that’s in the future. The story is about a chance meeting and the discovery of a recording studio. Travel, at its best, is spontaneous. A few hours spent in the company of an intriguing stranger, finding something that you weren’t looking for, getting lost and not really minding, are all part of the nomadic life Neil celebrates.

I was reminded, at points, of Patti Smith’s M Train. Linda too has a unique and unconventional view of the world. Like Patti, she tells her stories in a self-deprecatory tone that is never alienating or pretentious. It is easy to imagine standing in a long line at an Indian train station, chatting to her about weather, food, books or, indeed, music. She manages to capture the rhythms of travel in her prose. Many writers attempt this trick; very few pull it off.

Linda Neil

Whether it’s a story from her childhood in rural Queensland or a conversation with a guitar player in Paris, there is the sense that the richness of the experience is in the experience itself rather than the location. Her approach to travel is slow and thoughtful. On an early trip, her luggage disappears after a flight to Kolkata and she falls in with a group of volunteers at Mother Teresa’s mission there. The real adventure was supposed to take place when she headed south from that city but it is the afternoon spent in the mission that she remembers.

In Sydney in the early 90s, she heard Ed Kuepper’s The Way I Made You Feel on the radio and thought, ‘that needs a violin, my violin’. A little while later she ran into Ed himself on the streets of Newtown while on her way to Social Security. She mentioned her idea and gave him her number. It’s easy to imagine Ed Kuepper often fielding offers of this sort but, remarkably, he called her a few months later to play on his version of The Loved Ones’ Sad Dark Eyes. Neil became a regular member of his band and can be heard on a number of his albums. As a longtime Waterboys fanatic, I consider myself a connoisseur of the rock and roll fiddle. Her work with Ed must be heard. Start with Kuepper’s Character Assassination, a wonderful LP from the mid 90s.

Her violin playing is like her writing, filled with travel tales and experience. She is classically trained but her style has absorbed many different sounds and rhythms from her journeys. The album on her Bandcamp site, Beautiful on the Inside, feels like an extension of the book. The lightness of touch, the evocation of spirit, and the sheer warmth is as present in the music as it is in her storytelling.