‘Like a gothy yoghurt starter’: how Neil Gaiman and an Australian string quartet fell in love

Neil Gaiman is well known for his melodic, dreamy voice, which has been put to use on everything from audiobooks to voicing the Simpson’s cat Snowball. But Neil Gaiman the singer? When he’d occasionally perform live with his ex-wife, the musician Amanda Palmer, his voice was described by the New York Times, perhaps a little unkindly, as “a novelist’s version of singing”.

Next month Gaiman is bringing that voice to the Sydney Opera House, where he’ll be performing with the Australian string quartet FourPlay. How is he feeling about singing on one of the most prestigious stages in the world?

“Terrified. Absolutely terrified,” Gaiman sighs. “I’ve had to learn to trust FourPlay. I’m always reassured by the fact that Lara can actually sing.”

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“I’ve been a singer for 30 years and I’m equally terrified, Neil!” interjects Lara Goodridge, one part of FourPlay along with Shenzo Gregorio and brothers Tim and Peter Hollo. “We are all vulnerable on stage together. But I think that’s a really lovely part of it – we’re there to catch each other. It’s exciting to be that alive.”

How a goth English novelist and an Australian string quartet that does Metallica and Radiohead covers became a match made in heaven seems beyond words even for Gaiman, who recalls it as “like going on a blind date where you really hit it off”.

The author and band met in 2010 when FourPlay were commissioned by the Sydney Opera House to soundtrack a live reading of Gaiman’s novella The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains.

“A Neil story is a really meaty and fun thing to write to,” Goodridge says. “But having Neil in the room was terrifying …” Gaiman laughs, and Goodridge adds hastily “… for a short period of time, because we worked out that he’s awesome and wonderful. I think that is part of the magic of Neil: the beautiful, collaborative spirit that he has.”

That one show in Sydney led to Gaiman and FourPlay going on tour in the US and the UK, performing in Carnegie Hall and London’s Barbican. “At one point we were on stage in Hobart making weird sounds with David Byrne and Brian Ritchie,” Gaiman says. “I think it was Lara who actually said we had to record some of this, so it didn’t go to waste.”

Their album Signs of Life is the spooky result, a concept album based around a new zodiac contructed by Gaiman, along with a few other curios that snuck in – a haunting poem he wrote and performed about Australia Day back in 2011; his and Ben Folds’ song about Joan of Arc, titled The Problem with Saints.

At times, FourPlay’s spidery plucking and mournful bass recalls Bruno Coulais’ score for Coraline, the animated adaptation of Gaiman’s book of the same name: it seems there is something in his writing that can inspire a certain ethereal, grave eeriness.

“It’s like a gothy yoghurt starter,” Gaiman muses. “The gothy yoghurt starter that oozes through. You were going to say something so much more sensible than that, Lara.”

“No I wasn’t,” Goodridge laughs.

Gaiman and Goodridge sing together on Bloody Sunrise, a kind of dark doo-wop track about vampires. “I love that I can say things to Lara [like] ‘this is a lost Petula Clark song, if the follow-up song to Downtown was about a grumpy vampire being unable to bond with people’ and she’s like, ‘Oh right!’ And that’s exactly what comes out of her,” Gaiman says. “It is amazing.”

Signs of Life debuted at No 1 on Billboard’s classical crossover chart and has floated around there ever since. “I’m still baffled, amazed, delighted and sort of gloriously weirded out by that. I figured we’d sell some copies to the FourPlay fans and some copies to the Neil fans. But instead it has become its own thing,” Gaiman says. “There are people buying the album who have no idea who we are, they just like it. It sits there on the charts, slowly becoming The Dark Side of the Moon of classical crossover.”

Though he’s known for his novels, TV shows and comics, Gaiman has written for musicians before: in 2011 he, Palmer, Folds and Damian Kulash of OK Go formed the supergroup 8in8 with the aim of writing and recording eight songs in eight hours (they ended up with six in 12). When he writes for FourPlay, he sometimes comes to them with lyrics or a piece of writing to compose to. At other times, “we will be jamming around a concept and Neil is writing in the corner, our music as his background”, Goodridge says.

“There’s often a point where Peter will say to Shenzo: ‘You know that thing you used to do where you’d make a noise like a car crashing? Can you do that, but add a little bit of seagull to it?’ And somehow Shenzo makes a noise that sounds like a car crashing into a seagull,” Gaiman says. “I feel very privileged to be allowed in.”

The last time Gaiman was in Australia was in March 2020, putting the final touches on Signs of Life as the world was closing down. “That was where my life changed,” he says. “So for me, coming to Sydney and Melbourne and performing with these guys is a giant fuck you to Covid.”

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At the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne’s Hamer Hall they will play Signs of Life along with “gloriously strange things nobody’s even heard yet”, as Gaiman puts it.

“There’s one piece based around rude words in a Victorian dictionary that I think is one of the coolest things we’ve ever done,” he says.

“It’s really long because there are a lot of rude words,” Goodridge adds.

“The Victorians really loved euphemisms for sex,” Gaiman says.

• Signs of Life is out now. Neil Gaiman and FourPlay are performing at the Sydney Opera House on 15 January and Hamer Hall, Melbourne on 18 January.