Rocking all over the word

Lou Reed's new album, 'The Raven,' sets the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe to music. But rock musicians should beware - they degrade both song and writing when they lig with literature, writes Steve Jelbert

Despite the obvious appeal a career in music holds over juggling with the written word (pro: better money, more opportunities for casual sex, less risk of facing probing artistic questions afterwards, posterior keeps its shape; contra: see above), rock musicians remain fascinated by the cultural longevity of written works. Lou Reed's latest record is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, finally providing some proper recognition for this enduring American classic. This from a man whose best loved band, the Velvet Underground, took their name from a pulp paperback about suburban sex games found on a New York sidewalk by a friend.

Hmm, even Homer Simpson has been there, done The Raven, in a Hallowe'en special. And can we wholly trust a man who once helped pen a few tunes for a "concept album" by Kiss? Not even the sleevenote writer could get enthusiastic, even for money, when Music From "The Elder" was reissued a few years back.

Reed, who went to university where he drank with poet Delmore Schwartz and may also have studied, is at least qualified to have a go, being one of the few rock lyricists whose work has been deemed worthy of publication by someone else. The literate dabbling with great works might not lead to great art, but the intentions are usually sincere. More embarrassing are attempts to show a veneer of sophistication through namedropping. Sting is always a safe bet for laughs, but never forget that "Don't Stand so Close to Me", the former teacher's warning about frisky fifth formers, featured the immortal clunker "like the old man in that book by Nabokov". Perhaps "Woodhead" didn't rhyme. He later bigged up Geoffrey Chaucer with his 1989 album Ten Summoners Tales, his real name being, yes, Gordon Sumner. A nation laughed as if watching a rarely staged Restoration comedy.

The desperation of rock stars to convince their audience that they too have read a book knows no bounds, and fashion can never be discounted. What better way for Bono to prove his marvellousness to the world than by inviting Salman Rushdie onto the stage at Wembley Stadium to share the adulation. In return Rushdie wrote a crappy lyric for U2, who as yet, have not been threatened with a fatwa. God moves in mysterious ways.

Similarly, the belated English publication of Mikhail Bulgakov's great The Master and Margarita in the late Sixties coincided with many leisured young toffs discovering that its atmosphere of fantastical malevolence mirrored their own experiences of lying in bed in Chelsea, and the Rolling Stones thus penned "Sympathy for the Devil".More recently Martin Amis's London Fields became the urtext of Britpop, as Blur's Damon Albarn and his partner Elastica's Justine Frischmann found its, um, atmosphere of fantastical malevolence quite convincing, unlike everyone else on the planet, and it influenced their best known works, which have also dated quite badly.

Perhaps musicians just don't read much any more, what with GameBoys and mobile-phone porn to distract them. Nominally Liam Gallagher and Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch share an interest in C S Lewis. Yet Murdoch seems mainly to have admired Lewis's habit of replying to admirers in longhand, while Gallagher boasted the only book he'd ever finished was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. You don't sense a thesis. Unsurprisingly too, hard working metal veterans Anthrax admire Stephen King. Even Brett Anderson of Suede, that master of gauche references, recently claimed he'd stopped reading for years in case influences seeped into his work. Sadly he's now back on the books, which explains his recent Sting-esque line "you don't read Camus or Brett Easton Ellis'. Well, who does these days, dear?

Much easier than reading is simply identifying with writers who in some way reflect the presumed rock lifestyle. William Burroughs is sometimes credited with devising the very term "heavy metal" and Dan took their name from a dildo mentioned in Naked Lunch, but it's his heroin addiction which sealed his place in the pantheon. No wonder Kurt Cobain worked with him. Jack Kerouac hated rock'n'roll, but now a band called Pretty Girls Make Graves, a line taken from his The Dharma Bums (and also a Smiths song title) do the rounds. Despite still being alive, Hunter S Thompson remains respected for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, itself an extended article originally published in a rock magazine.

Yet once British music was blessed with an endearing strain of autodidactic pomposity, which perhaps peaked with the Smiths, when Morrissey kept finding new and better ways to refer to Shelagh Delaney and Oscar Wilde. Possibly the last great example of this were the Manic Street Preachers, whose best known tune starts with the clarion call "libraries gave us power" and who gloriously claimed to be stronger than "Mailer, Miller, Plath and Pinter". It's true. Old Norman has admitted to some loss of sexual interest in recent years.

So prevalent was this form in the eighties, when David Bowie (who has definitely read books) was still worshipped, that Heaven 17, a band named after a fictional band in A Clockwork Orange, were high in the charts. David Sylvian (né Batt) lovingly quoted Sartre, yet only in finding poverty did he match his inspiration. Even Dexy's Midnight Runners' first single "Dance Stance" boasted a chorus which was simply a list of great Irish writers. Sadly Echo and the Bunnymen used secondary sources for their hapless "My White Devil", which simply quoted from a found English essay on John Webster, and got the title of The Duchess of Malfi wrong along the way. It's a thin line between stupid and clever. And I haven't even mentioned Lloyd Cole, or his present day Mini-Me Brian Molko.

Will this ever happen again? I have my doubts. Sadly today the sort of people who might once have written a song inspired by a book are too busy writing books about the sort of people who might write a song about a book to write songs. And who's going to write a song inspired by a novel which simply rabbits on about, ooh, crying babies, unreliable home helps and supermarket chardonnay? Can publishers be blamed?

Yet classics endure (as well as being pre-sold), and their appeal lasts through the generations. When an eighteen year old Kate Bush summarised "Wuthering Heights" in three minutes that was simply, and rightly, sixth form stuff from a sixth former. Years later, she interpreted Molly Bloom's monologue from Joyce's Ulysses on The Sensual World. And one day, she'll doubtless turn to the menopause, if anyone's still listening. Has anyone written a book about it?