On a warm August evening. Salman Rushdie walked on to the stage and looked out over a sea of screaming fans. It was hard to see much beyond the first row, the photographers and security men, because of the vast quantity of light being blasted at him. But he could feel the animal of 85,000 people out there, and hear it roar. Because the roar from the back of the crowd had so much further to travel to get to the stage than the noise from the front, it came at him in waves. Not a phenomenon you encounter often at your average book reading. But then this wasn't your average book reading.
In fact it wasn't a book reading at all. The biggest crowd Rushdie has ever read to is 2,500 people ("pretty fucking big for a reading," he explains, "but it's not 85,000"). No, this was a rock concert: Wembley Stadium, 1993, U2's Zooropa tour - a massive multimedia, multi-everything, global-village-on-the-move of a rock concert. In many ways not dissimilar to a Rushdie novel. With a gesture that defied the fatwa, Bono had invited the writer to crawl out of hiding for a couple of minutes, to show friendship and solidarity. And that was the night that Salman Rushdie found out how it felt to be a pop star.
Now, almost six years on, Rushdie has written a novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It's a tale of earthquakes, love and rock'n'roll, the Orpheus myth retold - and messed about with, as you'd expect. Ormus, the Orpheus character, is a moody Bombay musician, with a guitar in place of Orpheus's liar. His Eurydice is Vina, an Indian American with the most beautiful voice in the world. And instead of Orpheus going to Hades to fetch Eurydice, it's Vina who brings Ormus back from dead after a car crash. It's a stonking great triple album of a book. Make that a boxed set, in fact.
We're on the top floor at Rushdie's publisher in London, with plates of sandwiches and a view over Pimlico. The eyes are much better thank you and, contrary to some reports, the operation - quite a routine one to lift the eyelids - hasn't made him look like Tony Blair. He looks just like Salman Rushdie, in fact, and he's relaxed and chatty. Two very unbookish-looking men with neatly-pressed grey trousers wait in the corridor, chatting up the Antipodean secretary. But she seems unimpressed by Special Branch charm. I hadn't been searched, and Rushdie says his freedom situation is slowly, very slowly, getting better. We're not here to talk about a fatwa, though: we're here to talk about rock'n'roll.
Rushdie, now 51, has grown up alongside pop music. "I feel it's my contemporary. When I was a kid, like everybody else, I sang into broom handles, imitated Elvis with squash rackets, practised the pelvis wiggle and so on. And I felt as I grew up that the development of pop music or rock'n'roll more or less mirrored that development."
Bombay, when Rushdie was a kid in the fifties, wasn't exactly drenched in rock'n'roll. He had piano and sitar lessons at home. There was very little western music on state radio for post-colonial reasons, but Radio Ceylon was more relaxed if you could get it. And Bombay was a very international city, so there were records coming in. There was even a record store called Rhythm House (the Bombay record store in the book is called Rhythm Centre), where you could get imports: Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Drifters, Elvis. "I think the first time I ever heard Elvis was in this room of a friend of my sister who lived in an apartment down the road, and she had some Elvis records. She, coincidentally, was the first girl I ever kissed, but that's another story." The first record Rushdie bought was Heartbreak Hotel.
In 1961, Rushdie found a new place to dwell - in England. He attended Rugby public school where he got a solid grounding in the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Dylan ("I remember very vividly the moment of listening to Dylan - I'd never heard a noise like it.") He went on to Cambridge University, where things got more psychedelic and West Coast -Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish. Unlike the President, Rushdie says he did inhale, although he never dropped acid. "An opium-hashish mixture was as extreme as I got. Which I have to tell you was very nice." And he giggles at the memory.
Then in the summer of 1967 Rushdie took a room over a fashionable clothes shop somewhere down the King's Road - and there were all the goings on you'd expect at a place like that. "There was this woman who worked in the shop downstairs. She just sat there all day in total darkness with incense, in a micro-mini and purple eyeshadow and very, very long false eyelashes. And kind of wasted, you know; she made Twiggy look overweight. I thought I'd go in and say hello, so I went in and said, `Hello, my name's Salman and I'm living upstairs, and we haven't said hello, so I just thought I'd come down and say hello, so, you know, hello.' She looked at me, with the most contemptuous look I've ever been given and said, `Conversation's dead, man.' And I thought, there's a lesson."
In his book, Ormus learns similar lessons over a similar shop, somewhere down the King's Road.
Rushdie went to gigs - to the famous Mothers of Invention concert at the Albert Hall, which everyone claims to have been at, and the 24-hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace ("the place was full of people sleeping and throwing up"). And he got into Pink Floyd, Bowie, and the Velvet Underground. "I suppose that's the music of my youth, all that stuff. The rest of it is just to keep me in touch. I like all kinds of things, but the music of your youth is the one that sticks. I stopped listening around the Bay City Rollers. And then I tuned back in about 10 years later."
I thought Rushdie might have been a T Rex person, seeing something of Marc Bolan about Ormus - the gyrating hips, even a Mini crash - but he says it wasn't a conscious decision. There's even a band called Trex in the book, but then there are endless references to bands and real people. These are often distorted, just in case you were thinking you were in the real world: so Van Morrison becomes Zoo Harrison, John Lennon sings Satisfaction, Madonna turns up, but as an art critic, there's a Debbie H, an Uncle Meat, a D J Jellybean, Brian Wilson is a Delphic Oracle and the Lizard King dies in his bath. What's all that about, then?
"The book does this thing about making a `slightly other reality',' Rushdie explains. "And so it was just an enjoyable way of doing it. It's called The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and the ground is shaking and uncertain and unreliable. I thought, do it to the reader as well, just progressively pull the rug out. So much of this stuff is probably the last worldwide shared piece of culture. You could actually make these references and everybody could play the game, in the way that once, perhaps, you could have made references to classical mythology."
At the centre of The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a band, VTO, and at the centre of the band are Ormus and Vina (part Tina Turner, part Madonna, with a bit of Joni Mitchell, Cher even). I found it hard to imagine her voice. Or the sound of the band. They're a rock band but they do Pakistani qawwals and have Cuban horns, and Chilean woodwinds. Rushdie describes them as "more Righteous than the Righteous Brothers, Everlier than the Everlys, Supremer than the Supremes . . . " but what does this all mean? What do they sound like?
Bono thought it was a band George Harrison might have wanted to have something to do with. And he has written a song to accompany the book which will be on the next U2 album. It's a love song, the song Ormus sings to Vina after her death, Orpheus's lament, and Rushdie says it's very beautiful. But even he is not sure what his band sound like. "With each song I could probably think of a different sort of sound. They're not one band, they're a kind of Frankenstein collage of loads of bands in my head."
And it's not supposed to be believable or convincing? "I thought the proposition - leaving aside the issue of Freddie Mercury - of the biggest rock star in the history of rock'n'roll being Indian was clearly outrageous. But if I'd been trying to slot somebody in between the Beatles and the Stones, or if I'd been trying to find an American singer who was bigger than Elvis, it would have been much harder to make plausible."
The issue of Freddie Mercury is left aside because he was that very thing: an Indian rock star, though he didn't really draw attention to his race. Like Ormus in the book, Mercury was a Bombay Parsee, and though VTO are nothing like Queen, Rushdie says, they do share some of that Bollywood glamour, a kind of vulgar excess that Rushdie seems to revel in.
JUST recently, Asian music has taken a big leap into the mainstream. What is commonly called the Asian Underground has come overground; Cornershop, Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation have all achieved much wider audiences, something Rushdie acknowledges and is pleased about. "During the writing of the book, it started coming true, and by the end of the book it was much more true than it was at the beginning. That's nice because it creates a slightly different context for the book to be published into than existed when I first worked on it."
But his own preference for music seems to be on a grander scale. As well as being mates with Bono and U2 manager Paul McGuinness, Rushdie knows Mark Knopfler, the Everly Brothers, David Byrne and Lou Reed, and he recently met Damon and Alex from Blur which he enjoyed. He likes REM and Sheryl Crow, and Jewel, and he'd like to like the Smashing Pumpkins but just can't.
"It's not rational why you like music, you can't explain it. It either speaks to you or it doesn't. And I've made serious efforts to like the Smashing Pumpkins, but failed."
Rushdie realises that his music, rock'n'roll, isn't what kids are listening to anymore. "They're listening to everything else - trance, techno gunge, anything except rock'n'roll." He has a 20-year-old son who goes "clubbing all the fucking time - too much for my liking".
Dance music sneaks in at the end of the novel, with VTO experimenting with loops and swirls and twirls and technical sound mattress. Even Eno, once a DJ on Radio Freddy (there go those references) becomes "the undisputed king of the loop, the czar of texture". But this isn't Rushdie's music. And he doesn't have much time for the poppier end of pop either - about the Spice Girls, he has "no feelings". He has lots of CDs, but he doesn't do the Nick Hornby thing ("I'm incredibly female. All that stuff about making lists and obsessing, I'm not at all like that.") He has snuck off to the odd gig in the last 10 years - Dylan in New York, U2 of course, the Stones.
He denies rumours that he does a Mick Jagger impersonation as a party trick, though he admits he has been known to do the funky chicken and walk the dog from time to time. The music helped: "I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I find it gets in the way of the other music, the kind of music I'm trying to make. But it can get me in the mood. And certainly I listen to it when I stop writing."
So what's he writing now? "I really hate not having a book to write," he says. "I know where it is now, and I've got notes. But I'm not quite sure where it goes." Bombay, London, New York again? "No it's going to be completely different. Shall I tell you? No, I'm not going to." Oh, go on. "Well at this moment it feels like some kind of futuristic thriller thing, and that's all I'm going to say - but of course by the time it gets written it will be a historical novel. Things change."
Salman Rushdie will be in Dublin shortly to promote The Ground Beneath Her Feet, published by Jonathan Cape, £18 in the UK