From the Keyboard Out:
On Writing Nicky Hopkins

Few spectacles in biography are bleaker than the sight of a writer punishing his subject for being larger than himself. There is a name for this in literary life: punitive framing. The quiet art of diminishing the subject through emphasis, through selection, through the inflection of what is left unsaid. It’s a tonal art. And Julian Dawson practices it with steady hand in his biography of Nicky Hopkins.

​

What you get instead of an inquiry is an unexamined chorus of minor acquaintances — the faintly aggrieved, the incurious, the middling — invited to scoff and diminish, their voices left unchallenged.

​

Dawson cites anonymous sources making character attacks — about private conduct and professional competence. He pathologizes Nicky's lifestyle as if it was some dismal aberration — without a faintest effort to situate it within the context of the 1970s rock culture. He collapses to one sentence a brilliantly creative woman in Nicky's life — Vanna Bonta — the relationship which showed the calibre of woman he could not just attract but enthral, as well as the calibre of man he actually was. He omits Nicky's own detailed account of why he missed Hyde Park — a pivotal moment when he might have joined the Stones as permanent member, something that would rewrite flakiness into heartbreak. And all the while failing to explore the creative voltage that ran through the man.

 

The voices of people who mattered — the ones with cultural weight — barely make an appearance. Keith Richards surfaces, but in clipped fragments. Even when Dawson quotes from his conversations with Mick Taylor or Bill Wyman, he can't seem to form a real question: about the epoch, its psychic climate. About what it felt like to hold power in that moment, or to witness someone who was giving it up. He doesn't ask what kind of man Nicky was in sessions that shaped the era. He doesn't ask about kindness, or cost. He doesn't ask whether the exploitation machine was ever even named among those men.

 

The book is full of microdoses of toxins throughout, but there comes a point when it all gets too much: around the moment he lets petty family grievances masquerading as insight to smear Nicky’s mother — the woman who gave him the piano, his first understanding of sound, who stood by him through every turn — and Dawson lets it stand unframed, untested. The words come from someone who never stood beside Nicky, yet Dawson gives them unchallenged room.

 

The end result? A book which renders the very quality that made Hopkins extraordinary — the courage of his unguardedness — as something pitiful, a book which flattens what it can't parse. Turned against someone who cannot reply and who never defended his own myth, the effect is dismal.

 

And then there is the problem of genre: a biography about an extraordinary musician which doesn't explore musicianship. Because to write about Hopkins without a working grasp of classical music, without even the basic grammar of jazz, is a category error. If you can't hear how the high register of Nicky's playing descends straight from Chopin's Nocturnes, then you are deaf to the logic of his character. You are, in effect, narrating in the dark. It's like tackling a biography of Menuhin and spending your pages on what he was like in hotel lobbies. And in this book Hopkins gets narrated from hotel lobbies rather than from the keyboard out.

 

Finally, there is a tic of this book which makes you doubt Dawson’s understanding of a biographer’s method. He takes details from Nicky’s life — things long reported by working journalists — and sets them down as if they had drifted to him out of the air. That’s allowed, maybe, but it leaves you wondering: who first said this, and when, and where? The worse offense is quieter: Time and again Dawson quotes Nicky himself, lifting his words straight from old interviews printed in real papers, without saying where they came from. What’s left is a cut-off path for anyone who might come after, trying to follow the truth back to its source.

 

In the end, Dawson comes across as small. Small in imagination, in empathy, in understanding of his subject’s scale and of biographer’s craft. The gossip, the omissions, the flattening of genius — all of it is not flamboyant cruelty; it's the steady, low-temperature tone-deafness of a man writing downward, keeping his subject within the reach of his own comprehension. And that’s why the book feels culturally illiterate rather than malicious — pettiness disguised as portraiture.

 

A competent acquiring or developmental editor would have caught all of it: the tonal imbalances, the sourcing, the shallow philosophy. And perhaps that’s the chicken-and-egg of it: did serious publishing houses pass because the book was misframed from the start, or because no capable editor ever laid a hand on it? Perhaps it's the chicken. Serious publishers do take risks — but only when there is real intellect at the table.