So when I started reading the book on Rupert Brooke, I looked at the pictures and saw Virginia Woolf in there and Lytton Strachey and wow, you know. But the new information that I didn't know was that Violet Asquith had a crush on Rupert Brooke. It got me to thinking: She was probably the last civilian to see him alive, because she was standing on the beach when his troopship sailed off for the Dardanelles campaign, which he didn't get to because he died [from blood poisoning on his way to battle]. So, I thought, what if Violet Asquith had married Rupert Brooke? As it happens, she married a fellow called Bonham-Carter, and her granddaughter is now a successful actress. Helena Bonham-Carter would be a different person if her grandfather had been Rupert Brooke. You get started on these paths and it can lead to madness (laughs), but it's still an interesting conjecture.

So, I thought, there's Violet Asquith standing on the beach waving goodbye to Rupert Brooke. Whatever happens, their lives are never going to be the same, in the way that World War I changed the world. In my way of thinking, World War I is the dividing line between the old world and the new, modern one we're still living in. In the way it changed the world, it also changed the lives of these two people. Brooke hadn't got long to live, even though he didn't know it. Violet Asquith was destined to live for a very, very long time, to become best friends with Winston Churchill and then, eventually, a leading figure in the Liberal Party. And, as I said, her granddaughter grows up to be an actress. Rupert Brooke becomes the first rock and roll star.

ND: (Cracks up.)

AS: Well, he wasn't a very good poet. He wrote one poem that I really like and two more than I did quite like, and then a load of terrible stuff that is very dated. But he looked absolutely great. He looked like a rock star, a godlike figure — he looked exactly like what a poet is supposed to look like.

ND: He was beautiful, yes.

AS: Rupert Brooke sets this mold into which everybody comes, from Nick Drake to Jim Morrison.

ND: Golden gods.

AS: Brooke was the first of the James Deans; the list goes on and on and on. So I tend to look at him as the first rock and roll star. "Somewhere in England, 1915" is an interesting lead-in to "Class of '58." You're dealing in a way with the same sort of thing, but from a radically different angle.

ND: Substance falling second to image...

AS: There you go. The other song I really like, which no one else seems to like, is "Out in the Snow."

ND: I admit, it took me a bit to warm up to that one, but over time, "Out in the Snow" — its moodiness, the strings of images — well, it's become endlessly intriguing to me. I wanted to ask you: What were you thinking of when you wrote it?