Julian Gough: An adventurous journey from Toasted Heretic to Rabbit & Bear
Julian Gough's has just released the latest in his Rabbit & Bear series of children's books.
Anyone who has been less than enthused by the bedtime reading routine with a small person will empathise with Julian Gough, who, one particular evening was struggling to get through “the most boring children’s book in the long history of the world” with his daughter Sophy, then aged six.
However, not many will go to the lengths that he did to address the situation — writing his own picture book, Rabbit’s Bad Habits.
It was a huge success, and now Gough, with illustrator Jim Field, has just released the fifth Rabbit and Bear Book, A Bad King is a Sad Thing, in which the beloved duo face up to a mean and power-hungry ice bear.
“It is probably a slight overreaction to entirely change your life and develop a new career just because you are annoyed with a book,” says Gough, who was previously frontman of Irish band Toasted Heretic.
He was born in London, raised in Tipperary, lived in Galway, and is now based in Berlin. Sophy is now 16, and he also has a two-year-old son, Arlo. Gough has written novels, plays, and poems, including, somewhat randomly, the narrative poem at the end of the multi-million selling video game Minecraft.
“I like trying new things, I like to stretch myself,” he says.
Gough also wanted to traverse new ground in the latest Rabbit book, exploring what he considers to be a shortcoming in many children’s books.
“There is a tendency in children’s books to say you can solve all your problems with kindness, compassion and empathy — if you are nice the world will be nice back," says Gough.
"That is true a lot of the time but it is very traumatic when it is not true and for a lot of kids, it is not. They have problems in their lives that are bigger than they are, that they won’t be able to solve with kindness, compassion and empathy. Children’s books have become a bit bad at acknowledging the real moral difficulty and complexity of some of the problems children might face.
"Fairytales were better at it, because back when half the children died before the age of five, there was no problem acknowledging that life was extremely cruel. There was no hiding from it — we hide from it now, and that is not necessarily good for children."
Like its predecessors, A Bad King is a Sad Thing underlines the power of kindness. "This book is really saying ‘what do you do when you can’t solve it by being nice?’.”
Gough loves interacting with his readers, and says he is still catching up with an email backlog from children wanting to know when the next Rabbit and Bear book would be arriving. It turned out that global events had conspired to delay their much-anticipated bedtime read.
“There were delays because of Brexit, then Covid, then the actual physical books were printed and they were caught up in the traffic jam in the Suez Canal. You don’t really expect that the little story you are telling is going to get caught up in this global supply chain problems but that’s the way the world is now,” he says.
As for music, Toasted Heretic recently released a remastered version of their 1992 album, Another Day, Another Riot, for streaming, including a previously unreleased track, Satellite Dishes. Could a reunion be on the cards?
“Well, we are all still alive, which is a start,” laughs Gough. “We have collaborated on re-releasing this stuff. We have another song that we recorded when we were teenagers about picking mushrooms that my wife insists was the best thing we ever did and we should put out immediately — we will think about it.”
Gough says his time as a musician seems like another life now.
“I look back on it very fondly but I have changed so much since those days. I have been married twice, I have had two kids and I have learned so much about myself. I think I am a better, more rounded person now but my God, it was fun at the time. I wouldn’t swap it for anything.”
* A Bad King is a Sad Thing, published by Hachette, is out now
- Myself and my wife loved Glow (Netflix) and we were heartbroken the last season didn’t get made because of Covid.
- Podcasts are an exciting art form in the way pop music was when I was younger. Blindboy’s mental health episodes are great. I like the way he is breaking the taboo around tough lads and therapy.
- I get into seisiúns with my 16-year-old daughter, where she will play a song she loves and then it sparks a song from me, it is like a Spotify tennis match. Over the last couple of years I’ve gotten into Lorde, Billie Eilish, and I’ve come to appreciate Lana Del Rey more than I ever thought I would.
- The next thing I want to write is a re-description of the universe using the tools of the novelist, so I have been reading a lot of physics, chemistry, astronomy and cosmology
