The runaway international success of ‘TheShadow of theWind’ has made Carlos Ruiz Zafón rich, sought-after and deeply uneasy. In his first British interview, he tells Nigel Farndale why

As the shadows lengthen over the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, one symbol of the city, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, stands on his balcony contemplating another, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. Zafón’s fifth-floor studio is two blocks away from the cathedral and so affords extravagant, eye-level views of its spires. In silhouette, they look like melting chocolate. ‘I grew up in its shadow,’ Zafón says, gesturing at the cathedral, ‘but I can’t say I feel at home here. I’ve always felt like an outsider in Barcelona. Out of place.’

It is a curious comment when you consider that Zafón, a tall, thickset 40-year-old with a ‘comic-book guy’ goatee and narrow eyes, has become synonymous with the city – not least because part of the phenomenal international appeal of his novel, The Shadow of the Wind, is its setting: 1940s Barcelona. There are, indeed, three-hour walking tours (in English) of ‘Zafón’s Barcelona’, in the convention of Dickens’s London and Joyce’s Dublin. Zafón shrugs and says, in his fluent, high-registered English: ‘When a book gets under your skin, I guess you want to see the places described in it.’

The Shadow of the Wind has certainly got under people’s skin. Since it was launched in Spain, three years ago, it has swept like a contagion across continents. The English translation reached these shores last January and it hasn’t left the bestseller lists since, clocking up sales of close to a million. It is, as Zafón tells me, now the most successful Spanish novel ever published (Don Quixote must have slipped his mind). Yet the only country where it received a lukewarm reception was Spain. ‘Nobody got the book here,’ Zafón says. ‘In every other country it got reviews, usually good reviews, in the first couple of weeks. In Spain, I have only had two reviews. I think it was perceived as an anti-Spanish book; certainly, in terms of style, it was contrary to commercial fashion.’

He leads the way inside, entering what he calls the ‘dragon’s lair’, a room lined with bookshelves – and toy dragons. (He has collected 400 of them, or been given them by friends – his nickname being The Dragon.) ‘Sometimes,’ he says, handing me a bottle of beer, ‘I feel as if I have created a monster with this book, the way it jumps from country to country, I mean. It has been published in 40 countries now. I have more control over it than I did but, at one point, I felt I had mortgaged my entire life two years ahead.

‘Before it was even translated into a country’s language, I would be signed up to give a talk in that country, then I would forget that I had agreed, and the time would come and I would have to say, “Actually, I won’t be free until February 2008.” What the hell? It’s absurd. I sound like an opera diva. I feel drained by all the travel.’

This may sound as if Zafón is complaining, but his manner is gentle, friendly and engaging and he is, of course, delighted with the success of his debut ‘literary’ novel (he has written four others, but they were marketed as novels for ‘young adults’.) ‘The problem,’ he clarifies, ‘is that all I really ever want to do is write and I can’t write when I am travelling.’

At the moment, he is at work on a second novel set in Barcelona under the Franco regime – he envisages a ‘cycle’ of four. ‘I like to work at night and disappear from the world. I write from midnight to sunrise. It is my vampire time. I don’t like mornings. It is a metabolic function: my brain doesn’t really work then. I like the silence at night and the idea that the city is asleep. I find it easier to concentrate. The phone doesn’t ring.’

Does this routine make him difficult to live with? ‘My wife is also a night person. We go to bed really, really late. She is used to me. She is a translator and she likes to work on her translations into the night.’ The couple met 20 years ago, when they were both working in television advertising. They married in 1993 and, soon afterwards, moved to California, where they lived for 11 years and where Zafón worked as a scriptwriter.

He thinks the mass appeal of The Shadow of the Wind may have something to do with his cinematic approach to writing. In a methodical way, he studied directors as well as writers – ‘from Dickens to Cervantes to Orson Welles to Japanese animation’. He analysed the structure of narratives – ‘without prejudice of what is highbrow or lowbrow’ – to find the ingredients of storytelling. ‘I tend to think in images. My storytelling has much to do with film and with the grammar of images and sounds, but it always comes back to books. I am a keen collector of books. After writing, my great pleasure is reading.’

In The Shadow of the Wind characters often read deep into the night, enthralled, only for the sun to come up on cue as the last page is reached: the whole universe, it suggests, is at the service of the act of reading. In this respect, Zafón’s novel has been compared to Umberto Eco’s bestseller The Name of the Rose, a sophisticated but readable thriller that turned on the civilising qualities of stories themselves. The Shadow of the Wind, indeed, is the story of a novel called The Shadow of the Wind, which languishes, like thousands of others, in a labyrinthine mausoleum for out-of-print works, known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The Cemetery was not only a place of forgotten or neglected books, but of forgotten ideas and people; a metaphor for the systematic destruction of memory and history under Franco. The narrator of Zafón’s novel, Daniel Sempere, tries to find out what happened to the author of The Shadow of the Wind, Julián Carax. Carax’s books are hard to find, not least because a shadowy collector has been buying them up and burning them, one by one.

I ask Zafón what he thinks is the secret of his book’s popularity? ‘As readers, we want not only a strong story, but also characters we can relate to, characters that feel real. We have to find something of ourselves in them. Each character, even those only there to serve the mechanics of the plot, should have a number of layers. The entire world you are stepping into as a reader must feel real. It must have resonance, you must be able to touch the light; smell the smells.

‘You have to work hard to create this illusion. You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands. The writer must subjugate his ego: not advertise himself by saying “look how clever this sentence is”. That’s bullshit. You read that kind of fiction and you get bored by page three. It’s a pose. Difficult for difficult’s sake.’ A grin. ‘But the real secret? I re-rewrite to death.’

Zafón feels it is enough for him to know that his book is being enjoyed now – he has no interest in posterity. ‘I don’t care what happens in 100 years. I won’t be around.’ This indifference applies to children, too. ‘For some reason, I never felt the need to have kids. My wife feels the same. We don’t feel a void. I don’t think they would give my life meaning. I do think of the books as my children, though. Whatever is inside of me, I put into my books. After I’m gone, who knows? It might be in the third-hand bin. The way I like to live, working at night, hopping from country to country, disappearing for six months, it doesn’t suit children. When you decide to become a writer, you have to accept that you will have to be a bit selfish.’

Does his wife keep his feet on the ground, I ask, regarding the success of his novel? ‘I don’t think she has to. A big success can be very confusing if it comes too early in your life. When you are young, you are more vulnerable to vanity. I was 36 when I wrote The Shadow of the Wind and the success of it was very gradual. If you have this kind of success straight off, I think there is a danger you can become an idiot, because you don’t have a perspective. It hasn’t changed me a lot. I fly first class now. But those things don’t change you. If I am pretentious, I was before, I haven’t changed. The only thing is, I am less anxious now.’

What about his friends? Has he detected any jealousy among them? ‘You know who your true friends are when things go wrong for you, but the opposite is also true. When things go well, the people who really love you are happy. Only once has a friend been unhappy with my success. He become extremely uncomfortable within his perception of what he thought was my big success. I thought, “Hey man, calm down.”‘ Being a writer, Zafón adds, can be a lonely business. ‘You are on your own. You have to have self-belief.’

He did not lack for it as a child. Aged 13, he wrote an 800-page novel which he sent off to a number of publishers, without any takers. ‘It was a huge, gothic, bloody book. At the time, I thought it was the best thing ever.’ He was precocious, in a word. ‘I was very bored at school. I found it very easy and slow and grey. My teachers didn’t really know how to handle me, because I was very sarcastic. I was over-confident, arrogant, a typical youngest child [he has two older brothers]. I went through periods of withdrawing into myself and school psychologists tried to figure me out, work out why I didn’t fit in. I found that irritating, too.’

His father was an insurance salesman. ‘He had a hard life. He was a child in the Spanish civil war and grew up in poverty. Struggled all his life. He always said he would have liked to have been a poet, but life didn’t hand him the cards. I suspect I have always been a mystery to my parents. They never knew where I was coming from. I’m different from my brothers. I’m an anomaly. I’ve always been told I was strange. The things that interested me were different. I was interested in books, music and films. They were an escape for me, from an environment that I found boring and where I didn’t feel I fitted in.’

It is a haunting comment, one that is poignantly illustrated the following day when Carlos Ruiz Zafón poses for our photographer in the narrow, cobbled streets of the Gothic Quarter. No passers-by recognise him – even those, presumably, doing the three-hour tour of ‘Zafón’s Barcelona’. ‘When I think of home, I think of California,’ he tells me. ‘My wife and I were never happy here. Spain can be narrow-minded, and provincial. In LA you don’t have to justify yourself. I think I will leave here again soon and move back there.’

J.

James Blunt

It could be the homes around the world; his military bearing; or that he’s our biggest musical export since Elton. For whatever reason, being called annoying, a philanderer or – worse – middle class doesn’t exactly keep James Hillier Blount awake at night. Nigel Farndale met him

It’s not the sight of the groupies that haunts me, but the sound, or rather the absence of sound, as they ghost past us on their way up the stairs to the dressing-room. It takes me a moment to figure out that the reason they aren’t talking to each other is that they don’t know each other. One of the band members, the keyboard player, I think, has picked them from the audience on the basis of their looks. Half-a-dozen of them, all in their late teens and early twenties, and all, surprisingly, in pretty frocks, as if they were going to a Sunday school meeting. They have been separated from their friends like lambs weaned from their mothers. The silence of the lambs.

The ‘us’ they are filing past is James Blunt and me. He has a bottle of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and not a hair in place – tousled just so, like a Renaissance painting of John the Baptist – but they don’t realise it’s him because he has changed out of the suit he was wearing on stage and is now in jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket, as well as a pink feather boa and star-shaped novelty sunglasses. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is the end of the day; we need to go back to the start, well, to the middle, when the seats are empty and the Texan sun is at its most unforgiving.

A barefoot and unshaven Blunt is wearing normal sunglasses and shorts as he plays his piano, strums his guitar and sings his plaintive songs into the microphone for the sound check, all the while looking out with his soulful eyes over an empty, open-air arena in Houston. At 5ft 7in, he’s not a tall man, but he has presence and an unaffected manner – a certain maturity, too, one that you wouldn’t normally associate with a pop star in the ascendant.

But then he is 34 and this is his second career, his first being as an officer in the Household Cavalry. He joined after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in sociology. He became a champion skier for the Army and not only saw active service in Kosovo, but also guarded the Queen Mother’s coffin when she was lying in state.

Tonight he will be supporting Sheryl Crow, though, since his second album ‘All the Lost Souls’ and the single from it, ‘1973’, went straight to number one in America, he is arguably the bigger act these days. Indeed, not since Elton John has there been a more successful British singer-songwriter in the States.

His first album, ‘Back to Bedlam’, also went to number one over here, as it did in 18 other countries, making it the biggest-selling album of the millennium. It even entered the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-selling album in one year. But it was his first single that really put him on the map. You’re Beautiful became the sound of that summer. It was everywhere, and still is – having become a favourite at weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. I even heard a brass band playing it at an agricultural show in the Yorkshire Dales this summer.

As well as millions of sales, James Blunt has won Brit awards, Ivor Novello awards, MTV awards and various Grammy nominations. In terms of credibility, he’s headlined at Glastonbury and won the respect of the world-weary music press. Yet not everyone loves him, as he points out when we get something to eat in the canteen area back stage.

‘After Back to Bedlam really started selling,’ he says, ‘there was this sudden aggression towards me in the UK, for whatever reason, and that focused my mind, made it clear to me what I was doing and why I wanted to do it. I write songs for myself. I don’t write them for you, or for anyone else, I write them because I have experiences that I need to process. I don’t have the answers all the time, but I do have lots of questions, and I express them in the songs I write.’

He is, I think, alluding to a poll last year of ‘the most annoying things in life’, which put him at number four, just behind cold-callers and queue-jumpers. ‘I haven’t met anyone who voted in the poll, have you?’ he says when I mention this. ‘That poll probably came from a website that was after some publicity. You and I could do the same poll very quickly right now and it would count as a poll. We could do one about annoying newspapers, for example. I promise the Sunday Telegraph wouldn’t be in my list. My parents take it.’

His father, a retired colonel in the Army Air Corps, manages his son’s finances. His mother arranged the purchase of his six-bedroom villa in Ibiza (he also has a chalet in Verbier and recently bought a place in Chelsea). ‘I’m not married,’ he says, ‘and so the support structure in my life is my parents. I’m closer to them now than I have ever been.’

He certainly isn’t married, as the photographs of him emerging from nightclubs with various high-profile women on his arm attest. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was probably the best known socialite, Jessica Sutta, of the Pussycat Dolls, the most glamorous. He also seems to be photographed regularly cavorting on beaches with bikini-clad models such as Petra Nemcova, whom he dated and then dumped – unceremonious dumping being his way of ending relationships, according to the tabloids. He once said he found himself in a swimming pool in LA with nine naked women. ‘I was the only bloke. It was the only time I wished my mates were there, purely to spectate. I had arrived. It was a moment.’

Now he says of the tabloid interest in his peripatetic love life: ‘Last week I went to my home in Ibiza and was photographed by the paparazzi in my swimming trunks with girls. What is the point of that? I’m not that bothered, but maybe the media should be concentrating more on global warming or the Russian invasion of Georgia.

‘Looking at me in my swimming trunks is not a great sight. It’s a waste of time. There generally is a long lens pointing at me wherever I go, these days. I’m comfortable with it. I appreciate how things work. But my record label said something about my always being photographed coming out of nightclubs and I thought, “But this is what I do. I was doing it before the second album came out, so what is different now? You didn’t tell me to stop then.” I’m not going to change my life because of these people. I don’t see why I should.’

His label also gets him to dye his grey hairs and be enigmatic about his love life, which is an old tactic dating back to the Beatles – they had to pretend they didn’t have wives and girlfriends so that fans could fantasise they were in with a chance.

Actually, at the time of going to press, Blunt seems to be going out again with one of his old flames, Verity Evetts, an Oxford-educated barrister. He has also stayed friendly with some of his other exes, the socialites at least. He told one – an ex who got married not long ago – that he doesn’t feel ‘centred’ at the moment and would like to get married as well. Then again, he also said that he never tires of singing You’re Beautiful night after night because it gets him laid night after night.

Either way, he tells me he has grown used to the idea that his mother will probably find out from the papers what he has been up to, and with whom, before he has had a chance to tell her. ‘And my [two] sisters are quick to email me about things in the papers, laughing their heads off. I get healthy, ritual abuse from them, and give it back myself.’

As we are talking, I can’t decide whether the way Blunt smiles all the time is disarming or disturbing. He’s like a victim of a religious cult, smiling at the beginning of the sentence and at the end. I guess he has a lot to smile about, but also I sense a great deal of insecurity to disguise.

Then, I’m distracted by the sight of Sheryl Crow playing table tennis across the room. She has been holding her adopted son in one arm as she bats with the other, and now, even more distractingly, she is heading straight for us. ‘Are we going to have one of our little conversations on stage again tonight, James?’ she says. ‘That flirting thing. I think it worked well last night.’

They discuss the duet they will sing – a cover of Cat Stevens’s The First Cut is the Deepest – then we both watch her shimmy away, her blonde curls bobbing. ‘She’s very down to earth,’ he says. ‘I’d met her a couple of times, which was why she asked me on this tour. We do end up playing a lot of table tennis on the road. We’ve done 117 shows so far this year, in 117 cities, and there are a lot of hours to fill in the day.’

As he sleeps on his tour bus with his band, one city tends to blur into another. When I joke that he is in Cincinnati now, he looks genuinely confused. ‘No, this is?… Oh, right. Actually, I always get the tour manager to say where we are just as I’m going on stage. I still managed to get it wrong the other night, saying “Hello Dallas” when I meant Austin. I’m surprised I got out alive.’

He is funny on the subjects of things that go wrong. ‘People are normally surprised by my show, which is more energetic than you might think. Jumping on the piano. Jumping out into the audience and running up and down the aisle high-fiving them. But going off the stage can be quite dangerous. I broke my finger once. My legs carried on when I jumped off, and I smacked down on the ground. The spotlight was on me, and when I got back to the piano I hit the wrong note and thought, “Why did I do that?” And I looked down and saw it was because my finger was broken, sticking out an angle. Look,’ he says holding it up. ‘It’s still crooked.’

On another occasion, in Chicago, he jumped 8ft off the stage. ‘When I began running to the audience, a security guard stuck his arm out and I thought, “Does he want a hug?” Then next thing I know he’s rugby-tackled me. He wouldn’t release me and I was screaming in his ear, “I’m the f—ing singer.” I had to wait for the other guards to pull him off.’

I would have thought Blunt’s training in unarmed combat would have helped. I presume he still works out. ‘No, never. Couldn’t handle it. Too boring. I am a hyperactive person though.’ He likes an adrenaline rush, as well, having recently bought an 1100cc Moto Guzzi V11 Sport motorbike. There’s also the skiing, which he still does, and the riding. Actually, he tells me, he never really liked horses before joining the Life Guards. So why did he join that particular regiment?

‘Well, it is a reconnaissance regiment.’ But they are all so tall in the Life Guards, did that not make him self-conscious? ‘Some are. The Foot Guards tend to be taller regiments, though. The Life Guards take a few shrimps, as well. Besides, they are on horses, so height isn’t so important. Also being in that regiment had the benefit of being in Knightsbridge. I got a chance to be in London and meet people in the music scene.’ And groupies, as it happens.

As he paraded up and down the Mall in plumed helmet and shiny breastplate, girls would stick their phone numbers down his knee-length boots. But it was his time in Kosovo that really made girls swoon. He used to strap his guitar to the outside of his tank, because there wasn’t room for it inside. He had learnt to play the violin at five, the piano at seven and the guitar at 14, while a pupil at Harrow.

He writes his songs on piano and guitar. ‘But mainly guitar because it is easier to carry around. It’s like a child messing around with a toy. If a tune comes to me I don’t record it instantly. I think if I remember it, then it must be worth remembering, and if I forget it, then it was forgettable.’

Does he have any anxiety dreams about forgetting lines or chords? ‘Not yet. Perhaps I will tonight. Perhaps you’ve jinxed me. But audiences aren’t judgmental, and if things go wrong and you can look them in the eye, that is fine. The only people who are judgmental are the journalists. I will be conscious of you being there in the audience judging me.’

Blimey. Sorry about that. Is it true he signs breasts? ‘Not that I remember. Not that I’m fussy what I sign. A lot of men started coming to the shows after I appeared on Top Gear last year. That was such fun. I spun the car five times. I thought I might as well make the most of it. I am competitive.’

He recorded one of the fastest laps, but I’m surprised blokes didn’t think him manly before that, given his tour of duty in Kosovo. ‘It’s because I sing songs that are heart-on-your-sleeve and therefore I must be overly emotional. Nothing I can do about it. I could pose more, but I am comfortable with my masculinity.’

He has said that his lyrics are autobiographical, in which case, are we to assume that the lyric on his new album, ‘I killed a man in a far away land’, means he killed a man in a far away land? I only ask because in the past he has said that he would never try to exploit what he went through, what he saw. ‘You should ask any soldier how many lives he has saved. How they do it is no one else’s business. What I took from my experience in Kosovo is that you are told from one day to the next who your enemy is and it keeps changing. That’s what is happening in Iraq, too. I believe in looking people in the eye, looking for the common humanity.’

He is a great believer in looking people in the eye. He will use the phrase again later and it seems to reveal a Christ complex, or a John the Baptist one. That direct and challenging stare of his. It would also explain the hair.

It is time for him do some photographs before he goes on stage and, endearingly, he says he is ‘not fussed’ about the grooming he is offered before they are taken.

On stage his features contort with passion when he sings. The big video screen goes in tight on his face. His voice is by turns soft and tremulous and forceful, but always high. Having seen him in concert once before, a couple of years ago, I notice the tone of his banter has changed.

‘Wow it’s hot tonight,’ he says now. ‘I’m surprised any of you are wearing any clothes. We could all take them off and get friendly.’ It is suggestive, designed to get the teenage girls in the audience screaming. Before he used to joke about his ‘girlie voice’ and taking helium to get it that way, and being ‘a bit wet’ and the ‘housewives’ favourite’. I think now he has realised that, actually, he is a proper musician, a popular one, too, and that he doesn’t need to apologise for it.

Afterwards, back in the dressing-room, he strips to the waist as he talks because he wants to take a shower before going back on to do his duet with Sheryl Crow. ‘Things got a bit hairy out there when I jumped into the crowd,’ he says. ‘Did you see that? Some thought it was some kind of sport to grab me.’

I watch his duet from the side of the stage and notice he whispers something in Sheryl Crow’s ear and then she starts running her hands over his trousers suggestively, patting them. Afterwards, I ask what he said. ‘”Is now a good time to ask for your phone number?” She was checking my pockets, pretending to look for a pen.’

He shows me round the gold-coloured tour bus where he will be sleeping tonight as they drive to their next gig in Dallas. It is full of hi-tech equipment and is nicely air-conditioned but there isn’t much space in the bunks. ‘We do live in close proximity,’ he says. ‘Some of us stay up late. This is the crew end, they have to get up early.’

Where do the groupies go? ‘Never have groupies on here. Never. They’d only get in if we invited them in. But we’d only ever invite friends in.’

Does he sleep OK? I heard he has to take sleeping pills. ‘It is a bit of a rough sleep, but better than a hotel and taking planes all the time because you have to get to the airport two hours early, which is miserable. Then your flight gets delayed.’

He is drinking champagne from a plastic cup. ‘This is for your benefit,’ he says. ‘The tour management went out and bought a bottle of champagne because he thought I should be seen drinking it. Better for my image. Isn’t that sweet? Normally, we drink vodka and beer. In fact, I think I’d rather have a beer, now. Want one?’ He opens a well-stocked fridge then takes me to the back of the bus where there is some seating space. He has one small case which he pulls out from a cupboard. It continues a few pairs of socks, T-shirts and a spare pair of jeans. No photographs or mementos. ‘This is all I have for 14 months on the road,’ he says. ‘I’m not known for style.’

Does he know how much he is worth? ‘No I don’t, not very interested in it to be honest. I travel with hand luggage only. That is why I always seem to be wearing the same clothes in photographs. If a tabloid says my clothes aren’t fashionable or my hair looks stupid, I really don’t worry about it. Don’t have any hair gel.’

In London, he takes the Tube or the bus. He prefers pubs to restaurants. When he goes to Ibiza, he flies easyJet. Still, that’s at home. Presumably on the road he can afford to be more self-indulgent.

Another lyric that we can only assume is autobiographical is ‘I’ve taken a s—load of drugs’. It is. Though his only comment on the subject is that he has ‘a comfortable relationship with drugs’. His relationship with fame is less comfortable. Oscar Wilde said there were two forms of tragedy: not getting what you want, and getting it. Is that how it felt for him when he went to number one? ‘Actually, I don’t think I had been dreaming about it. Certainly, I hadn’t anticipated being so recognisable so quickly.

‘I do remember getting a phone call from the record company, who said both the single and the album have gone to number one, and thinking, “S—, this is not what I expected.” I hadn’t prepared myself for it. Number two is great. Number two is nice. I sensed then it would mean having to change from being a musician to being a celebrity and that that would be a change for the worse. Fame doesn’t affect me, but it does affect everyone else around me. As for celebrity, it is the worst invention of the modern world. Gossip columns treat your life as if it were a cartoon. Relationships reduced to cartoons.’

Although there are other public-school bands around at the moment – Radiohead, Coldplay – Blunt seems to have suffered more than most from a perception that he is too posh to be credible. His family name is Blount (and his middle name Hillier), but he changed it to Blunt to sound, well, blunter and more proletarian.

When he tells me he would nevertheless still send a son of his to Harrow – ‘I think I would. I think I would. Public schools make individuals rather than sheep’ – I ask what he makes of the mood change now that the old Etonian David Cameron has made it OK to be posh. ‘Is it? I must come back to Britain immediately. Is it really safe to come back?

‘It’s not a dirty word to be posh, people come up to me and no one gives a damn if I’m posh. It’s about having a normal conversation and looking people in the eye.’

We head back to the dressing-room where he puts on his feather boa and novelty sunglasses then we wander back downstairs to have a word with Sheryl Crow, who is signing autographs. This is the moment at which the keyboard player says: ‘This way to the good-time room girls’ and the silent groupies dutifully appear.