What with fame and a fatwa, the past ten years have been quite an eye-opener for Salman Rushdie, in more ways than one. Now he's got a new look and a new book - about pop music, of all things. By Nigel Williamson

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Play it again, Salman

In the run-up to the publication of his new novel, there has been as much written about Salman Rushdie's operation to lift his famously hooded eyelids as there has been about the book. Upon meeting him it seems bad form to mention it, but the change is so striking that one cannot help commenting.

Gone is that sinister, man-on-the-run look. It is as if someone has suddenly lifted the shutters on his face and let in the sunlight. Although the operation was done for medical rather than cosmetic reasons - he suffered from a condition called ptosis that caused the eyelids to droop and close for good - it has left Rushdie, 51, looking ten years younger. When I tell him this, he checks the mirror. "It's not bad," he says cautiously, trying hard not to sound too pleased, although he is clearly thrilled with the results. The operation is also symbolic of Rushdie's journey out of the shadows of the fatwa issued ten years ago, after he wrote The Satanic Verses; Rushdie became the most famous novelist on Earth, demonised in the Islamic world as a wicked blasphemer whose books were fit only to be burnt, lionised in liberal circles as a brave champion of free speech. It drove him into a nightmarish world of 24-hour security, in constant fear of an assassin. Then, last September, the Iranian government agreed to a deal brokered by Robin Cook and formally disassociated itself from the price on the author's head. Even so, some fundamentalist groups still pose a threat to his life, and he retains a police escort on public outings.

It feels strange to be sitting with him in the genteel surroundings of a plush Knightsbridge hotel; he remains understandably guarded about personal questions, but displays only slight touches of the arrogance of which he has been accused. He seems content, and genuinely pleased to be discussing his new book. Slowly, Rushdie's life is regaining a semblance of normality. However, even during the underground years, in which he was forced to change his address every few weeks, he refused to allow his situation to destroy his life. A few months after the fatwa was declared, his second wife, Marianne Wiggins, walked out, declaring "he would do anything to save his life". Two years later, he fell in love with his third wife, Elizabeth West, his coeditor on an anthology of Indian writing published in 1996. They married in upstate New York in 1997. He became a father again, of Milan, now two (he also has a grown up son, Zafar, who is in his twenties, from his first marriage to Clarissa Luard). And he never stopped writing. Five years into the fatwa came his magisterial The Moor's Last Sigh. Now he is about to publish The Ground Beneath Her Feet, a vast and epic tale of love, death and rock'n'roll.

Given that pop music is perhaps the defining art form of the second half of our century, there is remarkably little decent fiction about it. Rushdie agrees: "Roddy Doyle's The Commitments is delightful in its way and there is Don DiLillo, but I can't think of anything else. It's hard to write about music because it isn't verbal. You have to come up with strategies to solve that, and the other elephant trap to avoid is over-enthusiasm. If you're not careful you can come on like a groupie kneeling down and unzipping the jeans of rock'n'roll."

The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a love story in which the two main characters happen to be rock stars. "I wanted to write about rock'n'roll, not as cheap music or low culture but in a way that took it seriously," he says earnestly. "Of course a lot of pop music is banal and will soon disappear. But frankly that is also true of most novels. It doesn't mean that the good stuff can be dismissed so lightly."

In the novel, Rushdie set out to answer a series of questions. "Why do we care about music? Why does it stir up such emotions?" he asks. "Because I am not a philosopher my way of addressing them was to write a story. I wanted to explore why a song unleashes such joy and sadness and articulates our emotional lives in the way that nothing else does. And that's as true of Mick Jagger as it is of Pavarotti." Above all, the book works because throughout its 575 pages runs the passion of a true fan. Rushdie understands music in a way that even the most painstaking research could never engender.

Born in Bombay in June 1947, the son of wealthy businessman Anis Ahmed Rushdie, he grew up in Pakistan and was sent to Rugby School at the age of 14. He belonged to the rock'n'roll years. "I heard the Beatles and the Stones shortly after I arrived in Britain from India," he recalls. "And I remember one day in about 1963 at Rugby School another boy telling me I had to listen to this record. We went into his study and he put the first Dylan album on and my jaw hit the floor. It was a really memorable moment and it has lived with me. If I had one Desert Island singer it would be Bob Dylan." From Rugby, Rushdie went on to study history at King's College, Cambridge and, after leaving worked in advertising (his main claim to fame was the creation of the cream cakes slogan "naughty but nice"); his first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975. In 1981, Midnight's Children, his second novel, won the Booker Prize.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, already tipped to be pitched against Vikram Seth's also long-awaited An Equal Music for this year's Booker, is arguably the first great rock'n'roll novel in the English language but, being Rushdie, it is so much more than that. There are multiple layers of meaning at work. The tale of his two rock stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, was originally conceived as a modern reworking of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, while a dozen intricate sub-plots weave in and out of the main narrative.

"I set out to write a love story, which is very hard to do in our cynical times without sounding slushy in a Mills & Boon way or being ironical," Rushdie explains. "The Orpheus myth is a great story with an eternal triangle of art, love and death, so I reworked it in my own way. A century ago a novelist would throw out references to the classics and Greek and Roman mythology and his readers would instantly get it. I realised that today rock'n'roll possesses a similar kind of mythic language in which we all share the references."

Pop songs, according to Rushdie, "show us ourselves as we might be if we were worthy of the world". It is a grand claim but one he has clearly thought about. "We live in a world of disappointment. You begin with great hopes and the beautiful innocence of childhood but you discover that the world isn't good enough, nor are our lives and nor are we. But there are moments in life when we can have an experience of transcendence, feel part of something larger or simply our hearts burst inside. Falling in love and the birth of a child can do that. So can hearing the human voice raised in song. It is one of the keys to our best selves."

Rushdie is fascinated by the iconic - almost religious - power of rock'n'roll, the role of the singer as shaman and spokesman for a generation. "Song began as a religious expression and although it has moved away from that, something of the priestly nature survives," he explains. "It can be anthemic and musicians can be seen as leaders. That places a burden on even the most subtle and intelligent that can destroy them. It wasn't particularly good for Dylan or Lennon," he adds.

But he admits to being under the spell and talks of the elements of worship involved in attending a rock concert. "It's to do with the phenomenon of standing in front of a crowd with everyone looking up at you. That's very powerful and can be dangerous. At its extreme it becomes crazy, but all of us feel it. When I met Lou Reed I felt very excited. It was a bit like meeting God, listening to him telling me how he wrote Walk on the Wild Side." Reed actually appears in the book, having undergone a sex change.

Over the years Rushdie has become good friends with Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Mark Knopfler and Bono, even appearing on stage with U2 at Wembley during their 1993 tour. Both Bono and U2's manager Paul McGuinness were among the first people to read his manuscript. "I thought the book was OK but I wanted to make sure I had got the record business stuff right," he smiles. "I needed them to tell me before it was too late if I hadn't but fortunately they gave me the thumbs up."

Bono then asked Rushdie for the lyrics he had written for the tuneless songs in the book. "I asked if he was going to write music to them and he said no, he just wanted to have them. Then he asked if there was a title track. And I said there was a song the hero composes after the main female dies and is called The Ground Beneath Their Feet."

After several weeks the singer invited the author to Dublin and played him a song based on Rushdie's own words. "I had no tune in my head when I wrote them but I had a pace and rhythm and when I heard Bono's version I knew it was exactly right. It's a ballad, a sad song, very Celtic with a high haunting melody but with a tabla drum that gives it an Indian resonance."

Plans to release the song to coincide with the publication of the book have been dropped and it will now appear on U2's new album, which will be released later this year. "I'm rather glad about that because it means the book can have its moment. I don't want it to be thought of merely as a seed-bed for a song by U2! But I'm thrilled they have done it because I like the blurring of fiction and reality. That's one of the themes of the book and having the song made flesh breaks through that frontier." Indeed, the collisions between fact and fantasy in The Ground Beneath Her Feet is bewildering: John Lennon, not Mick Jagger, sings Satisfaction while Lee Harvey Oswald's gun jams so that Kennedy does not die in Dallas.

"It's about creating an imagined world that isn't quite real but has a close relation," Rushdie says. "It's at an angle to reality and it is that angle which makes it interesting. It's not just a photograph." Playing such games with the reader has become a Rushdie trademark. His rock star Ormus Cama contains elements of John Lennon, George Michael, Freddie Mercury and countless others - yet he is all of them and none of them. "If you are going to write a modern version of a myth then the people you write about have to come close to living up to that mythic status. As the story developed Ormus and Vina got more and more like sacred monsters. The more fictitious the characters are, the more real they get."

Rushdie's next published work may be the diaries of the long years in hiding. Andrew Wylie, his agent, has reportedly been seeking a figure of £5 million for his account of life with a price on your head. Yet elements are already beginning to crop up in his fiction. In the new novel, his heroine Vina dies in a devastating earthquake on February 14, 1989. It also happens to be the day the fatwa was issued.

"I thought if I was going to write about convulsions I might as well acknowledge that something like that happened to me. Whatever my life had been in those ten years would have reflected in my writing and given that it has been so huge and profound I would be an idiot not to draw on it."

As he re-emerges into public life again, Rushdie is also keen to pay tribute to those who supported him during the dark times. "To fall in love in the middle of all the craziness was my one piece of good fortune and my friends were astoundingly loyal," he says. "But beyond that was this outpouring of affection from total strangers. Booksellers in remote places would put the book in their window out of solidarity. To be in the centre of thousands of little things like that was the counterweight without which I wouldn't have survived. I've always believed we all did it together. It was an incredible collective refusal to be bullied and it made me feel very humble. That was the most important thing that ever happened to me. Not the hatred."

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