Any Human Heart writing again of a whole-life view: "I don't think there's anything wrong with going back over territory you've previously covered." Though avowedly not an (auto-)biographical novelist, Boyd acknowledged that personal experiences often subconsciously affect a writer's fiction. As in several of Boyd's novels there are parallels with the author's life: both Boyd and Mountstuart lived in Africa and France, studied at Oxford, worked in literary London and had a taste of New York. Boyd usually splits the creation of a novel into two phases: research and writing. The first phase of "Any Human Heart" took 30 months as he carefully
How Many Birds gets faster. The singer states that he's lonely without his girl and doesn't know what to do. The Kids covered the song the same year, lead vocalist Michael Griffith and Tony Borg singing to the Bee Gees backing tracks. The Kids never recorded again but the fact that they chose this song to record proves that the Saint Clair tapes were not discarded when the studio closed, and were presumably in Nat Kipner's hands. But Kipner today has no idea where they went to. How Many Birds "How Many Birds" is a song written by Barry Gibb, recorded by the