The Undercover Soundtrack – Catherine Czerkawska

March 6, 2013 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris16 Comments

‘Friendship, betrayal and making sense of the past’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to open a secret channel to understand a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s guest is novelist and award-winning playwright Catherine Czerkawska @czerkawska

Soundtrack by The Corries, Dougie Maclean, Robert Burns, Liam Brennan

There’s no denying that The Physic Garden is a sad story. In mid 1800s Glasgow, an elderly man called William Lang looks back on his youth, when he worked as a gardener at the Old College of Glasgow University and became friends with one of the professors. This is a novel about friendship and betrayal, about trying to make sense of events in your past. It may not quite be about forgiveness but it is certainly a book about resolution and the getting of wisdom, no matter how painful that process might be. It is also a story about learning: about life and human nature as well as practical skills. It’s about loving and losing, about the paths we follow and the paths we regret not following, and whether we can ever reconcile the two.

Not surprisingly, I listened to plenty of traditional Scottish music while I was working. There’s a song which actually figures in the book. I call it Waly Waly but some people will know it as The Water Is Wide or even the Glenlyon Lament. Like most traditional songs, it crops up all over the place and in many different versions. It’s a desperately sad, 350-year old song about loving and losing, a song that would have been old even when my characters were talking about it.

‘Tis not the frost that freezes fell,

Nor blawing snaw’s inclemencie,

Tis not sic cauld that makes me cry;

But my love’s heart grown cauld to me.’

The version I listened to as I was writing was an old track by The Corries, a duo I was very fond of when I was young. This version seemed to me to echo most precisely the voice in which I ‘heard’ it sung in the novel.

With that single exception, however, the musician who provided the Undercover Soundtrack to The Physic Garden, whether singing the songs of Robert Burns or his own compositions, was Dougie Maclean. Let me begin with a song just about everyone will know. A contemporary composition, this still manages to evoke many of the feelings in the novel, and I don’t just mean the essential Scottishness of it. This is a song about ‘telling old stories, singing songs’, about friendship and change, about finding your place in the world, about resolution and action. It is, of course, Caledonia: but you’ll also find versions of it on various CDs and to purchase online.

There are a million recordings of the songs of Robert Burns and I’ve listened to a lot of them over the years. But it was still MacLean’s simple, beautiful, unfussy performances I went back to time and time again when I was writing The Physic Garden. Here’s one I listened to all the time: it seemed to evoke the very essence – the ‘voice’ – of William Lang, a song about love, about green and growing things, about the cares which beset us on all sides, above all, perhaps, a loving song about women.

But if I had to choose the song that could truly be said to have inspired The Physic Garden, it would have to be Scythe Song. You’ll find it on a fabulous CD called Riof. This quirky YouTube recording (there are tech problems in the middle) is a fine example of Maclean’s lovely laid-back performance. But listen to the words. I’ve used this song in creative writing classes as a perfect example of a poem and song rolled into one. It’s deceptively simple and it’s immense. Everything about it somehow fed into The Physic Garden: the relationship of a little girl with her father and of a son with his own father, the need to learn about life, the practical ways of holding and feeling, moving and judging and then, at last, you might ‘know what I know’. Even down to the Icarus imagery, which somehow found its way into the novel. This song always makes me feel exactly the way I felt when I was writing the novel.

There’s one more recording I want to mention – a reading, rather than a song – and it’s this one: Robert Burns’s Lassie wi’ the Lintwhite Locks. I’ve worked with this actor, Liam Brennan, on many productions. He’s from Ayrshire and his accent and interpretation of this Burns poem are exactly right. One of the characters in The Physic Garden is, indeed, a ‘lassie wi the lintwhite locks’. Did I have Burns’s lassie in mind when first I thought of Jenny Caddas, taking her swarm of bees? Well, maybe so!

Catherine Czerkawska is a novelist and award winning playwright. With degrees in medieval and folk life studies, she finds herself increasingly drawn to historical fiction although many of her seven published novels (so far) are contemporary stories. The Curiosity Cabinet (Polygon 2005) was one of three finalists for the Dundee Book Prize and is now available only on Kindle. Her new novel, The Physic Garden, was recently published on Kindle. Her other novels, Bird of Passage, The Amber Heart and Ice Dancing, are also available on Amazon Kindle. Catherine’s website and blog are here, she also blogs at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books and she tweets as @Czerkawska

GIVEAWAY Catherine is excited to give away a rare print copy of her prizewinning novel The Curiosity Cabinet to a commenter here. Extra entries if you tweet, Facebook, Google or write the link on the sky in jet vapour (but remember to mention it in a comment here so we know!) This is a rare edition, now unavailable, so it’s a real collector’s item.

Undercover Soundtrack

‘Not a thing to learn inside a day’ – Catherine Czerkawska

March 4, 2013 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris2 Comments

You may recognise the name of my guest this week. She was one of my earliest Soundtrackers and she returns this week with a novel of friendship and betrayal: a man looking back on his youth and making sense of a troubled history. It’s set in Glasgow, and traditional Scottish music gave her both geographical setting and emotional landscape: the depth in apparent simplicity, the universal condition of loving and losing. She is novelist and award-winning playwright Catherine Czerkawska; the novel is The Physic Garden and she’ll be here on Wednesday with its Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Cally Phillips

February 27, 2013March 6, 2013 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris8 Comments

‘Without the music there would have been no creativity’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to open a secret channel to understand a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s guest is screenwriter, playwright and novelist Cally Phillips @i_ebookreview

Soundtrack by Michael Jackson, Shaggy, The Beatles, Harry Belafonte, The Muppets, Nat King Cole, David Rovics, Sam Cooke, John K and Fred Ebb, Joel Grey, Liza Minnelli, Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters

All my life I have made up words to songs. As a student I used to entertain my companions on the way to and from the pub by making up ‘different’ lyrics to pop songs and musicals. It was just something I did. I heard music as a soundtrack in my head all the time and used the melody to write my own version of songs. I had a love of musical theatre and sort of wished that the world could be like that, people breaking out into song in the oddest places without any provocation. Strangely, I never thought about a career as a lyricist (I didn’t know you could). When I ‘became’ a writer for a job in my late 20s I chose screenwriting because I needed to earn a living. But life takes you on all kinds of unexpected paths and sometimes all the creativity inside you just hits that perfect moment. I’m lucky. For me the moment lasted the best part of 10 years. And changed my life.

In 2003 I started working with an advocacy group for adults labelled with learning disability who wanted to learn drama. I had no experience of ‘learning disability’ but plenty of experience of practical drama. It was challenging to begin with. Most of the group couldn’t read or write, some couldn’t or didn’t even speak. However, an amazing thing happened. Music unlocked the door.

One member of the group who never spoke beyond ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Happy’ just came alive when we started to use music. He revealed a talent for singing as well as a keen memory of 50s and 60s music. Consequently I started using music to bind together our flexible scripts. I found that by changing the lyrics of familiar pop songs to suit the story we managed to create dramas that the cast could engage with and which entertained an audience.

In 2004 we did a comedy musical version of Hamlet (called Piglet!) which included ‘ghosty’ pigs doing a song and dance version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (song starts 04:40) and Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me alongside my adaptation of a well-known classic with one word changed! ‘Piglet, do you want to know a secret.’ This was followed up by devised musical plays around the theme of Fairtrade – Go Bananas which featured Day-oh and Wake up and Smell the Coffee which featured, among other songs You’re the cream in my coffee and a play on recycling using the title of a David Rovics song The End of the Age of Oil and built around that song. Performed at the Scottish Parliament, we opened the event with our ‘star’ singer (the man who didn’t speak, remember) singing Amazing Grace accapella. That was a high point of my life. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Our most ambitious project was performed in 2008. Aiken Drum’s Recycled Musical was our first full musical. For the uninitiated, Aiken Drum is a traditional Scots tale which deals with how people view ‘outsiders’. It was a really political piece in many ways. We set it in a sort of fictional Industrial Revolution town called Trade Town. All the songs were adapted from pop songs. For example I adapted the lyrics of Wonderful World (song starts 0:38) –

‘Don’t know much about industry,

Don’t know much about commodities,

Don’t know much about stocks and shares…’

and my favourite line

Don’t know why you want to work for money, I don’t think consumerism’s funny.’

And we also butchered Cabaret’s classic Money Makes the World go round

‘When you haven’t any shoes on your feet and your coat’s thin as paper and you look thirty pounds underweight

My advice is get a job, get a mortgage, pay with credit, have all the luxuries you need

Cause money makes the world go around…’

We also nicked a concept from Godspell (watch this it’s awesome by about 2.20mins) engaging in a competitive sing off with Accentuate the Positive with You cannae shove yer granny aff a bus.

Having moved 200 miles north I no longer work with the group, but I have taken our experiences from that time and published them as a novel, A Week with No Labels, which includes all the ‘dramas’ I’ve mentioned and a few more besides. It includes many of the ‘created/adapted’ lyrics. Described by Julia Jones as ‘perhaps the most significant book I’ve read on my Kindle this year’, it is a tribute to my time with this amazing bunch of people who changed the course of my life and changed me irrevocably as well. Without the music there would have been no creativity. Without ABC there would have been no novel.

On the way to writing A Week with No Labels I have learned that music and creativity is for everyone. And that life can be a musical. One shouldn’t take it too seriously, one shouldn’t strive for perfection because what’s most important in life is to live and love and be creative together. The song which was always in my mind while I penned A Week With No Labels and remains there whenever I think about it is You’ve got a friend. Sung by my friend, Larry. Among other things he taught me that in our real life musicals the voice is less important than the heart. So maybe music is about more than just words.

Cally Phillips has worked as a screenwriter and playwright for 20 years and is now focussed on fiction writing. Committed to a life of creativity, she publishes advocacy work through Guerrilla Midgie Press and other writing through HoAmPresst Publishing. She writes in silence but still makes up songs, sometimes to extant tunes, sometimes recycling other melodies. Only the dogs get to hear these masterpieces. She is currently director of the Edinburgh eBook Festival and reviews for Reading Between the Lines Collective. She is also a member of the Authors Electric Writers Collective. A Week With no Labels is available in ebook format for Kindle and epub and as a paperback.Her website is here. Find her on Facebook and Twitter @i_ebookreview

Undercover Soundtrack

‘Music and creativity is for everyone – and life can be a musical’ – Cally Phillips

February 25, 2013 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

My guest this week has always made up lyrics, whether alternate versions of existing songs or not-terribly-serious inventions of her own. She says she wishes life was more like a musical, where people might burst out singing if the fancy takes them. Her deep-held belief that life should be lived with lusty vocals led to a collaboration with a theatre group for adults with learning disabilities, and, by circular means, a novel that commemorates the experience – A Week With No Labels. She is screenwriter, playwright and novelist Cally Phillips and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her very individual Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Dan Holloway

February 13, 2013February 8, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris14 Comments

‘Neon, nostalgia, regret and joy’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to open a secret channel to understand a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week, spoken-word poet and novelist Dan Holloway @agnieszkasshoes returns with the soundtrack to his latest collection

Soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann, Mamas and Papas, Pink Floyd, Garbage, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Kills, Nine Inch Nails, Portishead, Tracy Chapman, Eagle Eye Cherry, Melanie Pain, Emily Barker

i cannot bring myself to look at walls in case you graffiti them with love poetry is, according to the blurb I put together for it, ‘a lyrical, heartbreaking, but ultimately joyous picaresque across the neon-soaked night cities of the world in search and celebration of lost friends’. It is about a feeling – one that blends joy and nostalgia and sorrow and celebration and neon piercing the night sky and damp bridges and lives that spring fully and tragically formed from the concrete. The times I’ve seen that done best have both been through powerful connections between image and soundtrack – in the 70s, Bernard Herrmann’s oppressive industrial backdrop to Taxi Driver, and from the 90s the marrying of the dazzling colour of East Asian cities and the Mamas and Papas classic piece of nostalgia California Dreaming.

So music was right at the front of my mind from the start as I was putting it together. It’s also an accompaniment to my first solo spoken word show, which will premier at Cheltenham Poetry Festival on 24 April. So rhythm, cadence, pulling the audience through sound through a rollercoaster ride of the emotions were all right there at the fore. And with the multimedia background to the book, that initial draw towards the neon, nostalgia and grime of the cinematic city soundtrack was the perfect place to begin getting myself into the right place to construct and compile the book.

Rhythm is all

The thing about a collection – and a show for that matter – is that at every level rhythm is everything. Not just within the pieces but within the whole. Every dazzling, intense, searing effect you create is diminished by the wrong amount of repetition, enhanced by the right number of carefully placed repetitions, burnished or dulled by what comes before, after, a similar distance from the beginning, from the end. Every piece must hang together and flow effortlessly just like a perfectly-constructed album. This sense of flow, rhythm, shape is essential to all forms of the written as well as the spoken word, but it amazes me how little I see writers refer to beautifully-crafted albums as their exemplars.

Prog rock and poetry

Being the age I am, married to whom I am, of the musical persuasion I am, and someone who calls himself a prog rocker of the poetry world, there really is only one album to turn to for the perfectly constructed emotional and sensual journey. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is perfect in just about every way, and makes as great a live show as it does an album. From helicopters to gloriously crashing waves of sound via alarm clocks and lunatics on the grass, every step is in just the right position in relation to every other to make the journey an almost mystical path to enlightenment.

And yet, steeped in Bernard Herrman and Pink Floyd, I have the path mapped out before me but it’s still not enough. Still not the mix of anger, desolation, joy and nostalgia and, well, neon-soakedness all in one that I’m looking for. Which is why playlists are so fabulous.

I’ve always loved playlists, ever since as a seven-year-old I’d endlessly sort through my dad’s 45s making little stacks to play in order. And there is nothing better for keying you into the rhythms of whatever you are writing than a playlist the follows your work’s rhythms. So, get your headphones and have a listen to what is, in essence, my latest book.

Each track manages to blend the urban and the nostalgic, painting a constant backdrop as it were whilst the foreground moves with the rhythm of the collection’s picaresque.

We begin with the wistful recollective regret of Garbage’s You Look So Fine and the haunting Red Hot Chilli Peppers classic Scar Tissue we find the brutal, angry, relentless drumbeat of The Kills’s No Wow as the reality of loss loses its romanticised edge and gives way to a despair that becomes exhaustion at the nadir of Nine Inch Nails’s stunningly dissonant Hurt and Portishead’s Roads with its pitch perfect association with the film Requiem for a Dream. From that low point we emerge to appreciate the preciousness of the memories with Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car and Eagle Eye Cherry’s celebration of the intense, fleeting joyfulness of life, Save Tonight. But the celebration is only temporary and gives way to the bitterness and desperation of the pounding beat in Portishead’s Machine Gun before, exhausted and scarred but unbowed we emerge with Melanie Pain’s Bruises and finally lay down our heads, our lives and lost friendships streaming ever slower before our eyes as we fade into the night with Emily Barker’s Pause.

Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet and cultural commentator. He runs 79 rat press through which he publishes his own conceptual books and will, in June 2013, be publishing debut collections from five of the most groundbreaking new voices in poetry and prose. In the picture he appears with Diophantus, one of the 79 rats. He blogs at Authors Electric and is a member of the League of Extraordinary Authors. Find him on Twitter @agnieszkasshoes

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Susan Price

November 21, 2012 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris7 Comments

‘Beautiful swaying voices took me to vast forests’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to open a secret channel to understand a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s guest is multi-award-winning children’s fantasy author Susan Price @priceclan

Soundtrack by Pavel Chesnokov, the Cantus Sacred Music Ensemble, The Orthodox Singers’ Male Choir, June Tabor, Steeleye Span, Orlando Gibbons, the King’s Singers, Pierrot Lunaire, Jan Garbarek, Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, Tim Wong, Benjamin Britten

Music doesn’t help me understand my characters, or set the mood for a particular scene. I don’t need, for instance, martial music to write a martial scene. Instead, for me, the music seems to set the atmosphere, or time-frame, of the whole book. I can’t write a scene set in the past to poppy dance-music, because the music insistently reminds me of my own time and drags me back to it. I find it equally hard to write contemporary scenes while listening to music from the past. If Mozart is playing, my characters shrug off their jeans and trainers and slip into knee-britches and powdered wigs.

Czarist Russia

My Ghost World sequence (Ghost Drum, Ghost Song and Ghost Dance) is set in a fantasy Czarist Russia. I wanted these books to be fantastical, frightening and beautiful, with the brilliant jewel colours of Russian folk-art set against intense darkness and cold. While writing them I surrounded myself with postcards of Russian art, and played chants like this one on repeat.

The beautiful swaying voices, with their deep, dark bass notes took me into the vast, dark pine forests of Russian folk-tale, to Northern darkness and cold. Listening again, as I write this blog, I feel the visceral thrill and shiver this music always gives me.

The music and art served the same purpose: bringing together and concentrating all my disparate imaginings. Looking at a Bilibin forest, listening to an Orthodox chant, I was there, in my imagination’s world. This piece, with the Basso Profundo, sounds like the Russian Bear singing.

Past, present and Borders

It is always time and place with me. My Sterkarm novels have scenes set both in the past and in the 21^st Century, but the heart of the novels, for me, were the scenes in the 16^th century Scottish borders. I read about the reivers and their way of life, I visited the Borders, but to bring it all together and put me there, I played Border Ballads, which I’ve loved since a teenager. Here’s the wonderful June Tabor with her thrilling Clerk Sanders. The final, long-drawn note always raises my hair. It rings like a glass. It’s all there – love, hatred, jealousy, horror, revenge.

I listened to Steeleye Span a lot too. Even though they used electric instruments, I always felt they captured the spirit of many of these old songs better than many who tried too hard to be strictly traditional. Here’s their Wife of Usher’s Well, a tale of life, death, ghosts and maternal love.

Hits of the 16th

I wrote Christopher Uptake, set in the 16^th century, to the smash hits of Christopher’s day, such as The Silver Swan, sung here by the King’s Singers. (And its closing couplet, ‘More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise,’ seems appropriate for Christopher too.)

Poor old Keats reviewed plays in order to get a free pass to theatres so he could hear the playing of professional musicians. We’re spoiled today – we can hear excellent musicians any time we casually turn on the radio. Not only musicians of our own day either, but those long dead, and music played in the style of centuries past.

The far future

But what to play when writing something set in the far future, such as my Odin’s Voice trilogy? I found myself seeking out music that, to me, sounded strange and futuristic, and helped me expand my ideas to include all the weird and wonderful possibilities of nano-technology and space-elevators. More musically educated people might find my choices rather old-fashioned, but they worked for me.

First is Moonstruck Pieirrot, or Pierrot Lunaire. ‘What the hell did I just listen to?’ asks a YouTube commentator. I can’t say that I love it, but it’s extraordinary. I remember first hearing it. I was vacuuming during the early hours, while half-listening to the Open University’s educational programmes. This began, and I switched off the vacumn to hear it. I remained on one leg, spellbound, throughout. Didn’t like it, exactly, but couldn’t stop listening.

I am fonder of this by Jan Gabarek and the Hilliard Ensemble. I find it chill, eerie, beautiful and strange – but instead of evoking deep, dark forests, it evokes, for me, the vast dark emptiness of space and the future, where who knows what might be possible? Oberon’s song from Britten’s Midsummer’s Night Dream has the same effect on me. It may have been written in the 20^th century, as Britten’s response to Shakespeare’s 16^th century play, but its eerie otherworldliness, for me, suggests space – perhaps the music of the spheres?

In 1973, Susan Price‘s father signed a contract with Faber for her first book, The Devil’s Piper. She was under-age, at 16, and couldn’t legally sign it herself. She has earned her living by writing and lecturing ever since. Her best known books are The Ghost Drum, which won the Carnegie Medal, and is available as an e-book, and The Sterkarm Handshake, which won the Guardian prize. She has a blog and is also a founder member of the group Do Authors Dream of Electric Books (aka Authors Electric), and she tweets as @priceclan.

Undercover Soundtrack

‘If Mozart is playing, my characters slip into wigs and britches’ – Susan Price

November 19, 2012 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

My guest this week was so young when Faber bought her first fantasy novel that her father had to sign the contract. She’s more than built on that early promise by scooping the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian prize and is so prolific that in her credits she only lists her best-known works. Her imagination has ranged everywhere, from a fantasy czarist Russia to the far future – and thrilling, evocative music has been intrinsic to all of them. She is Susan Price, and she will be here on Wednesday talking about her Undercover Soundtrack.

About · Audrey Niffenegger · My Memories of a Future Life · piano · podcast · The time Traveller' sWife

Coming on Saturday: video and podcast with Joanna Penn

September 29, 2011October 5, 2011 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris2 Comments

This Saturday, October 1 if scheduling works according to plan, I’m guesting at The Creative Penn. In glorious grainy Skype video, you’ll be able to see me scrunching my writerly brow as Joanna – a thriller writer – quizzes me about writing literary novels and developing a literary style. If TV on your monitor is too weird, the post will also be available as more portable text and audio.

I’ve also been out and about on other websites. You might have already seen some of these, but as this is the book’s official online home it seems incomplete not to mention them.

A Journey of Souls : Why Novels Tell The Deepest Truth – this post at Women Writers was inspired by your feedback while the book was releasing. For which – thank you.

My book is like a TARDIS – or bigger on the inside than the out. Or the impossible job of squashing 100,000 words into a few paragraphs for a blurb, as explained in my monthly column on Do Authors Dream of Electric Books.

The Making Of… Really meaty questions about the novel, its themes and the choices I made in the writing. As explained to uber-editor fiction vixen Victoria Mixon.

My Memories of a Future Life was also featured on this post by Matt Kelland, where he was very complimentary but ticked me off for chopping the book in four. Point taken,Matt; not everyone appreciated the episode format and the novel is now available in one handy shot on Kindle.

I have to thank Gary Swaby for honouring me with the first author interview ever to feature on his newly-minted blog. And finally, I have to thank my husband, the writer Dave Morris. Not because I’ve become Oscarishly soppy (although he does say some nice things in this post), but because he reveals how if I’d followed his advice and that of most editors who saw the book, My Memories of a Future Life would have been a genre potboiler.

The paperback is now on Amazon.com and they’ve even been nice enough to discount it. I don’t know how long this will last but you can get the 366-page paperback at USD$10.76, saving more than USD$4.

The price of the individual episodes will stay at the launch offer of 0.99c until 15 October, and will then go to their full price of USD$2.99. They’ll always be available, but if you want to complete your collection at the launch price, hie on over to your Amazon of choice (UK, DE, rest of world) now.