Not all of the soundtrack for 'The Broken Bottle' can be included on a Spotify Playlist. That's because the songs written and recorded by the band during the course of the novel are not widely in the public domain.
Indeed, some of them don't exist at all, other than in your imagination. 'Titch's Song' and 'Jackson's Five' go exactly as you would expect them to, and the lyrics are so clear you can sing them to yourself now. Go on, have a go.
On the other hand, three tracks were kept for posterity from the demo tape the boys record in the music room after school. They are available to listen on Bandcamp. For those of you unfamiliar with Bandcamp, it is a site that allows independent artists to share and sell, or give away as they see fit, their musical creations. Bandcamp take only a 10% share of all revenues on digital sales, and 15% on physical sales. On the first Friday of every month they waive their share completely. This a great model for small scale musical artists.
So the good news is you can listen to three songs from Wilf's band The Sally Cinnamons: 'Half The Magic', 'Hold On' and 'The Bridge'.
Even better, you can download the songs AND the ebook version of the Broken Bottle for a mere £5.00, which seems like good value to me, but then I might be biased. You can also, should you choose, get a physical copy of the book plus the downloaded songs, if everything works how it should do.
The demo tape within the novel is partly inspired by a cassette my own band at school badly recorded in Bolton on a cassette player. The song I contributed to proceedings was a jaunty little affair entitled 'The Puppet'. It has never seen light of day since and, due to its unintentional melodic resemblance to a line from the theme tune to the children's TV show 'The Wombles', is unlikely to any time soon. Never mind ...
