The first book I had published was ‘Capturing the Wry’, a musical memoir of my first band The Irony Board. It came with a free 15-song CD of our studio recordings. It seemed a logical idea, the reader being able to hear the songs that were being described in the story. They wouldn’t have any other way of hearing them, unless the reader had known me when I was 22 and bought the demo tapes.
However, for me the soundtrack idea maybe has its roots a bit further back in time. My family used to go camping in Alderney. It’s a small island, with very little to do. That was largely the joy of it, there being very little to do. Looking for some new musical ideas to keep me busy, I created a compilation CD of fictional artists, signed to a fictional record label based on the very real island. I posted copies to the various family addresses, with a fictional press release, anonymously. I waited for the copies to arrive, and then the ruse to be rumbled. For some it was rumbled sooner than others… And then I wrote the story of the search for the fictional record label and its fictional artists. And posted copies through their doors on Christmas Eve.
You might get to read it at some point.
The curation of songs to accompany stories is nothing new. Nick Hornby’s ‘31 songs’ had a CD with it. I’m sure that wasn’t the first, but it was the first time I’d considered it. Magnus Mills’ ‘The Forensic Records Society’ did similar, but again they were other people’s songs.
I’m not naive enough to think I’m the only writer to have created a soundtrack to a novel, but it’s certainly not a routine thing. When ‘The Broken Bottle’ was published I enjoyed writing and recording the fictional demo tape from the story. For ‘This Is Not The End’ though I wanted to go further.
The soundtrack contains ten separate pieces of music. Two of these have lyrics, eight do not. I took inspiration from songs I wrote either at the time Wilf finds himself at University, or that I wrote about that time. The lead track ‘Scotswood Terrace’ is about any of the streets that lead down to the river Tyne from the old Roman Road in the west of Newcastle. I lived on one of them. An instrumental variation of the song appears later. The last song also has words; ‘This Is Not The End’ is an outlier, originally recorded in 2009ish and nothing to do with the time or location, but definitely in keeping with the narrative. Again, an instrumental variation appears elsewhere.
For the remaining instrumentals, some are based on the first song I wrote for The Irony Board, very much in keeping with the time and place. Indeed, one of the events in the story features in the lyrics. Another couple are based on the song ‘TLLS’, an early Broken Down Lorry recording whose initials stand for Tender Little Love Song. It’s a song Wilf could have written. One of the tracks meanwhile features the inimitable and much-loved voice of Mike Neville, local newsreader on both BBC and ITV regional broadcasts.
It’s very much the intention that the soundtrack adds to the reading experience of ‘This Is Not The End’, although I suppose that should go without saying…
You can get the soundtrack free with purchases of physical and digital copies of the book from www.brokendownrecords.bandcamp.com
You can also listen to it on streaming services like Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1BKGuKSiDsKzeYZdIrHgpD?si=XjzN0f0vTzOs4dOfheBywg
