A New Process - Writers and writing, Art and Artists, Music and Musicians

I have found a new process.  After being stuck with my Light Gate opera for a long time, I recently began a novelization to try and work out the story better.  I had written a couple of prologues before, which I envisaged being liner notes to accompany the album but over time I began to realise that I really needed to explain why the beacons in the story are so important; and in doing so, this brought up so much about growing up as child in the 1980s during the Cold War.  It enabled me to identify something specific to my own generation and at the same time multi-generational.  It was all going on and we were there.  In my case, I knew it was there from an early age.  That's just the way my mind works.  Maybe its over-sensitive.  I know that I am.  I don't apologise for that.

The last post I made, the first in a long time of any kind, was the first chapter of what is turning into a novel.  What did totally surprise me was that I've suddenly found it easy to write music that draws directly from the novel.  At the moment I pretty much have the first two chapters complete with the rest of the book worked out.

Its actually the first time that I've enjoyed writing in years.  I think that it was simply a lack of confidence.

In January last year I started a process largely drawn from Julia Cameron's excellent book The Artist's Way, having dabbled with it from the autumn of 2012.  I stopped writing for a long time.  In fact, I stopped music pretty much totally for a year.  I felt as though I had completely lost my way with it all and it was a pretty terrible void.  Cameron's process involves writing stream of consciousness prose every day.  I found myself writing - with occasional period of interruption - pretty much everyday.  At around the same time, I rediscovered my lost fountain pens and took a lot of joy in writing with proper ink.

One thing that I came back to was my opera and that I needed to finish it.  I'm trying that at the moment and this new process seems to work.  Instead of random lyrics that I like to pretend tell a story thematically, I'm actually writing songs that tells a story.  I think that there will be a balance of about 50/50 in the end because in rock n roll, you don't need to spell it out.  It isn't a musical.  It isn't primarily theatre and I really think that you need to create a structure in which you provide a prop to the imagination of your audience.

I think that you have to allow creativity to take time.  It isn't a tap that you turn on and off.  My life is very demanding, I have a very committed professional life - as unbohemian as that may be - and it is very difficult to strike a balance.  I don't like doing something and being half arsed about it; I always want to give my all.

All of which leads me on to something quite interesting musically.  I've decided to form a new band.  I'll need to lose the paunch for it because this will be more like what the Light and the Change did back in the day, my old bands.  That means a proper rock band with all the hearing loss (which thus far has proved to be temporary), cut fingers and housemaid's knees that that entails.  I don't really see it as the natural setting for the opera but I figure that its age limited in some respects.  I probably will look ridiculous trying to do windmills, scissor kicks and jumping bean ballet poses like I did ten years ago but its business.  You know.  Its the proper business.  But I think that I'm more open to shades of tone in music now than I was.  I'm probably less of an outspoken high self-minded arse hole now, I hope.  Others may disagree but these days, nobody would bother telling me.

The thing is, I really am enjoying writing this novel.  Its so rewarding.  Its also picking up on lots of experiences that I think that others probably shared about my life up until now.  There's always a twang of middle class awkwardness in my stomach when I 'fess up (as the kids say, apparently) by putting autobiographical references in stories.  But I've decided just to do it.  You see, in truth the Light Gate has these references, a certain setting in the real world but heads off into fantasy and I think that fantasy is based upon my experiences with post-traumatic stress disorder (que awkward twang).

And who knows, if and when it is all done, maybe I'll be better positioned as a 33 year old (I hit this age next week) with a hairline that ain't exactly superstar to make the most of it all.  Anyone that knows me knows that I am a massive Who fan (que another self-aware twang about writing a rock opera...a second one at that) and when I saw Messrs Daltrey and Townshend play Quadrophenia last year - both of them knocking on the doors of their eighth decade - it made me realise that there aren't any rules about this.  Not that I could ever liken myself to masters of the art like them but I figure that many years in the future, I might just have created something epic that I can be truly proud of.

You know, when I was younger I gave up so much for my music.  I hurt a lot of people.  People who asked me if they would one day get a chapter in my memoir.  I figure that I have debt to myself and a debt to them.
And deep down, I still do truly believe.  One man and his guitar can change the world.

The Light Gate Chapter One

Ok.  After reading this I am scared:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26442381

And this makes me bring forward the first chapter of my novelization of The Light Gate my long gestated Cold War rock opera.  I am no writer of prose.  I am a musician.  I never intended for the following to be public consumption but sometime things change.  Something changed tonight.   God bless.

The Light Gate

On the counter-point of darkness

Stand my glass gates

On foundations of light,

That guide with a brilliant beam

Holds the blinded navigator

Still searching for his sight,

And this magic light show

Has now begun

Like a razor sharp laser

Brighter than the sun.

Chapter One:  In Polished Destruction

He remembered them from his childhood.  Standing out on the horizon from his parent’s bedroom window as the heavy red orange summer sky hung like satin from the heavens to the ground.  Twenty or so steel towers stretching up to the setting sun in the West.  They were thin and delicately structured forms; intertwining strings of metal precisely strung and rigidly linked together.  He thought that they were beautiful and when dusk was settling he always thought that they were at their best.  That’s when lights came on like bright ruby beacons becoming more brilliant as the darkness came down.

When the night came and the sky was dark - Coca cola dark as he called it – you could see them bright and clear.  Like hundreds of red stars in the near distance, he told his four year old self.  They were awake through the night and being scared of the dark he took great comfort in this.  He thought of them as friends.

He asked his mother once about them.  “They’re radio masts, dear” she explained “those lights are there so that aeroplanes don’t fly into them at night”.  

“Clever!” he thought. They were very clever.

                                                                                ***

The dark brown Vauxhall Cavalier pulled up outside the fish and chip shop in Hilmorton, a small suburb of Rugby, Warwickshire.  Rugby was famous for its radio masts, some of the biggest ever built. They were first brought to life on New Year’s Day 1926.  In 1927, the site grew and provided the first transatlantic commercial telephone service connecting New York to London; at its peak it hosted twelve 250ft aerials.

As well as scientific research and telegram messaging, it was also used to communicate with the Royal Navy submarine fleet under the call sign, GBR.  It was where the BBC broadcasted its electronic time code pips on Radio 4, the ticking clock at the heart of the United Kingdom’s psyche since 1972. 

It is 1985.  The year that Gorbachev became Secretary General of the Communist Party and three years before he becomes Head of State of the Soviet Union.  The Doomsday Clock is at three minutes to midnight according to the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , the closest the world has been to nuclear apocalypse since 1952 and the invention of the Hydrogen Bomb.  Time has moved on since then with East and West Cold War rivals posturing for the dominance of their competing systems with easily enough fire power to annihilate life on the earth. 

In the early 1980s the Soviet Union began developing a Doomsday fail deadly deterrence called The Dead Hand.   Should a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity and overpressure sensors it would automatically launch its nuclear arsenal of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) at their pre-destined targets by computer control.  One accident.  One incident.  And the world would be ravaged by annihilation. 

Outside the fish and chip shop the little boy waited with his mother as his father brought a bag to the car with the warm smell of batter, cod and fried potato.  The heaters were on in the car and he felt snug in the back seat with a soft glow from the digital display of the in car radio.  Outside rain came down and the street lights shone on the road in the early night. 

The 7pm Radio 4 news started and the father turned up the car’s radio.  Blip.  Blip. Blip. Blip. Blip. Blip. Blip.  Beep. As car turned around to head home his parents listen intently to the headline news and after a silence break into conversation about the story that they’ve just heard.

“That’s us” the mother says, sounding concerned.

“W-w-hat’s us, Mummy?” asked the little boy, he was still learning to speak and had a terrible stutter.  He didn’t like the tone in her voice.

“It’s the radio masts.  If the Russians launched an attack, we would be at Ground Zero” his mother said matter of factly, as though she was resigned to an immovable fact.

“What’s g-g-g-round zero?”, he knew what zero was.  It was a numberless number.  He’d just learnt about that at school.  Zero meant nothing.

“Well, it means that if there was a war, the radio masts would be the first thing that they would try to bomb and if the Royal Navy don’t hear the Today programme pips two days in a row or something like that, then they attack the Russians”.

“Does that mean we would die?” the little boy was worried.  He didn’t want his parents to die.  He felt protective of them.  The radio masts looked a long way away when he watched them from his parent’s window, he wondered if he could do something to save them.

“Yes” she replied.  “But don’t worry…we wouldn’t know a thing”.

***

Tucked up on the top of his bunk bed the little boy felt uneasy.  He was worried about the Russians and their bombs.  He felt comfort from the landing light falling through the window above his bedroom door but he could feel a distant terror.  He snuggled up with his favourite teddy bear and hid himself under the blankets.

He’d never really known fear like this before.  It was his first taste of something that felt really bleak.  He couldn’t sleep, so stayed awake for hours with his young mind imagining the darkness falling over his towers.  The corners of his bedroom grew darker, so dark that he thought he could see things living in them like they were in another world.  He had visions of the destruction hanging over his world.

***

26^th April 1986.  01:23H.  Chernobyl, Russia.  Engineers are undertaking a systems test at the nuclear power plant near the city of Pripyat on the border of Belarus in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  A sudden power serge causes a reactor vessel to rupture.  A series of violent steam explosions damage the structure to expose the graphite moderator to the air resulting in a fire bursting up into the night sky spreading a plume of highly radioactive fall out up into the earth’s atmosphere containing four hundred times more radioactive material than in the first atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

27^th April 1986.  The little boy’s mother ran out into the street of a small Northamptonshire cul-de-sac.  She found in one of his favourite haunts at the end of the road playing with one of his friends.

“Darling, I need you to come inside.  Its nothing to worry about” she said trying to hide her mild panic “I just want you to come inside.  There’s some kind of toxic cloud that they talked about on the news.  Something to do with Russia.”

“Can Charlie come?” the little boy asked, gesturing toward his best friend.

The mother said that she better check with his parents and walked the boys to the house across the road.  Soon afterward he walked with his mother up to their family’s semi-detached house that sat up at the top of the road.  There was a dense wooded embankment running alongside the road with a wire fence and a long strip of grass between.  Charlie’s mother had thought it was best that he stayed inside his own home.

He watched the television news in the living room with big windows that looked out onto the road.  “Those Russians” he thought “they’re rubbish”.  The television said it was an accident but with an unshakeable impression that it was the result of inept operation and poor maintenance.  There was it seemed to his young mind another notch on the meter of bad things that could happen.  Maybe the Russians would be too busy to fight a war and bomb him.  Edward Sun slept soundly that night. 

Shortly after the extensive environmental devastation brought on by the Chernobyl incident - that poisoned the heart of the Soviet Union with pollution mainly affecting Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine, as well as much of Western Europe to a lesser extent - Glasnost, or as it translates ‘publicity’ meaning transparency became the dominant movement within Soviet politics.  Ultimately, it is seen as the process by which the Soviet Union led by Mikhail Gorbachev began to re-assess its modus operandi and led to the federation’s collapse in the late 1980s and until 1991 when the Doomsday Clock reversed back to 17 minutes to midnight.

The world breathed a sigh of relief.  Nuclear war no longer seemed like an immediate threat.  In the United Kingdom, Irish republicans bombed shopping centres and banks across in England.  In Belfast, a civil war raged between paramilitary terrorist organisations and the authorities of both sides.  The bombs were different and as the little boy grew into an awkward teenager, he didn’t worry too much about them.

***

On September 11^th 2001, Edward Sun was working in a munitions factory building parts for the Queen’s personal jet when the news broke.  Nobody paid much attention when the newscaster’s voice crackled over the speaker.  A plane had flown into a New York skyscraper.  Details were scarce at the time and his Mind’s Eye he imagined a little single prop light aircraft. 

Gradually the provincial radio DJ began to play more sedate, melancholic music as the extent of the Al Queda attack on the Twin Towers in New York emerged.  The news then came in that a second aircraft had followed, which began to ring alarm bells.  He decided to forego the promised over time he had booked in to get home and watch the news on television as it came in.  His co-workers sneered at him for being so earnest as he left but he was excited by the news; it seemed like something important was happening.

When he got home the television were pictures looked apocalyptic, huge plumes of heavy dust laden smoke stretching up into the sky.  It was surreal.  He felt enthusiastic about engaging with the drama unfolding; they’d even managed to hit the Pentagon.  Even though it was happening in a land far, far away he knew enough to know that the repercussions and went to bed that night a little drunk and half suspecting that the United States would drop a nuclear bomb somewhere that night.

The terrorist plan had been ingenious.  Their approach to death was chillingly practical.  Fly a plane into a building and kill three thousand people.  Their fatal commitment to religion lethally more so.

 A new war had seemingly begun but it still seemed remote.  The newspapers, television commentators and politicians all seemed to stress the great severity of what had happened.  World leaders expressed condemnation and promised vengeance but as time marched on it started to ring a little hollow; there would be no turning point just a slow, bloody pursuit of those responsible that would in the process claim the lives of many innocent people until Western pride could be restored.

The same leaders conspired to use the whole affair as a shameless opportunity to preach fear and remove the odd dictator or two for economic gain until nobody – except the devout, insane and blindly patriotic - quite knew which side of good and bad they lived on.

Edward Sun found himself living in a strange world.  He had grown to become awkwardly gregarious by nature, serious and intellectual.  Hugely driven but with a capacity for self-destructive idiocy; he sneered at his peer’s sense of fun, particularly in pleasure derived from creative pursuit other than that that he derived from his own inexplicable global view.  He thought that tortured artists were self-indulgent but justified his own self-indulgences as a necessary part of his creative process.  His deep introspection led him to troubling guilt over the contradictions in his high self-minded value system.

It was a gamble.  If he delivered, it would all be worthwhile.  If he didn’t  then he’d be a fraud, a failure or dead.  There was no rational line of mediation between the two.  The battle lines were drawn indelibly in his psychology.  One man and his guitar can change the world.