In the middle of 2019, I recorded some songs written by Stuart Brayson. He was launching a new stage musical called Pink Angora Sweater and wanted a diverse set of voices for his concept album. I loved the process; Stuart liked my recordings and one of them was played a few times on BBC Radio 2, so everyone was happy. I was in a particularly good mood on the way home from the launch party so when my friend and publisher, Stacey Haber asked if I’d consider writing a musical myself, I happily agreed without much thought for the consequences. “I’d like a musical comedy about death,” she said. She does this sort of thing all the time.
Having never written anything like it before I cobbled together an outline and one experimental song to see whether it might work but then forgot about it. Note to self; must get around to writing that musical. In December Stacey popped up to ask how it was going and wondering idly whether it might be ready to perform in the Spring (insert expletive here). There followed the usual panic, Christmas was a blur but by February 2020 there was a script and a bunch of new songs, so a production seemed at least plausible.
Then, just as I began to record the music, there was a rather inconvenient pandemic which smashed the very small chance of getting the show staged from ‘very slim’ to ‘no way on God’s Earth’ but, undeterred and with nothing better to do during lockdown, I carried on recording the songs in my tiny studio. Lockdown gave a lot of really good performers some unexpected free time, so I managed to get some truly wonderful people to record contributions remotely and send them to me via the internet, little by little, bit by bit until there was an album of music to go with the script.
It may be some time before theatres are properly open for business and it seemed a shame to waste all that good work so I decided to re-edit the script into a short story and put it into the world as a book with a CD (or an eBook and a digital download depending on your age and proclivities) and here it is, or here it will be on 20th January. There's more information on my website including an opportunity to preview the album, if you're so inclined you can pre-order the eBook from Amazon here and the album here.
So check it out, I guarantee you'll be blown away by the truly wonderful performances by our friends from the local music scene I'm so proud to inhabit. Let me know what you think!
Jim