Open Up – the playlist

Wales

I think of Open Up as a suite; and the opening story, ‘Wales’, as the prelude – a movement that lightly introduces themes and motifs that play out across the stories.

In ‘Wales’, we meet Gareth, a ten-year old boy, who’s attending his first ever football match – to watch Wales, no less! – with his father. Gareth’s parents have recently separated and he hasn’t seen his dad in three months. What happens next? Well, you can read the story here.

At one point, I considered calling the story, “I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”, after this song: it’s been the Welsh football team’s second anthem since a 1993 BBC Wales Sport promo. But in the end. I opted for ‘Wales’. It just felt to me less authorial, more open. I have other reasons for the title, but you don’t need to know about them.

Aberkariad

In 2017-18, I was living in Cork, where I was writer in residence at UCC. I didn’t know many people in the city, and I was feeling really shit about my writing. I felt completely unable to progress anything, and I was losing motivation by the day. When I wasn’t teaching, I felt utterly bored and restless and useless. Eventually, after a long period of doing no writing whatsoever, I started playing and writing things with talking animals – just to amuse myself – and then one day I started mucking around with something about a seahorse. 

Starting out, I knew as much about seahorses as anybody else: that it’s the males who get pregnant. But once I wrote a few lines I stumbled on a premise that felt like it had some heat: a story about a seahorse whose mother “abandoned” him before he was even born, and a father who insisted she was coming back. By January 2019, I was living back in Wales, and I had a couple thousand words written about a family of seahorses – six boys, and their father, and their uncle who mocked their father for his “romantic notions”. But I still didn’t have a story, and I couldn’t find a real way into the material. And then Sharon Van Etten released her fifth album, “Remind Me Tomorrow” – and I listened and I listened, and the album ended up having a huge bearing on the emotional register of the sentences I began to write. I wrote entire passages listening to “Jupiter 4”, as well as the track ‘Hands’. Suddenly, these songs – their mood, tone, atmosphere – pushed me through the choppy waters of the story when I was stuck and had no idea where to go.

Aberkariad

Developing ‘Aberkariad’, I read quite a bit about seahorses. A year in, I learned that the males keep to one territory, the females to another, and that they meet in a mutual third to mate. So I took a dollop of poetic license, enlarged the scale, and gave this place a Welsh name of my own making: Aberkariad (‘Aber’ = the Welsh word for confluence of waters; ‘cariad’ the Welsh word for love.)

I first heard “Sea of Love” at a wedding in 2012. I was quite drunk and I typed the lyrics I into the notes app on my iPod, so that I could look up the song when I was sober. I loved the original Phil Philips version (which turns up later on in this playlist) but I’m also obsessed with cover versions. When I fall in love with a song, I’ll spend hours on YouTube looking up covers, watching and listening to the ways in which the same words and tune can sound entirely different when sung and played by another human.

Aberkariad

I spent the first couple months of the 2020 lockdown living on a farm in South Wales, falling in love with someone over the phone. One evening, I went out for a walk into the woods, listening to this song, and I floated the whole way. The next morning (well, it was afternoon by the time I woke up) I went back to work on ‘Aberkariad’. 

Aberkariad

The scale of this song! The way it evokes a whole universe, an entire cosmos of feeling! On this album, Adrienne Lenker starts doing something she’d go on to do a lot more of in her later work: it’s as if she opens up a lyrical groove and just unspools it like ribbon:

With our aching planet, high and smiling

Cheap drink, dark and violet

Full of butterflies, the violent tenderness

The sweetest silence

The clay you find is fortified

We felt some focus, fade the line

The sugar rush, the constant hush

The pushing of the water gush

When I first heard this song, I stopped dead in the middle of the street and listened right through till the end. It was spring, the sun was setting, and I felt still and calm and stirred, knowing I had just encountered something that touches the eternal. 

Aberkariad

Another song mentioning the sea! 

I didn’t listen to this song during the writing of any particular story in the book, but it’s a song that has captivated me for over ten years now, and its ambition is something I have tried to match in ‘Aberkariad’. One thing I aim for in my own work is intensity, and this song has an intensity that I really fucking love and admire. It’s not a song for all moods, but when I need it, I reach for it, and the final lines still knock me sideways.

Aberkariad

Did I mention intensity? I love listening to this song during night-walks, the landscapes around me transforming in time with the music. I listened to this song over and over while writing ‘Aberkariad’, especially the scenes set in Aberkariad itself.

Floe: it’s an underwater factory, where each horn-toot is a chimney, pumping out thoughts and feelings!

Little Wizard

‘Little Wizard’ is set on one of those soul-sapping British winter weekday evenings, when it’s already dark as you leave work. The protagonist is a man named Michael, who is known as Big Mike to his friends, because he’s 5 foot 3. Mike feels victimised by his boss; he is skint; he is confused, stressed, sad, and dissociating. He finds comfort in football, food, and his childhood friend Rhian. During a phone call, she urges him to take a risk in his life. And then he does…

Passenger

Synopsis: a couple go on their first holiday together. The guy falls apart. 

I worked on this story for four years. Each time I thought I was finished, some inner voice told me to go back in, and go deeper. For a long time, the story moved quite mechanically between the character’s interior and exterior, and at some stage, very late in the process, I realised that the shroud between the two is very thin indeed; and maybe we don’t always know in which reality we’re residing. Looking at the story now, I can see the ways in which our inner landscapes are tablecloths which we pull out of ourselves to picnic on in the outer world. If you have an anxious inner picnic blanket, you’ll likely have an anxious picnic. Adjust your insides!

Passenger

I didn’t hear this version until I was doing edits on the stories. It was winter but I listened to the song on loop and felt like I was soaring through a blossoming spring. Listening to the song helped me find the green shoots that were trying to push through.

Birthday Teeth

Glyn is twenty-years old and lives with his depressed, agoraphobic mother. He identifies as a vampire, and stays up into the late hours, “conversing” with fellow vampires, and moderating the philosophy forum on a major vampire website. The story takes place over one night and one day, but covers a lot of time, a lot of memories, including a long unspooling all about Glyn’s relationship with a woman named Alice…

The story took two years to write. For the first year, I inadvertently kept the hours of a vampire, working very late into the night, and going to bed at 5am. The story went into some really dark places and I could never get it work, probably because I was depressed in a way that stifled my imaginative capacities. After a while, and some time away, I resurfaced and managed to find in the work a lighter strain that was able to hold everything together.

I finished the story in 2018 and sold rights for a TV option in 2019, and again in 2021. For three years, I developed ‘Birthday Teeth’ with Lisa McInerney for a TV series; alas, broadcasters turned it down. But in imagining the tone of that show, I made several playlists, and all of them included songs by Cate Le Bon. If a TV show of the story is ever made, I will insist that Cate Le Bon is invited to appear, perhaps performing at the Vampire Ball.

Birthday Teeth

As I say, I went through a mad time with this story. When my mental health started improving, I began stretching in the morning, and keeping my bedroom tidy. I have very fond memories of afternoons in that room, listening to Billie Holliday. The atmosphere was suddenly different: there was calmness, and I could finally think again.

This song speaks, I think, to an unspoken feeling in ‘Birthday Teeth’: you left me distraught. And yet, the song’s tone is oddly, beautifully, defiant.

Birthday Teeth

FKA Twigs’s voice seems to channel feeling from such a deep place here: a place before and beyond language. 

Filming the video for this song, she was recovering from fibroid surgery, and had to stretch for something crazy like six hours a day to get into the physical condition to perform. Her artistry in this video is breathtaking; and there’s something astonishing about the combination of her physical strength, her mastery of dance, the plaintiveness of her voice, and the vulnerability of her questions.

I first heard this song after completing ‘Birthday Teeth’, but I had both the song and video in mind when I was working on the final edits.

Birthday Teeth

Call back! 

This version of the song plays on the radio at one point in the story, and it cost me a couple hundred quid to clear the rights to quote a couple of the lines. And it was absolutely worth it.

Birthday Teeth

The five stories of Open Up represent a slim wedge of the work that I produced between 2016 and 2022. I wrote other stories, other novellas, and a couple of pilots for TV. An image which kept arising across these works was someone at a threshold – a hallway, a doorway, a wall – that they were desperately trying to break through. It’s in a couple of the stories in Open Up and it’s here in ‘Birthday Teeth’. In retrospect, I think that the person in all those works was also me, trying to push through the stuckness I was experiencing on and off the page.

Every time I wrote this kind of scene, this song was playing.

Birthday Teeth

I wanted to finish the suite on an unexpected note, an opening out… And then in the closing pages, Van Morrison threw his hat down on the table. It’s a passing reference, and this song is never explicitly mentioned, but I had it in mind.