Deadbeats

It is infinitely probable that nobody other than HLoF and I give a tinker’s shit about this but what the hell. Just stumbled on this forthcoming boxset from Mad Tom O’the Waits. Apparently it collects 24 rare and 30 unreleased tracks from over the years. Predictably enough Waits describes it best on the Anti website:

When I was small I always thought that songwriters sat alone at upright pianos in cramped smoky little rooms with a bottle and an ashtray and everything came in the window blew through them and came out of the piano as a song… and in a weird way that is exactly what happens.

What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead-end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.

At the center of this record is my voice. I try my best to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. With my voice, I can sound like a girl, the boogieman, a Theremin, a cherry bomb, a clown, a doctor, a murderer… I can be tribal. Ironic. Or disturbed. My voice is really my instrument.

Kathleen and I wanted the record to be like emptying our pockets on the table after an evening of gambling, burglary, and cow tipping. We enjoy strange couplings, that’s how we got together. We wanted Orphans to be like a shortwave radio show where the past is sequenced with the future, consisting of things you find on the ground, in this world and no world, or maybe the next world. Whatever you imagine that to be.

If a record really works at all, it should be made like a homemade doll with tinsel for hair and seashells for ears stuffed with candy and money. Or like a good woman’s purse with a Swiss Army Knife and a snake bite kit.

Orphans contains songs for all occasions. Some of the songs were written in turmoil and recorded at night in a moving car, others were written in hotel rooms and recorded in Hollywood during big conflamas. That’s when conflict weds drama. At any rate these are the ones that survived the flood and were rescued from the branches of trees after the water’s retreat.

Gathering all this material together was like rounding up chickens at the beach. It’s not like you go into vault and check out what you need. Most of it was lost or buried under the house. Some of the tapes I had to pay ransom for to a plumber in Russia. You fall into the vat. We started to write just to climb out of the vat. Then you start listening and sorting and start writing in response to what you hear. And more recording. And then you get bit by a spider, go down the gopher hole, and make a whole different record. That was the process pretty much the last three years.

Then we met Karl Derfler, a wizard engineer who works at Bay Side Studios in Richmond, CA, in the science fiction part of town. A battlefield medic, he did a Lazarus on a number of the songs and recorded all the new material.

On Orphans there is a mambo about a convict who breaks out of jail with a fishbone, a gospel train song about Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Boothe, a delta blues about a disturbing neighbor, a spoken word piece about a woman who was struck by lightening, an 18^th century Scottish madrigal about murderous sibling rivalry, an American backwoods a cappella about a hanging. Even a song by Jack Kerouac and a spiritual with my own personal petition to the Lord with prayer… There’s even a show tune about an old altar boy and a rockabilly song about a young man who’s begging to be lied to.

I think you will find more singing and dancing here than usual. But I hope fans of more growling, more warbling, more barking, more screeching won’t be disappointed either.

In an attempt to shoehorn some relevance to all of this and writing… erm… I listen to him a lot while working and he features as a recurring character in The Organisation.

Good enough.

And there we have it. Well, there the UK has it anyway (although as it’s co-funded by C.B.C., no doubt our token colonial will have it on his maple leaf shaped screen soon enough; ignoring the fact that, with the rife torrent network anyone in the world with a broadband connection — say someone in Spain… ahem — can now watch whatever television their browser favours). So, what do we think?

I know that Thomson The Design — my frequent sounding board in matters Who related — has his reservations, but the general feeling here in Casa Deadbeats was that we have another interesting show to occupy us for the next few months. It wasn’t perfect of course, no show is from the word go in my experience. It takes time for a cast of characters to build into something we care about. Let’s not forget quite how… fine Doctor Who seemed when its first episode screened a couple of years back. Impressive, yes but nothing compared to what was to come. There seems to me a huge amount of potential to Torchwood, some nice dialogue, rounded characters and a premise that opens up storytelling possibilities with consummate ease.

The second episode was a little hampered by its sex driven plot — Bruve felt the ‘lesbian snogging’ gratuitous, we boys refused to comment; although the wanking club owner was televisual gold on our sofa, three boys of varied ages laughing like drains — and showed that Chris Chibnall has a good ear for voices, which is always the most important thing in my book.

I interviewed Chris for the LOM book and we talked of Torchwood (he’s more involved story-wise than Russel T. Davies in many ways) and I was convinced then that the show would be in safe hands. His enthusiasm and understanding of TV drama with a fantastical edge was unerring and a splendid, anorak-y conversation was had.

Let’s just hope it’s successful because, not only will it provide another interesting diversion for a Sunday night it’s also another step towards getting genre television thriving again here in the UK — and Matthew Graham is being no slouch in this department either, his recently announced Life On Mars sequel being only the tip of this man’s fantastical iceberg.

It’s getting to the point that a resolute fantasist may have places to tell the stories he likes and get paid doing it.

Beats the shit out of writing for Casualty.

So… yeah… big contract fell through and I am now officially poor. Can’t be specific right now because not everybody involved actually knows so it would be bad protocol but most of you that are aware of my plans of late can probably guess anyway (and that doesn’t mean ’shout out the specifics in the comments section’, my lovely dears, for the reasons outlined above).

So. I’m back to the drawing board as far as a career is concerned through until March when Book Two of LOM offers another cheque in my direction.

All is not lost, there are a few possibilities, a few ideas. What’s that? You want specifics? Oh…

Okay then. I’ve got a really nice kid’s book idea that’s been brewing since I went snorkelling off the coast of my closest town a couple of months back. If one were to take The Water Babies, Stig of the Dump and Amando Ossorio’s Return of the Blind Dead and mix ‘em all up you would be close to the plot that bubbles in my head. My current editor has offered to put me in touch with the children’s editor at S&S so I shall remain foolishly optimistic.

Until the restraining order…

One of the writers I met through working on the LOM book has recently set up their own production company and has promised to have a meeting down the line with a view to me pitching a few scripts. I shall therefore look forward to my TV début (as a writer of course, who can forget my halcyon acting days? Emmerdale, Where the Heart is… Where would the pleasure start?).

Right up until they throw me out of the office for wasting their time…

There still, in fact, seems a degree of enthusiasm for Deadbeat as a piece of Telly, so I look forward to bringing that particular vision to the screen.

Right up until they cast Dick and Dom in the main roles and change the club to a Jelly Bean factory in Leeds. Because they think their demographic would prefer it that way…

Also on the go: the makings of a Giallo story that may be a short novel, a particularly eerie novella called “Last Train Home” and a short story influenced by Lon Chaney, Sr.

A writer’s life, conflicted but never dull.

Gx