‘Shadows of the past’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Meg Carter

My guest this week has written a psychological thriller in which two former school friends confront a life-changing event from their past. To create their teenage years in the 1980s, the author delved into her own archives, discovering old mixtapes and an Elvis Costello LP whose sleeve contained a lyric sheet written out by a close friend. She was struck by the way music became less significant over the years. What had once been such a fierce marker of personal identity was now an emblem of a simpler time – though not necessarily for the characters in her novel. She is Women In Journalism advocate Meg Carter and she’s on the Red Blog with the Undercover Soundtrack for The Lies We Tell.

‘Drumming is my heartbeat’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Wendy Storer

This striking phrase is a manifesto for a character who lives, breathes and seeks refuge in music. She is Daisy, an aspiring musician coping with a family member who is slipping into dementia. In the early stages of writing, her creator found that she would judge every piece of music she heard on whether Daisy would love it or not – and so the character was created by a series of instinctual responses. Memory is necessarily a theme here too, which became strangely real for the author as the music of her teens brought back the times she messed up at school, fell in love and wanted something so badly it didn’t seem possible. She is Wendy Storer and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack.