Music, summer, 1990s Camden – The Undercover Soundtrack, Guy Mankowski @GMankow

Guy Mankowski’s new novel Dead Rock Stars has been brewing a long time. He draws on his experiences growing up in the 1990s, teaching himself to play Nirvana songs on the guitar. (It worked. He went on to play in several bands, including Alba Nova.) Guy says the 1990s was a time when musicians seemed mysterious, and seeing a band poster was like a glimpse of another world. From those feelings and recollections he has created a punky period piece, centred around a teenage boy navigating love and life, helped by the diaries of his dead sister. It’s a coming of age story with first hangovers, first dances, first loves, a sense of hope and optimism. And also, the struggle to find your voice and get it heard. Find him on the Red Blog sharing his Undercover Soundtrack.

‘Skinny-dipping in greenish-hued waters’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Consuelo Roland

We often don’t realise what surprises our own work holds for us. My guest this week tells me that while writing her post, she realised she was seeing her novel in a fresh light. She’s been on this series before, so is no stranger to Undercover Soundtracks. This time she has a psycho-sexual tale of a husband who vanishes and a wife who follows him into a seductive, mysterious and dangerous night world in which they all become creatures of darkness, ‘skinny-dipping in deep greenish hued waters charged with sexual tension and lustful predilections’. The novel is Lady Limbo, the writer is Sunday Times Fiction Prize nominee Consuelo Roland, and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack.

‘Music prepares me to face a blank page’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Carol Cooper

I’ve long suspected that the music writers work to is not necessarily their favourite listening. My guest this week supports this theory. She says music is her creative Viagra, but that her choices sometimes surprise her – thus confirming for me that Undercover Soundtracks belong to a separate department in the mind. She describes her work as raunchy romance with a heartrending medical strand – she is also a doctor and the author of several health books, as well as a journalist for The Sun newspaper. Her musical colleagues include The Beatles, the BBC proms and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Carol Cooper is on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack.

Blogging break: I’m taking a short break from my dashboard this week – to work on a few projects and get the files finalised for my upcoming audio book of My Memories of a Future Life. The next post here will be an Undercover Soundtrack, but after that it will be writing and publishing as usual! In the meantime, here’s Carol’s post…