The Bookshop Band (Ben Please & Beth Porter) have a new single which is inspired by Irish author Donal Ryan’s award-winning book The Spinning Heart. They tell us “Even though this book is set in 1980s Ireland, looking at a community in shock, mid recession, there are so many parallels in the book that hit home regarding what is happening at the moment, so there’s a sprinkling of all that in the song and video too.”
Despite the song’s theme, the story of its creation is one of positivity. “The song came about because we had a gig cancelled (of course) but we and the arts venue we were due to play decided to try and salvage a little and create something new instead.” Watch the accompanying video for The Spinning Heart (which includes a guest appearance from their three-year-old daughter Molly) and read more about the song and full backstory below. It’s also our Song of the Day.
One of the gigs we were most looking forward to this year was a trip over to Ireland to play in the Nenagh Arts Centre, in Co. Tipperary. It was due to be in June, and then COVID came through like a wrecking ball for everybody and that concert went the way of all others, for everybody. After a nice chat with the venue, we decided that the new normal is what we make for ourselves and it’d be nice to salvage something, perhaps even make something new instead. They knew a well known Irish author who lived locally called Donal Ryan who’d written a bestselling book called The Spinning Heart, a fictional portrait of a small-town community in shock, in the wake of the Irish recession of the 1980s, each chapter told through the viewpoint of a different character in that community. The book’s themes also resonate with what has been happening recently, with individuals and communities in shock to something else, and how that manifests, or not, and how we treat each other. We all felt that it would be a good book to try and write a song inspired by.
The song itself started coming out while I was playing my new electric guitar – the product of a random lovely conversation I’d had with a guy in a pub three years ago. I had been telling him about how our family had only ever had wooden plates and bowls and how I wished you could still buy them for everyday use, and it turned out he was a woodworker. He offered to make me a bowl. The conversation turned to music, I said I was a guitar player, he said he made guitars, I said I’d love an electric guitar, and two years later he phoned me up to say he’d made the guitar we’d talked about! Long story short, it’s wonderful the conversations you have with random real people you meet, and let’s all not take that for granted when things get better.
Anyway… so I was playing this lovely guitar and the song emerged slowly from that over lockdown. As I was reading the book I kept thinking about the images of ourselves we portray, and barriers we put up, the figures and statues we see around us in metal, stone and flesh. The Black Lives Matter protests, particularly the events in Bristol where we used to live, seemed to creep out from the narrative of this book. Reading about the things that matter to this fictional community resonated with how we were feeling, locked down with our family, but also so far from others. It all creeps into the song. As I kept going round and round on the electric guitar I kept hearing drums, like Radiohead’s B-side version of Talk Show Hosts, smashing through. We rarely work with drums, but I really wanted to on this one. I blame the electric. We contacted our friend Laurence Hunt, who played percussion in Eliza Carthy’s WayWard band with Beth Porter, and he’d just set up a drum recording room for remote sessions – like all of us, finding ways to adapt as musicians in this very precarious time. Also, our friend Pete “one-man-brass-band” Judge in Bristol, who had played on some of our songs before, giving them both some freedom to experiment over the recordings. Each delivering on what we had imagined, but in a way we could not, which is the thrill, right?
I mixed the song at home. A good lockdown-training exercise in production for me, especially as I’m not used to working with drums. And then we scoured the local area for a location to film a music video. Most of our videos are just us playing the song live (often for the first time), so with this one, we didn’t even want to pretend. There’s a shot of me putting down a ukulele in there which is as close as we get, it’s a weird shot, but seemed to resonate with me about live music being removed from many people’s lives right now. Our three-year-old daughter Molly woke up mid-shoot, so she’s in it too. She knows how to work the system. The space was amazing, an old welding workshop in a crumbling old Victorian creamery, water pouring through the roof, birds flying around. Sculptures of metal arising from the scrap. Seemed an appropriate place.
Get the track on all streaming and download sites here: https://ditto.fm/the-spinning-heart