Echo & The Bunnymen Ocean Rain

Just as I began work on Weirdo, a friend gave me the remastered CD of this for my birthday. It was like a time tunnel opening up straight back to 1984, when I listened to my long-since buggered vinyl version of the Bunnymen’s orchestral masterpiece incessantly. All sorts of long lost memories came back unbidden, as if I was walking down the streets of the town with the people I knew in those days, or should I say, moping down the seafront in the dark after my Friday night art college class, staring up at the stars with ‘The Killing Moon’ going round in my head. The stars and the other lights that lay out in the North Sea – the flames burning from the multitude of oil rigs that surrounded the Norfolk coast. While Thatcher was destroying the industrial north, Wales and Scotland with her civil war on the miners, these black candles were keeping her in money and in power. I refer to them often in Weirdo. While my teenage characters try to take control over their lives by amateur use of White Magic, the oil rigs represent to me the Black Mass of the real Witch Queen of 1984. The imagery in Ocean Rain is so perfect – it’s all about moonlight, magic, trickery, heartbreak and of course, bodies of water – that every single track on the album has its own chapter heading in my book. I didn’t have to force a theme, it was already all there. The friend who gave me the CD, Benedict Newbery, also wrote the poem 'Some Man’s Business' which I use in the frontispiece. It, too, conjures up the themes of the book in the line: "Death to come to those we husband…" and its whole feeling of sinister, rural unease.