frightenedrabbit – Clare Zeschky

frightened-rabbit-scott-hutchison

It’s hard to write this and feel that there is anything positive to say. What positive can you take away from a life cut too short by a brutal disease?

I’m not even sure why I’m quite as cut up as I am. I didn’t know Scott, not personally. I know people who knew him, he could have been any one of my friends. Maybe that’s why it hurts, why so many people are touched by his music and his death. He could have been any one of us. He wrote about each of us, not just the surface things- the casual sex, the drink and drugs, the parties, the weather, the things that mark out normal Scottish lives. It was they way he got beneath our skins, because what was beneath his is beneath ours. The anxiety, the awkwardness, the constant presence of thoughts darker than the Scottish winters.

Maybe I’m cut up because his lyrics run through my own work. MAybe not directly but Frightened Rabbit have been a constant muse. The feelings their songs bring me make their way into my own work. If I’m stuck they would be one of the first bands I put on to bring me home, to take me back to what I remember, what I love and what I hate about home.

Maybe I’m cut up because it’s another fail on the system, on the way we treat mental health, and the way we treat people with mental illness.

Maybe I’m cut up because selfishly, I won’t ever see them live now. I’ll never get to shout along with the crowd, pouring out my own landslide of rocks and hopes and fears.

Maybe it’s because everytime depression takes another of us I have the voice in the back of my head that knows why a person would want to end their life. Because that voice, the voice which is nothing but a disease, whispers a little too loudly to me sometimes too.

But maybe that’s also my positive here, the thing I’m taking away. Because I know that voice and when it claims another of us it gives me the strength to face it and tell it to go fuck itself. It won’t take me. And I will damn well fight to make sure it is silenced in as many people as I can reach in my work.

So fuck you depression. Fuck you mental illness.

While I’m alive, I’ll make tiny changes to earth.

Goodbye Scott. Hope it’s easier on the other side.

The sea plays a vital role throughout The Remote Part. It is never far from the action and its moods often set the tone for the chapter. But for Isla the sea is part of who she is. It is a realisation that comes to her as the novel progresses, but even in the opening chapter she cannot escape it’s grasp.

Exhausted and sick she curls up in bed only to be pulled out into the night by Stewart, and pushed into the sea. More than anyone he knows the power it has to heal her.

Before them the sea roared, the waves breaking close to shore, so close she could taste the spray. The pull of the waves on the land was almost unbearable now, pulling her in. As if he knew she could no longer stand it, she felt his lips on her forehead, cool against her hot skin. His voice cut over the pounding rhythm of the water.

“Come back to me,” he said.

His hand was on her back gently pushing her towards the sea.

She stepped forwards, the sand giving way unevenly beneath her until she was running, falling to where land met sea, where everything was blurred. The water wrapped around her and she let her body be carried by it until she was through the churn of the shoreline and out into the heave of the open water. The currents whipped round her like the wind. They tugged at her, tugged at what was inside her. She fought them, instinctively, until the calm came. It came slowly, a warmth which sparked in her chest and flowed out to the tips of her fingers and toes to the top of her head. She let herself sink, deeper and deeper, losing the sense of where she stopped and the water started.

Frightened Rabbit are another band that is going to pop up a lot here. This is classic Scottish Indie rock. And they just keep getting better. There’s a darkness through their work, particularly Scott Hutchison’s lyrics that just gets to me. It’s a brutal honesty, almost a slap in the face sometimes that draws me in again and again. These songs sum up so much of the Scottish experience, the reality of a life that is harsh but not without joy.

This song worked its way into the novel as a whole. The idea of Isla being linked to the sea, bound to it. The way the water can cleanse and heal but also how it can empty a soul.

And the land is a marker line
All I am is a body adrift in water, salt and sky

So here’s the song:

Clare Zeschky

Tag: frightenedrabbit

While I’m alive, I’ll make tiny changes to earth.

Swim Until You Can’t See Land.