glasgow – 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.

I’d like to say I listen to music as I write, that I sit down at my old oak desk and tap out words in time to pretty tunes. But in reality I do most of my plotting in the car on the school run. So my inspiration comes from what CDs are in the glovebox. Or at least they did until I dicovered Spotify. Now I just stick it on shuffle and see what happens. It’s making the WIP interesting.

For this novel it is the songs I listened to on the road to daycare that worked their way into the text, inspired whole chapters and gave the project its name. So that’s where we start today. With the name.

It’s going to become pretty obvious that I’m a big Idlewild fan. They are one of those bands I’ve followed from the start- I remember them rolling round the floor of the Old Old 13th Note in Glasgow in the mid-90’s, creating a shambolic noise that still somehow managed to tear your heart apart with the gorgeous lyrics. This was that post-punk, post-grunge noise that Scotland reverberated to back then. And it had soul.

Fast forward a few years and things have calmed down a bit but at the centre the pure poetry of Roddy Woomble slays me every time.

The Remote Part is the third album, released in 2002, was on repeat in the car for a long time. My daughter knows the entire album off by heart. The songs wove their way through the story but it is the last one- In Remote Part/Scottish Fiction featuring Edwin Morgan that ended up being anthem for the book. This song, for me, captures the relationship between Isla, the main character and her home.

I also make a cheeky reference to it in chapter 19. Because I couldn’t resist.

She was eventually roused by a nudge and became aware that Stewart was playing the guitar and singing an old Idlewild song that she loved. She guessed from Fiona’s frantic nudging and the fact that he was looking in the opposite direction from her that it was directed her way. She also realised it was apparently a favourite of the group when he did his best Edwin Morgan impression to hearty cheering. He handed the guitar to Neil once he was done and announced he was going outside for a smoke.

So go have a listen.