Growing up in a dead-end, Thames Valley town like Marden Combe, Kai knows there’s no escape without a lot of talent, hard work—and luck.Two weeks before the Clayton Paul Blues Band plans to set out on tour to Germany, their singer quits, and drummer Kai takes matters in hand. With bandmates Jake and Jamie, they recruit a talented new singer—the enigmatic Dominique—as the new face of the band and set out on the road to Berlin in a rickety white van.
Dogged by mishaps and under-rehearsed, the band stumbles through their first shows, zig-zagging between chaos and brilliance. But as the first gig in Berlin draws near, the band begins to gel. They’re clicking with their audience, and even the stone-hearted Kai starts to crumble under the spell, first of Dom and then…of Lars.
As the end of the tour approaches, Kai must make hard choices. Dom? But she’s keeping a dark secret. Lars? Not after the acrimony of their last parting. The band? Or will that dream crumble too?
Hi, and thank you for inviting me to post something about Teardown.
It’s a very personal book for me, so I’m going to talk about the origins of the book, and one of the more unusual aspects of creating Teardown.
I started playing in bands when I was about fifteen, with some school friends, and learned bass guitar, because there were too many guitarists already. I stayed with those guys for 17 years, before my job made it impossible to stay in the band.
So it was inevitable that I’d write books about being in a band. In my first book, Expiration Day, Tania was a bass player in a couple of bands. Here in Teardown, Kai is the drummer, and I am drawing on my own experiences of touring Germany in a rickety van. Not all of the exploits in the book are fictional – but names have been changed to protect the guilty.
That was a long time ago – though it was at least in this galaxy. It was before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany. At one point in the tour we drove up close to the frontier between East Germany and West Germany. We were warned not to go too close. But we were close enough to see the barbed wire fences separating the two halves of Germany. I can still picture the scene – and the feeling of dread at how close we were to guards willing to kill, in order to keep the two Germanies separate. It has stayed with me and surfaces in several places in Teardown. The book title’s link to Ronald Reagan’s famous call - “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” is not accidental.
But back to bands, and the ‘Behind the Scenes’ part that I’d like to talk about, which is writing original songs for music books. I learned in Expiration Day that authors can’t just quote their favourite songs for their band to sing. The copyright lawyers are waiting to pounce. (The same goes for poetry.) So when the plot demands a song or a poem, you have to do the hard yards and write it yourself.
There’s form on this, naturally. Taylor Jenkins Reid wrote several songs for ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’, and because it got dramatised, I guess somebody set those lyrics to music. Iain Banks wrote songs for his ‘Espedair Street’, which was also dramatised. Likewise, Malorie Blackman for ‘Knife Edge’.
For Expiration Day I wrote one original song, and I had a tune, which I kept in my head. For Teardown, though, the songs are so crucial that I felt I had to do better. I wanted my readers to be able to hear those songs, at least as demos. For my own satisfaction, I wanted to prove that I’d written songs, not poems, that the music was integral with the lyrics. So I’ve recorded demos of all those original songs – there are five (plus a sixth “traditional, adapted by”). They’re a work in progress – I wanted to get something down in time for the book release – so currently demo quality, recorded in my home studio, with me doing all the parts. As Jamie tells Kai in the book:
“I’m not sure how to put this, Kai. You’ve got a good voice. It’s, well…not very, well, rock’n’roll. No…grit. Too pure. Sorry.”
Unfortunately, that’s me, too. I can sing, but I don’t have Dom’s voice. But I do have plans to re-record the songs, and get them closer to production quality. I’m working with one of my old band mates on ‘The Hall of Fallen Angels’ at the moment. Such as they are, all the songs are posted on my website at https://bit.ly/TeardownMusic .
If the music is important to you, or if you are just curious how the songs sound, please give the songs a listen. And if they inspire you to perform/record your own version, I’d love to hear what you do with them.
So I pulled the mic stand around to the side of the kit, set it up so it didn’t get in the way of the hi-hat, and we gave it a go. I picked ‘I Come from the Blues’, which was one of Clay’s compositions. It had fallen out of the set sometime in the last six months, but I loved Clay’s soft, jazzy butterscotch vocals on it. If it had been up to me, it would still be in the set, but Clay had said he wanted to move on.
Where did I come from? I come from the blues.
Where am I going? I’m going to lose.
Where is my future? I’m sure I have none.
Where is my hope? My hope is all gone.
I’ve always sung along—off-mic and under my breath—so I didn’t have any trouble fitting the words in the right places. And I’ve got decent pitch and rhythm. So I think I did all right.
Now, Jamie wouldn’t meet my eye.
“What?” I demanded. “What was wrong with that?”
He mumbled something.
“I can’t hear you, bro. What did he say, Jake?”
Jake looked away. He didn’t want to get involved in any squall between me and my brother. Besides, he’d used up all his words for the day.
“I’m not sure how to put this, Kai. You’ve got a good voice. It’s, well…not very, well, rock’n’roll. No…grit. Too pure. Sorry.”
“I see.”
“Look, we’ll ask around our friends. Social media. There’s got to be something online.”
I didn’t say anything. I was thinking lots though. About how I’d discovered that this was something I really wanted to do.
William lives in a small Buckinghamshire village in England. By night he writes speculative, historical, crime and other fiction. His debut novel, EXPIRATION DAY, was published by Tor Teen in 2014 and won the 2015 Hal Clement Award for better than half-decent science in a YA novel—the citation actually says "Excellence in Children's Science Fiction Literature".William’s latest novel - TEARDOWN - was published 10th December 2024, by NineStar Press in the US; it is an LGBT+ romance/road-trip.
His short fiction has appeared in DreamForge, Metastellar, Abyss & Apex and other outlets.
By day he writes software for a living and in the twilight he sings tenor, plays guitar and writes songs.
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Hi, I really appreciate you pulling together all this content - it looks great. Even a direct link to one of Teardown's original songs! Happy to answer any questions, of course.
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure! I had fun exploring the music, and your guest post gave me the proper perspective which made it even more interesting. Thank you for touring with Goddess Fish!
DeleteThank you so much for hosting and featuring TEARDOWN today.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a good read.
ReplyDeleteThe book sounds like a fun read. Love the cover!
ReplyDeleteYes, it's very much got that road-trip vibe. Kudos to Jaycee DeLorenzo at NineStar who did the artwork. I'd have liked a van like that, when I was touring... ;-)
DeleteThis sounds like one that will keep interested and reading for sure.
ReplyDeleteheather hgtempaddy@hotmail.com
Looks like a good book.
ReplyDelete