Coraline

The news is out. The secret I’ve been keeping for over five years. Probably the hardest secret I’ve ever kept! A secret that was ultimately divulged by The Guardian of all things!
Yes it’s true, I have written the songs for the new musical adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s internationally beloved book Coraline.

How did I get this amazing job? How did I go from playing in the handsomest niche rock band of all time to adapting one of the planet’s most celebrated authors? I don’t totally know myself. But here’s what I do know…

2017: I launch my musical Jocasta at a showcase event in The Lowry. Salford. It goes down well but the process of getting it to this point on my own has absolutely destroyed me. I declare that I am done with music, done with making it and done with performing it. I do not write a song for over a year, I barely even listen to songs let alone create them. I am done. I start a new life with my partner on the Isle of Skye.

2018: I apply to join the Scottish Fire & Rescue Service. I pass all the assessments: bleep test, confined spaces, working at heights, strength, stamina, timed equipment assembly, lung capacity, eyesight, hearing (that one was a worry after playing with The Bedlam Six for ten years!), maths, psychometric test, interview with the Station Commander… I’m in. It makes me believe in myself again. I feel useful and valued and a part of something. I finally feel like I’m not drifting anymore. I feel human.

Then absolutely out of the blue I get an email from director James Brining. He’s been asking around trying to find someone a bit weird to be a kind of Paul Shaffer band leader in a new stage play of Coraline that’s being workshopped. One scene happens in a theatre and they wanted a song to be sung as well as general incidental music. My name had come up on a bunch of lists. Apparently people think I’m weird.

You’d think I would’ve bitten his hand off. This was a dream proposition. But it had taken me a long time to get my head straight after swimming through music industry treacle for fifteen years. I was still a mess and I worried I’d lose myself again. I said no to being part of the play, that I’d just joined the emergency services, that I wasn’t that guy anymore. But I would write the song if that was an option.
It was an option. I read the book (I must confess I didn’t even know the story though I had read other Gaiman work) and the current draft of the script. I went to Leeds to meet James. He’s a lovely man who I took to immediately. He invited me to meet playwright Zinnie Harris in Edinburgh (she is brilliant) and then to come to a workshop that was happening a month later.

And then I did what I promised myself I wouldn’t do. I got really into it. I didn’t just write that song. I wrote loads of songs. I haemorrhaged songs. I hadn’t written one since Jocasta. I didn’t know if I could still do it but then they just kept pouring out – here’s one the parents could sing, here’s one the cat could sing, this one is for the old thespians in the basement… only problem was this show was not a musical, rather a play with mood music and a single diagetic song that happens in a cabaret setting. But that didn’t stop me. I wrote torch songs and I Want songs and lowest-ebb songs. During the workshop week I’d write songs in the lunch breaks, I’d go back to the hotel and write three songs a night. I barely slept. I’d brought my friend Felix Hagan with me as moral support and to play piano so no one would notice I CAN’T PLAY PIANO and he listened to me hack away at this material and helped me excavate the side of me that I’d decided to bury a year before.
And one by one songs crept into this play and actors would whistle them while making cups of tea and people would come up to me and say how much they liked them and before we knew it the play… had become a musical. But of course, musicals aren’t just plays with songs in, they are the theatrical equivalent of a massive Rube Goldberg machine, complex and delicate and time consuming with lots and lots of moving parts that must all operate in total equilibrium. One does not simply bung a bunch of songs into a script. So we started again from scratch and we made it A PROPER MUSICAL. The contracts were changed and suddenly I was part of the creative team. No, I don’t understand either.

Five and a half years (three of them as a probationary firefighter and two and a half as a competent one), four workshops, eighteen script drafts, one pandemic and many many 999 calls later the show has finally been announced and the response has been AMAZING. But that isn’t the biggest joy for me. The process itself has been life-changing. All the amazing people who are part of this machine – it’s just staggering, all the talent, all the energy and enthusiasm. Zinnie and I are great friends now, though we bicker like siblings over character arcs and emotional beats. James brings his family to Skye for holidays and tells me off for sending ten emails a day about cat lyrics. I’ve written over a hundred songs about buttons and mice and shadows and spooky doors and learned how to not be heartbroken every time one slips out of the script into the bin (the bottomless infinity-guzzling bin). Writing and rewriting and more rewriting. It’s exhausting and exhilarating and I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU TO SEE IT!

Coming to Leeds Playhouse, Manchester HOME, Birmingham Rep and Edinburgh Lyceum in Spring 2025.