“You could find yourself doing the whole of Sky of Honey. In sequence, with the birdsong and the cackling like a mad bint.”
During a round of radio interviews last year to promote Monsters at the Gate, talk turned to Kate Bush, as talk inevitably does when Holly Trinity stories are discussed. I shared the songs that had chimed with the first book and plugged the far from radio-friendly Waking the Witch.
Making Kate Bush a feature of these books has definitely stood me in good stead. The reference on the blurb reliably brings a smile to people’s faces. And of course, Stranger Things went and happened, creating a whole new generation of Kate fans, while at the same time, making me worry her music belonged to a fantasy world with deeper cultural reach than I could ever hope for. (Which is nonsense, really – the songs belong to everyone.)
Holly’s favourite artist was inevitably going to crop up again in Monsters at the Gate, but I wanted to give it a bit more weight this time around. It risked feeling like a self-consciously quirky affectation because, well, it is. To counter this, I decided to give Holly’s connection to the music roots in the narrative, showing just why these songs mean so much to her, and by doing so, explore her priorities and how they have shifted over the years.
Around this time last year, I published a short playlist of the Kate Bush songs to listen to while reading Holly Trinity and the Ghosts of York. And it seemed only fair to do the same for Monsters at the Gate. Truth be told, the second book was written to a great deal of Florence + The Machine, and yet somehow, specific Kate Bush numbers sit higher in the mix than first time around. In any case, enjoy.
Wuthering Heights One of the reasons for setting a substantial flashback subplot in the early 1980s was to plant Holly at ground zero for Kate Bush and let her fall in love with the first big hit. However, it proved a somewhat apt choice for the book, which is all about returning to a Gothic mansion to set the trauma of the past right, possibly by grabbing a soul.
Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake So, little spoiler here – at one point in the book, Sam’s band play a Kate Bush song. I needed something rocky enough to fit them (although they’d probably need to do it in a different key) and that chimed with our heroes’ ongoing issues in a not too on-the-nose manner. This slotted right in.
There Goes a Tenner This posh-cockney-accented oddity from designated Marmite album The Dreaming somehow became Mira’s theme this time around. The tale of a master criminal plagued with anxiety that their intricately planned heist will go wrong resonated for me with Mira feeling the juggling balls of her life slipping through her fingers.
This Woman’s Work This raw slice of fear and desperation was, from day one, Sam’s theme.
Rocket Man Bit of a cheat here, going for Kate’s cover version of the Elton John classic – although she absolutely makes it her own with a melancholy calypso vibe. The juxtaposition of homey normality with something bigger and more cosmic and the isolation that comes with living in two worlds are themes at the heart of the Holly Trinity stories.
Cloudbusting This one more than any was the song for the book. It really reflects Mira’s relationship with Holly, but also my own feelings in creating their adventures. Something wonderful yet perilous springs into your life unbidden. And when it does, you just know that something good is going to happen.
Monsters at the Gate is available in paperback and ebook from Sixth Element Publishing.
Ben Sawyer 