I don’t normally do this, but I sort of committed to it in an earlier blog post.
Back in May 2021, I blogged about the late and great Iain Banks’s biopic novel Espedair Street. I mentioned in the course of that post that it had been dramatised in 1998 by BBC Radio. In the closing paragraph I said
And I really want to listen to that soundtrack someday.
This update is to let you know that I have heard it… sort of.
The dramatisation was broadcast in January of 1998. It featured John Gordon Sinclair as Weird, the songwriting genius behind the 70s supergroup Frozen Gold. It was presented in a docudrama style, mixing a documentary about the group with some scenes presented as a regular drama. It starts out as a lovely fusion of the two styles but then devolves into a straight drama with occasional documentary snippets. But it doesn’t matter because it’s a terrific retelling by Joe Dunlop, taking the story slightly further than the novel did in pleasant and fulfilling ways.
It also features the songs.
We got snippets of them throughout the novel, hinting at what they were like, but you can’t really get a proper idea of what they were like in the author’s head, despite some of his stellar descriptions of what they sounded like. But he had long said that he had written full songs and music for them.
Here though, they are presented as songs, sung superbly by Monica Queen. They are mostly terrific, with each piece reflecting the band at different points of their success, from their beginnings as a pub band through to their days as a decadent supergroup releasing blockbuster after blockbuster. Some of them are superb, though, and they each feel accurate to the period, which is the most important thing for a story like this.
This production is presented as part of a collection of audio pieces. It also includes a rather gleeful (abridged) reading by Joseph McFadden of The Wasp Factory, Banks’s controversial debut novel, as well as Paul Cornell’s dramatisation of The State Of The Art, and Bill Paterson’s performance of the short story Pieces (in an amusing aside, McFadden and Paterson played father and son Prentice and Kenneth McHoan in the 1996 adaptation of Banks’s novel The Crow Road).
This collection is a great showcase of the many different facets of Banks’s talent. It also represents a sizeable chunk of the adapted works based upon his writing that are available to fans, making it a fairly important collection for fans of his work (if you’re a fan who is interested in adapted versions, of course).
You can purchase this collection through Penguin Books at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/470032/iain-banks-a-bbc-radio-collection-by-banks-iain/9781529954241
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