Guest Post: The Generation Killer Playlist
The Generation Killer (out now from Gollancz) blends a lot of what I love and want when I pick up a book and is book 2 in The Dying Squad series.
On the sixth day, God created MANchester. On the seventh, The Generation Killer intends to tear it down.
There's a new serial killer in Manchester - and it's up to a dead guy to catch him. Joe Lazarus, specifically: his latest Dying Squad assignment demands he bring to justice The Generation Killer, a psychopath who murders the oldest member of a family, as well as the youngest. Joe and his new partner Bits have mere hours to catch the killer and save his latest kidnap victim.Over to Adam....
The Generation Killer Playlist
Music is a hugely important part of the creative process for me. Whether making films or writing books, it’s got me out of a whole heap of creative cul-de-sacs. The first example of which is this:
1. Force Marker (Heat Soundtrack) v Tick of the Clock (The Chromatics)
There’s a twenty-one minute mash-up of these two songs somewhere on my hard drive, which for copyright reasons will never see the light of day. It’s a shame, because it’s pretty killer! It doesn’t exist because I’m having a mid-life crisis and I fancy getting into the remixing game (this is the ONE time I can’t blame something on a mid-life crisis), it exists because it was the only way I could think of solving a particularly troublesome action sequence halfway through the book.
Without tumbling into spoiler-territory, there’s a heist scene set in Japan (featuring a homicidal samurai spirit) that was causing me unending problems to write. Some parts of a novel you nail first time, others torment you for months, and this was very much in the latter camp.
Fortunately, music came to my rescue. The heist scene in Heat, and the pulsating opening of Drive were very much in my thinking when writing the sequence, so I stitched the two tracks together into a sweeping, dipping, roller-coaster of a tune then re-wrote the set-piece to the beats of the track. The mash-up was the secret sauce I was after - the set-piece is now one of my favourite parts of TGK.
2. Envy - Howard Shore (Seven soundtrack)
Seven was another touchstone when I was writing The Generation Killer - it’s an incredible film, just as powerful now as when it was first released in 1995. (The 90’s were very much my 70’s, when it comes to films - the fact that Heat, Seven, The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Leon and The Usual Suspects were released within 12 months of each other is OBSCENE.) This track comes in when Mills and Somerset are making their fateful journey with John Doe to the desert. It’s a master-class in how to slowly build tension, and became invaluable when I was trying to write the big reveal, when Joe Lazarus discovers the identity of The Generation Killer.
When I’d finally finished the chapter in question, I discovered I’d listened to the track five hundred times.
(Which probably meant Howard Shore earned about 30p.)
3. Adam Freehand (any of his Soundcloud mixes)
Adam Freeland’s mixes are absolutely A-list (I hesitate to use the phrase ‘they take you on a journey’ but they do, so there we are), but their epic, free-wheeling widescreen vibes were just what I was after when I was writing TGK. He’s someone I associate with clubbing in Manchester, too; one of the key locations in the book is the abandoned club Sankeys, which was one of my favourite stomping grounds when I lived in the city.
4. Music is Math - Geogaddi - Boards of Canada
Music is Math was an album was one that got hammered when I was working on TGK, but it was this song that summed up what I was trying to capture with the Manchester thread. ‘The past inside the present’ is the glitchy, spoken-word refrain that fades in and out throughout the track, which was the feeling I wanted to capture when Bits, Joe’s new partner, returns to Manchester. It’s a city that’s changed dramatically in the thirty years since he died there, but ghosts of its past still linger. I’ve always found Manchester to be a place that never forgets what came before, but is nevertheless fixated on what comes next.
5. Tron: Legacy - Fall - Daft Punk
When I was writing Daisy-May’s purgatorial storyline this soundtrack was essential listening, especially this track. One of the greatest soundtracks of the last thirty years, as soon as the headphones goes on and this fires up, the universe seems to exponentially increase around you. It was perfect for the other-worldly challenges the new Warden of the Pen has to face. Pretty much every writer I know has this album on their playlist.
6. Chernobyl - The Door - Hildur Guonadottir
In general, each of the three story strands in The Generation Killer had their own tracks, but this was an album that crossed over in a way the story strands eventually do. There’s a sense of off-kilter rot to the record; The Door captures the sense of decay and dread that builds as the novel goes
on. It creeps and tweaks at you, burrowing its way under your skin. Perfect for this book, but I doubt it’s many couples first wedding dance.
7. Prisoners OST - Prisoners - Johann Johannsson
Johann Johannsson has been a bit of a go-to composer when writing The Dying Squad books (his Sicarrio soundtrack was hammered for book 3) but the Prisoners soundtrack is one I’ve listened to when writing all three books. There’s an atmospheric melancholia to the album that I really love, but this particular track has shoots of optimism coursing through it, too. The tone of the album is very much one I’ve tried to capture in the books. The films essential viewing.
8. Bicep & Hammer - Dahlia
The Manchester of The Generation Killer is a doomy, terror stalked place. The Manchester I know - certainly the one I lived in for 4 years - is one of the greatest cities on earth. It’s hedonistic, exciting, and powered by the music of the past, as well as that of the present. This track by Bicep captured that feeling perfectly for me - it’s a love letter to clubbing of yesterday, with a kiss on the cheek of what comes next. It’s great nights that stretch into even better mornings. I wanted to make Manchester scary, but I also wanted to get across its seductive side, too. This track helped with that.
9. Destroyer OST - Ecstasy - Theodore Shapiro
One of my favourite crime films of recent years. The publicity centred around Nicole Kidman’s transformation in the film (when it should have concentrated on her career-best performance), but it’s a multi-layered thriller that got under my skin like nothing else has recently. Like Destroyer, the Dying Squad books, are, at heart, grimy crime thrillers about damaged people trying to find redemption by righting the wrongs of their past. This particular track is a thing of absolute beauty, and send shivers down my spine every time I hear it.
10. The Bomb OST - Onyx - The Acid
The Acid are a CRIMINALLY underrated band (Adam Freeland, one of my earlier picks, is a band member), and this was the track I played on loop when I was writing The Generation Killer’s epilogue. Again, it’s doomily atmospheric, but it also has a cautious euphoria to it. The epilogue of TGK has split opinion - some people have been a little enraged it’s so open-ended and leaves so many questions unanswered, but that’s what the third books for, damn it. All will be revealed…
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