Dance The Chorlston in the serious moonlight!
Deadline: 16th April 2014
Topic: The tale of two places
Collaborator: FirstnameFrank
Listen to the song here: http://richardlomax.bandcamp.com/track/dance-the-chorlston
This was written was for a performance at the First Draft nights in Manchester. They were celebrating their 2nd birthday so they had asked performers to pair up to work on something. It’s an interesting night for writers, actors, musicians, comedians and poets to display works-in-progress and ‘first drafts’ to a less judgemental audience. Absolutely ideal for the freshly written/ink still drying songs of the ’52’ project.
This was the first of the ’52’ songs that I would have perform live immediately after having written it. I’ve been moving on from week to week committing only a few of them to memory. The evening was being filmed so hopefully you should be able to see a shaky rendition of me and Frank performing the song live soon.
The topic for this week was chosen by my co-writer, FirstnameFrank. Frank and I have both recently moved from Preston, Lancashire over to Houmous Village and self proclaimed Riviera of Manchester, Chorlton.
With messy lives this involves a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between both places. There apparently is a famous term ‘NYLon’ used to describe people in a similar predicament to us albeit involving more money and glamour as they flit between New York and London.
So Chorl-ston was born. A combination of Chorlton and Preston. High brow stuff.
Frank wrote the chords for the verse and bridge and I added lyrics to them as well as an extra instrumental bridge and chorus before we arranged the middle 8 together. We were going for a cross between Samba and the Charlston but I think we might need a better percussionist than I to pull that off.
The coda is Frank’s. A beautiful Bond-esque chord sequence and melody with lyrics about home, happiness and family. I enjoy singing that bit a lot.
Please check out Frank’s solo material here: www.facebook.com/FirstnameFrank
Next week’s topic is the Mudanity Of Work which I shall be writing on my own but the next few weeks after this will be some interesting collaborations.
NB – This is the fifteenth song of the year! I am officially over a quarter of the way there…
Richard Lomax 