Chasing A Rainbow:
About The Album
Well, this is a very unusual one, compared to what I have been writing for most of my time… and yet, it pre-dates absolutely everything else I’ve done musically (outside of AlterZero/Silent Edges, that is…)
I had not long moved from a house in Bedfordshire to a one bed flat in Chesham in Buckinghamshire on the top of a hill, following the failure of my first marriage and had recently began a life as an IT Contractor; a path I was to follow for a number of years before I got to the events in life that then influenced all the music I wrote from a decade later on.
In the winter of 2004/early 2005 (February 2005, to be specific), I had a pretty vivid dream. In that dream, I was watching a bunch of actors, five of them, on a bare studio stage, very much like Coventry’s old Belgrade Studio Theatre, (where an old schoolfriend of mine cut his acting teeth before an incredibly successful career of Oscar nominations and Golden Globe wins) everything very black, absolutely minimal props or set details and yet, the detail of what they were doing and what the characters were doing just poured out like a firehose. It was a complete story, from end to end and at some point, it dawned on me, even while I was asleep, holy s***, this is for real, you’d better f**king remember this stuff, this is going to be important…
For some reason, I awoke at about 3.30AM. I had a small civil service/military sourced notepad next to my desk, a usual stationary cupboard item, in A5 size.
My task at 3.30 in the morning, which I knew I had to do, was to try and do the biggest brain dump of all time as to what the hell I had just experienced, I had to write it down. I had no character names, but I did have their parts in the story, their USP’s, their strengths and weaknesses and how they all dovetailed together and the spine of the story itself. I wrote down everything that I could remember, and one of the things that I still find hard to get a handle on is that it took me longer to write it down than to dream it. It took 45 minutes to write down, by which time, nearly half past 4 in the morning and I was due to go to work in North London less than 3 or 4 hours later, I had better get back to sleep and I’ll pick that…. thing, up sometime else.
I thought nothing more of it until I came home from work later that night and took a look at it; I had written the story in the back of the book, so it took up about 4 or 5 pages at the back of this notebook and it became very quickly clear, holy s***, this is a fully formed story. What the hell am I meant to do with this? I occasionally play guitar and bass and record and produce other music that my friends write – what the hell….? How…. Why? Where on earth do I begin? Its a complete story, I have to do something with it and if I dont know what to do with it now, can I learn how?
So… thats what I did. I started searching the web for information, bearing in mind the internet wasnt that old for most of us at the time and certainly wasnt as deep and wide as it is now and certainly not as ubiquitous – smartphones were at least 4-5 years away yet – and I tried to find my way forward – how do I write a story that I think is a screenplay? Who can I send it to? How do I write scripts? For some reason, although I didnt think then as spiritually as I do now, someone or something had sent me this work, this story for me to do something with, but I had no idea as to what the hell I was doing…
I quickly found a resource online called Shooting People, which was (as far as I was aware), a collective of independent movie makers of all manner of disciplines – directors, camera, sound, writers, lighting, the whole shebang, and started plumbing the depths of their boards looking for information as to what to do. And it didnt take long for my initial furtive reach-outs to start pointing me in the directions of people who could recommend mentors or places to get the right software to use to write the script and where I could download other professional scripts to learn the format and the discipline behind turning a story into a screenplay. And, reasonably soon I happened across a man who I have never met, but without the mentorship that he gave me, the whole screenplay would not exist at all.
I invested in a copy of Final Draft so that I could write it in a scriptwriting format and, through the absolutely vital mentorship of this particular man, the double Emmy award winning UK based Director and Producer David Ward, the story started to take shape and I learned so much from him that it is just ridiculous. The learning curve was incredibly steep (but not as steep as first learning Cubase, LOLZ), and it took until very late in 2005 before the screenplay in its final form, Chasing A Rainbow, was in a state where I was happy for it to go out of the door unsupervised.
I had so many things to think about that would otherwise have tripped up a novice writer; matters of continuity (the timeline goes back and forth like crazy – four years ago, then six weeks later, then two years later, etc…), do I break the fourth wall (I didn’t just break it, I planted a truck bomb under it and blew the absolute living shit out of it, LOLZ), how do I make the characters actions believable, how do I write the dialogue that is realistic and not stilted, how, how, how, how, it was just endless.
But… by the beginning of December 2005, I was ready to start pitching it and it went to the BBC Writers Room for their unknown writers competition, where it made the final six, losing out to a brilliant work called The Lakes, which was incredibly successful as a BBC1 drama and it was also pitched to both Marchmont and to Sony Pictures Europe. The feedback I got was positive but, being an unknown getting your debut work optioned then was like trying to get a songwriting cut on an album these days… (unless you’re part of the production inner circle, the likelihood is somewhere between zero and none, LOLZ) – “well constructed, well thought out character-driven piece” and “better than over 90% of what crosses my desk” and was alluded to as being very similar to Mike Leigh‘s Secrets & Lies, which is one of my absolutely most favourite-ist films, ever. I find Secrets & Lies an incredibly difficult, highly emotive watch, but it does everything that I want cinema to do, to take me on that emotional journey in the same way that great music does. Brenda Blethyn‘s performance is absolutely towering and how the hell she never won an Oscar is beyond me. So for it to be mentioned in the same breath absolutely blew my mind and was an enormous compliment.
But anyway, I’m digressing… To bring us up to date, I was (at the time) in a new relationship which would later become my second marriage, I was about to move to Pinner in Middlesex and I had a lot to concentrate on where we were re-recording old Silent Edges/AlterZero material that had escaped our efforts in “real” studios in the 1990s and I wasn’t really writing any of my own musical material… yet.
I didnt push Chasing A Rainbow particularly hard as a screenplay… on reflection, nowhere near hard enough, as I had an otherwise good career which more than paid the bills, I was in a wonderful relationship and about to be engaged again, I was just (I figured at the time), the organic semi-sentient being that for some inexplicable reason, this story was channeled through and what I did with it was up to me. I shared it with a very dear friend who is also an actor and musician and he has always been completely supportive of it as a project and remains so to this day.
I made the attempt to write some of the music to it in 2011/2012, when I was first widowed, but apart from a couple of sets of lyrics (which are not yet referenced in my library of works, but will be in due course) and one instrumental piece that was based on a piano Royalty Free MIDI loop which I then gutted and rebuilt, there hasn’t been a serious attempt at a soundtrack to it. But even then, I only really saw it in a kind of Pete Townsend/Lifehouse kind of way… while it was a complete story and even then, it was a viable one, I only really saw it as a vehicle to inspire more music, like a rock opera, as opposed to a real screenplay and the basis of a viable real motion picture.
Well, there is now. Now I have retired from industry, Chasing A Rainbow is a piece of work that in every way just as much a piece of my legacy as my music and lyrics are. I will be writing the soundtrack album from June 2026 and it will be finished this year and I will be pushing the screenplay much much harder than I did before. Back then, there was only cinema, five TV channels and Sky. Now, the amount of potential avenues that could be open for the screenplay to be turned into reality both in the UK and abroad is way way way wider and we may have had to wait 20 years, but… I think it is finally time that I do justice to this story. I dont know who sent it to me from wherever in the universe… but whoever they are, the universe for a reason gave it to me. I hope I will now be able to do it justice. I have also made the decision to pitch the screenplay at this year’s London Screenwriters Festival in April, which is an enormous step for me and hopefully, I will be able to bring it to someones attention who can take it to the next stage.
I’ve put together a couple of short reels of AI generated clips to try and inspire the writing of the Soundtrack and this should give a good feel of the direction of travel. I hope I can finally do it justice after all of these years. The second reel contains an edited version of a lyric that I wrote in 2012 originally called Stockholm Syndrome, but has since been Suno washed and renamed Taking Each Day As It Comes; It was originally intended as a Suno track to be on the Echos Of Unmade Miles album but is most likely to be on this particular soundtrack album.
Im hoping to start real work on the album in June, once I get back from the Screenwriters Festival. Regardless of whether the picture gets made or not, I’m determined to record the OST album anyway. The screenplay has been updated and tailored following critiques from industry insiders and is in a very lean, hungry position… it has its own website (chasingarainbow.co.uk) and there are Agreements In Principle for tracks from both the wonderful Aminah Hughes (the utterly gorgeous Blue Wooden Boat, to be used a title track at the end of the film) and from the equally brilliant Luke Paul Jackson, probably the most complete young writer/guitarist/artist in the UK at the moment, called Rubber And Magic.
Neither of these tracks will appear on the soundtrack yet, but if (and its a huge if) the film ever gets made, that will no doubt be reconsidered should the “real” official soundtrack album come to life; part of the deal/programme is that the Motion Picture Soundtrack will be written by me and I intend to do it sooner rather than later, particularly now that the screenplay itself is in a position where it really deserves it.
Its a very exciting project and one that is consuming a lot of the oxygen in the room right now…. for a good reason.
