My novel about the Portbradden family which I have completed in its first draft was, as I’ve mentioned before, inspired in part by the way bands break up. So many groups who have been so close, more like family than musicians playing together, suddenly fall apart. My husband has been in many, many bands,and seen many, many fallings out and break-ups, and the same thing can happen in families, unless they work very hard not to! The Portbraddens are cousins, with very strong and different personalities who are held together by the love and strength of their elderly grandmother… when she dies things go wrong. For the Portbraddens, it isn’t just the cousins but wives and husbands come to grief without grandma there to support and advise; however, for them the memory of grandma, and the younger generation of their own children bring them round and an uneasy reconciliation is made.
I couldn’t help but think of this yesterday, we were travelling and my husband picked up a CD from a service station where we stopped for coffee. it was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s greatest hits; of course I knew CCR, as apparently they are called, but I only knew their music, I didn’t know anything about them, until I read the sleeve notes as we travelled on. There were four members of the band, brothers Tom and John Fogerty and Stu Cook and Doug Clifford. Their biggest hit, in the UK at least was ‘Bad Moon Rising’, but they had many, many more successes from the late 60’s into the 70’s. Sadly there was a falling out, perhaps even more sadly it was between the two brothers. They continued making music in different ways but tragedy struck Tom Fogerty who contracted AIDS from contaminated blood while having a transfusion following surgery for a back problem. He died before he and his brother made up their differences.
Lois Elsden 