The very talented Driving Force

Looking back through my blog I came across a post about the influence of music on my writing… and thought I would re-edit and republish it.

Growing up with the music of the 60’s and 70’s it was almost every girl’s romantic dream to be involved with a boy from a band, or group as they were called then. I was fortunate for many reasons to marry a man who was a rock drummer. Bari has been in almost fifty different bands of all sorts over his long career as a musician, rock and roll, brass, pit orchestras… and of so many different musical genres. His stories are wonderful and anecdotes about great gigs, fall-outs, betrayals and duplicity all set to great music, is a true inspiration for me!

One evening, while still living in Oldham, we had a telephone call from the local police station… the officer was a friend of Bari’s and knowing he was a musician, told him about a band made up of policemen and traffic wardens who needed a drummer. Very soon he was a member of Classic Gold, a five piece band… and it wasn’t long before they changed their name, thinking Classic Gold sounded either like a brand of coffee or a brand of condoms… and they became Driving Force.

Driving Force played a variety of different songs from Buddy Holly to the present and included music from a band I had never heard of and for some reason thought were Welsh. This supposed Welsh band was in fact the very American Mavericks. We moved from Oldham to the west country and brought a couple of CDs with us which Driving Force had recorded and they included some Mavericks numbers. I liked the sound and borrowed a CD from the library…. and I was hooked! The rest, as the much used but very true saying goes – is history!

I was able to see the Mavericks on a number of occasions; I also saw Raul Malo on his solo tours with different musicians backing him, and Robert Reynolds and Paul Deakin on tour with Kevin Montgomery and the Roadtrippers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the band now, and seen them from Bristol to Glasgow, from Birmingham to Belfast, Coventry to Liverpool and many other places. I have made many friends, many many friends!

Observing the dynamic of a band, a group of excellent musicians and friends, such as Driving Force, or on the bigger stage, the Mavericks, really helps me write. To say Raul Malo, and the Mavericks are an inspiration is not an overstatement! Watching the way the different members of a band work together, work alone, interact, improvise, back each other when the inevitable glitches threaten to disrupt the set, I find ideas about characters, plot, action fizz up like beer in a glass! I leave a gig bursting with ideas and thoughts, some of which ferment quietly for months and even years before they come foaming out onto the page like a pint of Otter Ale fresh from the pump!

In ‘The Stalking of Rosa Czekov’, a band reunion is crucial to the plot. In ‘Night Vision’, music is also a vital strand of the story-line, and ‘Lucky Portbraddon’ was inspired by the closeness that develops in a band, and also the friction between the different members! My Radwinter series also has a family at the core of the novels – and I’m hoping that ‘Radwinter VIII’ will be available before too long.

If I have been inspired by the Mavericks, then I absolutely owe that to the very talented Driving Force who introduced me to their music!

‘Lucky Portbraddon’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08TQ479B9

‘The Stalking of Rosa Czekov’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/STALKING-ROSA-CZEKOV-Lois-Elsden/dp/B08M7J3SZG

‘Night Vision’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/night-vision-LOIS-ELSDEN/dp/B08SBCLCGK/

‘Radwinter’ book #1 of 7 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08KTRNZ8Z?ref_=ast_author_ofdp