When I Grow Rich works for me.  And just thinking off the top of my head, I reckon we could have the opening credits rolling with some sinister beats.  And someone like Wildflower delivering the lines from the old nursery rhyme, right up to the bit where it goes: “You owe me ten shillings say the Bells of St Helens.  When will you pay me, say the Bells of Old Bailey?  When I grow rich say the Bells of Shoreditch.  Pray when will that be, say the Bells of Stepney.  I do not know say the great Bells of Bow.”  Impressed eh? You can tell I’ve been doing my homework can’t you? 

And just thinking about credits and opening sequences, and how they can make or break a film, have you considered the soundtrack itself?  Now I know it’s not really my area, and that it’s your film, and I’m only an adviser on the story line, but I really want to make the case for original composition, because otherwise you run the risk of undermining the whole feel of the film. 

I mean the story we’re working on, right, is based around a club night held in Shoreditch.  An increasingly happening and successful venture.  A club that starts out mixing new electronic sounds, hip hop, drum ‘n’ bass, with the funkiest and ‘60s and ‘70s soundtracks and lost library music from around the world.  And of course it’s now a given that these old sounds represent some of the most innovative and daring music, though essentially it’s visionaries doing a functional job to order. 

So tempting though it is to recycle some of these sounds, I think we should reinvigorate the tradition they sprang from.  Anyway, there’s been enough clever-clever cultural referencing going on, with the Tarantino and the Big Lebowski, and so on.  I’m thinking here, originality, boldness, memorable incidental music, mood mosaics as they say, songs to remember.  Something to capture our times which in itself becomes timeless.

I was thinking about this at home last night, and coincidentally my flatmate, who as you know writes for i-D, was playing some promo tracks from what will be the new Anjali LP.  It’s in the same vein of genius as her Sheer Witchery series, where she worked with people like Boymerang, but a little different I guess as it’s more song based.  Still sounds out of this world, and very exotic, like you’re hearing the twenty first century for the first time.  And it just struck me, like a thunderbolt, that Anjali would be the person to get involved with this film. 

It’s toying with cliches I know, but her music does already sound like it’s made in multi-dimensional cinemascope.  So why not commission her to do the real thing?  I suggest we should move fast though, because from what I’ve heard of it this new record is going to blow up a storm.  She’s got the lot.  A street smart London girl, sassy and sexy, and she’s got that knowing noughties naughtiness offset against a wilful self-sufficiency.  If we’re as clever, we can get her to soundtrack our Shoreditch, and maybe even get her to appear in the film?  A nice role as a DJ, and even performer in the club itself.  I can just see her vamping it up, like a Jane B singing La Decadanse who’s had her head turned by the RZA and Kim Gordon.  Sorry, letting my imagination run away from me there.  But why not?

Seriously though the club is so central to all this.  It’s got to be our lightning conductor.  It’s an allegory.  The club as the new millennium, with all its unbounded enthusiasm and high hopes, and ultimately its innocence lost with the intrusion of chancers, commerce and corruption.  And it’s a metaphor.  Not just for the music business.  But for how London’s changing.  And Shoreditch in particular.  This is the tail end of the Mo’Wax and Metalheadz thing.  Things are moving on.  But to where?

Again, it’s just an idea, but why not call the club night Le Chiffre?  I’m contradicting myself I know with the cultural references, but it makes me think of the Casino Royale film, and Ursula and Bacharach and irony.  Irony is becoming seriously undervalued.  But the club – that’s serious stuff.  Like we agreed, the music on one hand is cutting edge, made by the children of the revolution that was A Guy Called Gerald and DJ Shadow and Photek and Dr Octagon.  Then on the other hand, there’s all the de-forgotten sounds.  The ‘60s French pop, Morricone and the Italian masters, the sinister spy soundtracks, the funky Bombay action thrillers, the Brazilian bossa, afrobeat and femme soul, early electronic experiments, the dub, the Impulse! style fire music.  We can hint at all that. 

But the story that spins out from the club.  I don’t think we should shy away from the Wolf Mankowitz or Colin MacInnes characterisation and moralising.  The London lore of Espresso Bongo and the Misery Kid.  But updated.  Past Babylon and Lights Out For The Territory.  I see that book as a huge influence on what we’re doing.  But ours is a territory where Iain Sinclair’s love of walking and exploring the London nobody much knows, and the bibliophile’s passion and the mysticism, are replaced by our key character who knows and scours London’s secondhand outlets and charity shops where buried treasure can still be found in the form of abandoned vinyl, but that’s becoming harder, so he has to use his wits and get into private collections first hand.

And this crate digger is the prime DJ and a partner in the club night, who exists for tracking down beats and breaks, exotica and esoterica in all its guises.  He’s a complex character.  He’s grown up in grinding genteel poverty around the east end, which is one of the toughest forms of deprivation, alienated even from the traditional albeit disappearing traditional working class by dint of the bookishness passed on by an abandoned mother.  Now he’ll stop at nothing, and he may not look much but he has something, and he’ll use his charm to get into places you wouldn’t dream of, and it may not always be plain sailing, but it’s the spirit of adventure nevertheless.

Like, his mates think he has a fatal fascination for dark eyed Italian girls, but he’s simply misunderstood when he’s engrossed in conversation with the staff behind Soho coffee bar counters.  There’s only one thing on his mind, and that’s to get his hands on any Piero Piccionis in the family.  And if that means bribing a father with an illicit still of Florinda Bolkan that can be arranged.  This is after all a guy who will hang around a bhangra rave in Leicester Square hoping a winning smile will lead to a soundtrack scored by RD Burman, or who will enrol in a samba dance class to worm his way into the affections of the teacher and divest her of her Joao Donatos, and if that involves an access all areas pass the next time Joyce is in town then so be it. 

And the credibility of the club is based on this pillaging and plundering, so the more he succeeds in his escapades the more the club’s reputation grows, and increasingly links are made with the new beat merchants who know he’s a great source for samples, and connections are made with reissue labels like Jazzman and Crippled Dick Hot Wax!  The people making this music available again, and who may need a little advice on or a liner note or two. 

So your man, who is very much the coming man, for all this though is one of life’s eternal innocents when it comes to business, and unbeknown to him his partners are acting very shrewd and canny in their wheeling and dealing.  And as the club fills and fills, so we start to hear about the commercial tie-ins, branding and brand recognition, celebrity endorsements, the rise of the superclub, and when it all blows up and the local gangsters get a little agitated by the uppity new kids on their block, and your man is brought brutally to his senses when all he really wants to do is refine his DJ Kicks setlisting which he’s bound to be asked to do soon by K7! 

And so the heartbreaking ending.  We can get Anjali to conjure up her sweetest, sinister, cloyingly claustrophobic beats, and get Wildflower or the great Roots Manuva to intone the alternative ending to that old nursery rhyme: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed.  And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.  Chip chop chip chop.  The last man’s dead.”

© 2007 John Carney