Right, settle down in your seats for this answer to a query from
You more or less answered this in a post earlier this week, but I'll ask anyway. If nothing else, it may be a chance for those who missed the earlier post to hear about it.
Have you found the sound of Riduna yet?
So… this is probably the most complex combination of music and writing I have embarked upon so far.
My family-in-law have, for decades and generations, holidayed on a tiny island in the English Channel (pop 1800), although we’ve not been there now for ten years but that’s a different story.
One year, whilst camping - and bearing in mind there is NOTHING to do on the island - I started to imagine a fictional music scene on the island; band names, song titles, back stories. When we returned I dug out my studio and recorded a compilation album called ‘The Riduna Sound’, roping in the kids and Mrs Nocash in varying degrees of reluctance to add to the album. I then burned the album onto CDs which were sent it in the post to the rest of the family, with a fictional press release, and waited for the penny to drop. It took longer for some than others…
I then set about writing the story of someone chancing upon this CD, and embarking on a search for ‘The Riduna Sound’, and had half a dozen copies printed up, which we dropped through letter boxes on Christmas Eve. The book had too many in-jokes to be more widespread, so I re-edited it a couple of years ago.
The plan is to self-publish it in the next year or so, although whether I accompany it with the original CD or re-do that, or indeed something else, remains to be seen…
I also had a Twitter page for the record label, run by its fictional manager, and started a follow-up book based on his diaries. Maybe I’ll finish that one day.
But I’ll answer Walter’s question with another question: who says it was me who looking for the sound of Riduna…?