The wonders of You Tube

Now you see it, now you don't...

You might have noticed a You Tube video of a couple doing the rumba appearing randomly on this blog. It was meant to go to the Other Place but turned up here by mistake, so I've sent it packing...

However, I thought I'd share this with you instead.

a) in honour of the new series of Dr Who returning to our screens on Saturday April 5 -woohoo! The Maniac Family can't wait...
b) with thanks to Persephone who found it for me
and
c) by way of explanation of strange conversation with aforementioned lovely Persephone in my comments section about a song called She's Got You High.

I have mentioned before that I use songs to get me in the right mood for certain scenes when I'm writing. At the moment I am gathering my playlist for the next book, which is going to be (I hope) a bit of a Christmas fairytale. The starting point for a book is always more joyous then the endpoint I find, because you still imagine that the ideas in your head will be realised in exactly the right way, whereas there is always a certain disappointment about seeing them transferred from your head to the page. Or that's been my experience anyway...

But this early bit, it's great fun, and I am having lots of ideas floating in and out and around my head at the moment in between ploughing on with the line edits of Strictly Love.

As my ideas float in and out, I find certain songs stick in my head as being just perfect for different aspects of the story/different character's theme tunes, and as I'm in the car rather alot I tend to listen to the same songs ad nauseam. The kids have now joined in with this, with great enthusiasm, so the playlist in our car goes something like this at the moment:

CD1 Track 1 (shouts no 3) - Worried about Ray, by the Hoosiers. Now I shared this rather batty video with you a while back, and I can't for the life of me see how a song about someone who made bad monster movies in the fifties can possibly have anything to do with the story I'm writing, but the tune is catchy and it's in my head, so maybe it will work its way in there somewhere.
CD2 Track 6 (is no 2's favourite) Your Love Alone is Not Enough by the Manic Street Preachers. It is not uncommon for you to see Maniac Mum driving her offspring between afterschool activities and for us all to be singing at the top of our voices, "When times get tough, they get tough, they get tough, they get tough..."
CD4 Track 9 (Mummy's favourite) Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones - I have a manic depressive in the story. So that should work...
CD2 Track 5 (No 1's favourite) The Other Side of the World To Me, KT Tunstall, which is the perfect song for all sorts of dynamics which I intend to be going on.
Not on any CD in the car, but absolutely spot on for one of my heroines is Bryan Ferry's fabulous Let's Stick Together - an anthem for all long term relationships if I ever heard one, and Coral's Put the Sun Back which is going to be her theme tune.

But there's been one song driving me absolutely insane.

CD1 Track 12 It's a bright, uplifting, optimistic song about falling in love almost before you know it and is just perfect for my other heroine and her love interest, but I knew neither its name nor its provenance. And as the CD player is in the car that Spouse normally drives, I couldn't find the box with the titles on either. I searched google and You Tube to no avail, and was beginning to tear my hair out in desperation. I mentioned this in passing on Marie Philips blog last week as she was talking about songs to which you can't remember all the words to . And blow me, Persephone not only found out - it's She's Got You High, by Mumm-Ra - but also found this Dr Who fest of Martha's best bits, that someone has put to the song. God, people are clever. I can't work out how to download stuff from You Tube and put it to muisic (hence my interactive experiment on the other blog) - but I think this is great.

No 1 was away all weekend on a trip to France and didn't get back till gone midnight on Tuesday. So I had a party of one and sat in the car listening to all of the above, along with Kinks live from Kelvin Hall (I LOVE Ray Davies). But I sang loudest of all to this... So anyone who was parked in a Surrey Sainsburys' car park the other night, yes, the mad woman singing to herself was indeed me...

Enjoy...

(And many thanks Persephone!)