These girls lives

Tomboy, Madeline second from left, looking mean...

This post needs to start with an apology...

I received a lovely email from Madeline Burrows of top US punk pop band Tomboy back in mid June, alerting me to an unusual, intriguing, and exciting commission of theirs: Creating the soundtrack to the US premier of Amelia Bullmore's critically acclaimed play Di and Viv and Rose.

But... the UK had been completely taken over by EU Referendum madness * and, as such, the email stayed in my inbox, un-followed up until I had time to breathe again... By which time, the run of the play had finished.

The good news is, you can still hear the soundtrack, and the play has traditionally been very well received, so it will be on somewhere, sometime at a theatre near you.

Di and Viv and Rose begins it's tale with three very different girls sharing a student house in the UK in the mid 1980s, and follows them through the ensuing years and decades, observing their changing lives and careers, and their developing characters, not to mention their evolving relationships with each other.

The band have provided exuberant, joyful, intelligent, sympathetic, and very listenable musical interludes that perfectly capture the spirit of youthful energy and poignancy of the play.

While the play's run has now finished, you can still hear the soundtrack over on Le Sigh (alongside a really good thoughtful piece about soundtracks) and Bandcamp.

Badly Drawn Boy famously got to soundtrack the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's About A Boy, it seems apt that Tomboy should have created such a wonderfully evocative score for a play so firmly About The Girls.

* - I have blogged about the EU Referendum, Brexit and related stuff over on Too Late For Cake, but the past three episodes of Dead Ringers and the past two issues of Private Eye nailed it much, much better (obviously...). Thus proving that satire isn't dead, it's just having to run like hell to keep up with reality...