Today marks 24 years since the release of Whiplash, James´s seventh studio album. My favourite track on the ablum is a song called Tomorrow.

Listening to James perform live, often stripped down, acoustic versions of Tomorrow not only saw me through much of the last year´s lockdown, but it also caused me to become fascinated by the creative processes of singer-songwriters, where artists get their inspiration from and how the vast majority suffer for their art.

Thinking about Tomorrow led me to think about Yesterday (the rom-com car crash of a movie purportedly written by Richard Curtis). Feeling for the lesser known screenwriter who actually came up with the original concept for a film where only the protagonist remembers the Beatles, I began to imagine how life for this screenwriter and the film might have turned out differently had Richard Curtis not gotten in the way.

I then asked myself what would have become of this movie had its director, Danny Boyle, teamed up with a writer who was a fan of James rather than the Beatles. Perhaps influenced by the exquisite keyboards in many of James´s best tunes, I began to write a radio play about a struggling screenwriter who moonlights as a singer-songwriting piano player. The radio play is still in development (yes, thank you COVID-19 you´ve been most helpful – not) but a spin off short story on the same theme “Tomorrow, James and the Blue Cat” has already hit the shelves.

Somewhat ironically, in publishing a story about plagiarism in the film industry, my editor and I had to avoid inadvertently appropriating the work of another artist. Not an easy thing to achieve when your story is based around a song written by someone else. Fortunately, that someone else is Tim Booth, lead singer (and dancer!) of James, an artist who is as generous as he is creative. So, I reached out to him on twitter.

After he gave provisional cleareance for us to use some of the lyrics from Tomorrow in my short story, the next hurdle for my editor was to get the official and legally binding clearance from Tim´s rights manager. Unfortunately, due to a very tight publishing schedule we didn´t get the all clear in time and I had to break all the rules of show-don´t-tell to rewrite the scene with the lyrics minus the lyrics.

If you´re a James fan, you might be interested in seeing how the story turned out. Well, there´s good news on that front. The story appears in an anthology of pandemic writing and best of all, the proceeds are being donated to 826national – a charity supporting the development of young writers.

The anthology which includes 85 other works of fiction, poetry and essays written during the pandemic is available here and outside of the UK through Kayla King Books.