The Joyous Steady Beat of Mani and What It Means to Me

“Rewrite your first chapter as the opening scene of a movie. What is she wearing? What is she drinking? What are her surroundings? What is she listening to?”

That last part. That was probably the most important part.

I was on the phone with my book coach, outside a busy brewery, a rare Denver drizzle coming down. I’d recently sent her the roughest of rough drafts of my book, which, after a decade or so of stops and starts, had actually taken form as a fully-fledged story. Well, almost. Hence the rough and hence the book coach.

What was she listening to?

She being my protagonist, Bea, a music journalist in 1989 London, working for a thinly-disguised NME-esque weekly.

I’d already decided that she was fighting to find another word for “iridescent” when describing the guitars of a band, which originally was fictional. But then, this book was about music. Why choose a fictional band? And what band summed up the excitement of the changing tides of British music at that time?

It had to be The Stone Roses. It had to be “She Bangs the Drums.”