Scott Mandley Hadley: Seventeen Songs About Lonely Vampires opens Saturday 3rd October at Arch 555 at Silly Towers, performing 17 songs about lonely vampire and what it means to be alone. Learn more about what you can expect:
1: Where did the inspiration come from?
A couple of years ago, I acquired a child (through legal means), and when my life partner returned to full time work after parental leave, I decided to leave full time work in order to spend more time at home with our child.
One of the activities I would do to entertain and interact with my infant and (eventual) toddler was playing songs and singing. Initially, the songs I improvised for the child were very baby centric – check out “It’s Orange Time” on my YouTube channel, “It’s Not Easy Being A Baby” and “Who’s The Cutest Baby” on the EP baby///vampire on my SoundCloud – but eventually the melodies I was trialling and playing with during the hours of daylight were leaving me with tunes and ideas that didn’t suit songs of childhood, and I wrote a song about being a lonely vampire while he was asleep.
A few weeks later, without meaning to, I was inspired to write another song about a different lonely vampire.
And then, after that, a third.
It was only at this point – showing my partner what I’d done during our child’s nap that afternoon (writing, yes, a third song about a third lonely vampire) – that it was pointed out to me that I’d hit this same topic three times.
In a moment of brash faux-intentionality, I said that, yes, I’d done it 100% on purpose, and that, actually, I was going to write even more songs about lonely vampires, actually. That had always been the plan and, actually, there were going to be 17 of them.
And I have written many more songs about lonely vampires since.
Have I written 17 at the moment of this interview?
Will I have written 17 before the date of this first work-in-progress show in October?
Well, all I can say to those questions is that seventeen is just a number, and as I sing in the second song of the show:
Seventeen Songs About Lonely Vampires
Seventeen Songs About Lonely Vampires
It’s what’s promised on the poster, it’s what’s promised on the listing,
Please don’t count them, I am insisting
2: Did you write the songs first or the vampire concept first?
I’ve been writing novelty songs for about 20 years at this point.
I’m not a very technically skilled musician, but I’ve always taken great pleasure in playing with music and musicality.
As a teenager I had a MySpace band page where I posted songs about the TV series Lost (a rhyming couplet I occasionally recall from that project is: “The monster’s coming for you / It killed Mr Eko, it’ll kill you, too”), though the only fiction-themed song from that period of my life that is still accessible is one called ‘Waste Paper’ that I made a music video for.
That song was about both the novel Hannibal Rising (a prequel to Silence of the Lambs that was only written because the author had accidentally signed away the rights to the character and was told that if he didn’t write one, someone else would) and a friend of mine I was a bit in love with.
Or maybe it was about neither of those things and that’s just the story I told myself so many times in hindsight that it became true.
In the years since then, I have posted videos of songs about time travel, about Tom Jones (the Welsh singer, not the novel), about Flat Earth conspiracy theories, and several songs about the very famous fictional character, Father Christmas, who is a near-vampiric character in my opinion, with his unending, nocturnal, seasonal life and his interest in entering people’s homes.
I’ve also been interested in vampires for a while. About three years ago, I stumbled upon a boxset of Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (the source material for HBO’s True Blood, which I’d watched and loved a couple of years earlier) in a charity shop in the Lake District, and I read them and loved them, and they became a key part of mine and my partner’s domestic language.
I had vampires on the mind, and one recent Hallowe’en I performed a few times as a non-supernatural vampiric character (who will feature, briefly, in the show), and wanting to lean in further with this character (and having accidentally written those three related songs), I felt inspired by all of this – and the ideas of desire, hunger, loneliness that are so key to vampires and, also, normative ideas of behaviour in what we optimisticly refer to as late-stage capitalism – that Seventeen Songs About Lonely Vampires seemed like a great basis for a longer form performance project for me.
I performed as a solo singer quite a lot when I was a student, but due to various factors in my life that I’d rather not go into here (though I did go into detail in my 2020 book, the pleasure of regret), it was something that stopped for well over a decade, and I only returned to performance via poetry and then – in earnest – comedy after I knew my above-mentioned child was on the way.
It was only when I’d been regularly performing comedy for over a year that I began singing in public again. I enjoyed it so much that I knew I wanted to do it more, regardless of my skill level, when it became time to develop a new full length show.
Although I have a very pleasant home life, unfortunately I’m not someone who has been lucky enough to have any kind of enjoyable professional life, and what I have done for money has almost always landed at being (at best) deeply unfulfilling and (at worst) humiliating on a level that causes constant and unavoidable shame.
I envy vampires their ability to pursue what they want, but to know what they want even more so, perhaps.
I have not been ambitious and driven and targeted in my working life and I have ended up suffering for it; my intentionality has always been focused toward my creative pursuits, which don’t always lose me money but certainly don’t cover my bills and coffee budget. Work has always been something I stuff in the sides, something that almost always escapes from its neat little box and causes nothing positive at all.
And though it might (or might not!) be too late for me to recover my life in such a way that what I spend my daylight hours doing in exchange for hot cash might become something that’s neutral or (ideally) positive, what I can do is continue to make sure that the time I find for myself to perform and create could make my life feel a little more personally worthwhile and exciting.
A musical show about vampires, yes, is something I want to be doing with my time. I’m very excited to continue developing this show following this Lambeth Fringe WIP!
3: You describe vampires as creatures of desire, hunger and loneliness. Why do you think those things are connected?
I think desire and hunger are very linked in that hunger is the physical description for the same mind-need as desire.
Hunger is something physical and felt bodily, and so is desire too, really, even if it is more centred in the mind and thought.
I’d see them, perhaps, as synonyms used to talk about want, though “want” for different things and at different levels of intensity.
We can hunger for things other than food, though, just as one can desire something that isn’t just physical touch. It would be pretty standard to say that a person desires (e.g.) a new bag or a new shirt or something, but to say a person hungers for new clothes would be overkill.
Similarly, if a person hungers for another, that would be seen as quite sexy if it was reciprocal but deeply sinister if it wasn’t. We want to be hungered for by those we want, but not by those we don’t; it can never be anything but intense to be hungered for (as the human lovers of vampires attest to throughout vampiric lore).
And loneliness..? The vampiric person, as I see it, is someone who centralises personal desire, to the point where it overlays and supersedes all else about them.
The loneliness, then, comes from solipsism; if what matters the most to you is your hunger, your desire, you, then you end up lonely because other people clock that and fall back… and though you might end up with other people around you who are also hungry desirous types, when your hungers and desires no longer align there is no more meaningful loyalty to care to rely on…
The loneliness for a vampire happens with time, rather than imminently and immediately.
You can care for someone you hunger for, yes, but hunger and desire can also be careless.
What a person wants in a lover is often not the same as what they want in a presence outside of the erotic. And that is the same with anything that is desired, really – often it is only wanted as and when it is wanted, and this can lead to pushing others away and being pushed away.
I think that selfishness leads to loneliness. But I see it in others and it does seem to lead to more satisfaction. I make terrible decisions trying to avoid selfishness and it constantly backfires.
I envy the simplicity of the vampire, the simplicity of the self-involved.
I would like to act decisively in a way that solely benefits me. But I don’t, and I dislike that about myself. I would like to be more vampire. But I’m too repressed and too self-conscious and my ego is too microscopic to be able to do so.
Maybe imagining what it’s like to be 17 different vampires might help me harness my owner inner monster???
4: Is the vampire a metaphor for loneliness?
I think the vampire persists in our cultural imaginary because it’s a metaphor for several things. I think that to simplify it merely as a monstrous version of a bat or a mosquito is to rob it of power and its potency.
I think the seductiveness and selfishness of the vampire – their using people up – is almost a warning, in a way; to beware of the charismatic, to watch out for those who pursue their own hungers without compassion or care.
So, yes, maybe the loneliness is part of that myth, too, part of the importance of the lesson it maybe tells; that if you are out of control, you will end up alone, too. You may as well go and fall asleep in your own grave if all you do when awake is suck the lifeblood out of others. A warning, then, both ways. Something not to be as well as something not to be consumed by.
I’ve met vampiric people and, yes, there is often a very distinct air of melancholy about them, but they also seem to have more fun than the rest of us. Then again, maybe instead it is that inability to truly accept that hedonism won’t make you happy that separates the lonely vampire from the depressed poet. Is the pursuit of pleasure an act of hope? Do vampires yearn to feel more than just satiated?
I’d say that, basically, they’re only interesting to me if they do.
5: How did your experiences affect the production?
I’m not certain if the question is referring to the content or the circumstances of the show, so I’ll answer for both possible readings of the question:
- I’m not a vampire. I’m not vampiric. I’m not literally or metaphorically sucking any lifeblood in any way at all and so my experiences are more absent than present in this show. My previous show was a comedy called BALD PERSONALITY DISORDER and was about hair loss and mental illness, and was 100% about my own experiences. And even though I made lots of jokes about not having hair, I increasingly came to realise that my hairlessness – despite it having been the situation for over a decade – is not something I’m remotely comfortable with. So I didn’t want to make another show making light of something about my body I continue to be unhappy about. I suppose I’ve then answered the other reading of the question, because my experience of talking about my experience led me to choose an (at this stage) less personal route into my new show.
- I wanted to play more with sound and music
6: What has been the most enjoyable part about creating Seventeen Songs About Lonely Vampires?
Having an excuse to write songs, which is something that I always enjoy doing, though for the past few years have very rarely made time to do it.
When you don’t live off your creative practice and need to fit it in around working, childcare and other commitments, you consistently have to choose and prioritise what you focus on.
So, I am a poet but I have one had one poem published in the last few years; I’m an essayist but haven’t published any prose more refined than blog posts for even longer; I make short films sometimes, but haven’t completed a video project aside from low impact music videos for a similar length of time. And that is because the time that I could have spent doing those things has instead been spent doing performance, and working on performance. Choosing to perform a little less the past few months and sit on the floor at home with a guitar and a notebook has been really fun and, to be honest, how I whiled away many of my favourite hours when a teenager.
And maybe, sure, if I’d spent less time back then writing songs about Lost and more time doing homework, I might have got into a better university and I might have been able to have made a professional life for myself that was less empty. But that, alas, wasn’t what happened. And I’m not vampiric enough to pursue creative aims at an impractical level, and I’ve promised my life partner that I won’t commit suicide until any children we have are old enough to be safely, legally and responsibly left alone, which does unfortunately mean that there’s no immediate opportunity of the cessation of daylight misery, which then means I must commit: commit to satisfying and enjoyable returns from the creative pursuits I pursue in my free moments, but it also means I need to commit to vampiricly seeking a daytime professional life that doesn’t stake me through the heart on a daily basis.
Thinking about selfishness and desire and hunger teaches me that I need to take a bit of this onboard. I don’t want to be lonely, but I do want – and it is very nearly a psychological need – I do want to not be diminished by the life I live outside of the home or the performance sphere.
Let’s see what happens. Let’s write more songs. And right more [personal] wrongs.
And please come see me mess around with approximately 17 musical numbers about lonely vampires in Brixton soon!
Scott Mandley Hadley: Seventeen Songs About Lonely Vampires opens Saturday 3rd October at Arch 555 at Silly Towers. Many thanks to Scott Mandley Hadley for answering our questions. Book your tickets here!
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