Carol Morley and Tracey Thorn: "Girls' schools? They’re a hotpot of urges"

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/21/carol-morley-tracey-thorn-the-falling

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The Falling is a drama about a mass outbreak of hysterical fainting at a fictional girls school in the 1960s, triggered by the relationship between two of the girls and mysteriously aided by the atmosphere created by their highminded musical group, prog-ishly called the Alternative School Orchestra. Directed by Carol Morley, who made the startling drama-documentary Dreams of a Life in 2011, the film also boasts a soundtrack by Tracey Thorn, formerly of Everything But the Girl. The two recently hooked up at the London offices of Buzzin’ Fly, Thorn’s record label, to discuss their collaboration.

“We met through Twitter, like you do nowadays,” says Tracey. “Carol came to a publishing event for my book Bedsit Disco Queen because I’d been tweeting about liking her films. Then she started stalking me!”

“I asked her to go for a drink,” says Carol, “and she said, ‘I’m really sorry but I’m going out with other people.’”

“I didn’t!”

“You did!”

In fact, Tracey was asked to provide the music for the film only after editing had begun. “I had a dream that Tracey was doing the music,” says Carol. “It was a David Lynch dream. A Twin Peaks dream. Tracey was in the film playing the music like the girls. So I brought her all the instruments the Alternative School Orchestra used: the triangle, the xylophone, the descant recorder.”

Tracey breaks in: “When Carol first asked me to do the music, I said I’d never done film music, I have no idea what to do and I’m a bit scared. And Carol just said, ‘That’s great.’ And then I saw a scene where the girls play. I thought, ‘Wooooh! Actually, I can see how we can do this.’ I thought back to the music I made in the school band. We weren’t that unlike those girls. We used what we had. We didn’t know anyone who had a drum kit, so we never had a drummer. Maybe I imagine I am those girls making that soundtrack.”

Tracey fed her songs to Carol, one by one, first takes, and they were slotted into the soundtrack, without Tracey ever seeing a completed cut of the film. The tracks on the accompanying album do sound eerily like music the girls might want to make, particularly the drowsy Follow Me Down, with its insistent trickling xylophone, and the percussive motif of All the Seasons, which weirdly sounds like an English didgeridoo.

“There is something eerie about any music that might be played by children,” says Tracey.

“Folk horror!” adds Carol.

Related: Carol Morley: ‘Mass hysteria is a powerful group activity’

So did Tracey go to an all-girls school? Yes, she replies: Bishop’s Hatfield, in Hertfordshire. This answer triggers a deafening shriek of excitement from Carol: “I WISH I’d gone to a girls’ school! I went to Goyt Bank Comprehensive in Stockport, which was named after the River Goyt. It’s shut down now. It no longer exists.”

“There’s a seething hotpot of urges and repression at a girls’ school,” says Tracey. “Nastiness as well. The girls at the school in the film are nicer than the ones at mine were. My headmistress was very like the fictional headmistress, and all the stuff about skirts not being allowed to be above your knees was in force That atmosphere of everything unspoken and unspeakable was very much the case.”

Tracey adds, however, that her musical career began at school, and it was productive and creative: “I formed an all-girl band called the Marine Girls, and we released what was effectively our first album, even though it was recorded on a four-track tape-recorder in someone’s bedroom and released on cassette. We got signed up by an indie label while I was still at school. It definitely started while I was in the lower sixth. I was in a band before that called Stern Bops. We blagged a gig at the end-of-term disco, and the headmistress came up to me and said [she puts on a Lady-Bracknell-style posh voice] ‘Tracey! You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel!’ So the headmistress wasn’t so bad.”

Carol’s musical career didn’t go as well: “At my school, you got free tuition for an instrument. I wanted to play saxophone, but by the time I got to the front of the queue, I forgot the word saxophone, so I had to play clarinet. We had to rent our instruments, and my mum got mine on hire purchase from Nield and Hardy in Stockport. She only made one payment because Nield and Hardy burned down. So I got my clarinet for free. I still have it. My first band was called the Playground, named after a short story by Ray Bradbury. I was the singer and I played descant recorder. We got one gig at a pub, but they wouldn’t let us play because we were underage.”

Have Carol or Tracey ever fainted? “I have,” says Carol, nodding emphatically. “I did at school. People would try to make themselves faint by sitting very close to hot radiators. The idea of fainting is very exciting. I’ve fainted at concerts. I fainted at the Roundhouse in Camden, and I was carried out by two men. You get a lot of attention. I fainted on the bus once.”

Related: Listen to a track from Tracey Thorn's Songs from The Falling score

“I’ve never fully fainted,” says Tracey. “I’ve had the headspin and the I’m-gonna-faint thing. The closest I’ve come to fainting was when I was pregnant. That’s why I think it is something that happens more to women. Girls at my school were always big on fainting. There was a little sick bay with a bed, and the object was to get into the sick bay. And everything would revolve around your period, which would involve some near-fainting.”

“It’s about attention-seeking and gaining control,” says Carol. “I made my cast take lessons in fainting from a movement coach because we had no mats. You have to fall on the soft parts of your body.”

On this note, the conversation ends, though Carol later tweets to explain that she was in the recorder choir at her primary school, and too nervous to play, but was allowed to be their mascot. It’s a surreal exchange, but seems an appropriate way to mark her beautiful and strange film.

• The Falling is out on Friday. Peter Bradshaw will be in conversation with Carol Morley at the Guardian Film Show, 22 April at the Prince Charles Cinema, London, 7pm-8.30pm.