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RIDING HOUSE STREET
By Edward St.Boniface
Thrill the world. Live the dream. Lose your soul.
SYNOPSIS:
‘RIDING HOUSE STREET’ is the story of the rise and fall of a pop star beginning with his desperate climb for success and ending with his quest to get redemption and forgiveness for the sins he has committed along the way. Its time frame is from the late 1980s to the present. In the late 1980s a penniless teenager from the counties, Al Lupton, arrives in London as a runaway. Keen to become a musician and find his fortune he instead cannot find a way to get out of the grim poverty he sinks into since he lacks skills, savings and any stability to make a proper start in life. Refusing to give up, Al finds a way to pay for music lessons. However he only gets his real start when he steals the cash savings of his piano teacher and uses the money to buy a keyboard. Forming a band with a talented female singer named Calliope, the duo win a ‘new bands’ concert and are able to successfully launch a tour. Going from strength to strength they find their big success in America and become a world class band. Suddenly blessed with the fame and fortune he dreamt of, Al is haunted by guilt over his crime stealing from his own teacher. Al and Calliope become lovers but Al cannot believe his good luck here either and becomes jealously paranoid. Despite the band’s greater and greater successes, Al is unnerved by his new life and finds it so hard to cope he eventually breaks up the band and ruins his loving relationship with Calliope. Tormented by a jealous tabloid journalist called Evel Tyler who has known and promoted the band from their earliest days, Al sinks into near poverty and obscurity again, trying intermittently to make musical comebacks but always finding his efforts sabotaged by Tyler. In 2010 Al has a showdown with Tyler at a London media club. He has an epiphany when he realises Tyler is jealous of him and the relationship he once had with Calliope and Al loses his fear of Evel’s influence in the tabloid press. Al participates in a music festival successfully and begins recording a comeback album, which to his astonishment Calliope offers to sing on. They nearly finish the album together, but then Al suffers a heart attack –literally a broken heart- shortly after Calliope reveals she is pregnant by and intends to marry one of Al’s former rivals for her affections. Although it literally destroys him inside, Al convinces Calliope he is happy for her. Al dies alone and without witnesses, but he has found peace knowing that Calliope is happy and by giving his blessing he did the right thing at last. Not long after, his comeback album is successfully released as a tribute to his life and career.
RIDING HOUSE STREET
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Hi, fellow Stagers. I myself have just joined our hungry community. I'm a transplanted Canadian living in London within hearing of Big Ben (on a quiet morning), in Westminster. I think us scribes have the hardest job of all in this hypnotising and crazily surreal-seeming industry. I think we've been facing it pretty much since the days when we occupied caves and nomaded through the wilderness, served the Pharoahs, wrote masques and plays for kings and queens and tyrants and dictators and prime ministers and presidents and all the way up to the radio and television and movies and webisodes of today; with whatever mad cybertelepathic or cosmointellectronic evolutionary innovation comes next. Namely, how do you make the truth (The Truth) entertaining and a good story? That's the dilemma that faces us in every generation. How do you pull together all the threads of life into one interesting and condensed story or series of them that tells an expectant audience what they want to hear and envision and see? I love that challenge. I think you have to start with yourself as your audience. I managed to lose some of my writerly inhibitions a few years ago when I decided to try my hand at a contemporary novel which escaped my control and became a trilogy. I put a lot of my own experiences into all of them and an enormous degree of my petulance about why life hasn't treated me the way it self-evidently should and came up with something I felt was more or less honest. I adapted two of the novels into screenplays since I did a screenwriting MA a few years ago and movies are one of my chief interests. My rule is always,'If it ain't fun, you ain't writin' true'. It also helps to write about what genuinely makes you angry (especially if its petty and personal) and scratches most at your vulnerabilities. The stuff you don't know how to resolve or maybe don't want to. I tend to find that brings out the most honest and sometimes inspired ideas and lines. Truth hurts and it should hurt. Whatcha think?