How a Smiths song inspired Ben Harrison's 80s-set storytelling show
Subtitled ‘Songs And Stories Of An Eighties Teenager’, the new show from Ben Harrison and David Paul Jones brings together a series of true stories with new settings of 1980s pop songs, writes Mark Fisher
Seven years ago, David Paul Jones performed a Valentine’s day gig in the Barony Bar on Edinburgh’s Broughton Street. The pianist put together a compilation of romantic songs he would sing for the occasion. In the run-up to the performance, his friend Ben Harrison, best known as the co-artistic director of Grid Iron theatre company, put in a request. Jones, known to his friends as DPJ, gave him a withering look. This was a serious concert, not a karaoke night.
“That’s not really how it works,” said DPJ. “I have been planning this for quite a while.”
But Harrison was in for a treat. At the end of the gig when DPJ returned for an encore, it was Harrison’s request he played.
The song he had secretly rehearsed was Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, the final single to be released by the Smiths after the band’s break-up in 1987, and an achingly sad lament to loneliness. A lover of the baroque and romantic, DPJ brought out all of its plangency.
“It felt like such a gift,” says Harrison today as he and DPJ meet over a post-rehearsal drink in a Marchmont café. “That song is written into my will to be played at the funeral – and guess who’s going to perform it…”
As a teenager, Harrison was a huge fan of the Smiths. Longing to escape from smalltown Norwich, he was captivated by Morrissey’s lyrics, with their blend of alienation, wit and sexual ambivalence. He had a friend who would stuff bunches of gladioli into his trousers, just like the singer, and when Harrison moved to Edinburgh to study English literature, he was all the more thrilled to listen back to Morrissey singing about Keats, Yeats and Wilde.
The publicity image for his new show, which has the same colour palette as 1984’s The Queen Is Dead, pictures a young Harrison with a Morrissey-esque quiff and a de rigueur greatcoat. The show is subtitled “Songs And Stories Of An Eighties Teenager”. Naturally, he has called it Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me.
“Morrissey was a beacon to people who didn’t play rugby or football,” he says. “It was another way of being male. And it was steeped in a working-class culture that I found attractive because it was the opposite of what I was living with.”
Made possible by Creative Scotland’s Open Fund For Individuals, recently put in doubt because of Scottish government budget uncertainty, the show is a kind of sequel to Harrison’s storytelling anthology, Undertow Overflow, a 2022 collaboration with songwriter Amy Duncan.
“When Amy and I were touring around the Highlands doing long journeys to Findhorn and Mull, we found ourselves listening to 80s music,” says Harrison. “The day after the tour ended, as quite often happens, I started thinking about the next project. Undertow Overflow was about my past, present and even future. This one would go back to stories set in the 80s.”
Fulfilling his youthful ambitions to act, Harrison performs a set of true-life stories, while DPJ creates new settings for 1980s songs by artists such as Kate Bush, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Tears For Fears. “We’re not parodying the sound of the 80s,” says DPJ. “It’s a show about memory and it’s much more elegiac. You’ll be surprised by the direction some of them have gone. The one that was giving me the fear was Madonna’s Like A Prayer. I was thinking, ‘How am I going to do this?’ But when I took a deep breath and did it, the sketch of it came out in a single take. It’s one of my most disco-esque songs but it’s got that very languid feel to it.”
Harrison was thrilled by what he heard: “It was the same reaction that I had to all of them: astonishment. The first time DPJ played me Small Town Boy I was in floods of tears. His version of True Colours is even more hopeful than Cyndi Lauper’s – it has such hope for seeing someone for who they are and not who they’ve had to be.”
In some cases, such as Head Over Heels by Tears For Fears, DPJ has surprises in store. “It’s going to take the audience quite a way into the song before they realise what it is because, although I’m faithful to the melody, I’ve changed the harmony and the feel is completely different. What I like doing with cover songs is exploring the relationship of the song and the story, finding ambiguous meanings. Be faithful, yes, because you did not write the original, but be free to be imaginative with them.”
Joined by cellist Justyna Jablonska and BSL signer Emery Hunter in Scott Johnston’s production, Harrison thinks himself back to a time of raging hormones, social awkwardness and the looming threat of violence. A cold-war story about tying a hammer-and-sickle flag around a statue of Admiral Nelson is teamed with Sting’s Russians. Memories of wanting to escape to the big city are complemented by Smalltown Boy. There are tales of bullying and sleepovers.
For all the teenage angst, the stories are frequently funny. “I was a complete arse when I was a teenager,” he says. “I used to swan about believing I was the greatest actor in Europe. I would tell anyone who would listen. I thought I was going to be running the National Theatre at the age of 23. It was unshakeable because I’d found this drug of theatre.”
Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me is at the Tron, Glasgow, 19-21 September; Summerhall, Edinburgh, 23-25 September; and James Milne Institute, Findhorn Bay Arts Festival, 28 September.
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