[FEATURE] A GIGANTIC SOUNDTRACK BY ASHLEY STOKES

20/9/2021

The role of music in my own stories is often not to provide the background vibe but an initial prompt, an encounter with an atmosphere that leads to a mental glimpse or image, or a lyric or title that comes to have associations or suggestions for me. Music becomes text.

In early versions of my novel Gigantic, its lead character, Kevin Stubbs, suburban Bigfoot hunter and Arch-Knower, robustly asserted a hatred of all music beyond ‘Theme from King Kong’ by Geoff Love and his Orchestra and ‘In the Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins, the lyrics of which provided something of a mantra. Beyond a reference to Kevin’s collaborator, Derek Funnel, trying to join legendary Sutton Jamiroquai tribute band Hominid Rex when he confuses them with a gigantopithecus research group, and a later relaxation of Kev’s anti-music puritanism – he now admits to some familiarity with the songs and cover art of Marillion – providing a playlist that matches the action of Gigantic is a challenge. High Fidelity this ain’t.

I rarely listen to music when I write and never when I am writing my own fiction. I am sitting here listening to John Barry’s King Kong OST as I type this and it’s giving my concentration a right load of stress and grief. If I do listen to music, if I am editing or ghost-writing, it will be neo-classical, ambient or drone, Dustin O’Halloran, Harold Budd or Winged Victory for the Sullen, etc., nothing that will remind anyone of anything that happens in Gigantic. The role of music in my own stories is often not to provide the background vibe but an initial prompt, an encounter with an atmosphere that leads to a mental glimpse or image, or a lyric or title that comes to have associations or suggestions for me. Music becomes text. Obsessively listening to the Burial songs ‘Come Down to Us’ and ‘Subtemple’ did lead to the story Subtemple (Black Static, 78/79). I once coded the titles of all ten Felt albums into ten consecutive short stories, most obviously in Forever Breathes the Lonely Word (Fleeting, 2012). No one noticed this striking move for mass-acceptance on my part. I am quite synaesthesic and can easily experience music as something else: narrative, cinema, an environment, an inner world, language, architecture, muscle. None of my characters in Gigantic have this sort of relationship with music. They have this sort of relationship with information, with intelligence and facts, or lack of.

Gigantic is the story of Kevin Stubbs and his associates, top cryptozoologist Derek Funnel and proper scientist Maxine Cash, and how they respond to the possible sighting of a legendary apeman in Sutton, the co-called North Surrey Gigantopithecus. It’s told dossier-style, a report with annotations. It’s the last great quest story, a bold adventure. If it needs a soundtrack, these are the songs.

Click here to listen to a Gigantic soundtrack Spotify playlist. Here’s why I chose the songs.

1. Gigantic - Pixies THEME FROM GIGANTIC: Title music to establish the sense of earth-shattering revelation that only a bigfoot sighting in Sutton can conjure. The Pixies didn’t record a song called ‘North Surrey Gigantopithecus’ because the phrase doesn’t quite work as a punchy chorus, so this will have to do.

2. Last of the Legendary Bigfoot Hunters – Luke Haines and Peter Buck KEVIN’S THEME: At last, a proper song about cryptid hunting in northern Surrey, and what a belter it is, too. ‘Snap the hairy fucker with my wide fucking angle’. Haines is from north Surrey and he gets it. Kev would have chucked away his one Phil Collins 7” single if he’d heard ‘Last of the Legendary Bigfoot Hunters’. Just imagine it playing in Kev’s head as he sweeps Banstead Common with two grand’s worth of thermal imaging camera, aka The Heat Ray.

3. Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World – The Divine Comedy
THEME FROM ARTHUR C. DAD: Episode Three of the 1980 ITV documentary series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World: The Missing Apes has almost religious significance for Kevin, and its title music – ‘a kind of Bontempi organ version of Thus Spoke Zarathustra from 2001’ – still resonates in his soul. That music isn’t available on Spotify, so we have to suffer this fey weedy bollocks instead.

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra – 2001: A Space Odyssey Soundtrack
BONUS TRACK: Included to compensate for ‘Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World’ by The Divine Comedy. It is not a coincidence that Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey and Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World: The Missing Apes, and both feature proper sightings of relict hominids.

5. In the Air Tonight – Phil Collins
MANIFESTATION: What plays in Kev’s head when entertaining the prospect that there is something in the trees and it’s gigantic. The brink of fulfilment, realisation, dream-actualisation. The end of the hero’s rainbow.

6. Theme from King Kong – Movie Soundtracks Unlimited
REVELATION: Geoff Love’s version of ‘Theme from King Kong’ isn’t on Spotify but at least there isn’t a Divine Comedy attack on this sacred passage of canonical gigantopithecus music. It’s best experienced on repeat in the cab of Kev’s white van while it’s parked up near Beddington Sewage Works or at Chaldon Trig Point.

7. Grendel – Marillion
DEREK FUNNEL’S THEME: ‘Weird music was playing. It was like The Funnel was stuck in an early Genesis LP, or the track by that Marillion, “Grendel”, the one that bollocks on for so long that you want to top yourself, but it had been playing over and over and over again and it was driving the whole world suicidal.’ Thus spoke Kevin Stubbs. ‘Grendel’ is as long as watching the Patterson-Gimlin film seventeen times. I know this because Kevin knows this. Mark E. Smith once compared Marillion to a miserable Scottish hotel.

8. She Blinded Me With Science – Thomas Dolby
MAXINE’S THEME: Maxine Cash, team leader of the Gigantopithecus Intelligence team and arch-nemesis and baffling female object to Kevin and Derek Funnel, always attempts to blind with science, with mixed results. This song possesses something of her chilly grace.

9. The Man who Sold the World – David Bowie
GORGO’S THEME: Maxine’s predecessor and second, non-Arthur C. Dad father figure to Kevin is Eddie ‘Gorgo’ Gartree, the man who started it all and the man always on the look out to make contact, contacts and do deals with bent coppers and the masons. Mr Big. The Presidential Candidate.

10. R.O.D – The Fall
THEME FROM GIGANTOPITHECUS: ‘It’s approaching, six-hundred pounds, gas and flesh.’ Nuff said.

If you would like to learn more about Ashley's fascination with cryptids and bigfeet in general read this brilliant article from Ashley

[FEATURE] FINDING GIGANTOPITHECUS BY ASHLEY STOKES

GIGANTIC BY ASHLEY STOKES

“I wasn’t sure you would get this far, so thanks a million already. You opened the mystery bag… Inside the bag, along with this letter, is a dossier that describes the whole story.”

Kevin Stubbs is a Knower. He knows life hasn’t always treated him fairly. He knows he wants to be allowed access to his son again. But most of all, he knows that the London Borough of Sutton is being stalked by a nine-foot-tall, red-eyed, hairy relict hominid – the North Surrey Gigantopithecus.

Armed with a thermal imaging camera (aka the Heat Ray) and a Trifield 100XE electromagnetic field reader (aka the Tractor Beam), Kevin and his trusty comrades in the GIT (aka the Gigantopithecus Intelligence Team) set out to investigate a new sighting on the outskirts of Sutton. If real, it will finally prove to the world that the infamous Gartree-Hogg footage was genuine, and a British Bigfoot is living in suburban London: FACT. But what he discovers undermines everything he believes in – and forces Kevin to face up to his own failures, and the very real, very scary prospect that he might have got it all terribly wrong.

Ashley Stokes

Ashley Stokes is originally from Carshalton in Surrey and studied first Modern History at the University of Oxford and then Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is author of The Syllabus of Errors (Unthank Books, 2013) and Voice (TLC Press, 2019), and editor of the Unthology series and The End: Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings (Unthank Books, 2016). His recent short fiction includes Replacement Bus Service in Out of the Darkness, edited by Dan Coxon (Unsung Stories); Subtemple in Black Static; Hardrada in Tales from the Shadow Booth, Vol 4, edited by Dan Coxon; Evergreen in BFS Horizons 11; Two Drifters in Unsung Stories Online, and Black Lab in Storgy. Other stories have appeared in Bare Fiction, The Lonely Crowd, the Warwick Review and more. He lives in the East of England where he’s a ghostwriter and ghost. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at @AshleyJStokes. Gigantic is published by Unsung Stories.