Dead Good Tunes: Tom Benn’s Chamber Music playlist

Do you regularly read a book and listen to music at the same time?

If so, you’ll love this new feature – ‘Dead Good Tunes’. We’ve asked authors to provide soundtracks to their books and then we publish the playlist for you.

Writing and music can be comfortable bedfellows. As well as enhancing some people’s reading experience, music can also influence an authors’ writing process and plotting.

French author/philosopher Albert Camus used musical terms and structures in many of his works including L’Étranger (The Stranger). Masculine, musical geekery and top 5 music lists provided the backbone to Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity.

Music features heavily in thriller writer, Tom Benn’s books and has influenced much of his writing.

His critically acclaimed 2011 debut novel The Doll Princess introduced the central character Bane, a 1990s Mancunian drug-dealing, streetwise scally. Its backdrop was Manchester clubland in the late 1990s and music of that time that many of us of a certain age look back on with fondness.

Chamber Music is Tom Benn’s ‘potent’ follow-up novel. Set in Manchester in 1998, 2 years after The Doll Princess, Bane is immersed in a brutal turf war with Hagfish and his ‘colourful’ friends.

If you love Tom Benn’s books or enjoy reading and listen to music then you’ll love the playlist that Tom has created to accompany the book.

Here is Tom’s complete 32 track Spotify playlist that you can listen to or subscribe to with the full list of tunes mentioned in the book, Chamber Music.

For anyone partying in the 1990s and younger fans of New Order, Morrissey, Snap!, 808 State, Wu Tang Clan, Steel Pulse and Happy Mondays it’s an evocative compilation.

Enjoy the tunes and look out for other featured authors and their Dead Good Tunes over the coming weeks.

The 10 most important tunes from Tom Benn’s Chamber Music
James Brown – Out of Sight
The Wu-Tang Clan – Hellz Wind Staff
The Ruthless Rap Assassins – And it Wasn’t a Dream (Dare to be Aware Mix)
Percy Mayfield – Life is Suicide
Al Green – Love and Happiness
New Order – Fine Time
The Notorious B.I.G. – Hypnotize
Steel Pulse – Soldiers
Anna King – If Somebody Told You
Morrissey & Siouxsie Sioux – Interlude