Several people on the message boards suggested existing tunes that seemed to fit the words I'd written, such as The Wild Rover, A North Country Maid or The Patriot Game.
I know now that this is because those songs follow the same ballad scansion I'd copied from Slip Jigs, but at the time it just seemed a rather baffling coincidence. When I later came to research some old British gallows ballads, I discovered their Victorian composers had relied on exactly the same technique. Like me, they'd published their words with no accompanying music, but structured those words to let readers attach any one of a dozen popular ballad tunes they already knew.
When Steve Tilston himself replied to my note, he suggested I graft an existing tune to my lyrics too. "I remember that, with Slip Jigs, I wanted a tune that sounded familiar, as if the listener had heard it before, but when pressed couldn't actually come up with the original template," he said. "I suppose therein lies the art. Why don't you use Slip Jigs as the template and bend it out of recognition?"
The short answer to that question, of course, was that I lacked any trace of the musical skills required for such a task. I was grateful to Steve for taking my efforts in such good part, though, and smiled when I saw he'd signed off his e-mail with the words "See you in court".
The best advice I got on the message boards came from the songwriter and teacher Tom Bliss. "Sometimes it helps to write two versions of a song," he wrote. "One for yourself which allows you to get the feelings out, and another - perhaps written sometime later - for public consumption. With a tragedy as terrible and as recent as this, it might be tactful to play down the details and use more obscure, but nonetheless powerful words, to suggest the tale.
"Songs work very differently to, say, a newspaper article. The tune will do much of the work for you, so your words can step back a pace. [...] If I was to tackle this task myself, I would use Nasra's name and make sure I'd communicated what had actually happened. But I would avoid overloading the story with more detail than was strictly necessary to get the emotional response I needed." (10, 13)
I could see that Tom's advice made a lot of sense, so I sat down at the keyboard again and tried to put it into practice. This time, I took Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol as my model. In its new version, I decided, the song should be narrated by Nasra's severed head as it rose from the bottom of the canal, and the result looked like this:
The Headlines (Nasra's Song)
The papers will not tell my tale,
I'll be my own reporter,
And tell of how I came to this,
Somalia's proud daughter,
To start my life so far away,
And end 'neath London water.
I came here as a refugee,
But money soon was tight,
I'd sell myself along the streets,
Of King's Cross every night,
To buy the drugs I needed then,
To find a little light.
CHORUS
It's cold down here: so cold and dark,
And I am all alone,
Your city's evil put me here,
Weighed down with blood and bone,
I miss the life I left behind,
My children not yet grown.
I met him on a night in March,
Out walking in the rain,
He offered twenty for a fuck,
And promised me cocaine,
Then led me northward from the streets,
I'd never see again
We did it once then smoked his rock,
"Get out" was all he said,
But when I tried to leave he smashed,
A crow-bar on my head,
He raped me then and stabbed me too,
By morning I was dead.
(CHORUS)
I watched from somewhere even then,
Though I was not alive,
And saw him cut my body up,
In pieces one to five,
My head and hands went in this bag,
To take a midnight dive.
I smiled while falling from the bridge,
To splash so far below,
I had a secret for the police,
My killer did not know,
He'd left a tag inside the bag,
They'd soon know where to go.
(CHORUS)
I hear the frogmen coming near,
The rest of me's been found,
The flat's address against my cheek,
Will close this sorry round,
My killer hears the police approach,
He knows he's prison-bound.
I glimpse the future as I rise,
Though waters cold and dirty,
I'll be at rest but he'll receive,
Hard years - not less than thirty,
A old man then he'll die in jail,
He can no longer hurt me.
(FINAL CHORUS)
It's cold in there: so cold and dark,
And he'll be all alone,
His own black evil put him there,
Weighed down by brick and stone,
Yet still I miss the life I had,
And children not yet grown.
I posted these lyrics on a couple of message boards too, and most people seemed to agree they were a big improvement. I was starting to feel that way myself, and again began dropping hints that someone should set them to music and record the song for me.
Meanwhile, Pete Morton, a well-known Nottinghamshire folk singer and a very talented songwriter, had seen my first set of lyrics somewhere. I got an e-mail from him on March 5, 2008, saying: "I've got a tune. It sounds very simple and traditional and works, I think. Very strong song. Well done! I'll record it asap."
Naturally, I was delighted by this and made a point of attending Pete's next London gig, where he played a verse or two of the tune he'd written for me just before going on. About a week later, Bernie Dembowski sent me a piano demo of his own tune for the ballad's first version, which he'd filled out with some swelling strings and a nicely doomy bass guitar part.