Frank Cottrell-Boyce's My World Interview

“Oh god, how do you know about that?” replies Frank Cottrell-Boyce when I mention his time in the Liverpool punk band Dead Trout. “Unfortunately, it’s on your Wikipedia page,” I respond. Born in Bootle, near Liverpool, in 1959, Cottrell-Boyce was at the right age when punk hit, and he became part of the scene in Liverpool and a regular at Eric’s Club. “Bands kind of came and went or morphed into something else,” he recalls, naming Big in Japan, Dalek I Love You and Dead Birds as contemporaries. “Loads of those bands became huge, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood.”

Yet, these aren’t his formative musical influences, for those you have to go back further. “You know the earliest banger – to use that word – I can remember would be television themes like ‘Top Cat’. I’d get so excited when I heard that,” he says enthusiastically. “Oliver Postgate was the most punk of all,” he quips about the creator of children’s shows such as Bagpuss and Clangers.

Children’s TV and punk may seem odd bedfellows, but they do give an inkling of Cottrell-Boyce’s career as a writer and the sheer breadth of his work. He started out in TV, writing for Brookside and Coronation Street in the 80s and 90s. In 1990, he teamed up with director Michael Winterbottom on a TV movie, Forget About Me, the tale of two Scottish squaddies making their way to Budapest to see a Simple Minds concert. It was with Winterbottom that he would make his name as a screenwriter, the two of them working together on a string of critical successes: Butterfly Kiss (1995), Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), 24 Hour Party People (2002), Code46 (2003) and A Cock and Bull Story (2005). Other films he has written or co-written include Hilary and Jackie (1998), Millions (2004), The Railway Man (2013), Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017) and, his most recent, this year’s The Beautiful Game, starring Bill Nighy and inspired by the true story of the Homeless World Cup. He’s also carved out a sister career as an award-winning children’s author, and wrote the opening ceremony for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

We hone in on two of his films whose subjects revolve around music. Hilary and Jackie told the story of celebrated cellist Jacqueline du Pré from the perspective of her sister. Remembering why he wrote the film, Cottrell-Boyce says: “I just thought it was an amazing story about childhood and sisterhood, it’s a film about family, and I was also really drawn to that music. I remember seeing her on telly [when I was young] and thinking, wow, that sound is so deep and it’s so old, this incredible mournful, ancient sound, and she looks so young, you know, there’s something magical about that.” From there, we go to 24 Hour Party People – “they’re two ends of the musical spectrum,” says Cottrell-Boyce – his story of the Manchester music scene in the 80s focused on Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda nightclub and a TV presenter on Granada. “It was a celebration of local television as much as of local music,” says Cottrell-Boyce. “I was working on Coronation Street when Tony was a big wheel at Granada, so that was the world I was living in.” Speaking of writing a film about Manchester when he’s from Liverpool, he chuckles: “It gives me enormous satisfaction that wherever I go in Manchester now, there’s a line that’s more or less the unofficial motto of the city. It’s on tea towels and mugs and it’s all over the student halls-of-residence, which is actually written by a scouser, which was me. It’s a ridiculous line. It says, ‘This is Manchester, we do things differently here.’ It’s attributed to Tony Wilson, but he never said it and never would have said it. It’s from the film.”

Cottrell-Boyce was born to Irish Catholic parents and has an Irish wife so our conversation turns to Irish music. He tells me how his sons learned to play fiddle at Comhaltas, and how this led to a particularly memorable experience. “The girls were practising Irish dancing on the lawn, and their brother came out and played this slip jig [The Bothy Band’s ‘Butterfly’]. And I just remember that being one of those golden moments, these little barefoot girls dancing with their brother playing this beautiful jig.” Did he ever pick up a fiddle himself? “I’m one of those dads who can’t sit in the car park with the newspaper, so I had fiddle lessons when they had fiddle lessons. And I was dreadful, really terrible.”

He mentions ‘Arthur McBride’ by Paul Brady as another favourite Irish song (“that’s a good one for the party”) before making a confession. “Now, this is very niche, but I’ve got a thing about anti-recruiting songs. I love them. ‘Arthur McBride’ is about two guys being asked to join the British Army and beating up the recruiting officer. Right. There’s another one, The Pogues covered ‘The Recruiting Sergeant’, which is a similar theme.” He saw The Pogues in Liverpool at one of their first shows, supporting Elvis Costello when they were still called Pogue Mahone. “That was, I’m going to say, 1983. I remember discussing whether to go and watch them or not because they were a support band. And then going in and, honestly, 30 seconds in, just jumping out of the seat. They were playing a lot of Irish covers, they were songs that were incredibly familiar, but blisteringly new. It was an incredible moment, like being given something back. I’m getting goose pimples just remembering that. It’s one of my greatest musical memories.”

We talk about The Imagined Village – which Cottrell-Boyce remembers in particular for their collaboration with Benjamin Zephaniah on ‘Tam Lyn Retold’ – and Eliza Carthy, and then he recalls a story about another fiddler. “I remember going to see [Dave] Swarbrick and it was incredibly moving because he was sitting down with an oxygen mask on his face and playing, and I was really aware of the difference between him and classical players, that he was coaxing music out. When you watch a classical player, you watch the precision and discipline and the operation of a machine. And watching him, it was more like watching Jacqueline du Pré, watching someone call something out of their soul. Another incredible memory.”

Cottrell-Boyce is the Guest Director of this year’s Brighton Festival which takes place throughout May and has a programme taking in music, theatre, dance, art, film, literature and more. Asked what music he’s looking forward to from the programme, he replies: “The person that I’m so excited about being on is Mahan Esfahani, who’s a harpsichordist. He’s doing [Bach’s] ‘Goldberg Variations’ on the harpsichord and it’s mind-blowingly brilliant.” He also mentions Kae Tempest – “do you know her song ‘Love Harder’? It’s inspirational, it’s sort of the theme of the festival” – and Orchestra Baobab – “I love them, they really go back to something.”

Brighton Festival runs from May 4 until May 26 across Brighton

This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today