H
e has nothing against horror, but Stephen Coates admits he’s not particularly a fan. The fact that he and his am- bitious pop band The Real Tuesday Weld have released an album called The Last Werewolf (Six Degrees Records) is mainly because the record is a soundtrack (of sorts) to British writer Glen Duncan’s book of the same name.
That doesn’t mean he didn’t enjoy writing music
about a flesh-hunting shape-shifter, though. “In a way it’s about a werewolf, but really it’s about
a man who turns into a wolf once a month and has to do all these vile things!” explains Coates. “It was fun, actually, and there are some songs on the record that are meant to be his werewolf side. But a lot of it is re- ally about him in between, as it were.” The latest album by the UK-based “antique beat”
act, a term Coates uses to describe the band’s fusion of 20th-century jazz and modern electronics, is the second collaboration between Coates and Duncan, who first became friends as teenagers. The Real Tuesday Weld also released an album for Duncan’s 2004 novel I, Lucifer, which sees the fallen angel being given a shot at redemption. The protagonist of The Last Werewolf novel (recently published by
Knopf) is Jacob Marlowe. Having killed his first victim in 1842, the now 201-year-old British lycanthrope keeps himself young through heroic doses of sex, exercise and eating people. But Marlowe must learn to live with being, as the title suggests, the last werewolf, after the death of his
only contemporary. His subsequent depression and loneliness drive him to consider surrendering to the hunters of the World Organization for the Control of Oc- cult Phenomena, which has wiped out the rest of his kind. Despite the novel’s graphic violence and the fact that
its lead character regularly transforms under the full moon, Coates doesn’t consider the book – its film rights already the subject of a bidding war won by director Ri- dley Scott (Alien, Hannibal) – to be a traditional horror novel.
“There are a lot of [horror elements] in there and some exciting, blood-
curdling stuff, but it’s more about the experience of somebody who this actually happens to,” says the singer. “So I think it’s more concerned with that than the hairy hound stuff.” Opening with the sound of Big Ben chiming, the album utilizes a variety
of musical styles, from bluesy stomps (“Wolfman”) to ambient sound- scapes (“The Cruellest Month”) and Coates’ trademark collision of old and new, such as the Tin Pan Alley brass backed by pulsating keyboard lines and dancefloor beats on “Love Lust Money” and “Tear Us Apart,” with di- alogue from the novel laced throughout. While none of the songs on The Last Werewolf sound particularly fright-
ening, Coates deploys a macabre sense of humour in his lyrics. “(I Always Kill) The Things I Love,” for instance, contains the lines “The look in your eyes will turn to surprise / As you feel the pain and you recognize / The one hurting you is somebody who / Said ‘I love you.’” The words are chill- ing even as the music and Coates’ melancholy crooning recall the torch songs of Cole Porter and Noel Coward. “My tone generally takes the macabre angle, I suppose,” he admits.
“It’s always been the case. The voice of Jacob the werewolf, he’s got a rather morbid sense of
humour...and also a sense of sadness. He’s not just a full-on violent kind of frenzied thing the whole time.” The book and record are currently only available separately but
Crammed Discs plans to release a limited-edition book/CD package in Oc- tober. Coates hopes fans get the chance to experience the story in both permutations. “If you came to the book through the music or you came to the music
through the book, I think and hope a third thing would happen,” he says. “There is more of a sense of the world in which the story happens and the sort of interaction. So I think that you’d get something else, which you wouldn’t get from the two things separately. That was the intention.”
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