Getting Organised

At Follycon we decided to run a dedicated UK filk convention, conditional on preparations being sufficient to be able to advertise it at Albacon 88 in Glasgow on 29th July to 1st August 1988.

We also decided to follow up the writing workshop with regular monthly meetings in London. These were held on the last Friday of every month.

The first meeting was held on Friday 29th April 1988. Nothing seems to have been written there, it was a general social meeting. I took a list of names, addresses and phone numbers at that meeting, with the intention of producing a list of those plus any lyrics that got written. I typed this up, photocopied it and gave or posted it to everyone who was there. I needed some sort of title, and of course the main essential was that it should be extremely silly. So I added a couple of vowels to the acronym for "We're Gonna Get Lynched!" (see previous entry), and made "WiGGLe". This also became the name of the meeting.

The original phrase is from the Deep Thought scene in the original radio version of the Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
Deep Thought: "The Answer Is . . . . . . . . Forty Two!"
The computer operator: "We're Gonna Get Lynched, you know that?"

At later meetings various lyrics were written into my notebook and published. The list eventually morphed into a monthly newsletter, and is still going today.

Then at the fourth meeting in July, Zander turned up. Now Zander had been writing his own songs for some time, so at the meeting he very shyly said that he had err been writing these um songs - and dropped a massive stack of paper on the table. There were so many that Zander had already left by the time the stack got to Mike Whitaker, who found Zander had written "Red Sun Rising" as a follow-up to Mike's "Before the Dawn", and cried "Bring that man back! He's a genius!".

The next morning Mike phoned Zander with the tune he had written for that song. And then other people wrote songs set in the same universe. And it grew a bit. The stage performance of the filk musical "Before the Dawn" leaves out a lot of the songs and a lot of the detail (for instance it omits a huge empire just next door).