Dave Jackson

Song & Screenplay

Liverpool John Moores University, UK

Prior to studying, teaching and writing screenplays and concurrent with those practices I was and am still involved in writing, recording and performing storytelling songs with various independent rock bands, and have used songs I have written as the inspiration for screenplays. My screenplay Violet City, filmed between 2010 and 2016 as an independent feature film and initially released on Amazon Prime in 2017 began life as a series of songs, that also developed into a novel. I have recently recorded an album, The Telling, with my band The Room. It is a series of 11 songs, set in a mythical 16th century Europe, which tells a complete story, and I am using as a treatment for a screenplay of the same name.

My paper will discuss the relation I see between storytelling songs, screenwriting, and cinema, the symbiosis between these forms in my own work and in the work of others. For instance, Bob Dylan’s ‘Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts’ reads like a prose treatment for a feature film. My earliest memories of certain songs like Vaughn Monroe’s (Ghost) Riders in the Sky’ imprinted cinematic images on my childhood imagination.

I have been writing, performing and recording with: The Room, Benny Profane, Dead Cowboys, The Room in the Wood, and as Dave Jackson from 1980 to the present. I have released 15 albums and numerous singles with these acts and toured in the UK, USA, Germany, Austria, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia, and the Philippines.

I have been teaching Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University since 2000, and wrote a novel and commentary entitled ‘Violet City: Personal and Cultural Mythologies in the Creation of a Fantasy Novel’. I adapted the novel as a screenplay in 2010 and the film Violet City was released through Indie Rights in 2017. I wrote a chapter for The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development entitled ‘Script Development from Novel to Green Screen Fantasy Feature’ published in 2021.