Tales of love, life, punk and 4-Play
Cork-based couple Linda and Carl Plover have dipped into their past for a new drama project, writes
In every life there are pivotal moments, points of no return that change everything and set you on an entirely new course.
For Carl and Linda Plover, meeting backstage at an English festival in the early Noughties, where they were playing with their respective bands, is one such moment.
Another, certainly, was Carl’s decision to chuck in his job and follow his new-found love to Ireland just three months in to their love affair.
“I saw her and I just thought she was gorgeous,” Carl says.
“But when we got chatting, she said, ‘I’m actually moving to Ireland in three months’ time,’ and I thought, ‘isn’t this typical.’ But sometimes you just have to dive in. And if I hadn’t dived in, what would have happened? Who knows, but here we are, three children later, and we’ve made a whole life for ourselves.”
Sixteen years on, the pair have become something of an arts power-couple in Cork: Linda, who had worked with BBC local radio in Nottingham and Birmingham, completed her music degree in UCC — the reason for her move in the first place — and founded successful music and events PR company Blue Monkey.
Carl, who had enjoyed some success with his UK experimental punk band 4,000,000 Telephones in the 1980s, now performs his punk poetry under the moniker of Wasps Vs Humans and has also found time to release his debut novel, Mattress, last year.
All this while parenting: Linda was a single mum to four-year-old Hannah when she and Carl met. Hannah is now 21, and the couple have two sons, Thomas, 13, and Jack, 10.
Linda and Carl performed together as Chunky Planet during their early years in Ireland, but Linda found swelling the ranks of their family temporarily tempered her creative ambitions.
Now, the husband-and-wife team are collaborating again, this time on a play. Entitled 4-Play — insert joke here about the importance of foreplay to couples — it’s a collection of four short monologues, written by Carl, Linda and two UK-based theatre director friends, Liz Lucas and Simon Clarke.
The individual plays are linked by a common theme: each explores one moment that changed the playwright’s life forever.
Both Linda and Carl’s life-altering moments are from their time in Lincoln, the East Midlands town where they grew up and experienced their formative days. The couple say there’s a pleasing symmetry in returning to Lincoln to premiere 4-Play, before bringing it to Cork’s Firkin Crane towards the end of November.
Carl charts his involvement with the punk scene back to one night in his teens when The Damned played the Sheffield Lyceum in 1982. His contribution to 4-play, Rat, focuses on that night, both from his own
perspective and that of Damned drummer Rat Scabies.
And he’s had the most reliable source for researching the play: Scabies himself.
“I told him I was writing a play about the Sheffield gig and he answered me back,” Carl says, still visibly chuffed at this contact with one of his musical heroes.
“He wrote me a big long email: he remembered the gig in great detail.
"So in the second half of the play, I’m Rat Scabies talking about the gig.”
The title of Linda’s play, Two Lines, is a reference to a positive pregnancy test: the life-altering moment she has chosen to recount is discovering she was pregnant with her daughter at 22.
“It’s very dramatic and quite personal,” she says.
My whole life just changed completely at that time. It was overwhelming, it was frightening, and it certainly wasn’t the plan, but it was the most amazing thing that ever happened to me. Dare I say, it probably even saved me.
Carl, 51, acted in his debut self-penned play last year, but for Linda, 44, this is a new creative direction: she has never acted or written for the stage before.
“There’s an element of performance to getting up and singing, so I don’t think I’m coming to it as a blank slate,” she says. “but it’s still quite scary.”
Pushing boundaries and continuing to grow creatively and as a couple is what it’s all about, though, Carl is quick to add:
“The first single we recorded as Chunky Planet was called ‘Pensioners Watch TV’. It was about how sad it is that couples end up sitting next to each other watching TV and stop talking.
We won’t turn into that. We’re going to keep writing music and performing. I love working with Linda and I can’t wait for the adventure of what this will entail.
