19th February, 2025

Guest post: Emily Cotterill – Now That’s What I Call ‘Significant Wow’

In today’s guest post, Emily Cotterill shares her playlist ‘Now That’s What I Call Significant Wow’ and muses on the musical influences which have shaped her as a person and a poet.

Now That’s What I Call Significant Wow

‘Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude’ in a lyric alongside ‘a pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete’ is almost exactly the energy I want from Significant Wow, it’s a shame Paul Weller came up with that before I was born.

It’s probably not the wisest thing to say, but I’ve deliberated more over the playlist to accompany this collection than some of the poems themselves. I’ve always hated answering the question ‘what kind of music do you like?’ partly because it’s so hard to answer, partly because of my lack of self-confidence, and partly because the only people who were happy about my answer were men at least a decade older than me in pubs. This playlist isn’t quite an answer to that question but it definitely gets into the ball-park of an answer. The fact that there’s a whole collection of poetry to sit alongside it makes it easier somehow, the book gives me something to back myself up with.

There’s music directly referenced in Significant Wow that isn’t on the playlist, partly because I don’t know how to reconcile ‘Come On Eileen’, ‘Mustang Sally’ and the ‘Grease Megamix’ and partly because the things that are more important are the things that are pointed at rather than named – Pulp’s kitchen sink lyrics, women in punk, David Bowie screaming ‘give me your hands ’cos you’re wonderful’. I set out to write a collection focused on celebrity and storytelling. In a lot of ways Significant Wow is that, but I also think it’s the evolution of my teenage scrapbook, I’m showing myself who I am and hopefully other people will see themselves in the poems and maybe in this playlist as well.

Other than children’s stuff (shout out to ‘Please Mrs Butler’) and the books for school, I didn’t really properly read poetry for a long time. I was a classic sixth form poet, guilty of writing without reading but I was definitely listening. Bits of lyrics always stuck in my head. From ‘Life On Mars?’ “girl with the mousey hair” to the unexpected “microwave ovens” and “colour TVs” in Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’ or the deeply unexpected use of the word “facsimile” in ‘Love Me For A Reason’ (the Boyzone version thank you, I was born in the 90s), I was always paying attention to lyrics in a way that I’ve relatively recently realised other people were not. There’s a broad musical theme running through this playlist but alongside that there are, I think, some really great words.

It’s a fundamental fact of my existence that I’m a Manics fan. I could have ripped up the whole playlist and given you a few hours of them. I think if you didn’t love something deeply and completely as a teenager you can never know what it was like, and if you did then you really don’t need telling that I am who I am because of them. Two Manics songs, and a bonus appearance of James Dean Bradfield alongside Public Service Broadcasting, made it onto this playlist because it was thematically sensible. Then there’s ‘So Dead’ which had to be there because of how it spoke to me as a sad, bookish, intellectually arrogant girl in a left behind town – “you’re going to pay for my intelligence”.

Emily Cotterill