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Walton brings Opal and Nev together at a time when their union was almost too preposterous to imagine. As an interracial musical duo, they are dynamite.Īnd, like dynamite, their impact is explosive. Not until his own attention is grabbed when he first sees Opal on stage they are destined to make beautiful magic together. Having endured a bit of a messy childhood, he’s a bit of a loner, “a goofy white English boy” who writes attention-grabbing music but can’t quite find his niche. While Opal is one kind of outsider (“an outcast Black girl from Detroit”), Nev Charles – a lanky, redhead from Birmingham (in the UK, not Alabama) – is another. What if a black-and-white male-and-female duo had in fact found musical fame somewhere back in the 1970s?Īnd so Walton created that scenario, conjured two curious characters to inhabit the roles and allowed the fraught politics and climate of social tension that accompanied the unfolding civil rights movement of the time to layer and texture events along the way. In it, she’d noticed a pair of wonderful songstresses grooving along to David Burn in footage from a Talking Heads concert and it made her imagine what might happen if one of these women had been front-and-centre alongside Burn, rather than merely backing him up. Walton says it was watching 20 Feet from Stardom, a documentary about background singers, that sparked the idea for the novel. Not only that, she says, but when she found herself in places where symbols of repression such as that flag were displayed without question, she felt scared. She says it was bands like that – popular, hard-hitting Stetson-and-cowboy-boots-wearing musicians who sang rock anthems like Sweet Home Alabama in front of a Confederate flag – that deepened her sense of not being represented in the musical landscape of her youth.
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Walton grew up in northern Florida, in a place she says was more Alabama than the Florida we imagine when we think of Miami her hometown – Jacksonville – also birthed Lynyrd Skynyrd. Opal may possess strains of Grace Jones and channel aspects of other female greats, but she is her own unique creation, a product of Walton’s urgent need to tell a story that connects to the part of her that felt unseen when she was growing up, in love with music that was in some ways not meant for her, music in which people like her did not seem to figure – other than as background singers. ‘The Final Revival of Opal & Nev’: A read that’s.īut, no. If you’re rejigging your budgets, and it comes to choosing between frothy milk and Daily Maverick, we hope you might reconsider that cappuccino. Our country is going to be considerably worse off if we don’t have a strong, sustainable news media. We can't survive on hope and our own determination. A little less than a week’s worth of cappuccinos.
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