This song is a track from his new album Bridges. This track is about the woman who is famous for writing 'Frankenstein'. She spent the best part of two years in Dundee (1812-1814) in the hope that it would improve her health. 'Frankenstein' is John's favourite book. Thinking back to his childhood in South Baffin Street in Dundee, he remembered a plaque on the wall of the steps at the end of the street. The plaque said that this was the site of the cottage mentioned in 'Frankenstein' and John later discovered that it was the cottage, owned by the the Baxter family, where Mary had stayed during her time there. The plaque disappeared in the early Seventies.

Mary Shelly describes that time in her introduction to the book. "It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered."

The track lasts for just under 4 minutes. It is stored in mp3 format which will download and play on most computers. The compression process used a high quality setting and so the size of the file is quite big at 7 Mb. The download time may be long (many minutes) over a slow connection and most computers won't begin to play the song until it has downloaded completely. But it is worth waiting for. Click here to begin the download. You can also listen to a short extract of around 1 minute.

John is appearing at Stonehouse Folk Club on the 27th January. See our music events page for more info. Copies of the album are available via his website www.john-malcolm.com.

© John Malcolm

(N.B. The dynamic range of the recording was so wide that I had to reduce it slightly during mp3 conversion so as to eliminate distortion on my computer's speakers.)