The Ladies of the House: Molly McGrann’s Playlist

The Ladies of the House is a tale of double lives and dark secrets.

After Arthur Gillies’s death, his wife and daughter discover he made his fortune from running brothels in some of London’s most exclusive areas.

Molly McGrann writes about some of the songs that inspired her while she was writing the novel.

Editor's note: We were unable to link to Patti Smith, Bob Marley or Stan Kenton but hope you enjoy the rest of this playlist.

Episode 1

The book’s main themes are lost love, unsatisfied love and a lonely marriage.

‘The bed was made; it had been made for twenty years. She never wanted to sleep in that bed again.’

The imagery in this song is violent and stark with unsettling piano trills, and such a high keening voice at the end.

’Sal was only sweet to him to keep her house – Mr Wye being Arthur Gillies’s main henchman and most trusted employee, his eyes and ears, a nasty bird a buzzard bringing death.’

Episode 2

‘She saw another version of her life inside the shabby rooms of the house in which she had been born… She saw the life she would have known among the people who always said they knew her best.’

Poverty forces women into prostitution.

Patti sings ‘Every night before I go to sleep, find a ticket, win the lottery.’

And the last word of the song: free.

Episode 3

‘By the end of the week, Gillies' stable of madams and whores had become legal tenants in some of the best neighbourhoods in London.’

This moment is a turning point in the book.

The song ‘Bowls’ goes round and round at a great pace to keep things moving, narrative-wise.

‘Looking at the house in the crescent, one would never think about what went on inside.’

Episode 4

'Her horizon had opened up again and didn’t she believe in possibility? Didn’t she believe in making her own luck?...She opened the cupboard where a mirror was pasted, stuck there since the old days. She took a good look at herself…Her eyebrows, drawn on that morning….her rouge two bright spots of excitement, her wrinkled chin, whiskerless, carefully plucked that morning. Not bad, she thought with a cluck.’

The version of the song that I like was recorded in 1964. It was one of the first recordings that Bob Marley made with the Wailers, when they were just the Wailers.

It's not a reggae song, not yet, and Bob Marley sings it like an R&B singer, with a sort of sashaying energy - just like Rita walking down the street.

"I know love is a guessing game," is the refrain and I always thought The Ladies of the House was a book about love.

Episode 5

‘Joseph gazed at the park across the way. The maze of it. What Annetta went looking for, he didn’t know. But every time she was found hiding in a bush.’

I wanted to write about dementia, having watched three of my grandparents and my mother-in-law succumb to it.

My lovely grandmother Betty lived with us for a while and she and I shared a bathroom. We adored her but she just wasn’t herself anymore, except in flashes. She was in a fog - it was like she was groping around in the dark.

There was this idea of going under. It was as if she were following my grandfather on a path he had travelled some years before: she longed for him.

Also, she kept taking the H off the bath tap and it drove me nuts: I’d steal it back and so the game continued until she eventually went into a nursing home and died there. Heartbreaking.

'Annetta dozed in a chair. A cup of tea was cold beside her. Her torn feet had been bandaged and she was wrapped in a blanket. She could smell the antiseptic and it made her head hurt. All of her hurt, the whole way through. She was old and tired.’

Episode 6

"‘I want my own house to run,’ Sal said. ‘I’ll pick the girls. You’ll see - no one will know a better house than mine.’"

So many artists have covered this track since Duke Ellington first broadcast it on the radio in 1930, but this is my favourite. This is such a classy tune and it really evokes the carefully choreographed opulence of Sal’s house in Primrose Hill.

'Sal dressed the rooms carefully in rich colours, mahogany and rose damask for the dining room, delft blue in the drawing room and a soft mossy-green wallpaper, the colour of American money up and down the stairs.'

Episode 7

‘Arthur worked so hard, Flavia said, she wanted him to rest, put his feet up. And so he did. He napped. He listened to ‘Tampico’. He only wanted ‘Tampico.’ He wouldn’t let Marie change the record, saying she’d scratch it so Flavia moved the needle and set it carefully into the groove.’

Tampico is an upbeat and gently satirical song. It’s a song Arthur Gillies would have danced to in nightclubs in post-war London while the city was being rebuilt around him.

And it’s also the only song he will listen to during his quiet weekends at home, as his wife Flavia cooks and cleans and fusses over him.