Punk rocker Dave Warner launches a new single to celebrate his new crime novel


Dave Warner’s latest crime novel River of Salt comes complete with its own music, and you can listen to it right now.

Dave has been performing the song, ‘No Good Can Come From This’, as part of his Life of Crime tour this month. Warner said he wrote it from the perspective of River of Salt’s lead character, Blake Saunders. ‘I was writing the book and got to a passage where Blake is playing a new song he has “written”.  I could hear it so clearly in my head that I went and wrote it for real and then recorded it with Martin Cilia on guitar, Lloyd Gyi on drums, and my wife Nicole, and another pal, Bill Beare, on backing vocals. I just thought it would be a fun thing for somebody who was reading the book to be able to click on the song to soak up the atmosphere. I don’t know if anybody else has quite done that before.’

It seemed apt to record the song given that it was Sydney’s surf music culture that inspired the novel. ‘A few years back I went down to hear my long-term music collaborator Martin Cilia playing at the Old Manly Boatshed with the original Atlantics. As I was watching them, the whole idea of a book or TV series set in the era of early 1960s beach culture was running through my head. Mark Preece of Manly Longboard is a good mate too and is always posting great photos of the era. It just seemed like a perfect fit.’

River of Salt follows a young contract killer, Blake, who wants out of the criminal life of Philadelphia and is fascinated by surf guitar music and surfing. Circumstances force him to flee Philly and he winds up on the other side of the Pacific in Northern New South Wales. He follows his dream, and everything is going well until a murder of a young woman threatens his new life. He must solve the case in order to protect the people around him and, being a killer himself, he’s the perfect person to do it.

River of Salt is available to purchase from all good bookstores and online. To listen to ‘No Good Can Come From This’ go to Spotify or YouTube.  To find out more about the launch go to Eventbrite.


Books discussed
River of Salt

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