Setting the scene for Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

Some musical inspirations behind the novel - and playlists to go with them!

Dear Sunshiners,

There are ten days until the release of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon, my latest novel. It is set mainly in Terrigal on the Central Coast of New South Wales, in 1986, and is centred around – no surprises here! – the Seaside Salon, where hairdresser Trudy smokes and combs and cuts her way through the days, bereft after the loss of her husband two years before. Joining her in the salon is hairdresser Evie, who has a young son, Billy, and an amicable relationship with his father, and apprentice Josie, who is enjoying her freedom from parental restrictions and her new sense of self. The fourth main character is Anna, who visits the salon with her mother but is not a client at first.

There are four love stories in the novel: lost love, unrequited love, first love and love on the rocks. And I had absolutely no plans to write a novel for publication this year, but these characters had other ideas as they came to me out of the ether and decided now was the right time to meet you all.

[Dawn at Terrigal Beach, July 2025 - photo by me]

The reason they could emerge was because I had, unwittingly, been preparing for them. As I mention at the start of the acknowledgements in the back of the book, I was watching the web comedy series Hot Looks Salon (part of the Neon Girls universe) by American comedian Casey Dressler. Originally it was all set in the 1980s, and I’m calling the series Hot Looks Salon because at the time I started watching it Casey didn’t have many other strands to her stories – now she has a whole phalanx of characters. The one I latched onto was Donna, the hairdresser at Hot Looks Salon. Although Casey doesn’t deploy this line much any more, towards the start, when Donna was about to use hairspray she’d say (to the imaginary client – Casey plays all the characters and can only do one at a time!), ‘Honey, cigarette down.’

Cigarette down.

That was the line that sparked my imagination (pun possibly intended) while my brain was idle for a few moments one day. Not long afterwards a chain-smoking hairdresser called Trudy popped into my mind. Then followed, within the space of no more than fifteen minutes, the other characters, the setting and the love stories. That last aspect surprised me, as while there can be some love stories in my novels, they are not a focus. But I let my characters boss me around and this is what they were telling me this time.

The other 1980s element was that I had the album Girlhood by Queensland artist Hayley Marsten on high rotation. I had interviewed Hayley about it for Sunburnt Country Music, my other creative enterprise, and knew it was influenced by 80s music. It’s also, as far as I’m concerned, a modern classic and the only album I can think of that has the experience of being a girl and woman covered so acutely and poignantly. Other artists have songs about it; Hayley made a whole album, and I listen to it still.

Once I started to flesh out the novel, the last influence appeared: the song ‘Black Sand’ by Matt Joe Gow and Kerryn Fields, from their album I Remember You, and especially the lines ‘I want to come back to you … I’ll meet you at the waves’, although the whole song had an impact. ‘Black Sand’ is about loss and memory, and there is a fair bit of both in Seaside Salon.

The novel was originally called Monday Mornings at the Summertime Salon and while we’ve kept the alliterative form of that title, it became clear by the time I came to the editorial phase that I was limiting myself with the Monday mornings thing and when I put title options to readers on social media, including The Little Salon by the Sea and Lessons in Love (or Love Lessons) at the Summertime Salon, two people separately suggested Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon and that salon name felt better. Huge thanks to Jenny Kessell and Nicole Sanderson for this final piece of the title puzzle.

With the novel release imminent, and that scene now set, I have two playlists for you just to set it a little further! The first is a 1980s playlist featuring songs from no later than the time the novel is set, and you can find that on Spotify or YouTube. The second is a playlist of contemporary songs, including ‘Black Sand’ and several from Girlhood, all by artists I know from my work on Sunburnt Country Music, and that’s also available on Spotify and YouTube.

Both playlists are in a custom order – I love putting thought into such things, as music is (as you may have guessed) hugely important to me, and making a playlist is a creative process just as writing a book is. The 1980s playlist is organised so that it musically ebbs and flows. The contemporary playlist is organised to match the emotional/story flow of the novel. However, by all means hit the shuffle button if you prefer! And I’m letting you know about them now so you can start to get the 1980s vibe going, if you wish, or have a sense of the emotional flow of the novel, if you wish. Mostly it’s because after creating them and testing them and reordering them for the past few weeks, there was no point in me hanging on to them any more. Just like the characters, they belong in the world. I make things in order to let them go and I hope that you enjoy these playlist-creations and maybe, in the contemporary one, find some new artists to embrace.

Love,

Sophie