Mark McCausland on The Spin: “It was really weird, seeing other people act out scenes that actually happened to me in life”

It’s a strange sensation, Mark McCausland acknowledges, to see moments from your own life played out on screen – especially by a cast made up of the stars of Derry Girls, Game of Thrones, Hardy Bucks, Love Island, and The Pussycat Dolls.

“They were filming scenes in the record shop where I worked for six years, and filming scenes in my house,” he reflects. “It was really weird, seeing other people act out scenes that actually happened to me in life. It was hilarious, actually! But the whole experience was definitely surreal.”

Shaped by Mark’s own experiences running a record shop, Boneyard Records, in his hometown of Omagh, and his adventures up and down the country in pursuit of rare LPs, The Spin lands in cinemas across Ireland and the UK this week, after an initial limited release back in October.

Following friends Dermot (Brenock O’Connor) and Elvis (Owen Colgan) on an epic cross-country road trip to pick up a highly valuable record in Cork, in the hopes of saving their struggling shop, it’s a madcap yet surprisingly tender tale, celebrating music and friendship as intertwined, and essential, forces.

Famed as one-half of The Lost Brothers – in addition to his solo output as McKowski, his work in ‘00s band The Basement, and collaborative projects with the likes of M. Ward, Howe Gelb and Nick Power – Mark not only provided the inspiration for the film, with a semi-autobiographical short story, but penned the original score too.

He found that the music and the story “fed into each other”, as he worked closely with Co. Tyrone-raised screenwriter Colin Broderick, who he first met by chance in Boneyard Records.

“He was home filming a different movie,” Mark explains. “I was actually reading his book, and it was sitting there on the table when he walked into the shop. He went, ‘Nice book you’re reading there. I wrote that!’ We just hit it off, and became best friends really quick.

“I was trying to write the story at the time, but I just couldn’t write a script,” he continues. “It was an art form that I just couldn’t get my head around. And it wasn’t until a year of being friends with Colin, that he said, ‘Let me have a go.’”

While the characters draw clear inspiration from Mark's life, he says Colin played a key role in “fleshing them out”.

“People keep on asking me which one am I,” he says of Dermot and Elvis. “But then they watch it and go, ‘Oh! You’re both of them!’”

Brenock O’Connor and Owen Colgan in The Spin

As with classics like High Fidelity, The Spin manages to capture both the mundanity and the madness of working in a record shop.

“I love High Fidelity, the book and the movie,” Mark nods. “People coming into a record shop, and asking to get their keys cut, and asking you to fix their TV – like in The Spin – that happens on a daily basis. It’s ridiculous.”

His own history with record collecting started early, he tells me.

“I used to spend all my pocket money, when I was a kid, on buying records. Then I inherited a massive collection of jazz records from my uncle, and that got me hooked on collecting, in a big way.

“Omagh didn’t actually have a record shop for about 10 years. Me and my friend would always take road trips to find record stores, and we’d travel the length of the country doing that. And then we said, ‘Why don’t we just open our own?’ It was more for ourselves than anything – just somewhere to hang out!”

Mark was also able to delve into that record collection for some classic soundtrack inspiration, when approaching the score.

“I always loved Bob Dylan’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack,” he notes. “And there’s a David Lynch film called The Straight Story, which is another road movie, with Angelo Badalamenti doing the soundtrack. The Ry Cooder soundtrack for Paris, Texas too. They definitely inspired this – but we wanted to give it an Irish flavour as well.”

His score was also directly informed by the Irish landscape that features so prominently in The Spin.

“Before we shot anything, I would drive around all those scenic areas up here,” he recalls. “It was on those drives that I would write the music in my head, and then I’d go home and record it.

“And then, when the cinematographer and some of the film crew started to arrive, to location scout and do a bit of pre-production, I took them on drives around that scenery, and played them the music. That was when they went, ‘Ah. We get it.’”

He also tapped into some of his country influences for the score, with pedal steel guitar courtesy of Cork's David Murphy. He was one of an impressive collection of musicians to contribute – with the likes of Saint Sister’s Gemma Doherty, Steve Wickham, Howe Gelb, The Coral’s Nick Power, Jolie Holland and Matt McGinn also appearing across the soundtrack.

“I was so lucky to have so many friends play on it,” says Mark. “So many people were willing to pitch in, at the drop of a hat. I was also lucky that a lot of the music was written and recorded during lockdown – so nobody had anything better to do!”

There are special appearances from Irish musicians on-screen too, including a cameo from Horslips’ Barry Devlin. In one of the film’s central scenes, Jawbone’s Phil O’Gorman appears as Jimmy The Fist, backed by a band that features Babyshambles’ Drew McConnell, and Mark himself. Lead actor Brenock O’Connor joins them to perform ‘Laughs For The Lonely’, a song off the upcoming debut album from Dead Goat, a supergroup Mark formed alongside Stevie Scullion (Malojian) and Matt McGinn.

“On my days off, I would get together with those guys, and we’d knock out a couple of tunes,” Mark explains. “That song was one of them. It was never intended to be in the movie, but Colin Broderick heard it, and said, ‘That should be the song.’

“If I had actually tried to sit down and write a song about friendship for the movie, I would’ve probably fallen short,” he continues. “But that one just came out, without trying. It completely went over my head that, lyrically, it really fitted in with the movie. Colin was the one that spotted it.”

The film is also sprinkled with easter eggs and subtle references to Mark’s own musical legacy – from a patch for The Basement on a character’s jacket, to a Lost Brothers poster framed on a wall.

“Even in the record store, I made sure all the records were my friends' records,” he tells me. “And the badges that they wear are my friends’ bands. The t-shirt Elvis wears for most of the movie says Blind Joe Death, which is a John Fahey record. And some of the things they say are little phrases from songs and stuff. There’s lots of little easter eggs around there.”

As well as reuniting Derry Girls' Tara Lynne O’Neill and Leah O’Rourke – who played Erin’s mother Mary and Jenny Joyce, respectively – The Spin also features reality star Maura Higgins in her acting debut, and a cameo from The Pussycat Dolls’ Kimberly Wyatt.

Kimberly Wyatt in The Spin

“When we started filming, we actually had different actors, from America, for some of the parts,” Mark reveals. “But then the actors’ strike happened, just as we started filming – and a good portion of our cast were like, ‘We can’t come.’ We were thinking we’d have to postpone the filming.

“But the director, Michael Head, got his little black book out, and he got Maura and Kimberly, and a few others ones as well. Kimberly was class craic – she came to the bar and was pouring Guinness all night.”

It was Mark, however, who convinced Barry Devlin to get involved, after bumping into him in a Belfast hotel, the night Barry was honoured with the Legend Award at the Northern Ireland Music Prize.

“We just got talking, and I asked if he’d be up for being in the film,” Mark recalls. “But this was two years before we started shooting. So, when we started, I called him up like, ‘Remember you said you’d be in the film…?’ And he just said, ‘When do you need me?’ He’s lovely.”

Barry Devlin in The Spin

That same Belfast hotel where they met, The Harrison, also happens to be the location of Mark’s new weekly music night, McKowski Café – taking place every Thursday evening, and featuring some familiar names from The Spin’s soundtrack.

In general, however, Mark tells me his main plan – aside from Dead Goat’s upcoming album – is to “go a wee bit slower” in 2026.

“I’m definitely trying to take my foot off the pedal now,” he reflects. “The past few years have been really hectic, with the movie, and putting out a couple of albums. I was also doing a lot of travelling over to America, and a lot of touring. Basically I was just saying yes to everything for a couple of years. This year I’m going to take it slow!”

The Spin is in cinemas from Friday, February 27, and The Spin - Motion Picture Soundtrack is out now. Dead Goat’s self-titled LP is out March 27, and can be pre-ordered here.