Heroes

I woke up at 11am, got myself a bowl of cornflakes, went back to bed,  made myself some toast, went back to bed, made myself a cup of tea, went back to bed, and so the hours trickled past in a fabulous lethargic haze. I now feel almost human again and celebrated this fact by heading to Sloane Square to watch the superlative London Gay Men's Chorus' "Heroes" show at Cadogan Hall. 

They performed a hugely varied concert which featured show tunes and camp pop classics. There was even a Mendelssohn oratorio, which felt wonderfully bizarre after Jim Steinman's "I Need A Hero!" I wonder what Mendelssohn would have made of 100 gay men singing his music with gusto whilst wearing ties in rainbow colours.

The LGMC sing fabulously well as a unit and there were a couple of moments when the hairs on the back of my neck started to rise. There's really nothing better than a male voice choir opening their lungs and letting rip. 

Everything was performed by memory and many of the songs were accompanied by really quite complex choreography, which all the choir were expected to do. There were drag queens, lots or rainbow flags, white gloves and plenty of costume changes. I was carried away by a glorious wave of gay pride!

Back home now for another mammoth sleep session. I reckon I'll be as right as rain tomorrow and ready to face the world again. 

Tough day!

Today will probably end up ranking amongst the most difficult days in my life, although as I wasn't actually expecting to survive it, I guess there's cause for some form of celebration!

We started at 10am with pupils from  three White City junior schools, all of whom were polite, diligent, in tune and hugely well-prepared and as a result got the day off to an unexpectedly positive start. I think they enjoyed the experience of singing in a recording studio, and I very much enjoyed taunting them by speaking in a freakishly low voice through their cans. "I love his deep voice," said one little girl, and it struck me how unfamiliar most children are with men. Nearly all primary school teachers are female and I guess there's a slight tendency for men to speak to young children (particularly their own) at a slightly higher pitch. It feels more child-friendly, I suppose, although it's never something I've bothered to do. Talk to all kids like their adults; that's my motto. It's what my Uncle John used to do, and it freaked me out good and proper! 

We continued at a good pace with Frank, whose song is about a 40-year love affair with a woman called Mona. He was in and out in an hour and I was muchly relieved. 

We were on time for lunch, and Julian and I sat down in a restaurant on the Uxbridge Road for some falafel and salad. 

It was after lunch that things took a bit of a nose-dive. One of our most talented contributors got "red-light fever" (the inability to perform in front of a studio microphone), most hadn't learned their words, let alone the music they'd had for three weeks, and to cap it all, our steel band forgot to come for their session. All this, of course, means extra studio time and the budget for the piece is creaking at the seams! 

It's so tough being the composer in this particular situation. Probably because I'm shattered, I took everything incredibly personally and kept having to stop myself from saying, "hey, I've written you a song to sing about your life and spent loving hours crafting it and honing it; the least you could have done was learn it!" If someone wrote a song for me, I'd be thrilled. Frankly, I'm thrilled if someone writes me a letter! Then all manner of terrible thoughts started flashing through my head: is the song good enough? Is the  music too difficult? It's the ultimate rejection, I suppose, and it did make me wonder whether this ought to be the last musical film I make of this nature. I genuinely find the pressure too great to deal with as I get older, and if the contributors themselves don't seem that fussed about being involved, I'm forced to question who I'm actually doing it for. I'm certainly not doing it to provide the world with music that anyone can sing, because what I write is so specific to the individuals who perform it.  

Of course I'm being a little over dramatic, as there were high points along the way. Danny's session was long, but ultimately highly successful and the group of teenagers who came in at the end of the day were a joy to have around, but I go into the bank holiday weekend with three major sequences left to record, when I'd hitherto expected to have everything done and dusted. Very disappointing. 

Anyway, we still achieved much today, and there were plenty of belly laughs along the  way and tomorrow I get to have a lie-in, which is just brilliant. 

Gawd bless 'em

It is difficult to even attempt to describe how exhausted I am right now. I was up at 5am - 5am, I say - driving Nathan to Heathrow for the start of his mini European tour with the Westenders. I returned home, packed my bags and immediately set off for Clapham.

Today ought to have been a relatively simple string session at Sonica, but I'd slightly underestimated the difficulty level of my music! There were all sorts of other factors involved in the general slowness of our progress; we started the session late, the players felt they were siting a little far apart, one of them was isolated in a carpeted room with a dreadfully dead acoustic, but the bottom line is that I was asking them to play a phenomenal amount of material and must learn from my mistakes! The good news is that all the players rose to the occasion and we got everything done, though God knows, by the end we were literally throwing music at the engineers to see what would stick! 

I was proud and hugely grateful to all the players for sticking with me, and doing so with such grace and a sense of humour, but at the end of the six hour session, I reckon we all felt like we'd been raped by semi-quavers. 

All this aside, there was some stunning playing going on, motored along as usual by the magical 'cello fingers of Vicky Matthews, who could break a man's heart with her luscious tone. Fiona and Gillon proved a winning combination on first and second violin; sparring off each other like the ancient friends they are. Viola was provided by the glorious Rachel Robson, and Beth the Brummie played a mean bass from her carpeted prison off the control room. Poor thing. Frankly I'd have told me where to go! 

Fiona, gawd bless her, stayed behind to do a sequence that I'd aborted in a frenzy of "we'll never leave this place if we don't cut something" and the two of us went for tea in Clapham afterwards. Pasta. Just what the doctor ordered. 

Tomorrow is likely to kill me and I'm already battening down the hatches 60 amateur musicians and singers. 12 hours. One tiny Western studio. Hell. Deep hell! I can't wait until Friday! 

Keyboards

I'm on the Northern Line heading north from Clapham Common after a day spent in the studio, recording music for the White City project. The session started with the wonderful Sam Swallow, keyboardist with the Hoosiers, who tinkled the ivories with extreme precision. Sam lives in White City and is the musician in residence in Bob the vicar's church, so it very much made sense to invite him to play piano on the tracks. I had no idea his playing would be so beautiful, however. He managed to make the piano sound like a symphony orchestra and seemed to   understood implicitly what it was that my music required. It is very rare that I find myself moved by piano playing, but there was a sadness in his touch which made my eyes prickle. 

We worked through lunch. My dear friend Rachel popped her head into the studio to do a quick hour recording a piano line for the Four Colours piece. We dashed out for a quick mouthful of lunch, and then returned to find Mustafa from the Egypt House on the estate waiting to record his solo, which he did very well, although I felt like a proper slave master; "do it again... Again... Again... Now once more with feeling!" There's a fair amount of tweaking and pulling around that will need to be done in post to make everything sound lovely but I certainly think we've got enough material to make that happen.

After Mustafa left, I recorded some more piano parts for White City, which I found a deeply stressful experience. I'm not a pianist, and find playing in strict time to a click track a little unnerving. You think you're doing so well, and then hear yourself and wonder why you ever put yourself in the firing line. Julian insisted that I persisted, believing firmly that a composer playing his own music brings a unique vibe and integrity to a song. He might be right. I just wish I had a better vibe! 

So, I've come home feeling a little disconsolate; like things could have gone more smoothly, partcularly as they started on such a high with Sam this morning. I'm also rather dreading tomorrow as I have a ridiculously early start which involves taking Nathan to Heathrow at 6am, before a day of strings at Sonica, which itself is a prelude to the mayhem of Thursday; a 12-hour session at Bush Studios where up to 80 White City residents will have their voices and instruments recorded. God help me! 

Someone with rather silly, heavy hair is standing by the door on this tube and I genuinely don't know if it's male or female. I guess, ultimately, it doesn't matter as I'm not expecting for us to have a conversation, despite the fact that he or she is staring at me in a rather off-putting way, probably wondering if I'm a boy or a girl.  I'm assuming it's a bloke, but there's definitely more than a whiff of the Sharleen Spiteris about him. It must be odd going through life knowing you're generating so much confusion. Perhaps he doesn't realise. I'm sure he doesn't care. And anyway, who am I to gender stereotype in this manner? I'm ashamed of myself! (Still fascinated...)

Walking the river

I've felt like Samuel Pepys throughout the day today, having walked all the way along the river from Monument to Pimlico, with a brief sojourn in Soho and Covent Garden, where I had lunch, popped my head in on Nathan at the Shaftesbury Theatre and had a hair cut. 

The day started way too early and I faffed about at home for far too long, which made me half an hour late for my first appointment. I loathe being late. I'm usually early enough to sit in a cafe with a nice cup of tea whilst preparing myself for whatever's about to happen. 

The meeting was with a wonderful charity called Thames21, who deal with clearing rubbish from London's waterways. We're very much hoping to work together on an electro-acoustic composition about the River Thames and threw some initial ideas around about how we might find funding. I'm not hugely thrilled at the idea of going cap in hand to a whole new set of people, but as Fiona pointed out, in Buddhist culture begging is considered to be an act which puts you closer to a higher state of being. I guess the process necessitates leaving one's ego at the door, which can only be good. My only consolation is that I only ever beg to pay others; so actually one could claim that I'm merely encouraging investment in the arts!

From Monument I followed the Thames path into town, passing multitudes of tourists, all of whom seemed to want the Shard of Glass to feature in their pictures. It did look rather attractive today, with its spire prodding the clouds, but it also struck me how open Londoners are to iconic and daring modern architecture. We love the Gherkin and we love the Shard (the two most potentially controversial buildings of recent years) yet could take or leave (but probably prefer to leave) any of the "safer" modern buildings. Be bold. That's what I say! 

Nathan's theatre is depressingly quiet. Burn the Floor is on. It's supposed to be magnificent, but audiences are small. They've got some suspicious-looking merchandise for sale; specifically water bottles which look like large blue dildos! 

A Spaniard with a long mane and tattoos cut my hair, and sent me into something of a stupor in the process. I love having my hair fiddled with. I could have fallen asleep in the chair. He took his time as well, which added to the experience. 

I walked down to the river and through a series of beautiful gardens on the embankment that I'd not really considered before. There were flowers (and statues) everywhere. It struck me how rude it would have been to ignore things which had been placed and grown with such love and care, so I sat down on a series of benches to take in the atmosphere. 

I ended up in Pimlico, an hour and a half early for my meeting, so sat writing in a cafe for a while, finally bringing myself up to date with work on White City. 

Pimlico's a funny old place. I always thought it was a bit posh, but it's actually got quite an edgy vibe; the curious sight of laundry hanging on rows of specially-made washing lines in a communal concrete space behind a housing block rather intrigued me.

This afternoon's meeting was with the NYMT. That's the National Youth Music Theatre. They wanted to talk to me about a potential commission, which I'd very much like to do. They were the opposition when I was a student. I belonged to the National Student Theatre Company, and these things made a big difference! The NYMT however were always a classy concern and seeing them performing Goodall's The Dreaming this year has made me very much want to get involved.

So that's it, really. I staggered home on the tube, back aching from the walking but relieved not to be panicking about work for the first time in ages! 

Eyes like saucers

I’m sitting in the loft going through the painstaking procedure of printing out hundreds of music parts for string and piano sessions on the White City project in the coming week. I’ve been formatting the parts all day and they seem to have taken me a lot longer than I’d initially expected. I’m going completely cross-eyed printing them all out. I’m doing it in low light. My head is spinning slightly. I want today’s work to finish, please.

I did however have a mega lie-in this morning, which has made a massive difference. I still have another four days of mayhem to get through this week, but I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Eurovision was great fun last night. About 18 of us sat down to watch it with plates laden with vegetarian lasagne. One of the big treats was meeting Llio’s Mum, and also introducing our friend, Ian, to the joys of Eurovision. I think it ended up a bit of a disappointment for him because he’d heard it was the most bizarre thing in the world. He also couldn’t work out why people at the party didn’t seem to be listening to some of the songs. I explained that the room will often audition a song very quickly to determine whether it’s worth shutting up to hear it. It is a bizarre thing. I guess some of us had watched the semis as well, so had already made our minds up in terms of what we wanted everyone else to enjoy. We can of course be wrong. I sent everyone off for a loo break during Hungary, and it ended up doing quite well in the competition.

Girls were definitely in the minority and those who came were very camp. The Mant sisters are always brilliant value for money and Julie Clare baked carrot cake. Biggest thanks to the lovely Tina who had arrived in the afternoon to help Nathan prepare and ended up scrubbing the bathroom clean.

Love was also in the air for two of the younger guests at the party. It’s a long time since I played match-maker!

My predictions were pretty good. I got three of the top five correct and Russia came sixth. When I put a bet on Russia, I didn’t realise they’d be placed so early on in the running order, which is the kiss of death, unless everything else is rubbish.

Bonnie was boring. There’s little else to say. Utterly predictable. The BBC really need to sort themselves out. I’ve written a letter to the Times about it, but don’t know where to sendit!

Right, that’s it for the day. If I stare at this screen any longer I’m gonna turn into a drooling imbecile.

Euphoria

It is, apparently, Rwanda Day, and some kind of mega-celebration is happening at the curiously-named Troxy in Limehouse. I'm not altogether sure what beef we have with Rwanda these days, but police are obviously expecting pretty major demonstrations, because you can't move for panda vans and men in high viz jackets waking around with sniffer dogs. 

Of course, far more important than Rwanda Day is today's Eurovision Song Contest, and I'm currently hot-footing it across London to our house (seemingly with a shedload of camp men in fancy dress) for our annual party, where I expect the top five countries to be Russia, Denmark, Azerbaijan, Sweden and the Ukraine.  Obviously I'd like Holland to win, primarily for being brave enough to enter a genuinely moving song, but I somehow can't see that happening. 

Brother Edward is actually there, in Malmo, and called me from an Internet cafe to say that the Danes were rather arrogantly assuming that victory was already theirs. Their song ticks all the right boxes, but does so in a rather clinical, almost cynical manner. I hope they come second.

Bonnie Tyler, for all her loveliness, has a song which lacks punch and will come 16th I should think. It struck me, whilst watching the semi-finals, that the UK is actually far too arrogant to win the competition.  What we systematically fail to realise is that it is not enough to enter a well-known singer barking her way through a semi-decent song, whilst a group of backing vocalists sway to Arlene Phillips' uninspired and tired old 'ography. A Eurovision song needs spectacle. To quote the song from Gypsy, "you gotta get a gimmick." However much you might want Eurovision to be "relevant" and "cool," it's not and it never will be. It's a big old, glitzy, escapist camp-fest. To excel you need to invest in the full package; a great (and utterly instant) song, a great vocalist and, most crucially, a unique gimmick. I'm talking shadow puppets, mini ice-rinks or a floor covered in 16,000 carnations. Bonnie standing in front of a pretend rock band of session singers won't cut it. People will walk away from this competition remembering the giant who brought the Ukraine's singer onto the stage, or the man hanging upside down in a perspex box!  

 

Eurovision doesn't need to be relevant because it has it's very own genre; one which most European countries understand - primarily because they wrote the rule book. The UK and France will never win if we refuse to adhere to everyone else's standards. To win, like in all art forms, you need to respect (and love) the genre, which is why Ben Elton will never write a decent musical. Trying to make Eurovision cool is like adding a rock beat to Mozart. It's unnecessary and ultimately futile. Its uncoolness makes it cool. The winning Eurovision Song is perfection within this crazy world and until we learn this fact, we'll continue to enter turkeys.

I think I just saw a corpse at Bank Station. The sight has troubled me. One of the platforms had been sealed off, and as I walked past, I saw a young man, holding a small bag, lying absolutely motionless on the floor on his side. What troubled me most was the fact that no-one was tending to him. An LU woman was standing above him saying "move along, please, there's nothing to see here..." If he wasn't already dead, why was no one trying to revive him, and if he didn't need reviving, why had the entire platform been closed off? 

I found the sight so distressing that I got on the wrong tube and headed south instead of north. I was in Kennington before I realised my mistake, and had added at least 20 minutes to my journey, making me in danger of arriving late to my own party! I'm really angry with myself, but am in Highgate now, so all I can do is wish you all a very camp and enjoyable evening. And if you're not watching Eurovision, why aren't you?