Let down: made up

I've been on the White City estate and under the West Way all day today, searching for filming locations in beautiful sunshine, with a lovely lady called Clare. 

I find myself perpetually drawn to rather shabby and gloomy locations; places with a bit of character. My concept of beauty is often what someone else would describe as a right mess. Finding unique locations often means going off the beaten track and heading into the alleyways and dark corners of buildings which most people would avoid like the plague. Today we found ourselves in a barbed wire and cardboard box-lined lane behind Shepherd's Bush Market with a tiny mosque in a tin-roofed prefab at one end and tube trains perpetually rushing overhead. A wooden cupboard lined with pairs of shoes sat on the pavement outside the mosque. The barbed wire was softened considerably by plastic roses, which had carefully been woven in. It was unique and hugely inspiring. I love locations which pose more questions than they answer; locations which tell their own story. 

Today's particular obsession was car parks and concrete underpasses; the grottier, grittier and more depressing the better! I particularly love car parks. They're often stranded rather spectacularly in the 1960s, even down to the painted transfer writing daubed everywhere; words like "exit" "staff only" and "no parking." Damp patches, mildew and little strips of sunlight give the walls a dappled, mottled, filmic effect, and there's usually a spectacular view from the top. 

It's rather hard to transition from the  composer of a work to its director. I like to sit with the finished version of the music and listen to it again and again until the pictures come to me, but obviously this process is no good if there's only a week between the studio sessions and the film shoot and the locations you need require permissions. I must have heard or uttered the phrase "health and safety" twenty times already today!

We have, rather predictably, been completely let down by the CSI steel pan band. I'm not at all happy about the situation. It's not much fun to spend time writing music for an ensemble who can barely be bothered to tell us they've decided not to play it. It's also not a great deal of fun to realise that, as a direct result of them pulling out at the very last minute, we may well have to lose the entire number they're playing on, which means a soloist who's learnt his number and a group of dancers don't get to be in the film.

We've also been charged for a number of studio sessions which were booked for them but unused. Sometimes I don't know what goes through people's minds.

I wouldn't mind so much if they hadn't twice said they'd do it. Their final reason for letting us down was that they had a relationship with another recording studio which they couldn't break. Quite why this wasn't something they could have told us at the start of the process I've no idea. I feel really disappointed and sad and have no idea how I'm going to go about sorting this. More stress. Thanks guys. I hope you don't do this to all the people you work with. 

On a more positive note, we now have a date for the second ever performance of my hour-long song cycle, Songs About The Weather, performed by the wonderful Fleet Singers in Hampstead. The piece is  about six different catastrophic meteorological events and how they effected people in NW3. Most of the stories and memories belong to members of the choir themselves. Get the date in your diaries. Saturday July 20th. I would be thrilled if anyone reading this could come along. It remains the longest piece of music I've ever written... And, I hope, one of the best!