Reggae

Bravo to the Canadian pop singer Carly Rae Jepson and rock band Train for pulling out of the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree concert this summer after hearing about the organisation's draconian ban on openly gay people either joining the ranks or becoming leaders. Every little helps, and gestures like this may have more repercussions than anyone could imagine. If the organisers of the scout movement refuse to behave like decent adults then we need to remove their toys. 

I've been on the White City Estate again all day, and spent the morning hanging out at a stall which sells produce grown on the community farm. Amazing leeks. The highlight of the experience was undoubtedly watching an extraordinarily grumpy woman from the Ivory Coast, whinging about having diarrhoea whilst throwing apples from a distance of 3 meters into her shopping basket because she couldn't be bothered to move her sloppy arse over there. I've noticed a slight tendency for people of West African origin to reserve movement for special occasions! 

My day started, as routine dictates, at the Starbucks at the BBC in White City, where I have my morning cuppa whilst doing an hour's work on Four Colours. It's a bit of a hassle cheating myself out of an extra hour in bed every morning, but it's the only way to manage two projects simultaneously. I get really irritated by writers who moan about the fact that they never have time to write whilst maintaining full-time jobs to pay the rent. An hour a day is all you need to keep the forward momentum. Take it off the time you watch telly at night.

From White City, I sped along the Central Line, for a quick meeting with someone within the BBC docs department at New Broadcasting House. I very much liked the woman we met, but can't help thinking there's always going to be a point with any potential commission of this nature where what I bring to the table just seems a bit "out there" or arty to merit being taken seriously as documentary. I always manage to fall between about a dozen stalls. Still, it was nice to see New Broadcasting House again, even though I'm not sure how anyone manages to get work done in what is essentially just a massive open plan office. Media people sometimes need to make noise, and news people surely need a degree of privacy? On my way to the meeting I walked through the middle of several board meetings which were happening on funny little areas of soft seating. It seemed a bit wrong, somehow. 

I went back to White City for the late afternoon and evening, where I met a charming vicar and a reggae band who looked every bit like the Buena Vista Social Club. They want me to jam with them on the 'cello; a thought which I find curiously exciting. 

Endless

The day started with an all-too familiar announcement at Highgate station. “Due to signal failure at East Finchley, we are experiencing severe delays on the Northern Line...” They weren’t lying. 20 minutes later, still no train, and a second announcement informed us that a “faulty” train had now been taken out of service. Meanwhile, more and more rush hour commuters were flooding onto the platform, crowd surges were developing, and I was losing the will to live. The trains eventually started passing through, filled to the rafters, the doors opening and closing again with no one being able to get on. It took me an hour and a half to reach Moorgate; a journey which ought to take under 45 minutes.

 

From then on the day took off. I was in Moorgate to visit the London Museum, where, rather randomly I was being photographed as part of some kind of in-house “this is what one of our archetypal visitors looks like” brochure. Someone had spotted me on my previous visit to the museum and identified me as a stereotypical example of one of their “cultural professional” visitors. It’s ironic for someone who prides himself on being one of a kind, to discover that he’s actually a stereotype, but if the cloth cap fits, wear it with pride, I say!

 

From the museum, I made my way along the central Line to White City, and spent another day on the estate in beautiful early spring sunshine, meeting residents, looking at recording studios, wandering through markets, chatting up cafe owners and trying to persuade one of our favourite contributors that taking part in the film wouldn’t compromise his religious beliefs.

 

The blossom has started to appear on the trees in the estate and I’m beginning to get the sense of a place which will look really rather pretty in the summer months.

 

I found myself in the ghastly Westfield Shopping Centre in the late afternoon, looking for a new pair of headphones. The place made me feel instantly uncomfortable. Everything is shiny, bright and over-clean. I could see my reflection everywhere I looked; in windows, on the walls, even on the brightly polished floor. It’s a horrifying temple of consumerism, and it made me feel physically sick; a sensation which was enhanced tenfold by my walking into the ladies loos by mistake. I was somewhat confused as to why there weren’t any urinals, and after entering a cubical, and hearing two women enter the space, I realised what I’d done. I sat in silence, sweating, as the women peed and chatted and peed and chatted, wondering if I should jump out, shouting “surprise” or pretending to be trans. I got myself into a terrible panic with the thought that a steady flow of women could actually lead me to being trapped in the cubical forever. Fortunately, the women’s voices finally disappeared, no new ones appeared and I bolted out of those loos, and, in fact Westfield, like shit off a shovel!

 

From West London, I headed east on the weird pink line and spent two hours in a cafe in Baker Street rewriting my Four Colours composition for our recording in May. Re-writing a composition which has already been performed is a luxury which doesn't often happen and I intend to make the most of the process so not one quaver of orchestration is wasted.

It was Matt's birthday tonight and the old gang were finally back together again for the first time really since Kevin died. There was a palpable sense of how important it felt for us all to be sharing a meal, and how much we'd missed the golden days, when everything felt like a glorious, sunny adventure.

I sat next to Sultana and it was just lovely to reconnect. The two of us have vowed to go and visit Kevin's grave together. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know where it was, and even more ashamed to discover he's with some of my London Requiem family up on Hoop Lane. I could have paid him a visit so much sooner.

The hunt resumes

Day one of my two-week full-time stint on the White City Estate and I'm already so tired that my legs have gone to sleep. I do, however, feel properly elated. 

We're searching for people with interesting faces and fascinating stories to be in our musical film and I find myself regularly astonished by the people we meet. 

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly a trip to a film club for pensioners, where they played 100 Faces and Songs From Hattersley, and made me feel like a film star! 

The film club happens every Monday afternoon in a church hall just off the Uxbridge Road, and upon entering we were handed cups of tea, led to a table laden with sandwiches, cakes and crisps and told to "stuff our faces" with whatever took our fancy. Quite a lot, as it turned out, and we were very hungry. 

I introduced my films and was thrilled by how well the Hattersley piece in particular was received. I still consider it to be my best work, and have never really understood why the BBC didn't push it as hard as my other, more celebratory films.

This evening we made our way to Willesden to meet a young poet from the estate called Imhotep, which has to be about the coolest name known to man! He had a fascinating outlook on life, and both Penny and I were hugely impressed by his manners and energy. We talked about the estate as a fortress, an oasis and as a wardrobe full of shoe boxes... The glory of poetry! 

It's been a good day, but a long day, and I've come home and am simply staring at the telly, which probably means it's time to go to bed.

Musical what?

We've just been to see a concert of music by a young musical theatre writer with a great deal of promise. He's currently in his mid-20s, and is obviously still in the process of finding his own voice, which meant some of what we heard was somewhat lightweight, but as the evening drew on, we were treated to a more complex songs which packed an emotional kick.

What I'm constantly irritated by, however, is the assumption that all musical theatre needs to be performed by actors affecting twangy, brassy American accents. My heart always sinks as I realise I'm going to be subjected to a song with no emotional content - or worse, that if there is an emotional core, the actor will singularly fail to find his or her way there. 

Every cabaret I visit these days seems to start with a hyper-nasal  squeaky salute to our cousins over the pond, which instantly has me looking for the programme to see if I can expect anything later on with a bit more weight. 

Sure, some songs are inherently American and need to performed with a Bronxy twang - imagine Adelaide's Lament being performed by someone imitating Julie Andrews - but Broadway performers generally have well-rounded voices with extraordinary natural resonance, which seems to vanish whenever the Brits "do" American. 

Even when many British musical theatre performers deign to sing in English voices, they often opt to hide behind comedy regional accents, which makes me wonder if they actually have voices of their own, or any interest in their audience's emotional journey! 

Anyway, it's time to get off the soap box and back to the telly. We're watching Let's Dance for Comic Relief, which takes me from the sublime to the absolute ridiculous! 

We spent the afternoon in Joe Allen's theatre bar and restaurant celebrating a highly pregnant Lisa's 40th birthday, which was absolutely wonderful. She looks ridiculously well, and I've seldom seen a baby bump being carried with so much out front. If the old wives tales are anything to go by, that is, unequivocally, a boy.

 

Thursday 28th February, 2013

Horrified to see that one of my blogs didn't publish this week. For what it's worth, here's what I wrote on Thursday, but forgot to put online...

I didn't sleep a wink last night. All sorts of thoughts were riding around my head like a game of Pacman. Just as I started to drift off to sleep, another cherry would appear behind a wall, and I'd rush off in pursuit. Fiona was sleeping on our sofa cushions and I got up in the night to talk to her. It all felt a little surreal, wrapped up in a blanket at 3am, talking through the dusty haze of the wee smalls. I eventually went to bed, and drifted off to sleep, listening to the song of what I think must have been a nightingale. 

I suppose I was worrying a little about money. The car cost £550 to  be repaired, and then, of course, when I went to pick it up, we were clobbered with a 20% VAT bill. I hate VAT. I hate paying it, and hate the fact that some rich people don't have to pay it at all. I've never understood how that works. It always feels like another way simply to make the rich richer.

I wanted to sleep all day, but instead worked hard at the Four Colours songs, marvelling at quite how much I've developed as a composer in the last couple of years. I'm much more of a minimalist when it comes to scoring. I like to see a lot more open space on the page, and can't believe how complicated and frilly the music I used to write seemed to be. I genuinely think this is the most important lesson any writer can learn; the need to continually strip back to reveal the power of a simple melody.

Of course this is  not to say that throwing everything at a page doesn't have its attractions and can't be quite exciting, but maybe this is the prerogative of an exuberant youth and I, with my creaking bones and aching feet am no longer young. 

Benny and Bjorn reached the 1980s - and their 40s - and suddenly started stripping back the orchestrations in ABBA songs alongside the scope of their melodies. Benny has often said that the power of The Winner Takes it All, one of their later compositions, lies in its profound melodic simplicity; two almost identical phrases, essentially, repeating again and again. By the time ABBA reached the end of the road even their trademark multi-layered backing vocals had started to vanish. 

I don't know much about the output and time-lines of less-significant European composers, you know, like Mozart but I'd be interested to know

if any of that lot became more sparse the older they got. One assumes the opposite is true of Beethoven whose orchestrations got bigger and bigger. Or did they? I've no idea... My friend Sam will be wincing. Literally wincing. I can see his knowledgeable toes curling up as he reads this. I appear to have based an entire thesis on my love of ABBA! And not for the first time! 

Wunderbar

I'm currently sitting back stage at the Old Vic Theatre in Hannah Waddingham's dressing room. It's the final night of Kiss Me Kate, and Hannah was absolutely sensational in the lead. 

The back stage is buzzing with the stars and their showbiz friends, all drinking champagne and screaming "darling" at the tops of their lungs. I've got theatre anecdotes coming out of my ears. Christopher Biggins is milling around in a sparkly scarf and has just popped into the room to say, "love you... Mean it! See you at the Ivy."

We're here with Meriel, who's been at a course all day, called Gateway Women, which she's asked me to mention. It's apparently an incredibly empowering course for women who can't have children either for medical reasons or because of circumstance and she says it's made an enormous difference.  She's literally buzzing. 

We saw the show from the Gods in the theatre, which was a fairly uncomfortable experience, but reminded me of my sixth form days at the Theatre Royal, Northampton when we used to sit on rows of benches on the cushions we'd brought with us from home. I once opened a packet of Malteesers and watcher in horror as they showered the audience in the circle below. This evening I managed to drop two chocolate buttons and three opal fruits on people in the posh seats below. Rich bastards. 'Scuse the language. I'm pissed as a fart after a glass of fizzy wine; my first alcohol in 3 months. 

The death of society as represented by a five-year old

I'm horrified to see that a small child has managed to rack up a £1,500 credit card bill by playing Zombies vs Aliens on some kind iPad. Apparently the game is free to download, but you can spend a small fortune buying bombs and things with which to kill the virtual critters. 

The ITV news took us into the front room of the very 5-year old whose computer addiction had caused the problem. The little boy was, of course, completely engrossed in another computer game whilst the adults chatted around him. He spoke in grunts and didn't seem that fussed about what had happened, or the mess he'd caused. In fact, he didn't seem to be that fussed about anything other than staring into his iPad. Lost in an alternate world of zombies.

Question. Does this little boy have a function? What is he giving back to society? I know he's only five and has plenty of time to turn into a proper human being, but right now he's a modern version of Mike TV from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I suspect few people would care, or in fact notice, if he were dragged permanently into cyber space to live with his only friends. The world he is occupying, almost full-time, is as real to him as his front room.  

And that got me thinking about the inanity and actual outright danger of things like twitter. A whole generation of people seems to place greater value on the opinion of those we meet in cyber space instead of those made of flesh and blood who live next door. I'm as guilty of vanishing into my computer as the next man.  We all get freaked out by the weirdo on the bus who wants to talk, and we accuse people of being boring  or "too intense" if they want to discuss philosophy or fine art. There's no point in debating the meaning of something in depth. That wastes time; get on your iPhone and see what wiki says! Discussion over. 

Meanwhile we genuinely think that people are going to be interested in a 130-character ungrammatical grunt about what we had for dinner or why Librans are always unlucky in love. We "un-friend" people who don't tell us what we want to hear, accusing them of being bitches even when they're actually proving they genuinely care. Who cares? There are always more cyber friends who'll listen to the whinging and say how shit life is rather than telling you the truth; that you need to pull yourself together, because ultimately very few people will care if you live or die. 

Society changes, of course, but this is the reason why people I talk to on estates say how they miss the olden days, "the days when doors didn't get slammed in your face. The days when you went to see your neighbours when you felt down." 

How do we get these days back?

The worrying thing in all of this is that we're running at high speed to a place where we cease to value life itself. Computers will always be able to tell us what we want to hear, so let's live in a little bubble with one, and that weird woman on the bus who talks too much will never bore us again. 

But life is cyclic. Living in bubbles will cause the break down of Society, which itself will lead to the destruction of all material goods. And at that stage we might re-engage our imaginations and actually be grateful for the distracting musings of the woman on the bus. Except we won't be on a bus because fossil fuel will have run out and busses won't exist! 

And so to bed.