Eggciting

I've been drinking tea and eating cake pretty solidly all day. Looks like I might need to fast all day tomorrow to keep the weight loss going in the right direction! 

Still, it's my day off, I've been working really hard, I've been with friends, and when confronted by  a beautiful banana loaf, it's rude to turn one's nose up!

The day started in a greasy spoon with the lovely Michelle, who stopped off in Highgate for a cup of tea and a gossip on her way to her singing lesson with Jem up the road.

We went to the greasy spoon for breakfast. Poached eggs. Lovely. 

Nathan's sister, Sam, arrived just after we'd started rushing around the house, trying to tidy up because we were so embarrassed at the mess it was in when we woke up. There were heaps of clothes in every corner and massive piles of crockery waiting to be washed up. It looked like an episode from a documentary about hoarders. Mortifying. 

We whisked Sam off to Julie and other Sam's house in Catford where craft and cake was being held, and sat in the garden whilst the sun baked our foreheads and hundreds of bees and butterflies buzzed and fluttered around the flowers. I adore bees, but the most exciting sight of the day was almost certainly the Peacock butterfly which seemed to be having a lovely time on the raspberry bush. Peacock butterflies were a fairly regular sight during my childhood but I haven't seen one for years. I felt rather privileged.

When the heat had evaporated from the day, we went upstairs and watched the final of Britain's Got Talent. I was thrilled to see the act from Hungary winning; another finger in the eye to dreadful xenophobic campaigns run by trashy newspapers about Britain (and Britain's Got Talent) belonging to the British. Highlight of the evening, however, was undoubtedly the arrival of a violinist from the onstage "orchestra" throwing eggs at Simon Cowell whilst laughing like a loon. No doubt some kind of protest against the quality of music in these talent shows. I know quite a lot of those string players and they get treated pretty badly by big labels and these large talent shows. I've heard stories of viola players being taken out of ensembles cus "their violins look too big" or because they're not pretty enough and heard shocking tales of players going unpaid because concerts have gone bust and record labels haven't honoured payments.

We've just seen a trailer for the film about Liberace starring Michael Douglas. It looks particularly entertaining and I'm told Douglas is astonishing. I just asked my friend Tina, who's sitting next to me, if she'd like to come to see it with me. "I don't really do cinemas," she said, "they make me fall asleep." I started laughing. "No" she said, "it's terrible. I'm not lying when I say I saw Groundhog Day five times!" I laughed like a drain. 

Finished (sorta)

I woke up this morning to discover that the Archway Road had been closed. Someone had jumped from the infamous "Suicide Bridge" and one assumes the emergency services were attempting to deal with the gruesome clean-up. Archway Bridge, which crosses the A1 at a great height, used to be renowned for attracting jumpers. If the fall onto asphalt didn't kill you, one of the cars speeding up the road below would usually oblige. It become such a hot spot for suicides that the council were forced to raise the walls and then build a metal fence above it, tipped with angry-looking wrought iron barbed spikes to deter those who might get drunk and find themselves doing something they'd have regretted in the morning in the unlikely event that they'd survived the drop.

These days, only the strongest and most determined are able to scale the fence and throw themselves off, which means the death toll has dropped significantly. Inevitably someone periodically drops through the net.

I looked at my twitter feed, which was filled with concerned North Londoners describing the road as like a scene from 28 Weeks Later and wondering how they were going to get their children to exams, or get themselves into work. 

It strikes me what a deeply selfish act suicide is; not just for those who love you, but for the strangers whose lives are wrecked by discovering your body blue and pasty and hanging from a tree, or twisted and mangled on a tube track. It's so often an act designed to punish those who are left behind and I have very little sympathy for those who take the coward's way out. 

Yes, yes, you're all going to besiege me with comments about mental health, and those young lads in the US who kill themselves because they can't deal with the pain of being bullied. There will always be exceptions which prove the rule, but by in large I'll always find myself reserving my sympathy for those left behind, and those battling illnesses who are desperate to stay alive. 

On that cheery note, I can announce that today saw me finishing the mix on the White City film. It will be mastered on Monday, and that will be that for the sonic side of things. It's strange to say that I don't feel a particular sense of relief. I guess the whole experience has been so exhausting and so much of a roller-coaster ride, that I don't have the energy to feel a sense of anything. Relief would come if I could guarantee what I've delivered was any good and at the moment I have no objectivity left to make this claim seem genuine! I think a day off tomorrow will do me the world of good. And then the circus begins all over again with the filming and editing! 

Bleeding ears

Another day of mixing in the studio, and I've officially lost all sense of what we're doing, why we're doing it, whether it's any good, and more crucially who I am! It's par for the course at this stage in any album mix: the ears get tired, and all objectivity flies out of the window. I start to listen to a track, but find myself simply hearing the noise of a perpetual yawn, peppered with the terrifying screams generated by one's ear honing in on the tiniest mistake, which becomes an epic sonic disaster. "Cut the strings", I shout, "cut all synths", "cut the guitar..." At this stage, of course, I realise that everything's been cut, and that we have to start the process afresh. 

Of course I'll soon fall in love with the music again, no doubt when I hear everything mastered, or when my ears have stopped bleeding and vibrating to the endless mush of the suspensions flying through my compositions! I remember this stage on the requiem all too well. At one point I wouldn't have cared if I never heard another bar of my own music again.

The problem with being a writer is that we spend our lives striving for perfection, but perfection always eludes us. There's always one note more out of tune than the rest, one note which is played too fast, another which is too loud... A song's energy dips in the middle; its melody doesn't reach the most sonically rewarding place and so it goes on. We strive. We fail.

My biggest worry is my tendency to over-score. Every time I record something I realise I've not quite taken into account the inconsistencies and eccentricities of real musicians and players, and as a result, haven't quite left the space for my melodies to breathe. I perpetually try to limit my orchestrations - reduce and reduce - but I find there's still always a little too much going on! I tell myself it will be different with the next project, but something always crops up; the BBC doesn't want dark music, they want joyodfanfares, the choir won't be able to sustain such long chords, you have one week to write 30 minutes' music and are therefore simply throwing anything at the manuscript that will stick...

I can, however, well see why genius artists like Picasso had their "periods", why some extraordinarily talented creatives are always too scared to finish their magnum opus and why the most wonderful of all rip up the rule book before starting each new work. Note to self; be braver! Scale and ambition sometimes play second fiddle to profound simplicity. 

Committees

The health and fitness regime is now two days old and I already find myself feeling a little better. I have run (or rather hauled myself) around Highgate Woods both today and yesterday, and zero high calorie food is passing my lips. I'm such a fat banger. Everything's a massive effort and when I'm waddling around the woods, it seems like I'm running at half speed. It struck me today, however, that I'm carrying at least two stones more than normal, and wondered how the old slim me would have coped with going jogging armed with about 8 bags of sugar. A tiny part of me therefore feels proud for even getting out of bed! Looking on the bright side.

I've been in meetings at the MU all day. I'm a member of the writers' committee and was trying to encourage everyone to be more proactive about the rights of composers. It's a complicated issue. It's relatively easy to protect performing musicians with various rules and guidelines regarding what they're paid and for what sort of work. With composers it's very different. There are no set rates. Some composers do their own orchestrations as part of their fee whilst others are expected to pay musicians out of their salary. A few will even pay musicians out of their own pocket simply because they can't bring themselves to put their names to music which sounds like it's been played by computers. We looked at the results of a recent survey of film composers and their wages and discovered that they vary wildly from people being paid £2.33 for a writing a minute's music right up to £20,000 and more. How much do composers earn? How long is a piece of string?

Amongst other things we discussed the lack of women on the committee (we have three in total, none of whom were there today); which begs a pair of age-old questions. 1) Are women that fussed about joining committees? And 2) Do that many women work as composers and writers?

I posed the last question and was immediately shot down in a sea of politically correct flames. I maintain it's a valid question. The only female composer I know is Fiona, and she's on the committee too! 

Actually, there are countless female singer songwriters out there, aren't there? Why aren't they joining us? Surely there's nothing particularly macho about being on a committee? We certainly don't actively dissuade women from joining. Now I'm confused. It's too late.

I'd personally argue that there was also a distinct dearth of gay people on the committee, judging by the fact that I seem to be the only one who has an opinion on matters Musical Theatre! That said, when I cheekily ventured this particular opinion, an older bloke pursed his lips and said "ooh there are..." 

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!

That magical light

We're currently in Huntingdonshire, or at least we would be if Huntingdonshire hadn't been unfairly swallowed by Cambridgeshire in 1965. We've come to visit Lisa and Mark and their daughters Poppy and Rose, in the charming village of Spaldwick. I was meeting the two-month-old Rose for the first time, and she's a beautiful-looking baby. How strange, therefore, that I continually referred to her as "he!"

We woke up in Wiltshire this morning, in the midst of the mother of all dawn choruses, which I managed to record with the machine I bought on Friday.

We had rehearsals during the morning for Much Ado About Nothing. The music I've written is beginning to sound rather lovely and I've really enjoyed working with such a super group of people. I've laughed a great deal this weekend. 

I have, however, felt ill all day on account of all the rubbish I've stuffed into my face over the past few days. I take this opportunity to state publicly that a major diet and health regime will begin tomorrow, so if anyone reading this sees me secretly scoffing a bar of chocolate, you have my permission to cruelly mock me. Call me fatty. Call me anything. It's for my own good! Nathan says if you cut me I'll bleed saturated fat, and he's not wrong. I reckon I'm 3 stones over-weight and am not happy about it.

The journey from Wiltshire to Huntingdon took us cross country through all my old childhood stomping grounds. From Oxford we travelled north along the A34 through south Northamptonshire towns like Brackley and Towcester. I regaled Nathan with stories of haunted houses and woodland adventures, remembering great friends like Tash and Ted who lived in this corner of the county when we were growing up. 

We crossed the M1 at Collingtree, the home of Fiona's parents, and then trundled along the A45 through Billing and round Earls Barton and Wellingborough. We pulled up in my childhood town of Higham Ferrers to stretch our legs and peer though the windows of our old house in one of the back lanes. As we walked around the house, we could see the walnut tree in the back garden which we'd planted on my Dad's 40th birthday. It's absolutely enormous these days and I'm sure the current owners of the house would be astonished to realise it is actually only 30 years old. The tree was a surprise, but I remember my Dad getting so worried as we waited for the tree to be delivered, thinking he was going to get some kind of stripper-gram!

It shakes me to the core to realise that I'm 40 next year. Perhaps I should plant a tree somewhere. I like the idea of being able to visit it from time to time to check on its progress and make myself feel incredibly old! 

As the sun sets on a glorious summer day,  we head back to London through the dusty, heavily-scented half-light which makes this time of year so profoundly magical. It's almost ten o'clock and the sky is still light blue. There's a yellowish light on the horizon. I feel sick though. I don't care if I never eat again! 

Much Ado

I seem to be in a hall in Wiltshire surrounded by adults dressed as children, all of whom are acting like five-year-olds. It's as sinister as it is surreal, but I've grown to expect nothing less from the members of the Royal Air Force Theatrical Association. We're rehearsing Much Ado About Nothing on the RAF base near Corsham. 

There are baby pictures lining the walls. They all belong to people in the room and we're having a competition to guess who is who. Nobody seems to recognise mine. I think it's obvious, but people don't know me very well in these parts. I'm dressed as Wonder Woman (not now, in the picture; at the moment I'm wearing a Wee Willy Winky night shirt and a dressing gown.)

We seem to be playing Flap the kipper with fish made out of newspapers at the moment. Earlier on, we played musical statues. I have never seen adults behaving in a more competitive way!

I better post this before I lose consciousness!