Long days

It's been another long, gruelling yet inspiring day. We work twelve hour days with the NYMT, which sounds like a hell of a lot, and would be by professional standards, but it's a truly immersive way to work. My favourite session is often the one right at the end of the day. It's half the length of the others, and it's regularly the time when the magic happens because everyone is exhausted and lets their emotional guard down. We had a session tonight with the girls, which involved learning the last sequence in the show, before I got a few of them to sing their solos. There were lots of tears when Robyn sang Could've Been and Kitty sang Shone With The Sun. That particular song is such an old friend. I sometimes can't believe I wrote it almost twenty years ago as an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. Paul Gambaccini, who was in charge of that sort of thing back in 1998, deemed it too "pastoral and classical" to do well in the contest, so that was that! The next time it came to light was in about 2005 when Sir Arnold Wesker, who wrote the lyrics, played the song on his Desert Island Discs. A few years later still, it was performed at a retrospective concert and I suddenly realised it was too special to languish in a bottom drawer. When the Brass commission arrived, I realised the song had finally found its home. It's actually the first song I'd ever re-purposed in this manner, but it fitted so well into Brass that I genuinely can't imagine the show without it.

Our choreographer Sam was in for the first extended period today and she worked on a couple of sequences, first with the girls, then with the guys. It's so wonderful to see a new discipline hitting the cast. We didn't do dance recalls on Brass because it's not really a dancey show, so I had no idea if any of them could move in any way. Some of them like Tom, Elliot, Ross and Corralie absolutely came alive. It was wonderful to watch.

We've worked split rooms all day. I deliberately wrote Brass to separate the girls from the boys so that we'd always be able to maximise the potential of rehearsals. The MD, for example could be running music sessions with the girls whilst the boys do book work, or choreography. It works really well from a practical perspective, but it does mean the guys and gals don't get to spend much time together, which they find a little upsetting, particularly when they're in boarding houses at least a mile apart. Socialising is, in my view, as important a part of these residential courses as anything else. Without the Northamptonshire music school courses to Grendon, I'm pretty sure many of my friendships wouldn't have developed as strongly as they have.

Anyway, this evening, after rehearsals, I decided to chaperone a group of male cast members to the girls' boarding house for half an hour. We had a lovely time drinking tea and eating Pringles in the communal common room. To tell you the truth, I had no idea I was breaking strict NYMT etiquette, so, quite rightly, got a stern ticking off, but I felt like a proper wazzock holding my mug of tea with Winnie The Pooh on it whilst the head of pastoral got angry!

Bliss

I went to bed last night without writing this blog for some reason and lay there, drifting off to sleep, trying to motivate myself to get up and remedy the situation. I failed spectacularly...

I'll not lie. The last few days have been blissful. Not only are rehearsals going well - we've almost finished learning the entire score - but, apart from running the odd note-bashing session, I don't really have any responsibilities. It feels like such an odd admission for a workaholic like me, but, because Brass is effectively written, and the creative team is so strong, my task is simply to let go. Almost for the first time in my life. There was a moment yesterday when I went up to the director, Hannah, to ask her a question about accents, and she said "what I love about you is that almost every time I've got something running through my head which I want to ask you about, you seem to be thinking the same thing!"

It suddenly struck me that seeing an established work being rehearsed is an experience which most composers are robbed off. We are only ever usually about in the high-pressure environment of a first production, when everyone's rushing about in a panic, demanding cuts and making us feel like rubbish writers because what we've written is too hard, or too high, or too whatever it is.

There's also a lot to be said for coming on a residential course with a bunch of really cool younger people. It reminds me of being at music school again. That sense of freedom and optimism can be very infectious. Last night we spent two hours playing a game called Mafia, just because we could. I didn't need to rush off to write more music, or sit on my own in a kitchen doing orchestrations. I could just sit down on a sofa and enjoy the moment. Bliss.

I very much enjoy the ten minute walk from the halls we're staying in to the main school. We walk across a beautiful playing field and it's a really nice bit of "me" time. This morning the sun was low in the sky and glinting on morning dew. The countryside is spectacular in these parts. We're right next to Knole House, of Vita Sackville-West fame, which is known for its many wild deer. Yesterday, whilst the girls in the cast started learning brass instruments for the first time, a beautiful Bambiesque creature with fabulous white spotty markings, skipped its way along the gully outside our window. We all rushed over to watch its progress and made the ludicrous types of noises that only a deer can inspire. The wonderful Lucy in the cast, in her glorious Derby accent, said "that, right there, is what we're all paying for!"

The Asian man who runs the local penny shop has vibrant purple hair underneath the halogen strip lights inside his gaff. I wonder if he knows? I died my hair raven black when I was eighteen and it went a similar colour. At the same time my brother had used too much Sun-In and gone bright orange. My mum once spent a shopping trip to Northampton telling us how proud she felt of her two boys!

I had something of an out-of-body experience last night as I watched the cast singing the first few numbers of the show. I felt a rush of pride and deep gratitude and then this surreal sense that all these amazing young people were working so hard on something I've written. It was a curious but gratifying emotion.

Military drills

We had the dreaded fire drill this morning, which is genuinely the only truly awful thing about staying at Sevenoaks School. No matter how much you try to mentally prepare yourself for the moment it always seems to be that little bit more shocking than you'd remembered. I think it triggers something deep down in my psyche that could only be explored via hypnotherapy because I'm quite sure that more normal people get woken up from deep sleep by a hideous mechanical wail, and find themselves irritated but perfectly able to haul themselves out of bed and into a puddle-filled car park wrapped in a duvet before going back to bed again.

I found the noise of the alarm so shocking that I woke up screaming and then, when I returned back to the room, was so worked up that I instantly burst into tears like some kind of fruit loop! I mean, that's just not right is it? Maybe I should put myself into some regression therapy? Perhaps it goes back to all those childhood dreams I used to have about hearing the four-minute warning of nuclear attack? It's fascinatingly primal!

The other slightly quirky thing I've noticed at Sevenoaks, is something I encountered a few years ago whilst staying in another school. Dawn choruses from birds who live in the vicinity of private schools and hotels tend to feature one or two whistles and chirps which sound curiously like modern-day alarm clocks and iPhones. I noticed that again this morning, probably as my sub-conscious was trying to prepare me for the drill which we were assuming would happen at about 6am. There are certain British birds (don't ask me which ones) who are capable of mimicry, and I suppose the one thing they hear a lot of in school grounds is the sound of loads of alarm clocks going off in rapid succession, so that's the noise they copy.

We had a good day of rehearsals today. We're slowly ramping things up and lots of music work is getting done. Hannah has continued with character and story background work and it's very much bringing the actors together. She's created a safe space where anyone can talk about anything without feeling either silly or frightened. She split the cast into groups of four at the start of yesterday and asked them all to prepare and deliver a little seminar on one of the themes of the show. Everyone took to the task with great alacrity. We had a song about trench life, a boxing match reconstruction of the causes of World War One, a quiz about Leeds and a brilliant talk about desertion and shell shock. The interpretative dance about early 20th century homosexuality was a little perplexing, but, I guess you can't win them all!!

Food in the canteen was a tad disappointing at tea time. It's usually very tasty but as I exited the serving area with a plate laden with vegetarian ravioli, Outrageous Jordan pointed out that it tasted of bleach. It did. I made do with the soup instead...

We went back to the residential blocks tonight and ate pizzas whilst chatting about lions escaping from circuses, rubbish supply teachers and science experiments going badly wrong.

Here's a bizarre thing... We have managed to cast a sixth form pupil from a school in Yorkshire as the wife of a character who is played in the show by someone who is actually her teacher in real life! That is one of the potentially bizarre things which can happen when the age range of a cast is 16-23. Fortunately, Brass is a very young person friendly show, so there's no funny business on stage, in fact, the two actors are only together in one scene, but when you're casting with a net as wide as we do with the NYMT, it's almost astonishing to think we could have ended up in this position!

The male cast did military training today with a real army colonel. They learned how to march and stand to attention and were utterly humiliated by the big man who made them run up and down hills, wear traffic cones on their heads if they were naughty and generally shouted and blustered a lot. Perfect from my perspective. The cast got mucky. And a bit angry... All is good.

Glorious banks

I barely slept last night. I stayed up late with Jeremy and the team and then I had the kind of restless night I always have when I'm away from Nathan for the first night. We sleep in dorms whilst we're in Sevenoaks School. My room has two beds in it, both of which are single, but only one of which is made up! I discovered today that Ruby, Laura and Ben have all slept here in previous years. I have heard one or two spooky bangs and crashes from the empty room next door, but I'll attempt to be brave...

The only trouble with the bed is the pillow. I should have remembered to bring my own. This one is so thin and insubstantial that, after folding it into quarters, my head was still flat against the mattress!! I ended up sleeping with the pillow wrapped around a towel, which did the trick.

I woke up with what can only be described as a hangover, and prowled around the Waitrose in Sevenoaks looking for shower gel whilst feeling horribly fragile. It was a far larger shop than I'd expected with terrible escalators and things. The man behind the till in the olden days would have been described as simple. These days we might just call him eccentric or "care in the community." I made the mistake of asking him a question. He panicked and said a lot of words which sounded like "please help me" in eighteen different languages.

Rehearsals went well today. Our MD, Alex arrived, and got cracking in a hard-core sort of way with the music. I did some one-on-one note-bashing sessions with some of the new cast whilst Hannah, the director, had a meeting with the new set designer. They shared some of their ideas with the cast, and I think we could be on for a fabulous-looking production.

My note-bashing session was with new boys Oscar, who plays Tom, and Matt, who plays Cov-lad Wilfred in the show. Matt is a genuine Midlander, which obviously pleases me greatly. Obviously I'm determined for him to be a long-lost relative but he's not playing ball. My Mum was christened in the village his Dad is from, and my own Dad is convinced that many people with his surname come from Nuneaton. "Not my lot" he said. "Boo" said I!

Hannah ran a fabulous session this evening, encouraging the cast to share personal stories, memories and thoughts. It was incredibly inspiring, and, in some instances, utterly hysterical. I got a serious case of the giggles at one point, triggered by a somewhat smutty one-liner inadvertently delivered by a cast member who's far too intelligent to aimlessly wander into a double entendre! Our new George is being played by Callum, who flies the flag for Wales so wonderfully that I just want to scoop him up, dress him in red and green tail coat and pop him in the Eurovision Song Contest. Every time he opens his mouth I feel another rush of deep Welsh patriotism! Llio's Ma Silva will love him when she sees Brass.

There's a glorious bank of girls in the show who come from different areas of Yorkshire and I've become obsessed with listening to the differences in their accents. I've also noticed that some of the Southern girls in the show are beginning to have their own accents altered by those around them. I am hoping this process continues until the entire cast sounds like they've just stepped out of the Leeds Corn Exchange c. 1914... Up the Barnbow Lassies!

Day one in the NYMT camp

I'm slightly perturbed to report today that the Corporation of London, or whatever they're now called, have decided to sell three cafes from underneath the noses of the families who presently run them, and have done for more than forty years.

The three cafes in question are all rather dear to me. The first is in the middle of Highgate Wood, the second is in Golders Hill Park on the West Heath and the last is the one down by the bandstand on Parliament Hill. All three are dog-friendly, lovingly-run, inexpensive and charmingly old school. They hark back to a bygone era with their little ice cream kiosks, metal self-service counters and1960s original deco.

Now, I'm usually the first to criticise the NIMBY attitude which shuns the notion of change in favour of some sort of rural idyll which isn't realistic anymore. Change is often very necessary. But here, in these North London parks, people like to escape. Nothing needs to change. The lack of change is what attracts generations of people to these places.

The fact that the Corporation is replacing these quirky, honest, independent cafes with a ghastly chain of restaurants is the most worrying aspect. Chains use brands. They rip out original features. They ignore their regular customers in a quest to appeal to a different, trendier, richer crowd.

...And of course lets not forget that a number of family businesses are being threatened by this decision.

A petition exists, which some 20,000 people have signed. It attempts to encourage the Corporation to reconsider their decision. If you feel obliged to add your name, you can do so here:

https://www.change.org/p/the-city-of-london-corporation-save-family-run-parliment-hill-cafe-from-large-corporate-catering-chain-takeover?recruiter=30699131&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink

I got on a train this morning to Seven Oaks and was aware that I'd brushed past a rather silly woman who was taking forever to settle herself down onto the seats opposite. Instead of saying something to me (I would have been fascinated to know what her beef actually was) she did the passive aggressive, very English thing of first staring at me and waiting for me to look at her, before catching the eye of another passenger and muttering a kind of jokey "some people" remark under her breath. I could see her staring at me in my peripheral vision but refused to play ball, because I'd genuinely not done anything wrong. In the end she stormed off down the carriage, so angry that she would rather martyr herself than simply get over it. Whatever "it" was...

The train was taking me to Seven Oaks school where rehearsals are taking place for the new production of Brass. The National Youth Music Theatre always do a week of rehearsals for their summer shows at Easter, which gives the young people a sense of what's to come, and also a chance to make friends they can look forward to seeing again in the summer. This Easter week is particularly useful for new shows, because it serves as a sort of workshop week to interrogate material and get a sense of the shape of musical.

This morning's journey to Seven Oaks instantly took me back two years. It was just a few days after my wedding and the director of the original production of Bass, Sara Kestleman, and I took a taxi to Charing Cross with suitcases filled with books and research material to inspire the cast. We'd just got back from a research trip to France where we'd spent two days looking at the locations which had inspired the piece. The show, at that point, was barely written. We had a script, but it was an hour too long, and perhaps only ten of the songs had been composed.

I remember feeling terrified. Would the show be any good? Would the young cast take to it? Understand it? Would the missing songs make everyone think I'd had a writer's block and start panicking that the show wouldn't be ready for the summer? I also felt a little bit weird that most of the cast had watched me getting married on Channel 4 just a week earlier!

It turned out to be a rather magical time. The weather was warm, the blossom was out on all the trees, the material went down well and I was deeply inspired. I'd leave Sara, Matt and Ben to the rehearsals and would vanish into practice rooms to write new songs. The music poured out. The song Letters was written in fifteen minutes flat. On one occasion Matt choreographed an entire dance number with me simply banging a drum so that I could orchestrate something which responded to the rhythms he felt the moment required. It was a very interesting way to write a dance number, and wouldn't have been possible without the Easter week of rehearsals.


...


It's now 1am, and I'm afraid I'm a little bit drunk! Rehearsals went very well. Hannah the director played a series of "getting to know each other" games, one of which was interminable, but highly successful. I certainly feel I know names and information about cast members I probably wouldn't have discovered through any normal rehearsal process.


I'm proud to report that we have a good showing on the LBGT front in this particular cast, although I have to keep reminding myself that gay white men are no longer allowed in the club, so I'm not sure where that leaves us!


It seems a happy cast, with a good percentage of proud Yorkshire folk which makes me feel very happy.


So there we have it. Day one in the NYMT camp is over... Where will the adventure take us next?

Yam yams

There's very little to say about today. It's been one of those Saturdays when I haven't done anything but eat a bit, sleep a bit, watch a bit of telly and generally hibernate. I've watched a lot of nonsense on YouTube. I always think a lengthy YouTube session is indicative of a completely misspent day, but I've packed a suitcase for an adventure which starts tomorrow, so I can't be too down on myself! How tragic! "What did you do today Benny Ball Games?" "Why, I packed a suitcase." "Wow, Triple B, you really know how to live! I wish I'd been round your house today, it sounds like you were having a riot!"

Nathan was out of the house all day today, doing one of those singing gigs where they all pretend to be waiters and then burst into song. I would be surprised if there were a single wedding guest or corporate type in the world who hadn't seen something similar at some point and felt the need to pretend to be surprised! My favourite story is the one where the woman in charge of one of these ghastly corporate award ceremonies turned to Nathan and said, "right, I'm now going to hand you over to Nathan for the surprise entertainment!" Cue Nathan arriving on stage pretending to be a chef... Cover. Totally. Blown.

Right. I've packed enough clothes for a week, and way too many pairs of socks. I feel you can never have enough pairs of socks. I don't have enough pairs of trousers so I've washed the very clothes I was standing up in today. Nathan found me this evening wandering about the house naked from the waist down. A tragic sight.

Proud Midlanders will be pleased to hear that a young actor called Stuart Ash is re-telling the story of Hamlet in Black Country dialect. Excerpts from "Yamlet" will be broadcast on the internet, (specifically Yowtube) throughout April. For those who have no idea why Hamlet would become "Yamlet" in Black Country dialect is that those afflicted with said accent are thought to turn the word "I am" into "yam." Outsiders call them "yammies" or "yam-yams"as a result. My mate Tina is a yammoi and she often makes me spake like one.

Grieving the Beeb

I emailed one of my people at the BBC this morning to be greeted with the all-too familiar response, "I no longer work at the BBC..." This email is only slightly less prevalent these days than the one which suggests the person at the BBC is either on sabbatical or has moved positions within the institution. The other regular response from BBC personnel is the one which suggests the person you're trying to contact is on leave. I genuinely don't know how the organisation manages to keep its head above the parapet with such an astounding revolving door staffing policy. No one within the BBC ever seems to be able to have a meeting with the person that actually makes decisions, because it's the school holidays or she or he "works from home two days a week." Worse than this is the fact that people commission stuff and then move on before the project is seen through. This results in entire projects being buried, shelved or under-publicised.

The recurring message in my present LinkedIn feed is former BBC staff announcing they've moved on to pastures new. These were proper "can do" creative people whose enthusiasm was sucked out of them by years of instability, reshuffling and brutal cuts. They're now using their skills elsewhere. One is working for Avon!

It's no wonder that the BBC is presently churning out very little but "safe bet" programming.

I would once have thrown myself in front of a bus to protect the future of the BBC, but I'm just not sure the organisation is doing anything important any more. It's certainly no longer my go-to channel when I switch the telly on. The two main channels today were almost drowning in repeats and re-hashes: "The Best of Wogan" "The TV that Made Me" "Too Much TV" "The Two Ronnies" "Perry and Croft: Made in Britain" "Room 101: Extra Storage". Even "Flog It" was showing a "best of the series" show. There's a limit to how often you can watch the BBC patting itself on the back and shrieking "look how amazing we used to be" whilst single-handedly refusing to be amazing in the present day. They repeat episodes of Top of the Pops on an almost loop (well the one which aren't presented by sexual pariahs) and yet they don't have the guts to commission a new show featuring chart music. It's Channel 4 who are still taking the risks and they are not funded by the license fee payer.

I went to the local corner shop today to buy a tin of spaghetti for lunch. It cost 74p. I handed the man behind a counter £10. "No change?" He said. "No, I'm afraid not," I said, feeling a little like his question would only have been valid had I been trying to pay with a fifty pound note. As I handed him the note he said, rather stroppily, "all the time, you coming in with no change." And I thought, "fuck you! All the time I'm coming in here and giving you custom instead of going to Sainsbury's down the road!" Gift horse. Mouth.

I worked all morning at Costa in the village whilst a loud-mouthed Jewish American woman shouted at her deaf elderly friend. For some reason she kept spelling her name. She'd go silent for a moment and then shout making the entire cafe jump. The woman sitting opposite me kept catching my eye and giggling.

On my way back from the rude shop, I went to our new local barber who turned out to be a rather jovial Iranian chap called Ali who'd grown up in Japan. Some people are just so "jet set"! I was a little surprised by how he pronounced Osaka. I've always thought it the "ah" sound was where the stress sat, but he stressed the "oh" - and made it sound more like the "o" of pot. Fascinating. He half made me want to go to Japan. I asked if, as a vegetarian, I'd struggle because the cuisine is so fish-heavy. "Oh no" he said, "there's lots of choice. It's not just fish. There's lots of meat too..." He then caught himself and said, "oh..." He spent ages cutting and primping my hair to the extent that I went into a hair-tickled coma. He's decided my parting needs to be higher on my head.

Speaking of hair, I have decided to embrace my beard for the time being and committed to it by trimming and shaping it this evening. Obviously it makes me look seventy-five, but I'm not sure I want to look forty-two.