Against the Tide

I woke up this morning and instantly embroiled myself in admin, whilst, at the same time trying to learn how to sing Against The Tide from Em. The plan had been for me to sing it at the new writers' cabaret this evening, but the best laid plans always go to pot.

I'm sort of relieved that I didn't end up singing it. Having had a cold for a week, my voice is feeling very tired, and, as I sang the song through, I'd find myself getting to the last chorus unable to sing the top notes. 

Anyway, the plan had been to get Jade, one of the regulars at the cabaret nights to play piano for me, but I was waylaid by a phone conversation with the BBC, and when I texted her to say I was on my way, she was already leaving the house to go to another rehearsal. So I got as far as Tufnell Park, and had to turn around. Thank God that modern day technology enables us to text whilst we're on the tube, or I'd have been at London Bridge before finding out the rehearsal was doomed.

At that point I decided someone was trying to tell me that performing the song was a bad idea, but when I texted Nathan, he said he'd have a bash at singing the song if I'd have a bash at playing the piano. So I spent a couple of hours learning an approximation of the piano part, and by the time he'd got home from work, he'd managed to learn the vocals. Quite how a man who was feeling as ill as he is, and coughing up lungs, managed to make such a sweet sound I've no idea.

We were on second, and things went surprisingly well. When there's no time to worry about making something perfect, the pressure has a habit of disintegrating. I knew there would be mistakes and I knew I didn't have the time to learn any fancy figures, so I stuck to what I knew I could play, and busked my way through the song. I royally screwed up the opening bars, but Nathan styled it out to make it look like I wasn't repeatedly looping a four-bar phrase. Nathan couldn't see the music, so ump-ti-tumped his way through one section but I think we just about got away with it. The crowd seemed to enjoy it.

There were some lovely songs from other writers, as usual. Michelle hit all the right notes with a song sung from the perspective of a woman battling cancer singing to an unborn child, and my new friend Seánna's musical set against the back drop of the Belfast troubles is shaping up to be a very fine project. There was even a flash mob where one of the writers had placed students from a Brussels-based musical theatre school in the audience, who suddenly burst into song. It was all very exciting.

We talked musical theatre and gay rights long into the night.

Let's look at the whole picture

We've been at Julie and Sam's at Craft and Cake all day today. Nathan is really under the weather with this cold, and I'm still suffering. I feel like my head's in a big jar of cotton wool, like the one my Grannie had in her blue bathroom, next to all of the fascinating-looking bottles of scent and the crocheted loo roll covers. But let's not talk about smells. I can't smell or taste a thing at the moment. I can distinguish between salt and sweet, and that's about it.

Craft and cake was lovely. Stephen West was there who I'm not sure I've seen since we spent a week in Italy together at Julie's house. Crafters reading this blog will possibly know Stephen's name as a top designer of knitwear. Walk into any yarn shop, say his name, and all the people behind the counter will go weak at the knees!

There was some lovely grub today which included an eccentric-sounding banana and pumpkin loaf, which tasted wonderful. Or did it? It had a nice texture! Tina made us all a sticky toffee pudding. Again, I was desperate to taste it properly because it looked beautiful. I thought the dates in it were pears. That tells you quite how screwed up my taste buds are right now!

We watched Strictly, which triggered a heated discussion about race. I'm not sure why. A lot of talk is happening at the moment about the need for colour blind casting and the lack of opportunities for BAME people in musical theatre. Traditionally, of course, there have been pitifully fewer opportunities for black and Asian performers in theatre. But things are improving (slowly) and many people out there are attempting to address the issue. Sadly, I sometimes feel that the changes which ARE happening are failing to register with people as they search for ever more examples of white-washing.

I feel it's really important that the leaps which are being made towards racial equality in the industry aren't swept under the carpet. This has to include acknowledging that there are presently a fairly large number of opportunities for BAME performers in the West End. When casting Beyond the Fence (where we ran a policy of complete colour blind casting) we were told that it was actually quite difficult to get BAME actors to come to castings for ensemble roles, because so many high calibre BAME actors were already in work in shows like Thriller, Memphis and Motown. Certainly our experience when it came to casting the male ensemble in the show bailed this theory out. When we put our hands on our hearts, we had to acknowledge that the three best actors for these three ensemble roles were the three white men we'd auditioned. Casting one of the less experienced, less well-prepared BAME actors we'd seen would have been tokenism. And wholly unfair.

Critic, Matthew Hemley, recently wrote an article in The Stage where he lambasted British musical theatre for its all-white casts, without a single mention of shows like Moby Dick, which featured two black leads (in roles you might expect to have been played by white people) and Wasted, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, where actresses from three separate ethnicities play the Brontë Sisters. It's wholly inappropriate, in my view, to point out what's bad in theatre without acknowledging what's good, because you're not painting a complete picture.

https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2016/matthew-hemley-camp-cliches-and-all-white-casts-welcome-to-musical-theatre-in-2016/

He writes about camp clichés in Lloyd Webber's School of Rock, but did he bother to come and see Brass? A more subtle and complicated exploration of homosexuality would be hard to find.

Sometimes I want to throttle these critics and say, "look beyond the shows which open in the West End, and see what people ARE doing in musical theatre. The ones written by people who can't get their heads above the parapet." There's some amazing work going on. If only we'd all open our eyes a little.

A day in Bristol

Yesterday was one of those days which seemed to go on forever. In retrospect, it did go on forever. 

We woke up at 6am. It was a genuine privilege to be up so early. A really intense light was making the horse chestnut trees on Southwood Lane glow in bright, metallic colours. I rarely get to see the magic hour in the morning.

We drove to Bristol, Abbie, Nathan and I, where Andras' life was being celebrated in a really beautiful woodland cemetery. What was very special about the service was that we weren't being rushed out of the building by the next funeral in line. We had the entire place to ourselves all day, and, more perfectly, the wake took place within the same complex of buildings, so instead of feeling like we were being engulfed by a conveyor belt of grief, there was a sense of everyone being in it together, and able to contemplate, grieve, share and laugh at our own pace.

I was hugely impressed by the service. It was dignified, appropriate, deeply moving and, at times, rather magical. It was overseen by an old family friend of Llio and Silvia's called, Pad, and, whilst he made his address, just as he started to talk about the warmth and beauty of the sun, the sun outside suddenly burned through the rain cloud which had been sitting over the chapel since we'd arrived. It got brighter and brighter and more and more dazzling. It felt rather mystical.

The service was devoid of all religious content, which I appreciated immensely. It set out to be a service about love - and very much succeeded. At the end, Pad recited an ancient Celtic blessing: "Deep peace of the running wave to you. Deep peace of the flowing air to you. Deep peace of the quiet earth to you. Deep peace of the shining stars to you. Deep peace of the infinite peace to you." It made more sense to me than any prayer ever has. There was also a fair amount of Welsh being spoken in the service, which was music to my ears, and reminded me of my own Nana's funeral, where I remember my uncles reading, probably from the bible, in Welsh.

We listened to a lot of music. And we listened to it properly. So often with these ceremonies, things get faded in and out willy-nilly, but this way we were introduced to music we'd not heard before. I had no idea, for example, that the music to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was originally an epic track by the Eagles. We were also introduced to a fabulous piece of music by an Icelandic artist, which I must track down. It's called Vor i Vasgaglogi by Kaleo and it's utterly haunting. All the music was music which Andras had found powerful or inspiring in his lifetime, and his gift to us was that music.

There was so much love for Andras in the room. I have seldom heard such vociferous and effusive praise for a person. I only met him once, but I now wish I'd known him a great deal better. Almost everyone talked about him as a man who literally seemed to glow. Brave, witty, beautiful, deeply intelligent.

Silvia and Llio spoke beautifully and bravely. I genuinely don't know how you move on from something like that. I certainly don't think you ever get over it as such. Abbie said something insightful, which had been said to her when she lost her father, namely that grief is like getting used to wearing glasses. The way you see things is never quite the same again, and it's absolutely horrible to begin with, but eventually it becomes something you learn to live with.

We drove home in driving rain and sticky traffic on the M4. Abbie and I had a quiz to do in the evening in Dulwich which was a barrel of laughs. One of the competitors got hammered, came up onto the stage and, all weird and coquettishly, started inappropriately draping herself onto the other assistant, trying to get him to mark her team more leniently. It was all a little uncomfortable, but we dealt with it as best we could. It did, however, make me think about how the occurrence would have been perceived had the boot been on the other foot. If a 40-year old man had walked onto the stage, and started touching up a 22-year old girl, he would almost certainly have been escorted from the premises. There are certainly a huge amount of double standards in society.

By the time I'd dropped Abbie home and crawled my way home across London, it was midnight. A long old day...

Supply teachers

I feel like my body is slowly beating this cold! It's taking it's bloody time. I wake up feeling okay, but as the day develops, I start to feel less well. I got completely out of breath climbing a flight of stairs earlier, so there's obviously something still wanting to make itself felt. And now Nathan is poorly. He's shaking in bed next to me like one of those hairless dogs.

I stumbled off to Swiss Cottage this afternoon for a meeting, and, in the process, bumped into young Ben Jones who played Alf in Brass. We had a lovely cup of tea at Hampstead Theatre where, incidentally, Sara Kestelman is presently performing, and where we also bumped into Ruby, who played Peggy in Brass. #BrassReunion.

Nathan kindly drove me down to Swiss Cottage, which is a doddle from Highgate in a car, but an absolute nightmare by public transport.

I worked out that it was actually quicker to walk home, but got to the base of Highgate Hill and jumped on a bus into the village. I didn't think a one in ten gradient was a particularly good idea in my present state!

The time zones all went wrong on my computer's email system this afternoon, meaning emails were (and still are) appearing in my inbox as though they'd been sent eight hours earlier. Then the same thing happened to my iPhone, and then Nathan's iPhone and then his computer. There's viruses everywhere in this house! It's like a form of time travel! Poor Nathan tried to sort it out and ended up on the phone for hours. We're still not sorted. I'm still living in the past.

Abbie came over this evening and we ate pizza and watched The Gilmore Girls. We're all off to Bristol tomorrow for Andras' funeral. I can't imagine how awful the day is going to be for Llio and Silvia, but all we can do is send bucket loads of love out into the universe.

It doesn't seem to be a good time for anyone at the moment. Someone who Nathan worked with at Urdang was killed last night on her way from a rehearsal and my Dad's oldest school friend has just had a stroke. 2016: what a flippin' awful year. In twenty years time people will simply say, "oh was that a 2016 occurrence?" And then they'll nod knowingly. They used to do that about my form at school when they saw our exam results in science. We'd had an entire year where we'd been banned from doing experiments on account of our having set fire to the lab, and then another year where we'd had nothing but supply teachers because our main teacher had been the one whose name the gunman was shouting when he came into our school to do the shooting. By the time we reached the fourth year, all bets were off. I didn't know a Bunsen burner from a blancmange.

The supply teachers were fun, though. We once saw how many crocodile clips we could attach to one poor woman's skirt, and, on another occasion, when watching a video in class (we saw the film Threads about nineteen times in instalments) the lights went off, there was a scream, and when the lights came back on again everyone in the class was covered in flour.

Quite what triggered that memory I'm not sure! 

(I think we attached 29 crocodile clips to the supply teachers' skirt.)

Walking the Nene

Don't listen to me today. It's been one of those days when I wish hibernation was a human prerogative. It's been grey and miserable, but for a very brief moment when it pissed it down with rain before the sun started shining, making the slate roofs outside shimmer like liquid metal.

Despite feeling shitty, I managed to write two songs for Em... or at least I made a start on them. I'm always slightly suspicious when people talk about writing a song in ten minutes. The Bee Gees claim to have written most of Saturday Night Fever in one night. That first little shot of inspiration always comes quickly, but the crafting of a song - its shaping, its development, its refinement and the creation of an accompaniment - takes a huge amount of time. If you're the Bee Gees, then you have talented minions to do this... but let's be under no illusion: they're the people who are actually writing your songs! Theatre music takes more time than most because you have to think all the time about character, drama and the constant musical variation which makes a theatre song worthy of the stage. It can take me months to take a song from that first shot of inspiration through to something which is worth performing. There's choral harmonies to think about, vocal ranges, orchestrations - and don't even get me started on dance breaks!! Today I was obsessing about the lyrics needing to feel like they're the words of the characters who are singing them.

I have decided to walk the length of the River Nene on five consecutive days starting on the 1st December. I shall walk about twenty miles every day and stay in travel lodges. As I walk, I shall make field recordings of the river, and hope to be inspired for the big composition. The river is exactly 100 miles long.

Now obviously I'm expecting to walk alone. I'm sure the weather will be ghastly beyond words, and I'll probably fall in and smell a lot, but if anyone, particularly Northamptonian friends, fancies joining me for a section, I shall be working out a schedule over the next couple of days. The 3rd and 4th December is a weekend, and I guess I'll be somewhere between Higham Ferrers and Peterborough in that leg of the trip.

Anyway. That's me! I need sleep.

Youth Proms, quizzes and colds

You see and hear the strangest things whilst walking about in London. Bonkers people don't usually migrate as far North as Highgate, but this morning, I was treated to a proper display of eccentricity! As I walked down to the tube, I passed a young Asian man, who’d managed to contort his body to fit inside one of the metal railings which prevent people from stacking it as they go down the steep footpath there. He was sitting astride a metal pole, with his back pushed up against the bar above him, and he was talking incessantly. At first I assumed he was on the telephone, but I quickly realised he was delivering what can only be described as his internal dialogue, which I couldn't help but tune into: "my prostate's on fire. Repeat. My prostate's on fire.” Very strange.

As I took the tube into town, I glanced down at the woman sitting below me and noticed she was reading the Daily Mail. I wondered what went through her head when she reads the bile which that particular paper prints. Is she taken in by it all? Does she take it with a pinch of salt and skip over the vile editorial because she likes the cookery pages or the horoscopes? I was genuinely interested. She looked a bit pinched and angry, so I wondered if she had a heart of stone…

Victoria station was a joke. It was abnormally crowded, so they diverted those of us changing lines out of the tube station and back in again instead of allowing us to make the two-minute underground walk, which prompted me to wonder why doesn't London work

I had a meeting at the Natural History Museum this morning. We thought it might be fun to discuss the Nene project underneath a giant fibre glass brontosaurus! The Northamptonshire Youth Orchestra are in town, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to hook up with Peter and Beth to kick some ideas about... and let me tell you: it's going to be epic!

I did some work in a Soho cafe around lunchtime before heading off towards The City to help out with a quiz, which was a deeply distressing experience. My cold was doing its best to make me feel like I was high on drugs, and the quiz was for 150 fourteen-year olds who essentially had no interest in being there, and weren't being controlled by any of the adults present. There was a constant squeal of high-pitched noise, which certainly wasn't the sound of young people trying to work out the answer to questions. After they'd been fed, most got up from their tables and started walking around the room, talking to their friends. The teams gradually got larger and larger as the kids brought their tables together to chat more. I had seven fewer teams at the end of the quiz than I'd had at the beginning. It was almost impossible to keep up. Cans of drink burst, kids were lobbing paper aeroplanes and crisps at each other, most were blatantly using their mobile phones to cheat, and I was slightly left wondering why we were there because child minding isn't one of my skills. I just wanted it all to end so that I could get on with the next part of my epic day.

This evening I was lucky enough to be invited to one of the Music for Youth junior prom concerts at the Albert Hall. I was there in a very glamorous box, being hosted by NMPAT, the Northamptonshire Music School. There were twelve or so ensembles performing from across the UK, representing every conceivable musical genre from jazz orchestras and African choirs to pop bands and koto-drumming groups. The crowning glory was plainly the Northamptonshire Youth Orchestra who played a fiendish suite of music with dexterity and panache. Yet again, I felt a great rush of pride to be associated with them. I was also touched to see that Northamptonshire has finally had its own flag designed, which some of the dignitaries in the box were proudly waving. I’m going to try and get hold of one to display in my attic with my flags from Wales and Yorkshire. We still fly the rainbow flag from our window. I like flags.

It was very exciting to see one of the large ensemble performance slots which we’ll be doing this time next year. The group who had been chosen to do it this time came from Croydon, I think, and performed a piece by Howard Goodall. There was a bit of dancing, and they all wore sashes and wafted large pieces of fabric around, which looked quite Top-of-the-Pops-circa-1979. It was a stunningly beautiful piece of writing - as always with Goodall. I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the lyric content of the piece, however; “it doesn’t matter what you do, or what happens on earth, it’s how you go up to heaven that matters.” Blimey.

Edge Hill University

I woke up in a very rainy Lancashire this morning, and drove to Ormskirk in horrible murky, misty haze.

Edge Hill university used to be a teacher training college, and is based around a rather grand, H-shaped, 1920s arts and crafts building.

A recent building programme has seen all sorts of fancy new buildings popping up across the campus with shiny atriums, glossy hubs, glass lift shafts and amazing displays of wall-mounted plasma screens.

I'd been invited to talk to third year students on the musical theatre degree course about Beyond The Fence, and the concept of computer musicals. It was rather fun to be candid, and to tell the actual story behind the project rather than what they decided to show on the associated documentary. It was weird to talk in such depth about all that stuff again, and a little surreal, if I'm honest, because I was full of cold, and kept getting all light-headed and dry-mouthed.

It was a nice bunch of students, and we had a bit of fun learning the protest song from the show. If I'm honest, I think the students were a great deal more interested in learning about the Greenham women than they were hearing about computers, and, in my view, that's exactly as it should be. Today's young people need to know about those extraordinary women, and, actually, I'd far rather talk about 1980s protest movements to a group of kids from a generation who are used to registering their discontent by merely going online and clicking on a petition. It's vital that the youth of today (who are always surrounded by a slight whiff of entitlement) realise what previous generations have done, seemingly just to enable them to feel politically apathetic.

We had lunch in a very posh canteen where a cheffy bloke made me a bespoke omelette. University food has improved a great deal since the days when I was forced to eat potatoes, peas and a cheese and onion pasty every day in Vanbrugh dining hall.

After lunch, my new friend Clare, who is head of the musical theatre course, had assembled a charming group of students, from across the three years, to read through the current script of Em. It was a very interesting experience. As always with table readings, you get a bit of a mix of people who are natural readers and those who aren't at all. It was interesting to note that Clare had cast the show and sent all the scripts out a week before, which makes me wonder why some of the people who were continually tripping over words hadn't thought to prepare a little more thoroughly. It strikes me that, in this industry, you have to do everything possible to get noticed and raise yourself above those in competition with you. There's no space for laziness or people who don't take initiative, particularly when a working professional from London comes up to work with you!

The piece went down well, and the students made some astute comments about the piece afterwards. It was a genuine thrill to hear a Welshie playing the part of Bronwen in the show, and genuine Scousers playing Liverpudlians. There was a lot of conversation about linguistic authenticity afterwards, with particular reference to the use of the word "like" in Scouse dialogue. Lots of food for thought, and lots to be getting on with...

The drive home was horrible. I was tried and ill and everyone on the road seemed to want to kill me. I was slightly heartened by the appearance of the "super moon," which is apparently closer to the earth than I'm likely to see again in my lifetime. It was apparently at its largest as it rose in the sky at about 5pm, but at that time the entire country, as always happens in the UK during these big meteorological events, was bedecked in thick cloud. I was therefore rather pleased that the moon deigned to make an appearance for me for much of my journey home. It was definitely very bright, but it didn't look particularly big, sadly.