Belligerent hikers

We’re heading to a hotel in Hull as we’ve a ridiculously early start at Spurn Point tomorrow morning. I take full responsibility. We were planning to film in the early afternoon until I was told that the place gets ridiculously busy on a Saturday and nothing’s certain to ruin a beautifully crafted shot more than a shed load of belligerent hikers!


It is the muggiest night of the year so far and I am more tired than words can say. I had a very nasty shock yesterday which meant I barely slept. It was after midnight and I was talking on the phone to Nathan. He was returning home after an evening with a local friend. As he walked down the alleyway behind our house, he spotted someone acting suspiciously and confronted them. I could hear the altercation on the other end of the phone. The guy was obviously getting quite stroppy, but Nathan was being reasonable with him and eventually I heard him disappearing. Nathan came back on the phone and said he was going to sit outside the house for a bit to see if the guy returned. We carried on chatting...

About 3 minutes later the phone suddenly went dead. I didn’t think much of it to begin with. Nathan’s phone loses its battery with frustrating alacrity. I left it a while and then called back, but the phone just rang and rang. Slightly perplexed, I called the home phone, but no one answered. I called the mobile again. Nothing. It seemed so strange. When we’re apart, we never go to sleep unless we’ve said goodnight to one another. It’s a sort of rule...

As the minutes ticked by, I became more and more concerned and eventually convinced myself that the intruder had returned and that Nathan was lying in the darkened alleyway injured or bleeding. The more I called Nathan, the more I panicked. Eventually I became inconsolable. I was stranded in Leeds. There was no way I could get home. I to call Fiona, but she was in Serbia. I tried to get in touch with the friend Nathan had been with, but couldn’t find a phone number. So I called the police. They offered to do a welfare call. I must have gone into shock because after five minutes I ‘phoned them again... and then again. At one stage they told me that officers were “at the scene”, which made matters considerably worse; “the scene of what?” I asked; “we don’t know” they said, sounding like they were lying...

Finally, after another hour, I got a phone call from the police saying that they’d found nothing untoward, although they’d also had no response when they knocked on our door. “No signs of a struggle?” I asked “no” “nobody bleeding?” “no”. So I went to bed and lay awake thinking about various other dreadful scenarios.

A text message came in at 4 in the morning from Nathan. The police had woken him up. His battery had died, his phone was on silent, and surreally he’d also simultaneously managed to unplug all the landlines in the flat. After our phone call, he’d gone on a trek to find some milk and then gone to bed because he thought it would be too late to call me back. So, I suppose I now feel a bit foolish for over reacting, but it was an utterly terrifying experience, and one that I sincerely hope will never happen again.

Today I went to Harrogate to play Doreen Brigham my Symphony for Yorkshire. Doreen is the delightful 98-year-old woman who’d won the competition to write lyrics for the last movement of the piece. I was absolutely terrified beforehand. Doreen had become something of a talisman for me and I’d thought about her many times throughout the process of writing the music, always desperately hoping that she’d like what I wrote. I was also highly conscious of the fact that the music is still not ready. I was so keen to let her hear a final version, but sadly that was not to be. The CD also skipped, so she couldn’t hear the best part of one of the movements.

Nevertheless, she seemed to enjoy what she did hear very much; saying after movement two how sad she felt it sounded and after movement one, how clever I was... But it was her response to the last movement that I shall never forget. She sat and mouthed the words as they appeared in the song, seemingly in perfect rhythm with the music almost as though she were singing along to a tune she already knew. It was incredibly moving. Profoundly so.

The rest of the day saw us back in Leeds in an area of railway tunnels known as the “dark arches”. It was proper guerrilla filming as in the process of organising everything else, no one had thought to ask permission to film there. Perhaps the feeling of naughtiness went to our heads because we really went to town, with smoke, fire spinners and all manner of crazy lights. Later in the day we were back outside the Hyde Park Picture House with the Colombian drummers before heading back to the arches because the club we’d booked for filming wouldn’t allow smoke, and I wanted the remarkable Ed Alleyn Johnson to film his rock God solo in a backlit cloud of swirling red mist!

Monday 10th July 1660, and Pepys did his first official day of work at the Navy Office. Not a great deal else happened, other than that our hero was taken to lunch by two friends; a lunch Pepys described as a “collation”. Oddly, my mother is the only other person I’ve heard use the term. When asked to make food for a large quantity of my friends, she’ll often throw together a “cold collation” – which is a kind of buffet, I suppose.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I’m really tired today; probably because we’ve had a day off from filming. If it were up to me I’d have spent the entire day in bed, but unfortunately our faintly ludicrous schedule means I'm back in the recording studio working on the final mixes of the music. No rest for Alison either who has spent the entire day injesting the rushes from the many hours of footage we've already shot. I have to confess to having had my fill of these compositions now! I’m unable to tell whether what I’m hearing is any good and I’ve long since lost the ability to make any informed decisions! They might be good. They might be bloody awful. My mind is now firmly planted in the land of images. It's one of the drawbacks of working both as a composer and a director. At a certain point I need to firmly shut one door and open the other. In all of the projects I've worked on like this before I've not yet been required to retrace my steps and return to the music, and my mind just won't deal with what it's being asked to do! Thankfully Hazel and Simon seem to have a good understanding about what's needed and what still needs to be done, so I am sort of leaving them to do their thing and just occasionally chipping in with my slightly addled thoughts.


Every time I stop, I just want to fall asleep, however. I so badly need a rest, but the next opportunity for one seems to be a week on Saturday, which at the moment seems to be a rather long way off! In the meantime, my skin is falling apart, I’m almost constantly dehydrated, my bones ache and I’m cramming more and more rubbish food into my body, just to get those little false rushes of energy as and when they feel neccessary..

I'm spending rather a lot of time obsessing about the weather, particularly for Saturday’s shoot. We’re currently expecting “heavy rain” in Leeds, which isn’t going to be much fun whilst we’re stuck on a roof with a rock band, trying to get epic shots of the city!!

But really all I want to do is sleep!

July 8th 1660 was a Sunday, and Pepys went to worship at Whitehall Chapel, writing, “here I heard very good music, the first time that ever I remember to have heard the organs and singing-men in surplices in my life.” Cromwell, had, as I wrote some time before in this blog, banished all organs from churches in the country, stating that they were “illegal in the worship of God.” Simultaneously, paintings, idolatry, Latin texts and by all accounts, anything that wasn’t simple whitewashed walls were also banned. After the restoration organ makers were in great demand and in fact it wasn’t until the early 19th Century that some parish churches found themselves with replacements. Thrilled as he might have been with the music, Pepys didn't enjoy the content of the sermon, which was toadying in the extreme to the King; “I did not like that Clergy should meddle with matters of state”. Quite right.

Shaking Hands

We’re driving back to Leeds in the most stunning, almost unnatural sunset. Bruised grey and maroon clouds are floating in front of strips of peachy orange and iridescent light blue. Today was all about York and started on the train station with singer, Steve Cassidy, who has a haunting voice that somehow reminds me of my Mother, perhaps because it’s reminiscent of those early 60s pop crooners she used to play to me as a child. His shot was the modern day version of our steam train thundering into Pickering station and I hope it will prove to be just as impressive.


We had a brief, slightly rainy sojourn on the York City walls before heading to the Minster to record and film the carillon. It was rather fun to see Hazel and Simon from the recording studio rubbing shoulders with my film crew and I took a picture of them all standing on the roof looking over the city.

There are few words to describe how thrilling it was to hear my music being performed by the carillon. It's such a grand, beautiful instrument, especially when played by John Ridgeway-Wood, who is an extraordinary musician. The whole experience became almost overwhelming and at the end of the first take, I had a little cry, which predictably was captured by the “making of” cameras, who by now must be rubbing their hands together with glee at my erratic and eccentric behaviour. After we'd finished recording, John, too confessed to having felt hugely emotional. There truly is something magical about all these musicians, from so many places and backgrounds, coming together and really giving it their absolute best. At the end of the day, John presented me with a beautiful book about the Minster Bells, which he’d signed with a charming message. It's the perfect momento of a perfect moment.

And the day just got better... In the middle of the afternoon, I fulfilled another one of my life’s ambitions by getting the chance to stick my hand out of an upstairs window on The Shambles and shake it with the person on the opposite side of the street. For readers who don’t know the significance of this slightly bizarre act, The Shambles is a medieval street in York, where the houses are so crooked, the two sides of the street bow towards one another and almost touch in the middle. I think I saw people shaking hands on Blue Peter or Watch as a child and always wanted to give it a go; hence my deciding to do a shot involving two trumpeters there.

In the early evening we went back to the Minster to film the Shepherd’s Brass Band and we finished with the most beautiful shot looking down on the band from the roof of the Minster, and then drifting off into a biblical looking sky.

July 7th 1660, and Pepys went to the Change and bought himself two prints of works by Rubens. The rest of the day was spent in the Navy Office, starting the lengthy process of creating an inventory of almost everything that existed in the building; goods, books, papers etc.

Wuthering Heights

Today was a testing day to say the least. The weather wasn’t exactly kind. It spitted with rain and the wind was strong. I guess on the bright side, there were no mudslides and no 'cellists floating away in freak flash floods, but there was a fair amount of hard-feeling and one or two little arguments bubbled up.

The morning started well, with one of my favourite performers, the harpist Fiona Katie Roberts, who I’ve said on many occasions feels like the heart and soul of this project. She appeared looking radiant in a big blue dress, with heather in her hair. We filmed her in her stomping ground, namely the bleak moors above Haworth, and for the occasion I wore amber flowers behind my ear and made myself a dandelion chain. I don’t really know why, but it felt somehow appropriate for the Wuthering Heights. It was a bit overcast, and some of the shots were looking slightly drab but it was here that I'd decided to film the symphony's final shot, so it became vital that we pulled out all the stops and found something remarkable. We used steady-cam and then set up a jib which enabled us to have the camera pull further and further away from Fiona until she was just little speck on a rugged hillside. It felt like an appropriately moving way to end the film; the sounds of the wind howling through her harp strings still echoing in our ears.

We transferred, rather late, to Howarth, where we filmed all sorts of seemingly random musicians, on the steep and picturesque high street in the middle of the town. We sat down in a pub for lunch but I detected that Alison was getting a bit anxious about time. As we walked back to the car park she pointed out that we absolutely HAD to keep on time so that we weren’t late for the Yorkshire Wind Ensemble, who’d suffered so much from our poor time-keeping in the recording studio process.

Unfortunately, when we reached the car park, we realised to our horror that we’d been clamped; both of our vehicles. We were about ten minutes late and the bastards had moved in like vultures. The car park in Haworth is famous for it. The BBC have even done pieces about it. The residents don’t like it. There are two red-faced men who sit in a little hut and they don’t care what anyone thinks about them. According to the people in the pub, they’ve even clamped the local district nurse! They know they’re skating on very thin ice and this makes them defensive and abusive, and when I tried to argue with them, I found myself subjected to a torrent of hideous homophobic remarks, the like of which I’ve not heard since the 1980s. Bizarrely, I think they were saying these things precisely because they thought I wasn't gay, which somehow made it even worse. They soon started to back down when I got right into one of their nasty red-faces and said; "are you being homophobic to a homosexual? Are you? Are you?" "No mate" he replied "I know lots of gays"... The use of gay as a noun implied this was probably not the case...

The shoot ended on Ovenden Moor, underneath the huge wind turbines. The Yorkshire Wind Ensemble were wonderfully well prepared, which made what could have been an awful end to the day, a great deal more bearable. The light was disappearing at a fast rate of knots, and I had to scrap just about every one of the shots I’d so carefully planned. We were thinking off the tops of our heads and creating shots based entirely on limited set-up times. Fortunately Keith the cameraman was on great form so we ended up with a few corkers; a stunning silhouette of the entire ensemble and a brilliant shot of the bassoonist against a bruised-looking sky. We were literally running from shot to shot, however and I'm sure every single member of the team is knackered tonight.

Pepys was also making music on this date 350 years ago. At the end of a busy day, he sat with William Howe in Montagu’s residence and the two of them extemporised songs in darkness; which feels very reminiscent of what Keith and I were doing tonight! And there was another striking similarity between my day and our hero's. Pepys went for a drink in the Half Moon pub, and the place was so rammed he couldn’t get served for half an hour. I spent a similar amount of time waiting to be served in a pub in Haworth. I’d like to say it was because the place was full, but sadly, for quite the opposite reason, the bargirl had gone outside for a fag... and probably done the weekly shop at the same time!

Go That Extra Mile

It’s been another day of unbroken sunshine. I’m getting browner and browner and keep wondering when all this good luck is going to run out. I suppose the only thing we're suffering from is slightly higher than average winds. This morning, the area around the Humber Bridge was particularly blustery; our poor pianist looked like she'd been fiddling with a Van de Graf generator. I made the same joke several times; "you'd pay thousands of pounds" I said "to get this effect at the Eurovision Song Contest" but sadly no one laughed. It was at that moment I realised for the first time in my life that Eurovision isn't neccessarily the cultural and political trendsetter that I'd always reckoned it to be.

We had a very unpleasant period today on the Hessle foreshore, just up from the Humber Bridge. We were trying to film the kids from the percussion section of Hull Youth Orchestra, but first health and safety, and then a series of technical disasters meant we slid way behind schedule, and shot a fair amount of unusable material. Unfortunately we were left without any form of playback and I was forced to conduct the players, with an ipod in my ear, instead of focussing on watching the pictures, or noticing what the players were doing. No doubt I’ll get into the edit and see a series of shots wrecked by people playing out of time, looking bored, or doing that crazy thing of flicking their eyes towards the camera self-consciously.

I wound myself into something of a tizzy, which wasn’t helped by a rather strange woman from BBC Humberside who seemed to be filming everything we were doing and kept appearing in our shots, and then asking me for interviews like the world was revoling around her work. The film crew from BBC4 were also milling about. They're following me wherever I go for a “making of” documentary. I think the director of said piece was rather hoping I'd have a full-on tantrum, but I find shouting embarrassing, so instead he had to make do with shots of me pathetically sitting on a beach eating a Macdonald’s Veggie burger which Alison thrust in my direction because she knows a lack of food makes me grumpy. After interviewing me about how despondent I was feeling, I caught them filming the Macdonald’s bag on my lap and noticed the slogan daubed across it; “go that extra mile...” So I went that extra mile, all the way to a shop in fact, to buy some extra water because Macdonald chips are saltier than the Dead Sea.

It’s very strange have a film crew popping up everywhere. I’m permanently wired for sound, so forget they’re there, until I’m swearing, or weeing, or buying orange squash in Scarborough...

Anyway, the negativity of the morning soon drifted away and we got stuck in to some really decent filming which culminated at Spurn Head in the late afternoon, where every shot seemed to get more beautiful. The sky went a shade of royal blue, the sun turned to golden syrup and every musician seemed somehow more prepared than the last. We filmed one sequence whilst paddling in the sea. It was what I call “point and shoot” filming. Stick the camera anywhere and the results are astonishing. I was hugely disappointed that we’d not managed to fit the boys from Circus Envy into the day as originally planned. As we left the area, the sea was beginning to shimmer and the light was turning a shade of amber. Sadly the lads are on holiday, and we have to wait until Saturday morning to revisit Spurn Head and discover weather God truly is smiling down on us. There were moments today when I felt as though something utterly unique, and truly wonderful was finally becoming possible. Perhaps if it chucks it down on Saturday, it’ll be because someone up there feels a few rainy shots would make the film even more magical.

We finished the day on Hull’s pier with members of the hysterical Hull Ukulele orchestra and the immensely talented Mambo Jambo. We filmed the latter in a series of understated shots behind the bar of the Minerva pub. A few extra lights gave the whole sequence a sort of timeless beauty and Frankie and Pete from the band shone like little drops of fire.

July 5th 1660 was the day when the city of London formally entertained the King, the Privy Council and all the members of the combined houses of Lords and Commons. The event took place at the Guildhall. There was, in Pepys’ words, “much pomp” which involved processions and all manner of street music and theatre.  Sadly it rained, and “being at White Hall, I saw the King, the Dukes, and all their attendants go forth in the rain to the City, and it bedraggled many a fine suit of clothes.” Fortunately, we had sunshine all day!

Living the life

I fell asleep at 8.30pm last night and slept all the way through to the morning. I was so tired. I’m not sure I’ve ever fallen asleep that early. Perhaps it's a sign of my getting old.

Today was another successful day. The morning felt a bit stop-starty; rather long breaks followed by sequences that we were forced to shoot in limited time. The weather forecast predicted light rain all day but we were blessed with almost unbroken sunshine.

The day started at Hillsborough tram stop with the Yorkshire Saxophone choir who are a highly talented bunch and looked fabulous against the sandstone buildings behind them, saxophones of all shapes and sizes glinting marvellously in the clean, early-morning light.

We then transferred to the Park Hill estate, and for those of you who’ve been to Sheffield, it's the rather controversial set of buildinbgs which sit on the hillside behind the train station. Many people hate it. I find it beautiful in a slightly brutal sort of way. My first visit to Sheffield was as a teenager. I came up to interview for the university and I remember seeing the estate looming above me, and feeling a mixture of terror and awe. I was from a little town in Northamptonshire. I’d never seen anything so large and Orwellian. It looked like a castle and couldn’t imagine what it might be used for.

We filmed a string quartet, and then a rapper, who peered down on us from a stairwell as tiny pieces of paper floated from above. It was one of those shots that just worked.

The early afternoon was about the Sheffield trams and we ended the day in the hamlet of High Bradfield with the Stannington Brass Band, who were just superb. The shots we filmed of them up there are extraordinary. Despite ridiculous gusts of wind, we managed to set up a jib, and I think we were all incredibly pleased we went that extra mile. Once again the camera was able to simply drift about in space. Cameraman Keith is fast turning into a legend!

I have to say, I'm happier at the moment than I've been in a long time. This really is the life.

A busy day for Pepys 350 years ago. He took a boat from Westminster to London Bridge, dropping off his wife at the Whitefriars Stairs, which were just East of the Temple. After a meeting, he went to the Navy Office on Seething Lane to take a look at the dwellings that formed part of the complex. Pepys’ new job potentially carried a “grace and favour” residence in one of them, and he was thrilled at the prospect, chirping that even the worse houses were “very good”.

A very real slice of life

It was a fine day of filming today, which stayed on schedule and was blessed with beautiful sunshine. It started at dawn at Rievaulx Abbey with the wonderful Ebor singers. I was hugely impressed by their professionalism and the way with which they threw themselves into the slightly bizarre visual world of my symphony. Keith shot some extremely impressive material. We used a jib and allowed the camera to float around in the sky and dive down on the choir from the very top of the abbey ruins.

We returned to Leeds to film sequences in Hyde Park and at the indoor market. I suppose my favourite shot was on a back-to-back terraced street where people still hang their washing out over the road. We were lucky enough to catch an elderly lady putting out her sheets, and Miles the violinist played in front of her. It felt like a very real slice of life in that particular corner of the city and I felt very privileged to be able to include it in our film.

The day ended with Michael the pianist in a sort of piano restoration centre. It was filled to the brim with dusty pianos and pieces of keboard and it made the perfect location for Michael, who plays such wonderfully old-school music. As we were setting up the shot, he moved from one piano to another, treating us to several standards; The Man I Love and Don’t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue; all played in his inimitable style. Fabulous. It also gave me a rather splendid idea for another composition; how does "Concerto for piano shop" sound? I'd write a piece of music that could be performed live by every piano in a piano shop...

Not a great deal happened in Pepys’ life 350 years ago. There was an extremely lengthy meeting at the Admiralty Office but Pepys still didn’t feel secure that the post he’d just been awarded would remain his in perpetuity. In fact, on this date, he paid someone L50, simply to go away and stop trying to claim the post for himself!