Thursday 28th February, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wunderbar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do we get these days back?

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

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

And so to bed. 

Never grow up

Nathan finally arrived home at about 1am yesterday, after waiting for the AA for a full four hours. Unfortunately, and probably necessarily, the single female drivers take priority, so if you're a bloke, you'll probably wait a great deal longer, particularly if you've managed to crawl your way to a lay-by. The clutch-less car was deposited at the Kwik Fit garage in Kentish Town, and the breakdown truck driver kindly dropped Nathan back home afterwards, which apparently isn't AA policy: they'd rather leave you at a dodgy garage in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

The saga turned into a farce this morning when Kwik Fit announced they didn't fix clutches and that our car would need to be instantly removed from the forecourt or they’d be forced to have it towed away. According to Kwik Fit, the AA is perfectly aware of their policy on broken clutches, and should never have left the car with them. The situation became ludicrous when the AA claimed it was now our responsibility to have the car towed to a more appropriate garage. Their policy, they told Nathan, is to only allow one tow per breakdown.  Nathan eventually sorted things out but everything happened with terrible grace, which is deeply disappointing. I would have thought the AA ought to be used to dealing with worried drivers, and would at least feign compassion.

I left the house about ten minutes after I should have done and found myself running late all day as a result. It was well beyond rush hour  when I arrived at Highgate tube but I still found myself pressed up against a man who looked like a cockatiel and a woman who smelt of Marmite in a ridiculously crowded tube which was being "regulated", a process which seemed to involve a great deal of waiting on platforms. Meanwhile, something ghastly was happening to the deodorant under my right arm which had started to feel like honey. Sticky armpits are about as nasty a way to start a day as it gets, with the possible exception of waking up and finding a dead person in your bed on Christmas morning, or discovering you pitched your tent in the middle of a river. Oddly, both of these things have happened to people I've met, which forces me to somewhat downgrade my comment about sticky arm pits.

I spent much of the day in White City speaking to more extraordinary people with astonishing tales to tell. It's always when you least expect it that a story pops out which knocks you sideways. I won't elaborate. You'll have to wait to see the film!

I came home and had tea and cake with Fiona and lovely Vicky 'cello at Jackson's Lane. We talked about grown-up things like houses and children in a completely un-grown-up sort of way. I have no intention of ever growing up, and don’t see much evidence of many of my friends doing so either. It would be nice to own a house, however. One day...

Poverty

I woke up this morning feeling like death warmed up. I hadn’t slept nearly long enough the night before, and was awoken in the night by a curious alarm and flashing light coming from under the curtains in the bedroom. Unbeknownst to me, Nathan had taken possession of some kind of smart phone, which had been given to him in rehearsals as lost property. He’d very kindly decided to take it home and charge it up to find out who it belonged to, but what he didn’t realise is that it was set to ring some kind of bizarre wake-up alarm at shit o’clock in the morning. The thing made me jump out of my skin and in my half-sleeping state I couldn’t work out how to switch it off. I took a look at it earlier actually, and still don't know. It seemed to stop of its own accord, but went off again some ten minutes later, freaking me out all over again. I wanted to throw it at a wall like an alarm clock in a cartoon.

I feel rather like I’ve wasted today. I’ve been working, but at a lethargic kind of pace. I’m in a No-man’s-land between commissions and can’t start writing the White City musical until we’ve found all our contributors in another few weeks. I’ve just put the final touches to the latest draft of the Pepys Motet, and need to turn my attention now to the Four Colours songs, but have that “standing on the edge of a diving board” feeling, where the thought of jumping off and getting embroiled in yet another world of tiny dots on a page is not exactly thrilling. Of course, it’s fine once I’ve started. I just need to take the plunge.

Nathan has just phoned to say that the car’s broken down, which is about the last thing we could do with right now. He’s stuck in a lay-by near the M25, somewhere close to Weybridge, and is terribly hungry. The AA say they might be as long as two hours. Apparently the clutch has stopped working, which sounds horribly expensive and what neither of us has right now is money; certainly not the sort of money it might cost to repair our car. I can’t begin to imagine what kind of a knock-on effect this is going to have. Still, I know of so many people who are having it much worse at the moment, so there’s sod all point in complaining. We all had the option of studying maths at school and going into banking! I don’t think I’d be any happier with lots of money anyhow. I’d just be worrying about a different set of problems. The wealthiest people I know are undoubtedly the most miserable.

 

Incidentally, can someone tell me what a "classically trained" chef is? I'm often described as a classically trained composer, but surely all composers have learnt a classical instrument at some point, even if it's just the recorder? Would anyone call themselves an "un-classically trained" composer? I remember hearing about a bloke who wrote musicals, once, who made a big thing about the fact that he didn't read music. Music was, according to him, "too constraining." I just laughed. That's like a poet saying they don't know how to hold a pen.

Committee

We paid Julie and Carol a surprise visit last night and sat up until 3am watching the Oscars with them in Lewisham. We left before the best actress fell flat on her face whilst collecting her award, and missed Barbra Streisand and Adele, which I was sorry about, but sleep was beckoning. We did see Shirley Bassey, however, and applauded her wildly. She's almost 80 and can still chest a C! Legendary. 

Of course, when you go to bed at 3.30am, you wake up feeling exhausted and somewhat disorientated and I had a day of meetings at the MU to attend. We were trying to think of ways to encourage some of the larger funding arts organisations in this country to invest in recordings. It's so important these days for composers to have recordings of their music; particularly as the art of score reading seems to have passed into legend. The music industry is changing all the time and it's our duty as the MU writers' committee to keep on top of things. 

We were given fancy sandwiches and boxes of fruit for lunch, which I slightly overdid.  I have an intolerance to kiwi fruit and melon, and after chowing down on a whole plate of the latter, my throat started to feel very itchy and my voice started sounded curiously silky. Fortunately Fiona was on hand with an antihistamine, but this is definitely an allergy I need to watch. I think avoiding melon and kiwi for the last few years has possibly exacerbated the problem.

From the MU in Oval, we went to Soho, and sat in my favourite spot, downstairs at Leon on Old Compton Street where Nathan met us for a bite to eat. He's just cast on another sock. Another masterpiece, no doubt. 

Quiz!

It’s been a ridiculously quiet Sunday, and it strikes me that I’ve spoken to no one all day, apart from a rather curious lady in the gym. Nathan has been rehearsing a show and got up preposterously early to do so. I lay, like Lady Muck, in bed for most of the morning. I did a bit of writing and then got sucked into a Carry On film; something about Henry VIII. They’re all the same, but it made a pleasant enough distraction.

I went to the gym and met a woman in the steam room with a face full of shampoo bubbles. Who shampoos their hair in a steam room? She was obviously in a great deal of pain because the bubbles were dripping into her eyes and was running towards the shower. She returned to the steam room some two minutes later, and apologised for her behaviour; “there was something in my eye. It felt like shampoo,” she said rather quizzically. FELT like shampoo? Her face was literally covered in bubbles. Surely she could remember putting that much shampoo in her hair before getting in the steam room? It’s not like shampoo remains in a latent state in one’s hair, waiting to turn into sea foam the moment it senses moisture!  And furthermore, if it wasn’t shampoo, what on earth was it? I was horrified.

I came home from the gym and sent out a load of emails about our music quiz. A date for your diaries: Saturday April 27^th, 2013. Nathan and I are writing a quiz to raise some funds for the Rebel Chorus’ recording of Four Colours, which is going to be released for the Kaleidoscope Trust. It’s very important to me that every penny which the recording makes is able to go to the charity, so we need to raise about £600 to pay for a specialist recording studio where the choir can all sing with headphones on.

The quiz promises to be a rather genteel occasion. It’s an afternoon event, right next to Hampstead Heath, which means that people can spend the morning walking their dogs and the evening doing whatever they might feel like doing. The quiz will be accompanied by tea and fine cake. What more could anyone want?

To reserve a place contact Nathan@nathantaylor.co.uk. Bring a team, or come on your own. We will allocate you a seat on a table with like-minded souls.