Sent to Coventry

I went to Coventry today, the ancestral home of most of my family. I was there to meet Hamish at the Belgrade theatre. We talked about musicals, and the general lack of funding in theatre at the moment. Coventry has just been massively hit by another round of cuts. It's deeply depressing. No one can afford to commission or perform new musicals and no one in this country is taking responsibility for the development of composers and writers. What commissions there ARE usually come as a result of producers buying the rights to books and films, which of course inevitably leads to the watering down of passion. So all in all the meeting was a little bleak....

Far less bleak was my lunch afterwards with Siobhan from BBC Coventry and Warwickshire, who was the brains and braun behind Coventry Market: The Musical, which was a massive community musical film we made in 2008, featuring the shoppers and stall holders of Coventry's famous circular indoor market, which was built from the ashes of the city after the Second World War.

Siobhan was on great form and took me to a little vegetarian cafe in a dodgy-looking concrete jungle on the edge of the city centre. All the food on the menu was named after different actors. Shiv had a "Tortilda Swinton" and I had the "Ingrid Burgerman." When I first looked at the menu, I didn't realise we were in the land of food puns, and only did so as I said out loud, "what the hell is Soup Pollard?"

After lunch I went to Stoneleigh, a little village outside the city where my Grannie lived from when I was born to when she died about ten years ago now, I suppose. It's a stunning village, but it was all a little wind-swept today. Spring has not yet been declared in the Midlands. I parked up on the Main Street and ambled down to my Grannie's old house, which I was relieved to see still bore the name, High Beams, which my family gave it more than 40 years ago.

I walked down the lane to the river, which remains beautifully clear with bright green reeds undulating in the water like the tails of tropical fish. I stared into the water for some time, wondering how many times I'd stood on that particular spot as a child and in how many different weather conditions. I remember when the whole lane flooded and we had to walk along wooden raised walkways, which have long since disintegrated or been engulfed by cow parsley.

I walked across the meadow to the church, and stood for some time looking at my Grandparents' grave and feeling supremely emotional. I don't quite know why it affected me so badly this time. I suppose I was experiencing an emotional response to the way and speed that time passes. There are probably very few people left in the village these days who remember my Grandparents. I stared into the old house, with its new lamps and lovely leather sofas, and tried to remember what it looked like twenty or thirty years ago. The bubble wrap in the windows, the strange polished stone eggs, the high-backed, 1960s swivel chairs in the study which would have been so amazing for children who wanted to recreate blind auditions in The Voice.

I drove back home to London, listening to a debate on Radio 4 about Islam and the fact that large numbers of Muslims think that Armageddon is on its way. Apparently, the end of the world will be signified by in-fighting within Muslim sects and wars fought largely in Syria. (Familiar sounding?) The actual end is triggered by a Muslim army marching into Rome (bit random) and Jesus reappearing, ripping the cross in half, and telling everyone he was a Muslim all along. (Seriously!) So basically, ISIS are all behaving like c**ts because they genuinely think they're bringing about the end of the world, which is, you know, nice. I'm fast losing patience with that lot. Since they started tying gay men to chairs and lobbing them off buildings, I'm been thinking they need to be wiped off the face of the earth to enjoy the wrath of an eternity of nothingness. They're backward and violent and it's time to start getting tough with communities and individuals in this country who don't take enough responsibility for their own. Let them go to Syria. Why stop them? Just don't let them return.

I rehearsed the Fleet Singers again tonight. Get your diaries out. Our concert is on Sunday 22nd March, which would appear to be two weeks away! Someone had made absinthe-flavoured chocolate brownies for the interval refreshments, which were absolutely delicious, in a sort of heady way!

Portrait sixteen and goodbye-ee

It's been a day of meeting friends. Everyone needs a day like this from time to time...

Hilary came up to Highgate first thing and we walked through the woods up to Muswell Hill where we bought pastries before heading back via Parkland Walk with its Mrs Tiggywinklesque elevated views across the city.

It's always so lovely to see Hils. There was a time before she moved to Lewes and had little Jago, when we saw each other all the time and I miss our chats about music and singing and art.

We went down to Giraffe on the South Bank this afternoon for Ian's goodbye drinks. So many people were there: Abbie and Ian, Julie, Sam and Matt, Anthony, Shannon, Llio... We laughed a great deal, had some lovely food, wound Anthony up a treat and sang Goodbye-ee and lots of other First World War songs. In fact, at one point we sang in such glorious multi part harmony that the entire restaurant started clapping!

Highlight of the evening was undoubtedly taking Llio's portrait for the front cover of the Pepys Motet album. Llio sings the pivotal alto three track on all movements of the piece. The third alto sings almost constantly through the piece, and has a lot of prominent solo lines.

We set up a fabulous photograph in front of the Royal Festival Hall with a load of candles and lanterns. Anthony and Nathan shone torches onto Llio's face and Shannon dropped glitter in front of the camera for a little added campery. The results were dramatic and beautiful. Llio looked like Tori Amos; red hair glowing like the embers of a dying fire.

We drove Ian and Jem back to Friern Barnet at the end of the evening, vowing to see Ian again before he leaves next Saturday. Procrastination, or what? I genuinely don't want to say goodbye to him! None of us do.

We get to keep Jem for a few more weeks...

Brunch and daffodils

I received another wonderful email from Australia in the midst of the UKIP mayhem yesterday, which I found deeply moving. "Dear Ben, I watched "our gay wedding" here in Australia this week. Many thanks for sharing that part of your lives. It was an education for me..truly…and changed my views…to better ones. The basis of all human rights is ultimately love…and you demonstrated this wonderfully. So thank you. My best wishes to you and Nathan... people who point you towards a better view of truth/kindness are ultimately good friends… May you both be well and happy..live in peace and concord."

It is profoundly moving to know that our love has been partially responsible for an epiphany of this nature. The thought almost blows my mind, in fact. More excitingly there seems to be a growing number of people in Oz who are referencing our wedding whilst calling for equal marriage in Australia.

I cast my mind back a year to a time when we thought by doing the project we ran the risk of becoming national laughing stocks. I am so relieved that we were brave enough to do it.  A year on, we've been nominated for five major awards and moved many people in a country ten thousand miles away. Seems astonishing I'm out of work!!

Philippa sent me an early morning text this morning. I must have been awake when it arrived, because I heard the phone gently vibrating. I answered the text and got out of bed to go to the loo. When I got back in, Nathan was as warm as toast, and it struck me that there's actually very little that is more wonderful than the feeling of getting back into bed for a snuggle with a toasty warm partner!

I had brunch with Llio in Muswell Hill. I haven't seen her for a while, and she was looking fabulous. Rob Viola walked past the cafe, waved, and popped his head in, apparently just to say how cool Llio's hair looked! He was absolutely right of course: it's pillar box red and glows in sunlight. On a beautiful warm spring day like today, it glows big time! We spent our brunch buoying each other up. Both of us are writing and recording music in an era where no one seems to want to buy recorded music, so a lot of mutual support is required!

I walked back to Highgate through the woods which were full of silly, happy, bounding dogs and thronging with the sound of birdsong! The first daffodils are up as well.

From Highgate, I went to Kentish Town to rehearse the Fleet Singers. We made our way slowly, but surely through about half of the piece, and bits of it are beginning to sound really rather lovely.

There was a glorious sunset as I drove back to Highgate. As I walked up the steps to the front door of the flat, an aeroplane passed over, high in the sky. It was glowing blood red and was a curiously beautiful sight.

We heard this year's UK entry for Eurovision this evening, which is a fusion of Charleston music and trip hop. It's very Will i Am, and I rather like its vibe. I'm told the Eurovision fans are less convinced. I guess it all depends how well the performers perform the song live. I was horrified that the BBC didn't opt to unveil it on terrestrial telly. You had to press the red button for the big reveal (hopelessly inauspicious.) I was also horrified that they opted to interview the performers rather than the song writers. It is, after all, the Eurovision Song Contest. A contest for songs, not singers!

Photograph fifteen (and why I hate UKIP!)

My day started with a rather comic exchange with a chap called Owais Rajput who is standing for UKIP in the Bradford East constituency and who recently, and for no apparent reason, requested my friendship on Facebook. I woke up today to see that, as usual, he'd posted a lot of rambling nonsense on his wall about his party. What continually confuses and intrigues me, however, is that this particular UKIP member is an Asian man.

The bad idea bear which often sits on my left shoulder forced me to comment on the post. "Quick question. If you get elected for UKIP, at what stage will you have to deport yourself?" It was deliberately incendiary, but, as I pointed out in a later post (once the shit had really hit the fan), I was genuinely fascinated to know how a man of Asian origin could align himself to a party, the members of whom have proved themselves time and time again to be desperate bigots.

I then asked Mr Rajput what his personal - and his party's - stance on gay marriage was. I've asked UKIP people this question many times in the past and they always seem to fudge their answers in a rather sinister way. They usually end up telling me that it's not an interesting enough question to merit an answer. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Gay marriage was repealed in California after several years, so I should think it'll be a while before my community is out of the trees in that respect.

Mr Rajput's answer to me was astonishing. He told me that he could only answer my question after the process of "inductive approach" had taken place. He then said a lot of other things, mainly party jargon in incredibly badly written English which made me wonder if UKIP had actually encouraged an illiterate man to stand for parliament, largely, one assumes, so they could send out the message that they're not a party of racists.

I immediately looked up the meaning of "inductive approach" and it turns out that Mr Rajput was actually telling me he'd base his opinion on gay marriage on the results of a post-election local referendum! In fact, every opinion he had would be based on what local people told him through opinion groups and referenda. If only we could all be that flexible!

Of course no political party can practically be run like that. Referenda are expensive, and frankly, even if the majority of the good citizens of Bradford East are in favour of something it could well be that the rest of the nation, in their mini-referenda, feel rather differently. This "bottom up" politics is naive and completely impractical. What is Mr Rajput suggesting? That, if they don't approve of gay marriage, the citizens of Bradford can opt to make it an illegal practise in the city? Insane nonsense.

Of course the conversation thread rather quickly turned nasty, with a series of UKIP cronies joining the conversation;

"Why you choose gay marriage for your platform I suppose is cos you are gay. Well that's your business so don't impose it on the rest of us"

Rajput continued to have his ten pence worth and I started to get the very strong impression that he simply wasn't very bright;

"Benjamin, now you going to teach me, how to do politics in Bradford East? no you not, only my Bradford East people will dictate me through thr local working groups, definitely no dictations from outsiders."

(Seriously, this is what he wrote, I copied and pasted it from the thread... Is it not a little worrying that a man who can't string a proper sentence together has actually been chosen to stand for Parliament?)

I told him my business was done and that I no longer wished to waste my time talking to someone who refused to answer a very simple question. To which he replied;

"Benjamin, you sure your business done here? I wish but that is not the case, your business done and UKIP business started from here. Thanks provided us the business. UKIP knows only one business, how to serve local people of United Kingdom."

Horrifying...

The messages continued, with another Asian man from Bradford diving in and asking Mr Rajput to answer the very simple question I'd posed. Mr Rajput told us he was only prepared to answer our question once he'd been elected. He then wrote to me; "I won't take no dictation from you." Seriously! You couldn't make this stuff up!

The other man from Bradford continued, "Owais hasnt given an honest opinion. He cant. UKIP wont let him. Benjamin has asked a perfectly valid question. If he cant give his opinion or views how can he perform at hustings etc, and how can he sway the floating voter?"

Mr Rajput's response to this was short but sweet... "Keep dreaming"

Things turned even nastier when one of the UKIP cronies started spouting thinly veiled homophobia;

"A gay having a go at people because they have a different opinion to him 😂.Im not sure if it's ironic or hypoctical 😃" (emoticons included!)

Then the conversation took a remarkable turn to the surreal, with one of the cronies, who'd been quite brutal previously said;

"I respect gay peoples' rights to get married but I don't have to agree with it. After all it is now the law of the land. I have never been married and no regrets at all. I have my pets but all but one of my family bar one brother are dead."

And here's how the conversation then went;

Me: I'm genuinely sorry to hear that Pat. I hate to think of any one not having family around them. On the bright side you have a very fine looking dog, who makes me very envious

(I'd looked at his profile which showed the picture of a King Charles Spaniel, and, frankly, being rude to a man struggling through life like that felt pointless and cruel.)

Him: Well Benjamin 2cats and Polly are like family and keep me company so never feel lonely. Got my motorbike to get about. Thanks.

Me: What are the cats called?

Him: Punchy and Smuffa-Jane would you believe it?

He then sent me three pictures of the cats and the thread came to a close.

In the midst of all this arguing, I took a Pepys Motet portrait. This one was of Carmen, who sings soprano one on all six movements of the piece. And when I say soprano one, we're talking obscenely high notes. I think she sings a top E on the recording, which is about as high as Mozart'a infamous Queen of The Night goes. It sounds like whistling! It's brilliant!

I photographed Carmen in front of various pieces of graffiti in Shoreditch. This part of East London is renowned for its graffiti. It's where Banksy and all the famous street artists ply their trade and it's one of the only places in the capital where I think graffiti actually enhances the visual environment. In Pepys' day it would have been mostly fields. Shoreditch would have been a small village with a few coaching houses and a church on the way to Bethnal Green, the village where Pepys shipped all his belongings during the great fire of London.

I had a quick tea with Carmen and then went to Hackney City Farm to meet Philippa and talk about suggestions for a re-write of Brass. Just as I sat down, a child literally starting banging his fists down on the out of tune piano there. It was a shocking, heart-stopping noise, and Mummy wasn't nearly fast enough in making it stop. I think for a moment she thought what her child was doing was actually sweet. I wanted to bring the piano lid down on her child's hands to give him his first lesson in cause and effect.

We made a run for it and completed our meeting back in Shoreditch, stopping off en route at Philippa's house where her husband Dylan dropped a phone charger out of the window, in the process whipping his wife across the face with the cable. It would take me too long to explain why Philippa's husband was dropping a phone charger out of an upstairs window. Sometimes it's best not to ask with Philippa...

Still, the notes she gave me were good ones. Very good. Obviously I was a little intimidated. Rewriting anything can be a big slog, particularly something which has already been performed. I'm actually going to be cutting four whole roles from the show. It feels really odd to be thinking about cutting roles, but I have to keep telling myself that I'm not cutting the actors who played the roles, just the parts themselves in future productions. It's not that I'm cutting roles which were not performed well. On the contrary, one of the roles is going because the actor who played it was SO good, he made those who saw it think he was playing a larger role than he actually was!

I came home via Caledonian Road where I saw the huge floral shrine to the teenaged lad who was randomly stabbed there this week whilst riding his bike. Such a dreadful story. Killed because someone wanted to steel his bike. Everyone reading this will know I'm a bit of a bleeding heart liberal when it comes to criminals, but in this instance, I'd lock those bastards up and throw away the proverbial key.

70s number ones

I'm watching a programme about the best number ones of the 1970s which is reminding me quite what an epic decade the 70s was for music. We've had I Feel Love, Heart of Glass, Wuthering Heights, Bridge Over Troubled Water... These songs changed the sonic landscape of pop music like no songs have ever done since. People aren't really aware of how daring these songs were for their time, because they have been aped so many times since. The emotional intensity of Bridge Over Troubled Water is the stuff of legend. Personally speaking, it reminds me of my Mother, who used to sing it to me when I was a child.

Dancing Queen came second, predictably to Bohemian Rhapsody. Obviously I'd have loved ABBA to win, but I'm not sure you can argue with that particular result! Bo Rhap is the only song to have been number one in four separate years! What an astonishing factoid!

Today's been spent working ferociously; editing music and then speedily creating a last-minute pitch for a TV project, which I'm keeping my fingers firmly crossed about.

I went to the gym. I'm still not entirely sure I'm 100% over the illness I had pretty much throughout February, but I guess if you can run 6 km without dying, you can't really be that poorly!

On the verge of nervous breakdowns

After a tiring day of writing arrangements, formatting parts and running at the gym, Nathan and I decided to give ourselves a little treat. For two utterly broke individuals, that was probably only ever going to amount to a walk on the Heath or a chip supper from Toffs in Muswell Hill, until we remembered that the lovely Matt Lucas had given us theatre tokens for our 40th birthdays. An hour later, we jumped in the car, drove down to our secret road off the Strand with its free parking spaces, and bought tickets to see the musical version of Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

I'm ashamed to say that I haven't actually seen the original Almodóvar film, which is quite some admission for a man who loved All About My Mother so enormously. I think I've always been the partner of men who don't particularly like watching films with subtitles (yes, sadly that includes Nathan)!

The show was okay. Some things stood out. Tamsin Grieg is a fabulous actress and Haydn Gwynne absolutely stole the show with the most gloriously subtle, yet simultaneously over the top performance. I know her as a telly actress, so was rather astounded by her totes legit musical theatre chops, but Nathan, of course, knew her previous work in the West End, which included playing the original Miss Oolie in City of Angels.

The set was perhaps the most ghastly looking thing I've ever seen on a West End stage. It looked like a melamine flat pack from MFI, all white and lit with ludicrous primary colours. It offered nothing to the show. Nothing whatsoever. And in many instances it was a distracting eyesore.

The book and lyrics were good. The lyrics were excellent in places. Gwynne sings a divinely moving song about feeling invisible as an older woman which was beautifully structured. Sadly, the music did nothing but groove. It was all baselines and drum beats and not a lot of musical content, particularly in the realm of tunes, which had the effect of making everything seem a bit bland and non-dramatic. There were a few too many songs as well which seemed to rather come out of nowhere.

But overall, I applaud any musical which fills its stage with strong female roles, and after I'd accepted that everything looked a little cheap and sounded a little bland, I was able to sit back and enjoy what was being offered to me. Will it run and run, however? No.

Portraits 12, 13 and 14

My day started with a touch of tinnitus, which I could have done without. Sadly, the more I mention tinnitus in this blog, the more likely I am to receive emails offering me curious American remedies. I've genuinely no idea how that works. I mean, how do those bastards know my email address?

Today's been another day of photographing Pepys singers, starting with Rebecca Shanks, a soprano who has sung in every composition I've written for the Rebel Chorus in the last five years. Rebecca's involvement with the Pepys Motet goes all the way back to 2010. Long-term readers of this blog will recall that when I first put pen to metaphorical paper, I was in the process of trying to raise the finances to perform an even more ambitious version of the motet, which was actually scored for forty individual singers. In this initial incarnation, the singers split into eight choirs of five, each of whom represented a different aspect of Pepys' life. We had a gospel choir representing Pepys' family life, an opera chorus representing his brutal snobbishness and a folk choir singing passages in the diary which mention the often lively occurrences in the streets and theatres of 17th century London. Add to this a choir of students from Magdalene College, Cambridge (where Pepys studied) and a choir of Naval officers (to represent Pepys' job as a naval administrator) and you have an incredibly complicated and ambitious piece of music, the rehearsals for which sent me closer to the edge than perhaps any period of my life ever! Read back over blog entries from October 2010, and you'll be introduced to a man on the verge of nervous breakdown! On one occasion I remember rehearsing the folk choir in a flat in Vauxhall, before driving through the night in a terrible storm to Dartmouth in Devon, where I had a 10am rehearsal with the navy boys.

Still, the performance itself went incredibly well, despite the fact that the forty singers were actually singing together for the first time. We performed at St Olave's, the church where Pepys and his wife are buried and it was a visual and sonic feast. The folk singers dressed like pagans, the musical theatre choir came in their tuxes, the Magdalene college crew wore their gowns, and the navy officers set many hearts a flutter by arriving in full ceremonial uniform including swords. The last movement was performed "in the round" with the forty singers actually surrounding the audience. I'm told it was like medieval surround sound!

Rebecca sang in the early music choir in that particular performance and when it came to the recording she sang the third soprano line on all six movements. Today, I photographed her in a mixture of city locations with giant skyscrapers to represent the City which Pepys knew so well, but plainly wouldn't recognise if he were scooped up, great skirts, vests and all, and deposited in the 21st century.

I walked from the Gherkin to St Paul's, feeling my way through the City like a tourist without a map. The second portrait of the day was with the charming Scottish mezzo, Helen Stanley, who sang alto on four movements of the motet. I photographed her by the Millennium footbridge which links St Paul's to that other great London cathedral, the Tate Modern.

I'm one of the few lucky people who can actually claim to have been on that particular bridge on the day it opened; the day it bounced up and down like a trampoline! It was a curiously unsettling experience, which would even have made an old sea dog a little queasy. I actually think it would have been a bigger tourist destination had they allowed the bridge to keep its wobble, but I guess, no matter how much we were all assured at the time that it was perfectly safe, eventually the whole thing would have collapsed into the Thames, taking scores of bemused elderly people with it.

I had a cup of tea from a little Italian cafe which was so insanely strong it gave me the jitters all the way from the bridge to Borough.

I had osteopathy in Borough after working for a few hours in a cafe there. I read a newspaper in the waiting room, which, for the first time, made me understand why some people actively like the Tory Boris Johnson. He's apparently had a quite the showdown with Asim Qureshi, director of Cage (which campaigns against the US-led war on terror.) Qureshi claims that MI5 have to take a great deal of responsibility for the behaviour of the ghastly Jihadi John, whom they apparently harassed. Johnson tore into Qureshi with a tirade of abuse which, in my view, makes perfect sense; "if you are going to have an impact on the lives and the minds of young Muslims, you have to focus on what these people are doing wrong and not immediately start scattering blame around. You have got to focus on where they have got their lives wrong, the false choices they are making, the false understanding they have of Islam..." And I'm afraid I agree.

The third and last portrait was of Jana Sutherland, another stalwart of the Rebel Chorus, who sang in the musical theatre choir on the original forty-part version of the motet. I photographed her at Drury Lane, which is mentioned twice in the sections of the diary I have set to music, the first time, most hauntingly, in relation to the plague; "I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon their doors..." The second reference is far more jolly, and talks about milk maids dancing in the street, watched over by none other than Nell Gwynn, standing at her lodgings door in Drury Lane.

On my way to the tube I bumped into young Josh, the assistant director on Brass. He's in a young writers' group at the Soho Theatre, and was heading in the wrong direction, so I walked him to the theatre and we sat and nattered for an hour.

I went home via the new station at Tottenham Court Road where there's something horribly wrong with the escalators which were shrieking and screaming so much I thought my teeth were going to fall out. It was a truly hideous noise, which must be fixed for the sake of the collective sanity of the thousands of people who go up and down there on a daily basis!

Feet like stumps, I'm home again, feeling exhausted but upbeat. Let's hope the tinnitus doesn't haunt me tonight!