Adele

Our feet feel like little tree stumps! During the course of the day we must have walked twenty or more miles; up and down the sidewalks of Manhattan, usually in a diagonal direction to avoid waiting at pedestrian crossings for too long. We have been as far west as 10th Avenue, as far East as Lexington, north to 50th, and south to 4th Street. I'm pleased we walked everywhere because we've also eaten a huge amount of food, largely because we miscalculated our timings and ended up promising to eat with everyone we met today!

First port of call was brunch with Ian. Brunch for me in New York is always an omelette with fried potatoes and rye bread toast with blueberry jam. Ian and Nathan both appeared to be eating sweet things like pancakes with bacon strewn on top, which seems an odd combination to me, but I'm told it works.

Ian walked us through Washington Square Gardens where a busker was playing an actual grand piano! He must make a fortune if it's worth shipping a huge instrument like that into a park. You've also got to be fairly confident about the weather to do that sort of stunt. One rain shower and your piano is wrecked. He didn't need to worry today. It's unseasonably warm and the sun has shone permanently.

We met Cindy in the early afternoon and she took us for a wonderful walk around the village. We saw her beautiful apartment on McDougal, sat in cafes, went to second hand record shops searching for ABBA singles and then had lunch in a veggie restaurant. I learned that the Yanks don't use the word "squizz" to mean look. The man in the record shop didn't know what to say when I asked if I could have a squizz at his ABBA collection! I also learned that New York is full of practising psychics.

A lot of cafes, bars and shops have closed since I was last here, which made me sad, particularly when I discovered they'd closed due to rent rises.

We took the subway up to Midtown for the late afternoon and met Christopher Sieber out of the matinee of Matilda, where he's playing Trunchball. We sat in another cafe and essentially watched him eating whilst catching up on about three years of chatter before heading back down to the village again.

We met Jem in a piano bar called Duplex, where the waiters sing show tunes and a big old tattooed bear plays the piano. New York, and possibly the whole of America, has gone Adele crazy. She's releasing her much-anticipated album, 25, this week, and is doing the rounds over here. In fact, I think she's in New York today. They LOVE her. And actually, one of the waitresses in the piano bar opted to sing the song Hello, which created a real moment, with all the punters joining in with the choruses. Oddly, and for some bizarre reason, I suddenly felt incredibly proud to be British...

We went from Duplex to an Italian Restaurant on Bleecker where I had a salad. As we arrived, a crazy light installation was happening in Father Demo Square which involved a giant light switch, which members of the public could turn on and off. The switch triggered a million fairy lights attached to the trees around the square, but also lights attached to about fifty people who were in frozen tableau poses. When the lights went off, they moved, and froze again when the lights came back on. It was a curiously alluring sight.

We walked home. Forty blocks. I have to sleep.

So good they named it twice

I seem to be writing this blog entry on a trans-Atlantic flight. Turns out we’re sitting in the worst seats on the plane. To my right is the toilet. People are queueing in the aisle next to me. I have to keep leaning over to close the door. When we were eating, someone made a very horrible smell! As if that weren’t bad enough, the row behind us is for the people who have “paid for extra leg room” which means there’s a sort of wide aisle by the emergency exits where people feel the need to congregate. The people who have paid for the leg room are getting very shirty at the people who are trying to walk across the plane in the space where, one assumes, they feel their enormously long legs should be. I don’t really think they have a right to be shirty. They may have paid for extra leg room, but I didn’t pay for the screaming child they brought with them and I’m keeping my angry mouth very firmly buttoned! 

We had pretty bad turbulence at one point. I say pretty bad. I’m sure I’ve experienced worse. In fact, on my way back from Greece once, the aeroplane dropped hundreds of feet in a few seconds, everyone’s dinner flew everywhere and an air hostess hit the ceiling with her head and was taken off the plane in a neck brace! Fun times! But today’s turbulence was horrifying. I’m not a great flier at the best of times, and, obviously, after Paris, I’m rather jumpier than normal, but this turbulence was accompanied by the endless sobs and wails of children across the plane, which made it incredibly distressing. The bloke behind us (the rich one with the long legs) decided to entirely ignore his screaming child, so it simply screamed louder and longer. When he eventually picked it up to give it a bit of attention, he decided to hold it just above my head. It was like a hovering harpy, which immediately triggered an attack of tinnitus. Just what the doctor ordered. 

So we’re off to New York. Yay! We haven’t been here for too many years. My very close friend Sharon has a young lad whom I’ve never met and, when we were last here, Ground Zero was… well, Ground Zero. I understand it’s a fabulous shimmering tall building these days, which I’ve no doubt we’ll be able to see from everywhere on Manhattan. I’ve heard the journey to the top of the building is well-worth the effort (even for a man with staggering vertigo), so, if I’m feeling brave, we’ll probably do that. 

We are excited about our trip. We have an obscene amount of theatre to see. Many friends out here are currently in many shows. We get to catch up with Cindy, Ian and Jem, Christopher and Kevin, Derek and Lesley and, of course Sharon and her crew. We get to hang out in the village, stroll along the High Line, sing in piano bars, have brunches of french toast, omelettes and fried potatoes sitting in 60s style booths, eat cup cakes in coffee shops and see those beautiful, ostentatious lights of Broadway. As the plane gets closer to our destination I’m allowing myself to feel a little more excited. The hideous thought of flying will always prevent me from actually looking forward to a holiday until I’m about to land! 

…

We arrived in Manhattan at about 7pm New York time and I immediately received word from my bank that they’d frozen my card on account of “fraudulent activity.” This is the third time this has happened in as many months. So there I was, in my hotel room, speaking to someone called “Warren” in an Indian call centre, begging to have my card unfrozen so that I could get some money out. It’s a fairly ludicrous situation but it appears to be mostly sorted.

We’re staying on the East Side in the Midtown area, so went to Times Square for a little wander this evening. If anything the place is even brighter than it was when I last visited. There are new walls of light with huge advertisements for theatre shows, perfumes and Hershey chocolate bars almost everywhere you look. There’s also a large presence of armed police, all of whom carry machine guns, one assumes to show Americans that they don’t need to worry about their theatres being attacked by extremists and to show the rest of the world that America won’t be fucked with. There’s a very crazy juxtaposition between them and the street artists on stilts, dressed as minions and the Statue of Liberty, having their pictures taken with excited children. Americans seem to be able to ignore people holding guns. I was drawn to them like a moth to a flame, and then instantly repelled after realising that if I stood anywhere near them I would be caught in the cross fire if there was a shoot out. 

We had a slice of pizza in a cruddy cafe somewhere around 9th Avenue, and then swung back into the theatre district, where we found Ian lurking in the foyer of the Helen Hayes Theatre where he’s working on the production of Dames At Sea. We whisked him off for a catch up and a slice of apple cake in a nearby cafe, bought some melatonin from an all night chemist, and… well, I guess it’s time to go to bed. My clock informs me it’s 5am in the UK. No wonder my eyes are itching! 

Kitchen Impossible

We're currently watching "Kitchen Impossible with Michel Roux Junior", which, baring its ghastly title, is an incredibly compelling programme. It follows the fortunes of a group of young people with physical and learning disabilities ranging from Tourette's to Down's Syndrome via all shades of autism. The aim of the show is to train the young people in the skills which might give them a shot at a job in the culinary industry.

The most distressing story in the show belongs to a young lad called Dan who lost his sight a few months ago as a result of diabetes. It's astonishingly upsetting to watch him trying to cope with his new situation. He exudes sadness. Even the other young people give the impression that they feel he's ended up with the rough end of the stick. They try to look after him, but plainly none of them can look after themselves.

The comedy aspect of the programme is universally provided by a girl called Sophie with Tourette's, who, during Michel Roux's opening pep talk suddenly shouted "Michel, can I lick your face?" When she was finally offered a job at the end of the series, she said, "yes please. I quit!" Brilliant telly. I've howled with laughter. I've wept...

We've been writing all day, whilst tidying the house in preparation for our holiday which starts tomorrow and couldn't come at a better time because we're both rinsed out I tell you. Rinsed. Why is it that we feel the need to tidy a house for a period of non-residential activity? I stuck a load of bleach down the loo before chucking the bottle away in a bin bag which Nathan took out with him as we left the house this evening. Sadly it must have got on the wrong side of the liner because it's splashed all over his trousers and ruined them entirely.

Anyway, we're currently working on an incredibly rude song for the secret project, which, once we'd got the tone and gist of the lyric sorted, offered us a bit of much-needed comic relief. It's the big solo song for the one cast member in the show we knew well before the project started rehearsals, and we sincerely hope she's not going to be too shocked by its content!

Later this evening, we watched a show about First Dates, which featured a pair of waiters discussing two mega-haired hipsters who were eating a meal together. The most perfect description of hipsters emerged from one of the waiter's mouths: "It's like someone's taken a rainbow and dragged it through the mud!"

Recorders

I took a last-minute decision this morning to jump in the car and drive to Thaxted where I was reliably informed my brother and brother-in-law were spending the day.

I'm glad I did. It was a much-needed tonic after another sleepless stress-filled night. We spent a great deal of time looking into our familial history online. Edward has managed to track one branch of my mother's side back to 17th Century America! It's not often it goes that way round! How many times have you heard an American tracking their family back to 17th Britain!?

It turns out that there's a heck of a lot of Welsh blood on my Mum's side as well as my Dad's, so, as I've always suspected, if you cut me in half, I'd bleed red, white and green!

We took ourselves to a wine bar called Recorders for lunch. I'm rather surprised we've not been there before. It has a good ambience (lots of exposed beams), friendly staff, a wonderful menu - tonnes of veggie food - and omelettes which are light and fluffy like soufflés. Better still, they were playing ABBA on the stereo... And not just the big hits. We heard all sorts of obscure tracks: He Is Your Brother, Hasta Mañana, The Day Before You Came, Head Over Heals, Eagle...

Each of the songs seemed to trigger a childhood memory. Playing records in my bedroom as kids, dancing to Honey Honey in the sitting room... The lyrics seemed to have extra poignance today for some reason as well. It's funny, you can travel the globe and have the most extraordinary life, but your siblings are the only people who share the memories of formative experiences. That seemed very apparent today.

I left Thaxted after Strictly It Takes Two and zipped back through gales to London. I haven't driven out of Thaxted on a still night recently, which means the conditions haven't been right to witness the crazy hovering band of ghostly smoke you sometimes find on a hair-pin bend on the edge of the town. We saw it a month or so ago, and I'd love to see it again so that I can get out of the car and explore it properly.

We came home and edited our film for the Eurovision entry, discovering to our chagrin that even though the deadline is Friday it can take up to 72 hours to be sent the details of how to submit a song once you've registered interest. I sincerely hope this doesn't scupper us in any way. Life can be awfully complicated sometimes can't it?

Eurovision Thunder

After a morning of work on the mystery project, Nathan and I set sail through a rainstorm for Sonica Studios in Clapham, which is, after Julian's studio, the place in the world where I've recorded the most music. I've done sessions for all sorts of projects there, from the Busker Symphony to parts of the London Requiem and the whole of the Pepys Motet. It's a true home from home. Apprentice fans will recognise the studio's name as the location where this year's contestants recorded children's story books.

Today we were recording vocals for our Eurovision Song Contest entry. And I can reveal that the vocalist who breathed wonderful life into our song was young Lauren Samuels, the lead actress in Bend It Like Beckham in the West End and an all round good egg. She's probably best known for reaching the last three in the BBC TV search to find a Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. You remember the show? Each week one of the potential Dorothy's got carted off in a hot air balloon singing Somewhere over the Rainbow. Camp. Beyond. Words!

It turns out that Lauren is actually from Nuneaton, which makes us practically brother and sister. Her step Dad lives in the street where my Dad was brought up, and her accent is instantly recognisable (and genuine music) to my ears.

Of course she was brilliant. And not just brilliant vocally, but friendly, charming, funny, low-maintenance and completely unfazed by the fact that entry requirements dictate she had to be filmed singing live at the microphone.

The entire session was done and dusted in an hour and the music was whisked off to Julian by some virtual magic and mixed this evening. We've just heard the results and they sound epic! I couldn't be happier. Nathan is currently sweating and swearing whilst editing the film together. Poor lamb has a cold which is making things very difficult.

Speaking of the London Requiem, (which I mentioned very briefly at the start of this blogpost), if you go onto You Tube and search for the film of Agnus Dei from the London Requiem, you'll find a new comment which says (in caps), "why was this London Requiem event not given any publicity and I saw nothing about it anywhere until three years later when I found an entry in the book 'Bizarre London' by David Long?" Fame at last! I'm not sure I've been mentioned in a book before...

Whilst we're on You Tube, I'm more than a little happy to report that my film, Tyne and Wear Metro: The Musical has recently passed 100,000 views on You Tube. Adele I am not, but I'm fairly chuffed with that figure!

Bermondsey biscuits

Fiona and I have just been to a very pleasant gig at a former biscuit factory down in Bermondsey. The material we were listening to was written by Stef Olsdal from the band Placebo. It was essentially electronica with a prominently featured a string quartet, the 'cellist of whom was actually playing my 'cello. The players had come from Spain, and, to avoid her having to take her instrument on an Easy Jet flight, Stef asked around to see if anyone in London could lend her one. I stepped into the breach and am proud to say the instrument sounded very nice, although the girl playing it said she'd found it a little hard to play because the bridge is really high. It suddenly struck me that I might have been a much more dextrous 'cellist in my youth had I sorted this particular feature out!

The band performed in front of a wall of film projections, which, at one point featured rather compelling images of buildings and bridges being demolished. I'd rather like to watch a building being exploded like that in the flesh. There's something incredibly dramatic about the way they implode, although, there's tragedy there as well. The tattered curtains flapping in the broken windows of a condemned building tell a million stories.

Stef made a moving tribute to those who had been killed in Paris, some of whom he knew personally. Shivers.

Bermondsey is a weird and slightly eerie part of town. Fiona said she'd heard someone getting off the tube and turning to her friend to ask "are we still in London?" The place is full of imposing council blocks and dark railway arches. I was a little relieved to get out of there if I'm honest.

We're watching the X Factor results show. I have three observations.

1) Nick Grimshaw needs to stop going on about how much he hates musical theatre. He never misses an opportunity to say something facile about how acts shouldn't do this and that because it makes them "look like they're in a musical."

2) Girl singers shouldn't tap their fingers on their microphones whilst singing - especially when it's not in time with the music. The Sugababes used to do it and it irritated me then.

3) Modern flame-haired bleety "singer" Jess Glynne should not be mistaken for 1970s Rock God Jeff Lynne.

So what do we do?

I kept hearing horrifying stories from Paris today and then going online to see if there was more information available but not quite being able to look at what was there. It's genuinely difficult to know what to say. When people start being attacked for listening to music, watching football and sitting in cafes then I no longer understand the world. I certainly don't understand the ludicrous people who feel the need to make comments like "if you thought Paris was bad, imagine what it feels like to live on the West Bank." The Paris attacks were on the fringes of my world. The theatre massacre, for example, happened in a venue Fiona has played in three times. Some of the people shot were people she knows.

Stef from the band Placebo came to borrow my 'cello this morning and was telling me that the fans of the band who were playing in the theatre when the gunmen stormed in, were, in many cases, also fans of his band.

...And then you start to wonder what theatre they'd choose if the same thing happened in London? The Kentish Town forum? The National Theatre? The Shaftesbury, where Nathan works on the box office...?

I genuinely can't get my head around what has happened. Two thoughts are currently flying about in my brain: Firstly, that we have to carry on as usual. We must continue to make art. We must continue to go to the theatre. We have to or our industry will die. Frankly, if someone takes me out whilst I'm in a theatre, then so be it. I'll die doing the thing I've lived for.

The second thing which I've started to wonder is whether the Muslim community itself needs to stand up to be counted. It's no longer enough for religious leaders to simply send written messages which say "we condemn this." They need to march. They need to irradiate radical preaching so that young Muslim people don't think it's okay to do this sort of thing. I realise a lot of Muslim people are scared of their elders and scared of raising their heads above the parapet, but unless they do, we are lost. I'm somewhat sad to report that very few if any of my Muslim contacts on Facebook are displaying solidarity symbols on their profiles. And, of course, why should they? I'm not... But then again, there could well be hideous retaliations against Muslim people after Paris and I worry that if the Muslim community doesn't scream "not in our name" vociferously and angrily, then people will feel justified in their bigotry. But then, that's just one view, which comes out of a man with very little understanding of what the hell is going on in the world at the moment.

Speaking of bigotry, we watched Strictly Come Dancing tonight and were thrilled to see homophobe Jamelia in the bottom two for the fourth time running, which must be some sort of record. Of course there was a fabulous irony attached to her dancing to A Little Respect, not just because it's a song which was written by a gay man, but because Andy Bell, its writer, sang it at our wedding. Our gay wedding. One of the gay weddings that Jamelia doesn't approve of. I didn't see the dance of course. I spooled through it both times so have no idea if the woman can dance or not but she looked absolutely awful in her bright pink dress. Like someone who'd done a smash and grab in a charity shop.