crusty

My voice has officially packed up on me. There's nothing left of it. It turns out that too much coughing and too much singing on a ragged throat makes your voice sound like Crusty the Clown!

I spent the day looking for work. I wrote to a million artistic directors and looked at a thousand jobs on the Guardian website, whilst juggling all sorts of other tasks, like prepping scores for the Man In The Straw Hat and chiseling away at A Symphony for Yorkshire, which I decided today was absolute bullshit! I even got my 'cello out of its case for five minutes and had a little scrape. It genuinely sounded like I was sawing wood. In fact, my 'cello sounded like my voice does this evening!

I was appalled at how many jobs in the Arts and Heritage section of the Guardian were for fundraising posts. They've got all sorts of fancy titles, but, based on what I saw today, it would seem that the only people who are actually getting paid good money in my industry are those who are fleecing money out of others to pay themselves! I'm astonished by how much money fundraisers in the arts are earning compared to the artists themselves. There's something extraordinarily messed up about that!

This evening I rehearsed the Fleet Singers again. We had a sectional with the tenors and bases and then a full rehearsal. I was particularly pleased with the altos. What a difference a week makes. Perhaps a few of them read this blog last week when I said I was a little disappointed with them, but I got the distinct impression that some of them had gone away and done their homework. When I was conducting, quite a number of them were staring up at me with big grins which told me they knew exactly what they were doing... or at least that they had the confidence to blag! Giving good face is the first rule of performance.

Portrait eleven

I took the eleventh portrait for the Pepys Motet album cover today. This one was with the lovely Nigel Pilkington, who sang tenor on all movements of the piece. Nigel is almost the dictionary definition of a polymath. He works as a voice over artist, but is also a trained lawyer, a sign language specialist and a speaker of an abnormal number of languages, the latest of which is Swedish. I keep meaning to introduce him to Brother Edward and Sascha. I'm sure they'd find a million things to talk about.

Nigel lives in the Barbican, and initially I thought I might take advantage of the location by taking his picture at the London Wall car park which is notable for one thing; deep underground, amongst the concrete pillars, a section of the original Roman London wall still stands. It's the most curious anomaly. It's a sizeable chunk of wall, about ten feet high and twenty feet long, and very obviously Roman with its line of red tiles half way up the stone work. It's so surreal to see it nestling down there entirely surrounded by 1960s concrete!

We actually decided not to photograph Nigel in front if it. I tried a few sample shots and couldn't get an angle which adequately displayed the bizarre juxtaposition of wall and car park.

We met Nigel on the street outside instead. It was a beautiful sunny day, but as we stood waiting for him, there was a light rain shower, which astounded us because there wasn't a cloud in the sky. We simply couldn't work out where the rain was coming from.

Nigel suggested we went to a public roof terrace with astonishing views over St Paul's Cathedral. It amazed me that the place existed. The city is full of all kinds of crazy nooks and crannies. You could live or work there for years and still be surprised.

We went from the city to Julie and Sam's house for Craft and Cake, which was remarkably well attended with about twelve crafters doing everything from double-knitted hearts, to Abbie, who was was knitting a three-dimensional fox's head! I did hair! That's going to be my craft from now on. I'm absolutely awful at it, but I'm willing to learn. I put Michelle's hair up in a beehive and Tina's into a neat little chignon. It strikes me that this could well be the gayest sentence I've ever written. I told everyone I was going to open up a salon. "What sort?" They asked. "A literary salon?" Yeah, yeah. Very funny...

We stayed behind afterwards and watched a film called Big Eyes whilst Tina knitted socks aggressively and Nathan continued to teach Julie how to double knit. Double knitting, for the uninitiated, is a form of knitting where two sides of a garment are created simultaneously. Most knitting has a "wrong side"; a side which the knitter doesn't want the world to see. Double knitting is reversible, which opens up all sorts of possibilities. It's also something of a science. Double knit patterns have to be incredibly carefully worked-out; which is one of the reason I suspect why Nathan is drawn to it.

Talk schmalk

I've sat on the sofa working all day today. On and on the arrangements of the Symphony for Yorkshire go. I'm bored rigid.

Nathan and I are plainly rather boring people. We never go out on a Saturday, in fact we rarely go out any night. A great deal of this is because Nathan so often works at the weekends, but it's also because we're both poor, neither of us drink that much and both of us hate noisy, crowded spaces! Perhaps we've become smug marrieds? I'm reminded of the Beautiful South song, We Are Each Other:

"There's no more little secrets we haven't yet disclosed,
We bore the living daylights of anyone too close,
And all our cards at Christmas are written to us both...
Count them up, who's got the most?"

I spent a great deal of time in the late afternoon talking to various people at Talk Talk about our intermittent wireless reception. First port of call was an utterly pointless series of conversations with call centres in New Delhi. It's impossible to say what I'm about to say without sounding ludicrously racist, but then again, we've been conditioned in the last twenty years into thinking that anything which remotely criticises practices involving ethnic minorities is bigoted.  But here's the deal. I think all call centres for British customers should be in the UK. There. I've said it.

Here's the main issue: People in Indian call centres are invariably not given the clout necessary to help customers with anything other than the most simplistic problems, regardless of how stressed the customer is getting. So there's always a limit to what can be achieved if you end up speaking to one...

There are also cultural differences. When someone in London talks to someone in Newcastle, they are likely to have shared points of reference, a shared sense of what is acceptable, and more capacity to bend the system in the process of standing up for their customers' rights.

There's also a formality to the language which some of the Indian call centre people employ, which can drive a caller up the wall. The bloke I spoke to today actually sounded like he was talking in riddles at one point. Why say it in one word when you can say it in nineteen? Today the chap actually said, "I humbly request," which might have been quite endearing had he not gone on to tell me that "the five fingers on one hand are not equal in size." I mean, what the hell does that mean?

Anyway. I had a little trump card up my sleeve, which is a number for an English office somewhere within Talk Talk which was given to me years ago when I brought an ombudsman in to complain about their appalling customer service. Whenever I call it, a bemused person asks how I got the number, but they always go out of their way to help...

So, when, after an hour of talking to New Delhi, I was still heading in ever-decreasing circles, I called the secret UK number, and, surprise surprise, within five minutes the problem had been escalated and, within half an hour, solved. Fairly ludicrous.

Nathan came home and we went for a walk around the block in the drizzle. We went through Queen's Wood, and gazed at the droplets of water hanging from the branches of the trees, backlit by lamplight. They looked like tiny LEDs behind a star cloth. Beautiful.

Photograph ten

A last minute decision saw me rushing into Oxford Circus today to take a quick photograph of Laura Cheetham, who sang soprano on all six movements of the Pepys Motet. We ended up opting to use the impressive timber-framed exterior of Liberty's department store as a back drop for the shot. I felt it looked suitably Pepysian despite the fact that it's a nineteenth century building masquerading as a sixteenth century one.

In order to get a splash of blue sky and the immense grandeur of the building, I ended up having to lie on my back to take the picture. It's amazing how many unnecessary tuts and mock sighs of astonishment you generate by lying on your back on a London pavement. I would have thought the majority of people have better things to worry about!

I was back in Highgate within an hour and a half and at the kitchen table working on A Symphony for Yorkshire. On and on it goes. I wonder sometimes if it will ever be done, and quite why it seems to be taking me this long, I've no idea. Perhaps it's because I've got nothing else to do.

We went down to Kentish Town at 6pm to meet Uncle Archie and Cat to discuss an ever-growing list of potential projects. Surely one of them will come to fruition? This waiting for gainful employment lark is like pulling teeth.

We ate pretzels and drank tea whilst Archie and Kat had a well-deserved end of week glass of wine. It was lovely to see them both. Dreaming about the future is fun!

We came home and watched Cucumber on Channel 4. Everyone's been talking about the most recent episode, so I tuned in with high hopes. Sadly it told the story of the least loveable of all the characters in the show, and did so in a series of yawn-worthy, badly-acted cliches, which disappointed me greatly. For the record, not all gay people are gurning, self-loathing, dysfunctional, emotionally aloof violent bastards who live in some weird Mancunian underworld. The ending was unnecessarily brutal. But why should that surprise me? It seems this entire series has done very little other than attempt to shock. The whole thing has left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.

Portraits 5-9

I slept for about ten hours last night, and woke up feeling a little better than I have been of late. Today promised to be rather epic, so I was relieved not to feel like a rinsed out dish cloth.

The purpose of today was to take another five... count them... five portraits for the front cover of the Pepys Motet CD, so I charged the camera batteries, grabbed a handful of Little Welsh Nathalie's beautiful placards and headed first to London's Pride, the epic St Pancras train station, which genuinely has to be one of the greatest stations in the world.

What they've done to save that place is genuinely amazing. This was the grotty barn of a building surrounded by old gas works where trains from Bedford and Wellingborough used to pull in. I sat as a teenager for many hours on various benches next to dirty-looking coffee kiosks drinking tea and feeding Mars Bars to pigeons. These days the entire place has been hollowed out. The Eurostar trains sit proudly alongside the longest champagne bar in Europe and the kiosks have been replaced by Carluccios, and Cafe Paul and Fortnam and Masons and scores of fancy little boutiques which announce to the rest of Europe that London means business. Two bronze statues peer over the hustle and bustle: Paul Day's giant meeting statue of two aquiline-nosed lovers fondly embracing and, appropriately, a statue of Sir John Betjeman, who loved this place.

The first photograph I took was of Joe Louis Robinson, who sang tenor on four of the Pepys movements. He's actually a little better known as a musical director, but he also has a charming light voice, which works very well in the mix. The Pepys Motet is an a'capella composition scored for twenty individual voices, each with a unique part, which means, at various stages, the twenty singers are all singing something entirely different. It is a highly complicated piece of music, which was almost impossible to record!

I photographed Joe at the Paul Day statue, and then again rubbing shoulders with Dear Sir John.

My second shoot of the day was in a rainy Greenwich, fortunately under cover, underground in fact, in the famous foot tunnel under the Thames. We actually filmed here, years ago, when I was working as the acting coach on the movie 28 Weeks Later. We were there for a whole day, but I don't remember much about it apart from climbing a lamp post somewhere near the tunnel, just to show off really. I used to be able to hitch my way up a rope or lamppost barefooted like a little monkey. I'm not sure I'd have the guts to do that now.

Our green room during the shoot was actually on the Cutty Sark; that famous old tea clipper in dry dock in Greenwich, which I'm told, for ten years, held the record for the shortest trip from London to Australia. There was a terrible fire a few years ago which nearly destroyed the ship, but fortunately, when it struck, most of its original wooden fixtures and fittings had been removed for renovation.

The Greenwich portrait was with Trevor Bowes, a professional operatic bass, who, like Joe, sang on four of the six motet movements. This evening he opens in Purcell's African Queen at English National Opera.

The Greenwich foot tunnel is a spooky sort of place, which smells of damp plaster. A lone double bass player was busking down there. It was a curious noise. A bowed double bass sounds a bit odd whoever's playing it; a curious blend of scrapy and robust, like a beginner 'cellist. For a few moments I even wondered if it was some sort of low saxophone or a tuba. The sound was reverberating through the tunnel in a most mysterious way. Anyway, it was a rather quirky accompaniment to our shoot, which I ended up rather liking. If you look carefully on all the pictures, the double bass is nestling proudly in the distance.

I took the DLR to Tower Gateway where I met Christopher Diffey, an operatic tenor who sings on all six movements of the piece. He's just off to Leeds to start rehearsals on a Jonathan Dove opera with Opera North, which actually opens at Covent Garden. I took his photo down on one of the Thames beaches by the Tower of London; an area I'm almost convinced would have been Pepys' alighting point for pretty much any river taxis he took whilst living at the Navy Offices near St Olave's Church. The tide had only just gone out, so everything was slippery and covered in algae and sludge. It was worth it. We stood underneath a wooden pier which provided some really interesting shadows and shapes against the murky brown water of the river.

I walked all the way from Tower Bridge to Moorgate to look at a potential location for a shoot on Sunday, then walked back to Bank and tubed it to Holborn before walking to Soho where I met the lovely Anthony Harris, a deeply theatrical and wonderful tenor who sang on all movements of the Pepys Motet. I photographed him outside a sex shop as a sort of nod to Pepys who was quite a randy bugger, and, if sex shops had existed in his day, would almost certainly have frequented them. As it was, Soho was only just being developed in his day. Previously it had been a hunting ground for the well-to-do. I'm told the word Soho was actually a hunting call.

Anthony and I had a lot of fun wondering around Soho, China Town, Piccadilly Circus, and then Soho again, where we sat outside a cafe drinking tea. I was determined to find him a husband, but my mission failed.

We met Nathan at his theatre and then walked up to Euston Square tube for the last shoot of the day. This one was with David Gregory who sang bass on all movements of the motet. I took photos of him staring into one of those curious warping convex circular mirrors you get on the underground. I'm never quite sure who they're for. They're usually on the stairs, one assumes so that you can see who's coming down as you're going up, but I'm not entirely sure they're necessary! They're cool to photograph though. I once took a shot of Tanita Tikaram staring into one of those. I used it for the inner sleeve of the London Requiem album.

I'm now in the bath. Shattered!

Wedding down under

What a difference a day makes! Yesterday night there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Today, everything's gone drizzly and murky, and I'm sweating in my duffle coat!

The newspapers this morning were filled with the story of the three missing East London teenagers who have gone to Syria to join ISIS. It's terribly sad that three young girls have felt the calling to do something which could ultimately make them so miserable, but at the same time, their absconding raises a number of serious issues...

It is clear to me now that many young British Muslim kids do not think of themselves as British. In fact, worse still, many think of Britain, the place where they live, as an enemy nation. I find myself struggling to do anything but assume that the majority of imams in British mosques are not doing enough to alleviate the situation. For me it is wholly unacceptable to live in a country whilst eschewing its values. If you want to be in the UK, you simply shouldn't be allowed to barricade yourself inside an inward-looking sub-community. If you want to take advantage of free trade, free speech, a relatively high standard of living and all the other trimmings which come from living in a Western nation, it is your duty to integrate. This means, amongst other things, that you have to learn English, you need to respect women and LGBT people, and you have to acknowledge that free speech means all British citizens have the freedom to poke fun at whatever or whomever they consider fair game. If you don't like these rules; head to another country. Just as those teenaged girls seem to have done.

I listened to a programme on Radio 4 which interviewed a member of the infamous Biradari in Bradford. The word Biradari means brotherhood in Persian, and in Pakistan, members of the Biradari are almost more important than politicians or religious figures. We're told that a Biradari exists in Bradford; a group of men who wield what many would describe as an unhealthy amount of power over the large Pakistani community in that particular city.

The man who was being interviewed was basically boasting that if he told the community to vote for a certain party, then that party would almost certainly be elected. It didn't work with George Galloway's Respect, who were actually elected based on an open opposition to the Biradari, but it certainly raises deeply uncomfortable questions about corruption and the potential for corruption among minority groups within the UK. There was a genuine sense that, at least in Bradford, the Biradari were operating the strings of whichever politician-puppet they had  chosen to support. This, of course, begs a question; who turns a blind eye in gratitude, and for what?

I'm afraid to say that the man being interviewed, though claiming to have been in the UK since the 1960s when he was a boy, was utterly unintelligible. He had the thickest Pakistani accent, which, for someone who effectively grew up here is an indication, possibly, that he'd not made integration into the UK a high priority, and that it's possible to live entirely within a mono-cultural ethnic community within the UK.

It's been quite a busy day today. Whilst working on Brass with PK in Worthing, a lot of activity was happening on Our Gay Wedding: The Musical, which was being broadcast in Australia. There were lots of lovely messages on Facebook and Twitter, and a nice review in the Sydney Morning Herald:

"If ever there was a compelling argument for legalising same-sex marriage, this is it. If only every wedding were as passionate, heartfelt and thoroughly entertaining as that of composer Benjamin Till and actor Nathan Taylor, who got married in Britain on March 29, 2014, the first day that same-sex marriage became legal in England and Wales. With an emotional introduction by narrator Stephen Fry, this is a hilarious and brilliantly penned musical about 21st-century love rights..."

Simultaneously news came through that the show has received it's fifth award nomination. This time for a prestigious Royal Television Society Award in the Best Arts Programme category. We're up against Grayson Perry with his wonderful "Who Are You?" series. I'd almost be offended if we beat him! His show fits the brief of the award so much better than ours...

Our trouble, of course, is that Our Gay Wedding: The Musical defies genre. Is it a documentary? A musical? Structured reality? An art film? A political statement? Perhaps unsurprisingly we've had nominations for music, entertainment, innovation, TV moment of the year, and now art...

I, of course, am still no closer to finding my next job! My mate Matt always used to say that a career in the arts alternates between taking a step forward and consolidating the ground you've covered. I'm not really very good at consolidation!

No Man's Land

I've been trying to organise more Pepys photo shoots in any spare time I've had today. Frankly, it's a little like trying to herd kittens! I'm attempting to find locations and times which mean no one has to go out of their way to meet me, but pretty much every person who's requested a slot so far has subsequently cancelled, leaving me scrabbling around to fill their space with people who haven't yet been photographed! You'd think people didn't actually want to be on the front cover of a CD! I've decided to instigate a "two cancellations and you're out" policy. Or in this case, "two cancellations and you're replaced by a balloon, a charming view of London, or, frankly, someone who fancies being on the album cover twice." Once in a fabulous disguise! Rebel Chorus members be warned! Be very warned!

It's freezing cold today. I walked from PK's house to West Worthing station and actually started panicking. It doesn't help that my charming cold is still hanging around like a fag hag at a gay orgy. My lips are cracking, I have a dry tickly cough and my shoulders ache. Mind you, a friend of mine tweeted earlier that his Monday morning had started with an injection in his eyeball, so I'm rather counting my blessings!

Our Gay Wedding: The Musical airs on Australian telly at 9.30pm tonight. That's 9.30pm Australian time, which I think must mean it's already tomorrow down under, and that 9.30pm at night there might be when I'm walking to the station in Hove tomorrow morning. I recently learned that some places - like certain areas in India - have time zones which encompass half hour differences. Mumbai, for example, is five and a half hours in front of us. How ludicrous is that? If you're prepared to split hairs like that, why not go for 16 minutes difference. I'm going to propose that for the Scilly Isles or other silly isles.

We've been working on the Brass soundtrack all day today and kicked things off with No Man's Land, the final number in the show, and something of a mega-track which includes a sequence where half the cast go over the top. We have to listen to every section in isolation whilst working out what needs to be done with it. There are approaching sixty performers on the recording, so you can imagine how painstaking the process of polishing them can be! We spend a lot of time making judgment calls. Occasionally an individual performer might have made a bit of a mess of a sequence where other players were also being recorded. Do we try to bury their mic in the mix? Or do we cut all the musicians who were simultaneously playing? It sounds a bit mercenary, but sadly with a recording, the out of tune notes never go away! There are also a number of instances where less is actually more. A delicate vocal can be strangled by too much orchestration, so sometimes we cut back so that something more subtle and beautiful can reach the light. You've got to kill your daisies if you want your grass to grow. That and other gardening metaphors...

I'm not a gardener. Well not a downhill one anyway!