Thursday 15 January 2009

Recovering from a long and tiring day yesterday, spent at Ardkinglas recording Debussy on the wonderful 1928 New York Steinway A, for an episode of the forthcoming series of Skins. I picked up offline editor James Hughes from the station first thing in the morning and up the road we went, to find Calum and Cameron Malcolm waiting for us with some vintage Neumann valve mics already set up, and Angela ready with a hot water bottle to stop my hands from freezing up (‘I didn’t know what these were until I lived here’).  The piano sounded spectacular: occasionally I got so distracted listening to the fascinating way that low chords resonated, that I forgot to play the next bit.

I’m not exactly a natural Debussy pianist to begin with, and the added demands of playing to picture (with James keeping me right when I drifted out of sync with his editing) meant that the result isn’t exactly textbook pianism – there’s certainly the odd missing note, and some dodgy textural balance here and there – but it was lots of fun to be working with moving pictures in great detail: something I haven't really done since I was last regularly writing music for television 15 years ago. 

Calum’s technical multi-tasking skills were much in evidence as he traced a troublesome creak to the piano innards, and proceeded to take the action out in our lunch break, while I was heating up some soup in the pantry. James sacrificed a bit of one of his socks to make the repair …

We managed to get finished mid-evening just as the wind was getting up and beginning to howl down the huge chimney and rattle the windows (and as the sustain pedal started to develop a squeak), and I drove James back down to the airport through the gathering blizzards, keeping a safe distance behind the West Coast Motors bus whose driver I figured knew the road in the dark better than I did. He made the last flight south with 2 minutes to spare – a grand day out.

Today my right foot has been aching badly all day. I've been raking my brains trying to figure out how I can have injured it, and then I remembered that it was operating the damper pedal of a piano with great care for several hoursyesterday. Somehow I managed to limp to the framers to pick up our new James Kochalka painting to hang in the hall - you can see it featured in the final three seconds of this interview ...