Saturday 3 March 2012

on the train back to Glasgow – worth the extra £15 to sit in first class
About a week ago I was rehearsing in Alasdair Roberts’s kitchen with Stevie Jones and Mairi Morrison, which was rather joyous: I’d taken a harmonium and some of Stefan’s cakes. Alex Neilson and Alistair Caplin joined us later at soundcheck: note Alex calmly reading the Guardian in the photo below.  Once we’d got the sound sorted, the gig was fun, and the seriously hot backstage area was made more comfortable afterwards when we shared the bottle of champagne that Mairi had stashed in the fridge.  It tastes even better from a Sigg water bottle. Don’t forget to buy the album.

I’m very pleased to make a brief appearance in Philip Tagg’s diary of his ranting tour (‘ranting’ is not a criticism, sometimes it’s necessary).

It’s been a non-Steinway piano week for me, firstly with Roy O’Neil’s triumph in getting the 1844 Broadwood restrung and ready for Ronald Brautigam’s concert on Tuesday.  Ronald was on devastating form, the piano sounded gorgeous, and we all ended up in the pub. As Ronald said, ‘today just gets better and better’.

Then on Thursday I tackled Haydn and Schetky on the McNulty with Kathy Fuge.  Ronald had expressed some jealousy at getting to play Haydn Canzonettas (‘I get tingles now just thinking about it’) and sure enough it was enormous fun, even if I enjoyed the rehearsal much more than the concert. My usual fortepiano-related stress was multiplied in this case by ‘student observers stress’, but we finished with an encore of Shirley and Dolly Collins’s All Things Are Quite Silent, and for a couple of minutes all things really were. We must do more soon.

Then an early start yesterday for the train to London and RAK studios, its lovely vintage gear and equally lovely staff: a proper old-school recording studio, with record company people dropping by, an assistant engineer to make the tea, a recreation room with table tennis and a pool table, and Paolo Nutini in Studio 1 downstairs. I got the string arrangement for Rae’s song put into Sibelius on the train, and will now have to rework it tomorrow morning before the overdub session, in response to Rae’s blistering performance that’s now committed to magnetic and/or optical media (‘tape’ is easier to say).  Susie asked me to take Jeremy the dinosaur on a day trip, so here are some of his souvenir photos.

I thought I’d spend the day in the corner taking notes, but I ended up playing bass, glockenspiel, a bit of piano, and then Tim let me do some melodica and backing vocals on his song for episode 9 too. It was a day filled with lots of generous and efficient musicians, and special mention to exec producer Bryan Elsley whose direction to me before going down to play piano was ‘you are Willie Nelson’s drug dealer’. I think I know what he meant, but I’m not sure.

Completely unrelated to all of this, here is some excellent advice from Robert Fripp’s diary on contracts, worth quoting in full.

The contract has been sent by the Commissioning Editor, of the US university press interested in my writing, under The Twenty Minute Rule: if I can’t read a contract written in English, understand 95% of it, in twenty minutes, I tear it up. And on occasion, return the pieces to the person who presented it.