Madame Galina's Doings Diary

I Got It In The Neck

For my It’s Not Fair blog.

E-mails sent at early morn:

"How could you praise other actors and not me?”

“I have the hide of a rhinoceros but please don’t use me as a platform for your weird hang-ups”

“You have taken the shine off all my brave efforts.”

I grovelled and took offline what had given offence.

I’ve put it back on again now. It’s my blog. And my hang-ups may be weird, but they’re mine.

Let's take the girl who read some of her writing aloud and unasked. Perhaps it’s an old-schoolism and out of date, but I believe that if an artist attends the performance of a colleague, nobody needs to know that they’re there. They shouldn’t pull focus in the foyer, at the stage door, in the Stalls Circle ladies loo - Heather Pearl, you know who you are! - or out front. My mother was terrible in this respect, singing along at my father’s gigs from a table near the stage.

"Singing along?" my father shouts, "moo-ing along, you mean!"

Both my parents were singers.

“And I’ve said it before” – my mother - “but I’ll say it again: it’s sad that you inherited your vocal cords from your father’s side of the family and not from mine. Vocal cords that could only ever have taken him singing his Country And Western round the pubs and the clubs and the folk festivals and what have yous.”

It’s a lottery, singing. It all comes down to the quality of two flaps of skin straddling your wind-pipe. My mother’s flaps were Fortnum and Mason, my father’s Quicksave, apparently.

My mother

“My father, your grandfather, was adopted. His real family surname was James. Never knew his blood mother’s first name. Except she was famous in Wales as the soloist for Madame Clara Novello-Davies (mother of the late, great Ivor) who had a choir. No-one knows what happened to her. There was talk of a fire or of a trip to make her lights in New York, and she never got there. As a girl, I was taken to see her brother, Caradog Gareth. Worked for the water board over at Maesteg, he did. Had a house right in the middle of a terrace. Opened the door to me and he knew straight away who I was, except that she, his sister, had the flaming red hair and I had the jet black. And we went in and he took me over to the piano and played the hymn and I sang and he said: “And there’s the voice” and shut the lid. No more needed”.

And what happened?

“First setback was when I was fourteen and my family refused to let me have the good shoes to compete with in the Eisteddfod. The talk was that I would have easily won the cup and gone international overnight. My mother said it wasn’t my turn, it was one of my brothers’s. I forget which of them exactly. But Vic was playing football and could have gone in his boots, which he only would have changed into anyway. John was only going to watch him, anything on his feet would have done. Dave was in London, out of foot-shot completely. Donald was getting married - who would have been looking at him? Would it have killed them the once? And in the third row but one in the marquee for the competition I saw the man who discovered Stuart Burrowes. There I was singing He Was Despised in boots with laces that didn’t match. There went my lights I should have had.”

The second major set back to her singing career was me being born. After a flourish of Rossini's Nacqui All’Affano - aka Knackering Your Fanny - she'll say,

“There. That's the voice could have taken me to the top of the operatic tree.”

“If”, says my nan on that side of the family, “she’d ever come down off the cross long enough to do anything about it.”

“Lost all the support under my diaphragm giving birth to you, though, Iestyn. Practically prolapsed me, you did."

When she's off on this one, the party line is that Gareth, my older brother, slipped out like an eel mid-cadenza during an avalanche of job offers that for some reason or other she didn’t accept. At all other times, the truth outs: he took seventy-three hours and was an arse-first breech presentation wearing his umbilical cord as a scarf.

"Back previous to your birth, Iestyn, I could have moved the ironing board with my support muscles. Lost all that. Eleven pounds six you were. My floaty e’s in Rest In The Lord didn’t stand a chance. No wonder you were nearly born in the corridor”.

Now, I’m not saying I was fat, but when her waters broke flood warnings were issued across three counties.

And my nan on that side said, "Talking of diaphragms, when your mother went to have one fitted after you were born, it was the same circumference as the wrong end of a bleach-boil bucket, so no wonder your father started chasing that woman from up Caerphilly way with the mobile home."

“Your father had it easy", mum's off again. "He had shoes, and his singing teacher played for the local concert party, which is how he came to have his first break when they were on the big show in Cardiff and he got spotted by the man who booked for the Nashville Rooms.”

The concert party was The Magnificent Seven. One: the name isn’t terribly imaginative. Two: after a ballooning accident over Merthyr, there were five of them. Dad was originally in the chorus, but his three cord Slim Whitman tribute set was the only thing ready to go on when soprano Florrie Evans got given the bird at a gig in Tiger Bay.

“Miles off form she was”, my father remembers, “and on it she was no Maria Callas, mind. Doing the Miserere from Il Trovatore, straight after Neddy the comedian with his routine about having to share a bed with his eight brothers and sisters, and three of them wet the bed, so when his mother asked which end he wanted to top and tail he asked for the shallow end. Tenor, Bernard, from Tredegar, walked in at the back and through them all sitting at the tables with the candles stuck in the bottles, that everyone’s keeping a close eye on. Not the fire risk, mind, like you’d think, but because there was a couple of bob to be had back off them at the corner shop. And Bernard was singing:

Dawn over rosy mountain
Love through me like a fountain

‘And Florrie, flatter than the testicle that caught in the mangle, sang,

I am assailed
By a horrible voice

And the crowd were all shouting back:

”You’re not the bloody only one, love. Bugger off back to Bargoed”.

‘Gwen, her sister at the piano, made a dash mid-diminished seventh cord, caught her, helped her off just in time, and they pushed me on for a solo spot. Went down tidy. Over the moon I was when they asked me to do another one at the next gig. RAF St. Athens, it was. Sadly, it got cancelled cos the camp mascot, a billy goat called Bryn, refused to get out of the bath again”.

This was from an interview he gave in 1965 to Country News, the trade rag for sequin and tassle jacketed yodelleurs everywhere. A plug for his residency at The Nashville Rooms in West Kensington.

Dad and I going back to the B and B after a gig in Portsmouth

Two couples, imagine, arrive at the Nashville Rooms at seven for the show at eight. Carrying plastic carrier bags, they make for the loos. Manager Charlie Stephenson (think Sid James with a wire-wool’d face) sees them and stops talking to a regular known as the Duchess in the snug.

“Piles of poop, ain’t done the signs”.

The two couples are onto this and won’t go into the loos.

Charlie, singing The Time Waltz, mediates with the blue tac. He hides Men under Braves, Women under Squaws.

“Have I got the weeks right?”

He has. Next week the stand-in signs will say Cowpokes and Cowgirls.

The couples change out of Dolcis and BHS and glumph thwock back through the toilet door. The caged mynah bird that joined Charlie singing The Time Waltz stops on two-and to advise them to mind their arses. Tonight, Matthew, they are going to be Mountain Stream, Moonshadow, Passing Peace Pipe and Long Battle Fought Brave - AKA, during the pissed row with Passing Peace Pipe just shy of last orders: Short Pulling Of Hair Run Away From.

Don’t call them Alan, Derek, Pam and Liz. They can tomahawk.

“Real suede?” calls Jane, Charlie’s daughter, from behind the bar.

“No”, answers Mountain Stream, checking for knicker coverage, “cheesecloth dyed in tea”.

Jane mule-flaps upstairs with a half bottle of Moët starting the mynah bird singing again as she goes. Time Waltz, la da da di da.

It’s Passing Peace Pipe’s first round.

“How! Saloon Keeper”, he tells Charlie with stop sign hand.

“How…do”.

“We come in peace for licquor”.

“Welcome you that come in peace”, while he’s thinking, “Do we have to?”

“We would like two of that licquor” – pointing to the Carlsberg tap, “one of that licquor” – the gin optic – “and one of that” – the vodka optic.

“With juice of sun-going-down-colour fruit”.

Charlie tries and fails with a poem on do they want ice and a slice? Passing Peace Pipe smiles and offers,

”Ah, you wish to know if we require tomahawk’d fragments of Mountain God’s cot blanket three days climb up Blue Ridge Mountains and of fruit that is colour of corn ripe in blessing of laughing Sun God not in shadow of passing buffalo in afternoon prairie light”.

Good to get that clear. They do.

As Passing Peace Pipe crosses plain back to gathering outside wigwam Charlie whispers his thanks to godblimey that Moonshadow is on diet again.

“Otherwise we’d have been here all f-ing night with the bar snacks, asking Big Chief Crone Mother to bless us from her cooking pot, and fertility dancing and wah wah wah wah wahing up and down in front of the crisps and the nuts”.

He employs four extra bar staff for these Count-ry nights as it is.

More of them are arriving now. Changing clothes and names.

“We come in covered wagon”. Ford Cortina.

“We come on stage coach”. The number 27.

“We come on mule train”. By rail. And some Brave is now buffeting his head with a drinks tray.

Dad is in the wings playing with the confederate pistol and holster he got mail order from Kansas. Mum is there. She plays bad company member to his good. He has always said nobody but you is bothered by your status, so don’t bother anyone else with it. Mum bothered on his behalf.

“Need anything, Terry?” says Charlie, putting his head round the door.

“No”, says my father.

“New carpet curtain throughout back here would be nice”, says my mother.

“Everything all right, then?”

“Aye”, says my father.

“How can it be?” says my mother, “God only knows what Iestyn is up to with the baby sitter. Been one thing after another he have since he was born. Croop at eighteen months, rushed into intensive care, could only be handled with gloves through holes in the glass, ward sister who nursed him ended up winning Nurse Of The Year…”

I upset mum with my first show. I told this story, but said she sent Sister Claudette a letter telling her not to interfere next time.

“Fell down the stairs at two and a half, lying there looking like an over played with action man”.

She would update and add to her true me-stories over the years.

“At five we took him to see Bambi in Streatham, had to carry him out when they shot Bambi’s mother”.

“Aged eight he pleaded with us to let him look after Pipkin, the school rabbit. Had asthma all over it. And it was the beginning of the summer holidays and we couldn’t take it back as no-one was manning the school. Six weeks of him sounding like Terry’s grandmother’s pug wheezing into an empty yoghurt pot”.

“Sensitive skin aged nine, he developed. Couldn’t go out of the house from hotter than May onwards without I had to cover every inch of him in Calamine”.

“Let him go on his own with Robert Martin to the circus on Hammersmith Green and he got run over”.

“Aged twelve to fourteen we were sending him to educational psychologists on the bus – which he never sat at the front of – every six months or so. Miss Potter, his deputy head, said he had forgotten how to learn, he spent so much of his time being lippy to his teachers. Philip my friend with the Marks and Spencers cardigan fetish thought it was because he was gay. And as for his school reports. Sewing lessons don’t need quite the amount of screaming he does in mine, Mrs. Clossick. Irrelevant in maths no matter what he says to sit at the back singing the song about the Inch Worm, Mr. Smith. Never fails to cause a commotion in art when the class are at the paint desk mixing their pallets, Miss Amzah”.

Just before eight o’clock, back in 1965 at the Nashville Rooms, mum goes out front to get noticed at her table.

“My wife is here, I hear”, Dad will say between songs, when she has oo’d along with the melody like a menopausal heifer quite long enough, thank you.

But her piece de resistance came with Mr. and Mrs Zephyr. Telepathy act. Mrs sat onstage blindfold. Mr went into the audience.

“I am coming among you, and ask that you give me objects that you have about your person. Then, I shall transmit an image of whatever object you give me telepathically from my mind to the mind of my wife.”

“It was a code, of course”, dad remembers. “Not obvious, like “Get this right, dear”, being be a pen. Or “Take your time, dear”, a watch. But still it was a code. And of course, there’s a limit to the kind of stuff people are going to take out with them to the theatre.”

At a variety night in Luton, my mother beckoned Mr. Zephyr over and handed him a tin of Kitekat.

“But I thought they could really do it! How was I to know it was a code?”

Legend says Mr. Zephyr called out:

”You’ll be the cat’s whiskas, I hear, if you get this one, dear”.

The stage is a small world and dad got fewer bookings. He and mum had a fight that ended when he held her head underwater in the kitchen sink with the post Sunday lunch soak. In the don’t you believe it calm after they talked, she came upstairs full Sue Ellen going on, blinking and clutching at me, gravy like a wonky corsage on her left shoulder.

So, is it any wonder that I have a hang up about decorous front of house behaviour? Or that that when I was taken aged eighteen months to the informal crèche run by Aunty Daisy I thought: thank Bambi’s mother for that. There has been a mistake. Those Welsh nutters aren’t my real parents. This lovely Lily Of The Valley smelling lady, who plays me The Lonely Goatherd whenever I want, who pretends that Cod Liver Oil grows in that tub on her window sill, and who lets me eat mince straight out of the frying pan – she’s my mother.

At picking up time, I refused to leave.

“Why do I have to come home with you? What did I do? I haven’t bitten the lady, I haven’t said “f**k” or “c**t”, and I haven’t done do-do's in my hand and hidden it anywhere.”

Oh, but I did later…

Snippet...

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Life's Not Fair...

Miss Behave, aka Amy The Swordswallower, star of La Clique and lots more besides, has asked me to be in her 2008 Edinburgh extravaganza.

“I want your strongest ten to twelve minutes. It’ll be a true Variety night, and none of this bandying around of buzzwords like Burlesque and Vaudeville.”

I said yes, left her with the niceties, and got out The Bible: the notebook containing On Doing Edinburgh, by Lizzie Roper: actor, voice over genius, character comic and erstwhile producer of our double-hander Ballet Who?!

I did my first Edinburgh when I was already in my thirties, so well in line with Roper Chapter One Verse One:

“Don’t be an eighteen-year-old going up before you’ve been getting changed in the toilets and ignored in grotty pubs for at least three or four years. That’s just pissing money away and lowering the tone. What’s the latest calculation? It would take something like twelve years, six months and two days to watch all the shows back to back. So the less eighteen year olds wasting everyone’s time with cack, the better.”

She had a lot to say besides.

“From the minute you decide on doing Edinburgh, you are always, always on duty. You have to see every situation as potential to get bums on seats from there on in. This is, of course, if you’re not going up there for an adventure holiday of showing off plus alcohol, barbecue crisps and kebabs. And by kebabs, Iestyn, I mean you. What was all that shit you promised yourself?”

When in Edinburgh I will eat five fruits and vegetables a day.

I will flyer.

I will rest before the show.

I will drink sparingly.

I will get eight hours sleep a night.

“Actually, you did one of the things on that list: you flyered…”

Lizzie also didn’t think it was terribly on duty of me to sleep with a Canadian because I was so pissed I thought he said he worked a lot in TV, whereas what he actually said was that he worked a lot as a TV.

Not that she wouldn’t advise you to “sleep with anyone who might be of use.”

If they want you to. And they really can be of use.

“Go to the opening event at your venue. Make sure you meet everyone, ask what they’re in, tell them what you’re in. If at all possible go and see all the shows at your venue, and make sure the performers know you went. If they come to see you, then you are duty-bound to return the compliment.”

“Bum”, I said to Lizzie before we started our show one night, “the cast from that New Highlands Writing play with the lead character that only speaks through her violin are out front…”

“Well, Iestyn, it could be a lot worse. Supergirlie are in our venue, remember. Let’s go on our knees that they don’t come and see us. We’ll go and see that play tomorrow.”

As a duty, understood. But I’m getting a bit pissed off of late at people trying to get me to go and see them perform and buffeting my if I want to I will stance.

“When are you coming? Shall I see if there’s a staff offer? When exactly do you get back from Berlin? Well, if you touch down at four-twenty, get through customs say by five, you can still get to the theatre…”

Not all of these demands are being made by friends in lead roles, either. My mate that's trying to make it an an actor, was being so insistent and aggressive, I wouldn't risk being left alone with him, afraid he was going to Rohypnol me and I’d wake to find myself tied to a folding chair in a Suffolk field with him about to "appear" on(made of orange-crates) stage as confused noise within.

Sam Hodges, entrepreneur extraordinaire, started the High Tide New Writing Festival this year. On Good Friday, I headlined a cabaret and comedy night for him as part of the inaugural weekend.

On duty in the foyer was Mark Richards, The Voice Beautiful, literary adviser to the festival. I was getting up to speed with him and his, when a girl wearing what Mrs. Pooter's idea of a titty top might be bounced up and took an A4 pad out of a carrier bag.

"Listen to this", she said.

She read us some lesbian porn and bounced off again.

"Was that a foyer event?" I asked Mark.

I had a great gig. Even falling off a double-pirouette and onto my arse, only dented my hip and not my enjoyment. Until I went into shock later on.

When I was scanning the audience for potential Solors, many fingers were pointing at the heckly bowler-hatted chap in the front row whose beer I had already confiscated. When he was onstage in the light, I recognised him. Geoff Breton!!!

He was heartbreaking as Ben in The Rotters’ Club on the BBC, and a perfect (even in those pants!) Nick in What The Butler Saw at the Criterion. He’s obviously done a lot of ballet before, too. And he was determined never to let Galina have the last word.

On the clapometer, he got not much more than “ometer”, but I wasn’t letting him get away. He was a fairytale stooge. Quick witted, mouthy, pas de chat-ing irrelevantly. He joins Taps (Um Qasar) and Reggie (Al Amara) as one of the three Scarf Skit Solor Supremes.

http://www.thestage.co.uk/images/pics/8786.jpg
Follow this link to see what I mean about the pants...

I feel for Geoff; and for Christopher Harper, who shone at the festival in a comic sketch called Assembly. They’re outstanding talents. But so are squillions of actors. Being, as the Liverpool Post says, “Part panto dame, part white-face clown, part stand-up – has to be the result of a drunken one-night stand between Tommy Cooper and Margot Fonteyn” there are far fewer of me for me to compete with.

The High Tide Festival was beautifully produced: print, publicity, front of house: all on the money – yet none of this can guarantee Geoff and Christopher the continued and, indeed, meatier success that they deserve. Whereas a soprano that I came across during one of the most heinously ditzy artistic endeavours that I have ever been lucky enough from the getting of comic material point of view to witness recently had a big splash at the Met in New York, replacing Karita Mattila in Fidelio.

WHAT? I know...

Back in March 2004, Maria (see Look What I Did, Mum and Wasted Sympathy) said, “I’ve formed a singers’ support group, and called it Vocalese. It’s a double pun on singing being easy and on a technical exercise…”.

Otherwise known as a singers’ joke. Like this one from my time at the Royal Opera House.

“What’s on tonight?”

“Death In Venice, madam”.

“Pardon?” “

“Death In Venice”.

“Come again?”

“Death in Venice!!!”

Do you see what they did there? Deaf In Venice.

“And why, Iestyn”, Maria went on, “don’t you just come along to a Vocalese and see if its worthwhile for you and your needs. Our next meeting’s at Sîan and Dave’s. And you’ll like what’s going on with them. He had a number one in the eighties, and has been clever so since with investments. He can give Sîan the lifestyle we all crave: Egytian Cotton throws, plasma screen TV, no children. And I’ll say this to you, as it is for the others: it’s up to you to make sure you walk out of there after the meeting having got out of it what you envisaged before hand. There is something that you and you alone can offer us…”

There was. My piano accompaniments for everyclittingone else in the group.

Sîan opened the door to me with a “hello” that started somewhere around Top C and got sillier and sillier. She was dressed in the soprano uniform of pink sweater over white cotton trousers, her hair was clipped back behind her ears, and she had a bottle of water grafted onto her hand. I looked about me as she led the way into the music room. Dave had clearly spent a lot of his time post eighties recording session restoring fireplaces and cornice work.

“Yes, and all the windows and re-sashed,” Sian said, when I commented on how great it was to see original features.

Dave wandered in with a beer. He wore a black denim suit over a white t-shirt and cowboy boots. He said three or four times how totally, absolutely supportive of Sîan he was in everything she did, and how he was enriched by the wads of integrity people brought to Vocalese. Then he slunk off upstairs, and we could hear him throughout the meeting shouting at the football.

More people arrived, whooping with opera laughter. Sian served herbal tea (I was dying for a gin and tonic) with spice-free nachos (ditto some Bombay Mix.)

A woman came and stood so close she was almost inside me, holding out her hand to be shaken. Her face was like proving dough with granary bits stuck in as features, she had Enid Blyton hair, and she was dressed in a prison uniform accessorised with a treble clef broach.

“I’m Helen”, she said. “And what can I find to tell you about myself? I’m relatively new to Vocalese. I suffered from aphonia for seven months last year because of a previously suppressed family trauma. I’m a high mezzo, and a lesbian.”

When the meeting had been called to order, we had apologies for absence. Claire. She was much better, but still not able to be with Vocalese, she was sorry. She loved us all, and would need us to help her get out of a bit of a trough.

“I know some more”, said Sîan. “She’s had an operation for that thing that was spurting stuff from the top of her lung. She now has a scar. I went to see her at home. She obviously hadn’t hoovered in ages, the place smelt of wet dog and there was stuff all down the front of her dressing gown. She’s really worried about how the scar looks. I felt I had to tell a white lie and say that you could hardly see it. Actually, she looks like someone gave her a tracheotomy with a hose pipe.”

Next we had a Projection Of Wish for the new member of the group. Maria stepped up for this. Someone seemed to have painted her orange for the evening. She wore a black leather mini skirt, a purple boob tube and six inch heels.

I thought, “the Weeble’s wobbling and might well fall down tonight. As she walked to stand at the stripped-back mantelpiece, I got a hit of her perfume. Givenchy Presents: Eau De Rape Deterrent.

“I have to admit to prior knowledge of tonight’s initiate”, she said. “And I know that one of his great loves is detective fiction. So, Iestyn, I think your putting it out there in the space, thought projected wish should be to sing in adaptations of Agatha Christie. I’ve been thinking this for a while. And Claude, who’s not coming to meetings any more, knows someone that sang in a Hercule Poirot before. And your party piece would be just the right period for it and everything. You’d earn a mint.”

There was a sussuration of happiness round the room, while I just stared at her.

Of course!!

Brilliant.

I’d be falling over the jobs coming in.

I’d get nodules on my vocal cords from the singing overload.

Points Of View, On The Box letters pages and the Television Watchdog receive thousands of complaints each day about the number of programmes being broadcast that are school of My Dog Won’t Keep Its Kennel Clean And It’s Detracting From The Value Of My Haunted House… - …I’m A Celebrity In The Pantomime/Quick Shot Of Me Right In The Back Row On An Audience With/Through The Keyhole sense And Want To be In Hello So Vote For Me To Eat Out Ant And Dec If Necessary … - … and Oh, Look A Reality Contestant: Let’s Be A Git To It; but these would be as nothing compared to the convoy of articulated lorries stuffed with sacks of post that would result from my Putting It Out There In The Space Thought Projected Wish.

“Dear Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms delete as appropriate Points Of View,

'Why oh why oh why is it that every time I switch on the goggle-box there’s that fat gay with the weird Welsh name in a smoking jacket singing New York, New York to the back of David Suchet’s head?”

And why, I wondered, was Claude, who knew the singer whose work I would presumably be taking away, not coming to Vocalese any more? Hannelore told me at a later meeting.

“He came for his first time the same time as Helen’s first time. And he’s the conductor of the Brick Lane Gay Man’s Chorus, you see, and for some reason Helen is against those. She was quite strongly asking him why we had to have Gay Man’s Choruses? Did they sound different? Wasn’t it a kind of themselves putting themselves into a ghetto that they didn’t need to put themselves into? She could understand why Gay Mans’ this or that or the other would maybe be a needed thing where there may be discrimination. Football teams, she said, perhaps. But in a Gay Man’s Chorus? What was next, she was (again quite strongly) asking. Gay Mans’ Interior Design Companies? Gay Mans’ China Ware In Department Store Departments? Gay mans’ Post Offices? Claude did not come since.”

Perhaps gay male singers do sound different. The backs of our throats having been worn away to bell-end shapes, and everything.

Next up was Maria again with Vocalese Conjoined Putting It Out There. Aka group plans never to be followed up. That month it was to form the members of the group into a chamber choir, also called Vocalese.

“If you’re onto a winner, why fix it?” she said. “And our first gig will be at the hospital where I’m working at the moment.”

Aka where she was doing such a great job of terrorising the old into freeing up the beds you’d think she was a government initiative.

“What’s the date?” said the post-aphonic lezzer, pulling a diary out of her handbag.

“There isn’t one in the sense of to be rigidly put in a diary”, Maria said. “But whenever I mention it, you can almost smell the positivity round the nurses’ station. I had a look at the day room. Perfect. We could do lovely part songs”, she said.

“Or Yiddish songs”, said Rachel. She simpered. “The last time I did some of those, it was a gala”.

Rachel was scraggy up top and spready down below, dressed head to foot in black wool. She looked like a two-ply goth. But it was the arse that thrilled you. Imagine a witch puppet being worked from a mound of just cooled lava.

Rachel had a tendency to galify her performances.

She had me sight-reading the accompaniment of an aria from Tchaikovsy’s Jeanne D’Arc later in the evening. By then I had played for everyone else in the group. I was tired. The piece was bloody hard. I made a hash of it.

Rachel pointed out that the key signature had five flats. I didn’t answer. We tried again.

“There is a rallentando there”, she said. “That I need.”

I ignored her again and played on.

She clicked her fingers at the speed she wanted. I stopped playing.

“Look”, I said. “You can’t just put a piece of Tchaikovsky in front of me and expect me to play it at sight.”

“No”, she simpered. “But you see, the last time I did this it was with the Northern Symphony Orchestra. It was a gala.”

On a later occasion it was some Wolf. “…with Roger Vignoles. It was a gala.”

Some Kurt Weil. “…on the bill with Ute Lemper. It was a gala.”

If she moaned when she was frigging herself off in the bath it would be a gala.

“We could sing Madrigals at the hospital”, said Erica, the inevitable smock and chunky socks wearing Danish Church Warden.

I went to a madrigal concert once. There was a single nip of fun, when the conductor cum compere alto in his purple corduroy suit, cravat and sandals, announced:

”Next up, we enter a Fairies’ Ring. Me on top with split lower parts”.

Maria said: “Actually, we have a captive audience, and that’s when you can really open up your bread to show there’s meat in your sandwich.”

“Not really if by “captive” you mean the audience is in hospital beds or wheelchairs with the breaks applied”, I said.

I suggested we ought actually to perform lighter material, to jolly them along,

“Think more Classic FM than Radio 3. And totally dappy things for encores. Like She Had An Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini done as Gregorian Chant”.

From the looks I got, you’d think I’d suggested digging up Bach and gangbanging his eye-socket.

“Let’s maybe finalise the repertoire another time”, Maria said, the suggestion “when Iestyn is not here” sounding full swell in her tone. “And think that maybe we could get a tie-in for the concerts with hospital radio. You never know who might hear that”.

Er, non-deaf patients?

“And maybe we need to think about making a CD. We could do it from the hospital performance and take advantage of the inbuilt ambience.”

I warned them off that one. When I’d been a chorister at Southwark Cathedral, we sang Christmas Carols at an old peoples’ home. There was ambience galore during the guitar intro to our opening number. Three zimmer frame diving accidents, five fights over the novelties in the crackers, and Margaret shouting that she knew perfectly well that people was singing, thank you, but she wasn’t going to shut up and listen to them until she had her entitlement of nuts. While the choir was having tea and mince pies after the concert, Margaret picked up the guitar and strummed some chords. An old boy shouted, “For f***’s sake, take that f**king thing off her, the f**king c***.”

Sister intervened.

“Margaret: no guitar. Bernard: no F’s or C’s.”

Next at Vocalese we had the sharing of a negative event to dissipate the useless bad energy of it. I wouldn’t have thought it would be necessary to look any further afield than the evening in question but,

“Tonight”, said Sîan, we’re going to have our sharing from…”

She milked it into a full-on Play School “through the…through the…” whichever window.

“From Rachel.”

Sighs of disappointment round the room, but a gleaming gloat from Rachel. Sîan said to me, “We can only have one person per meeting sharing as we’re not talking size of Big Ben re the Blessing Bell.”

“I’d like to share” Rachel said, in a voice like a four-year-old saying I Spy With My Little Eye, “about my recent audition on the Isle of Wight”.

The others wore ready to be horrified expressions.

“It was for a Gala.”

Funny, that.

“I took the Catamaran over and everything” Rachel went on.

The others sharply intook their breath. Catamaran? Catamaran? And everything?

How did they expect her to get over there? Swim?

“I was scheduled to sing when the orchestra in residence broke for lunch, so I arrived in good time, warmed up, got myself into the frame of mind. Made sure I had found the beam of energy to coincide with being called into the hall to sing. And I did, I just know I did.”

“You did, I can tell from the way you’re telling us, “said Sîan.

Rachel smiled at her. She needed approval. Sometimes. Most of the time I reckon she could have played Sardines on her own.

“When I got into the hall I noticed that there was not enough room for me to sing as I would need to to feel that I had pleased myself in as far as what I had set up for myself to get out of the experience of auditioning that day. I had what you would call a thin runway, and nothing like a platform. All these instruments all over the place. Trombones and things. So, I moved some of them to give myself room. And one of the panel actually asked me what I thought I was doing and to leave them alone, would I mind? Yes I would mind.”

“You needed to take your space, for goodness’s sake”, Maria said. “What was wrong with you moving stuff out of your way?”

“If they wanted you to give your best”, said Erica, “they needed to give their best first and put out there that you were valued being there to sing for them that day”.

A pause. Which went on too long. I realised that I was supposed to have said something negative-dissipationary.

“Did you sing well, Rachel? Have you heard from them yet?”

“That isn’t really the point.”

“Isn’t it? Why not? Rachel, maybe they liked your singing and will use you. Then who cares about the other stuff?”

I think the only reason I didn’t get a stilettoing was because I was new.

Sîan took a little bell off the mantelpiece and rang it in all four corners of the room.

“We choose to cleanse the negativity of this event”, she intoned, with each dong.

It may be my imagination, but I’m sure she strayed from being snug in the north west corner and rang the bell at me.

I was keeping to myself that my mate Major was a trombonist and if he had caught Rachel moving his instrument they’d be wiping her shit off the end of his bell.

But my point in telling you all this is: Erica. She’s the one. She went over to New York, got with the Mr Contacts singing coach, was signed by the right agent, had the audition for James Levine, signed on the dotted line for the understudy gig.

When I heard the announcement of the cast change, I thought “it’s unbelievable”.

Watching Geoff and Christopher in the High Tide Festival on Saturday I thought, “it’s unfair.”

With A Totally Topical Taste

Gosh, look at me in my last but one blog making a topical reference. (See My Day In The Hills). The Polonium on the window, natch.

I don’t do topical, you see.

First, I don’t know enough about current affairs. If you ask me, Panorama is the bit in Sleeping Beauty where the Lilac Fairy shows off her remedial boatmanship.

Second, I was put off topical at secondary school when Mr. Jones, acting head of English, announced in assembly that there were plans to take us to see Roman’s In Britain, but he’d be “buggered if that happened.”

We were thirteen. How inappropriate.

It’s easier to get laughs with topical jokes, though. Here’s Nancy Mitford on adapting Roussin’s play La Petite Hutte in the early fifties.

“I write and rewrite great chunks of the play and then see how the new bits go with an audience. Any finer points there may be in the play pass entirely unobserved - the name of Dr. Kinsey is introduced and they laugh for five minutes”.

Yep…

I have to admit that, going back to the second point above, I had it in for year assemblies. This was because Mrs. Spinoza let out my secret during one of them.

I’d kept secret that I sang in the Southwark Cathedral Choir. I was at an inner-city School (to say the least) and I was determined to have as many not-getting-beaten-up days as I could.

Then one Monday assembly Spinoza stood on the drama hall stage, told the Bible story about hiding your light under a bushel (which Mark White, not very bright, took to mean that she was relaxing the No Smoking rule), and then said:

“Apropos hiding your light beneath a bushel - congratulations are due to Iestyn Edwards in form 2H, who has been chosen to represent Southwark Cathedral choir at the annual Cathedral Choirs Festival being held this year at St. Paul’s”.

Congratulations was not what the other boys in my year thought I should get – boys who had Saturday jobs down the print or East Lane, and fathers with nicknames like Lights Out, One Twist and No Marks. For three months I was allowed to be library monitor and stay indoors during break with the other freaks: two other obvious gays, the Adam Ant obsessive, a girl who suffered from Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome (premature ageing) aka Manky Odour Granny Face, and Peter Penwarden. He came from somewhere up North.

But funnily enough, I wasn’t getting the aggro because singing at Southwark was effeminate. No, it was because it was posh. And I know this because the year before I’d got away with playing Sandy in the school production of Grease. And this was a mixed school, remember.

Stephen Harper (who played Danny to my Sandy) as he is today. Never got over me, obviously...

Aged twelve, you see, I was the only pupil in the place that had both the high notes for Hopelessly Devoted To You and the cleavage for You’re The One That I Want.