Broken Music: A Memoir (20 page)

So when Ewan turns up to see if we might be interested in being the band for the show, and with such a princely sum of money on offer, our brows are as low as is anatomically possible, in fact he’s lucky we don’t bite his hand off in gratitude.

The projected musical will be written by Tony Hatch, pop genius and writer of classic sixties’ songs like “Downtown,” a huge hit for Petula Clark on both sides of the Atlantic. The production will be called
Rock Nativity
and the book, written by David Wood (one of the young actors in Lyndsey Anderson’s
If)
, will tell the story of the birth of Christ, from the Annunciation to the Epiphany, in three acts. Mr. Hatch has a reputation for being a hard taskmaster, but we are full of bullish confidence and very excited at the prospect of working with a genuinely famous person like himself. We are full of projected fantasies that this will be our chance at the big time, believing that fame is a kind of positive contagion and that we too will become elevated in status by mere proximity to someone as esteemed as Tony Hatch.

There is one small problem. While the other three members of
Last Exit are self-employed professional musicians, I am now a schoolteacher. Playing for
Rock Nativity
will entail a Wednesday matinee, when I would normally be teaching in class. I say nothing to the others, because I think I can sweet-talk Sister Ruth into giving me Wednesday afternoons off and much of the run will take place during the Christmas holidays. I’ll figure it out somehow.

Rehearsals begin a few weeks later. We are given the parts to learn. There is nothing particularly difficult to read but there is one passage in the overture that has me playing a repeated eight-note minor scale at an impossibly fast tempo. I put a lot of hours in practicing that scale, playing it slowly at first, and then faster and faster, but I’m still nowhere near the required speed.

Our first rehearsal is on a very cold mid-October evening. The band is set up in a large gothic hall in King’s College behind the theater, and we quietly run through the parts. A 6/8 gospel ballad called “Open Your Heart” is the first song up. It is absolutely freezing in the old Victorian hall and I can see my breath in clouds in front of me. The ancient radiators are as cold and dead as dinosaur bones. I am wearing a green woolen balaclava, and all that can be seen of my face are my eyes. I think we must be nervous. Ronnie is tightening and retightening his hi-hat, John is restringing his Les Paul, and Gerry and I are staring fixedly at the parts and making sure that there are no hidden surprises. I start blowing on my fingers to warm them up, and I suppose in this hat I must look like a nervous Edmund Hillary about to tackle the South Col of Everest. This is probably why Ronnie gives me a disparaging look and a long-suffering shake of his head, when Mr. Tony Hatch walks in escorted by the director, Gareth Morgan, and the actress who will play the leading role. She is accompanied by a small brown dog.

Mr. Hatch is wearing an elegant cashmere overcoat, a tailored suit, and a neat, sober tie. He looks exactly the way he does on television, freshly scrubbed, not a hair out of place, and affecting a slight prissiness that is redeemed by a sardonic smile.

Mr. Morgan, in his anorak and aran sweater, has the barrel chest and demeanor of a Welsh prop forward, a proud bullet of a head and a thrusting jaw. With his wild red hair and the lilting song of the valleys in his rumbling baritone he is all Celtic fire.
Josephs Technicolor Dreamcoat
was his triumph, and here he is a general presenting his troops to a visiting head of state. The young actress who will play Mary has a straggle of dark curls escaping from beneath a long gypsy headscarf, and the darkest eyes I have ever seen. Her brown dog seems to be half a corgi attached to the oversize head of a springer spaniel. He begins snuffling around the band’s equipment.

We are only cursorily introduced by the director to Mr. Hatch and then the actress, who graces each of us with the briefest of glances. I am the last to be introduced, although all she can see of me are two green eyes peering through the slit of the green hat, and then she takes herself into the corner of the hall to prepare. Her dog seems fascinated by the Hammond organ. Gerry unwisely aims a discreet kick at the animal’s flank when he imagines the dog is taking an undue interest and about to lay some territorial claim on the polished walnut panel of his instrument. Fortunately I’m the only witness to this act of folly.

The first instrumental run-through of the song goes well, and Mr. Hatch doesn’t look too unhappy. Mr. Morgan takes a seat at the back of the hall, lights up a cigarette, and starts blowing smoke rings into the air as he watches the girl he has cast as his leading lady with a cool scrutiny. The little brown dog has by now successfully managed to cock his leg by the side of Gerry’s precious Hammond and
has left an unmistakable proprietary mark, but Gerry is thankfully too busy with his part to notice. Again I say nothing.

The leading lady is pacing in the far corner, quietly warming her vocal chords in the cold room. She is wearing a dark coat over a long bohemian skirt and green plastic shoes. Two large gypsy earrings frame the exotic features of her face, but it is the eyes that draw me like magnets. There is a fierce obsidian intensity about them that is as unsettling as it is compelling.

Mr. Hatch, now satisfied that we can play the tune, indicates to the actress that she should come to the microphone in the center of the hall. While this is not an audition, there is still a charge of tension in the room—seven males and one female, everyone watching, waiting. Like a diver about to leap from some great height, she breathes deeply and a mist forms around her in the chill of the room.

The song begins and her singing, at first understandably tentative, grows in assurance with every phrase, and by the final notes of the rising coda there is a nodding agreement among us that this may well work; the awkward mood in the cold room has been transformed, and we are all buoyed with a confidence that perhaps this show could be a hit and carry us along in the wake of its success. Of course I have no idea at the time, but this woman will soon play a part in altering my world beyond all recognition.

The rehearsals continue, and at least from the band’s point of view, they seem to go well, although
Rock Nativity
as a whole doesn’t have the innocent charm of its predecessor,
Joseph
. It all feels a little too ponderous and top-heavy, pastiche pretending to opera. The supporting cast seem unsure exactly where to pitch their performances. In the previous production they were at ease with the unpretentious spirit of the music; now they aren’t at all sure how seriously
to take it, and more important, neither does the director. Inflated with more than a little hubris by his previous successes and the presiding eminence of Mr. Hatch (not to mention that the play concerns one of the central tenets of the Christian religion, that of the virgin birth), Mr. Morgan’s production teeters between solemnity and hilarious parody. At least that’s how it seems from my subterranean perspective beneath the stage. The full dress rehearsal before a sold-out opening night is traditionally expected to be chaotic, in order (so the superstition goes) that the performance to follow can be flawless, but here there seems to be a level of panic, of confusion and sheer incompetence that everyone knows is way off the scale for a normal run-through.

Part of the problem is the set. It is a massive pyramidal steel structure of precipitous platforms at different levels connected by staircases, ladders, and a series of ramps, I suppose to represent the Judeo-Christian hierarchy of deities, angels, and lowly mortals, with musicians occupying the lowest realm of hell beneath the main stage. Since some of the actors have to transmute between these different levels of being, as well as different levels of height and vertigo, the staircases and ramps are dangerously congested with complicated choreography and explanatory songs.

In one number the actors will begin singing and dancing on the raked lip of the stage in front of the stalls. By the second chorus they will have split into four separate groups, mounting the ladders and staircases, crisscrossing the upper levels of the pyramid, weaving chaotically through each other in an effort to make their way across to the opposite side of the structure and all the while trying to keep up with a score as convoluted as the set. That no one falls and injures themselves is a miracle in itself, but the chaos is far from pleasing on the eye. We in the band are largely invisible in the dark bowels of the
stage set, and merrily provide a brooding accompaniment to what will surely be a biblical disaster, in every sense.

Each musical number seems more inept than the last, and from my vantage point in the dark I can see the director in the second row of the stalls, alternately with his head in his hands or staring hopelessly and helplessly at the stage, his creation in ruins. His normally proud face has grown redder and redder with mounting apoplectic rage, until he finally explodes in a fearful bellow that silences the music and shakes the theater to the high rafters.

“RELAAAX! CAN’T ANY OF YOU JUST FUCKING RELAAAAAX?”

Needless to say, the director’s beseeching has the opposite result, reducing already tentative actors into terror-stricken wrecks. The leading lady still shines like the star in the East, but the rest of the population of Bethlehem, including the three wise men and the angel Gabriel, seem to be laboring in a sandstorm of confused aims, inflated egos, and hopeless misdirection. No one will sleep easily tonight, and I also have a nagging personal worry that I still haven’t dealt with Sister Ruth over the matinee issue.

Next day as I drive north through the morning traffic, I resolve to broach the subject with the headmistress. I shall be direct and fearless, explaining that while I want to do the best job I can at the school, my true vocation is to be a musician, and if she would just let me have Wednesday afternoons off I would try and make up for it in other ways. Perhaps organizing the carol service or directing the Christmas play I begin rehearsing my pitch in the privacy of the car.

“Sister Ruth,” I will say grandly, “I feel after my long experience in the provincial theater” (pause for effect, perhaps taking a deep breath, as if about to dive heroically into a cold pool, or offer oneself selflessly on a sacrificial altar), “that it wouldn’t be inappropriate if I
were put in charge of the Christmas play this year” (and considering the debacle that I’ve been privy to over the past weeks, I can’t imagine that I would do a worse job). “After all, I do have some very talented performers in my class.”

By nine-fifteen I am taking the morning register. The usual people are missing, but also one of my budding extroverts, Kevin Anderson. Kevin is a delightful lad, charming and funny, and what he lacks in normal academic skills he more than makes up for with his singing and his jokes, which occasionally err toward the blue end of the spectrum, but are delivered with preternatural comic timing.

At the break the school secretary comes in to the crowded staff room and tells me there is a phone call for me in the office.

“Helloo?” It is a high-pitched yodel on the other end of the line. “It’s aboot oor Kevin, ’ees not feeling very well, ah think ’ees gorra bad coold, so am ganna keep ’im off school the day, okay?”

There is something suspiciously unconvincing about this phone call.

“Who is calling, please?” I ask, as politely as I can.

“Er …It’s me, Mam!”

“Kevin, if you don’t come in to school right now, you’re going to be in big trouble, do you hear?”

“Yes sor.” His voice has miraculously returned to its normal pitch.

“By the way, Kevin, where is your mam?”

“She’s at work, sor, at the factree.”

“Okay, Kev, come back right now and I won’t say anything, deal?”

“Yes sor!”

I’m sure if Kevin had used the word
bilious
in his performance, I would have let him get away with it.

After lunch I have a brain wave. I will suggest to the good Sister that next Wednesday we should take the top two forms to the theater to see the matinee of the nativity play stressing of course the religious aspects of the production as well as the cultural. While they are watching, I shall be able to perform my tasks in the orchestra at the same time. And when she sees what a success it all is, she too will be swept up in the magic of the theater and I shall then be able to convince her to give me some time off for the subsequent Wednesday matinees.

By the end of the run I have managed to play every single matinee by the ruse of escorting the entire school week by week and class by class to the theater, and cutting deals with the head as well as the rest of the staff.

The reviews for the first night of
Rock Nativity
, while not the ecstatic notices that
Joseph
had received, are nonetheless respectable. We seem to have averted disaster by the skin of the donkey’s arse.

I am also feeling rather pleased with myself in that during the first-night party in the theater bar I have worked up enough courage to approach our leading lady. She is deep in conversation with Mr. Hatch’s famous wife, Jackie Trent, and feeling too out of my depth to have anything interesting to say to either of them I decide on the strategy of engaging enthusiastically with the brown dog. The dog seems to see through me right away and glares at me with a studied indifference, and it is a while before his owner notices me.

“Och, don’t mind him,” she says with an unmistakable trace of Northern Irish in her voice. “He’s just an old curmudgeon, an obstreperous wee git.”

“What’s his name?” I ask, keeping to my pretense as an expert dog fluffer.

“His proper name is ‘Buttons,’” she replies. “But everyone calls him ‘Turdy’, for obvious reasons.”

I look down at the sad-eyed brown dog with the oversize head. “That’s nice,” I say, not sure at all how to take this conversation any further.

Ms. Trent by now has moved on, leaving the two of us alone with the dog, and for the first time the actress grants me a look of cool appraisal.