The Trial of Dennis the Menace!

I’m just finishing the score for The Trial Of Dennis The Menace, an amazing new show set in the world of the classic British comic, The Beano. The show is part of the Southbank Centre’s Imagine Festival for Children, and is aimed at ages 7 and up, but I can assure you it is more than suitable fun for adults too! More information and ticketing can be found HERE.

Much as I was never a regular reader of the Beano, my Dad grew up with it, so accordingly, every Christmas I received a copy of the Beano Annual, and hungrily dived in.

My favourite character has always been Rodger the Dodger – I guess as a composer you can only admire someone who puts more energy into avoiding what they ought to be doing than they’d ever need to expend in doing it! – and I took no little satisfaction in acquiring the nickname ‘The Dodgers’ during my time as an undergraduate, having developed the skill of avoidance-without-penalty, as I liked to think of it, into an art form.

As part of the writing process we met and talked with The Beano’s current editor Mike Stirling, who pointed out to us that he has the honour of holding a position whose title is often used as a derisive remark amongst other journalists! He also explained a lot of the wonderful history of the Beano, which is now 74 years old.

The offices of D.C.Thomson, publishing house of both The Beano and The Dandy comics, are located in Dundee, Scotland. The first edition of The Beano came out in 1938, and despite paper and ink rationing, ran throughout the Second World War, it’s popularity so great that key members of the comic’s staff were exempted from active service by virtue of it’s contribution to the up-keep of national morale.

In line with this The Beano played it’s part in the general propaganda of the time, notably with an episode where Ivy The Terrible captures a German U-Boat! Mike explained that each nation had it’s own particular style of propaganda, the German approach was more sinister, the American approach more cautionary and the British approach more about lampooning the enemy in an attempt to undermine their authority, which was right up The Beano’s street of course.

It became clear very early on in the process that the lawyers of D.C.Thomson are in the practice of keeping the tightest of reins on their copyright and I am completely forbidden from any public airing of the music outside of the show (without their express permission that is) - but when I hear them referred to as ‘The Beano lawyers’ I can’t help but image that they’re just more characters from the comic and would fully bungle any attempt to actually prosecute me! This however is definitely not the case.

The show itself (which has an amazing script by the poet Caroline Bird) is set in Beanotown, which we find in crisis, the adults clearly preparing for a severe crackdown on all hijinks. Dennis the Menace, the Beano’s flagship character, is caught and put on trial for stealing the Mayors gold chain – symbolically the most heinous of crimes, hitting right at the heart of the Beanotown establishment, but is he guilty? There’s more to it all than meets the eye of course, but I couldn’t possibly tell you any of it here!

The brilliant cast and director are in rehearsal now, and the show looks set to be a stunning avalanche of mayhem and ridiculousness, so job done!

My approach to the music has been to invoke the character of a school band – made up of violin, clarinet, upright piano and percussion – to provide everything from incidental music to song backing, atmospheric underscoring to sound effects, all supporting and colluding with the characters of the show in their respective mischiefs. The idea plays into the fact that Bash Street School is a location central to The Beano, and the Bash Street Kids make a key appearance in the show. Also, my memories of secondary school played a part in the decision, thinking about the impromptu bands that seemed to coalesce every lunch time, jamming in the music room with the utmost solemnity and unfazed by any incongruence in the instrumentation or ability of the group, it was a very special, and accidentally very punk aesthetic.

I’ve actually made recordings of all the songs from the show to help the cast learn them but unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, I’m forbidden from using them outside of the show, so I can’t give you a sneak preview – however, early in 2011 I did write some violin and cello pieces for a Southbank Centre workshop researching into the potential of a comic book based show, and I can let you hear one of those. So here is a track called Full Grown Logic, it’s not in the show itself, but it’s where I first began playing with the aspect of my style that I  then developed and used for all the music that is in it - the recording is from a rehearsal and played by the inimitable Mr. Oliver Coates and Ms. Emma Smith.

It’s about the trials of getting through the school day when you’re little, and to write it I imagined that it was the music for an episode of The Muppet Show where the special guest star, Dmitri Shostakovich, featured in a parody of The Great Escape set in a Victorian market - hope you enjoy it! - and if you do, come and see the show!

Powered by the Sun

I was talking with someone the other day about how we each have different ways of relating to our work, and in the course of the conversation stumbled upon a new way of thinking about my composing, a way which now seems to provide me with a constant source of reinvigoration whenever I’m tired and asking myself ‘what’s the point?’.

For me, one of the most exciting things about life as a whole is that it’s an anti-entropic force, so whereas the inanimate universe becomes increasingly disordered and less information bearing, life has the incredible ability to transmute various elements of it’s environment into energy and put that energy to work counteracting the ‘heat death’ tendency of the rest of the physical world, namely towards the business of organisation.

With organisation comes information (yeah, come on! - sorry, had a bit of a Zack de la Rocha moment there!), in the form of self-organising living structures (the human body), in the form of living things organising other things, both inanimate (a hotel, a bicycle), and animate (an orchard, animal breeding (and herding!)), and these days in the form of conceiving and organising things like computers which in turn are increasingly capable of creating new information of their own (please see Mr. Ray Kurzweil’s work on The Singularity if you wish to pursue that line to it’s fullest).

Inevitably, purely by virtue of being a form of life, I’m creating information in all sorts of ways without and prior to any personal notion of being creative, but my official, conscious and deliberate line of organising comes under the umbrella of ‘music’.

And of course the fact that I actively engage with the idea that I’m creating information isn’t an issue of hierarchy here, there’s no way in which I could claim to create more information than another human being just because they make no conscious attempt to do so.

The point is though, that as someone who makes a conscious attempt to create information in the form of music, I’ve found endless excitement in the idea that despite the many concepts and abstractions involved in my attempts (and in some cases my achievements!), in one sense what I’m really doing is just turning the light and heat of the sun into information like all other life – it’s obvious when you say it like that, but when I think of my music in terms of it being the energy of the sun in another form, I can’t help but keep going with a smile on my face.

That’s perspective for you isn’t it? Being aware of more than just what’s right in front of me as I work is always an amazing help, and this train of thought is great because it doesn’t fall into either the paradigm of ‘I’m small and insignificant in the universe’, or ‘humanity is the greatest creation of nature and all other forms should be subservient to it’s sentient power’, it’s me and the sun, working as a team to make some music, just as nature intended - much as it didn’t know it! Like a bird, translating energy into birdsong, except the bird isn’t silly enough to think that it’s aware of what’s really going on, and spend a good portion of it’s life sweating about it!

So the next time you find yourself utterly absorbed in whatever it is you’re doing or making, day or night, take a moment to have a cup of tea and nod your head to the sun, it is definitely nodding back.

Oh, and then there’s love and envy and all that stuff too, but I figure the sun’s already done enough without laying that at it’s door as well!

old-school back-garden fireworks!

Since it was just Bonfire/Guy Fawkes night, I thought I’d make a post about fireworks – or rather my own particular relationship with that great tradition, the firework display.

Firework displays have always been one of my very favourite annual events, and to this day I feel reassured that dragons, magic and space pirates (amongst other things) definitely exist every time I witness a good one, so there’s no underestimating their importance as part of my coping strategy for the real-world!

While reflecting on this it occurred to me that through a combination of organised, public firework displays and increased disposable income, I’ve grown accustomed to the idea that part of the magic of fireworks is their spectacular choreography – the colour and texture combinations, the use of levels, the judgement of narrative arc etc, and all supported by a Heavily Dramatic, Up-Beat-Party or 18-Till-I-Die-esque rock number soundtrack, be it butchered by the sound editing skills of a pyrotech or something more slick, possibly commissioned by a Communist government.

In actual fact, however, the choreography of the displays of my earliest memories is of a very different nature, being that these were staged in our small, family back garden on an incredibly tight budget and enacted by two apparently fearless WWII veterans and one super-careful-ex-Chief-Fire-Officer-of-the-National-Theatre, a.k.a my two Granddads and my Dad.

In a way this was the closest I came at the time to understanding something about the fact that my Grandparents had ever been in a war. They never spoke about it and I was too young to fully understand, but noticing that they didn’t seem to think anything of the danger of fireworks, I just put it down to the fact that if you’ve been in a war and survived it, our little back-garden display could hardly seem to pose you a threat!

My Dad however had seen fire from a very different perspective as a member of the London Fire Brigade and, unlike my Grandparents, had found himself on occasion inside places such as burning sugar refineries, where you couldn’t see or breathe without apparatus and the way you came in was now blocked by the collapsing structure of the building itself.

So with the specific personnel of our pyro-team in mind you can image the hilarious scene of my Dad, appropriate torch in hand, peering into the metal safety tin (which housed the fireworks and kept them from being accidentally lit) to find something slightly more exciting than the last while in the background, and unbeknownst to him, his Father and Father-in-Law were returning, cigarettes in hand, to a lit firework they thought needed a bit of help or readjustment, standing over the top of it much like Wile.E.Coyote investigating why his man-trap didn’t trigger as expected!

In terms of set-up, we could afford one box of fireworks (probably made by Standard from what I can remember) which we bought at our local Londis – it was always a source of great excitement when that Londis set up it’s special glass fireworks case, the countdown began from then really – plus an additional couple of larger rockets which my Grandparents bought, and 2 packets of sparklers, one which got used up as an exciting prelude to the main ‘show’, and one which took the edge off the post-display comedown, it was a very good system!

The garden was brilliantly prepared by my Mum and Dad and included such great constructions as a special Catherine Wheel facility – a board with a nail in the middle of it on a fencepost - and a piece of guttering cut to size and embedded in the lawn for launching any fireworks with a more crazy/unpredictable trajectory – things such as Screamers for instance.

Of course, other than the sheer scale of the thing, what made our display most distinct from the bigger public ones was that due to both financial and logistical implications our display was always one firework at a time. So however big and spectacular an individual firework was, and it was never going to be that spectacular because those ones were expensive, it would have to shoulder the responsibility of the excitement on it’s own. It doesn’t sound like an ideal recipe, and yet it was unendingly exciting, and I realise now that what the constraints on our display created was an unavoidable air of intense ritual:

The crucial selection process – making sure that each firework was individually rewarding whilst not accidentally peaking to soon -, calling out the name of the firework (Scarlet Fury, Harbour Light, Star Hell, Carnival Spray, incredible names – and incredible artwork too!), walking down the garden to the ‘live’ zone, positioning it for launch/spin-off, lighting the blue touch paper, retiring to a safe distance, and waiting for that singular event………..sometimes waiting longer than others……… FWEEEEEEYASHHHHH[DEAFENINGSILENCE]PAHHHHHSSSKSKSKSSSss

- multiple screamers: SBOOMOP SBOOMOP SBOOMOPEEEEEEEEEEEEEIEEIEEIEEEEEEI

The fireworks themselves, however inexpensive, were always breathtaking to me, but that sense of ritual was as much the real magic of the occasion.

I’d love to create a fireworks display ritual, write the music and design the flow with another artist and a pyrotech, one firework at a time, each a whole world of magic and possibility. This Japanese display seems to be very much of that nature, and I think it’s captivating.

One year my Dad had a little bit of extra money and we thought it would be fun to treat ourselves to one of the more monstrous looking fireworks we could never usually afford. Having no personal experience of what any of them were like (not having the benefit of the internet in those days!) we chose by name and size, finally plumping for a chap called the Depth Charge. It cost £32, an unthinkable amount for a single firework, and claimed to shoot 10 consecutive ‘bombs’ into the air, each of them terminating in a deafening explosion. Naturally the Depth Charge took it’s place as the climax of our display, and you can imagine just how much anticipation surrounded it’s detonation. The ritual was observed - “the Depth Charge”……

Dad lit the blue touch paper and came back to stand with the rest of us in the spectator zone, all waiting, completely silent but for the sound of other distant, back-garden displays. The first bomb launched with an ominous thunk, straight up, no flares, no sparks, no trail, and then, just as it seemed as if it must have broken Earth’s gravitational pull and been lost to orbit, a sub-bass cataclysm struck which near flattened the wheatfields of Kent! Dogs barking and car alarms for miles, a sort of sea-sickness as if time had been hit and reshaped like a punch-bag or the fluid in my ear had turned to molasses, and then, still reeling, another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another!…..Or at least that’s how it seemed! One way or the other it was a little piece of heaven.

So in honour of the wonder of fireworks, I’ll leave you with these clips from amazing displays:

For anyone who finds themselves wrangling with the ‘less is more/more is more’ conundrum then this display is designed to clear up the matter once and for all, returning a verdict that more is without doubt more!
When you consider that the very least you can do is set off one firework, and if you’re going to do that there’s no point it being barely visible, and even one lone firework can ignite the sky (I think I might be accidentally writing the lyrics of an amazing soft rock song!)…

This is an extra special set of displays, each launched from the same Taiwanese skyscraper as part of consecutive New Year Celebration displays: 2008 2009 2010 2011 – my favourite is the opening to the 2010 display, in one sense incredibly simple in it’s composition, in another sense tons of explosives attached to a huge building and timed to be an organised pattern!

For a change of pace, how about a hand-held display? Or some mechanised ground fireworks maybe?

Finally, wow , wow - and how’s this for a parting shot!!!

In conclusion, I’d like to make a display which is launched from a diorama of models of giant mythical creatures doing battle which is also a fully functioning crazy golf course, so you can really get in amongst it all – I’ll get to work on it!

Yip yip!

The Elysian Quartet to play outpatient live!

As you’ll see from the front page of my website, the wonderful mammals of the Elysian Quartet* (*actual mammals may differ from those pictured) are going to be playing brand new arrangements of the outpatient tracks Vole Sweeps Up! and D N A U X B along with a whole afternoon of other brilliant things from a whole range of other brilliant people - full details of the gig can be found HERE!

Making arrangements of tracks can be a pretty involved process, and in that respect Vole Sweeps Up! takes the biscuit. The original score of Vole was written for the machines to play as MIDI, so I didn’t really worry if it looked nice or not, and when I came to make the arrangement, that laissez faire attitude to the cosmetics of it came back to haunt me (although I’d do it again I tells ya, a million times over I’d do it again!) - and just to be clear, I’m not endorsing feeding voles with biscuits, I’m not saying it would be bad outright, but I just don’t know, so I operate by the rule that if they can’t find it in the wild then it’s best not to give it to them - remember, even the mice in Bagpuss were only faking being able to make that chocolate biscuit, let’s learn our lesson!

Revisiting something you worked on really fiercely over a short space of time can be a real eye-opener, having lived with the reality of the music for a little while even working out what you thought you were trying to do can be a challenge, but it’s actually quite elucidating too – you often get the chance to consciously learn about things that at the time you were doing unconsciously. Then you forget that you learned them and continue to do them unconsciously so that at some point in the future you can be surprised by them again, and the cycle is complete!

You’ll also have noticed that finally Specialized is HERE! Took a little while to assemble this one, put the decals on and learn the instructions for making it transform but now I think you’ll find it’s fully operational and stuffed like a pepper with shiny new tracks! (that pepper is just for listening though, don’t eat it, it’s full of shiny tracks, I’ll make you another one to eat – how’s this?).

And on top of all that I just finished a new piece for the Scottish Clarinet Quartet called The Parlour Guide to Exo-Politics – got back from rehearsals in Glasgow only last night, the piece is sounding great and it will get it’s first airing in November I think, so I will keep you posted. In the meantime it’s back to my underground lab where I’m trying to discover the answer to this question: If John Cage’s 4’33” occurs in a forest and no-one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?
No answers on no postcard please – i’ll si’thee, yip yip!

moustache? no?

Much as I enjoy some of his paintings, my favourite part of Salvador Dali’s work is undoubtedly the amazing things he said, not least this:
“Since I don’t smoke I decided to grow a moustache - it is better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several moustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends “Moustache? Moustache? Moustache?”. Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of moustaches.”
What a remarkable thing to do!

As it happens I found an actual moustache case which is used for the storage and transportation of fake moustaches for use by make-up artists, but Dali would have had to fill it with something else to keep his angle on things I think - he was pretty obsessed with the symbolism of the egg, and this case looks like it could be easily adapted for the safe transportation of eggs - perhaps eggs painted with the face of Dali with little holes to grow cress hair and moustache!

And look at this awesome Dali egg chair!

Of course the fake moustache is a brilliant and simple way to transform your look for fancy dress with a whole range available. My favourite is the Hulk Hogan Moustache which looks like it comes in a pouch emblazoned with Hulkamania! - the question as ever being whatcha gonna do brother, when the 24” pythons and Hulkamania run wild on you?! I think it’s important to find your own answer of course! In the meantime, to get you into the right frame of mind for such problem solving there are instructions on how to at least capture the classic, pre-Mr. Nanny, Hulk Hogan look!

And here, according to the Daily Mirror newspaper is the concensus on “Britains top tache”! with Freddie Mercury leading the way with his distinctive teeth/moustache combo.

Of course no moustache fixated blog post would be complete without mention of the awesome force of nature that is the world beard and moustache championships! Truly a wonder to behold! And I can’t help but conceive of a made for tv farce set around the premise that the ‘World Beard and Moustache’ and
 ’World Firework Display’ championships have been double booked to occur at the same location on the same night! I beg of you, somebody give me the money to make it, pa-leeeeeease!

To finish, what better than a review in pictures of some of the animal kindom’s great moustaches?

that’s it but y’all come back now - yip yip!

let’s do the mouldywarp again!

Mouldywarp mouldywarp mouldywarp!

at the moment the game really is a foot!

At the moment I am haunted by this image of the shoe, sock and lower trouser of Gordon Brittas. Yep.I’m working on a piece partly consisting of a slide show of still images from seminal 90’s sitcom The Brittas Empire, and the more I look at this image I grabbed the more amazing it seems!

It’s from the first episode of the Brittas Empire, when the ultra-organized, socially lacking Mr. Brittas (played by Chris Barrie - Spitting Image, Red Dwarf’s ‘Arnold Rimmer’, Lara Croft’s butler in the film versions - and most surprising of all the voice of former American President Ronald Reagan on the the 12” Single release of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’!) first arrives at his new place of work, the Whitbury New Town Leisure Centre, and was never intended as a still image, so perhaps that’s where some of my fascination comes from, that it’s actually me that’s taken this ‘photo’ and now I have to work out why it’s my favourite!

For me it certainly has an unnaturally heavy cultural payload, conveying so much information for what is essentially a photo of a foot – but the most low-order executive nineties foot of all time! (having written that I can see why my plans for an awards show never really got off the ground!)When I was younger I used to have a pair of trousers like that, but with the classic nineties flecks of white and silver, coupled with pink flannelette socks and a slightly billowing pink shirt with white checks I must have looked quite specific as a child – when I get round to doing live shows though it is tempting to re-adopt it as a performance uniform!These days I like corduroy, which is just one more reason why I was so thrilled with Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, the film is amazing in so many respects, but not least Mr. Fox’s beautiful brown corduroy suit, it’s the perfect choice. And in reality the suit is very small of course, the thought of which makes my head go a bit funny – a miniature corduroy suit that you know exists somewhere in the world, I don’t know, it just makes me feel odd to know that it’s out there somewhere – in medieval times you couldn’t just know that somewhere in the world is a miniature suit, could you? I suppose maybe if you knew about Doll’s Houses you might, although the reality is that you’d almost certainly be very very busy with much more immediate concerns!Detective Lester Freamon (the doll’s-house-furniture-manufacturing police Pokémon) would know i’m sure, and if he didn’t you can be sure he’d know how to find out. He would also, by coincidence look amazing in “quote unquote ‘Fantastic’” Mr. Fox’s (when you make a post-modern joke about a Wes Anderson film that’s just about as much post-modernity as you could ever fit in one place!) corduroy suit with Gordon Brittas’ shoes and socks – after all, they are two characters, both alike in fastidity ! - that’s right Billy, I said it! 

I was going to do a mock up of Lester Freamon in Mr. Fox’s suit, and then I found these photos which come close enough to doing it for me!

Certainly enough to get the point across – you’ll have to imagine the Gordon Brittas shoes and socks, but the photo at the beginning should be a help, and i’ve made an artist’s impression of my own fantastic suit for you here:

So now you know what to expect when my shows go live!
Now, where was I? - is this what a blog is? - it is now!
           see you again soon cowboys for more culture rustling! Yip yip!