MY Piano Quest

With John, things could not have been more different.

He spoke with exaggerated north London camp cadences. Dears, duckies and pure polari. The affected semaphore of a pantomime dame, the awkward waddle, and the come-hither look, he’d made them his own and given them his individual signature. He had piano lessons from somebody called Ticciaci who had a studio in Ealing. “Ooh lads, I’ve got to see touch-my-arsey tonight – wish me luck boys!”, he’d quip at the fourth formers, who regarded him rather like a…

The building was a fairly humble sort of concert hall, with lots of heavy velvet curtaining. It was used for outside broadcasts. There was a grand piano, and some seating for a very small audience. I was taken into another room and taught some of Britten’s songs. I did not know the songs, but I was to learn them well enough to sing them on the radio later in the course of events. The whole experience could easily be made to sound like Kafka. I didn’t really know what the problems surrounding this broadcast…

In a local way, she was famous, Suzie. In those days, local music festivals were routinely reported in the Ealing papers. Her name was never out of print, or so it seemed to me. Suzie Tee had triumphed again in the under sixteen’s! Hats off to Suzie. A clean sweep for Suzie Tee! Somebody who might beat Rick Wakeman I thought. That sort of thing easily impressed me, and anyway, she was pretty. She had a talent for winning all of the prizes, all of the cups and competitions, to the extent that many would be…

The enormous event of that summer had been the BBC production of Carmen. It was simply a mammoth undertaking. Any opera is hard work. But what made this quite extraordinary was that since videotape hadn’t been developed yet, the plan was to broadcast the production live, in real time. Rudolph Cartier, the director, wanted to use the small chorus of boys to swell the chorus throughout the opera, so we were required not only in the second scene, where Bizet calls specifically for youngsters, but elsewhere…

Alan Freeman, the Radio DJ, hosted a family quiz game called ‘Play your Hunch’. It was one of those game-shows where ordinary people answer simple general knowledge questions for prizes. It was a BBC television show, and hugely popular. In the middle of the show was a music and dance interlude from the resident troupe of high kicking girls called the Television Toppers. They generally wore very little. I had seen them on tv at home: anyone near puberty was aware of them. It was very mildly risqué, with…

Alan Sainsbury-Hicks was an unpleasant little man. He had a crisp military moustache and the pink eyes of the alcoholic that he was. To the boys of Ealing Grammar School he seemed perpetually livid with rage, as if an essential part of his identity was fury laced with the threat of unpredictable violence.  He would do tours of the building, sweeping up boys who were stood outside of classrooms and take them to his study to be caned. Indeed, part of the threat of being told to stand outside the classroom was…

My father played hymns artlessly. His bifocals required that he crane his neck forward and tilt his head back as he strained to decipher the dots. The piano spat out each chord with obvious resentment and with all or most of its notes correctly stacked, but with no consideration whatsoever for the rhythm of the piece. For him, playing the piano was a puzzle-solving exercise, and the puzzle – if he could have articulated it - only seemed to be associated with the notes. Behind the notes was a more sinister…