A strange display of friendship

Tuesday 8th October - St Giles Cripplegate

An imaginary Mercury Prize

On the 8th October at St Giles Cripplegate (the nice church on the Barbican Lakeside), Alex McKenzie, Nat Philipps, a selection of our dear and valued friends and I will perform something new for a long long long time. 

I don’t have any tattoos but I’ve always wanted something that says: ‘The truth is I thought it mattered I thought the music mattered but does it bollocks, not compared to how people matter’ from the start of Tubthumping by Chumbawumba. As a teenager I imagined that would be my winners speech at the Mercury Prize and then I’d drop the mic like Alex Turner. The sentence is a bit too long and clunky to get tattooed anywhere but the sentiment is important to me. People matter so much much more than music, and music is just a tool for knowing yourself and others. 

Stockhausen’s version of friendship

For my final recital at Guildhall I learnt In Freundschaft by Stockhausen. It’s 20 minutes of oppressively notated music and choreography for solo soprano saxophone and, bizarrely, this is Stockhausen expressing friendship. With a bit of context from Stockhausen’s programme note it’s possible to see where he was coming from. The themes have a sort of reverse centrifugal force to them - they start as mirrors on the extreme range of the instrument and then get closer and closer together, that’s quite friendly. I don’t know if anyone would listen to In Freunschaft without context and think ‘hey this sounds like friendship’. Equally, noisy and free improvisation can often feel angry because (particularly the saxophone) can sound very shouty and snarly. 

But for all the screaming and snarling noise (or squeaky and sweet noise) I can’t think of anything more friendly than people really really listening to each other and considering their response. 

In two weeks time I’ll finish my tour with Giffords Circus and I will have played the show 288 times; I’ve also been reading Marina Abramovic’s autobiography. I see the value in repetition and endurance in music. As both performer and audience to 288 shows I’ve started watching my fingers move as if they were someone else’s, I have no idea what I’m about to play next but I watch my hands reaching for a different instrument, I laugh disproportionately at any slight change to the show’s script. At the circus there’s so much to get past before you can go into this daze, so many things to follow, so many things that have to happen that require total concentration - it took about 100 shows before everything became automatic. In a free improvisation setting one could hopefully reach that point almost immediately (maybe that’s a goal of mine) - to just be watching your fingers move - not understanding what they’re doing or why - to be listening to everyone else the same way you listen to yourself. Ultimately, the repetition of 288 shows is nothing compared to the repetition required just to practice an instrument and when you are given total freedom then a lifetime of repetition can sit behind your brain and fingers.

Dear dear friends,

On the 22nd March 2023 I have saved in my diary ‘Improv Alex’. I’d come straight from leading a chaotic sixth form big band to Water Into Beer in Brockley, a tiny tiny little bottle shop that hosted free improvisation gigs. There were old people drinking weird IPA’s in one corner and a young people setting up theremins in the other corner. I had never met Nat before but Alex had decided that we should be friends. 

Nat was on tenor saxophone, Alex and I flanked him on alto saxophone’s. I remember we made some rules for the performance but I don’t remember what they were. We got to the  end of 30 minutes of saxophone saxophone saxophone and Nat said ‘oh I totally forgot about the rules we made’. We were all giddy. I felt like I had poked my head through the firmament, real freedom (and made a new friend hehehe).  

And from that point we were a BAND (but we haven’t done any gigs since). We’ve all played together in lots of other things but the trio has never returned  due to all three of us being busy buzzy bees and running off to the circus and such. But finally we’re all back in London on the 8th October for this one performance. 

I’d met Alex the year before through teaching together at Hackney Music Service. I’d been to a Shovel Dance Collective gig and thought ‘that person playing the whistle is so cool wow’ and then I turned around at teacher training and there was that person who’d been playing the whistle. An incredible bit of fate that led to me getting a low D whistle then loads more whistles and then showing up to my audition for the circus with loads of whistles and then the circus hiring the guy who can play loads of whistles.

Too many sliding doors and coincidences surround Alex, Nat and I. All arrows point to the 8th October being really something.