It's All About The Music!

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IN TOUCH – It’s all about the music

TX: 02.11.2021 2040-2100

PRESENTER: PETER WHITE

PRODUCER: BETH HEMMINGS

Music

White

Good evening. Tonight, we’re talking about this…

Music

White

Hearing a bit of this…

Music

White

And discussing the themes which inspired this…

Music

White

You’ve guessed it, you genius, tonight’s programme is a music special, exploring the work of three visually impaired musicians from very different genres. They’re not household names like Stevie Wonder, Andrea Bocelli, Jose Feliciano but they are highly respected professionals in their own fields.

Well, we’re going to be asking how they navigate their careers, what part visual impairment plays in that, if any, and to what extent they buy the popular idea that somehow blindness and good musicianship are linked.

Campion

Hi, my name’s Chris Campion and I’m a heavy metal guitarist from London.

Music

White

Well, Chris, welcome to the programme. Where did your career in music begin?

Campion

I’d started playing at a very young age, like 11-12, I was already trying to prove I was better than my brother kind of thing. And then did a good 10 years of the solo guitar journeyman kind of journey. I’ve got retinitis pigmentosa so it’s been a very slow gradual decline of my sight. So, I could wing it in the early days and it’s slowly got less wingable. And then I started playing in bands because I wanted that experience, I spent about a good 10 years moving from psychedelic rock into a more sort of lounge jazz but always with a couple of indie bands on the side. And then in the last four or five years I’ve mostly been doing heavy metal music and just trying to become a better musician.

White

What about during the dreaded lockdown?

Campion

Well, nothing, zero. I mean, yes. But certainly, by the end of the year I realised I had another bunch of songs, so that’s the next thing to get out basically, is what I’ve been doing in the last year.

White

Right. Well, we heard a little bit of your track Run at the beginning of the show, is there a story behind that?

Campion

Yeah, so Run was a song that I wrote while I was writing a play for the Extant Theatre Company, directed by the great Maria Oshodi. And while putting that together the tune that was hanging out, was around in the ether, sort of starting to form, was Run. So, it became the opening track of the play and yeah, it’s basically – there’s a monster hiding outside and if you’re not careful he’s going to come in and get ya, basically and take that anywhere you want basically.

Music - Run

White

Chris, because yours is a condition, you mentioned it, which results in sight deteriorating, I just wonder how much you had to make adaptations as you’ve gone along really.

Campion

Yeah, I mean I never really encountered any other blind musicians in all my years, so it’s sort of like my own journey was kind of uninformed and I was sort of making my own way through it. I mean I was always led around by my other band mates, lead on stage and all of that, it was more getting a bit exuberant on stage and realising you’re three feet away from the microphone that you have to get to pretty quickly and you can’t see where it is.

White

Because am I right you used to hide your condition on stage to some extent?

Campion

Yes, I mean, you know, if something calamitous was to happen I’d probably tell people but…

White

Did anything calamitous ever happen?

Campion

There might have been a couple of times I fell off stage, definitely knocked a pint of beer into quite an expensive amp in a venue I won’t mention in London.

White

What, in case they catch up with you?

Campion

Well, you know, no one saw me. And so, it’s just things like that and sort of stages can be very chaotic when there’s five bands playing a night and it’s just a lot of relying on my friends and standing there – they know the protocol, they need to come and get me, put me in my place, I’ll set up and then they take me away again. And that works great. And I use a hell of a lot of tech in the studio to actually be able to get anything done. But the thing is there’s actually quite a lot of tactile accessible tech, which makes it so much easier to work.

White

And just one thing I forgot to ask you, but you always ought to ask a musician – influences on you, other rock guitarists maybe?

Campion

Number one is Robert Fripp, I’m afraid, he’s definitely up there as my number one. Him and Hendrix, obviously, are the two that feel almost alien in their ability and even though I’ve played guitar for 30 years I still don’t know where some of those places are on it to be honest.

White

Chris Campion, stay with us but for the moment, thank you.

Now, to quote the legendary jazz double bassist Ray Brown – “Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.” Well, that was certainly the case for singer Katriona Taylor when she made the decision to quit her high-profile career in law to pursue the much chancier business of jazz and soul music. Well, I’ve been talking to her about that decision. But first, her latest album.

Music – Blind Passion

White

Katriona, first of all, you’vecalled your latest album Blind Passion in tribute to other blind artists, I’m interested to know why you’ve specifically featured your covers of songs from the likes of Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Jose Feliciano because I’d rather expected blind artists might not want to be pigeonholed, as it were, as a blind artist or a blind singer, just a singer?

Taylor

I decided that it was time in my life to start talking about being a visually impaired singer, which I hadn’t really always talked about or made too much of in the past. So, I felt, if I put some of those artists on there, and obviously the album is some of their songs and some of my songs, that it gave me a way to talk about my sight a little bit more and about the eye condition that I have.

White

So, who, in particular, influenced you when you were growing up, either as other blind artists or not for that matter?

Taylor

Oh goodness, I have such eclectic tastes. I was very influenced by the choices of my parents. We had playing in the house things like Billy Joel and Abba and Aretha Franklin, that was on my dad’s side. And on my mum’s side she loved Brazilian music, so I had Astrud Gilberto, Tom Jobim and so I had some really good influences there.

White

Your dad’s a bit of a jazz fan, isn’t he?

Taylor

He does like a little bit of jazz, yeah. He was travelling around the world, so he would always kind of go into those, I guess, seedy jazz clubs in New York or wherever he was and watch the local acts.

White

And for those who don’t know and haven’t put it together, your dad, in his day, famous tennis player, who I can remember beating Rod Laver at Wimbledon, I think.

Taylor

That’s right, he got to the semi-finals of Wimbledon three times – Roger Taylor – he was Britain’s number one.

White

Right. Now if you were just to pick out one song from this album, what would it be?

Taylor

Ooh that’s hard, that’s hard. I would pick one of my songs Fly Me to the Stars. It’s just a really positive vibe, it’s a real feel-good song and that’s how it makes me feel.

Music – Fly Me to the Stars

White

You became a singer but actually that wasn’t your first real profession was it, you switched from law to music, quite a gamble really. What made you do it?

Taylor

Sheer foolishness. No, I studied very hard to be a lawyer, I worked in the City of London as an intellectual property lawyer but I just felt for me that something was missing and for me it was my soul calling to write music, in particular and to perform and sing. And so, I, yeah, I took that gamble. But I just think you only get one life and one chance and I really felt compelled to follow my desire to sing and perform.

White

I mean how tough is it to get established in music? I mean people might feel that because there are so many major blind artists, iconic blind artists, that there wouldn’t be the resistance to it that people tend to meet in other fields. Is that right?

Taylor

Music is super tough, it doesn’t matter who you are, doesn’t matter whether you are blind or not. And I think some of those artists were working in a different time and in these times it’s still tough, it’s still very competitive, quite a ruthless industry really. But I’m in it for the reason of just loving – loving it – that’s the passion in the title of the album and I think it speaks a little bit about me and how I feel passionate about what I do.

White

Katriona Taylor, thank you very much indeed.

Now if you listened to our programme last week, you’ll remember that we were talking about climate change and the COP26 summit which has just started in Glasgow. Well, someone who wanted to make his own very individual contribution to this debate is classical composer Michael Stimpson with his vinyl release of a work called The Angry Garden. We’re going to come on to the significance of that work in a moment but just to get a sense of you, first, rather like Katriona, you made a life changing switch from science to music, I think, as a young graduate. What prompted that?

Stimpson

I think it may have been just getting drunk in a café in France. But I had just finished a very old-fashioned degree in botany and zoology. But by the time of the end of the degree all the romance of my science had sort of left me and by that time I was convinced that music was the best way forward for me.

White

Now before your sight loss, you were a performer – classical guitar I think, rather than rock guitar. You’ve played with some pretty big names as well.

Stimpson

I was spending all my 20s trying to be a performer and I was getting there but unfortunately, I had a rather strong illness that curtailed that. All the name dropping would come post-illness really. I started writing, editing articles and books and I worked with people like Brian May of Queen and Alfonso Johnson, who was bass guitarist with Santana at the time and Paco Pena the flamenco guitarist kindly did a chapter for the book and even the wonderful classical guitarist John Williams wrote the forward. So, it then went on to a series of music with a lot of those people as well.

White

We must come to that illness because it had such an effect, a bolt from the blue really. Just explain what happened.

Stimpson

Well, it started on Christmas Day actually and gradually, gradually felt more and more poorly. Got into hospital and by New Year’s Eve was totally paralysed and was in intensive care, unconscious for about four months. And when I woke up, I couldn’t see. And it took roughly about 10 years to fully recover from all the pain. But in the early stages I thought I might be able to learn to play and did the advanced course at the Royal Academy of Music but there was a tiny bit of tremor left in one finger and so high-level performing wasn’t going to be possible. And so, I made the decision – I was composing a little bit but decided to take it more seriously and went back to university and did my masters and then doctorate in composition. It’s certainly laborious if you’re say writing for the orchestra because it goes through about sort of 15 levels of gradual refining and editing. You get used to it but actually the writing and the music is the pleasurable part, I think it’s everything else around it that perhaps wears you down rather more.

White

Right, now we must come to reason that you’re here, although it would have been fascinating enough anyway because your latest release, The Angry Garden, you hadn’t writing this for COP26, I think it was – you composed it some time ago – but the themes behind it you feel are now particularly appropriate.

Stimpson

Yes, it’s a longish five movement work for soloists and choir and orchestra but when I was planning the work, with the poet and author Simon Rae, it was obvious that you couldn’t bang on about climate change for the whole piece. And so, what we decided to do was take a very long-term approach and so the first movement is in terms of creation of the Earth and the Universe and we don’t get to the actual climate issues until really the end of the fourth movement. And the second movement, itself, was something called Eden, it has a feel of a dripping rainforest in the middle section, I wanted to draw in a rather idealistic English countryside, almost Vaughan Williams kind of feel. And so, the music has a rich brass, recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and you can imagine it’s just a fabulous sound.

Music – The Angry Garden

White

Well, we can only play a small part of The Angry Garden but Michael, can music change minds do you think?

Stimpson

Well, I’ve always wanted to or preferred to connect a piece of classical music with a contemporary issue because I always felt that this helps move classical music into the more, shall we say, realistic world. My first string quartet celebrated the end of apartheid and, of course, The Angry Garden was just to bring the issue, 20 years ago, to a different kind of audience. So, I think it can. I’m quite realistic that it’s not going to cause huge change, although I think with such formidable performers in this recording, it could help to bring new audiences to classical music.

White

Right, brilliant. Chris Campion is still with us and Michael and Chris we’ve ranged about as widely as we could possibly do in terms of musical methods and genres, and I just wondered how much do you two think you have in common and what would you like to say to each other? Can I bring Chris back in, who’s been listening?

Campion

Sure. Well, I think, essentially, just the driving force of trying to create something unique that is somehow an expression of you. The frustration levels can get pretty high but it’s also joyful when you have it all in your head and it’s actually all in there. There’s a magic to that as well.

White

And Michael, have you played any heavy rock?

Stimpson

Well, I did actually used to teach the electric guitar, for Chris I’m full of admiration because however skilled one became on the guitar, you’d try something basic on an electric guitar and you’d feel totally idiotic. So, my heart is with Chris because the range of sound is so varied.

White

I’m really sorry we can’t get you two jamming together. Michael Stimpson, Chris Campion, thank you both very much indeed.

And that’s it for today. From me, Peter White, producer Beth Hemmings and studio managers Richard Hannaford and Jonathan Esp. Goodbye.