Arbiters of Noise: Are Mogwai the last true punk band?

ca. Nov. 1999 or earlier

Scottish five-piece Mogwai aren’t the first artsy, postpunk act to righteously employ the dynamics of loud versus soft, rock versus not really rock, distorted versus clean and dissonant versus harmonic. But they’re the best to come out in a long while, perhaps since American indie legends Slint. Like that wildly influential combo, Mogwai make music that’s precious and ponderous, definitely rockist and distinctly their own. Their music approaches the wall-of-sound squall of crafty prog-trancers such as Ghost and Pelt, but it’s more varied, harder-edged and difficult to describe. Amazon’s Mike McGonigal chats with Mogwai guitarist and pianist John Cummings. Amazon.co.uk: You recorded Come On Die Young with Dave Fridmann (ex-Mercury Rev) in upstate New York; what was that like?

John Cummings: As a producer and engineer, he’s great. The studio is this house that some couple had spent two years building while they lived in a big caravan outside. Six months after it got finished and before they’d actually moved in properly, the couple got divorced. So Dave and some of his friends bought the house. It’s in the middle of a big forest and it was hunting season when we were there. We weren’t really able to go for a walk around, in case we’d get shot by hunters. They might have mistaken us for some animal–a rabbit, maybe.

Amazon.co.uk: Did that kind of situation really centre you guys?

Cummings: Me personally, yeah. The last album was recorded really near where we all stay in Glasgow and that was a bit of a problem. Stuart and Dominic had to go home and walk the dog and stuff like that; they couldn’t really concentrate.

Amazon.co.uk: Young Team and Come On Die Young are named after gang slogans; what’s all that about? Are gangs really big in Scotland?

Cummings: Ehh? I mean, they exist. And when you’re young, there are always gangs: “Oh, you can’t go up there because there’s this gang hanging about.” None of us really were part of all that, but it’s what we went to school with and just remembering the things that we used to see greatly amuses us. When we went on tour before we recorded the first album, we were getting quite silly. That’s when we made up all our alternate names. And we decided that we were Mogwai Young Team: a gang. We got quite excited by a kind of tour madness and started writing “MYT” and we got a bit carried away. At one point in the tour, we were close to getting the Led Zeppelin-like symbols. We snuffed out that one quite quickly. But the names kind of stuck. My name was Captain Meat. It’s not the best name.

Amazon.co.uk: No, it’s not.

Cummings: People seemed to think it’s got something or other to do with my liking sausages and chicken and stuff. I like meat. It’s a tasty substance. But if I had a chance again, I don’t think I would have named myself after it.

Amazon.co.uk: Is “Punk Rock/Puff Daddy/Antichrist” supposed to read as Puff Daddy the Antichrist, or is it like there’s one section of the song dedicated to Puff Daddy and another to the Antichrist, if they are in fact separate?

Cummings: If we had connected the name “Puff Daddy” with the term “Antichrist” any more …

Amazon.co.uk: …You might have had some trouble?

Cummings: Yeah. So we had to kind of separate them a wee bit for legal reasons. As far as I’m concerned, Puff Daddy very much is the Antichrist, yes. But we really couldn’t make as bold a statement as that.

Amazon.co.uk: Why do you think that?

Cummings: There’s nothing wrong with pop music. “Never Ever” by All Saints is a tremendous song; I could listen to it every day. But take, for instance, that Puff song with the “Kashmir” riff–the riff itself is the only thing in the song that’s of any value. Puffy’s just done nothing good at all. And I suppose it annoys me that everyone thinks he’s brilliant and he makes so much money, and he thinks he’s brilliant and he’s just not. He’s offensive.

Amazon.co.uk: You guys have something of a political-social edge, which is interesting for a predominantly instrumental band. For instance, there’s your EP from early 1999, Fuck the Curfew. Can you explain, first of all, what that’s about?

Cummings: There’s a town called Hamilton near Glasgow; it’s where we recorded the first album. They imposed this curfew and if you were under 16, you couldn’t be allowed out after nine o’clock at night. It was ridiculous that kids couldn’t actually be out doing anything after nine o’clock or they would get sent home. The curfew is not going to solve anything at all. When things annoy us, it does tend to seep into our music in some way, even if it’s just in song titles. We’re not going to ignore the fact that we get really annoyed by government policies or other things, but neither are we going to start a huge political movement based around it. We’re not going to try to get everyone at our gigs to start chanting, “We hate the Government. We hate the Government.” Nothing like that.

Amazon.co.uk: Does the fact that you don’t have much singing at all in your songs confuse people?

Cummings: Yeah, a lot of people don’t really seem to understand it. But I don’t really think there’s anything to not understand. It’s weird. If I saw monkey brains on a dinner menu in a restaurant, I would probably think that was quite weird, but it’s very commonplace in some countries.

Close to You: Elvis Costello talks about his meeting of the minds with Burt Bacharach.

by Rickey Wright

ca. November 1999 or earlier

In a long-ago MTV appearance, Elvis Costello praised Whitney Houston’s voice while bemoaning her taste in songs; only half-jokingly, he offered to write something worthy of her instrument. With Painted from Memory, his collaboration with composing-arranging legend Burt Bacharach, he delivers. The pair, who first worked together on “God Give Me Strength” from the film Grace of My Heart, have delivered a record full of the elegance of Bacharach’s classic work–not to mention Costello’s best, most affecting album in a decade. Costello spoke with Amazon’s Rickey Wright about the making of this masterpiece.

Amazon.co.uk: Was it easy for the two of you to decide to continue after “God Give Me Strength”?

Elvis Costello: I think it was essential [laughs]! I think after we finished writing the songs, we handed it over to the production and they performed it in the film and then, like all films, they take a while to actually finish them. So one minute we had a real tight deadline to write the song in, and then we had a while to sort of wait until the film emerged. And we got a second call saying would we consider recording “God Give Me Strength” together for the end titles. I hoped that the song would go on–you know, would have a life of its own–but the minute we made the record of it together, it was absolutely essential.

Once we got that rapport going in the room, then it seemed like, “Well, if we can work this well on a song that we wrote over the phone, and make a record this good, what kind of song can we write if we get in the room together?” And I think it’s been worthwhile. I wouldn’t return to the phone method now. I think it’s been very productive to get in the room and be able to look in each other’s eye when you’re, say, proposing something and when you’re disagreeing about something. We don’t just agree about everything instantly. We fight for what we believe is the right way a passage of the music should go–and we’re talking about minute details of the placement of one note in the bar or exactly the way something is phrased or where the harmony changes–in a lot more detail than I’d ever written with anybody else before, and I have to say probably examining the music in more detail than I’ve ever done independently.

Amazon.co.uk: When the two of you write, do you think about arrangement ideas at the same time?

Costello: They sort of come very naturally out of the song. It’s self-evident where a song is going to need support, and so by the time we got to the end of the writing process, Burt had sort of a sketch-out of the orchestrations, and it was just a question of which actual instrumental colors we would use, so we would credit each other.

For “In the Darkest Place”, he said bass flute. I’m going, wow! I know an alto flute, but I don’t think I’ve ever even heard a bass flute. I know they exist, but they’re something that’s in the back pages of your orchestration book that they never write about. But sure enough, it’s a really mysterious and intriguing sound. I mean, it’s a perfect way to introduce that song and this record.

But at the same time, with the song “Long Division”, I remember saying to Burt that maybe his first notion, which was an alto sax, was something people had heard a few times before. Maybe if we used an oboe, that would be a bit more unusual. But the notes that the oboe plays are the ones that Burt had originally written, and now he says, “I can’t imagine it being a sax.”

So it’s very interesting how we sort of sometimes even crossed over in our position in this. We would sometimes change roles, where he’d be looking for more words–“Give me more words”–and I’m looking maybe at some ideas to do with the orchestration. Just colors, now; I couldn’t take any credit for the actual notes that were played. Obviously, my share of the music is in the composition of the songs, not so much in the orchestration. But it came out of the composition, so in a way, there weren’t too many different ways to go. I think sometimes Burt weaves a line of strings through a melody in a very interesting and unusual way, as in a song like “What’s Her Name Today”, one of the songs that’s in the latter part of the record. Other times he’ll be inclined to just support the crescendo of the song, as he does in “God Give Me Strength” and “I Still Have That Other Girl”, and he’s always looking to use less and less.

You know, he isn’t looking to swamp the whole record with lots of strings or instrumental details. He was always very, very careful that the voice would be supported but that it wouldn’t be challenged in an unpleasant way. Just give me the real proper support for those big, dramatic crescendos.

He’s very, very austere, and he’s always trying to hold back the surprise. He’s always delaying the thrilling moment. He’s never, never giving it away; he’s always saying, “Sing quieter. Give yourself somewhere to go. Don’t tell the whole story, don’t give the whole story away in the first four bars.” It’s where I have to really try to be resourceful in the singing to match it. And obviously I’m not a smooth pop singer, and I don’t think anybody’d want to hear me suddenly turn into a smooth singer.

Amazon.co.uk: Did you feel challenged as a singer by doing this?

Costello: Obviously. We knew that when we were writing the songs. I mean, some of these songs are nearly two-octave range, a couple of them are over two-octave range, and the key has to be arranged so that the lowest part isn’t too low and the highest part is attainable, even if I have to reach for it. I think that’s an exciting sound.

A lot of people really respond to the excitement in my words when I get up there. Some people find it too harsh. But they’re people that want to listen to a different record; I can’t help them! They are the ones that really want easy-listening records. We’re not making an easy-listening record. We’re making a passionate, emotional record the way we always intended to.

~Rickey Wright is an Amazon.com music editor. A longtime critic and journalist, he has written for USA Today, Alternative Press, and many other publications.

Powder Keg

No byline

ca. November 1999 or earlier

With the release of his first opera, Powder Her Face, young British composer Thomas Adès has sped so far ahead of his status as “the one to watch” that critics compete for superlatives to describe him. For Adès’s debut recording, the prematurely named Life Story, Michael Oliver concluded his review in Gramophone magazine with an uncommon rave: “Adès is a composer whose gifts are so remarkable that it would be hard to exaggerate them.” His first big symphonic piece, Asyla, which was premiered in October 1997, has been described as “Beethovenian”. Adès is routinely compared to the precocious Mozart, the endlessly inventive Stravinsky, or the operatic Britten.

What’s going on here? Can Adès really be that good? Most of the works that the composer wrote before his 25th birthday have already been collected on EMI recordings. In addition to the two already mentioned, these also include Living Toys, and together they make up a discography especially impressive for a composer who was born in 1971. Yet even if Adès’s talent is so special, how is he able to survive the continuing hype and inflated expectation?

For better and worse, the classical music press take their musicians seriously. But beware the young composer anointed as “the one”–he’ll likely be first coddled and eventually smothered by the attention, and if the creative well goes dry, the formerly supportive press will pounce. At least for the moment, Adès has been spared the cold glare of critical detachment. It’s easy to hear why.

He delivers in part because he naturally incorporates these expectations into his work. The music of Adès is always assertive and confident, often restless and spectacularly clever, and often self-conscious, or rather, self-aware. He knows we’re listening–a reversal of the postmodern aesthetic–and by temperament he doesn’t wallow in harsh modernist angst. Instead, humour bubbles up where it’s unexpected and though Adès has crafted a recognisable style, the early pieces he has released on CD each show a distinct character.

When he sits down to write music, this is a composer who blends the full palette of late-20th century compositional techniques, from comforting tonality to serialism, always with an ear for the vernacular couched in sparkling, uncommon and attractive sounds. Even Adès’s shorter pieces, such as The Origin of the Harp or Darknesse Visible, trace emotional narratives with a beginning, a middle and a tangible end. From all this, one might think Adès shamelessly panders to the audience, except that he consistently manages to usher the listener into his musical world, on his own terms.

To put it uncharitably to so many other young, worthy composers, Adès stands apart because he is one of the few who sounds like he knows what he’s doing and whom we can trust and enjoy right from the first notes of his music.

Born in London into an artsy, scholarly family with Sephardic roots, Adès started writing music at age 11 and later studied at the Guildhall School of Music (with composer Robert Saxton) and at King’s College, Cambridge (under Alexander Goehr, a composer of extraordinarily wide-ranging knowledge). At 18, Adès won an important competition as a pianist, though he never accepted the premise of playing the same repertoire over and over again as a concert performer must. His urges were to create something new. Studies continued with György Kurtág, the great Hungarian miniaturist, and public attention came in 1993 with the London premiere of the poetic, 10-minute piece Still Sorrowing for “prepared” piano.

Some who attended that concert still remember the delightful experience of hearing so startling and original a voice. Soon after, prizes and commissions began arriving with frightening rapidity. By the end of 1993, Adès was composer-in-residence for Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra.

Unusually bright and perceptive in interviews, Adès is quick to laugh and share an unusual tale, aware of his standing as perhaps the major young composer around today–in Britain and elsewhere–but at the same time seemingly indifferent to that possibility’s banal meaning.

It’s in performance that Adès reveals himself as a complete musician. There’s something rather touching about a young composer-pianist-conductor who pays so much detailed attention to music by Kurtág, François Couperin and Conlon Nancarrow when his own music is next on the programme, to take one example from a concert he led in the United States in autumn 1997. Adès’s technique at the piano is conceptual and colourful, with plenty of virtuosity, but he’s always keen on finding fresh insight.

For all the flattering buzz of the moment, there might be dangers ahead. Like other performer-composers, from Leonard Bernstein to Pierre Boulez or Oliver Knussen, Adès runs the risk of letting his compositional creativity slacken as orchestras and music presenters clamour for his services. (Good conductors are rare at any one time, but good composers are practically non-existent.)

Still, it’s undeniable that a composer who performs is able to benefit from a sort of feedback loop. The necessity of playing or leading an ensemble in one’s own music is certain to clarify how notes are put on the page.

But a composer can easily become entangled in the more immediate and lucrative demands of conducting, performing and administering. Perhaps the plummiest of these activities involves the Aldeburgh Festival (founded by Benjamin Britten), of which Adès was appointed artistic director for the 1999 season. Meanwhile, Covent Garden has commissioned Adès’s second opera, which will involve the phenomenon of cults (to a libretto by poet James Fenton). The work is slated for the 2001 season, when the opera house is to reopen after repairs. If the success of works for the stage such as Powder Her Face isn’t quick to fade, that should provide all the inducement Adès needs to pursue his uncommonly promising future as a composer.

Milestones: Jazz trumpeter Mark Isham can’t get enough of Miles Davis

by Paul Tonks

ca. December 2000 or earlier

Jazz musician, trumpeter, film composer, electronic music specialist–Mark Isham is all these things and more. Following the release of his Miles Davis-inspired album with Miles Remembered, Amazon.co.uk caught up Isham during his residency at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London.

Amazon.co.uk: How do you abbreviate everything you do on a business card?

Mark Isham: (laughing) When I travel internationally they give you a boarding card which says “Occupation” with about a half inch of space. So I’m faced with that question from time to time. “Musician”–I figured they’d immediately take me to customs and go through every bag. “Composer” seemed a little more of an up-scale profession. One would have to go back to “Musician”, though, as the only one-word description.

Amazon: What was the childhood light bulb that made you think: “that’s what I’d like to be”?

Isham: Trumpet was a specific light bulb for me. It was the instrument I was immediately attracted to. The classical trumpet really, the beautiful clarino trumpet you hear in the music of Bach. Then I quickly discovered jazz too. I think Nat Adderley was the first contemporary jazz trumpet sound, although he was playing cornet. Not too long after that came Miles Davis.

I spent some time as second string trumpet in the San Francisco Symphony, the Open Symphony and the San Francisco Opera. I was never a contracted player, but I was there when they needed extras. It was about to become a professional career for me but I was also playing in nightclubs and rock bands. I never found it easy to do both. Perhaps because I had so many other interests in music, like electronics. I didn’t perhaps have the discipline to put in the time to become the consummate classical player. I’m a pretty good trumpet player and if I stick to jazz I do okay!

Amazon: Did you prefer to be the focal point in the music as a story teller?

Isham: I think that did have something to do with it. I realised fairly early on that my goal was to be the band leader. Not for any particular fame and fortune, but because I had ideas about what the music should be like. I really had an opinion. As fun as it was to sit at the back of an orchestra and play Mahler symphonies, unfortunately the life of a classical trumpet player really wasn’t going to hold my attention. My love of jazz was becoming stronger every day, and it quite easily won the battle within me.

Amazon: What was winning the battle for jazz ?

Isham: It brings us to The Silent Way Project and Miles Davis. coverIt was that fusion time–1969 and 70 with In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Bitches Brew particularly changed my view as a band leader and conceptualist. Wow! Here’s music that has tremendous melodic harmonic sophistication, as sophisticated as any contemporary classical music, but the rhythms are right out of present pop with a trumpet on top of it. It couldn’t be any better as far as I was concerned. It was the fusion of everything that I loved, respected and was interested in. Miles plugged into the wah-wah and echoplex. He reassured me that the trumpet could stay afloat, because these were the days when guitar was taking over.

Amazon: Were you looking to record at that time ?

Isham: I was just getting out of High School and trying to learn how to do it. But we were doing some pretty sophisticated stuff for 17-year-old kids. I have some little garage tapes from that time aren’t too bad.

Amazon: It’s the keeping of things on tape and the Bitches Brew album which of course ties everything together for the new album. At what point did you realise your tapes from The Silent Way Project were destined for release?

Isham: coverThe band had really taken its own point of view with the music. We weren’t just copying but playing it for ourselves. When we had about 18 shows on tape, I made a demo, then decided to move on, since I’d re-captured my enthusiasm for the music. Meanwhile I gave that demo to my manager and said: “bring the record company into focus with what we’re doing.” Next thing, they’ve said: “It just so happens we’re re-releasing a box set of Bitches Brew, and we’re having famous mixers coming in to re-mix Miles’s music on Panthalassa. Let’s join up and put yours out as part of it.” There seems to be this cultural consideration that this music is back. I couldn’t have been happier.

Amazon: Who do you listen to now? If you even get time!

Isham: My main interest now is a lot of this electronica stuff. I’m getting myself educated in who the players are, who the innovators and strong voices are like Underworld and Aphex Twin. I also like to listen to the newer classical stuff: I try and keep up on John Adams and John Tavener and composers like that. A certain portion of my film music career is still orchestral writing, so I like to keep up on where the current state of orchestral music is. Very rarely do I find myself inspired by anyone from within the film music community. I’ll listen to anything Elliot Goldenthal writes, but there’s so many restrictions within the Hollywood system that not many scores inspire me.

Amazon: Film music can sometimes be looked down on as not being “pure” music. Is there any such delineation in the numerous jazz styles ?

Isham: There’s the big uproar about soft jazz. I think there’s this set picture of what jazz is. The “real” jazz musicians seeing Kenny G at the top of the charts said “we have to differentiate ourselves from that!” Then the Kenny G clones follow fast and you suddenly have this whole genre of music that’s very successful. I wonder if this resurgence of interest in Miles Davis and “American Jazz” is a reaction to it. I think it’s going to help re-shape what jazz is. Jazz purists will have their opinion. For those who want to make this distinction I guess it’s a case of “the grass is always greener …”

Amazon: It seems your diverse career has you on both sides of the fence and on top of it.

Isham: It all interests me. What I’ve learned is that it’s all valid. To me some of the most interesting things about being alive is to see just how many points of view you can experience.

~Often found selling lies for a shilling, Paul Tonks is London Correspondent for LA-based Film Music Magazine. He won Silver in the 1920 Olympic Writeathlon, can play Bernard Herrmann’s entire works on spoons and writes for the British Academy of Composers & Songwriters.

We’ve Been Expecting You, Mr Bond

by Paul Tonks

ca. December 2000

Bond wouldn’t be Bond without the girls, gadgets and guns, but neither would he be quite as exciting without that famous signature theme. Amazon.co.uk goes undercover with composer David Arnold, lyricist Don Black and original guitarist Vic Flick to report on what keeps the franchise’s musical timebomb ticking.

What do we expect to see in a James Bond movie? First of all, there’s the Bond Girls, those saucily named lovelies like Honey Rider, Pussy Galore, Holly Goodhead, Plenty O’Toole and Xenia Onatopp who keep James’ trigger finger itching. We expect introductions to be made in a casino, naturally. Then we need memorable baddies and henchmen, such as Scaramanga, Blofeld, Goldfinger, Oddjob and Jaws. Some nifty gadgets courtesy of Q (and now R) will be needed to do away with them, and the perfect finale will see a huge explosion followed by a final reserve of energy for the closing bed scene. But what, then, do we expect to hear in a James Bond movie? After the fanfare and gun barrel silhouette there’s always a title song and opening credit sequence to look forward to, followed by action aplenty, during which we expect the composer to come up with a new arrangement of the famous Bond theme to help us cheer him on.

David Arnold, composer of the Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough, recalls his feelings when seeing their predecessor Goldeneye, scored by electronic music specialist Eric Serra. His reaction neatly encapsulates just what our pre-determined expectations about the music are: “I liked the first 20 minutes a lot, but because the composer didn’t change his usual style, the rest of it sounded the same. You do feel when watching a Bond movie that at some point you need someone to stand up and point a load of trumpets at you!”

This is the John Barry legacy composers like Arnold must live up to: a brassy, brash swagger. “You’re in a bit of a no-win situation,” Arnold comments, “because people complain if it doesn’t sound anything like John Barry, and they also complain if it does too much!”

Alongside the wailing brass, the other Barry Bond sound goes all the way back to the original movie, Dr. No, where Barry is credited as arranging the famous theme for Monty Norman’s score. The orchestra for the recording consisted of five saxes, nine brass, solo guitar, a rhythm section and no strings. Capturing our imagination forever was guitarist Vic Flick, who in 1962 was a member of the John Barry Seven.

“John and I worked on the sound,” recalls the guitarist, “and it was recorded in about three quarters of an hour. I thought it was a very entertaining and exciting film. Of course, no-one connected with it had any idea the interest would last 40 years. I wish I’d got residuals!”

There’s something about each movie’s title sequence that truly whets your appetite for what’s to come in the score. A Barry trademark was to craft each film’s main theme as the title song’s melody. Lyricist Don Black details his involvement with the legacy: “John was a fan of my song ‘Walk Away’ with Matt Munro. He asked if I would like to have a go at Thunderball? The first thing I did was look the word up in the dictionary and it wasn’t there! Being with Tom Jones it was the most exciting introduction imaginable. Tom actually fainted on the last note, which is very high. Then I did Diamonds Are Forever and The Man With The Golden Gun. I enjoy writing James Bond lyrics because they are a particular brand of lyric writing. It’s got to be dramatic and goose-bumpy and inviting you in.

“Diamonds was much easier to write than Thunderball. I wanted to make it as sexy and provocative as I could–very Shirley Bassey. Harry Saltzman thought it too sexy, especially the line, ’touch it, stroke it, and undress it’. But we got away with it ! I think it’s one of the best Bonds. It seems to capture everything. That inviting, seductive, come hither aspect. But Golden Gun was a terrible title for a song. I don’t think John or I were ever really happy with it. I’d love to have another go!”

Black teamed up with Arnold for the Tomorrow Never Dies song “Surrender” (sung by kd lang over the end credits). “Someone asked me if I knew Don Black,” Arnold reminisces. “I said: ‘you don’t know him do you?’ The way Don talks about John and I is like he’s talking about Spencer Tracy or someone. He’s a great fan of our music. It’s very flattering, of course, but we don’t think we’re amazing.” Thanks to Arnold’s enthusiasm, though, they collaborated once again for The World Is Not Enough.

“I’m so pleased to have been asked to do the new one,” Black enthuses, “because it’s the old style back again. It goes for the vintage Bond sound. It’s what John brought to it, and David has contemporised. The song is performed by Garbage, but it could easily have been sung by Shirley Bassey. It has that mystery quality.”

Since the title sequence photography is done after the song, the music in many ways dictates a template for the visuals. The late Maurice Binder was the original artistic genius, and it was for the resultant Diamonds Are Forever sequence that Black was paid one of his highest compliments by Steven Spielberg. “Andrew Lloyd Webber introduced us, and Spielberg said, ‘You’re not the Don Black are you? You wrote my favourite title song of all time.’ He went on about how the word ’lustre’ comes at the right time, about the translucent light, and he explained what a wonderful experience it is when you hear these lyrics put against the titles.”

There’s no getting away from how deeply the Bond musical legacy has ingrained itself in society and our expectations. Vic Flick can’t escape from it, even on holiday: “I was on a fishing trip off the Florida coast trying to get away from it all. A motor yacht came by with it’s sound system going full blast playing–you guessed it–the James Bond Theme!” ~Often found selling lies for a shilling, Paul Tonks is London Correspondent for LA-based Film Music Magazine. He won Silver in the 1920 Olympic Writeathlon, can play Bernard Herrmann’s entire works on spoons and writes for the British Academy of Composers & Songwriters.