Sunken Gardens, Dalston Power Lunches And Wonky Folk

Level of conviction in own genius: 6.5

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 3

Watching / Listening: ‘The Master’ on my flight to Toronto / Emily Portman’s back catalogue

Hair Day: The Most Expensive Haircut I Have Ever Had (like Emeli Sande but without the twin-sets and achingly dull songs); firmly considering having zig zag lines etched into the sides by a Brixton barber!

I’m a bit late with getting my oar in on the ENO’s much-trumpeted, look-at-us-we’re-down-with-da-yoot 3-D opera Sunken Garden at the Barbican; but I’m picking up my paddle anyway, to add to the smokin’ ‘was it good? Or was it SHIT?’ online debate, with the Telegraph/Guardian/Standard/Indie etc firmly crossing their arms in the former camp, and Norman LeBrecht looking a bit billy-no-mates in the latter. Sarah-juicette and I happily got bumped up to some good seats, upon which to take in the undisputedly impressive technical heft of the various screens and the synchronisation of filmed singers with live orchestra and vocalists. I do think there could be a lot of fun to be had with 3-D film in theatre, but fun was to be heard slamming the door and skipping off, laughing maniacally, to some club in Clerkenwell to pump its fist for four hours while WE sat, increasingly baffled and squirming slightly.

 As Mark Kermode is extremely wont to rail, 3-D is not a marker of quality, but instead too often thrown in desperately to add gloss to a soulless flibbertigibbet of a movie in which a) story b) writing and c) characters are found lacking. For every Cave of Forgotten Dreams, there are plentiful Transformers 3. Whilst Sunken Garden’s use of film, and in the second half, 3-D film, WAS integral to the story (documentary filmmaker gets increasingly drawn into his research about a missing guy, who has in fact been trapped in a verdant virtual purgatory by a crazy woman), I couldn’t help but hear Kermode shrieking like a disapproving great-aunt in the background. For this opera had a pretty dreadful story, chased down with weak characters and fist-in-mouth dialogue. Honestly, no-one should EVER have to hear the phrases ‘I am the head of a charitable arts foundation’ or ‘it’s an arthouse documentary’ sung operatically in slightly angular phrases. David Mitchell has not made an auspicious start in the world of libretto-writing, and Michel Van Der Aa’s music was mostly uninteresting vocal lines and swampy orchestral writing which had so many dramatic peaks that when the biggest revelations happened, they were rendered musical damp squibs. It was hard to make out the revelatory details anyway, as they were being histrionically wailed by two sopranos at pitches far too high to get the words out, and mostly whilst one did some madly hammy hand-thrashes to splash 3-D droplets towards the audience, and the other writhed around wrestling a long bit of apparently threatening material in unconvincing fashion (Van der Aa also directed). Having gone in rooting for it, we emerged underwhelmed and slightly embarrassed, and found many friends and acquaintances equally irked. Let’s hope the next big things do a little better…

 Two days later, Andy and I were in Mangal 2, rubbing shoulders and plates of tzadziki with various Beeb writers, conductors (André de Ridder, who’d waded his best through Sunken Garden) and BBC Radio 3 presenters (Sara Mohr-Pietsch, with him), which made up for the fact that we (gasp!) didn’t see Gilbert and George (they were reportedly in later. PHEW). We then headed to Dalston’s latest bottled-beer-and-dank-basement-dive called Power Lunches (of course!); it turned out to be a highly illustrious and extremely select audience, including André, Sara and Radio 3 producer Peter Meanwell, who had rocked up to see a bunch of Manchester music students, including young composer Tom Rose, put on their second night celebrating their new record label Slip Discs (nice). Olly Coates played a stunning solo ‘cello set as we sat on the concrete floor (Kagel, Britten, Squarepusher), followed by a fab electric guitar and laptop/drums duo with Leo Abrahams (who has the most amazing CV as a producer and session musician, from Brian Eno to Imogen Heap to Grace Jones), and Larry Goves did some live electronica alongside Olly. It was fun, and Very Dalston.

I had a smashing You Are Wolf gig in Oxford this weekend, at The Cellar’s Irregular Folk night. Vez, the promoter, looked after us beautifully (tea, cake, general super-niceness) the sound (by Geezer – that was his name!!), for once, was really excellent, meaning Andy and I could really respond to each other, and the crowd was fulsome and full of cheer. Headlining was the very wondrous Laura J Martin, a Scouse lass wielding the same Boss RC-50 loop station, a flute (she did some mean jazz-spitting and singing into it), a voice that really was like Kate Bush’s (rather than just a lazy reference point) in its mixture of ethereal gossamery tones and sudden, more strident edge, plus some mandolin and keyboard. She was occasionally accompanied by bassist Ollie from Oxford mega-folkpopsters Stornoway, and did brilliant fawn-like dancing to quirky beats that evoked Greek ancients having a rave. Check her out!

Creative news: juice have now recorded their final second album session, tackling Dai Fujikura’s 2.5-minute beast of a piece, and Anna-juicette’s marvellously dislocated Mariah Carey cover. The You Are Wolf sessions are now fully recorded, and beginning to be mixed by MaJiKer, who sends me rough cuts over email from Paris. And Woodwose, my community chamber opera, is finished! Hurrah. I am rewarding myself by hot-tailing it to New York via Toronto and Washington D.C.: full report to come!

Terror-Rave, Soundwalking and Leek Tartlets

Level of conviction in own genius: 6.9
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 5, if making instrumental parts from a score counts, urgh
Reading: Sped through the wonderful 'Londoners' by Craig Taylor, a birthday book from Andy; now weeping hopelessly at every other page of Vera Brittain's amazing 'Testament of Youth', 80 years old this year.
Hair Day: Needs Serious Cutting Soon

As is my wont, I packed in a few cultural things into my birthday last week. I was in Cambridge the night before to collect my joint winnings (along with fellow Yorkie and all-round fab lass Stef Conner) from the Incorporated Society of Musicians' inaugural choral prize, hurrah! The Queens' College Chapel Choir sang my SATB version of the trad. song (which I do as a You Are Wolf number) 'All Things Are Quite Silent' in a very pure, super-perfect version, as well as singing Stef's and other winner, talented whippersnapper composer Toby Young. We were then ushered into the ostentatiously Arts and Crafts-y Queens' College Hall for a posh meal, complete with slightly weird, archaic graces in Latin and toasts to the Queen and that sort of thing. The Oxbridge ways seem pretty damned sniggersome to the likes of progressive -'60s-university-going husband and I, and even more so as I'm reading about Vera Brittain's (see above) breathless recounting of her debut at Oxford in 1914, complete with through-the-night cocoa parties with equally lofty, serious fellow studentettes. Still, it was nice to chat to Toby and also to meet gregarious, uber-gifted clarinettist/composer and voracious reader Mark Simpson over tenderised beef and leek tartlets...

It was back to Queens' for a lunchtime concert from Mark, Melvyn Tan, Guy Johnston and Jack Liebeck; there was no better day than my birthday for my first live performance (shocker!) of one of my favourite pieces of classical music, Messaien's 'Quartet For The End of Time'. It's so masterfully and transparently constructed and with such craft: chamber music as filigree jewellery. The final movement - though the 'cello and piano is my favourite - with its ever-soaring violin line, was enough to make me fall apart. After a brief schlepp about Cambridge, it was back to the safe heartlands of Dalston for a hang-out in a new tea shop, dinner at Mangal II with friends (and Gilbert and George, naturally), and we mopped it all up with some punishing terror-rave at Cafe Oto from the likes of Birthday: BAM!

It's been a packed concert-going schedule: the next night we went to Wigmore Hall to support Team GB, otherwise known as seeing some of the George Benjamin celebrations, with a concert version of his first, chamber, opera, 'Into the Little Hill', which was pretty marvellous, though even seated right at the front below the bellowing/shrieking soloists I still thought that the words could have had more space. The highlight for me though was David Sawer's 'Rumpelstiltskin' suite, which whilst not exactly ground-breaking in soundworld, was a brilliantly-orchestrated, deeply delightful affair.

This week, juice were busy in Sussex, recording and filming a new music-film piece for composer Paul Robinson, and we were filmed by a chap who is usually to be found shooting the likes of 'Frankenweenie' and 'Fantastic Mr Fox'. We also did initial workshops for four composers as part of the Sound and Music 'Embedded' scheme, trying out loops, hockets, vocal white noise and medieval erotic letter-settings, and discussing being wheeled around in shopping trolleys to represent Jupiter's orbiting moons. This is quite, quite normal for juice...

Juicette Anna was also part of Brit composer and hair arch-rival Tansy Davies' UBS Eclectica series retrospective at LSO St Luke's, singing her song cycle 'Troubaritz' with our percussionist/composer buddy Damien Harron. The night was packed full of halting riffs and broad genre references - the highlights being violinist Aisha Orazbeyeva's solo scratchy, glitchy piece, influenced by the Bach partita that preceded it, and the closer, 'Neon', complete with Tansy standing up to piledrive in a bit of electric guitar. It was quite a sceney night, and good to mingle with new musicky types in the pub afterwards.

Thank god for the sun today! I was not so lucky at The School of Life recently, when running my first workshop, in the art of listening and soundwalking. We'd planned for it to be April so that the birds would be tweeting merrily, the zephyrs balmy, etc; instead we got air so cold it practically scalped you, and a sound-palate of cars and people shivering. STILL, a successful night was had by all, and I got the class of clever adults thinking about their sonic environment and composing soundwalks, inspired by the likes of my walk-art hero Richard Long, John Cage, Chris Watson and many more. The next one will be in sunnier climes!

Lots of radio recently! I went into the Resonance FM offices in Borough to record a little session for Sam Lee's Nest Collective Hour (also to be found on Folk Radio); it's a very marvellous, old/new/no-folk show, and a pleasure to be on, though frankly my performance was a mitigated disaster of loop station confusion and general calamity, urgh! STILL, even James Blake accidentally left a sliver of yelpy loud loop in his recent 6Music session, so the loop station gremlins get about a bit. Curses upon them! It was also rather lovely to turn on Jazz on 3 and find myself singing on it - a second album track from Metamorphic opened the show, yay!

Falcon Conclusion

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 4

Watching / Listening: Pining after finishing 'Boardwalk Empire' Season 3 / The traditional song Molly Bawn as sung by a 93-year old man

Hair Day: SERIOUSLY considering coppertop in order to maintain standards as quoted by Sam Lee (see below)


It's all go as usual here, all while battling with the evil maggoty-looking infection that keeps hanging around in my throat (URGH!). But I have still managed to fit in some birding of various varieties.

First: a visit to the English School of Falconry in Bedfordshire! I got to fly a big ole owl, a harris hawk, hold a three-week old baby owl (looking remarkably like an infant gremlin to me), hold a 9lb juveline bald eagle, and my favourite, the very gorgeous Peregrine/Lanor falcon cross. It makes me think I should get back there, rather more glamourously-clad than in this Battling Winter-look below, and do a photo-shoot for my You Are Wolf birdlore-themed album, all glitter and feathers and faux-nonchalantly attempting to hold up a golden eagle or sumfink. The album is ticking along nicely, with just a few bits to send to MaJiKer before he can get on with mixing. I'm planning to call it 'Hawk to the Hunting Gone'...

I've thus been cramming some bird field recordings to possibly add into the album, though finding the perfect sonic environment has been tricky. It's either too noisy (Ruskin Park on Easter Sunday, Hampton Park on Easter Monday under a flight path), or too damned quiet (Rainham Marshes in Essex). In the secret garden at the back of Brockwell Park, it was like flippin' Snow White or something: as I quietly sang 'The Bird's Courting Song' into my Zoom recorder, a dunnock hopped across my path, a robin perched on the bench to listen, a squirrel climbed the trellis above my head and sat looking down at me, and two doves sputtered down on the grass. And none of them made a GODDAMNED PEEP.

It was lovely to sing some of the 'birdlore' songs at Sam Lee's Nest Collective night at the Old Queen's Head in Islington this week (I'm going to be on his Resonance FM show this Tuesday 2nd April, 12pm!). Sam very kindly (and rightly) introduced me as possessing 'the finest hair in contemporary classical music' - ha, take THAT, Eric Whitacre! I was mostly there to sing as part of MaJiKer's ongoing NORTH project, exploring the traditional folk songs of Scandinavia through new English lyrics, looping, much vocals and projections. It was a GOOD excuse to get a new dress (an all-white maxi t-shirt dress that looks a bit like a net curtain, since you ask) and I have really thrived on exploring different characters in my voice when taking the lead. We hit the Albert Hall with it (and with Sam) on June 11th!


Whilst most people (judging by Twitter, anyway) were watching 'The Voice' on telly (HONESTLY! The ADHD-editing in the first minute made me feel SICK), Andy and I donned extra layers and headed up to Clapton for a hipstertastic-sounding event: a shadow puppet theatre play; with live improvised violin, electric guitar and electronics; in a former dentist's. YES! In truth, the prospect of the night far outweighed the actual show itself, as it started over an hour late, the rest of the (tiny) audience were friends on the guest list, the shadow puppetry was distinctly underwhelming, not least because there was often  5-10 minutes of darkness between each tableau vivant, and the venue seemed to be MORE cold than it was outside, meaning my legs lost all hope of feeling after about 10 minutes. STILL, we giggled our way home on the bus, imagining that we were probably there right at the start of something big, y'know, like the Sex Pistols at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall.


In other news, juice are two recording sessions down, one to go, with our Nonclassical chum Gabriel at the helm, and have really noticed the difference between this and our last album recording, since working with MaJiKer. We are much more interested in and aware of the colour of our voices, which is lovely. We are recording lots of love songs, original (by Jim Moray, Dai Fujikura, Michacu and more) and arrangements of Rihanna, Mariah Carey, Kraftwerk and much more. I'm refining my community chamber opera score, Woodwose, and am making plans for a NEW chamber opera. On wild swimming. Hurrah!

Attack of the Fallen Women

Level of conviction in own genius: 6.5
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 3
Watching / Listening: 'Boardwalk Empire' Season 3 / suggestions for my radio show
Hair Day: Floppity, moppity

Nonclassical, my label (juice have started recording their second album, woo hoo!) have just held a big festival of pioneering electronic music, so Andy and I made it along to a bit at XOYO, where the demographic was almost entirely men in their 30s with beards. I sadly missed Raymond Scott and the final set by The Orb man Alex Patterson, but did catch the bludgeoning percussion/electronic piece by Stockhausen, Kontakte, plus, much more soothingly, two Messaien pieces for ondes martenot and synth/piano. The ondes martinot is a sort of electronic theremin, and is basically a hopeless romantic of an instrument, espeically when playing the achingly meandering phrases of Messaien's 'cello and piano duo from Quartet From The End of Time. There is no more beautiful piece! And did you know that Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood is the only owner of an ondes martinot in Britain, fact fans?!

To the gods at the Royal Opera House for George Benjamin's much-lauded (a new opera! With contemporary music in't! That everyone LIKES!) Written on Skin, with George, or 'team GB', as I rather too loudly and excitedly shouted jst before he lifted his baton, conducting. The set was excellent, these contrasting rooms of clinical heaven/archeologists' lab with rough-edged medieval-ish chambers. The orchestral writing was mostly glorious, especially with the slightly sci-fi-sounding glass harmonica for the bit where everyone suddenly moved in slow motion; all lush and filigree and delightfully detailed, though I sometimes thought it burbled along in too unrelated a fashion underneath the singers. I thought it started slightly sluggishly, dramatically-speaking, but the slow-burning tension was ratcheted up from act to act to proper Greek drama/Shakespearean tragedy-style heights by the end, and complemented in a way by the scoring that I'm sure would be easy to take for granted but is in fact highly skilful. I didn't really see much need for the modern-day bit - it was all about the central ferocious love triangle for me. Barbara Hannigan was storming as Agnes, the young wife whose lust is awakened by the visiting Boy/Angel who comes to write an illuminated manuscript: rolling around, or being thrown around, usually whilst singing perfectly controlled, pure high notes. But therein lies the rub for me: here's yet another opera with a central female character who is another fallen woman - what a BORE! It made me REALLY want to write The Descent: The Opera (if you don't know the film, 5 super-cool pot-holing lasses fight terrifying monsters in caves, with nary a male in sight), or at least SOMETHING where the girls are MAD REAL, not defined simply by their sexuality, and DEFINITELY winning out in the end.

Finally, my career as a radio DJ has begun. Well, in a teeny tiny way at least! I am presenting the Strawberry Shortwave Radio Show live on Haggerston Radio on Sundays at 4-6pm and I've done two so far. The idea is to play music inspired by a weekly theme, and play a very eclectic range of tunes. Proof of pudding: this first boat-themed week featured Gavin Bryars, Guys n Dolls, Laurie Anderson, three versions of the traditional English song 'A Sailor's Life', field recordings, poetry, angry postpunk about the NHS,and Iron Maiden. YES! The shows are archived. Here's two to treat your ears to!

You're So Dane

Level of conviction in own genius: 6.5
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 3
Watching / Reading: Two excellent films: 'Lore', just beautiful and dark, and the screamingly tense and screamingly '70s 'Argo' / 'The Year of The Flood' by Margaret Atwood
Hair Day: awight

To venues both big and small as a punter recently. I went to the Rose Theatre next door to the Globe for a short, sharp shock of a 'Hamlet', there to see our friend Jonny Broadbent go all Dane, complete with 'The Killing'-style knitwear. The Rose in the site of Bankside's very first theatre, and this show had the delicious tagline of being the first 'Hamlet' there since 1594. There was a wonderful use of the space: hemmed in by the teeny cardboard box style-set for much of the play, upon a hammy version of the play with the play, the black screen I assumed had a wall behind it was pulled down to reveal, behind a balcony and to audible intakes of breath, a cavernous space with a big pool of water at its centre: the foundations of the old theatre, underneath the canopy of a massive new building! String of red lights suddenly lit it up, and it was then used for Ophelia's mad singing scene, the Yorick scene, complete with brilliant Hamlet-and-skull shadows, and more.

Then it was to the Barbican to finally see Bobby McFerrin, one of our greatest living vocalists, live. It was a very chilled set of spirituals, many recorded by his dad (the first black male opera singer at the Met), with some raspy blues and some typical Bobby-ish chest-hitting and scatting. He leapt about all over his preposterous four-and-a-bit-octave range like a gleeful springbok; commanded his louche players; and introduced his 21-year old daughter as a honey-toned backing singer. Just lovely.

I had the very touching experience of having my graphic score for recorders, Screech (which you can toy with to create your own video-composition right here!), interpreted by five groups of recorder players aged from about 8 up to 18 at St. George's, Hanover Square, in my final outing as Handel House Composer in Residence. It was so fab to see a class of 20 Year 4s avant-gardely squealing, pipping and hissing, in partly-improvised renditions led by recorder masters Consortium 5. The new music future is kids! With recorders! Here's Yerbury School giving it some:
There was a time when my ambition was to play Cargo in East London. Then I did, in 2006, with juice! Then  I wanted to play Cafe Oto. And I did! Finally, The Vortex was in my sights; and lo! now I am a regular. I sang with Metamorphic in February, and DOLLYman finally got their foot in the door, having fun playing off-the-dots for the first time as support to the Kandinsky Effect's album launch. Let's up my targets. Next: The Barbican!

Silent Opera, Foxy Opera, Singing Kate Bush For World-Famous Fashion Designers, etc

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0
Watching / Listening: Daftly enjoyable enigmatic poshos in the new Poliakoff, 'Dancing on the Edge' / recommendations on Gorilla vs Bear blog
Hair Day: pleasingly short; am considering a dyed copper-top. Nice!

Pah. London's current prescription of cold rain and rainy cold has not been much fun, though the last couple of days have given glimpses of a good-weather renaissance. But how I long for the summer, for freckles and wild swimming! There's nothing for it but to hurl myself not into the warm, chlorinated fug of the municipal pool but instead into much culture...

Seeing as I'm writing one, I've started itching to see more opera. First up was Silent Opera's version of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, in a brilliant corner of London I've never ventured to before, a mile past Canning Town to Trinity Buoy Wharf. This feels a bit like the north-west docks in Amsterdam, looks south to the O2's startled yellow feelers, and includes super-cool, brightly-coloured live-work containers. The opera was in a lovely big warehousey wharfey space, and we were all handed wireless headphones at the door. The idea was that, with a reduced 5-piece band, we could hear the full orchestra in our ears, along with amplified vocalists and the live players. The singers, with very subtle radio mic clipped about their persons, were free to roam amongst us, and the audience was moved, faintly promenade-like into two different spaces for Acts II and III. I have to say, I found the headphones (and the core idea of silent opera-ing) pretty unnecessary: everything was being gently amplified through a PA anyway, and moreover, it was miles more thrilling to listen to the singers, unadorned, live. And it would have made much more sense to simply pare down the scoring to the harpsichord, harp, theorbo, etc, and be rid of the extra strings completely. It was too much like Renaissance-karaoke for me. The costumes - a sort of Camden-rave-in-1998 - were vile, and the bunch of gurning dancers ineffectual; that said, the singers were marvellous, and it was fabulous to have them sweating and bellowing up close and personal. But a flawed project, I feel.

To the Southbank, and a weekend amongst their epic The Rest Is Noise season. I caught the Aurora Orchestra doing George Antheil's very-ahead-of-its-time Ballets Mechaniques, which smacked barnstormingly of the fear and wonder of encroaching technological onslaught. And it was good to catch Barbara Hannigan showcase her duo role as soprano and conductor in an afternoon of, if I'm honest, soporific Satie and rather more zingy Stravinsky, in his mini-opera Reynard, performed with puffed-out glee by the likes of Roderick Williams. The aim with the season, as in the Alex Ross book, is to place 20th-century music in socio-political context; I'm not sure that, so far, this has been the most successful part of the concerts I've seen: pre-cursing the Antheil was a jazz singer rather uncomfortably attempting to seduce a Saturday afternoon crowd including an impressive amount of avant-garde-loving under-10s with Josephine Baker songs, and a too-slight cubist film of the Aurora. Harriet Walter read from diaries by the Russian princess who commissioned Satie and Stravinsky, which was fascinating, but too long.

To my own shizz!

juice have performed with MaJiKer in Wigmore Hall to an excitable crowd including many Tower Hamlets teenagers who screamed with sugar-high abandon at our Rihanna cover. I debuted by little suite of songs on London's forgotten rivers, lostriversongs, with loop station and killer acoustic improvising trio 7 Hertz at Handel House. Most recently, I did another hymn-leading stint at The School of Life's Sunday Sermon, fulfilling a personal and flatteringly insistent request for my services from the day's lecturer, high-art fashion designer/filmmaker/artist Hussein Chalayan! He also wanted a Kate Bush song, so I learnt 'The Man With The Child In His Eyes', to sing to the 500-strong intellectual massive. Hussein casually informed me before the show that he'd told Kate I'd be singing it today. WARGH! I tired to dismiss daydreams of Hussein providing me with clothes for all award-going occasions for the rest of my life, passing my number along to Kate, etc. Just another usual Sunday for moi, then!

January Do's!

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 8
Watching / Listening: Have soared through Breaking Bad Season 2 and Mad Men Season 5 already this month. Middle-class Guardo-reading box-set perfection. / Peter Grimes, for inspiration.
Hair Day: crammed under a pink beanie. Brrr.

Yeah, screw that ole January-is-the-crappest-month-Blue-Monday nonsense. I love January! New projects, new resolutions (I have sensible ones that I have to complete at some point in the year, rather than any stupid read-every-day-eat-alfalfa-do-zumba sort of ones) and cultural fun. You've got to stomp through that snow in your most unashamedly nerdy stout walking boots (I have new ones - they are old-fashioned brown leather ones, like Wainwright would have worn on his travels. Fashionable if you're in Keswick. Not so much if you're in Camberwell.) and DO STUFF.

CREATIVE STUFF has included laying down a lot of material with producer maestro and 2013 collaborator of choice, MaJiKer, for my debut You Are Wolf album, featuring the birdlore set. I have a got a truly special guest to sing a little something for it too. Excitement!
My big project for the next few months is my community chamber opera Woodwose. I wrote the libretto whilst snuggled in front of a log fire up in the Yorkshire Dales at Christmas, and now am knuckling down to it at home. I'm quite proud of my ability to not look at the internet until mid-afternoon - I really CAN live without cat videos and Fantasy Football League after all!

SOCIAL STUFF has included being jostled at Brixton's Hootenanny, as is par for the course, and enjoying rather more the lovely vibes up the road at Mango Landin', which is ten times less skanky. DOLLYman had a very fun time playing a charity gig there and went down a storm. We're extremely excited about our gig at the Vortex on Feb 21st!

I popped to the PRSF party earlier in the month; it wasn't quite as fun as last year's - the Scala was a bit soulless really - but it was nice to see (a slightly sleepy) Sam Lee and band play, as well as Ayanna Witter-Johnson. Speaking of Sam, I am proud, and a little sheepish given the company, of having done a remix for 2012's Folk King, which is part of a free and downloadable EP here!

Last weekend, Platform 33 had their 1st birthday party in a cool (and COLD) railway arch in Waterloo. The night, always designed to be super-eclectic, crammed in a brass ensemble, South African township funk, sword dancing, and razor-sharp recorder quintet Consortium 5, who played my badluck birds pieces. Here's a lovely review!

Speaking of badluck birds, check out my online composing/video/webgame of one of the movements, Screech. See if you can make your own version of the piece...

ACTIVE STUFF has been on the QT, BUT I reckon I redeemed myself slightly by going to Covent Garden's Oasis and swimming very, very fast in their outdoor pool with a temperature of -1 outside and many gulpfuls of snow. YES!

Buy New Music For Christmas! Kerry's rundown of her pals' releases

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Hours of creative activity in last 24: 2
Watching /Listening: 'The Killing', like the predictable middle-class artsy boxset-loving Guardo-reading lass I am / Cerys on 6Music, who has just played excellent National Jazz Trio of Scotland alternative Crimble EP
Hair Day: APPALLINGLY long, by my standards. Which is very short by most other people's.

I thought I'd compile a list of friends' releases this year, that you should really consider buying as Christmas presents for your most discerning nearest and dearest. What better way to give than by supporting some of the UK's finest alternative musicians? YES.

Firefly Burning - Lightships

Easily one of my favourite live bands, this Portico Quartet-meets-Arcade Fire-meets-Fleet Foxes produce totally sublime, folky and complex music that makes you slightly weep.








Jimmy Rosso - 32:32

My DOLLYman compadre Jimmy in his solo debut, which is a more experimental, spooky, glitchy mixture of James Blake, Bon Iver and Panda Bear.








Tom Hewson - Slightly Peculiar

Blissed-out solo jazz piano debut, inspired by Messiaen, Bill Evans and John Taylor.









Sam Lee - Ground of Its Own
2012 was a runaway success for folk troubadour Sam, who was hardly been off the radio or awards circuit since the summer. Beautiful arrangements including shruti box, Japanese koto, jew's harp, wound around Sam's melting croon on a bunch of traditional songs.





Roshi Feat. Pars Radio - Don't Breathe It To A Soul

Ethereal electronica inspired by a silent movie, with digital remixes from Pere Ubu's David Thomas, Gargarin, Now, and ME, in my Fisher-Price first remix (under my You Are Wolf moniker)! Also available as a limited edition 7" vinyl.





Lazy Habits - Lazy Habits

If you haven't seen these chaps live, you've not lived! The Habits' UK hip hop/brassfunk finally lands in their long-awaited debut.








Gabriel Jackson/Vasari Singers - Requiem

Wicked choral composer, BBC Singers Associate Composer and British Composer Award-winning Gabriel Jackson celebrated his 50th birthday this year. Here's the Vasari Singers in the first recording of his Requiem.





Anna Meredith - Black Prince Fury

Re-released on the Moshi Moshi label, this is brilliantly edgy composer Anna's electronica debut.








Have Yourself a DOLLYDOLLY Christmas
And I'll squeeze in one of my own: DOLLYman's rather alternative Christmas EP. From wild squealy 'O Come All Ye Faithful' to fall-over-lovely medleys, you KNOW it makes sense!

British Composer Awards: EXCLUSIVE! Kerry's acceptance speech that never was

Level of conviction in own genius: 6
Hours of creative activity achieved in the last 24 hours: 5
Reading / Watching: 'Electric Eden' by Rob Young  / 'The Hour', lovely classy stuff from the Beeb 
Hair day: Not bad actually, especially after emergency hairspray run in town


So I'm just back from this evening's British Composer Awards (the 10th, and going strong), held this year at the supremely blingtastic Goldsmith's Hall next to St. Paul's Cathedral (and I mean blingtastic: displaying flagons once quaffed by Charles II, rugs bigger than the floorspace of my entire flat, chandeliers with real candles that took 45 mins to light, and a ceiling the height of about 15 composers stacked on top of each other...). I have managed to get in the door for the third year running, this time in the shortlist for the Education and Community Award for my work on the Art on the Underground project 'A Lock Is A Gate', which I was cheered to hear a track from played on Radio 3 this week - all those rum Hackney kids, singing little solos on the wireless!

The after-awards drinkies and after-party (when I say after-party, I mean 10 of us sloping off to a deserted posh city bar for a final drink. NEXT YEAR I'm hosting it, Elton-John-at-the-Oscars style) was fun enough. I rocked up with Gabriel Jackson and Sarah-juicette. Good to chat to John Barber and his lovely Firefly-lass Bea, Simon Speare, Stuart King and Claire Shovelton from CHROMA, Richard Barnard (who refuse to break throughout intense questioning as to which category he had judged, PAH), various publishers, and I got some Oxford University Press gossip from super-sweet Alan Bullard. Amusingly, composer Gavin Higgins had his photo taken with Andy, insisting that he was his hipster glasses/side-parting/Top Man jacket-wearing doppelganger. Hee hee. 

I had never really thought I stood a chance of winning (though was gratified to hear that there was a skirmish over my piece in the final judging; I like to imagine that there was proper fisticuffs and bloody noses, and much using of bad words, interspersed with 'but she's a GENIUS!', hur), especially with music animateuring/composering wunderkind John Barber in there with me, but you know how these things go. You start thinking there might be a ghost of a chance, and that ghost morphs into near-future visions of getting up on that stage and making the speech of your life. So I did indeed prepare a proper, tub-thumping speech, which seemed especially right following on from last week's rather more high-profile Evening Standard Theatre Awards and the ongoing spat between Maria Miller and Nicholas Hynter. This truly was the reason I was gutted not to win (congrats though, Paul Rissmann!); I REALLY, REALLY wanted, as John Barber also told me he'd planned, to give a verbal two fingers up to Michael Gove. 

The all-round cultural hero (and overseer of the Cultural Olympiad) Ruth MacKenzie gave a simple, succinct and powerful speech about the state of the arts in this country and the EBacc proposals. I planned to do just the same: to say how fantastic it was that the Education and Community category existed at the BCAs, because there's such a rich history of music education and amateur music-making in this country, as well as a history of professional composers and performers working with various ages and abilities, from Britten and Maxwell Davies to, well, John Barber and Paul Rissmann for starters! And the reason I find it so rewarding is to see the palpable joy and sense of achievement from participants in creating their own music. And that, of course, is the key term: creating. Whether it's writing a love poem, stringing a few chords together on guitar, crafting a present for someone, or doing a sketch, there is nothing more wholly beneficial than expressing yourself through a creative medium. Which is why it's so worrying that we are in a climate where the government seem to regard the arts with such disdain. The Culture Secretary says that she agrees with Nicholas Hynter that the arts is very beneficial for the British economy; yet the cuts keep coming. Newcastle Council have cut their ENTIRE arts budget!  The Education Secretary says that of course the arts is an important subject, yet flagrantly omits this sixth pillar of learning in his proposed EBacc, saying it can be taught as an optional, more extra-curricular subject. How can he not understand that the arts is not an accessory, it's the freakin' dress (and mine was an Asos exclusive Lauren McCalmant design tonight, thanks very much)! While Hynter focused last week on British artists' contribution to the economy, it's important to remember that arts education in schools isn't JUST there to produce fantastic, exportable, tourist-magnet style artists; it's there to help send into the world imaginative scientists, creative engineers, and everything in between. We MUST keep making music, with and for everyone; I might suggest, for starters, two radical reworkings of songs, perhaps with 100 Year 4s on violin and an adult djembe ensemble, and send the recordings to my two least favourite departments of government: 'Crazy Man Michael' by Fairport Convention for the Education Secretary, and, obviously, 'How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?' for the Culture Secretary.
 
Ha, and there's my speech practically in full. I was pretty disappointed that no-one, apart from Ruth, stuck it to the man a bit in their speeches (not even Harrison Birtwhistle!); it was all rather bland and apolitical. It's a teeny niche we contempo musicians live in, but one with at least a Radio 3 profile and some press coverage, and surely it's worth making the most of the limelight to say your piece and stand up for music in this country. 

Mega-congrats to everyone tonight. Here's the list of winners in full!

JUST FOLKING DO IT

Level of conviction in own genius: 6
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2
Watching / Listening: 'Homeland'. And 'The Killing'. And 'Fresh Meat'. And 'The Hour'. / Fairport Convention's 'Liege and Lief'
Hair Day: Brassy blonde and overlong. Unsure as to how to resolve the issue.

I've gone absolutely crazy on folk song, all fuelled by the wondrous writings of Rob Young in his glorious overview of 20th century British folk music, 'Electric Eden'. It has made me realise that the traditional music of this country has been darkly pulsing away in my bloodstream all along, and I'm just starting to really feel it - or as Dave Simpson of Fairport once said 'Nothing resonates like old song'. I don't think I'm happier than when singing these old songs, and am feeling fit to burst with all the things I want to do with them. But one thing at a time. All-round wunderkind MaJiKer will be producing my 'birdlore' songs for some sort of first You Are Wolf album; and I'm working on a wee set about London's lost rivers, whose buried meanderings feel like latent folk songs in themselves, with Leeds music-mash-upping 7 Hertz.

And so on to spreading the Good Word: I'm bang into my Wigmore Hall community chamber opera workshops, seeking out traditional songs and stories from 9-year olds, elderly West Londoners and a community choir. I've been planting the seeds of the idea of song-collecting amongst them, and some have done beautifully; it was especially lovely to hear a South African lullaby sung by a Year 5 pupil (and learnt from her grandmother) then recognised by two other classmates who remembered it being sung to them by South African relatives. Then there's Robert, a sweet elderly singer who, whilst in the early throes of dementia, just needs the slightest prod before he's off crooning folk songs from his Geordie childhood.

I went to an evening at the EFDSS to celebrate 80 years since the library opened. Dame Shirley Collins, whose louche, dulcet tones and exquisitely flat vowels I have been sighing over of late (especially in her early album with blues/raga/roots guitarist Davy Graham, Folk Roots, New Routes), gave a talk about Bob Copper's song-collecting, accompanied by archive recordings and photos; then The Copper Family rolled up for a second half of singing old rural songs from Sussex, which have trickled down through generations of this famous family. It was unbelievably lovely and heartwarming, a robust sound (though I might suggest that every single arrangement being in the same key and in the same arrangement is a little uncreative) sung by two generations of siblings and cousins, and brought a tear to my eye with their last one, belted out as they hugged and kissed each other and swigged their last dregs of beer. You might as well scrape mud off some ploughed Sussex field and shove it in their mouths, such is the authenticity and honesty. It made me want to start a folk clan, made up of friends who can harmonise and are up for singing in pubs, forcing ye olde songs on unwitting hipsters in Shoreditch. I'm going to call it Foxheads. Any takers?

Mix that with the singer I saw last night and voila! That's where I want to be. It's quite ridiculous that I have only very recently come across Julie Tippett, and her performance along with Keith at the prepared piano in a long free improv set at The Vortex made all the dots join up for me, between contemporary classical music, jazz and folk. Seeing her sing for the first time, and go between operatic-ish high notes, hardy chest voice, squeaky pointillist notes, funky vocal percussion and everything in between was an epiphany! She seemed like (NB: for Buffy fans only) The First, the one from whom everything else followed! I'm going to try and get a lesson...

I had a fun - if a little close to the bone, with my score not arriving til two days beforehand - first bash at performing John Cage's Aria (a seminal solo 20th century coloured graphic score, where the singer needs to choose ten vocal styles to veer between) up at York Uni's monumental Cagefest, 'Getting Nowhere', along with the other juicettes. My Johnny Cash seemed to melt into my Tom Waits, by Bulgarian into my Camille, my Mariah into my Ella, but I managed to get away with it all by painting my face like a clown and using Anna's kids' toys as my required auxiliary sounds. It's very easy to be funny by holding up a musical fluffy frog and looking a bit grumpy when you look like this: (I'm told with conviction that I have a future in the circus...)

100% Live Girls!

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2
Watching / Listening: The end of the majestic second series of 'Boardwalk Empire' / excellent Percy Grainger chamber music on Radio 3
Hair Day: Thankfully settling down into a more blondey-blonde. Phew.

It's been a very folky week. I met musical compadre (and hopefully producer of my first You Are Wolf album) MaJiKer for a Gilbert and George - I mean, a Turkish at Mangal 2 in Dalston, where the artist duo eat nightly - before tracking down the remarkable Dalston Boys' Club for a Nest Collective gig. What a venue! Seemingly a bohemian, near-illicit church hall, it's packed full of slightly risque paintings of nude men proudly displaying their crotches, along with stone cupids and strange dolls; it has an out-of-tune baby grand and tons of dank armchairs and candles. Sam Lee, of the Nest Collective, warned us gleefully in his welcome that it was an illegal (unlicensed) gig, and that the police could bust in at any moment and stop everything. I crossed my fingers all night for the fuzz to burst in noisily to find a load of Dalstonites sitting on the floor listening attentively to Julie Murphy or the Ballina Whalers singing a sea shanty. Alas, it never happened!

It was my huge pleasure to have Scottish folk hero Alasdair Roberts come and play in my series at Handel House, and even more so to sing a couple of numbers with him. He is currently performing a lot of his new, epic, characteristically raven-dark material, which belies his very charming and sweet nature, as I found by putting him up in Camberwell that night. I also managed to go to dinner with not just my favourite folk singer but my favourite poet Robin Robertson as well (his friend, and I've set some of his work), in an abrasive evening of grizzled Scots art-kingpins.

In a whirlwind weekend, I put on what I called on Twitter 100% Live Girls! but was actually 60% live girls and 40% live bassist husband and electronica wizard Graham Dowdall. The Vortex needed a last-minute gap filled, so I volunteered my You Are Wolfing services, plus the fantabulous Laura Moody and Roshi feat. Pars Radio. It turned out to be a pretty magical gig, a lovely crowd that included folk denizens Nancy Wallace, Lisa Knapp and Sharron Kraus. Hurrah! Perhaps this will revive mine and Andy's idea of putting on 100% Live Girls! , cutting-edge music by girls, in a strip joint once a month. It certainly helps with my blog audience numbers - I noticed that there was a significant peak of readers in my last-but-one blog, 'Schnittke Hot! And An Incredible Encounter'. Hhm. Expect all posts to sound slightly salacious from now on.

juice have just launched their first crowd-funding mission: to commission beatboxer supremo (and more recently, composer) Shlomo, and to work/co-write more with MaJiKer. If you're interested in being part of our band of commissioners, please do visit our wefund site and check out all of the amazing presents and incentives you can earn yourself!

I'm currently starting preparatory work on my community chamber opera for Wigmore Hall. It's in the very early stages, but as it's been commissioned as part of Wigmore Hall's Britten centenary celebrations next year, the themes are folksong/lore and the outsider figure. I am reading Marina Warner's excellent book on the male grotesque figure in folk history, 'No Go The Bogeyman'; did you know that the word 'bug' comes from words such as 'boggle', which meant the Devil, also called the Lord of the Flies in the Bible? Strange that variants on words for bogeymen are now leading brands of yummy mummy prams, the very thing parents were supposed to protect against...

New Old Music

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2
Watching: 'Fresh Meat', yay!/ Andrew Bird on The Space, singing from A Room For London
Hair Day: Thankfully settling down into a more blondey-blonde. Phew.

A busy week! First up, I rocked up at my endz in Bucks for the Little Missenden Festival, and my commission from the Festival for the early music consort Alamire. I'd written a 13-minute 8-part vocal piece setting texts by Nicholas Culpeper, barmy Tudor herbalist/physicist/astrologist, which I very much enjoyed composing: a lovely time was had honing his meticulous prose into quirky little poems about marsh plants (Missenden means 'where the marsh plants grow', don't you know...). I did my usual thing of mixing pretty folky stuff and open 5thy stuff with extra-vocal yelps, whispery bits, swoons and swoops, etc. I think Alamire are rather more used to the glowing richness of Byrd and Tallis, which they did marvellously well in the teeny old Norman church, than having to stutter little hi-hats but they did a good job; I was a little nervous about what the audience might think, but I had some lovely feedback, and was compared to both Lachenmann and Richard Strauss, which can only be a winner, if entirely incorrect. Ha ha.

I took my Dad to see Sam Lee open the Festival the night before, and what with him being the rangy, tousle-haired Crown Prince of New/Old Music and notching up his Mercury nomination, the place was packed full of old ladies hoping to get his autograph. I loved it: he'd brought along Irish traveller singer/storyteller Thomas McCarthy, who I've seen before, and just brewed up a gorgeous atmosphere of tales, songs and a love of the land, all cooked up with a shimmery melting pot of strings, Japanese koto, ukelele, tabla and shruti box. PLUS he was wearing the most excellent (bespoke, hand-drawn country scenes, obviously) shirt.

It was back to London the next day for a discussion of my music and some You Are Wolfy songs as part of Culture Kitchen, the London Review of Books' new occasional series of supper clubs. The last one was with a fashion designer favoured by Lady Gaga! I nattered amongst a delicious North African spread of beetroot humous and pomegranate molasses, rose tea and figgy scrumptiousness, and felt highly self-important. Hur.

This week has been made hugely excited by the arrival of my first nephew, Holden, who freefalled in six weeks early and is still in hospital. Obviously, he is the cutest thing that ever lived (though he does look QUITE like a frog, feet and hands-wise...)

My bro Richie, had he not been in a new-fatherly daze, would have been mad jealous of my next gig, as an ad hoc singer in Aphex Twin's night of theatrical experimentation at the Barbican. I was part of the Heritage Orchestra/Choir, who were Aphex Twin's human synth for the night: we were fed nasty sine tones in headphones, and had to sing/play what we heard, responding to a dynamic gage on a big projection screen. I was on the end, so was lucky enough to have a cameraman practically IN MY MOUTH half the time, beaming my wan, un-make-upped face to a sold-out Barbi crowd. Erk. It was a fun half day, but in truth, the piece itself was 40 minutes of bafflingness. Quite why Richard D. didn't introduce more textural variation, rather than just having long, whiny glisses for 40 minutes, I'm not sure. It was a supremely excellent toy, and would be amazing in the hands of an array of musicians/composers, which is clearly where it should go next. Apparently the second half was a blast: here's a review.

FINALLY, I had the second in my series of gigs at Handel House, trying out lots of new stuff with recorder whizzmistresses Consortium 5. My second commission, badluck birds, which has an open source flavour (the pieces are in layers, or fragments, which can be arranged by either the performers or audiences), went very well; I had to bully adults into coming up and directing the players, but they were great. The webgame version of one movement, Screech, is still to come!

Had a cracking time in Amsterdam over the weekend. It can be summed up thus: canals, rain, coffee, art, rain, mint tea, lostriversongs research, photography, rain, warehouse bar/clubs, rain, boutiques, rain, canals.

Schnittke-Hot! And an Incredible Encounter

Level of conviction in own genius: 8
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 4
Reading: Hopping between 'Electric Eden' and a biography of Gertrude Bell
Hair Day: Alarming change from yellow-blonde top half to near-white (not expressly of my wishing), giving me a glimpse into my Hair Future when I am aged 75. Have been embellishing with emergency temporary pink.

The first of my curated season of gigs at Handel House went off with a bang, with a sold-out crowd (ok, so you can only squeeze 30 people into the Georgian front room, but trying to put on new music in a Museum famous for le Baroque is tricky business!). Ensemble Amorpha, led by rising composer and Junior Trinity compadre Luke Styles, came along to perform Michael Finnissy's installation-esque piece The Molly House; four players, plus Michael on harpsichord, wandered around the first floor playing from his flexible 'kit' of score sheets, and occasionally playing a hoover, hairdryer or electric whisk for good measure. In truth the additional instrument was the insane floorboard creaking as the audience meandered around with them,but nobody seemed to mind too much. This was chased up with strong showings of contemporary string writing, from a taut Ligeti viola sonata, to Luke's own excellently astringent violin/viola duo, and finally Schnittke's gorgeously claggy 'lento', which sounded as thick and luscious as a quartet rather than just violin and 'cello (I thoroughly credit my title joke to 'cellist Louise). The austere, robust music worked excellently in the House, and the audience seemed hardy to it and appreciative.

Two notable meetings happened - one was meeting composer Laurence Rose, whose day job is high up at the RSPB; surely an encounter just having been waiting to occur given my obsession with birdies in my music. But easily topping that was when a tall, bearded chap in his 50s introduced himself as 'my namesake', and I realised that the high drama moment had finally arrived when I met not only my name, my full initials, but also my job doppelganger: London-based composer Kerry Andrews. I kid you not. I half-expected us both to spontaneously combust upon setting eyes upon each other, or else, lock into some sort of immediate vicious battle to the death using only our bare hands and teeth, but instead we shook hands, and I said, hopefully in not too Dr. No-style 'we meet at last!'. I've been long aware of Kerry (and so, it turns out, has he of me), often through confusion on others' parts - that rogue 's' makes all the difference between being a male sound artist/visual artist/composer and, well, ME. We exchanged stories of confusions - the best being when he went to a job interview and introduced himself, to which the interviewer replied indignantly, 'no you're not! I know Kerry Andrew and you're not her!' to which he had an excellent reply of 'well, I was here first!'. Ha ha. He and I have both been congratulated on various funding wins or recent events that the other has done. I suggested that we put on a joint concert, though perhaps that will confuse everyone even more. Well, it's either that, or start a long-running feud, Saruman and Gandalf-stylee. Hur hur.

Me Do New Things

Level of conviction in own genius: 6.5
Hours of creative activity achieved today: 0

Reading / Listening / Watching:  Just started Rob Young's wondrous 'Electric Eden' and hence have been listening to early The Incredible String Band and Vashti Bunyan and dreaming of English pastures... / Brill documentary series, The Clintons

Hair Day: too long to quiff up properly. Emergency haircut required!

Phew, it's been a long time since I wrote in here. I've been signing off old projects and looking forward to embarking on new ones.

I wrote a 13-minute piece for (mostly) early music consort Alamire over the summer, which premieres in my endz in Bucks next week. Report to follow! I finally finished my set of 'open source' pieces for recorder quintet Consortium 5, which has being gently rolling along in stages this year, with various incarnations as a webgame (soon to be launched), 'control the players'-style live versions, and improvising graphic scores, including for school recorder groups to have a go. The live versions are being premiered as part of my curated concert series at Handel House, which also includes one of my folk heroes, Alasdair Roberts, with whom I hope to sing a teeny bit, woo hoo! I saw Alasdair play a lovely set at the Nest Collective's monthly folk session upstairs in the bunting-festooned, steamily packed Old Queen's Head; they were supported by rebranded, but still reliably joyous, Firefly Burning. It was great to hear some new tunes from them, which combined complex rhythmic workouts alongside gorgeous Fleet Foxy harmonies sung with a near religious fervour. Bliss!

Soon I'll be passing over the relay baton at Handel House, with perfect timing and little fumbling, to the next composer-in-residence, Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian, I've a few loose ends to tie up, chiefly a set of miniature folk/improv songs based on London's lost rivers, which I'll hopefully be doing with Leeds' fab classical/folk/improv trio, 7 Hertz. Elsewhere, the Big Project for me over the next nine months is a super-exciting community chamber opera for Wigmore Hall, a 45-minute piece that I'm writing the text and music for, with a bumper cast of 90 kids, a 40-strong community choir, an elderly group, a professional sextet and a tenor. Cripes! I'll be channeling Britten (whose centenary it is next year) by incorporating some folk theme/music element, as is my wont.

It's always scary doing new things, the webgame being one of them, but therein lies the fun and the learning too:  I recently read a lovely interview with rising star violinist Thomas Gould, leader of the Aurora Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonia amongst other things, in which he said it was important to always say yes to everything (within reason), and to never think yourself above certain projects. A good philosophy. Thomas was part of another musical whippersnapper, Trish Clowes' second album launch at Kings Place this weekend, in which she showcased her knack of combining a traditional jazz quintet with a string quartet, and jazz conventions with a classical sensibility. I stood in for Trish's usual singer with a couple of numbers, which was great for me - with nothing other than a sound check as a rehearsal, I was kept on my toes with some fiendish lines! But it was lovely to get lots of compliments about my voice, which is apparently like 'silk', and not, as it felt with a head-pummeling cold, like a rub on a jagged, stripped fence. 

This week I joined juice in donning bespoke cloche hats, slinky dresses and pearl-laden wrists to sing in composer/electronicist Mira Calix's new live score to Alfred Hitchcock's little-known (and to be fair, he was not a fan of it either!) silent film, Champagne. This was part of the BFI Southbank's mammoth The Genius of Hitchcock series, and the film was a biggie too, rolling in at 1 hour 50 minutes. We had a large chunk of live vocals to sing, sometimes scored, and sometimes improvised; Mira decided to grab loads of texts from girls' power pop songs, meaning we played around with Kelis' 'Milkshake' to scenes of 1920s flappers... great fun. Juice are looking forward to cooking up some more love song arrangements over the winter and recording our second album with Nonclassical early next year. Bring it on!

Folk-opera-sical and birdlore launch!

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Hours of creative activity achieved today: 3

Listening: Sam Lee's excellent new album, Ground of Its Own

Hair Day: still blonde

I thought I should see Dr Dee, what with admiring Damon Albarn's polymathic vibes, plus its trumpeting of being a folk opera about England. It was a folk opera of sorts, but makes more sense if you splice the word 'musical' in there. Folkoperasical. Yes, that's it. It was a strange mix, which sometime worked beautifully, and sometimes felt like a bad musical in a posh opera house.  Theatrically, it was astonishing at times - there were RAVENS! Real, live RAVENS! - with clever set-changes, a huge barge of musicians which slowly ascended and great use of projections to demonstrate Dee's vast mind. Musically, Damon Albarn's rich, croony heartbreak of a voice was the diamond; having him crouched there in an operatic context just made me want more contrast between singers: between those delicious pop imperfections and vulnerability, and the glowing sounds of the classical singers. He also also knows how to work a microphone; the other voices' amplification had a slightly garish music-theatre edge, though it did mean I could hear all the words (something the Guardo complained about here). As it was, the counter-tenor (hamming it up to ghastly heights in his last moments) sounded a little uncomfortable to me, and the chorus either didn't exaggerate the rough sound enough or they were just really shoddy. There was also very, very little story to speak of. Give me a damn opera house to work with! The omissions were obvious to me: the lovely early music consort (plus glittering kora and drums) made a great sound, so why bother with the orchestra at all? They were under-used and unnecessary. Just have the amplified consort and go to town with the orchestration, getting them not just to do pretty Elizabethany things but much more experimental too. And if Dr Dee wrote feverishly about the language of the angels, then how can you not write chorus lines that are divinely, eerily strange? It's a no-brainer...

To Deal! The premiere of my new set of You Are Wolf songs, birdlore: murders, charms and murmurations (funded by the PRS for Music Foundation's Women Make Music scheme) which I plugged on BBC Radio Kent the day before.  I've ended up making two versions of this project: one for the usual one-girl-band-plus-occasional husband (loop, melodica, ukelele, gong, recorder, FLUTE!, and Andy on bass) and one for me, a touch of the loop station and string quartet and clarinet. The latter was for flexible chamber ensemble Sound Collective, including lovely tattooed behemoth Stuart King on clarinet. We performed it at Deal Festival, in this divine ecological gardens place, Pines Calyx - the venue itself was built into the hillside and had a hobbity air. I was sooo happy with it and like to think it had a sense of my current musical spirit: a mix of trad. folk, spoken word, classical chamber music, with touches of experimental stuff. We caught brill original folk trio Lau in the evening and, exhausted, I slept sitting down in Deal's most gorgeous wee pub, The Ship.

The next day I took traditional music to Year 11s and 12s at a school in Dover; I'd been a bit gulpworthy about this, not knowing anything about the kids, who I imagined would snort in derisory fashion at this stooopid old music. Instead, we had a super-sweet bunch of teenagers from soulful, music-theatre singers, to dancers and a Laura Marling-a-like, who jumped feet first into arranging different versions of the traditional tale/song Two Sisters, having given them a whirl on Jamie Woon's version of Wayfarin' Stranger. I practically wept at the 17 year-old lad with tattoos and a side-shave bellowing 'bow and balance to me!' with extreme sincerity. Adorable!

Tomorrow it's off to premiere the original version at a no doubt sodden wee festival, SoL Party, in deepest Kent. I've been getting to gips with a few new tricks on the loop station, plus all those instruments to make it a bit more eclectic. I'm proud of my hard work: I've created a set of songs based on British birds, with arrangements of traditional stuff galore, plus some originals. There's music sounding like a weird medieval-funk procession who are off to kill a wren, Central African Pygmy-yodelling cuckoos, a drone-rock, and a spooky new song about a barn owl. Now I'm just off to talk to a man about some live ravens...