Second Theme - bumpy starts and how to survive them...

My 'career' takes its own turns, and I become a silent film pianist...

Two years after leaving college, I got a call from my father – a scary letter from Barclaycard had found its way to my family home, he had opened it, and wasn’t best pleased to find his son was being pursued for £1200 worth of credit card debt. My father was a totally straight, well-organised, financially impeccable man who, on retirement as a manager for the civil service, had become treasurer for Methodist Central Hall, the administrative centre of the church.

I was hauled over the coals, and the deal was that he would pay off my Barclaycard debt and close the account and I would repay him at a fixed amount over a year. But there was another proviso he insisted on. I would have to take the Civil Service exam. This was the entry-level examination in general knowledge and intelligence which preceded any application to join the civil service. True to my word, I presented myself at Hove Town Hall, a couple of miles from my old school, where I found the same desks arrayed down the hall that I had last seen at my A Level exams five years previously. The sense of nightmarish déjà vu was only enhanced by the appearance on the invigilator’s stage of Hove Grammar’s terrifying deputy head, who had, like Gordon Brooks, taken retirement and was now earning pin money as an invigilator. Feeling the icy hands of doom closing around my neck, I turned over the paper and was presented almost immediately with a Maths problem that commenced, “You are the manager of an NCP Car Park. If you have 114 spaces at £4 an hour, and 320 spaces at £6…”

Four weeks later I got a letter at my digs in Eastbourne. It was from the Civil Service. I had not only passed the exam, but I was also in the top 30% of applicants. They wanted me to attend an interview in Westminster. That same week I won a crossword competition in TV Times and won Leslie Halliwell’s autobiography ‘Seats in all Parts’, about his love of historic cinema.

I sat up all night with that civil service letter. I had no money, I only had the fading conviction that I had the talent to succeed as a musician, composer or actor. In the morning, I tore the letter up and told my father I had failed the exam.

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The Tivoli Cinema was a 1906 picture house perched atop the Eastbourne Conservative Club. It was closed in September 1982, and Mark Brewer, always enterprising and on the lookout for new opportunities, took over the lease for us ex-Aberystwyth students to run it as an arts centre. A bar was built at the rear, the stage was extended but we kept the screen and projection, and we put on our own shows as well as bringing in touring shows, special events, cabaret and comedy nights. He bought a beautiful Challen grand piano from the BBC (said to have been played by Noel Coward and probably was, along with thousands of other hands) and equipped the Tiv with all the electrics we needed.

We did OK, given that Eastbourne was pretty impervious to change, but a good local following built up, and during the summer seasons we had four shows going simultaneously. One of them was a new childrens musical by Alison and I, Wildcat on Safari, about woodland animals meeting exotic creatures from a safari park, which subsequently played in Jersey and was published by Weinbergers. We ‘washed our faces’, in showbiz terms, and had a ball planning the shows and ‘alternative cabarets’, following the lead of the show we’d seen in Edinburgh with Alexei Sayle. I did a turn as a 96-year-old pianist who took as long to get across the stage as he did to play anything. The end of my act was ripped off from Dudley Moore’s brilliant Symphony of Endings and joined a load of routines by my friends, all presented by a Master of Ceremonies (my mate Graham Alborough) going through a marriage crisis and finding every audience member he picked out to chat with had the same name as one of his wife’s lovers. Meanwhile, major theatre companies like Cheek by Jowl, IOU, Paines Plough and the Mediaeval Players played one and two-nighters at our venue and the bar never did less than a roaring trade.

One day the original projectionist dropped round and offered his services, with the proviso that he had to test out the cinema equipment. The following night we sat through his personal, battered print of Emmanuelle, and it turned out the equipment worked fine. I tried my hand at programming films with half an eye on the ‘vintage cinema’ trade that would proliferate some thirty years later – the double bill of Top Hat and Angels with Dirty faces did well, as did the Errol Flynn Robin Hood in which we got the audience to dress up and had the Hastings Archers shooting arrows over their heads as our first half entertainment. But modern cinema wouldn’t emerge in the Tivoli until representatives of Eastbourne Film Society, Mansel Stimpson and Roy Galloway, arrived and asked if they could programme the Society’s evenings in the Tivoli. We were delighted, as they could call on 200 members, and they also had another suggestion. The third film in the season they wanted to be a silent comedy. They knew that I improvised at the piano, would I be interested in trying out as a silent film pianist for Buster Keaton’s feature Steamboat Bill Junior?

I accepted with all the alacrity (and arrogance) of youth, and the Society lent me a 16mm projector so that I could watch the film on the wall of our digs. As it unfolded, I became aware of the immensity of the mountain I had chosen to climb. Not only was there the duration, an endless-seeming 71 minutes, but the content of those minutes was extraordinary. Buster didn’t appear until ten minutes in, after our introduction to a 1920s Mississippi world of rich and poor ferry-owners (Buster’s was the poor one, Steamboat Bill), when he appeared from behind a departing train and set out to identify his father using the white carnation he had mentioned in his arrival telegram, unaware that his had dropped off. From there we entered gag sequence after gag sequence, all topped off with the white-knuckle storm and the house falling around him.

Now I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t prepare much, especially as I would not be able to read any music or notes in the darkness, so I put together a theme tune for the whole film, and a theme to sum up Buster (which I still use) and trusted that ‘something would happen’ as the film unreeled.

Boy, did it. I stuck to my motifs, running variations and trying to match the images, until the first really big laugh from the audience – at that moment the music under my hands changed completely, and I was suddenly playing something I had never heard in my life before. It was as if I was back at that piano in Aveley with my parents giving me ideas for things to play, only now the ideas were all coming out of the screen. I took the ‘new’ music I was hearing as the jumping off point for the next section, slipped in my own motifs where I felt they’d work, then the next huge laugh came, and with it not only that leap in the musical ideas, but the warmth of sharing Buster’s laughter – the music gained confidence, and because of that the film got better and got more laughs. Across that extraordinary 71 minutes I and the film and the audience took flight, each feeding off the other’s energy and delight until the final chord. I stood up to take my final bow unable to remember a note of what I had played but convinced that I had found a new career. Pity I was fifty-four years too late…

It wasn’t really a choice. All my life I, and my generation, had been told that silent films were all museum pieces, and the music played at the time was cliched at best, and at worst a little old lady at an untuned upright banging out variations on one tune. Nobody much was regularly playing silent films, except the hallowed National Film Theatre in London and film societies, and nobody, but nobody, was trying to make a living as a silent film accompanist.

But at the time I was on and off benefits, despite what bits and bobs we could earn from the Tivoli, and I was staring up the twin mountains of an acting career and a music career and feeling I wasn’t really cut out for either. Members of the company who wanted to be actors headed to acting school, I completed my course with Gordon Brooks and got my A Level music, as well as the gems of the classical repertoire he opened my ears to, but genuinely, I couldn’t help feeling that maybe the Civil Service had beckoned after all… until Steamboat. Now that was a something different, and colleagues in Eastbourne first got me playing for short films in local schools, then got me playing in public and prep schools further afield.

Another year went by, and the Eastbourne Film Society put me in front of Louise Brooks’s Pandora’s Box, a 1927 super-sexy melodrama in which Louise, desirable and entirely aware of her desirability, was surrounded by inadequate men who used her, or tried to, before falling victim to their own hubris. Again, I plotted out a theme, and found myself enmeshed in the film as just one of the audience, except that my response was turning into music under my fingers. As well as being able to tell stories with music I was following the Aber Drama Department’s diktats about the importance of the subtext, tracking the long arc of Louise’s fall to her death at the hands of Jack the Ripper whilst paying due attention to all the roadsigns along the way – the murders, the passionate affairs, the villains, the (very few) angels. That year, the award for Film Society of the Year went to Eastbourne, helped a little by my Pandora’s Box performance, and I was all the more convinced that somewhere in silent film playing, tucked away, was a career.

Until then, there was the Tivoli, a stint as Musical Director on our own national tour of Salad Days followed by Christmas as MD of the Chesterfield pantomime, the odd stint as a film extra with an agency in the South (during which I carried Tom Howard’s coffin, sat behind Inspector Wexford and carried a cup of tea past David Warner) and the first ideas of writing a musical. I also organised my own first double-bill of silent films at the Tivoli, with comedy-horror The Cat and the Canary followed by Keaton’s The General. The print of the second had so many joins in it, and each one made a crack like a bullet in the tiny, sound-proofed projection box, our projectionist said it was like World War Two in there.

In the audience that night was Tim Cornish, Film Officer for South-East Arts, and he suggested I might play in a few of his venues – these tended to be Film Societies, so the movies were all eye-openers for me – Sunrise, Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. I merrily toured the South-East, delighted to find that all the audiences expected their silent film pianist to be an elderly gent with leather patches on his tweed jacket and instead got a hungry 26-year-old who should have been a bank manager. But at the time, the involvement of Tim and the ACE at grassroots level was crucial to people seeing live silent film. In 1980, Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s Channel 4’s epic Hollywood series had introduced the genuine glories of silent cinema, its performers, directors, tragedies and milestones, to mainstream audiences. A year later, their presentation of Abel Gance’s five and a half hour Napoleon with Carl Davis’s monumental score dispelled for all time the notion that silent cinema consisted of mummified museum pieces. By the time I started working in 1983, the performance of live silent film was in the zeitgeist, interest was growing amongst cinephiles, but still there was only one place that regularly showed silent film…

So, taking my courage in both hands and enclosing a reference from Tim, I wrote to the National Film Theatre under Waterloo Bridge in London, offering my services. They politely turned me down, explaining that they only paid £20 a film, and most of that would be swallowed up by my train fare from Eastbourne. I replied that I would take the hit, I really wanted to play for them. They replied saying they would think about it, which I thought overly cautious. Eventually, I got an invitation to go up to the NFT, and audition…

The audition turned out to be playing a film ‘at sight’, in other words, without seeing it beforehand. I wasn’t told what the film was, and when I arrived that afternoon at NFT2 it turned out I was playing for a press preview for a season called ‘Hollywood Bubbly’, programmed by a fine historian and cinephile called John Gillett. Again, with the assurance of youth I sat at the piano, and the film began to unfold on the screen as I swung in with a confident theme I had worked out in advance…

I got lucky. The film was a 1926 Norma Shearer movie called Upstage, a Broadway backstage melodrama of the rise and fall of a chorus girl, so we were in the theatre, a milieu I knew well and loved. The story was reasonably predictable, I could make a decent show of the dance numbers and mapped out Norma’s journey from back of the chorus to star and back again with reasonable ease. But I got really lucky with the final sequence. Having lost her supporters and her position through arrogance, she was reduced to dancing once again in the chorus in tank towns around the US, and as the final sequence began – and this was the real luck – it was snowing.

I had been playing ‘snow’ for twenty years, it being one of the scenarios my parents had given me and requires little more than twinkling away in those top octaves. When allied to a sense of isolation and failure as occurred in Norma’s story, as with so many melodramas, it was beautiful. With an inward yell of delight, I opened the metaphorical throttle and played the final scenes with as much musicality as I could manage, reading ahead that what happened in these scenes would be Norma’s chance of absolution, played out with everybody, as well as the elements, against her. I guessed right, completed the film triumphantly on the End title as if I’d been playing it all my life, and headed to the back of the auditorium.

Waiting for me was John Gillett, smiling broadly, and a thin, bespectacled man I didn’t know. “Can I introduce you to Kevin Brownlow?” asked John, and suddenly I was in the presence of the man more responsible for the revival of silent cinema than anybody else. Thankfully he enjoyed the film, liked my playing and said so. “Are you available next Tuesday evening?” asked John, “as that’s when we’ll play it in front of the audience, and we’d like you to play…”

I was in.