Back in the early days of The Bedlam Six a lot of the reviews we got said I should be writing for musical theatre. I suspect they meant it as a veiled insult rather than a compliment, as many critics deem musicals to be something of a deformed cousin to the superior genre of rock (this was before the likes of Hamilton and Book Of Mormon came along and shook things up). I know why they said it: a lot of our stuff had a narrative thrust and a pronounced conversational element (not to mention a certain knowing flamboyance). But as much as I liked musicals I didn’t agree. For me rock music was, is and always will be a theatrical artform, everything is story-based, no exceptions – those who believe the singers are the same onstage as they are off it probably also shout constructive tips to Hamlet during his duel with Laertes.
And really, narrative-based third-person character pieces actually have more of a place in the rock and pop canon than in musicals. Think of “Ziggy Stardust” or “Eleanor Rigby” or “Lola” or “Boy Named Sue”: narratives and tableaus performed by pop icons in amongst more traditional examples of the mainstream form. The biggest hits in musical theatre are nothing like these, they don’t tell stories from start to finish, the eleven o’clock number never has a “then and then and then” structure – the songs are about NOW and ME and US, they are moments that stand still. In short, they are pop songs. They get on with it, they are efficient, they seek out the most direct route to your heart and then cling on for as long as possible.
Now that I write pretty much exclusively for musical theatre I have a far greater respect for pop music than I ever did in my gigging days. Twisty-turny lyrical album tracks like “When Matilda Came Of Age” or “The Tell-Tale Hound” or “Ghost Story” could never be more than filler in a stage musical, the first songs to be axed when the run-time is exceeded. It’s almost always the “I Want” and “I Am” songs that make a musical a success because that’s where we witness people opening up, that’s where we get the honesty. It’s no surprise Hamilton proved to be such a phenomenon, Hip-Hop is a genre that’s almost entirely made up of “I Want” and “I Am” songs, the strangest thing is that it took this long for musical theatre to realise (or accept). In recent years Grime has taken the “I Am” song even further, with a greater focus on the socio-political context. If you haven’t watched Stormzy’s Glastonbury set I urge you to seek it out – his central performance oozes charisma and, coupled with the staging, lights, choreography, choir, song themes and the mixing up of genres, feels like musical theatre at it’s very BEST.
Since being commissioned as composer for a new piece of theatre about eight months ago I’ve written around thirty songs (obviously they won’t all go into the finished piece – it’s not Jocasta!). This has been my most prolific period in years. The year before that I didn’t write ANY songs. And it wasn’t for want of trying. In recent weeks I’ve been writing songs for children, for parents, for pensioners, for ghosts, for monsters, for animals, for inanimate objects, for ghoul people made out of a sort of sentient putty… the weirdest part is that for the first time in my music career I’ve felt a complete lack of imposter syndrome. Weird to write a song to be sung by a cat and not feel imposter syndrome. But then it’s a weird business.
I think the reason I’m so comfortable in this area is that the best examples of musical theatre are essentially truths masquerading as fantasy, whilst being in a rock band is to be a fantasy masquerading as the truth. It isn’t a great stretch of the imagination to write a song about loneliness for a child to sing, you just write about loneliness and don’t get too bogged down in the details: that deep ache is the same however long you’ve been alive, it’s only the context that changes. If I decide to write a song for myself to sing about how vulnerable I feel then, regardless of how open and honest I am, it will inevitably tumble out as some sort of millennial commentary or critique of toxic masculinity or be held up against my more aggressive work or lumped in with other men from a similar class/background. In short it’ll drown in context. In our society we seek to “other” people far too instinctively, but when confronted with a fiction we examine it for traces of the truth and, by association, ourselves.
There is such a freedom in writing for fictional characters that I’m amazed more songwriters don’t do it. Not because you get to pretend to be someone else, but because you get to be YOU. My old Bedlam Six notebooks are full of unused lyrics and ideas that were abandoned because they didn’t fit with the version of myself that I was trying to be ten years ago, because the big secret common to singer-songwriters the world over is that none of us really know who we are. Because you’re supposed to be one thing and absolutely no one is. My first musical Jocasta featured a huge cast of victims and predators and idiots and heroes and cowards and cynics and idealists and murderers and there was a bit of me in every single one of them. This new one feels like it should be an even greater stretch, peppered as it is with fairy tale elements. But if anything that’s even easier. The further away it gets from being one singular believable version of a human being the better it is for me, because a singular believable version of a human being is the hardest character to play. Because it’s by far the most unrealistic.
“Do you miss performing?” people ask me.
No, because I never stopped. None of us do.
So I bought a train ticket with the last of my money. The direct service takes just over three hours and in that time I somehow managed to write a one-man show called Louis’ Lectures in Love – basically a dozen of my existing songs linked up by bitter rants about disappointing (fictional) relationships. I didn’t know it but this was to prove a massive turning point in my career. Was I a singer-songwriter or a character actor? In 2008 The Bedlam Six (then called The Black Velvet Band) was a pretty straight rock group; we’d just started to break through (or felt like we had) and were about to play our first festival mainstage. But relations were stretched, hope was getting thin and everyone was to some extent hedging their bets. I’d rung around my bandmates to see if they were free to do the Fringe with me. Ali had a week she could spare in the middle of the run, Cleg and Tom just a few days. Dan and Fran not at all (Biff wasn’t yet a member). I knew I couldn’t carry this on my own, I was already blagging it as much as I dared. So I got in touch with other friends from the Manchester music scene and by the end of the day had enlisted Richard Barry and Alabaster dePlume for almost the entire run, as well as John Fairhurst for a big chunk. The first two shows I did alone, then Richard joined me, followed a couple of days later by Alabaster, then John.
We were also filthy: I had three white shirts in rotation and one suit. By the end everything was a grey brown, like we were providing our own sepia filter. But as the run continued and our free time became more of a blur, our little show gained focus. We didn’t want to just get away with it each night, we wanted it to be GOOD. Every night Richard, Alabaster and I tuned our characters and tightened up the changes, added shifts of beat and timbre, altered the narrative when joined by Ali, Tom, Cleg and John, then jumbled the ideas round when they left. By this time our friend Dexter had come along to provide tech support and we’d shifted from a loose cabaret feel to an actual story about dead performers trying to keep the lights on in the afterlife – a sort of musical Huis Clos. After two weeks of playing to tiny audiences (often numbering in the single figures) word started to spread that this was a show that changed every night and punters started to come more than once (and bring their friends). We even picked up an award from some obscure magazine. In the last week we were getting full houses and by the final two performances it was a show that finally felt right: it was alive, it worked and we really liked it.
I’ve never known hunger or fatigue like it. Never felt so dirty, like my clothes could stand up on their own. Never been so aware of friendships hanging by a thread. I was dangerously close to ruining my relationship with the Bedlams with this extra curricular activity and it took a long time to patch things up properly (not helped by a much-regretted vault of ego on my part that established the ampersand in our bandname from that time onwards). Living conditions were strained, there was always noise, there was too much booze (the barman at the theatre made the best Bloody Mary I’ve ever tasted), people came to our apartment for parties that lasted days and in comparison our show would feel like the sanest bit of the evening, like a precious gulp at the surface before sinking back into the slime. I remember one night Richard becoming so frazzled and furious by John Fairhurst playing guitar at 4am that he ran into the darkness of a nearby public park shouting “Who wants a fight? Someone fucking fight me!” Another night he stood in the wings stark naked while Alabaster and I played out a scene, strolling between the curtain pulls in my peripheral vision like the ghost of some poor grounded cherub cursed with human adulthood.
I’ve not done the Edinburgh Fringe since. I’ve often been tempted but doubtless I would’ve made the mistake of planning too much – as the Bedlams got more successful I became more serious, saved the mayhem for the stage and stayed sober the rest of the time – it wouldn’t have been the same without the chaos. In 2009 Richard, Alabaster and I resurrected the show (now with an actual title: Dead At The Cafe Styx) for the Brighton Fringe, performing it in St Andrews Church; then a few months later we gave it one last run out in the theatre space above The Kings Arms in Salford (which I think was our best version – there was a bottle of red wine on stage that the three of us would each attempt to monopolise throughout the course of each scene; I also remember particularly enjoying the interval one night when we turned off the lights but didn’t bring them up again, just stood in the pitch black for fifteen minutes discussing how the first half had gone while the audience sat wondering if this was part of the show or if we’d just taken leave of our senses).
But the place that birthed it: oh what glorious hell it was. That residency at the Edinburgh Fringe was what made me into the performer that finally managed to find a career in the music industry. Embracing theatre and character and painstakingly rendering chaos into a finely tuned nonsense, that became the Bedlam Six’s calling card for years to come. But more than anything it was the context that was the star. A big mess of performers throwing their money away, not looking after themselves properly, getting into debt for the sake of their art, hoping for a break, crying out for an audience in the most oversaturated performance space in the world. It’s basically a microcosm of the creative industries. And that’s why it is such a worthwhile experience: What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.
