Mad Dogs and Music Men

Written by Tanya Cooling

I am occasionally beset in the small hours of the morning with the sensation that I’m in real trouble. I moved to the other side of the planet to be a singer. The commercially viable kind, you ask? Good heavens no, I mean classical. Luckily, that feeling is generally fleeting and as I look out at the nearly constructed Olympic Stadium I can see from my living room I think I might be exactly where I should be and I consider the life of a musician in London and how on earth I got here.

On the 2nd of February 2006 an underwhelming spattering of snow gently pelted my husband and me as we dragged our two suitcases, our bank cheque and our jet lag like a petulant infant down the street. After five years in Australia, my blood may as well have been water. And yet, we giggled like kids on Christmas day as we called home from a real red London phone booth.

The hotel in Earl’s Court, and I use the term loosely, was an inauspicious introduction to British hospitality. The bathroom was a walk-in shower/toilet conveniently attached to a hallway with a bed that could only be accessed from the base. To make this manoeuvre less daunting, bulky duvet and blankets had been substituted with a large woollen handkerchief that barely made it to the edges of the mattress. Nothing like the possibility of hypothermia to bring a young married couple together.

After settling in to our hotel we met with Miss X, a potential source of accommodation, who escorted us to her South-East London home that afternoon.  A few weeks before our move I had made contact with Miss X through a connection at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where I’d be studying.

She’d mentioned owning a somewhat neurotic Rhodesian ridgeback dog in her emails and now bid her intrepid charges wait behind the front gate so that Ferdie could become accustomed to us. I never worked out why Ferdie was a troubled dog but I can tell you that after only three hours of sleep, in a strange and frozen land, he was an eight-foot monster charging toward us down the garden path, dagger-fanged and fire-breathing. I can only assume it was as bad inside his head as out.

When Ferdie’s fears were finally soothed we entered the house and after a short interview we were signing the tenancy contract and breathing, albeit cautiously, a sigh of relief.

Those first six months in London were exhilarating in the sheer volume of new experiences. Our exploration was somewhat superficial due to the assumption that the tube stations were significantly more spaced out than they actually are. In central London each one is within easy walking distance and once we realised this we began discovering otherwise unnoticed side streets which opened up the real London.

While I was waiting to begin my training I took a job as a sales assistant in Covent Garden and it was here that I caught my first glimpse of one of the many forms professional music can take in this city.

Pre-London, the word busker conjured an image of 11-year-old flautists tootling outside ‘Modern Bags’ in Browns Bay. In Covent Garden Market in the shadow of the Royal Opera House musicians perform every day all year round. Belting out ‘O mio babbino caro’ to backing tracks, longhaired ladies slide through the tourists like liquid mercury, wrapped in prodigious layers of wool. It might be a little chilly for the Christmas audience but how many times do you actually get to see a singer’s breath?

Covent Garden busking is a profession in and of itself. Not only must each performer pass an audition, they must also obtain liability insurance. Street performing is actually illegal in London but the Market Association pays a large fee to the City government for a license to allow busking in Covent Garden. After all this there is even a specific area for classical musicians to perform. Many of the performers supplement their ‘takings’ by recording and producing their own CD’s, which go for about ten pounds.
Miss X had been working a high-powered job in an office and at the age of 28 decided to follow her dream of being an opera singer. She studied with a teacher at the Guildhall School and after a time became involved in the busking scene. Twelve years on she was now running the entire classical operation, which included panelling regular auditions of new acts and issuing licenses to perform.

So is this just a little corner for the lost souls of classical music? In fact many of the performers were graduates from some of the best schools in London. They had simply chosen the great outdoors over a rank and file desk job in an orchestra or the comparative cushiness of a permanent chorus position. Many were making ends meet with other jobs. On the side, Miss X owned a flat down the road that she let out and had started her own opera company which she advertised to a corporate market. Her partner was a cellist and a painter working out of a tiny shed in the back garden, selling his pieces to friends and friends of friends.

Establishing a career in music is more like a course in becoming an adult. Being able to not only make choices but also accept the consequences of those choices makes up a large part of the experience. The self-determining nature of the job that others envy you for comes with a considerable burden. You have to be able to know your own heart and also find the grace not to judge the choices others have made.

This is something I would not learn until after Guildhall but in the meantime, our six months with Miss X and Ferdie (who incidentally, never became accustomed to our presence, especially if we were wearing hats) were up. Ben and I were moving into student accommodation in the heart of London city and I was about to carry out my life goal of studying music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.