That’s the difference you see, I never, ever, allowed myself to absorb enough of what was thrown at me; I never had the sense to examine closely enough the things that I deemed uninteresting so that they might actually become so. To me, everything had to have a point, even though I was too youthful or just plain stupid to know what was, and what wasn’t, pointless. Everything I considered unimportant had the door slammed in its face.
I know better now. I know that everything academic or cultural – especially cultural – in its way, has a part to play in our journey. Variety is most certainly the spice of life in this respect; I feel the juddering impact of opera in the same way that I luxuriate in the vocal wonder of Bobby Womack; I can be irritated by the tone of a book but appreciate the author’s idea, and I remain able to enjoy the blissfully exquisite lilt found in both Grieg’s “Varen” and John Martyn’s “Solid Air”. That’s a privilege, for sure, to have the capacity for both and all things in between. I thank my lucky stars for the all-consuming passion I have had for music since I was knee-high to a small Italian opera composer. My response to music is essentially an emotional, visceral one; at a push, when colleagues in the office, taught in college that continental reactions to music must be treated with the sharpest of suspicion, I am able to hold my own in opposition. But more often than not, I will merely suggest they are talking bollocks. I suppose I was, and am, the antithesis of what E M Forster called the ‘underdeveloped heart’ when referring to the public schoolboys of England. Contrary to his thesis, I was, am, all heart; my mind and body were the things that struggled. And I am Italian am I not, a race whose well honed positives are as well documented as their weaknesses? I am an unquenchably emotional and anxious individual, there is no ‘off’ switch – just a dial that turns it up or down. I’m melodramatic, too, and Woolverstone never managed to curb that side of me at all. Did my life make me like that? Did I learn my anxieties from my mother? A psychotherapist once told me that I had, and I don’t know for sure if he is right, but I choke and weep at films and operas and almost everything in between. I am, however, keen that few should ever notice.
So whatever, wherever or whoever I am, I am probably just a product of all the things that formed the corridor of my life’s journey up to this point; nothing particularly exceptional there then. When I walked out of Woolverstone for the last time, I was certain, convinced, absolutely bloody sure that I knew precisely where I was going and what I would do. I’d flunked my exams deliberately, so I had to believe that, didn’t I? I was still a Fulham boy on the surface of it, and that’s where I wanted to go. The big wide world was to be my domain.
Rugby still held me in thrall and, quite quickly after leaving, I received phone calls from people working for the (still amateur) clubs in London and who knew masters at the school. I didn’t do anything about it for several months, but eventually I was invited to a training session with Rosslyn Park Colts one Thursday evening. The pitch was waterlogged so the session didn’t involve any playing but would be a fitness workout, and they asked if I would go back in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, another player from Epsom and Ewell RC asked if I would go and play for them and agreed to pick me up in Fulham for training sessions and matches. I was pretty puffed up about the fact that clubs seemed to be after me, so I took the opportunity offered by E&E and at the first training session, faced with a group of behemoths, I said my favoured position was wing forward because there was no way I was going into a front row with that lot. It wasn’t improbable either since I loved to tackle, was quick across the ground and very aggressive in both. They started me off in the fourths or fifths, I can’t recall, but I do remember scoring quite a few tries in each game and twice being promoted to the next team up.
At around the same time, I remember going back to Woolverstone for what was a regular Old Boys’ reunion and meeting Steve Halliday and Adrian Thompson, two fantastic players who were playing first class rugby at Harlequins and my team-mates against the First VX, when I was invited to play hooker for the Old Boys. Outside the Butt and Oyster, both asked me if I was still playing, and Adrian Thompson, almost certainly unaware of the dangers, said to the gathered throng that I would be England hooker one day! With such a commendation ringing in my ears I returned to Epsom and Ewell ready to prove him correct. However, my neck, twice badly injured during my school career, was playing havoc, and I went to see a specialist. His verdict was unequivocal: “Well, Michael, you can either walk, or play rugby, the choice is yours”. It was devastating to have a burgeoning sports career curtailed at 18 years old, and to this day it still smarts.
Ludicrously, I worked in a trendy hairdresser for a few months before I’d had enough of blue rinse Chelseaites and the piss artist ex-newsreader who came in everyday. I began to hack at my friends’ hair whilst at school; I don’t know why, but it was probably because I just thought I was good at everything. Some of us had done holiday work washing hair in Scissors, the single trendiest hairdresser in London at the time, so it may have come from that and I thought it was worth a try when I left. So, I became a junior at Annie Russell’s salon in the King’s Road. I did have a talent for it, apparently, but the whole thing didn’t suit me at all. Some of the women clients were foul-tempered, rude and whined about having sensitive scalps or bad necks, and their perfume was of the expensive type that weirdly, always had a note of sweaty body about it. It wasn’t long before I had worked out a system of scalding them accidentally at the washbasins or being a little vigorous in my scrubbing. The final straw came when I was asked to make a cup of coffee for Reginald Bosanquet, who was as drunk as a lord as usual and who, because he lived in the flats above the shop, was in almost everyday. On this day he was in Bloody Mary Mood and abused my coffee-making abilities. Time to leave, I thought. He died a couple of years later, which came as no surprise to me whatsoever. Despite the apparently wasted 6 months Annie Russell’s represented, it was my first experience of wealthy clientele, and the conversations in the break-room among the gay staff were instructional in many ways. Everybody was impossibly trendy, and after a while I didn’t feel like a fish out of water, but goodness me, I felt like slapping some of the staff. I had never really seen an adult tantrum until I’d worked there. (An interesting footnote: I still know how to cut hair and even have my prized pair of Solingen scissors, purchased at great expense and which are still in mint condition, never having needed sharpening in over thirty years.)
I left Annie Russell’s, chuckling to myself at the thought that I had ever imagined hairdressing offered me a path to fame and fortune. I’ll go for something more my cup of tea, I thought, and ended up at a builder’s merchants in the sales office, where I would take large telephone orders from building firms. This was more my style, I decided: doing deals, using my wits and outsmarting people. I enjoyed it because I got the chance to barter and argue over prices, and one afternoon, I negotiated a huge order with one of the biggest builders in the country. I put the phone down with a flourish, punching the air in triumph. Dave, the dour sales manager of Polish extraction, congratulated me until he took a look at the sales sheet. He wanted to stab me when it became clear that my lavish brokerage had clinched a deal that committed the firm to selling a mammoth order of plastic guttering at less than cost. Soon after, they moved me into the yard, where I was taught to drive a forklift and got very fit lifting and carrying bags of sand and cement. I rose to the giddy heights of timber foreman in a matter of weeks, but it was manual labour. I had already taken a step backwards.
In south London, where I worked, there were plenty of people in the yard who were ready to mock my ‘public’ school past. I never denied it or ran shy of it since I always wanted to appear different from them, but the contrast between us in that yard was not as marked as it had been during our respective educations. I was kidding nobody but me. How could I tell myself I was different from them when I was sitting in the same hut, drinking the same tea, trudging through the same mud and enjoying the same bawdy, wilful
ly offensive humour? I beg you not to misunderstand me because these were not people I looked down my nose at. They were straightforward, working class individuals, honest and lacking in pretension and from precisely the same background as me, but they had not been offered the chances I had been. And there were things in my head, experiences, put there by Woolverstone, that I could neither ignore, nor shake. I liked theatre and classical music, I had sung in choirs, I had studied books none of my workmates had ever heard of, I was a bag of contradictions, and I could sometimes spy on the faces of my fellow labourers a look that asked “why are you here?” George, a lecherous old soldier who supervised the yard, stung me one afternoon with a comment he may or may not have intended to have much impact, but it struck home like a sniper’s bullet. As I trudged back into the hut, soaked and tired from stacking ten tons of sandbags onto pallets (twenty five bags to a pallet, ten pallets), he snorted in derisory fashion, his feet by the paraffin fire, a cup of tea in his hand.
“I bet you never thought you’d end up doing this.”
I looked at him, not sure how to respond, but I brooded on his remark for the next twenty minutes. Eventually, the lights went on. That hut, perched under a railway arch near Clapham Junction, was the scene of my revelation and I do mean a revelation. Bells rang, horns sounded, shame and regret and embarrassment consumed me. I’m better than this.
So I found some words for George. I’d like to think that the glint in his eye as I said them was because he saw himself as a mentor, that he had given me the awareness to take my opportunity, but to be honest, it was probably because the eye was a glass replacement for the one he’d lost in Aden.
‘You know what, George? I am better than this. I didn’t go to that school so I could be told what to do by an old git like you or to stack bags in the pissing rain.”
He took it well as I got up from my ragged, reclaimed armchair, walked out of the hut, out of the yard and out of denial.
The story from there is long and winding, but suffice to say I read, I listened, I thought. I decided to repay the debt that I owed Woolverstone. The pride of being at the school returned to me, and my eyes fell open – wide open. It is hard to say what I actually did to change things other than taking more interesting and challenging jobs, but I curbed my belligerence a bit and from various bosses learned the art of ordered thinking, I took broadsheet newspapers instead of The Sun, I listened to Radio Four instead of Radio One. I am aware that this all seems ridiculous – like Educating Rita. I find it a little embarrassing to impart the information to be honest, but what it did do is enable me to feel normal about having had an education; that to know and appreciate things beyond the environment in which I lived was, in fact, something we are all capable of and nothing to be ashamed of. My sense of selfworth had never left me inasmuch as I had always thought of myself as being ‘equal’ to others. My precocity had never dimmed either, but the ambition that Woolverstone instilled in me had been squished and mangled to fit my old Fulham mindset. I had, in this respect at least, reverted to type and what my awakening did was simply recalibrate my self-image to a version of myself that Woolverstone worked hard to put there in the first place. When I left school I thought anything was possible, but it was within a boundary set by my little world. Now, I was ready to try the one everyone else lived in.
That was 1984.
OPERA HOLLAND PARK
The story of the rise of Opera Holland Park probably deserves another volume all of its own, but it would be remiss not to explain why, after so often being cast as the well-intentioned pariah of any company I ever worked in, I have managed to sustain a quarter of a century in this one job.
In 1989, after moderately successful stints in newspapers, the hotel industry, advertising and marketing, I ended up at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on the strength of a scant CV and the gift of the gab – and that is really all I had. I had no knapsack of qualifications to offer employers, but I was fortunate to be in a time when ‘talent’, if it was discerned, was allowed to flourish. Along with the experience I had gathered in my other jobs, I also had the knack of being able to learn quickly, to absorb, draw on things I had learned at school and to create an apparent whole. So I convinced Kensington and Chelsea to let me loose on their cultural portfolio. Indeed, they had in fact pursued me when the job had failed to attract a suitable candidate, although I had turned down the offer of an interview to take up a post in a marketing agency where, within a couple of months I realised that scratch-card promotions and working from a hideous office on the North Circular was never in a million years going to satisfy me, nor, if truth be told, was I ever going to satisfy them.
With my mortgage rate going through the roof, it was a desperate time, and the letter repeating the invitation to interview came at a good moment, although the meeting didn’t go well on the surface of it; one of those interviewing me was dozing through half of it, but I must have been the best of a bad bunch. The first incarnation of my life at the Royal Borough saw me in a pioneering role as a marketer of the libraries and arts services, which seems an odd thing to say now but which nevertheless rang very true at the time, when libraries had never previously felt the need to actually persuade people to use their services. I was also required to promote and publicise the cultural offering of the borough, which had a surprisingly vibrant portfolio of museums, galleries and what was known then as The Holland Park Theatre – it was inevitable that I would find the latter of greatest appeal.
Simply acquiring some press for the venue was enough to take its audience from 14,000 in 1989 to 25,000 in 1990, my first season. I even persuaded the BBC via its GLR radio station to become media sponsor. Opera was a large part of the festival, provided by visiting companies of varying quality, but there was a rich programme of dance – contemporary as well as an annual residency by the Royal Ballet School – theatre and even puppetry. Birmingham Rep brought two productions to the festival, including Cider with Rosie, which remains one of the most vivid memories I have of anything on our stage.
Opera, though, was the big seller, and Mick Goggin, the then theatre manager, had developed a roster of companies who generally produced the pops of the repertoire. At the same time, I was being pressured into acquiring greater levels of sponsorship of a financial kind, but I was increasingly exasperated by these demands because I knew that no sponsor worth its salt would invest in something that had the pong of amateurism about it. I don’t want to insult these companies because they were not all amateur in the least, but they didn’t always give us the finest productions. When a chorus member in Aida has not only a real tea towel on his head but one with the word “glasses” emblazoned upon it, you know that something needs to be done. That production was given by a company called Opera Lirica, which had at its head the conductor Joseph Vandernoot, who was irascible, as old as the hills and conducted at half-speed, but he had enjoyed a distinguished career, notably as music director for Ballet Rambert. He had also given the first UK performance of Puccini’s Edgar under the auspices of the Fulham Symphony orchestra, and I always admired his dedication, learning an awful lot from him whilst he growled and spat at me. It was, however, possible to knock twenty-five minutes off the length of any production he gave when he allowed his assistant to conduct a performance. So these were not the best productions our money could buy and, after several years of listening to my colleagues bemoaning the fact, I proposed a radical solution: we should start our own producing company, an idea that went down like cold vomit, to be fair.
By 1995, six years had passed, and I had immersed myself in the process of opera, learning its distinct producing dynamics, the personalities of its proponents, the details of delivering it and, most crucially, the technicalities of the singing and playing at its musical heart. I had also begun to explore the repertoire beyond the core pieces, and my tastes were becoming well defined. I had experienced opera at Woolverstone and had sung throughout my time there, and had a facility for the theatre in general.
But meeting and working with singers and directors, designers and conductors meant I could absorb so much more. I was essentially, once again educating myself. What I knew for certain was that the nuts and bolts of putting on a production were simply not for me and held no appeal beyond being a horrifying matrix I could admire and understand. So in arguing for the creation of our own company, and pressing home the idea that every penny we spent went not into the pocket of an independent producer but onto our stage, I also insisted that we engage someone to do the legwork. The council agreed.
By the autumn of 1995, we were fully engaged in creating the company Opera Holland Park, and it had strong ideals that we still retain. The intention was to give emerging, British-based performers the opportunity to sing and work with more experienced and established artists, and, to that end, we engaged Anthony Besch and Peter Rice to direct and design our inaugural production of Un ballo in Maschera. The production sat head and shoulders above anything we had done previously, and we acquired the support of American Express for the run.
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