The Music of My Life

Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

The first record I ever bought, age 11, was Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin Polonaises 1 to 7. For a year I saved up the pocket money my grandfather gave me to get it. I played it on our record player, which was like a sideboard with built in speakers.

I had watched, on our little black and white TV, a biopic of Chopin called “A Song to Remember”. In retrospect, it was almost certainly both cheesey and historically dubious. I have never seen it since, but 56 years later I still remember two scenes.

The first is when Liszt, playing in a palace to an aristocratic audience, puts out all the candles saying they should listen to his new piece in the dark. When the lights come up again, the audience gasps to find they have in fact been listening to young Chopin; to whom Liszt has just given his first big break.

The second is when Chopin, playing a concert, coughs blood onto the keys, before going on to die of tuberculosis in a suitably decorous manner.

I don’t recall if and how the film treated his romantic relationship with George Sand, whom nowadays we would call non-binary.

I loved the music, and Chopin has stayed with me ever since. So has that first record.

When I went to Dundee University in 1977, every possession I owned in the world fitted in to one BOAC flight bag and a small cardboard box.

In that cardboard box were some books and a tiny cassette player with sixteen cassettes in a little case, one of which was Rubinstein playing Chopin, which I had copied from vinyl onto cassette using our neighbour’s stereo system.

I find that many people assume me to have come from a wealthy or upper class background. That is not true at all.

My father was one of thirteen children born in Edinburgh to an Italian mother and a Scottish alcoholic hotel porter who had survived the trenches of the First World War. They lived in deep poverty, first in the Old Town and then slum cleared to West Pilton.

At 13 my father left school and went to work picking out reusable hemp with a spike from tarred and encrusted old ships’ ropes, at British Rope in Leith Docks. He was so tiny the workers sometimes used to hide him inside a coil of rope to let him get a break.

At 18 National Service in the RAF took him down to Norfolk. He was one of the few for whom conscription was a distinct improvement in living conditions and diet. He met my mother in Norfolk, and stayed.

He was an extremely talented man. He worked his way up to be in charge of all catering and entertainments on the then massive United States Air Force Bases in Lakenheath and Milldenhall. He then left and put these skills to work in the private sector.

Between my being born in a grotty council house and my reaching the age of 6, my father had a meteoric rise to wealth and owned a Rolls Royce, two Mercedes and a yacht in the South of France. I never saw the latter but I remember the cars. We lived in Peterlee, County Durham. He also had an apartment immediately behind Selfridge’s.

Then it all came crashing down. The constabulary did not approve of the way my father had made his money. He had moved into the gambling industry and some of his methods were unorthodox. His business partner, Frank Hoy, was jailed for seven years.

My father was not jailed as he fled the country. I did not see him again for a decade.

We moved back to Norfolk and I grew up in real poverty. Rural poverty is often overlooked.

When I say poverty, I mean I was genuinely malnourished with permanent physical effects. All – and I mean every single item – of my clothing for a decade came from jumble sales, principally what was known as the “Church thrift”.

We were four siblings, aged from 9 to 1 when Dad left. We had a wonderful loving mother but she was somewhat fey, and her grip on reality was never terribly strong. She could not cope. My sister was the eldest and looked after us. In retrospect, we were feral.

It was however an extremely happy childhood. We roamed the cliffs, beaches, woods and fields. Nobody ever asked where we were or what we were doing. I was related through my mother to half the small town. I had grandparents nearby and a great extended family.

School was the only traumatic bit. I hated it. I passed my 11 plus and went to an extremely selective grammar school, 15 miles away, by bus every day. It had been a private school and still retained much of that ethos. They quite literally hit you about the head with the wooden-backed blackboard rubber until you spoke and behaved as English gentlemen.

My grandfather was deeply musical – he conducted the local brass band, and could transcribe by ear and arrange for brass band any music he heard. His collection of records was an important retreat for me, as were his books – he was a socialist.

My musical collection and my musical tastes expanded as I got older. Success at university and in the Diplomatic Service meant I could buy music I wanted, on vinyl, cassette or eventually CDs. I served in Nigeria and in Poland, great for Chopin.

Thirty years after I bought Rubinstein playing Chopin, home computers had reached a stage where you could transfer music from cassette to CD, cleaning it up of hiss in the process.

I sat in the tiny spare room of my home in Gravesend many evenings transferring vinyl and cassette to CDs. I printed out disk shaped labels of album art to attach to the CDs. Sometimes you could find that art online. Otherwise I would scan the cassette or LP artwork.

So by 1998 Artur Rubinstein had moved from vinyl to cassette to CD. I had over a hundred of these homemade CD’s, soon greatly outnumbered by music CDs bought as I went on to serve in Ghana and then Uzbekistan.

All of my music always went with me.

I have fought against bipolar my entire adult life. It has at times been crippling or dangerous. As you will have gathered by now, I have a deep emotional response to music. I was probably age about 25 when I realised that this could exacerbate my bipolar. I tended to listen to music which reinforced the mood swing.

Put simply, if I were depressed you might find me in a darkened room listening to Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathetique. If I were manic, you might find me bouncing to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.

So I started to use the music the opposite way, to try to moderate mood swings. This had limited success. But then I perceived that the kind of music I was listening to could prefigure a manic or depressive episode, when I was apparently still “normal”.

I devised a system where I would only play my music entirely at random, with a closed eyed selection. This seemed actually to work for me as a prophylactic against bipolar.

So I bought an amazing Sony 400 CD rotary jukebox style player, with an external amp and speakers. This enabled me to random shuffle my music automatically, and play not just albums but individual tracks randomly shuffled.

I found this really did work against bipolar. The effect seemed significant. Of course this is self-referential but it did correlate with a significant reduction in attacks. I understand my music therapy may have just been a prop to reinforce control of my own mind, but it worked, so who cares?

By 2001 I had three of these Sony 400 CD players, which you could link in series, and in a slot in one of them sat Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin.

Then it was the turn of CD’s to be redundant. In another decade or so random track selection could be done from a phone, without a metre high stack of heavy Sony units. Rubinstein moved to a shelf.

Until now. Life goes in circles, and being again rather straitened, I had to save up to buy a Brennan ripper, but now I have it. Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin is now safely digitally encoded inside it, and I am working on all my other CDs.

I presume these units appeal only to nostalgic boomers like me, who want to converse in the musical ideolect of our collection curated over a lifetime, rather than get lost in the universal availability of streaming.

It is a sobering thought that, if I listen to my music, at random, for an average of one hour a day, I am unlikely to live long enough to get through every track.

I have eighty very narrow shelves of CDs, integrated into my bookshelves. I just pulled out a handful from one shelf, appropriately at random, to tell you what is on it, without much detail.

Boccherini – Guitar Quintets 4, 7 and 9
Beethoven – Complete String Quartets (4 Discs)
Tchaikovsky and Arensky – Piano Trios
Fred Astaire – Let’s Face the Music
Rick Wakeman – Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Saint Saens – Cello Concerto No 2
R.E.M. – Reveal
The Animals – Greatest Hits
Glenn Miller – Jazz and Blues
Chopin – Mazurkas
Battlefield Band – Threads

I do have recent music, just not in that particular batch. Of course, playing random tracks loses the pleasure of hearing an entire symphony or album straight through, but I occasionally still do that.

It is going to take a long while to load everything on this Brennan. When I finish, before I go into my randomised pernanent therapy, I shall listen to Artur Rubinstein play Chopin Polonaises.

You never know which will be the last time.

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