You Can’t Stop the Music


I am fond of amateur theatricals and, while there are many incidents in youth that determine the course of a life, I can chart my direction from the moment when, at the age of thirteen, I stepped onto a stage in a pair of white satin pantaloons and a powdered wig.

At a time in life when my peers were chasing a muddy ball around the Tuatapere domain I chased song lyrics and dance steps in the local Memorial Hall, under the measured baton of Mrs Phyllis McClymont, the chemist’s wife.

I was an accidental actor. I found my way into the Memorial Hall through neither audition nor an unquenchable desire to lift the coattails of fortune. No, I owed my lucky break to chicken manure.

I had been barrowing chicken manure on a bleak winter afternoon from our henhouse, across the back paddock, over the road and onto Mrs McClymont’s strawberry patch. Piano music tinkled as usual from the lounge. This was the most tastefully appointed room in Birch Street, perhaps in all Tuatapere. A warbling soprano voice rose above the notes of the piano.

As I slewed past the lounge, my face straining against the ammoniac reek of my barrow, the music stopped, a window opened and Mrs McClymont’s blue-rinse-haloed face appeared.
“I need you,” she commanded.

And that was that.

When I told my parents my father seemed completely unsurprised at my elevation to stardom. He had tremendous faith in chicken manure.

The show in rehearsal was The Gondoliers by Gilbert & Sullivan. I fell at once deeply, passionately and everlastingly in love with G&S.

The music that has profoundly influenced my life has always found me by accident: my sister’s boyfriend reaching blindly into a wardrobe stuffed with LPs and pulling out Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks; the father of a girl I was madly in love with at 21 playing a Mozart piano concerto on a blue harpsichord. Gilbert & Sullivan took me completely by surprise - courtesy of a barrowload of chicken manure.

A hundred and thirty years or so after their invention it is easy to deride Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operas.

It’s not so much that they’re old-fashioned. The stories, littered with orphans, babies switched at birth and forced marriages are no different than most Hollywood romantic comedies. The language is stilted rather than archaic and the costumes wouldn’t look out of place at a high school lipsync.

It is the style that outs them as a throwback to an earlier age. They seem as ponderous and declamatory as a traction engine, their humour laboured and their pathos, well, pathetic.

That they are constantly reprised is due to just one thing – the music. The music is fabulous - sly as a courtesan, exhilarating as big surf. My family hates it, of course. To them it is all tiddly om pom and fa la la la. And, yes, it is those things, but allow yourself to sink beneath the frills and the music is deep and rich and full of surprises.

And it is fun to sing because, when stripped bare, it is simply a collection of great tunes. Gilbert & Sullivan were the Lennon & McCartney of their age, producing a catalogue of hits which wove themselves so deeply into our collective subconscious that even now their imprint remains. Few people would not raise at least a flicker of response to the Major-General’s patter or Three Little Maids From School.

Not that I understood all this when I set foot on the stage of the Tuatapere Memorial Hall. Back then it wasn’t the tunes that grabbed my attention.

It was the girls. Yes, there they were, real girls, tucked away among the dowagers, the pirates, the footmen and the minor nobility that populate the world of G&S.

My role in The Gondoliers was to be the Lord High Drummer Boy – this is why I had been summoned by Mrs McClymont. My hopes of impressing the girls soared as I dressed in satin bloomers and powdered wig, only to be dashed on the rocks of choreography.

The girls, you see, were the famous ballet troupe from Blackmount – a district so remote it barely figured on the map but nevertheless produced beautiful and talented ballerinas. My task was to dance a fiendishly complicated Spanish Cachuca with these maidens.

I worked strenuously but I couldn’t do it. The girls twirled effortlessely about me, clacking their castanets and flashing their eyes disdainfully while I plonked around with my half-roll of puppy fat and two left feet.

Mercifully the experience, although it put me off myself for a while, dampened my enthusiasm for neither girls nor G & S.

Next month I will once again sing Gilbert & Sullivan on stage, in the Mid-Canterbury Choir’s winter concert at the Tinwald Hall on Saturday 15th September. We will sing a selection of music from four operas: Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and, happily, The Gondoliers.

I am delighted to rediscover this music after 30 years. It is like meeting an old friend.