Imagine you are on a train.
​

The driver has been speaking over the Tannoy almost continually. His announcements are full of confidence, “The next stop is Haggerston.” When in fact the next stop is Crystal Palace. “Change here for the district and circle lines. “ When in fact there is no interchange at the next station. “There is no step free access from this station.” When in fact there are lifts a plenty.


You remain in your seat.


It’s clear to you that the driver is a little dim, but you shrug in an amused fashion. You glance around at the other passengers. Some will be scrolling on their phones, others will have their headphones in watching a documentary on Netflix, other’s will be engrossed in a book. There may be some who look up with a slightly concerned air of amusement who will share a smile with you, roll their eyes and shake their head as if to say “Huh! That guy.” Then go back to their paper. You go back to your book.


You remain in your seat.


The commentary continues. At one stop, the doors open and then close three times for apparently no reason. You look out the window and see a station attendant with a confused look on his face. The train pulls away from the station.


You remain in your seat.


You feel the train almost imperceptibly begin to speed up. You’ve been on this journey before. Countless times. It’s your regular commute and it feels like the train is moving a little faster than usual. You look up again at the other passengers, a couple are glancing around.


You remain in your seat.


The train passes through a station that it should have stopped at. Those standing near the doors mutter “For fuck’s sake.” under their breath. Other’s may be more vocal. You feel for the poor bastards. Their commute is going to be a bit longer. Maybe they won’t make that appointment. Maybe they’ll miss that interview. Poor fuckers. But it’s not your stop. So it’s not really your concern. Those around you are becoming agitated.


You remain in your seat.


The train continues to speed up. It passes through two more stations without stopping. You have a second to catch the bewildered faces of the passengers on the platform as the train storms by. By now, people have stopped watching Netflix. They aren’t looking at their phones. They’ve stopped reading their papers and the train is moving almost impossibly fast. Someone says “Right, that’s it!” and pulls the emergency cord. You secretly think “Thank god.”


You remain in your seat.


But the train continues to accelerate. The commentary from the driver has gone from simply wrong to an insane internal monologue. Now it’s clear that the person in charge of the train, in charge of all of your lives is not fit to be driving a train. The people who were supposed to be in charge of the hiring of the train drivers were lied to. And the rail bosses care only for themselves and the lining of their pockets and nothing for the commuters in their charge. There is no longer any doubt. A madman is driving your train.


So what do you do now? Do you remain in your seat? Does the train have to roar through our own station before we do something? Does it have to crash headlong into another train killing everybody on board? What will it take?


Donald Trump is in the UK people.


Time to stand up.

Five years ago I was a wandering itinerant folk singer/songwriter/performer/theatrical nut, living on a dime and sleeping on the floor of my best friend's house. Seven months previously I had taken the somewhat drastic step of quitting my day job to pursue my dream of becoming a full time songwriter. I had saved up some money in my years working in administration and since I couldn't think of anything to spend it on, I decided to give myself a year and see if I could survive on professional performing and songwriting work. That year I earnt the princely sum of about £1400 from my first forays into the world of the professional songwriter. Interestingly enough they all came from theatrical contracts... consequently the £10,000 I had squirreled away over the previous 5 years was soon depleted to a small collection of nuts.

That money is gone forever, but I don't think I'll ever regret the decision to have a go at doing this for a living... because I feel like one of the lucky ones. It's been hard, at times I've lived on practically nothing, I've lived in hostels, I've toured shows for months on end but at the end of the day i get to do what I love almost every day now. Writing songs for shows. If I hadn't given myself that chance I think I would always have regretted it. I also would probably own a nice little house in Kennington... but hey.​

Of that £1400, the majority of it came from a project titled These Trees Were Made of Blood.

Director Amy Draper had been to Argentina a few years previously and had become fascinated by the story of the Madres de La Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo). I didn't know it at the time, but when I was just a baby (and being encouraged to stick my fingers in electrical sockets by my big brother) in 1980 New Zealand, upwards of 30,000 people were being brutally tortured and "Disappeared" by their own government in Argentina. The Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo were mothers of the Disappeared. Their children were taken from clubs, from homes, from classrooms and subjected to horrific torture and murder by the right wing military state. They were detailned without notice, without trial and their very existence was denied. From 1978 - 1983 the population of Argentina lived under a terrorist state. Only the Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo were brave enough to speak out. They were ordinary women thrown into horrific and extraordinary circumstances. They were threatened with death and torture on a regular basis but they maintained their peaceful protest which eventually helped lead to international pressure and the eventual downfall of the military government. To this day, many do not know what happened to their children and they still march in the Plaza.

Amy found me whilst I was performing with my folk band in the foyer of the National Theatre, she was a friend of our singer Angie Fullman, who introduced us and suggested to Amy that I might be good to work with...

She must have liked what she heard as soon I had a conversation with her and I was offered one of my first professional jobs, to come along to a week of workshops at The BAC to write some songs for this show inspired by The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. I was excited and intimidated, Amy's instinct was to turn this story into a political cabaret. Many people I mentioned the idea to, said, "You want to do a cabaret musical about the murder and torture of 30,000 people? You're nuts. Good luck with it." 

But I thought there was something there. There was something so horrific, so terrible that it felt like words were not enough to do it justice. I could hear music in my head. A mixture of traditional Weimar Cabaret, Gyspy Jazz and Argentinean folk music gradually crept together in my tiny musical brain. I listened to everything I could get my hands on and then suddenly we were in a rehearsal room at the Battersea Arts Centre with cabaret artists, actors, singers and musicians and I had to write some songs... 

That's how my journey on this extraordinary project started.

It is now five years since that first giddy experience, and I feel I have gained in experience and so I wanted to talk about how I approached writing the songs for a piece of "political" theatre. The show had a successful critically acclaimed sold out run at The Southwark Playhouse in 2015 when Producer Jim Croxford of Theatre Bench took a chance on an unknown, creative team because he believed in the story we were trying to tell.

I know that for many people, politics can be very dry, but I think that it is only “dry” if it’s presented that way. A lot of people’s experience of political stories is through the news media, which (sometimes as a necessity) often overlook the intensely personal stories behind politics.

For me, politics is all about heart. It’s about people and struggle. Yes, it’s about numbers and statistics but behind them are thousands of beating hearts. In some cases people struggling to exist even on the most basic level. And that’s why I think that watching so-called “political” theatre can be amongst the most powerful and deeply affecting experience that an audience can have. So when people said I was crazy to be working a show that essentially documented a mass state-sanctioned genocide, I thought the opposite. 

Where could the stakes be higher? This story seemed to me like the very story that needed music to tell it properly.

That was all very well… but where to start?

I’ve said that politics is all about heart. You have to dig deep through the stats to find the humanity underneath it all. This is sometimes difficult but I think it’s absolutely essential to creating a political show. You can’t just have a message or an opinion. You have to have a moving narrative that your audience can connect with. In this case Amy had decided that she wanted to focus on one mother’s story to find her Disappeared daughter and she wanted to set it all in a cabaret.

Immediately the heart of the show was obvious. How would you feel if your only child was taken from you for unknown reasons, brutally tortured and murdered and then the perpetrators denied it? 

The first thing that suggested itself musically was the idea of a lullaby. What represents the closest connection between a mother and her child? A mother singing her child to sleep. I wrote a lullaby inspired by Argentine folk music called My Little Bird, that tells of a mother’s fears for her children. Eventually it also grew to represent the suppression of the state. But it all started with that most personal of song forms. The songs grew from that seed to become cabaret numbers that subverted and shocked, dark torture tangos, and defiant ballads. 

One of the difficulties of political cabaret is there is a tendency to want to educate as well as entertain. Again the key is to make sure that any education is part of the narrative and connected to the heart of the story. This is easier said than done and I haven’t always been successful with it, but I’ve tried. If people are coming to the theatre they want to be entertained, they want to feel something extraordinary and woe be to the writer who doesn’t fulfil this basic want.

We are now in the final stages of being able to tell the story in the manner we have always felt it deserved. The Arcola Theatre is producing a new version of the show and it will be on this summer from June til July. But in order to make the work as good as it can be we need to raise some funds for the production. To this end we have launched a crowdfunding campaign to help... If you’ve enjoyed reading this blog (or indeed any of my blogs over the last years) then please do consider donating to the project by clicking the link below. Or if you can't donate share the blog far and wide with friends and family!

Since that first job in 2012 I’ve had the good fortune to go on and write many shows, but the story of These Trees Are Made of Blood remains one of the most important and powerful stories in my mind. Please help us create the show we know it can be!