Browse Works
Additional Information
Chains of W edlock (1969)
Baldovan (1976)
Fancy (1977)
Stage Love (1978)
The Airlie Birds (1979)
Star Rider (1980)
The Millionaire’ s Daughter (1980)
General (1983)
Verbal Agreements (1984)
The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies (1985)
To Anaktoria (2002)
Ozymandias (2020)
These songs come from various decades and exhibit a diversity of musical style. ‘Chains of Wedlock’ is in my early pop idiom and was in no way influenced by Tolstoy’s novella ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. ‘Baldovan’ was an attempt to illustrate the power of music to disguise infelicities in poetic texts. ‘Stage Love’ was later developed as an instrumental movement in my Suite Grotesque, Op. 32. ‘The Airlie Birds’ was composed as a rugby league team song for Hull F.C. ‘Star Rider’ was a song to promote a motorcycle road safety course. ‘The Millionaire’s Daughter’ was composed to lyrics in an English version of Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill’s Happy End. There was no music for this song, and I have no idea who translated the lyrics, or if they were originally the work of Brecht or, perhaps, Elisabeth Hauptmann. ‘General’ is another translation of Brecht (‘General, dein Tank ist ein starker Wagen’, 1937) for which I have yet to discover the translator (indeed, it may well have been me). ‘Verbal Agreements’ is an autobiographical song, written after my landlord stopped paying the rates on the property I was renting. ‘The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies’ was arranged for my own pleasure singing and playing the guitar. ‘To Anaktoria’ was an attempt to set a famous Sappho poem in its original Greek and keep to the quantitative Sapphic metre (– u – – / – u u – u – –). ‘Ozymandias’ practically composed itself during a walk in Well Wood near my home.