Going for a Song

TIM Firth can remember everything about the first time he met Willy Russell. It was the day his life changed. The year was 1983, the summer was hot and he was 18 and about to go to Cambridge to read English. Back home in Cheshire, he’d spent months working on a musical version of Macbeth in the style of Marillion ("funnily enough, it never got anywhere"). But writing musicals was what he had set his heart on, so when he heard about a course which Russell was tutoring on entitled Writing for Performance, he put his name down straight away.

Earlier that year, Russell’s Blood Brothers had opened at the Liverpool Playhouse. Even though no-one could possibly guess it would still be making him millions 21 years later, for a would-be singer-songwriter like Firth, it seemed to have a compelling freshness. Here was a show written not by a classically trained musician, but a straight-from-the-heart Scouser who had learnt his craft in the city’s folk clubs. Maybe Russell - who was giving the course with the show’s director, Danny Hiller - could teach him how it was done.

Except Firth had got it all wrong. The course, run by the Arvon Foundation at Ted Hughes’s old farm high up the steep Pennine valley, overlooking Hebden Bridge, had nothing to do with music and everything to do with writing plays. "There was this terrible moment on the first night when Willy said, ‘Go away and write a couple of minutes’ of dialogue between two people. You’ve got an hour.’

"I was petrified. I’d never done anything like that in my life. So I went away and wrote the only thing I could think of - about a couple of kids my age trying to write a song.

"Willy read one of the parts and, within a couple of lines, Danny had started to laugh. If I can trace my interest in comedy to any one moment, that was it."

These days, Firth’s track record as a writer is almost as impressive as his first mentor’s. Last year, you could have wandered out of the London premiere of his film Calendar Girls and have the choice of either watching another, Blackball, about lawn-bowling and starring Johnny Vegas, or Our House, his Olivier award-winning West End musical based on Madness’s greatest hits. On television, All Quiet on the Preston Front, Once Upon a Time in the North, The Flint Street Nativity and Neville’s Island all dot the CV of the man who had once never thought of playwriting.

But talent needs luck to survive and grow, and Firth has had almost indecent quantities of it. At Cambridge, he spent three years mostly writing plays, every single one of them - including his 1984 Fringe debut, Hexen, about witchcraft in Cheshire - directed by his friend, Sam Mendes. Still at university, he was taken under the wing of Alan Ayckbourn, who, over the next decade, directed and commissioned much of his work for his theatre at Scarborough.

His latest project, though, circles right back to when he first met Russell. After his first snippet of playwriting had been so warmly received, Firth started messing about on the piano in the farmhouse lounge. Russell got out his guitar and an impromptu session, fuelled by more red wine than the teenage Firth was used to, lasted until 4am.

Over the years, as their respective careers blossomed - Russell’s with Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, and his recent, hilarious novel, The Wrong Boy - the two writers kept in touch. Occasionally, they’d even give courses together at Lumb Bank, and whenever they did, they would still play music together, with Firth at the keyboards on that same old, upright, farmhouse piano around which their friendship had first began.

In the last year or so, though, their music-making has had an added sense of purpose. For each, it has led to a debut album - Russell’s Hoovering the Moon and Firth’s Harmless Flirting, which will be out later this year. And it has resulted in their Singing Playwrights show at the Pleasance Grand Theatre, where they will be performing songs with a seven-piece band and reading extracts from their writing.

"It’s difficult to describe," says Russell, "but essentially it’s a mélange of the spoken and the musical. We might begin with one of my songs, but within the first minute of it, while the track’s still running, we’re into a reading from Neville’s Island, then it’s another verse and a reading from Shirley Valentine. And that’s how it carries on, not just song followed by a reading, but mixing them up more.

"When Blood Brothers first came out, people found it hard to pigeonhole, and they’ll have the same problem here. We might be in mid-song and then suddenly we’ll take off into another melody, and then straight into a reflective section. Any audience expectations about what they’re going to get is going to be completely blown away."

The Singing Playwrights show is a condensed version of a production Russell and Firth have already taken on tour throughout England. That in turn had its roots in their collaboration over the last two years which Russell dubs "a musical WeightWatchers".

"Every six weeks or so, we’d meet up either in my house or Tim’s with the promise that we’d each have a couple of songs completed," he explains. "That deadline was like a WeightWatchers’ weigh-in - and gradually we found we were amassing quite a few good songs."

The initial idea was to make a record, but they soon agreed that their differing styles would work live but not on CD. I wonder about that. While Russell’s music has a harder edge, both writers’ lyrics have a depth, an eloquence and a sheer verbal dexterity. They tell stories - sometimes simply, like Russell’s hymn to fatherhood ("Any father would be glad to know/You went further than he’d dared to go/He would forgive you that you dared to dream/He’d gladly give you the world’s ice cream"); sometimes unravelling the complex minutiae of betrayal, as in Firth’s Harmless Flirting and Sometime in July.

Whether they swing out to vaudeville or back to quiet reflections on unfulfilled dreams, these are songs where words matter. They are distinctive, rooted, unashamedly thought-provoking rebellions against recyclable pop pap. Why a major label hasn’t signed them up - Russell produced Hoovering the Moon himself - is beyond me. But the playwright himself isn’t bothered. "At least this way we get to keep complete creative control."

Firth adds: "At least these are honest songs. Certainly they’re not trying to be American songs. Only recently I’ve been starting to notice that among the biggest influences in the core structures are the Methodist hymns I remember from going to Chapel with my mother as a kid. But as Willy says, that’s no surprise: most of them were just purloined old English folk songs. To Be a Pilgrim is a case in point. You get all these powerful, moving chords for the left hand to play that almost force out a really strong melody for the right."

After Edinburgh, the singing playwrights’ careers will take different tracks. Russell is to write a film version of his 1980s TV series One Summer for the Pleasance show’s producer, Ian Brady. Firth has turned producer to get a series of TV comedy dramas, which will be unveiled at the television festival, off the ground.

Right now, though, they’re tuning up for a show which may just be the first time any one British playwright - never mind two - has sung in front of a paying audience since Noel Coward entertained London café society.

And if you want to hear a masterclass in writing for performance, whether it’s the spoken or sung word, there’s probably no more enjoyable show around.

DAVID ROBINSON - Scotsman

• The Singing Playwrights are at the Pleasance Grand Theatre, 20-30 August. Willy Russell also appears at the Book Festival on 19 August.