Music

After the release of his debut album Hoovering the moon, Willy Russell and playwright Tim Firth created their live show ‘In Other Words’. A performance of music, songs, verse, readings and anecdotes, all woven together and performed by Willy Russell and Tim Firth appearing as soloists, as a duo or as part of a six piece band, led by musical director, Andy Roberts. In Other words included songs from both ‘Hoovering the Moon’ and Tim Firth’s album, ‘Harmless Flirting’ as-well as readings and passages from their theatre work.

The show was reworked and renamed ‘The Singing Playwrights’ and Willy and Tim played 12 gigs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

“LONG before the plays that made both their names, music was Willy Russell’s and Tim Firth’s first love. In this show, they return to it with a seven-piece band, lyrics to linger over and a dazzling overlay of words and music that you’d be hard-pressed to match.

Being playwrights, they know all about making each word count. But what they are doing here - cutting up and reassembling their selected prose then interspersing it with their own songs - offers them the chance to make their words count in altogether different ways… Both Russell and Firth have the kind of range that would allow them to turn their 90-minute concert in whatever direction they wanted. There’s the sublime (Living on the Never Never (Easy Terms) from Blood Brothers) and the joyous (She Give Me, and its highlights from Shirley Valentine).

These singing playwrights are indecently talented, but Russell’s commanding soliloquies and Firth’s versatile lyrics combine effectively to make it a night that only the coldest-hearted could fail to enjoy.”

David Robinson - The Scotsman

Willy Russell composed the music for the British comedy Mr Love. “I was approached by director Roy Battersby who'd already shot the film from a script by Ken Eastaugh.I really liked the script and took the job even though by that time there was very little left in the budget for scoring the film. It was a good opportunity to learn though and with the help of some gifted musicians, including Dave Goldberg, I think I wound up with a simple but effective score.”

Arts Desk with Jasper Rees

When did you actually start writing songs?

“Well, I’d messed around with bits of writing… it was the one thing I could do at school, I loved it when we had English and it was composition. The rest of the kids in the D-stream of my secondary school in St Helens hated it, but I loved it! So I messed around with bits of writing, and my mum had always written bits of poetry and verse, so it wasn’t an alien thing to me. But the idea of being a writer… y’know, I was 14, and a writer was someone who wore tweed jackets, smoked a pipe and went somewhere called Oxford or Cambridge!

Coming from my background, you wouldn’t know what a writer was. If I said to my father ‘I want to be a writer,’ he’d go, ‘Well I want to be the King of England, now what are you gonna do for work?’. So I put the idea away again, as being a nonsense. I was in the D-stream at school, headed for the bottle factory.  But I’d always been precocious musically and I was a huge Buddy Holly fan. And one of my closest friends in my early teens was Tom Evans, who later on was in Badfinger and co-wrote Without You, and he was a big Everly Brothers fan.

Around the same time  I stumbled into the Cavern for the first time… We saw these black AC30s come on stage… and then four men in black, with their hair combed forward! It was like the Martians had landed… The Beatles kicked in with Some Other Guy, and life was never the same again. It was before the Beatles were known and I had two years of the best kind of music you could possibly imagine, right on my doorstep… The idea that someone was doing something as visceral as that only six miles from where I lived was absolutely astonishing”.

“Within two weeks, I’d gone out and bought what I thought was a guitar. It was a plank with wires on, basically!”

“Then the folk thing happened, and I became aware of Dylan. And once I became aware of Dylan, I realised that I could write songs.”

“I heard a Peter, Paul and Mary album, and remember going to an Animals gig down here. They played a song called Don't Think Twice, It's Alright by a guy they said was called Bob Dye-lan? It was fantastic, so me and some mates went round all the record stores the next day. 'Have you got anything by Bob Dye-lan?' Fortunately at one store a fellow said 'I think you mean Bob Dylan,' so I managed to get hold of a Dylan album - and that was my route into folk music: throwing away all the electric gear, going acoustic, trying to be Dylanesque, and beginning to write my own songs.”

I remember being with my then band The Kirby Town Three. We'd heard of a place in Liverpool's London Road (The Green Moose) where they played folk music…. although some of it was a bit hard-core for us, we were intrigued, and we could see the connection back to Dylan. In fact we discovered some of the melodies we thought he'd written were actually composed two, three, four hundred years ago. So it was that predictable route, really - through easy melodic, American finger picking songs into traditional music.

You also had lots of people who were performers and writers, and although they weren't writing 'Folk Music', that milieu provided a wonderful opportunity for them to present literate songs, trying to say something.

“I learned the art of story telling in the folk clubs of the sixties”.

"The Moose was a really important period for me though. I never for one second realised it at the time but I now see that from having to do that gig every Thursday I was learning all kinds of things about the nature of performance, about audiences, about what will and won't work, about how overwriting can kill a song (or, indeed, a play or any other form for that matter). Although none of us knew it at the time, all those folk places, cafes, pubs, old cellars were a fantastic training ground for all kinds of talent - it was a completely anti-commercial, anti music-establishment phenomenon.”

“I was widening my writing into other forms, and I wanted to take what I'd learned and what I loved about folk music into those other forms.”