Alfie Read online

  We had a few parties, including one the day before the wedding where, inevitably, I was asked to sing. At the time I was getting ready to go on a tour of America with a big band, singing old Broadway songs, so I sang Sinatra’s ‘Luck Be a Lady’. I went up to Mum after and said, ‘That was fun Mum, wasn’t it!’ She said: ‘You should not be singing that stuff, Alf. I don’t like it.’ Ah man. Mum had quite specific views on what I should sing back then, she likes the classical rep. ‘I’m sorry, Alf, but no.’ I was so upset, because I was really looking forward to singing different styles, breaking into different genres. It was new to me and I was feeling pretty sensitive about it. I didn’t know what to say, so I just walked out of the house in tears, and kept walking, and I punched a tree, broke my hand. When I got back, Sarah’s mum brought me and Mum into a room – she’s very positive like that, Sarah’s mum – and got us to talk it out.

  My hand’s still damaged now, my knuckles are kind of flat. Because trees don’t move. So I got married with a broken hand. You can see it in the wedding photographs, because I didn’t want to get married with a cast on. It’s ridiculous. I’m shaking people’s hands and you can see the pain in my eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  DISCOVERING AMERICA WITH THE JAZZ CATS

  In retrospect I maybe shouldn’t have got married in a kilt. It was Mum’s tartan, Irish Tartan, County Mayo. A kilt and a broken hand. There are a few things we could have done differently – we might have turned it all down a notch. Sarah had eight – eight! – bridesmaids, because she was 24 and one of the first of all her friends to get married so made them all bridesmaids. All of Sarah’s girlfriends were enamoured with John and he scored with one of them – there’s footage somewhere of her dancing kind of inappropriately with him in front of Mum and the priest.

  It’s my fault because I was in charge of getting the music sorted, and I did too good of a job. Somebody had put us in touch with this DJ, big tubby guy with a handlebar moustache and little bow-tie. He said, ‘We’ll do the Christina Aguilera song, we’ll do “The Shoop Shoop Song”, we’ll do some Britney, we’ll do the Grease medley . . .’

  I said, ‘You know what, mate? No. None of that. Listen carefully. Do not bring any of your records. I’m going to go home and I will make you sixteen hours of music, and that’s what I want you to play.’

  He said, ‘Well, if that’s what you want, but I don’t think people are gonna dance to your music.’

  I gave him a big pile of CDs, rock songs, Celtic music, some good Irish jigs, the floor was packed all night long. It was very pretty, the reception was in Red Butte, gorgeous botanical garden, and Sarah looked stunning, she was glowing just like she did the first time I saw her, more so – she looked so beautiful. She always does. And it was a great month. Despite the cultural differences, our families had a lot of fun together. Some of my sisters came for the wedding, brought their kids, and John had a blast, he stashed loads of beers in the garden so he’d never have to go into the house to get one. Sarah’s family were still finding them months later.

  We couldn’t have our honeymoon till almost a year later because I had too much work to do. After the wedding I had to come straight back to London to do Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the ENO, which wasn’t a very good production, awfully modern. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Ridiculous wig they had me in. The people in the opera house were saying it was such a classic one to do, but it just wasn’t fun at all. And it was my first run-in with ENO, because on the first day of rehearsal I made a couple of musical mistakes, in one of the most difficult parts of the show. I’d sung every single other part correctly, but there was a tricky ensemble moment where I needed a little bit of help, a bit of coaching on it. John Berry from ENO phoned up my agent in New York, and said they were very worried about my learning process. My agent phoned me and said, ‘We’ve never had this said to us before, by any opera house about any artist. This is a very worrying thing, Alfie.’ I said, ‘Listen, I made one mistake and I needed a bit of help with it and that was it. I sang the rest of the piece perfectly.’ They should have been worrying about the conductor – he cracked open the score and didn’t know it all. He spent most of the time while he was conducting the rehearsals on his mobile phone. One singer was so incensed he just walked off in the middle of the piece. And it didn’t help that ENO had set me and Sarah up in a shed in the bottom of somebody’s garden in Kilburn. And I do mean a shed in the bottom of somebody’s garden. Metal roof. Massive spiders. It had been converted into a bedsit of sorts for this lady’s father-in-law, who’d been ill. We moved in and she said, ‘I hope you’ll be happy in here, my father was. He died in here a week ago.’ £250 a week too.

  From that we went to Brussels. I went straight into another production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but a much better one, directed by David McVicar, who I’d worked with on La Bohème at Glyndebourne. It wasn’t cartoonish like the ENO production was, it was pretty spooky actually, in a lovely way. It looked like the set for Edward Scissorhands. We had a cute little flat there, it was our first Christmas as a married couple. We had a pair of my hiking socks for stockings, the Boe DIY skills serving me well. Sarah really wanted a tree so I bought one and walked back with it, trekking through the streets of Brussels with this 6ft Christmas tree – all you could see was my legs underneath. This tree walking down the road. I glimpsed through the branches at one point and there were some Japanese tourists taking my photo. Well, not my photo, a photo of this walking tree.

  I then went on this 10-week tour of America, which was unofficially affiliated with the Boston Pops, some of our orchestra had played with them. It was called Broadway: The Big Band Years; we were doing 1930s and ’40s musical theatre songs, the big band stuff, Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter, Gershwin, Lerner and Loewe, all of that. At that point I was really into that sort of music, I loved listening to a bit of Sinatra, and it was relatively easy to sing, although it was a slog – we did a gig practically every single night for two months. There were about 20 of us driving around the United States in a coach. We went right round the curve of America, starting in California playing the universities, down to Palm Beach, all the way along the bottom, Arizona, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, up to New York, Boston, Connecticut, down through Ohio and Indiana. Mostly smaller regional places. It took us three days to cross Texas. We hit border control at Mexico and I didn’t have my passport with me, I didn’t have a green card at that point, and the bus driver said, ‘If anybody comes on board, hide under the seat.’ Are you kidding me? I was scared stiff, picturing this border cop getting onto the coach and dragging me out. I was ready for it, crouching under this seat, the only Brit there, thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing? I’m a singer for crying out loud, I just want to sing!’ But they just let the bus through.

  It was really eye-opening, seeing so much of the States. We went through Louisiana and Mississippi – the Mississippi river was a knockout. It was a constant carnival there in the south, the energy of the place and the vibrancy of the people really inspired me. But there was some dark stuff there too. A couple of buses overtook us there, one said ‘Whites Only’, and another said ‘Blacks Only’. There were a lot of Ku Klux Klan symbols around, it was a bit of a shock to be in the presence of that, to be faced with it. In those smaller more insular towns, there’s still a lot of that going on, and when you’re driving through and you catch a glimpse of it, it’s brutal. Just keep on driving, don’t stop. We drove through some of the poorer regions to get to the venues, a lot of rundown places that had been hit by big corporate companies that had basically shut down towns. Walmart had opened a strip mall and the small-town businesses had had to close. Bakers and butchers had just shut down because everybody was at Walmart. It’s such a shame that that happens with America, people all shopping under one big roof – it patronises it. We drove through real shanty towns in Cleveland, proper poverty, people living in shacks and huts. And we played everywhere, we did it all. We pl
ayed a retirement community home in Florida, which was like a holiday camp, a little prisoner of war camp for old people. Kalamazoo was a riot – I’d only heard of the place before in that Glenn Miller song, we did some good partying in the bars there. Some places weren’t so inspiring. One motel we were in, me and Sarah were in bed watching that film Sideways, and the guy in the film was in a similar motel watching TV, just as we were watching him, and his bedspread, that generic American bedspread, seemed to blend from the TV into our bedspread in our room. The mundanity of those places is overwhelming.

  The culinary situation was pretty dire, food was bad on the road. In the venues in the north part of the country, the Women’s Legion would cook for us, which was very sweet of them, and it was great to have home-cooked food, but it would always be lasagne. Always lasagne. Why? In the south, it was gumbo and rice, jambalaya, which was great, except for one time in Louisiana when I was really looking forward to some nice southern food, and what did we get: lasagne again. I hate it now.

  The crowds were awesome, full-houses, and again I learnt a lot about how to interact with audiences, how to work with them, shades of D’Oyly Carte and Scottish Opera Go Round. We got a great response from them, we’d joke with them, we’d talk to them about the songs. It was good training, and that’s stuck with me all the time. Doing my own individual little gigs in the years after that was good experience too – you learn a lot from crowds when it’s just you and a couple of musicians. Invaluable experience, great training for what I’m doing on tour now. I’m still learning. I was kind of using the Bring Him Home tour last year as an opportunity to see how far I can go with what I’m singing, in terms of variety and spontaneity. I want to always keep changing things on the road – it keeps everyone on their toes. Not just the musicians, whenever I change something it means the lighting guy has to change something, the sound guy has to change something, the projectionist. They have to keep up. But it’s nice to have that freedom. I don’t want my shows to be rigid, I love the spontaneity, and I want to translate that intimacy and informality to the bigger venues I’m starting to play.

  It was a hell of an experience, travelling America on a bus with 20 musicians. There were two hammocks swinging away, and some seats had been removed for bunk beds. The highlight of the day was playing Scrabble. Most of the guys on the bus were great. The drummer, Gregg Gerson, used to be Billy Idol’s drummer. He’s a reformed alcoholic, very strong-willed, very proud of the fact that he’d not touched a drop for 15 years, got his medallions for it. Very LA, rides a Harley, lives on the beach in San Diego now with his wife and son. The first time we rehearsed together, when the first song finished he jumped off his drums and walked up to me and said, ‘You’re a monster. You rock. I love you. Gimme a hug.’ I love him to pieces, he’s been through a lot, he’s a real character. We got on like a house on fire and hung out a lot – he was a real saving grace for me on that tour. We’re still good friends – I want to use him for some of my gigs in America. We used to go to In-N-Out Burgers together to avoid some of the grottier food that was on offer on that tour. In-N-Out was half decent food. That was the place for us. I bought him an In-N-Out T-shirt and insisted he wore it. But because he was a rocker, he didn’t fit that big band jazz mould, the cats, as they called themselves on that tour. They didn’t like what he brought to the table, his style of drumming – it wasn’t jazzy enough for them. He left and they brought in a jazz drummer. They were nice enough to me though, and there were some really good players. Great trumpet player, great jazz guitarists, really solid, knew their stuff. Although they had hired a cellist to play bass, which Gregg said was like spitting in front of a fan. It was a real shame when he left, because I got on better with him than I did with anyone else. But he was pretty miserable about having to play with that band, it wasn’t working for him. He called it purgatory.

  Keith Levenson, the Artistic Director who was leading the whole thing on piano was a conductor on Broadway. He had a drink of whisky on the side of his piano at all times. He’d have conversations during my songs with the other singer, a girl called Robin Skye, who’d sung in some Broadway shows. Actual loud conversations. I’d be up there singing ‘A Foggy Day (in London Town)’ and Robin would come and sit on the end of his piano stool while he was playing and they’d have full conversations with each other – you couldn’t quite believe it, couldn’t quite fathom their ignorance. Robin was really sweet though, other than that, and funny. At one point her hair extension fell off, in the middle of a show, and she just picked it up, put it back in and carried on singing.

  Keith was seeing Mackenzie Phillips, the daughter of John Phillips from The Mamas & the Papas. She was another big drinker, heavy smoker, proper 1970s party girl, and could get herself into a bit of a state, which was a shame because she was a nice girl, you could have a decent conversation with her. She just seemed to be vying for attention a lot – it was difficult to believe half the things she said. I don’t know what went on in her life, she’s had a heavy time of it by all accounts. Near the beginning of the tour, me, Sarah, Mackenzie and Keith, an odd bunch to begin with, stopped overnight in a resort called Two Bunch Palms, near Palm Springs. Al Capone built a compound there in the 1920s – apparently he used to go there with his gang and party with the Hollywood elite. He had a tunnel system built – it’s blocked off now. They had an Al Capone suite, with a meeting room and a private restaurant at the end. It’s quite a place, pretty creepy, but Mackenzie and Keith liked it, we had a fun time. Mackenzie used to go there with her family, the Phillips clan, when she was a kid.

  That tour was depressing for Sarah though, on the road with 20 musicians, only a couple of other women – she said she felt like she and Mackenzie were groupies. She only lasted a week – she left after California, didn’t want to go through Texas. And then she joined me in South Carolina, stayed until Virginia, and then went back to Salt Lake. And it was getting heavy for me too: we did something like 97 shows in two months. I was getting really tired, really fed up, and really bored of being on that bus. There was a guy there called Brad who was really good at Scrabble, beat everybody, the reigning champion, and towards the end I started beating him. And I thought, ‘Shit, I’m beating this guy. I’ve got to get off this tour.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  BREAKING IN

  We lived on the road for a few years. It was tough, moving around from job to job, no stability, borrowing money from our parents. And that was before we had kids, we had the freedom to travel about together. Each job fed the next, tiding me over financially for the rehearsal and performance periods until I got paid again at the end. That’s why you get a lot of opera singers on the road all the time. I performed in Otello at Glyndebourne a few months after the Big Band tour, and I asked a fella if he was going home for Christmas, and he said, very matter of factly, that he wouldn’t get home for two years. And that’s not uncommon in opera. I couldn’t live like that. Even now it hurts, it’s hard when you have a family at home and you can barely get to see them. It’s really quite lonely. You hear of lots of affairs and divorces in that world. Sarah was a rarity – the wives weren’t around much. She got to know a lot of the female singers. The idea that you’d be away from your family all the time offended me. I really wanted kids and I refused to believe that it couldn’t be done, that you had to sacrifice your life for your career. I was always looking for a way to do that, to have the luxury of your family life and the beauty of your kids alongside a good career, and in a sense I’m still looking for a way, because I’m still on the road so much. While the kids are young they can come with me, but it’s a huge frustration for Sarah because we don’t have a base, our living situation is never set in stone. It can change at the last minute, at the drop of a hat. Plans suddenly don’t work and we have to make new ones. It’s been a tricky time.

  We were finally able to have our honeymoon a year after we got married, and as well as our little three-day camping trip in Zion, we went to stay in Sarah’s
grandma’s condo in Hawaii. I’d never been anywhere like Hawaii before, somewhere that tropical and that hot, where when you stand in the sea, you can be up to your chest in water and still see your feet clearly. In the sea in Fleetwood you can’t be up to your ankles and see your feet. We went snorkelling, which I hadn’t done before, and I was a little jittery having to throw myself off the side of a canoe into the sea, a mile from shore. Sarah was off like a shot, swimming away, thanks a lot. I was on my own, panicking. The guy on the boat behind me was having a panic attack – his wife was trying to calm him down. But it was extraordinary. At one point the sun hit my back and I felt this glorious warmth all over my body, and it was like somebody had flipped on a light switch, the sunlight illuminating the whole of the coral. Another reef, I walked out and went under and the sea was a little rough, couldn’t see much with all the sand swirling about, and then again it suddenly cleared and settled, and I looked around and there were these bright green giant turtles next to me, quietly floating there. So serene. They were like these ghosts that had just appeared from nowhere. It was such a wonderful feeling to be there with them.

  Around this time my first album deal began to take shape. Record company rumblings had begun with a false start back in 2003, towards the end of the La Bohème run on Broadway. James Morgan, who I’d met a couple of times, got in touch with me. I’d worked with his wife Juliette at Grange Park Opera, an outdoor opera festival, sort of a mini Glyndebourne if you will, I did The Mikado and Così fan tutte there and Juliette was in the chorus. James was working as a record producer, he’d worked with a number of artists including Katherine Jenkins and Elton John. So he had dealings with Universal Classics and Jazz, he knew people in the industry, he had the contacts and was able to get me in front of people. He’d been taking note of what I’d been up to, especially on Broadway, and wanted to present me to record companies, set up some auditions for me.