The boy soprano who aimed high
August 2008
Portrait by Kate Sutherland
by Alex Salmond, talking to Lindy Cheyne
Beezer Brown, my singing teacher, was distraught. Throughout my childhood I had had a fine soprano voice, and showed great promise. I sang some fairly serious stuff, I was semi-professional.
In the early Seventies, my voice broke, and the glorious, soaring tenor voice that Beezer had predicted, failed to arrive. What he got instead was a faltering baritone with a range of about four notes. My singing career came to an abrupt halt.
Beezer persevered with me for two years, hoping that a wonderful voice would re-emerge during the growing-up process, but it never did.
But there was an enormous benefit. If at the age of 10 or 11 you can sing in front of hundreds of people, speaking in the Scottish parliament or the House of Commons is no different whatsoever. And that applies to any child… if you can perform at that age, in front of people, it is the easiest and best way of imbuing confidence. That is why I am so desperately keen to see the promotion of theatre, dance, song, whatever.
It left me with poise, command of audiences – and speaking is much easier than performing. There are other benefits. I was a terribly asthmatic child, and breathing was very important in my singing career. When you are making a speech, the way you breathe is very important for the way you accentuate a phrase.
Paul Robeson’s empathy for Scotland
My favourite singer of all time is Paul Robeson – a fantastic American bass with a voice in which deep bells ring. He was also a politician; he had his passport taken away in the Macarthy period. He had a tremendous empathy with Scotland, incidentally, and a lot of Scottish connections – he was great friends with Jimmy Reid. Paul was known for singing Old Man River, which was written for Showboat, a musical written in the 1930s. The song looked at the position of slaves in 19th century America and Robeson actually changed the lyrics.
One verse goes, “I’m tired of livin and feared of dying,” but Robeson deliberately changed it and sang, “I must keep fightin until I’m dying”. Not such a great phrase as the original, but nonetheless, as a rallying call for black America, it was much more apposite for the civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties.
Robeson had a radio programme in the 1930s on the BBC; he was a tremendously powerful figure for political emancipation. Nobody has ever sung Deep River like Paul Robeson sings it.
I also had a liking for songs from musicals – they were part of my repertoire and I loved them. Even now I probably know the songs from most Rogers & Hammerstein shows, and from that generation of song writers. I can certainly sing them in the shower, at any rate.
Last week I was at Saltcoats, opening the new school, St Thomas’s, and they have the most fabulous music department. I was telling them that at Linlithgow Academy circa 1968, we had a new school, but the idea of a music room…
At Linlithgow they have soundproof studios, practising studios, recording studios, and I think it’s paying off, big style, because they have four bands – from the school brass band and string quartet to the piper who piped us in, and a woodwind ensemble as well.
This wasn’t normal in my childhood. I was doing a lot of choral singing and was out ‘on loan’ to St Michaels and Songs of Praise, and things like that. But my big starring role was in Amahl and the Night Visitors – I was Amahl. [Amahl and the Night Visitors is an opera in one act by Gian Carlo Menotti, the first opera specifically composed for television in America.] The composer lived in his retirement in East Lothian, and only died a couple of years ago.
Amahl was an enormously successful operetta through the Fifties and Sixties, and Menotti allowed it to be used for amateur productions for nothing, no composer’s rights, so long as they used a boy soprano in the lead role and not a female soprano. That was his only stipulation.
My personal piper
That was fortunate for me, because it was Callandar Park College I was singing with, the teacher training college near Falkirk, which had any number of female sopranos, but no boys.
At the end of the first scene Amahl and his mother retire to the single bed in their hovel, so on stage, at the age of 11, I went to bed with a 19-year old student teacher, but all for the purposes of theatre. The whole performance was an invaluable experience.
One of the great tragedies of my job is that there is little time for reading. You get to go to a whole lot of events and meet lots of interesting people, though, and see interesting plays and performances. As a matter of course, I have a young Scottish musician at everything I do, at the castle or anywhere else. It’s an opportunity to display some talent.
As for the Royal Scottish Academy, the conservatoire teaching of music has not had the funding that drama has had, and we have arranged for that to be reviewed. I can’t pre-empt what the council is about to do, but something that has been wrong for 16 years is about to be put right.
I have my own piper in Stirling, young Connor Sinclair, the under-13 champion. He’s fantastic, I met him at the Save the Regiments event; his ambition was to be the pipe major of the Black Watch – that was his family’s regiment – but it was not to be. So I made him my unofficial ‘official’ piper. And since he has gone to the school this year, you can see the change in his ornamentation, his twirls, the maturity of his playing; he’s a brilliant wee piper – and much cheaper than an entire band, so I tell him!
Hopefully we are helping to change the perception of Scotland internationally. I’m not a ‘Wha’s like us’ person, never have been. I’m very familiar with Scotland’s faults and foibles and failings, but, trying to stand back for a second, there are very few countries that have influenced history as Scotland has.
J.K. Galbraith, one of the seminal minds of the last century, who admittedly was slightly prejudiced…although he was an American, he was originally a Canadian, and a Scots-Canadian by his ancestry… said that in the history of mankind, only the Scots had produced anything worth a damn.
But you could put in a claim for the ancient Chinese and perhaps the Egyptians. But certainly in the last half millennium, he’s not far wrong actually. We have contributed an enormous amount in the whole range of human endeavour.
And incidentally it is perfectly obvious to me why Scotland has achieved so much – it is the Scots’ appreciation of education. Universal education was a Scottish invention, in the 16th and17th centuries, and out of that came every other Scottish invention. Therefore the idea that this country which has achieved so much should sink into unrecognised obscurity, as a provincial quasi country, is just ridiculous.
So I look forward to a reversal of Scottish fortunes; it has already started with the cultural revival, then the political revival, and hopefully an economic revival as well. The cultural revival probably started in the 1930s, when people decided to adopt Scotland as a concept, with our history. Now on one hand we have huge forces of poverty sweeping all over the world, and people might look at Aberdeenshire and say, 70 years ago Aberdeenshire was much more Scottish than it is now, but if it hadn’t been for the cultural revival, starting with the folk revival in the Fifties and the theatrical revival in the Sixties and Seventies, there wouldn’t have been anything left.
Cultural revival
It is interesting that the cultural revival anticipated the great political revival which started in the late Sixties. These things, together with the coming of the Parliament – hopefully now asserting itself to represent the people – set about the economic transformation which followed.
None of these things have been linear, no easy process… it’s all bumpy, but it’s certainly all worth doing and worth having. The outlook for Scotland is fundamentally better; without it the outlook for having a Scotland at all in the mid-20th century would be in serious question.
There is a quote somewhere – I’ve never actually looked it up – from a somewhat annoyed Conservative MP in the 1950s, declaring in the House of Commons, “Haven’t we reached the stage where Scotland is England?”
England has a fantastic cultural and literary tradition, stretching back the best part of a millennium, over a range of activities, but that tradition is eroding quickly, much to England’s detriment. But we have challenges in keeping this momentum going, and the biggest challenge is getting the magnificence of Scottish cultural expression on to a modern setting – in stage and television and film.
That’s why I set up the Broadcasting Commission, almost as soon as I came into office; something which is not within the province of the powers of Parliament, but which is absolutely necessary to it, to focus attention on the lack of opportunity we have in getting our wonderful creative people on to a wider canvas. And hopefully we can do something about that.
We have had successes – take the festivals we have throughout Scotland, wonderful festivals like the new arts festival, Coast. Our winter festival will run from St Andrews Night through to Burns’ Night – Beezer Brown was a Burns fanatic – that’s why I know so many Burns songs. Burns Night is the logical beginning of our Homecoming, which will flow through next year – and which will be fundamentally important to Leopard magazine. The winter festival should have the best of everything – the best of Celtic connections – the cultural highlight of our year.
The drawback is that as soon is something is successful, you can’t get to see it. There are lots of wonderful productions on for one night at the Traverse or somewhere, and never seen again, because there isn’t that next step to take them round the country.
We mustn’t be too toffee-nosed about it. We’re not just speaking about high art… we should produce the best of everything… the best of soaps – they provide valuable acting and script-writing experience, all of which adds to the rich mix. Folk must understand that it’s the whole panoply on which we are judged.
Doctor Who, almost by serendipity, is giving Welsh television a critical mass, because the writer was Welsh and insisted on doing everything in Cardiff, building up expertise and making great television drama.
Superb Black Watch
I was very interested in the performance of the Black Watch last year, a superb theatrical production to the great credit of everyone who made it. But although the programme about the Black Watch was a first class documentary, I didn’t think the film of the production was up to the same standard. It’s an incredibly difficult job, to get that fine, pressurised, almost forbidding atmosphere of the Black Watch play on to a television screen. I suspect it’s like everything else – you need experience to do these things.
We have produced great theatre like The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil, and Sunset Song – these are expensive to produce. We have the world’s largest international festival in Edinburgh, but how much of it is televised?
Vienna is the place to be on New Years’ Day, but let’s face it, it’s the same concert every year, but it has world prominence.
Compare that with the Edinburgh Festival, and how little is done in terms of international promotion. The Edinburgh Festival programme should be being beamed across the planet. Every year the highlights should be brought together and promoted internationally. We probably get one hour of the Tattoo; we do so little with so much. To do all we need to do we must have the financial control that makes it possible.
You get all these guys coming up for the television festival, signed off from their largely metropolitan agendas, Michael Grade and the like. These people are infuriating. You know it was Michael Grade who was responsible for suggesting to the director general of the BBC that there was no need for drama productions from Scotland because the talent wasn’t there?
The whole problem in Scotland with what’s left of Westminster is that we have to spend too much time and energy trying to second guess what they think about this, that and the next thing in London.
I want to get to the position where, if we want to do something in Scotland, we do it. If we make a mistake we do something about it; if it we do it well, let’s do more of it. That’s the psychology of independence. Let’s put the community and the country first.
I went to see the kids of Drumblade Primary who are campaigning for a wood pellet boiler for their school. I told them that having the boiler will be good, but the most important thing is that they have the right attitude and are doing it.
When McDermott spoke of Scottish society, he told of meeting the challenge and having the triumph. I like that; I like to see folk meeting the challenge and having the triumph. The kids of Drumblade will remember the day
they won the boiler, and will go on
to greater things.
Rosalind (Lindy) Cheyne makes the most of life with a Leopard at the fit o’ Bennachie.
This is an article from the August 2008 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.