Oral Histories

I'm Neil Brand, I’m a composer, writer, performer, pianist and broadcaster, but when I was working at Polka I was principally an MD and composer, and an actor musician at times as well. No proper training either in music or particularly in the theatre, although I did do a drama degree for three years, at the end of which I came out as an actor musician. Polka was one of the first times I actually did get to properly use everything that I’d learnt, because I was performing as an actor, I think I was also playing some music live if I remember rightly and I was recording some music for it, and teaching some of the songs. When I first started out, if you did all those different things people weren’t particularly interested in you because they thought you were no good at one of them, but now that’s all changed and I think Polka was one of the first places where, if you were brought into a production, you were expected to use every skill you had, whatever that might be, and learn a few more as well along the way. Vicky Ireland interviewed me for a part in a play called The Giant’s Baby. We got together and we chatted and we got on very well. She was looking for someone who’d got musical abilities but who was going to be able to do multiple parts. I felt very lucky actually that I got that job. I was sort of a kind of actor/stage manager in a way because I was doing a lot of the on stage set movement. So I played various parts, I played a gypsy who comes to tell the baby’s fortune, I played Mrs Butters, the lady from the council which was my first time in drag and so far not quite my last. I have to say I’ve had a complete success with that particular part, it’s the one everybody remembers me doing. I was one of the movers who came to shift stuff around, but also I was the giant hitting the house, and it had been a superbly made set. It was like a kind of a house, front door, centre at the back, and when the giant arrived to take the baby back, I had to push this giant boot through the door and onto the stage, and then tap its foot because it was waiting impatiently to get its baby back, and as soon as I’d done that the lights went out, I had to go rush round to the side,munder a load of ropes to bring down the ceiling, and shoot the smoke machine onto the stage, so there was just this wreckage and the baby’s gone. So I have say it was a really enjoyable first time because I had loads to do, and it was five different parts I think it was and it was just fun, and it got loads of response, you know the kids went bananas. The baby knocked me out with his rattle while I was playing the gypsy and that just went over a storm. So that was my intro to Polka, but off the back of that Vicky asked me if I’d write some songs for the following year’s summer show, which was The Four Friends. And that’s the first time I wrote something for Polka. I know I was involved in The Giant’s Baby, The Four Friends, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, Patchwork Quilt, Jungle Book, Wizard of Oz, and there were revivals of a couple of those, The Giraffe and the Pelly went around the place, I remember that. It was without a doubt a major part of my theatrical life, and I learnt a hell of a lot there, and I felt very grateful to be given so much latitude to apply my trade. There are directors who say, “Oh yes absolutely do what you like” and then you do it and they’re all over it like a rash, and you have to change everything, well that never happened with Polka. And you would have meetings at which all the main creative people would be there, they’d be thrashing out ideas at the top. So by the time you came to the actual rehearsals or even the casting that show was pretty much up and running.  Nothing, not much was left to devising because costumes, set etc. Oh Lenny! Lenny in costumes! God yes, Lenny and the other costume lady went right through the time I was there, and they were absolutely, for me anyway, they were Polka continuity. Again, part of the family, and everybody had so much shared history, no matter how many years down the line and shows down the line it was always really nice to feel you were back with the building again and you were back working with this sort of family. With Polka you immediately had a sense of a little bit of intimacy really. There was so much that was really, I think alluring to kids, it felt magical as a space. One of the things about working with Polka, particularly as a performer, particularly if you do the summer season, you are going to be in each other’s pockets day in day out for three and a half months, and that sense of a kind of shared joy of what you were doing was so important. Both Roman and Vicky were tremendously good at building that sense of community, kind of a shared set of directions that we were all part of, and I do think the performers particularly that came to Polka, it wasn’t that they had a particular need to do theatre with children but they were aware of what the difference was and what was needed with theatre for children and what it tended to mean was that their performance was always communicating out, always there was this, not just an ability, but an understanding that you needed to communicate on to one with all those kids out there, and I think that was one of the main things that Vicky could spot was where there would be that proper engagement from the stage to the auditorium. It’s a lucky thing for me, although it is something I’ve worked at, that I wear many hats with my work. I am writing music but I’m also writing words and writing text and I write radio plays, I write articles for magazines and newspapers, but I also get to write songs for people, I also get to write my own music and I also get to score films and tv, I write themes for people. For all the fact that these are all to do with the same basic thing, which is storytelling and music in storytelling, I have loads of different things I do within that,and that keeps me both sane, because I think I would got out of my mind at the same job the whole time, and, except thanks to lockdown at the moment, usually it keeps the mortgage paid and I think more than anything else it keeps me challenged. One of the things that Polka taught me was what a blank sheet of paper you had when you had a new show. Every new show you became something else. For The Jungle Book I became someone who wrote in the idiom of what we decided with The Jungle Book.  For Sleeping Beauty I was writing fairytale music but big sounding cinematic fairytale music.  When we did The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me I was doing quirky but charming songs for fun characters, and I’ve kept that going until now, because the challenge is what keeps you going. If you’re suddenly presented with a new blank sheet of paper that’s so exciting, and if that work you’re going to do is for people who are sympathetic to what you’re after and work with you and everybody’s aim towards the same final result then there’s nothing better. And also because it then requires you to change and somewhere or other to adapt, do something new, it’s a great spur to getting up in the morning. I suppose career-wise the biggest thing that I’ve ever been able to pull off was through radio, actually through radio drama, was the two, so far two, there will be more, concert dramas that I wrote for Radio 4 and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, where we had a full size orchestra accompanying a piece of drama. In one case, Wind in the Willows, and then in the second case A Christmas Carol. The Giant’s Baby was a career highlight, Giraffe and the Pelly was a career highlight, Sleeping Beauty was undoubtedly a career highlight, and I think in a way it’s slightly disingenuous to pull out a couple of things because what I have realised is that over the years nothing I’ve done has been wasted, so that I can look back now and I can see the signpost that that show I did with that show, then pointed me to that and then pointed me to that and then pointed me to that etc. And so I started late, I was a late developer, but at the age of sixty-three everything that I’ve done in the past I can now see how it fits and where it’s going. I’m hoping my greatest career highlight’s still to come because all of this feels like a foundation, building on a foundation to eventually just try the next thing, and the next bigger challenge and the next bigger challenge, and if I pull off those then again it’s a fantastic reason to get up in the morning.