Talking music

Michael Harding has two new plays doing the rounds and both were directly influenced by his new found passion for music. In fact, one play, Talking Through His Hat, focuses on Swift and “how he was haunted by Carolan’s music” and the other, Sleeping A Love Song, features his friend and collaborator Steve Wickham, who said on the day Harding bought a flute, “That is the most important thing you will ever do in your life, play music.” And Harding agrees. But the “astonishing” discovery of music, at this level, actually goes back to just after Harding did his last hotpress interview in 1998.

“The following year my back went out, something inside was beginning to tense and for about two months I was crippled,” he remembers. “I even felt my life was over and I had this sense of being clenched. I’d also been off cigarettes for five years because I was practising Buddhism, but that was like tightening a spring and I realised you had to release the spring for all that to come out. And that moment, believe it or not, was when I had a cigarette again! That was a moment of being alive – this beautiful cigarette smoke! So I got a boat, I’d get a bottle of wine and go up and down the river, sometimes with Steve, and I found myself coming alive from the inside out.

“The next thing was buying that flute and Steve did say the buying of an instrument was the most important thing I could do. So I gave up the cigarettes and started playing the flute. And suddenly I found I was writing plays on the flute. I wrote Sleeping A Love Song, another piece called Duck Soup which a theatre company is looking at and has Steve in it, and lots of music. And then I wrote the story of Swift which is not only about his obsession with Carolan’s music but it’s kind of telling him, ‘Stop talking and play a tune yourself!’ So I have found work coming out of inhabiting that musical landscape. Sleeping A Love Song, in which Steve plays some of his own music, is a very physical love story between a young man and a girl. Who just happen to be travellers, because I like writing about travellers.”

Michael also reveals that playing music also made him realise that “after 17 years in rehearsal rooms” working with the likes of “beautiful directors” Patrick Mason and Brian Brady he was, nonetheless “passively” learning his craft.

“And I also realised what I really wanted to do was get up there and perform,” he says, with relish. “So I decided to get up there and do the play about Swift myself! Not as an actor but as a storyteller, a performer. That, too has opened up the world for me. It has given me a sense of making a piece of theatre, then structuring it and standing up and delivering it to the audience yourself. I get such a buzz out of that. And it all has made me catch, maybe, something other than God in the universe – which is music.”