MMy mum had an administration job at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry during the run of Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story. When I was 11 or 12 I would quite often catch the bus into town just to hang out with her after school and she would sneak me in.
The Belgrade is an amazing place. It’s not beautiful in the traditional sense but it has a lot of the Coventry aesthetic that I love. It was great to walk through the precinct and then into the Buddy at the end of the day. You could turn up in your school uniform and not know what was going on… and by the end you were a fan and knew all about the history. I saw it maybe three or four times; as a kid the walk felt like a whole era in my life.
Buddy is a bombastic event that everyone takes part in. There’s dancing and clapping and it feels quite raw and lively. It’s an example of art being for everyone. A musical like Buddy also helps fund more independent theatre and I like that dialogue between popular art and more experimental work. I think that experience is also deeply embedded in my relationship to being an artist, that symbiosis between something esoteric and strange and something very popular.
The tragic plane crash (which killed Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in 1959) is a key part of the story and is intended, I suspect, to give the audience a sense of the legend. As this is a musical, it is emotionally over the top, with every emotion being massively drawn out.
When I started writing as a kind of avant-garde performance poet, writing sound poems, I went back to the song Peggy Sue. I also wrote about Buddy Holly in my PhD thesis, exploring the relationship between technology and voice, because his performance kept breaking down. He ended up sounding like a skipping record.
Before Buddy, I wasn’t a writer. Just a kid who, for certain reasons, watched a lot of TV and sometimes musicals! I became a writer who puts the emphasis on voice and voice acting and joy and experimentation and cheesy pop melodramas and a bit of music. I think that sense of the place of art in society was really formative, and I like the fact that my path to that was something quite cheesy.
