Interviews

This extract is from Maurice Lindsay’s anthology of Glasgow life ‘As I Remember’ and was kindly sent to me by David Bruce of Glasgow.

'....[My mother] had given up most of her professional piano playing, but kept on her Saturday afternoon job as 'pianny wumman' at the children's matinees of 'The Picturedrome' near the top of Easter Road. A supermarket now occupies the site of that picture-house that I knew so well. The piano was in a curtained corner to the right of the screen, and there were chairs and stands for the fiddler and cello-player who played in the evening along with another pianist.

My mother and I sat in the darkness, with the hooded light of the music stand and the screen flickering above, or I could look for a seat in the front of the house if I liked. The children got in for a penny each, infants-in-arms for nothing. You would see a boy staggering past the box-office, carrying his wee sister, nearly as big as himself.

They read the printed bits of the picture out loud in unison, as if they were in school, and shouted all the time. When the baddie was creeping up behind Pearl White, they all cried 'Shoat!', and when she got the better of him in the last episode of the serial, after I don't know how many Saturdays, they cheered with all their might. But my mother gave them a good pennyworth of music, mostly from memory. Sometimes she put a novel on the stand and read that, while she kept playing just the same.

The following extract is from ‘Just a bloody Piano Player by Henry Shirley, a recollection of silent movie accompaniments in New Zealand.

"....At our cinema, the Britannia, there was no way of seeing the film before arranging the music, in fact, the evening performance was sometimes held up awaiting the arrival of the next can of film from some cinema on the other side of town showing the same feature. My solution to the problem was to lay out 4-5 piles of music on top of the piano, each one suitable for a different 'mood'. There would be gallops for westerns, one-steps and foxtrots for comedies and various pathetic and passionate pieces for dramatic moments. Our proprietor, Rex Woodward was a fine chap who had retired from a lifetime spent in fairgrounds and circuses and had bought the Britannia to keep himself interested. He was quite fond of us boys and gave us a free hand except in the matter of music for comedies. For him the quick 6/8's of the sawdust ring were the ideal accompaniment to comedy. He hated the new syncopated pieces that we favoured. It was strictly conventional to accompany scenic films with a waltz- by Waldteufel preferably as Strauss was almost unknown then.

It was quite a trick to read music at sight, follow the picture and conduct when needed with the right hand. If there was a quick scene change from, say children playing, to a 'baddie' lurking round the corner, I had to grab a number from the 'suspense' pile, throw left and right a violin and trumpet part and try to keep some sort of sound coming from the piano until we were ready to start together again.

For the next two nights the program would then be in order and we could concentrate on getting the right notes. Then a change of program and a repetition of the process. By Saturday night everything would be running smoothly. From the first pompous notes of the overture to the last tremolo chord of the evening, 3 young musicians could give everything they had and think themselves the best band in town...My only grouch was having to play alone for Saturday children's matinees....

But there was recompense, Because of the din, it hardly mattered what I played, so I could practice improvising. With a musical vocabulary of only a few chords, I eventually worked out a formula that would carry me through a three hour program of assorted love and hate, humour and horror..."

The following extract was kindly sent to me by Luke McKernan of the British Library.
It is an extract from Ursula Bloom's autobiography "Mistress of None" (Hutchinson, 1920).

‘Ursula Bloom was a popular novelist of yesteryear, but before the First World War she was for a time a pianist at a cinema in St Albans. She wrote five volumes of memoirs, and in the one I've read (Mistress of None) there is a delightful account of the experience of playing in a small cinema of the period, as well as being a good account of the cinema experience at that time in general. Gaps in the texts as transcribed by me are marked with ellipses.’

[p. 86] I met a young man. I suffered the inevitable romance. The young man was sorry for me, I think he understood the position, and knew that I was up against it. He was an architect, and he had just erected a cinema at Harpenden. It was called 'The White Palace,' and he was to be the manager. It was suggested that I could play the piano for the pictures. I thought I probably could. I was to be paid thirty shillings a week, minus ninepence for the insurance stamp, and with the whole thing arranged I went home on wings. My new venture, however, did not receive favour in the domestic circle. Mother thought that it was dreadfully infra dig, and [p. 87] she wept tears of woe that her daughter should sink in the social scale like this! A player at a cinema!

On matinee days I was to play from two-thirty until five, and six until ten-thirty. It certainly looked a bit grim. We started the next week with an opening ceremony, and everybody who was anybody was invited. Nobody paid for seats. The whole place smelt of new paint and distemper, and that general dampness which fills a very new building. I have got to admit that as the hour approached, I got more and more frightened.

It was a nice little cinema with a dynamo that persistently let us down that first week (twice we had to give the money back) and rows of plush ‘tip-ups' in the accepted style.

[p. 88] We had a box stuck far back near the operators' room, but it was discovered later that one of the operators used it for immoral purposes, and it had to be closed. In the beginning the piano was set on a balcony, which was very public for me, and I found it distinctly trying. For the whole preceding week I had been practising Hermann Finck's 'Melodious Memories' and 'Danube Waves,' and a selection from the Geisha, which the music shop had suggested would be very suitable. Now I was frightened to death.

[p. 89] The moment I started playing at the cinema, a very horrid fact was borne home to me. The piano was far too near the roof. The echo went upwards to the roof, and descended, with the result that the waves of sound met each other. It was nothing more or less than a hideous row. In that first bitter afternoon I lost all my affection for Chin-Chin-Chinaman, for Hermann Finck and his 'Melodious Memories,' also for 'Danube Waves.' I never wanted to hear the beastly things again. By five o'clock my hands were aching beyond belief, and I went out to tea at a café, and treated myself to a fairy cake, which I felt that I had deserved. Only the piano would have to be moved, I had become quite decided on that point, it would not possibly continue where it was.

The subsequent evening performance was little short of Hell. You got about two and a half minutes' rest in every half-hour, in between the pictures, and it is few people who are used to playing the piano for four and a half hours straight off. Mother helped me most nobly, but she had to leave at nine, and the last hour and a half in that fetid atmosphere were terrible. After that I could not understand [p. 90] why people ever went to the pictures for fun. I can still recall the enormous relief with which my aching fingers played 'God save the King.'

'Tomorrow they'll be worse, because they will have got stiff,' the young manager told me.

That was a nasty thought, and probably a true one, and I cannot possibly stress how stiff your hands can get when playing the piano at the cinema.