Piano was your first instrument?
Yeah. I was a choirboy before that. My dad's a priest, and I was one of the non-octogenarian choir members in the local church. I'm not religious, but you do it because you're a kid and your parents are telling you you've got to. Then they realized I wasn't terrible at it. I auditioned for the cathedral in Manchester and got in there. If you go to the cathedral choir in Manchester, you also go to the school next door, which is Chetham’s [School of Music]. It's hardcore: 7 a.m. starts, six days a week of rehearsals first thing in the morning, then a normal school day of music lessons, and I was doing my normal schooling on top of it, plus extra music and piano lessons. I was playing piano as well, but I wasn't very good. When your voice broke, you'd normally leave the choir and go back to regular school, but by this point I'd gotten quite into writing music. I was 15, and I'd written a few pieces for the choir, which they performed. I auditioned at the school as a composer. There's a small department, but I stayed on as a composer and got into electronic music while I was there. My teacher was interested in that as well – electroacoustic music. I was spending a lot of time doing the standards of composition, like Bach chorale re-harmonizing, counterpoint lessons, and orchestration, plus writing my own music and doing lots of electroacoustic music as well. There are three studios there, and one was a little MIDI studio with lots of workstations with an Atari [ST] computer. You had to install Cubase every time you turned it on, into the RAM from a floppy disc. This was when I was 15 through 18. There was a newer studio there with a Mackie D8B console, [Alesis] ADATs, and all the advanced things you'd get in that kind of level of studio at the time. There was an old analog studio with a 2-inch tape machine and an Akai S950 [sampler]; that was my playground. There were a Korg MS-20 and some basic synthesizers. That's where it all started, as a 15-year-old working out of there, writing music classically and trying to incorporate electronics. I remember a school concert where I wrote a piece for trombone, and I filtered it through the MS-20 and put it into a [Yamaha] SPX990 effects processor.
You were studying theory and composition at a very early age.
Yeah. I was never very good at the piano. Still not very good at the piano. I can get around, and I understand it, but I don't practice enough, basically. I'm so much more interested in making than playing. Although now, as I'm older, I've been buying sheet music to play for fun. I'm going through all the Ravel, and I'm learning it slowly. I'm practicing a lot more now than I was before.
Can you sight-read?
Yeah. But not like Britt [Day], the pianist here at the ballet; he's amazing. You put a piece of music in front of him and he just plays it. But me, I have to figure it out and it's slow.
You detoured a bit and got a PhD in neuroscience. How did that come about?
