Pianos, Toys, Music And Noise: Conversations With Steve Beresford
by Andy Hamilton
Bloomsbury Academic, £90.00

IN HIS story of the life and musical times of the protean soundmaker Steve Beresford, Andy Hamilton has developed an audacious and innovative method of conceiving and writing biography – a 260-page series of conversations with his subject, including commentaries by many with whom he inspired, played, affected and changed. As such, it is a book which continually entertains, educates, reflects, informs and chronicles cultural history.

Beresford, now a septuagenarian, has been a constant presence on the experimental musical scene for five decades. Pianist, electronics wizard, film and TV composer, player of an assortment of toy instruments, musical pundit, producer and comedian.

His influence within the world of free improvising is ubiquitous –not only as a performer but as a relentless listener, always critically hearing and grooving with every new sound that he absorbs.

I have seen him dozens of times within the audience at every jazz and improvising venue – large, small, obscure and prestigious –from the South Bank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall to Dalston’s Vortex and Cafe Oto.

Hamilton asserts that “Beresford’s work is marked by irreverence, humour, virtuosity, anti-virtuosity and playfulness.”

A Shropshire man, he moved to London in 1974 and threw himself into the minority world of improvised music, forming bonds with brilliant and pioneering musicians like guitarist Derek Bailey, saxophonists Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill and Tony Coe, and drummer John Stevens.

He later made a kind of living with part-time teaching at Westminster University, and has been driven by a continuous life tension and contradiction between the absolutely serious and the glory of being anti-serious.

Hamilton catches him pronouncing: “But the point is, we should all be paid for doing things we like – the whole world should be doing what it likes, and getting paid for it.”

His book is a profoundly stimulating read – a kind of 21st-century Boswell’s Life of Johnson – and difficult to turn aside from, whether its protagonist is talking about Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, Morecambe and Wise’s comic genius, John Cage’s avant-garde composing or the ineffectiveness of British cardboard milk cartons.

It is a biography that never bores its readers and is perpetually alive with music and humanity, humour and narrative.

Hamilton has found a witty, always surprising and digestible way of describing a life and its cultural era. But ohhhh, the price! £90 admission is totally at odds with and a betrayal of Beresford’s spirit and message. Bloomsbury – get the cheap paperback out as fast as you can.