How did you get that up there?
Tim and Tom keeping the lid on a container-mounted grand, Granton
You may well ask…
Believe it or not the short answer is; up the ladder.
A slightly longer answer is; this lovely Chappell grand piano came to us from Gillespies High School in Marchmont back in 2015. I had borrowed a van and persuaded my pal Dragon to help me move it down some stairs while the kids were milling around. This was insane. It was way too heavy for us but somehow we managed. Dragon’s kung-fu training really helped. It was our first grand and it sounded great.
The Hidden Door festival was in the Arches by Waverley Station that year and after a wild proto-Pianodrome installation there in which our Chappell held pride of place, we had no means to remove it and nowhere to move it to. We tidied and swept the echoing arch, leaving the grand there in the middle of the empty floor and closed the big wooden doors on it.
Darkness and dust kept the piano company for a year until the developers came. Thankfully they managed to contact me before the piano got chucked in a skip. By happy coincidence Kelburn Castle wanted it and a rustic crew helped hoik it onto a tractor trailor and drive it up to the High Viewpoint there where, on a plinth, under a tent it comanded a spectacular panoramic view of the Firth of Clyde and awaited equally spectacular performances at the imminent summer Garden Party.
A few months earlier, in another tent, this one on a beach and emblasoned with the words ‘Portabello Peoples Piano Project’, I had found another piano with an empty sleeping bag behind it and the music for Beethoven’s Pathetique on the stand. When I had finished stumbling through the second movement I noticed a business card. Ben Treuhaft, Underwater Piano Shop, tuning £35 through 2016. I kept the card. Naturally, later, I thought of Ben to tune our grandly situated grand at Kelburn which he duly did. But I never got to hear what turned out to be the piano’s swan song.
That night, at Kelburn, disaster struck. A storm blew away both the tent and the lid of the piano. Everything was in disarray. When I returned I found Hector of the Chapel Perilous Sound System in the castle kitchen trying to dry out his mixing desk on the Aga. At the High Viewpoint I found the piano in ruins. The strings were submerged and rusting in two inches of rainwater. The amusing irony of Ben’s shop name was small consolation. I was heartbroken. I had cared for this piano. Through the communal efforts to move it and the wonderful music it had played I had become attached to it.
Though I had no idea of the futility at the time I resolved to save it. I carefully removed the action and put it in the boot of my car with the heating on and the windows open to dry it out. I tipped the ponds-worth of rainwater out of the soundboard and limped home. In the Pianodrome container at the Forge I set the piano up in hopes that one day, when it had fully dried out I would be able to bring it back from drowning.
Chappell, drowned in the Pianodrome container.
You know when you have a project which is basically impossible but you don’t want to accept it and so nothing happens for almost ten years? Cue Sophie Joint.
At the beginning of this year, Sophie, a wonderful singer songwriter from Glasgow got in touch to ask if we could bring a grand piano to the beach as a prop for a music video which she was making to coincide with her album launch. We were just moving out of Debenhams to Granton and we had use of a van.
By this point we had more grand pianos than we knew what to do with. One that had graced the glass display cabinet at the front of our derelict department store showroom, a Lunar, we had had to leave behind when we left. I recently searched in vain for it in the lunar landscape of rubble there to no avail.
The moment had come to accept that our Chappell’s playing days were over. We destrung it and walked it, legless and perpendicular on a trolley, half way along Granton Pier over icy and uneven rocks which threatened at any moment to tip it, and us, into the freezing January sea. Sophie finished the shoot, miming soundlessly, seamlessly on the now silent keys and went home to warm up.
Sophie Joint with the silent Chappell on the freezing Granton Pier.
A couple of hours later we swung by with the van to pick up the piano but not before it had garnered significant curiosity. A local walker took a picture of their dog seated at the keyboard and posted it. It went viral and got picked up by the BBC who got hold of my number and interviewed me over the phone. It made The Nine news. Crazy.
Finally, what to do with this beautiful piano carcass? Why not put it on the roof? It doesn’t weigh too much now the harp and strings are out. Why don’t we tie a rope to the front and push it at the back using the ladder as a ramp? Better secure the lid so it doesn’t blow off in the wind.
That’s how we got it up there.