My Jewish father had fled Germany in 1939. He served in the British Army and married an English woman after the war, yet found it hard to get a job in the UK. After teaching in Kuala Lumpur he returned to Berlin, in 1961, taking his family with him. He was an architectural historian, and had very strong opinions about every building, so I know that he would have cared about the quality of a building created for music that was being constructed at the time, the Berliner Philharmonie, designed by an architect he knew well, Hans Scharoun, which opened in 1963.

I was miserable as a young child in early 1960s Berlin – it was the time that the Wall was going up, I didn’t speak a word of German and my mother, who was never comfortable in Germany, returned to London with me, while my father and brothers stayed in Germany. My father was a knowledgeable classical music fan. We rarely dared to knock on his study door, because his work was so important to him and any interruption could enrage him. But if I heard music coming from the room I knew I could walk in. He would be sitting, exactly midway between the speakers, with this look of complete concentration on his face, and he’d wave me to a chair. I dared not make a sound until the piece was finished. Then, he’d turn to me to say ‘Wonderful, no?’.

Before I studied theatre sound and lighting at LAMDA [London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art], I swept floors and fell in love with the intimacy of lunchtime theatre in a room above a pub at the Orange Tree in Richmond. I was 18 years old and I was working on a show, based on the story of Jonah and the Whale. It was directed by the first openly gay man I had ever met, Michael Richmond, who taught me so much. (He died of AIDS in 1988.) One of the pieces of music he used in the production was the Adagio from Albinoni’s D minor Oboe Concerto, played by Pierre Pierlot. It was the first time I understood how deeply one could be affected by the use of music to create a mood in a theatre play.

Another very powerful combination of music and image was when I first saw John Schlesinger’s film Sunday Bloody Sunday, with Murray Head as the bisexual lover of both Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson. Schlesinger used ‘Soave sia il vento’ from Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Before I ever heard the rest of the opera, the impact of hearing the aria during the love scene between Finch and Head was explosive for me. It’s one of my favourite movies of all time. And it was a very important film in portraying a gay relationship with real sensitivity.

Aside from Mozart, Bach is the composer I go back to most frequently – the Brandenburg Concertos, The Art of Fugue, St Matthew Passion – but the Double Violin Concerto is from another of my favourite films – Hannah and Her Sisters. Woody Allen’s use of music often overwhelms me, or makes me laugh out loud, which this does. The scene is where Hannah’s husband, played by Michael Caine, takes a loutish art collector to buy a painting from the temperamental Max Von Sydow, and it all goes horribly wrong, and this music starts just as the scene unravels into recrimination. I love it!

I’ve been working as a photographer since the mid 1970s – I started by taking production photographs for Gay Sweatshop – and worked as a documentary photographer for decades, but the photo for which I’m best known was recently included in the exhibition ‘Women in Revolt’ at Tate Britain. It shows a billboard advertising a Fiat car. The tag line is ‘If it were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched’ under which someone had spray painted ‘If this lady was a car she’d run you down’. One day in 1979, I saw the defaced billboard on the Farringdon Road and laughed out loud. Because of the traffic, I had to take the photo from an angle, and by chance a woman in a fur coat walked by: and it just added something wonderful to the image.

I’ve lived in the Bay Area of San Francisco for over 30 years and 13 years ago I founded Paw Fund, a charity which provides free veterinary care for pets who belong to the homeless. It’s tough, often emotional, but rewarding work. As a result I’ve ended up with six dogs – some senior, some missing a limb. Sometimes when we’re all in the car, I put ‘Soave sia il vento’ on repeat, and we all listen. It seems to calm us all down!

This feature originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today