There was never any music in the house where I grew up. My mother always claimed to be tone deaf. And till the day she died, she said that she had no idea what music was. She might have just as well been listening to a washing machine. And so no, there was nothing. The first kind of music I ever heard in the house was excerpts from The Mikado – Gilbert and Sullivan. I think an auntie gave me a 78.

I did sing in the combined choir of the county, which was made up of the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys and the Cambridgeshire High School for Girls. The only way to ever meet the girls was to be in the combined choir. So I sang treble when I was about 12. One of the pieces that we sang, I can remember to this day! It was from Borodin’s Prince Igor.

‘What brings us joy in our lives is delving into our innate capacity to empathise with other human beings’

I remember going on some kind of Labour Party or Communist Party junket to London and seeing Salad Days – ‘Oh look at me, I’m dancing!’ – which is very like ‘Three little maids’ from The Mikado. Then came West Side Story which was like a nuclear bomb going off. What a huge revolutionary statement West Side Story was. I saw a production in London in about 1960 and was just completely blown away by it. And then the movie came out. I mean, it did reinvent everything, didn’t it? It also started a kind of revolution by writing about social history and contemporary society.

I didn’t really make an attachment to any kind of classical music till I was about 20. I’d bought a pair of good speakers called Celestion Ditton 15s. And I think I wanted to play stuff through them that wasn’t just what I was normally listening to, which was blues and jazz and that sort of thing. So at a certain point I developed a big attachment to 19th-century music in general, but to Berlioz, in particular. The Symphonie fantastique, for instance, is scored as if Berlioz knew how modern recording techniques were going to develop, because it’s scored in a completely different way from anything that happened before. In it he pushes sections up as if they were mixed individually and there was somebody sitting there at the desk going ‘whoa’. You can suddenly hear the trombone section playing, you know? So that appealed to me. Also what appealed with Berlioz, particularly, is when you listen to the Te Deum you think, if this guy had had a PA system, this is a huge kind of anthemic stadium rock, but done for St Paul’s Cathedral or St Peter’s in Rome!

I’ve never thought this before, but Berlioz in his other big choral works and operas has drawn a kind of emotional response from me because of the grandeur of the experience of being immersed in that kind of beauty. The last time I played to hundreds of thousands of people was Zócalo Square, Mexico in 2016. The time before was in Berlin in 1990. You don’t play to hundreds of thousands of people very often, but the connection with the audience is extraordinary.

There’s a song I wrote called ‘Perfect Sense’ with a huge chorus, which I manufactured electronically. It’s meant to be a football crowd singing. It’s very Berlioz in terms of its instruction to our emotions to empathise with the message, and to join in with your god. So the influences are there and the vastness of the works comes from the scoring of religious music for the adoration of something bigger than ourselves. My adoration, of course, is for perfect sense. It has nothing to do with a god. It’s an adoration of the ideas that we human beings might finally figure out that we are in a unique position of power, and that we’re destroying ourselves, and that we don’t have to. We could go, ‘No, we don’t want to do this.’ We can get rid of the oligarchs, and the warmongers, and the money managers, and the hedge funds, and ask, ‘What actually brings us joy in our lives?’ Well, what brings us joy in our lives is delving into our innate capacity to empathise with other human beings. And music is one of the purest forms of human communication. It transcends creed, colour, the lot.

This article originally appeared in the March 2019 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today