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Programme Note

Commissioned by BBC Radio 3 in 1999, Arsenal:Trevor's Conversion is one of five movements from Portraits In Absentia, a collage of sound, voice, music and words woven from the messages left on my answer phone over a period of three months.

The piece opens with a message left by a friend explaining that she was canceling our brunch date because she’d been up all night celebrating the Arsenal victory after attending one of their matches.

I live near the Arsenal football grounds in London and often, carried in the wind, one can hear the distant roars and cries of the crowd during matches. It can be a rather eerie and unsettling sound, these waves of distant voices, and yet also sometimes quite moving, giving the effect of a kind of urban chorale, tens of thousands of (mainly) men singing passionately at the top of their lungs.

I had always wanted to record the crowd chants at one of these games and see where it might lead musically. An opportunity arose when a friend, Trevor, who was attending his first ever match, agreed to record the match for me on my walkman.