Composed Comfort

Paul Fincham is a composer whose carol Ring The Bells will be sung in concerts all over the country this christmas and whose opera The Happy Princess got good reviews last summer. Susan Elkin meets him.

Paul Finchham smashes every stereotype about impoverished composers hunched in cold garrets wondering where the next meal is coming from.We meet in his elegant, spacious Islington town house drinking tea in his delightfully spare but extended and generously proportioned basement kitchen diner looking out on the pretty rear garden. He uses the entire ground floor space upstairs as a work area with grand piano, big computer, screen and the like. “I can use this as a recording studio too” he tells me cheerfully, inviting me to a piano recital in his house on a later date which I accept with alacrity.

For Paul, 60, – who is as contemptuous of the idea of retiring as I am – composing is a second career. Having trained as a lawyer, he worked for many years in corporate finance. “I went to prep school in Bromley because the family home was in Beckenham and then to Tonbridge School. After that I read music at Cambridge” he says directing me to his ground floor loo where there’s a very evocative poster advertising a Cambridge Footlights pantomime, written by Paul with Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie in the cast.

So what made him abandon music when he graduated? “I didn’t want to be poor!” he says with simple honesty and an engaging grin. Of course, he didn’t really abandon it anyway – real musicians never do. “I’ve sung with the London Philharmonic Choir for over thirty years” Paul tells me, and it was for them he wrote Ring The Bells which premiered in the Royal Albert Hall last Christmas. He then shows me the list of the fifty or so choirs who will be singing it this Christmas now that it’s published by Boosey and Hawkes. “It’s in its fourth reprint” he says happily. “Interest in it is growing exponentially”.