An Interview with John Bird
By Sarah Kirby
John Bird’s biography, Percy Grainger, first published in 1976, remains the most influential and comprehensive biography of Grainger to date. I was saddened to hear of Bird’s death in July 2025, and reproduce here edited excerpts from an interview I conducted with him, sitting in the garden of his flat in Clapham, in May 2024.
John Bird: I was born in a place called Walsall. But the great person who came from Walsall was Jerome K. Jerome. He wrote one of the great masterpieces of humorous English prose, Three Men in a Boat. Jerome K. Jerome. What a name! And he was born just down the road from where I was born. Percy performed in Walsall, once, at the town hall a long time ago, when he was just performing with Ada Crossley!
My father was a brewer, who hated music, but he let me do more or less what I liked. I trained as a waiter and a chef in Birmingham, on a little street off Broad Street called Brasshouse passage at the Birmingham College of Food and Domestic Arts. The first job I had after college was catering on the Atlantic Coast of Ireland, in County Mayo in a place called Newport, not far from a mountain called Croagh Patrick. That is a holy mountain in Ireland and the spot from which Saint Patrick is alleged to have cast all the snakes from Ireland. There’s a great pilgrimage where people come from all over the world and they climb up this bloody mountain, some of them in their bare feet even now. It’s potty!
SK: How did you get from catering in County Mayo to writing about Percy Grainger?
JB: My introduction to Grainger was twofold. I’d always loved, since my interest in music began to flower, the music of Grieg and Delius. And then I learned that both of them had admired and loved this man and loved his music. And so I decided to look a little further. When I came to live in London, when I was 21, I used to love going round markets and there were two or three in London, specialising in junk, with second-hand books and second-hand records and so on. One day I found a stall that had a lot of 78s in it—I loved 78s because my mother collected them—and I happened to pick up one of the three-record set of Grainger playing the Op. 58 Sonata of Chopin. I put on the last two sides of that, and it changed my life. It knocked me absolutely flat. And I thought, you know, there’s something very interesting in this. It’s not just the virtuoso pianist, it’s something talking to me and saying, listen to this, damn you! It’s a stunner, isn’t it? That record. But whenever I spoke to someone—particularly academics—they didn’t seem to think Grainger was worth tuppence. They thought he was the court jester of twentieth-century music, but I thought, surely there’s more to it than that? Those were the two strongest things that took me into this unknown world of Grainger.
SK: So you decided to write a book?
JB: I had never written anything before, and I was a complete flop at school. But I thought, well, I’m going to do something about this, even though I’d never written any essay more than half a page long. I was never an ambitious person. I didn’t know what to do in life, but I liked to travel. My father was a great traveller, and I suppose I got infected by his love of travel. I moved to Australia, I actually emigrated. I was one of the last of the ten-pound Poms. I got there for £10, and for that I went through the Panama Canal, to Curaçao, Trinidad—not in that order—Panama, Tahiti, New Zealand, Wellington, Sydney and Melbourne. That was one of the great experiences of my life.
I had a motorbike when I was in Australia. God created Australia for motorcycles. Those beautiful straight roads taking off to this big brown land. There’s nothing nicer than going somewhere to get out of Melbourne on those lovely coast roads. The peninsula, I loved, and the Royal Australian Automobile Club used to do lovely trips into the mountains, to the Dandenongs. The Dandy! There’s so many beautiful things. I’ve got happy and sad memories about Melbourne, and going up and down to Sydney and Brisbane on this motorbike. I fell in love in Melbourne a lot of times—but we won’t go into that—oh dear. I lived in East St Kilda much of the time. A dreadful hole.
SK: What was it like researching at the Grainger Museum then?
JB: The welcome I received going to [the Museum in] Melbourne, was no welcome at all. The Con [the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music] closed its doors on me, and the reason they offered was that I was not an academic, and that I couldn’t read music. It was as if to say, piss off, we don’t want anyone who’s not an academic with twenty-seven degrees. They had this bizarre, perverse attitude towards Grainger in Melbourne, it was really hurtful. I can’t remember anyone worth talking to at the Con.
SK: You eventually gained access?
JB: Yes, but they didn’t like me. They didn’t like anyone who was not an academic. It was a total wreck of a place. You’d pull a drawer open and there’d be a letter from Tchaikovsky. Why was it in this particular drawer? I don’t know. There was one girl, who was sort of nominally in charge and she kept having nervous breakdowns. But then Kay Dreyfus arrived, and she didn’t do things by halves. She decided to do the job properly and got the place properly funded. I got to the collection before Kay did. She made that museum. She gave some years of her life to cataloguing and putting it in order. Kay, I adored and worshiped. Without her, there would be no book.
SK: What kind of things did you find there?
You’ve got the most weird things in that collection, but the most valuable stuff, I think, are the letters to and from Grainger, and the copies that he’d done of his letters to other people. If there’s one barrier to Granger’s mind, it’s that awful old photocopying machine. You have to do a negative, and then in doing the negative, line after line vanished.
Of course, the manuscripts, the musical manuscripts, and the sketches, are valuable too. If there’s anything lacking in my book—and it’s something I was only able to do when, some years later, I was asked to give lectures on Grainger—it was that I wasn’t able to argue his case as a mighty talented composer. I wish I’d been able to do that. I couldn’t really fight the good fight because I couldn’t read music, but I had some great help from two very good friends I made when I was in Australia. One was the famous pianist Leslie Howard, and David Stanhope, who’s a composer, bass trombonist and a brilliant horn player. Both of them are difficult like me, but I love them both in a horrible kind of way. They were so kind to me because they also believed in Grainger.
I was in Australia nearly four years. I was going to settle in Melbourne, but my dad became very ill and mum was looking after him on her own, so I came back home and helped mum as much as I could. And then Dad died, and I had to look after mum.
SK: You conducted many interviews and corresponded with so many people who had known Grainger in your research. What was that like?
JB: I'm trying to think of the people who gave me keys to the Grainger personality and the Grainger talent. I met Bernard Herrmann. I met Stokowski also. He thought Grainger was a wonderful man. Kitty Parker I met, in great old age, in Sydney. We went for a ride on the ferry.
I also met Ursula Vaughan Williams, and she was a sweetheart. She gave me some money when I was broke, which happens a lot with writers, let me tell you! She gave me a grant from the Vaughan Williams Trust, without me asking. She just wrote to me once with a cheque inside it, she was so kind. I went to see her several times. Ursula was wonderful. She had a lot of little keys into Percy and his love life in London before the First World War, in that ever-changing rockpool of friends, you know, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Grainger, Bax and that lot, Goossens and Beecham and others. At that time, Percy was friendly with a group of French composers, and there’s a wonderful photographer, Baron De Meyer, who obviously fell in love with Grainger, no question.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was another person who loved Grainger. And he once said something Percy wrote was good as Bach and Percy remembered that till the day he died. There’s a lovely picture of Ralph and Percy at the Cecil Sharp House, at some reception. And for some reason Percy is in full evening dress. I don’t know why.
I became very friendly with Ella Grainger, what a charmer she was. She gave me a bit of money when I was broke, too. She was a lovely lady and was so kind. I didn’t ask for it or anything, it just came through the post, and it paid my rent for a long time.
Sometimes I got help from people that surprised me. There was one bloke who worked for a small publishing house in New York who’d known Grainger, I can’t remember his name [probably Eugene Weintraub]. He wrote me these beautiful letters. He was totally unknown to me, and he’d met Grainger only once. He immediately saw through Grainger, and saw the tragedy and the sadness, and the way he felt in old age that he’d been neglected. I never met him, he just wrote me beautiful letters about how, unless I really understood the sadness of Grainger, I would not understand him properly.
One of my dear, dear friends in the last year or two of his life was Eric Fenby. Oh, what a darling he was. He told me quite a lot about Granger. He was a very perceptive man, a lovely man. But the thing that irked me about Eric was he said Delius would have been so much the greater composer had he been a Christian. I actually tackled him about it. I said, ‘Eric, how could you write that?’ I said, ‘do you still believe it?’ He said ‘yes, I do’. He was very firm about it. Do you know there’s a film about Delius? By Ken Russell. I can’t watch it without pouring with tears. That last scene where Jelka scatters the rose petals. Oh, I weep like a baby. That bloke who played Grainger, [David Collings] do you know I saw him once on the London Underground! I was just about to go up to him and say hello, look, you’re Percy Grainger! And then he got off the train and I missed him forever.
I did quite a lot of work at the Cecil Sharp House, where they had a wonderful librarian who also loved Grainger. They’ve got quite a lot of good stuff at Cecil Sharp house. It’s very odd, because Percy didn’t give tuppence for Cecil Sharp and thought he was a waste of space because Cecil Sharp didn’t give tuppence about Percy’s idea of writing down all the funny bits and twiddles of folk music. I think the piece Percy did in the folk song magazine is one of the great pieces he wrote, actually, and he’s written some wonderful bits about music.
SK: Was there anyone you wished you’d met? Or things you would have liked to know more about?
JB: I wish I could have met Evald Tang Kristensen. And I think someone should write about Grainger the pianist. It’s fascinating what he wrote about Busoni, and I wish he could have written a bit more about Louis Pabst. He was his composition teacher, wasn’t he? What the hell was he doing in Australia? This bloke from Northern Germany or Russia, it was part of Russia wasn’t it? Kaliningrad? That odd little bit. Percy, by some stroke of luck, found this teacher. He had a wonderful face, and he taught Percy all his philosophy about music—you start off with your best tune straight away, all of that—that was terrific. I wonder where Percy got, you know, how he doubles up the last chord in the piece? Where does that come from? I’ll bet that comes from Pabst, the bloke who studied with Anton Rubenstein. And I wish I knew more about Adelaide Burkett. I bet she was a fascinating woman, but we don’t know much about her. Percy loved her.
There was this funny bloke he met in New Zealand [A.J. Knocks]. There’s a picture of them together. Percy had a lovely smile as if to say, ‘see how proud I am, having met this bloke? Look what I’ve got! Look what I’ve found!’ He was proud as punch he’d met this bloke. I’ll bet he was fascinating. You could do a whole book on the people who walked into Percy’s life and out again, who made big impressions on him and then vanished into thin air.
SK: You also wrote a lot about Grainger’s parents. What did you think of them?
JB: I think the villain in the story is Rose Grainger, myself. Her manic possessiveness, it was awful. And I realised that almost from the word go, I think. I had a little thing about Percy’s mum. I think I would have been scared of Rose, and I think she scared most of Percy’s friends. Oh dear. I got in trouble with one or two people by letting it be known I didn’t care much for Rose. But I feel a great friendship for Percy’s dad. I think he was a nice bloke. I’ve had one or two friends in my life who’ve been alcoholics, and it’s a killer, and genuinely I feel very sorry for these people. But sometimes people who are very creative suffer a lot because of their addictions. Booze is a terror, and great art often has its roots in great suffering.
SK: You were the first to write publicly about some of the more difficult aspects of Grainger’s story, like sex and racism. How did you approach that?
JB: It was Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. They wanted to discuss, when I met them in Adelaide [in 1970], whether I should tackle Percy’s colourful and unorthodox love life. You come across it whichever way you approach it and to ignore it is wrong. It was Peter Pears who said I must tackle the subject, and if you do it properly, he said, it won’t upset people. It was difficult, I must confess. But Percy wrote several long essays about the whole wretched business. Pears said I must tackle it, but Britten, who was a bit of a prude, hesitated. I saw there was a disagreement because they realised that when the time came for big biographies or studies of their career, of Britten's creative life, they would have to do something about their long…[trails off] On the BBC they always referred to Pears as Britten’s ‘lifelong friend’. Really, how twee! But they couldn’t say anything else, in those days, you see.
The other thing you have to come to terms with is Percy’s antisemitic feeling. You have to do something about that somehow, and his barmy ideas about blue-eyed blonde-haired people. You must! I mean, an awful lot of people were antisemitic in those days, although that’s no excuse. It’s very difficult. It was total hokum-pokum, bullshit. But you’ve got the roots of the stories in those things that his mother or father gave him. And that one, Houston Stewart Chamberlain—wasn’t he a friend of Wagner’s? If you know the roots of that, I mean, before Hitler, you’ve got Wagner who wrote the most vile things, and worse than both of them was Martin Luther. If you really want to see some nasty things, you read Martin Luther! Dreadful men.
SK: How do you feel about the book, and about Grainger, now?
JB: I wish I’d been a better writer. One or two people have criticised the book because it’s not written in very good English. Well, to hell with them! But I drew a line under Grainger, that is to say, being involved in broadcasting my love about Grainger. I’ve done enough of that. People want me to write an article on this, that, and the other about Grainger and I don’t reply now, because there are other things to do in life. I don’t regret anything. I think he was wonderful, but then sometimes my heart breaks when I open the programme of this year’s Proms and see not a note of Grainger. But I don’t want to only be remembered as the Grainger biographer. I don’t know what I want to be remembered as.
I developed a funny theory, I may have mentioned it in one of my prefaces, and that is, if you’re going to do a book about a creative person, sooner or later you’ve got to tackle this odd thing called creativity, and what makes people write symphonies and great novels and do great statues and paintings and so on. I decided that creativity, for what it was worth, was not the product of one tiny corner of the intellect. It was a product of a person’s totality. And you’ve got to do the whole lot. You have to. It’s a moral obligation for biographers who are worth their salt.
The one thing I tried to do was to discover everything there was to be discovered about Grainger. Creativity is about turning a man or a woman’s totality into great art, and all those things like the waves on the Albert Park Lagoon, that’s what great art is made of. Those lovely mountains you see when you’re travelling, and the big trees you see in Australia and the kookaburra and the dingo singing and howling. That’s what Grainger’s music is all about.