Back in 1987, Anne-Marie and I were studying in Swansea University. We met through the Musicians Society and played in the University Orchestra together. We found we both shared a love of West End musicals and so decided we would try and write an original musical together. Anne-Marie had just written the music for a production of A Midsummer Nights Dream that had been staged at the Taliesin Theatre in Swansea University. We thought it might be nice to write something along the lines of a fairy tale though we had no idea what.

A few weeks later I was telling my mother, Molly, about this idea. At the time she was a freelance journalist and she also had a couple of novels published as well. She suggested basing something on the Scottish fairy tale of Tam Lin. And she offered to write the stage play. We were off and running.

Anne-Marie and I worked on the music for the first Act and recorded a demo in my little home studio based around an 8-track tape recorder. We played and sang all the parts ourselves – its was very rough but gave us a basic idea of where we were going.

And then we left it. University studies took over and other musical projects took priority. There it sat, left and discarded for many, many years.

Then in 2018 my mother unfortunately developed dementia and moved into a local care home. In clearing her flat, I came across the completed stage play for the musical. I did not even know that my mother had finished it. It seemed to me that I could and should complete the musical using her completed stage play.

I started in October 2020, deep in COVID lockdown, working initially on my trusty little MacBook laptop. I had the old demo of the first act, and my mother had labelled a few of the songs in Acts 2 and 3 with a demo tape I had given her. That was long gone, but I was able to work out which song was which based on the lyrics. Additionally a few songs had no music, and for these I wrote new music.

I started recording, playing many parts myself but also using session musicians and singers through fiverr.com along with friends and artists that I had worked with previously. I was also able to use many of Anne-Marie’s original piano parts as we had at some point recorded all her piano parts using MIDI. These I could now play back through beautifully sampled pianos such as the Hans Zimmer piano from Spitfire.

I was even able to use some of Anne-Marie’s vocal parts which I pulled out of our original demo.

And here is the result after two years of work. I have to say I’m very happy with the result and I truly hope Anne-Marie would be as well. Unfortunately, I have lost touch with her over the years so she has not heard the finished musical. Anne-Marie – if you’re out there, please get in touch!

Dave