The play that changed my life: ‘The Buddy Holly musical showed the arts are for everybody’

My mum had an admin job at the Belgrade theatre in Coventry during the run of Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story. At the age of 11 or 12 I quite often got the bus into town just to hang out with her after school and she would sneak me in.
The Belgrade is an amazing space. It’s not pretty in a traditional sense, but has a lot of the aesthetic of Coventry, which I love. Walking through the precinct at the end of the day and then into Buddy was great. You could turn up in school uniform not knowing what was happening … and then by the end of it, you’re a fan and you know all about the history. I saw it maybe three or four times; as a child, the run felt like a whole era in my life.
Buddy is a bombastic event that everyone’s part of. There’s dancing and clapping, and it feels quite bawdy and lively. It’s an example of the arts being for everybody. A musical like Buddy helps to fund more independent theatre, too, and I like that dialogue between popular art and more experimental work. I think that experience is all quite set in my relationship to being an artist as well, that symbiosis between something esoteric and strange and something very popular.
The tragic plane crash [that killed Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in 1959] is very much part of the story and I guess engineered to create in the audience a sense of the legend. Because it’s a musical it’s hyperbolic emotionally, every emotion massively drawn out.
When I was starting out as a sort of avant-garde performance poet making sound poems, I returned to the song Peggy Sue. I wrote about Buddy Holly in my PhD as well, studying the relationship between technology and voice, because of all the kind of hiccups in his performance. He ended up sounding like a jumping record.
I wasn’t any kind of writer before Buddy. Just a kid who watched an awful lot of TV and sometimes musical theatre because of circumstance! I became a writer who prioritises voice and vocal play, as well as joy and experimentalism, campy popular melodrama and some music. I think that sense of where art sits in society was really formative and I like the fact that my way into it was something quite cheesy.