I think I started blogging in 2010 or so. Honestly, I can't really remember. Everyone was doing it back then. I had written my first book - Who's My Bottom? - all about the trials of being a jobbing singer on the road, so blogging about the same subject seemed like a good way at keeping my hand in. My second book - Scraping The Bottom - is largely filled with those blogs and they no longer appear here.
At home I would regularly meet two writer friends for coffee and general bitching about the world, and my daughter christened us "a bunch of saddos" and the name stuck. "Where are you off to?" my wife would ask. "I'm just popping off to Saddos..." As the itinerant singer of the pack, the one who was always disappearing for work, it wasn't hard to come up with the name "Saddo Abroad" and this was how my blog appeared for a few years on a blogging site whose name I can't remember. There was an appetite for my sort of thing, and I developed a loyal readership, each post announced on Twitter and Facebook, in the days when they weren't fetid with idiocy and bile.
After a couple of years or so, I was approached by the editor of a new online music magazine - SINFINI (which I opined was a pretty dreadful name) - asking if I'd write my opinionated stream of drivel for them. For money! Pausing only extremely briefly to worry that my stuff would now be edited, rather than left to my own unerring scrutiny, I said yes, and after that I blogged very rarely on Saddo Abroad.
Not very long after that, the german magazine Opernwelt said they would like me to write a regular column, so I did that too. Someone would take my rather idiomatic prose and translate it into German, no doubt turning some of the trickier anglicisms into something comprehensible to Teutonic ears, without - I hope - losing some of the jokes.
By 2015 I was writing a lot. As well as my articles, I would write longer pieces for SINFINI and Opernwelt, and for BBC Music Magazine too. For the first three months of that year, I took time off singing - my wife was on a triple-opera contract in Los Angeles, where I joined her - and devoted myself to full-time journalism. While I enjoyed it, I could see that it couldn't be a longterm job for me, especially when the Opernwelt editor wondered if I'd be interested in being a critic. That was an emphatic no.
And then SINFINI packed up. And a new editor arrived at Opernwelt who wasn't interested in the ravings of a jobbing British tenor.
On these pages are blogs and pieces I wrote for the magazines.
All content is copyrighted.