🎾 Love All: Fairlight Serves Queer History on Centre Court | Fairlight: The Musical

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Fairlight is more than just a new musical – it’s a reclamation of a history too often hidden. On Saturday 30th August 2025, the world premiere of this bold and innovative electropop show will take place at the Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society in Birmingham – the birthplace of lawn tennis. It’s the perfect stage for a story that intertwines sport, sexuality, and visibility in a way the theatre world has never quite seen before.

The show’s title is a double nod: to Fairlight, the house where Harry Gem and Augurio Perera invented the game in the 1860s, and to the Fairlight CMI, the revolutionary sampler whose sounds inspire the show’s pulsating score. Through playful, inventive storytelling, the musical revisits the Victorian origins of tennis as an opposites-attract queer love story, weaving in fragments of real history – from prosecutions of gay men to interviews with LGBT+ tennis professionals today. The result is bond to be an electrifying mix of romance, politics and pop, staged in the very place where tennis began.

At its heart, Fairlight asks why, even today, sport can remain a space where authenticity is challenged or denied. With wit, emotion, and a soundtrack that nods to electronic music history, co-creators and artistic directors Alex Taylor and Michael Wolters are pushing the boundaries of what a musical can be. I sat down with them to discuss how this ambitious project was born, why tennis felt like the perfect vehicle to tell a queer love story, and what it means to premiere their work on hallowed sporting ground as well as the learn about the difficulties of writing, producing and directing your very own musical, where the show has been, and where it might go next!

TRANSCRIPT

(0:00 - 6:04)

Hello! Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Alexandra Taylor and Michael Walters who have written and composed the musical Fairlight. Unfortunately the first half of the interview ended up like you see above. I'm not entirely sure why this happened but what it basically means is that unfortunately I've lost the first 10 minutes of this interview.

But worry not, I will summarise the points that Alex and Michael made with the notes that I made after I realised that this has happened. I apologise in advance if I get anything wrong or I miss some key details but this was the only solution I could come to. Let's give it a whirl.

I started off by asking them to tell me a little bit more about themselves. Alexandra Taylor or Alex is an award-winning BBC writer who has written for the stage, the screen and for audio as well. She's a member of various different writing collectives and we are most definitely kindred spirits because, like me, she has a front door that she's decorated to look like a TARDIS.

What an absolute legend. Michael is a composer in the world of contemporary music working on pieces that deconstruct and question traditional concert situations. He has done loads of commissions throughout his history including stuff for the a 12-minute opera called The Voyage with Stan's Cafe in Birmingham.

In addition to all of this wonderful stuff he is also the deputy head of composition at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and he runs a master's programme in experimental performance. The next question I asked them was what exactly Fairlight is about. Fairlight is an electro-pop musical about queer invisibility in tennis, that's the tagline at least, as was explained to me by Alex.

It is about the story of the origins of tennis which, little be known to some, was actually invented right here in Birmingham. It is named Fairlight after the house where Harry Jem and Augurio Pereira first came up with the idea for lawn tennis. Harry Jem was a solicitor who held a prestigious position in the Birmingham magistrates.

He was also a keen sportsman and founded several clubs, a well-known raconteur, an after-dinner speaker and a partaker in amateur dramatics. I think all the best people are. Augurio Pereira was very different.

He was the son of Spanish immigrants and brought to the UK when he was four years old and aged just 17 he was left in Birmingham by his family to run the Birmingham branch of their very successful import business while they moved to Manchester. As history would suggest these two unlikely friends met through a mutual love of sports. By 1859 they were reported to be playing their new invention, lawn rackets, at Fairlight.

Both Alex and Michael say that although there is no evidence alluding to Harry and Augurio being anything more than friends, why would there be? It was Victorian England and sodomy was illegal so no one could talk about it anyway and as we all know from history the LGBTQ plus community is very underrepresented because of this. Upon researching the story Alex felt like it spoke to her as an LGBTQ plus romance and so the idea for the musical began to evolve. Fairlight was also the name for a synthesiser which was first used in the 1980s on popular albums by bands like the Pet Shop Boys.

It was incredibly expensive but it was the first step of sampling and it was the first introduction of this into the mainstream music of the time. Michael simply loved this connection and so the musical became electro pop. I asked him how the idea for the musical started and how it all came about.

Michael went on to tell me that he was commissioned by the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham to write a creative piece about basketball. He decided to pursue a piece about how underrepresented the LGBTQ plus community was in basketball and really in sports in general. He expected that idea to be rejected but actually everyone at the Commonwealth Games was incredibly amenable to the idea and to the concept and wanted to see the matter researched and discussed more.

This eventually evolved into further research on the subject and it transpired that throughout the entirety of sports there are very very few out gay players especially within the male sporting industry. In fact at the beginning of writing this musical there had been no openly gay tennis players in the history of the sport ever. In December 2024, so a mere eight months ago, the first professional male tennis player came out openly as being gay.

It therefore shows that not only is this piece incredibly relevant but it is incredibly important to raise the awareness not just through tennis but through all sports that there should be better environments created within sports in which people feel like they can come out in a safe environment and not be persecuted for it. Michael went on to tell me more about his work. He has always pushed the boundaries of weird music and this is what he wants to do here.

He's worried the word that weird has too many negative connotations but he talked to me about the word queer and how that used to carry a lot of negative connotations as well. But queer is a word that's now been taken back by the LGBTQ plus community and now that they've taken ownership of this word they feel like it is a more positive and freeing word to be associated with. He's using art to push the boundaries of what's possible and creating this theatrical sporting collaboration with Alex to start a conversation about queerness in sport which is giving this experimental art a purpose.

I then asked them both how they met and it transpires that Michael started dating Alex's roommate and they've now been together for a very long time. When Alex and Michael met they got on like a house on fire and it wasn't long until they realised that they actually worked really well together and that has led them to do so much creating together. I then went on to ask them how the writing form has evolved from the early days.

(6:04 - 9:15)

They told me when they first workshopped the piece that it was a 20 minute performance. It was a lot of ideas thrown into it and it felt a little bit bitty without a centralised storyline. They've recently refined the musical and are now pretty sure they're pleased with the story but time will tell when we see it on Saturday.

What they also found in the initial writing phase is that it focused very much on the history of tennis with the queer romance as the secondary feature within this story. Now with a bit more research it has evolved into a piece where actually the queer romance is telling the story first and the history element is more secondary. As I've said while there's no historical information to suggest that the couple who started the game of tennis were actually a couple there is also no information proving it wrong.

What Alex and Michael are doing is they're utilising this to make a point about not only the history of tennis and give value to Birmingham where this started but also to the issues within sport today and the LGBT community. By centralising the story around a queer romance you're turning it from a piece about tennis into a piece that has real purpose. As a composer Michael looked a lot into the musical side and once he settled on electro-pop as the musical genre of the piece and looked further into utilising the Fairlight synthesiser or synthesisers in general as an idea he then did a lot of research into how this sort of music is composed and how it's used as an instrument.

With the help from alumni from the Birmingham Conservatoire this concept evolved further. He brought on British composer Paul Norman who is also an alum from the Birmingham Conservatoire and the pair of them were really able to bring this musical idea to life and make it the show it is now. Together they have spent the last year not only finishing off the project but creating a network of people who all together will work as a community and a team to bring this piece to the next level taking creative and logistical steps to ensure the future of this piece.

Honestly this part of the interview was really fascinating I'm gutted that you guys can't hear it but hopefully that gives you an overview and now we are going to jump back in with Alex and Michael who are going to be able to far more eloquently explain what their show is all about. As we rejoin here Michael is telling us all about the different music of the piece and how the musical language comes together. Halfway through the process we started to embrace sampling as a technique so it wasn't just about using the sounds from the demo, we started sampling our own sounds that we wanted to use.

There's one track where I sampled my voice and I sampled myself playing the flute for example. We sampled grunting from tennis matches. One song has lots of grunts in it.

Yeah it's funny every time you hear it. Yeah that happened. Yeah I don't know the trajectory, I don't think so.

No of course it did, of course it did. I mean because your first script was very much about the history of lawn tennis and put the love story secondary and we turned that around. Yeah we did, that's true.

(9:16 - 10:26)

So it's much more the love story. It does tell that the tennis and the love story are intertwined but the focus is on the emotional journey of the the two characters with a bit of tennis in the background. How many times have you workshopped it now? Well I guess only that once really.

Last year the work in progress, a 20-minute extract. We haven't put the show on. I mean obviously we've had rehearsals and devising days and things but we've not presented it.

And the beam showcase which he came to, but that was very much a pitch for the show rather than the show itself. So yeah we haven't put it in front of an audience that often at all. No.

Did you get any useful contacts from beam? Honestly? I don't, yeah no, I don't think so. I think we're a bit too weird, you know. It's like we also, we tried to apply for an Arts Council touring brand and then we also realised this is just not made for that because they want the buy-in from lots of theatres.

(10:26 - 11:38)

But we don't have that. So same here, I mean people might just think we have a nice idea but we don't need to put things on a tennis court. Yeah absolutely and it's difficult that but I think there are probably community grants that would make it more accessible.

Yeah maybe, I mean we've got funding to put on this show from various different trusts from about four or five if not more different places. But then it's that scrabbling around for little pockets of money to build up enough. We have an Arts Council application in and part of that application is really quite a high number of workshops and we want to do workshops in all the areas where we want to perform and get material made for the performance because they are, that's what you will see, there are little bits in the performance that are really quite different and they're also interchangeable.

So do you utilise live sampling as well? Haven't yet, I don't know, not at the moment. Not at the moment. But now that you've said that I can see the wheels turning.

(11:40 - 12:24)

But it is, there is the possibility of that should we go down that route. Talking a little bit more about the funding and your production journey, obviously developing a new musical is a massive undertaking. What's the sort of practical side and the steps that you've taken to get it as far as you have? I think the most important thing that we did was to pay someone else to do our funding application.

I think previously we've never done that before with any project, either jointly or separately. So we got a specific person, Andy, in to do the application, the Arts Council application for us. And that, I mean, it was still a huge amount of work.

(12:26 - 12:37)

But because he knows how to do that, he knows how to speak Arts Council so well. So that was a huge help. So that's why we got the funding for the work in progress.

(12:37 - 12:44)

Brilliant. And yeah, that was a massive step. I mean, there were a lot of new things for me.

(12:44 - 13:42)

I mean, I'm used to working, I'm used to working as a collective. So which usually means we do what we can do. We know what people's strengths are and we're using them.

But this time we had to audition because we needed singers. There was a lot about electronic music that I didn't know. So I asked Paul to work with me because he's a big electronic music person.

Brilliant. So lots of things needed to be outsourced. That sounds great.

We got a producer on board to specifically look after the logistics of liaising with tennis clubs. We got a press woman involved. So Helen, who's been organising a lot of interviews and things for us, so yeah, it has been quite new for both of us to kind of get people on board who we didn't know.

(13:42 - 13:46)

We still stayed producers though. That's the thing. We couldn't just say we just did the art.

(13:47 - 15:16)

I mean, most of our time was producing things. It is an enormous amount of work. How have you compiled your team? Is it a mixture of networking and contacts and putting applications out there? Yeah.

I mean, a lot of things actually are former students of mine. Yeah, Paul's a former student. Paul's a former student.

Tana's a former student. Alex, who did the costumes, former student. And that's what university is really good for.

You meet new talent and then you help them into the professional world by giving them the first jobs. But then we've also worked with a lot of our other contacts within the Birmingham Arts world, reaching out and asking people, do you know anyone? Have you worked with this person on this? And that kind of thing. So that's how we got Helen on board.

She was recommended by Stance Cafe, I think. No, somebody else. Always get that wrong.

But yeah, so there's been lots of different outlets and ways in which we've assembled the team. Is there anything that's either restricted your creativity or you've had to be really creative about due to restricted budgets that's sort of spurred off that? And then you've gone, do you know what? Actually, that's better than if we'd have had a million pounds. Oh, that happens all the time.

(15:16 - 15:57)

Yeah, I mean, that's just way of life. I mean, I quite like it as well because I don't need that much money to make good art. It always feels like that.

I'm not saying don't give me any money. Money's an extra bonus, isn't it? No, you need some. But it's like when you start to get more than the absolute basics, it's like, okay, what can we do with this money? Where can we best spend it? But still give us more money.

Yeah. And ultimately, the state we're in at the moment is more money means more shows. Yeah.

It's not so much been about the content of the show. It's been about the amount of shows we can do. So we've got enough to put on one show.

(15:58 - 16:11)

We want to put on more. Yeah. And there's an element.

It's not just a piece of art. It's very important to us that a lot of people see it because it has a message. It's activism.

(16:12 - 18:49)

There's an activist element about it because it's the situation is crazy. And actually, you get an idea from the interviews that we've done. But the more you the more you go into the subject, the crazier it gets.

Weirdly. Yeah. It'll come back around.

Obviously, you're bringing the show to the birthplace of tennis. Did that inspire it being site specific and immersive? Or what was the decision that you came to that? I think that was really early on, wasn't it? I mean, it probably came from you, but I don't remember. To do it there? Yeah.

Well, to do it on a tennis court as opposed to in a theatre. It was just something like, well, of course we do it on a tennis court. I mean, it does help that Oliver is a member of the tennis court.

Oh, brilliant. So he was very familiar with it. And so it was present in our lives.

It wasn't like an alien tennis court that we didn't know about, but we then had to approach it. You know, we knew the ground and all of them knew the spaces that were available and that kind of thing. Of course, it's fabulous that we can tell the story where it happened.

It's amazing. Although that's what I want to say. Our biggest challenge is the weather.

And it's been hot for weeks. And there's rain next week. So for the last two days, we've been just thinking about what do we do? So, yeah, we have plans in place.

It's a decision we took. We always knew. We're in the UK, it's an outdoor performance.

And we ignored it. And now we're living with the consequences as it gets closer and closer. But that's one of the risks that you take when you're making stuff outside of theatre.

When you're doing it in theatre, it's a really controlled environment and a very safe environment. Because it's unlikely that nothing massive is going to change or go wrong. The second you choose to make that decision to put it somewhere else.

And it's one of the things in talking to a lot of the tennis clubs that we're hoping to tour at next year. It's alien to them. Yeah.

And they're like, Oh, what is this scary thing? Yeah. And it does create an extra barrier of trying to convince people that we know what we're doing. But also meeting them halfway and going, what do you need? Yeah.

And hoping to kind of create something that's beneficial for both parties. Right? Yeah. On the other side, though, a theatre is incredibly inflexible.

(18:49 - 20:23)

Yeah. You know, so is the world of sports. Incredibly inflexible.

So finding a way of getting in there somehow has been really interesting. And you've now got a relationship with the Lawn Tennis Association as well. Oh, yeah.

From the beginning. Yeah. They've been really, really supportive.

All the interviews that we carried out, not all of them, some of the interviews that we carried out, we did at the National Tennis Centre and they supported us. That's got to be pretty cool. It is.

It's a really nice place, actually. It's a really nice place. And, you know, they've been super supportive about trying to help us contact various people in the tennis world and the tennis clubs and things.

So, yeah, big props to the LTA for the support they've given us. And what's your current team like? So who's doing your production, marketing, PR? You've touched on a little. Who are your performers? Do you have musicians as well? We don't have.

Well, our musicians are Paul. Yeah. So Paul, who co-composed and arranged the music with Michael, he's our DJ.

He'll be doing a lot of the live mixing and curing and stuff. That's cool. That's different as well.

I'm not going to pretend I know anything about it. You sounded very convincing. Thank you.

So we've got two singers, Tej and Harry, who will be performing this show. We've also got Henry, who's on our kind of, we've got three singers in total. Obviously, we only need two for each show.

(20:24 - 22:39)

And they're all brilliant. They're just, Henry performed with Harriet Bean. Tej performed the Progress last year and they were all great.

We've got Tanner, who's the dramaturg. And performer. I mean, everyone except me performs.

I'm the only person on the team, I think, not performed. Helen, who's doing our press and publicity. Jen, who's our tour producer.

Andy, who's our Arts Council application producer. Oliver, who's our filmmaker. Yes, filmmaker, did all the interviews and all the assets for the screen.

Yeah, me too. Joe French, who's the tech producer. Alex, who designed the costumes.

Yeah, different Alex. And also, we have to say, the tennis club as well. The committee there.

Bob Holland, who's the tennis historian, who supplied the net. The Royal Government Conservatoire events team. We are providing stewards and producing the evening.

Yeah, so it's quite a few people. Yeah, it's nice. You've pulled a massive community together that wouldn't ordinarily have met, I think.

No, absolutely. Oh, and two tennis players. Oh my God, the tennis players.

I had a feed. So there is live tennis playing during the piece. That's awesome.

And so there are two of the members of the club who are going to be performing for us and playing tennis during it. Amazing. And what's your vision for the future? So this performance you're doing now, is your intention to extend it, to tour it? Where do you want it to go? I think the actual, I mean, we won't know until we've done it and seen it, but I think the actual show we're fairly confident is what we want.

I don't need to want to make any particular changes there, but we want to tour it and we want to tour it to different spaces. So we want to be at least at one tournament, you know, a tennis tournament. And it's looking like we would have to go to Germany to do that, to Bad Homburg.

(22:40 - 23:08)

They're thinking about it. Wimbledon would like us, after the championships, for an invited audience, but we also want to go to Brighton Pride and we want to go to some park somewhere and perform just in a community. Because that's the other side of tennis.

It's not just clubs. There's a lot of, in this country particularly, there's a lot of opportunities to play tennis in parks, like Camp Hill Park in Birmingham. And we would like to perform on a court like that.

(23:09 - 23:13)

And then there's Leamington as well. And Leamington. We've got a date.

(23:13 - 23:22)

Yeah, we've got a date in the diary for next July. I think it's the 26th of July next year. Because Leamington is where the very first tennis club was invented.

(23:23 - 23:28)

Invented is not the right word. Founded. Founded by Harry and Alvaro, our two main characters.

(23:29 - 23:45)

They set up the first dedicated lawn tennis club in Leamington. But subsequently it went away, leaving E.L.'s Edgbaston Archery as the oldest one. There's a song called Leamington, about moving to Leamington.

(23:45 - 23:49)

In the show. So you have to do it in Leamington. It's written in.

(23:49 - 24:05)

They might even adopt it as their song. You know, the song of Leamington. Can you imagine? Do you know what steps you've got to take to get there? Or do you have a plan? Are you feeling your way? Is it a bit of everything? If the Arts Council say yes, we'll do it.

(24:06 - 24:17)

If the Arts Council don't say yes, we'll have to try and raise money in other places. But we've got a show now and we've got a plan and we've got a team. It's just about raising the cash to pay everyone to get it on the road.

(24:19 - 24:47)

And are there any specific relationships you're looking at in the touring community that you know would help you take this to the next level? I think it's just a lot of it is the tennis clubs, isn't it? But which we're already kind of in contact with local councils and things as well in terms of parks and stuff. What's been the most challenging part of developing Fairlight up until this point? Certainly now. It was fine until this week and now it's become the most challenging part.

(24:48 - 25:03)

But yeah, I mean. I mean, on the plus side, at least it's happened this week and not on the day. You can sort of put things in place and I've worked in outdoor production and theatre and I think people know what they've signed up to or at least 90% of people do.

(25:03 - 25:27)

And they'll come with their mats and they'll come with their garden chairs and they'll come ready to sit in the rain and persevere. And I think what it creates a really special relationship as well with the cast, because the audience knows that if they're sitting and they're cold and wet and damp and feeling a bit sorry for themselves, and the cast is still giving it their all throughout this as well. I think it creates something special that you don't get in theatre.

(25:27 - 25:39)

We certainly had that with the work in progress. Doing it between showers and there was a bit of a communal... What's the word? Sense of togetherness. Yeah.

(25:39 - 25:52)

And seeing it through the rain. But there is a point with this, though, where it becomes... It's how heavy the rain is in terms of the tech. And the safety of the players on the grass.

(25:54 - 26:03)

Because outside tech is complicated. Yeah, everything has to be rated and all covered in a bin bag. It's the graceful way of doing it.

(26:04 - 26:08)

Yeah. So yeah, we'll see. That's a big challenge.

(26:09 - 26:27)

Raising money has been a big challenge. Putting the spec together in terms of what we approach clubs with, that was a big challenge. Without making it seem too daunting, but with being realistic about what we needed to put the show on.

(26:30 - 26:33)

Yeah. By far the most difficult thing was the money. Yeah.

(26:34 - 26:44)

Certainly the most time-consuming. Time-consuming and you get just so many knockbacks. You just... It's easier in a team than to say, OK, let's just carry on and do the next thing.

(26:44 - 26:52)

If you do this on your own, which I've also done in the past, it's just brutal. Yeah. Constantly to be told, no, no.

(26:53 - 27:07)

Yeah. What's been, on the flip side of that, the most rewarding or affirming moment of putting this together? I really loved our devising week. It was intense because Michael and I both have COVID and I think we gave it to Tamra as well.

(27:08 - 27:31)

But it was just so nice. There were five of us just intensely talking about the content, the creative and artistic content of what we were making and not funding applications and budgets. And that it was just... And like we did it from like 10am to 6pm when our brains were all fried.

(27:31 - 27:39)

But it was so much fun. And yeah, I really enjoyed that bit. Yeah, me too.

(27:39 - 27:42)

Yeah. And writing the music. Yes, I loved writing the lyrics.

(27:42 - 27:52)

We had one day when Michael and I laughed a lot when there was this one particular song. Yes. Which it was really hard for Michael to get across what he wanted from the lyrics.

(27:52 - 28:06)

And I wasn't getting it and he wasn't getting my lyrics and it was like, this isn't working. And then what we ended up doing was just inventing total nonsense words to the rhythm that Michael wanted. It was only about the rhythm.

(28:06 - 28:12)

Yeah. There was no other way of explaining it. Donkey chair is hiding on the attic.

(28:12 - 28:19)

Oh, and just laughing about the nonsense we were coming out with. And I just really enjoyed it. It did the job.

(28:19 - 28:30)

It really did. It's one of my favourite songs. Why do you feel like now is the right time to bring this story forward? Well, yeah.

(28:30 - 28:43)

Well, then we've got an out tennis player who's played in US Open Qualifying this week. Lost in the first round. But we've got one.

(28:43 - 28:49)

Yeah. December last year. So he came out after we'd done the work in progress performance.

(28:50 - 29:01)

But there is now one male out professional active tennis player for the first time in 160 years. But it also, it just feels like we're going backwards. You know, there's more crime.

(29:01 - 29:07)

People are afraid. Coming out is a thing again. That is debated whether it's right or not.

(29:08 - 29:16)

Look at America. It's just frightening. And you just have to do something.

(29:16 - 29:38)

And then, you know, I make things like that because for me, just making art was not enough anymore. Because I found it really weird making art while all this shit's going on and I can't do anything about it. And so I thought, well, let's put the two together, you know? Yeah.

(29:39 - 29:50)

And where can we find you? Where can we find the show? 20 tickets left, you said? Yes, some. Yeah, there are some tickets left as we speak now. By the time people see this.

(29:50 - 29:58)

Might not be. But it's fairlightmusical.co.uk There's a link to buy tickets.