The brilliant English organist Anna Lapwood talks to Bryan Crump about how a chance midnight meeting with electronic artist Bonobo in London's Royal Albert Hall led to a viral TikTok video.
Anna Lapwood Photo: Nick Rutter
That Anna Lapwood would become a musician there was no doubt. That was settled in early childhood. Deciding on an instrument took a little longer.
It could have been the harp – she was principal harpist in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain – but that involved too much time waiting for the conductor's cue.
She told Three to Seven host Bryan Crump that even her final choice – the pipe organ – took a while to bed in.
"I hated it. It's such a strange instrument. It's so different to anything else I played. When you first start the organ it can feel like you're fighting against it a little bit, because it's this huge machine."
Perhaps it was the battle that won her over, Lapwood's own determination to master the monarch of all instruments.
"I think... that once you have overcome that hurdle, you have a full orchestra at your fingertips. I'd play with orchestras as a harpist where you basically sit and count the rest bars, for a very, very long time."
Still, even once Lapwood had settled on the organ, there were other obstacles to overcome. Like the decibels.
Harps you can play almost anywhere, anytime, with very little risk of getting noise control involved.
Playing the organ pretty much shuts down any other activity going on in the church, cathedral or town hall, which is why Lapwood tends to practice in the middle of the night.
"It's a really common thing. Organists around the world are kind of used to going into these incredible buildings after hours, having them to ourselves, and having that chance to experiment with the full sound of that instrument in that space."
It was at one of those midnight sessions Lapwood made the leap to rock and roll.
She was starting her practice session at the Royal Albert Hall while electronic artist Bonobo and his band were having a party after a gig. The bar they were in started shaking, as the sound of the organ goes through the whole building.
"A couple of them came up to see what was going on.... Some people just shouted up, 'Can you play the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor?'"
"So I played it for them, and then invited them up to come and see the organ and have a go, and then realised that they were the band. And they sort of made a joke, saying 'Wouldn't it be funny if you joined our show tomorrow for our last night.'"
"I really didn't think it was actually going to happen, and then.... I got a text in the early hours of the morning saying 'let's do it, let's bring the organ in to the show'."
Eighteen hours later, Lapwood is rocking Bonobo's world.
"It’s impossible to explain what it feels like when you feel the energy of five and a half / six thousand people just thrown at you. I mean, the moment the organ first came in, when no-one was expecting it, and the cheer that erupted. I will never, ever, ever forget that moment. And I still get a bit emotional, I get goosebumps when I watch the video back."
The Royal Albert Hall gig with Bonobo was the first of other crossover collaborations, including a recent concert with Ministry of Sound.
“No one expects the organ. And then when it hits, it’s like it hits them right in the chest, and it’s as if their sound world goes from 3-D to 4-D. They lose their heads every time. It’s quite a fun thing to watch!”
Lapwood's latest album, her second, is Luna. It's made up mostly of organ transcriptions of some of her favourite music and inspired by her experience looking up at the night sky in Zambia, a country she often visits for teaching work.
She's trying to sum up the enormity of the universe with arrangements like this:
Mind you, Lapwood argues, an organ is even bigger than the sum of its pipes: the instrument is the entire building it's inside.
“ A lot of people say the building is like the final stop on the organ. You will play a piece completely differently in two venues.”
Anna Lapwood Photo: Nick Rutter
No surprise then, after her conversation with Bryan Crump, the Cambridge-based Lapwood is off for another midnight-to-dawn session in London's Royal Albert Hall.
Her overnight practice routine: a lie-in in the morning, "then have a normal day at work, but maybe have a little afternoon nap, before I go to London, and then work through to 6am, sleep on the train back, have a little nap when I get home, and then have a slightly later-starting working day the next morning".
So next time you hear an organ playing in a cathedral in the middle of the night, it's probably not a ghost, but someone like Anna Lapwood doing that they love best, pulling out all the stops.
“They are massive. I mean, the 64-foot stops.... if you play that by itself, you can’t actually hear it, you just feel. It’s like your ears are pulsing and your whole body is pulsing. And when you put that in underneath the really loud organ sound, the whole air in the building feels like it’s moving in a different way.”
Anna Lapwood Photo: Martin Stevens
