Nigel Kennedy, 69, is an English classical musician who found worldwide fame for his 1989 recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which has since sold over two million copies. Born in Brighton, he was heralded as a child prodigy and received a Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music in 1997. He is as much associated with his music as he is his love of Aston Villa – he is a lifelong, highly vocal supporter and often performs in club shirts. He has one son with a previous partner and now splits his time between Poland and the UK with his Polish wife of 28 years, Agnieszka.
Here, he shares the moments that made him, from being left under the piano as a baby, to moving to New York on his own at 16.
When I was growing up, a single-parent family was taboo, so my childhood wasn’t orthodox. I was born in Brighton and we lived in Hove. I was an only child and grew up with my mum and grandma. My dad was nowhere to be seen. He was in Australia – I only met him twice – and I have four half-sisters there.
My mum used to keep me under the piano as a baby, while she taught Beethoven, Bach and Chopin. She was a piano teacher but couldn’t afford babysitters. She started teaching me when I was three. Music was in my life before any other education.
When I was seven, I auditioned for the prestigious Yehudi Menuhin School of Music in Surrey. I won a 10-year scholarship, including board and education. Then I moved to New York City on my own at 16 to study at performing arts school Juilliard.
I paid for my rent in Manhattan through busking. You didn’t need a license, so me and my friend played outside Tiffany’s. People would come out having spent thousands on some meaningless bit of jewellery and chuck $50 into the violin case, out of guilt. This was the 70s, remember. We could pay a month’s rent by playing for two hours and still have a slap-up meal in an ostentatious restaurant.
I saw being able to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world as having made it. Unlike in a concert hall where audiences are a captive, ticket-paying crowd the street felt like a more honest test of whether the music connected. With busking, people were stopping because they wanted to hear it.
I didn’t settle down until my forties. I’ve been happily married for 28 years now. I was living in Malvern in Worcestershire, running up a hill, and saw this beautiful girl sitting there: my future wife. I would play parties with my mate Caleb, and one day Agnieszka was there, in a beautiful black dress. We’ve lived in Poland for 15 years now, up in the mountains on the Slovakian border – Agnieszka’s family are all here.
Being in touch with nature, and peace and quiet, is where music evolves from. For me, that means long walks and letting musical ideas settle without distraction – themes and phrasing often come when I’m away from the instrument, rather than forcing them in a practice room. I can go walking, up into the mountains, for 25 kilometres without seeing another motherf**ker. All I’ve got to worry about is wolves and bears, and the rutting season in November for deer.
At 69, I still party as hard as I used to. We played at Ronnie Scott’s in London recently, and the party lasted a day and a half. It makes me sad when I hear potentially interesting actors and musicians say: “I’m such a much better person now that I’ve gone teetotal.” It’s another excuse for the self-obsession we’ve all got from social media. If life is not a celebration, and just a list of thou-shalt-not commandment–orientated shit, it’s not for me. The musicians I’m playing with at the moment are notorious for being shit partiers, but I respect them because they bring such great music onto the stage.
I always wear an [Aston] Villa shirt – always. I’ve got 30 at my house in London alone, and goodness knows how many back at my main home in Poland. People associate me as much with football as music.
I would swap all the music success for being a professional footballer. Having 40,000 people, all sharing the same dream, and scoring the winning goal, must just be such an amazing high.
I think people see me as a guy who either fixed or ruined classical music. They definitely see me as a renegade. When I walk into the villa, people sing, “His name is Nigel, he does what he wants”. I’ve never been inhibited by the imagined protocol of my work, as a lot of other so-called classical musicians might be.
Nowadays, I’d be diagnosed as having dyslexia – but they didn’t diagnose things like that when I was a kid. That’s probably a large reason why I’ve had to do a slightly more free-form job. I love reading, because it’s your imagination doing the job, but it takes me a lot longer to read a book than other people. I have absolutely no difficulty reading or learning music.
Whether it’s words or music, I’m very interested in the space between them. If you pause for thought before speaking, that’s a route to emotional communication. I’m very much into space theory – not as an airy-fairy thing, but as a way of finding truth amongst an overload of information.
Nigel is on tour until November