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It can be quite humbling when you sit with someone blessed with a natural ability, someone who can casually bring a musical instrument to life. Especially when your own musical genius extends little further than singing along to the radio, stuck at traffic lights when you think nobody is watching. The good news is that humility is trumped by modesty when you meet Bryan Mackenzie, who has been in Dubai for 8 years now. “I suppose it sounds a little bit corny, but I was waiting for the tube in London-freezing cold, fed up wrestling with the paper and there was an ad in there for a job over here. All sounded a little too good to be true but I was so sick to death of the commute I thought what the heck-and went for it, and I have been here ever since.”
He will tell you that he can play the piano, and indeed he can. What he won’t tell you is that after starting playing at 5 years old he was teaching others to play by the age of 12! “ I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was so keen. I was working part time in my local music shop so I just craved any opportunity to play. I guess I had about 20 pupils at a time - couple of kids but also quite a few adults. Of course they were a bit skeptical at first! There was a big curtain at the shop that separated the teaching room. I would make this big play of coming out to meet these people who would look at me as if to say “Is your dad in?”, then I would play a few bars and their jaw would hit the floor, I guess I loved the theatre of it all and so it made it easier to perform in public later on.”
These were then days before Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and telephone votes decided if you were good enough to entertain the nation. Some older residents from the UK might remember Hughie Green, ‘Opportunity Knocks’ and his famous ‘clap-o-meter’. It would gauge by studio applause who the winner was every week - maybe things haven’t changed that much. “Yes it was all a fix! But nobody really cared too much. I worked with Hughie quite a lot as well as most of the TV stars of the day, but it was a different time. The only famous pianist was Liberace who was almost a comedy figure but a massively accomplished musician. Without him there was no Elton John, without him no Billy Joel and without him no Joels Holland, so these things evolve.”
“I’d lived all over Dubai at first and when they started building it seemed a smart choice to buy an apartment here, so I did, and I love it. I also wanted a kind of hide away from the West End of London. I still go back almost monthly, but now I have a sanctuary here.”
”I also wanted to play less music, I’d been playing; teaching and selling pianos for 20 years and so needed a bit of a change. I have tried a few things here and currently deal in property in the Caribbean, so it is a bit of a change”
“I suppose the one guy I would like to see perform here is Michael Buble, but I would travel anywhere to see a good musician. I was in the States last month, a weeklong round trip just to catch one performance. The guy wasn’t even particularly famous, and the tickets were only US$50 - but that’s the whole point of musicit’s what you like that counts”
And the future? “Well I am 50 next year, and we did a great gig a while back where some ‘rich and famous’ types had hired a French chateau. They flew me in with a couple of West End friends and we put on a special private show which was fabulous, so I am thinking of having a similar party for my birthday … but I’m staying here in Dubai, for the foreseeable future, at least. Who knows what the future holds?” With that he swivels on his stool to casually remind me of his natural talent. It takes less than three bars for you to appreciate the ease with which he plays, and for a while you’re compelled to just listen.
