Page 129 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

Louis, Missouri, Josephine Baker. All being well, the show travels to Baker’s spiritual home,
Paris, in the spring.

As it is, after the Philharmonia concerts Bullock starts as artist in residence at the Guildhall

School in London for two years, charged with developing the students’ “creatives processes”.

And at the same time she begins her tenure as a “collaborative partner” with the San Francisco
Symphony, one of a kind of a supergroup of mostly millennial and fully hip musical innovators,

including the composer Nicholas Britell (of Succession theme tune fame), the jazz singer

Esperanza Spalding and the guitarist Bryce Dessner.

It’s very “Musical Avengers Assemble”, I suggest. “That’s exactly how we talk about
ourselves,” she hoots. Undeflected, she says that the idea is to let artists share their ideas on how

an organisation should actually be run.

Raised on musical theatre (her mother taught tap dance) and opera (her stepfather gave her

recordings of favourite divas), Bullock enrolled at music college, but midway through her
degree spent almost a month in rehab dealing with alcohol and substance abuse (“really

anything I could get my hands on”). This at least meant confronting demons head-on. “I was

grateful that I drove myself into a dark and distant place fairly early on.”

More gruelling battles were to come when, as a postgraduate at the Juilliard in New York, she

developed a psychosomatic disorder where she would open her mouth and nothing would come

out. She puts a hand around her throat to show me; let alone singing, it was “not being able to

speak for hours at a time”.

She asked mentors whether she should quit, but they pointed out that the singer they saw on

stage was much stronger than the person asking them for advice. It was “a realisation
that that person can inform the rest of you, and not the other way round”.