Why I never tire of Messiah

Clare Stevens, a tireless performer, riffs through the memory bank:

At around the time when I started singing for him he had famously been arrested for being drunk and disorderly in the street outside the church, on his way home from the pub on the other side of York Street, but conducted his own defence in court and arranged to get off on the technicality that when the police spoke to him he was actually inside his own house. Some years later he was sacked by the church after one argument too many with the rector – and one too many irreverent post-Evensong voluntary – and moved to the South Coast. he died far too young after suffering a heart attack on the organ bench.

Full story here.