MY OTHER
FAMILY
The London
Philharmonic Orchestra
About The Author
Laurie Watt is a lawyer and amateur French horn player. He is a product of a very musical family. His mother was an alumna of the Royal Academy, and his father took up the bagpipes in self-defence, which he practised at the local school for the deaf in Basingstoke. So, music, mainly, but not all, the classical kind, has kept Laurie more or less sane for all his life so far.
In the 1970s, he was fortunate to be around and available when asked, to defend a simple unfair dismissal claim on behalf of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
MY OTHER
FAMILY
My Other Family’ is an autobiographical account of the involvement of the author, Laurie Watt, with one of the great orchestras of our land, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he has, over nearly fifty years from the mid-1970s to present-day, established a close relationship
The author is a lawyer whose professional specialisms had nothing particularly to do with music law, but he was introduced to the Orchestra at a time when some fairly momentous issues arose in the late 1970s, involving the employment status of the members of not just the London Philharmonic but also, as it transpired, for the other independent London orchestras.
Not long after all these employment issues were satisfactorily, even triumphantly, sorted, then big changes at the Royal Festival Hall loomed with various attempts to change the orchestral structures in London by the powers that held the purse strings for much of what happened in music in the United Kingdom. These led to the tortuous, and occasionally hilarious, occasionally scandalous, road to sole Residency at the Royal Festival Hall. The author was there and fully involved as the Orchestra’s lawyer. He became very close to the Orchestra, helping them set up successful and profitable tours in Australia and South Africa because of his travels to those countries on his ‘other job’ as an international commercial litigator.
