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.

The author spends some time throughout the book on some of the occasionally quite amusing byways of orchestral life, travelling with the Orchestra, the management, the conductors, and the players he came to know; also quite a lot about the music and the setting up of the LPO Record Label and his own involvement in that.

This is not a formal history of the London Philharmonic over this period, as the author has restricted himself to those aspects of its life in which he became involved or even entwined and takes the reader through its 50thAnniversary celebrations and onwards into the new century, with upheavals at the South Bank, a major crisis in 2009, and right up quite close to the great pandemic that started at the end of 2019 by which time he had been invited to be an Honorary Member of the Orchestra for Life.