In the 1970s, a new supermarket selling LPs arrived in my home town of Hornsea, East Yorkshire, and I began spending my pocket money on records. I was just 12, and fell immediately in love with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I dreamed of playing that music myself. We didn’t have a piano in our house, but there was one in my grandmother’s care home, where I learned to play Beethoven by ear.
On Saturdays, I would walk two miles to a village church that had a piano. The church was surrounded by pig farms and covered in nettles. Teaching myself how to play there, with pigeons cooing and farmers ploughing the fields, was magical.
I left school at 16 and managed to get into the Royal Academy of Arts. I continued to play piano all my life, working as a concert pianist alongside being a professional portrait painter. In my 30s, I visited Thailand for a few months, where I met my wife. We married in 1996, and I’ve been in Thailand ever since.
My wife is an artist and started making sculptures of elephants at a sanctuary called Elephants World, which cares for rescued domestic elephants just outside Kanchanaburi in west Thailand. There was one particular elephant that seemed to have such deep, passionate feelings. It made me wonder what would happen if I were to play music to them.
For my 50th birthday, my wife persuaded the manager of Elephants World to allow us to bring a piano into the sanctuary. These elephants have worked for humans all their life and many are blind or disabled from being treated badly, so I wanted to make the effort to carry something heavy myself.
To get the piano into the wilderness was challenging. The sanctuary is on the banks of the River Kwai, so we used a pickup truck to transport it. We placed it in a field planted with bana grass, where the elephants gather to eat their breakfast. It’s a peaceful area undisturbed by visitors.
When I started playing, it was hard to hear the piano above the sounds of nature and the elephants munching grass. Elephants are almost always hungry – if they get the opportunity, they’ll eat and they won’t stop. But as soon as I started playing, one elephant, who was blind, stopped eating and listened. We realised that this elephant, trapped in a world of darkness, loved music. From that day, there was never any concern about disturbing their peace, and that was the beginning of it all. We occasionally film the performances and now have nearly 700,000 YouTube subscribers.
I continue to play for these elephants that run free in the sanctuary, though I could be killed at any moment. It seems to be the male elephants, the ones who are moody and dangerous, that listen to the music the most. I have faith that the music somehow calms them. Once, a particularly dangerous bull elephant walked straight to the piano when I started playing, and curled up his huge trunk in towards his mouth. He looked like a baby sucking its thumb. He just stood by the piano and I thought, bloody hell, isn’t this the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen?
Their breathing actually slows down when you play, which tells me they are relaxed and happy. There was one elephant that would walk away if I played Schubert, but stayed for hours for Beethoven. I’ve even had elephants that would appear to dance to Beethoven. But music is only one part of your day with them. You have to build trust. These elephants have been mistreated, so I spend time cleaning and feeding them.
I’ve played pre-recorded music in the jungle, but they didn’t seem to react; same with the electric piano. An acoustic piano, where the sounds vibrate off the wood, seems to communicate better with the animals. They have excellent hearing and can pick up sounds through their feet. I also think elephants understand the language of human expression, which shows that music really does connect us all. It’s a universal language.
In the last 13 years, I’ve played for the elephants about 150 times. Being from Yorkshire, I never would have thought I’d fall in love with an elephant, but I have done many times. They feel like family.
• As told to Daniel Dylan Wray
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