Richmond’s Moody Blue is taking to the Twickenham stage. Fiona Adams compares notes with flautist Norda Mullen...
It is not often that you hear a smooth, Southern American voice in Richmond. Yet here I am on a brisk February morning, enjoying just that in the kitchen of resident Norda Mullen, along with a cup of tea and a cheeky piece of baklava. Pretty and slight as a nymph, Norda is smiley, full of energy and enthusiasm and eager to extol the wonders of her adopted home town. “Lovely” and “magical” are her laudatory adjectives of choice.
An accomplished solo performer, as well as official flautist with the veteran band The Moody Blues, Norda moved here in 2010 to be with her British husband Kelvin, Workforce Director at Kingston Hospital. Kelvin fell in love with Norda from the audience at a Moody Blues concert in the early 2000s and admired her from afar for a year or so before the couple finally met in person, having been encouraged to get together by mutual friends.
“We started corresponding through MySpace. Then we had phone dates and we would be talking, talking, talking,” explains Norda, who will be in concert this month at The Exchange in Twickenham. “We finally arranged to meet in New York at a restaurant in the Village. I was terrified! I made the taxi driver go past real slow before he dropped me off, so I could get a good look at Kelvin waiting outside. I got out, we kissed, and the next day we went to Tiffany to look at a ring!”
A long-distance romance ensued, with much toing and froing across the Pond. In the end, the couple decided that it would be easiest if Norda came to the UK to live, as she could work from anywhere.
“Kelvin was living in Henley at the time, but he had an interview in Richmond. He left me to wander around the Green and have a coffee. When he came back I said: ‘I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll move to the UK if we can live in Richmond.’”
Norda was born in Tennessee in 1960, the youngest of six children with four sisters and one brother. The family moved to Mississippi when she was four and Norda was to enjoy a happy, creative childhood with her musical siblings, her father Perry, who worked in New York City as Vice President of clothing firm Garan Incorporated, and her Greek mother, Eleni Kondaloni, a musician and artist.
“My childhood was ‘battle, battle’; we fought a lot, but it was great,” she recalls. “Sometimes you look back and think: ‘Well, that was a little weird.’ But families are weird, especially with that many kids! They say you’re spoiled if you’re the youngest, but you’re not – you’re completely ignored. That’s why you have to be an overachiever!”
Invigorating childhood or not, however, young Norda grew desperate to escape the confines of Mississippi and, after a day trip to her father’s office in the Empire State Building, begged for the family to move to the Big Apple.
“My father was a Southerner and he wanted us to be Southerners too. ‘Southerners have a certain outlook on life that I want you to have,’ he used to say. I thought our house with its eight acres and two horses was all very boring… but my father was adamant. He exposed us to the world, through travel, but we were Southerners.
“As a teenager, I felt like I had a chain around my neck in Mississippi, but I have come full circle now and I love where I grew up. I understand what Dad meant; it was a wonderful place.”
Norda happily admits to having an ego and a hugely competitive spirit. By the age of 11 she had already formed her twin musical ambitions: to play on a movie and to be part of a great rock band. Having started the flute around that time, following two of her older sisters, she soon outstripped them.
“I wanted to be the best. Perhaps I just needed to be heard and seen, but I got very good, very quickly. I was soon better than my two sisters and they both quit!
“Even then I had to be the first chair in the school band [the premier position for a particular instrument]. I beat this guy who was two years older than me. My ego! I am learning that it’s not always good, but it does get you places.”
Indeed it does – especially when allied to natural talent and a fierce devotion to practice. At 14, Norda auditioned for the prestigious Interlochen Arts Summer Camp in Michigan, which she was to attend for four consecutive summers, studying with greats like Alexander Murray and composer Howard Hanson. It was demanding, but thrilling. Norda would have happily spent the rest of her school days there.
“It was very challenging mentally and you have to have passion. Everywhere you go you hear music; people practising. The training was intense and I would always come home after those eight weeks a completely different player.”
A tough training ground. Yet Norda accepted it without question.
“I knew it was my destiny. I always said that I wanted to be one of the best flute players. There are plenty of great ones, and I wanted to be very, very good too.”
After studying flute performance at Northwestern University in Chicago, Norda spent time teaching, playing commercials and doing sessions, even working in a bank, before following a boyfriend to LA. There she started doing the same thing over again, her career as a performer not really taking off.
“I did think to myself that there had to be more than this,” she admits. “I was kind of bummed out that it was so hard!”
Things changed when she began to teach the children of singer/songwriter and composer Randy Newman. After listening to a demo of her playing, Newman helped her achieve one of her life goals by getting her into Sony Pictures to play in the orchestras on the likes of Toy Story 2 and 3, Monsters, Inc, Jurassic Park and the Matrix series. Crucially, he also became her mentor, supporting and advising her through her career.
“He is my hero really,” she says with feeling.
Her association with The Moody Blues began in the mid-1990s when singer Justin Hayward was doing a solo tour in California and needed a flautist to play on three songs: Nights in White Satin, Tuesday Afternoon and Voices in the Sky. In typical Norda fashion, she had no qualms about taking on one of the most iconic songs in music history.
“Justin wanted me to play the solo in Nights and he started explaining: ‘Oh, there’s some funny flats and sharps in it…’ And I was like: ‘No offence, but I figured it out when I was 10 years old. It was the first song I learnt to play by ear!’ And he was like: ‘Oh right, of course…’”
She laughs in self-deprecation.
“God, I was so obnoxious!”
She eventually joined the band full-time in the early 2000s when original flautist Ray Thomas retired. Guardian angel Newman had a helping hand in urging agent Robert Norman to hire her and, despite a slightly bumpy start, Norda has never looked back.
“I listened to their music day and night – just Ray’s microphone recordings. I had to become him. But a lot of the fans didn’t realize that he had left and they were shouting: ‘Where’s Ray? You’re not Ray!’ It was tough going, that first tour, but the band was wonderful. I’m really, really lucky; the luckiest flute player in the world. I can’t think of any other band I’d want to work with. The Moodies are a shoe that fits perfectly.”
At The Exchange Norda will be going it alone, playing and singing some of her own works, as well as covers of songs by some of her favourite female artists, such as Annie Lennox, Michelle Schocked and Rickie Lee Jones – plus, of course, the incomparable Nights in White Satin.
“It’s kind of difficult not to do such a beautiful song!” she says, before going on to describe her flute as her “soul mate and sanity”.
“I just pick up the flute and feel better about everything,” she reflects.
After a couple of hours in her creative, cheerful company, you are guaranteed to feel the same way too.
Norda Mullen is performing at The Exchange, Twickenham, on Mar 23, 8 pm. Visit: exchangetwickenham.co.uk
