Violinist Leo Phillips on his lonely life on the road and how he ended up in Bangkok

CHILD’S PLAY I don’t think I picked up the violin so much as had it thrust under my chin. Both my parents were very keen. My father is an artist, my mother is a music teacher and my sister plays the cello. I started pretty young, when I was five or six. It’s such a physical thing playing a string instrument that I think it’s good to start young.

Towards the end of my school days people were already asking me to play professionally. I played the Mendelssohn concerto in my school’s centenary concert and one of the other parents came to my dressing room and said, “Give me a call in a day or two, I may have something for you.” I was very excited by this burgeoning career opportunity so I did give him a call and he said, “I often get students to help me shift boxes in Harrods.”

But soon after that I had a stroke of luck – my sister’s cello teacher was Johannes Goritzki, who ran the Deutsche Kammerakademie, so I ended up going to Germany a lot to play at the Kammerakademie and then I joined another German orchestra. I did a lot of travelling – it was terribly exciting aged 18 or 19 and doing all that.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ... After a couple of years of that, Felix Wurman, who was the cellist in Domus, a wonder­ful group that he put together, sat me down and said, “You have to take your playing more seriously and do a bit more studying.” So, in 1985, I went to Chicago for a year to study with (violinist and teacher) Shmuel Ashkenasi. In Chicago, I also got into improvised comedy.

The stuff I learned from that, especially related to chamber music, was incredible – the idea of co-operating. One of the first rules you learn as an improvise person is that you bring a brick to a team not a cathedral, so you can subtly alter things in various ways. It’s all about patterns and connections that are hidden from the audience.