***Please Note: The initial stock has now sold out and we are awaiting the next shipment, which is due in the warehouse in early August. We apologise for the delay***

In Not half bad, the esteemed composer, organist and former RSCM Director Harry Bramma offers a rich and deeply personal memoir that spans nearly a century of musical and ecclesiastical life in Britain. From his formative experiences as a Yorkshire chorister, through his Oxford studies with Bernard Rose and David Jenkins, to his transformative leadership roles at Worcester Cathedral, Southwark Cathedral and the RSCM, Bramma charts a life devoted to excellence in sacred music.

Told with wit, warmth and candour, this autobiography brings to life a remarkable era of church music, filled with vivid portraits of figures such as Melville Cook, Sir William McKie, Sydney Watson and Ralph Downes. Bramma reflects on the joys and trials of music-making in schools and cathedrals, on building choirs and championing standards, and on his theological insights that shaped both his approach to ministry and music.

Not half bad is both a personal testament of faith and artistry, and a unique window into the changing landscape of church music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

“The engagingly-told story of a musical lad’s remarkable sixty-year journey from a Yorkshire mill town to an Oxford organ scholarship, and thence to the cathedral organ lofts of Worcester and Southwark, leading to international eminence as the Director of the Royal School of Church Music and a retirement post at the only church in London that had once expected the gentlemen of the congregation to wear morning dress. We meet an array of colourful and eccentric characters along the way, evoking a lost England of gaitered bishops, steam trains and ancient country pubs where a good meal and a pint of ale could be had for five shillings – all affectionately portrayed with a keen eye for detail.”
Sir John Rutter CBE.

“Harry comes across as a proud Yorkshireman with a strong sense of history and a deep social conscience – echoes of Alan Bennett perhaps. ”
Dr Christopher Robinson