My audience with Manchester City star Nathan Aké — and his piano
The Dutch defender loved music as a child before football took over. Now the self-taught musician is taking his passion into schools
Martin Samuel
Wednesday May 29 2024, 5.00pm, The Times
Nathan Aké studies his hands. “I’m shaking,” he says. This is a man who, less than a week ago, played a cup final in front of 80,000 people. This summer, he carries the hopes of the Netherlands, his nation, into the European Championships. That concludes in Berlin’s Olympiastadion. It’s not small.
The crowd that has Aké rattled, however, comprises The Times, a video cameraman, his publicist Nina and a member of Manchester City’s PR team. Oh, and a piano. That’s the issue, the piano. Specifically, playing it publicly. Aké has a charity initiative, Playing for Change, that is dedicated to putting pianos into schools, and this means that, on occasions, he is required to demonstrate his skill, learnt in lockdown.
And we’re not exactly Saturday night at the Glasgow Empire, this little gathering in a canteen at City’s training academy, everyone ready with encouragement and applause. But Aké is a relative novice and uncomfortable. Later, he will be joined by three schoolchildren from the East Manchester Academy, and some photographs are taken side-on as he plays, so he doesn’t have to be aware of who else is in the room. His playing improves noticeably with camera lenses and eyeballs out of sight.
Aké (second from right) and his teammates celebrate a fourth straight league title
Aké (second from right) and his teammates celebrate a fourth straight league title
ALEX LIVESEY – DANEHOUSE/GETTY IMAGES
And that’s the reality for many footballers, removed from their comfort zone. It’s a lazy caricature, the arrogant player. The sport’s a cross-section. All jobs are. So some players are high maintenance, or aren’t very bright with the ball put away, but others are smart and caring and have a conscience, or have earned degrees and speak several languages. And some even like the works of the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi and want to put pianos into schools. Aké likes Einaudi and putting pianos into schools. His wife wishes he’d play more Chris Brown.
“Yes, she says that,” he says, smiling. “My missus is always like, why can’t you play more upbeat, why does it always have to be this emotional stuff? But I’m relaxed, I like more chilled chords, you know? Classical, but modern classical. Einaudi, Yiruma, Hans Zimmer.”
That was the last concert Aké attended: a celebration of Zimmer’s music at Manchester’s AO Arena in April. He didn’t go with his Chris Brown-loving spouse. He went with Rúben Dias, his defensive partner at Manchester City. It’s fair to say football has changed from the days of hairy-arsed centre-halves, all-night benders and Stringfellows. Aké and Dias can cope in at least four languages between them, and move in circles that are cosmopolitan and largely teetotal.
When Manchester City won their fourth straight Premier League title this year, the scenes of glassy-eyed players emerging from the celebrations suggested a collection of lightweights, not party animals. And, confined to home during lockdown like the rest of the country, it was Aké’s idea to reacquaint himself not with vodka but with a love of music forged at school in the Hague.
“I started with guitar, me and a friend, but then I got very professional with my football and that’s when I stopped going to lessons, which was a shame because I loved it really,” he recalls. “For me, it became only football, football, football. I was very driven and nothing else could get in the way. We nearly got a piano because someone had one they weren’t using, but it was too big to fit in the house and I can remember being disappointed.
• The figures that show classical music is skewed towards rich kids
“Then when lockdown happened, I started learning piano, just wondering how far I could get. I sort of surprised myself, because I was practising every day and getting such joy from it. I would practise for hours and hours and got into a real routine. Get up, gym, food and then piano for hours. It got to the point where I felt like I was addicted. Every night I would go to bed thinking about the piano, and what I had to do the next day. Then I started watching videos and copying people.”
It was when Aké’s new hobby came to the attention of Casio that the Playing for Change initiative was born. The company already had the germ of an idea but needed a figurehead. The East Manchester Academy, in the shadow of Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium — millionaires at one end, three quarters of the pupils getting free school meals at the other — was an obvious place to start.
“And we went there, and it was just fantastic,” Aké recalls. “They weren’t only excited that there was a footballer in the school. They wanted to show me what they could do, what they could play. Others wanted to start learning straight away. It really touched me seeing the kids’ reaction because we truly didn’t know how it was going to go. Then we saw how happy they were. They even had a band, four or five of them, playing jazz, playing Afrobeat — very keen.”
• There’s a proven way to bring music to state schools
The East Manchester Academy has kindly sent three budding musicians to our photoshoot. Toluwalase, 14, Mariam and Cyrus, both 13, are all multi-instrumentalists, with Toluwalase particularly proficient. His ears prick up at the mention of Afrobeat. He knows Fela Kuti’s Water No Get Enemy, playing in the background as the shoot is set up. And he’s the tallest in the picture too, dwarfing Aké. When the quartet pose together Toluwalase politely sits on a chair or the whole thing looks out of whack. But that hand span comes in useful for some effortless playing later, and he’s not fazed by spectators. Aké’s impressed.
“With football you can be nervous but you still play,” he adds. “It’s a team sport so you can have a bad day, but somebody, your team, helps you out. It doesn’t matter. With piano, it’s just you. You are nervous, you miss a key, then it is all ruined.” So he couldn’t be a concert pianist? “No chance.”
We meet the week before the FA Cup final, a few days after Manchester City have won the league. We get on to the similarities between the disciplines — the hours of practice, the dedication. Aké mentions “the zone”. The zone the best athletes operate in, clearing their mind of fears and distractions, and the zone of accomplished musicianship. They’re the same, he reckons.
“Things will go wrong all the time,” he says, “so you have to be able to deal with that. You will make mistakes and you have to keep going until you get it right. That’s what I learnt with piano at the start. It would be so easy to just give up. Even now, if you don’t focus you make mistake after mistake, and maybe people lose interest because of that. You get frustrated but suddenly, boom, it just clicks together. You just listen and, without knowing, you play it. There’s just this connection, very similar to football, it’s weird. The rhythm, the zone — when you’re in there, you’re not thinking about anything else. Once you’re in that zone, you just play, you don’t think about consequences.
• Why we must all bang the drum for music in schools
“We had a big game [against Tottenham Hotspur] a few weeks back. The manager [Pep Guardiola] said he could see us playing and thinking, what happens if we lose? We were thinking about the consequences of failing before anything had even happened. But like the piano, when you play free, it just flows.”
The next stage will be a countrywide rollout of 24 pianos. Schools are invited to fill in a form and a decision will be made on the most deserving and necessary applicants. These are troubling times for arts funding in schools, and not just in the UK. The right-wing coalition in the Netherlands, led by the Party for Freedom’s Geert Wilders, has spoken of cutting arts subsidies altogether.
“It’s a worry,” Aké admits. “When I was growing up, music was the subject everyone looked forward to. I know people who are still playing now because of what they learnt in school. If you don’t get that at a young age, a lot of people will lose it for ever and never find their way back again — never find their talent, never play, never find that joy. I think we’re discovering what you get back if you give young people instruments.
“It would be like stopping people playing sport. I’m thinking of all of us here at City. At a young age you’re trying to find what you’re happy doing.”
It shouldn’t take a footballer to remind us of that, really. But then not all footballers would, or indeed could.
The mancityfans.net football forum
The BEST FORUM in all the land and all the world
