Yet Memorial was, and for me will remain, indissolubly tied not to a fictional film death but to the death of 39 Italian citizens at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, witnessed throughout the world on TV on the evening of 29 May, 1985. At that time I was working on a commision from the Festival d'Été de Seine Maritime in Rouen for a large scale work, lasting around an hour, to be performed in an electricity generating station at Yainville made redundant, silenced by nuclear power. The building retained its potency, however, in its enormous scale, its permanent collection massive generators and turbines and its vast window at the far end. All these features, coupled with a reverberation time of around ten seconds suggested, indeed dictated, a slow, powerful, processional composition in which the harmonic overlapping brought about by this extremely live acoustic would be organised in such a way as not to be disruptive. Switching on a television set that Wednesday evening expecting to see a football match between Liverpool and Juventus, I witnessed a massacre. In the following few days newspaper photographs of the grieving families made such a profound impact on me that the composition, previously abstract, purposeless and title-less, gently transformed itself into a memorial for the dead football fans.
