Andrea Bocelli
“Wine is a passion for me, and making wine is something my family has always done. My father made it, in a rather old-fashioned way, for drinking at home. My brother and I started to make wine commercially in 2000, using local sangiovese grapes. We only make small quantities, but you can buy it all over the world.
“I’ve enjoyed wine ever since I was a young child. At the beginning, it was just a drop of wine with dinner and lots of water, and, little by little, the amount of wine increased and the amount of water decreased.
“Food is important to me, too. Like all Italians, I love pasta. I can do without anything else but I have to have pasta. Of course, I eat international food when I’m on tour. I like Chinese – it’s good and light, which is the main thing. But I don’t eat for five hours before singing in a concert, and I’d never drink alcohol during a concert.
“There’s an Italian saying: ‘Wine makes you sing.’ The problem is, it makes you sing badly.”
Andrea’s ‘Vivere/Dare to Live: The DVD’ is out on 5 May, in support of the charity, Action Aid.
Supergrass
“We recorded this album in Berlin [says Mick, far left]. We were there for four weeks, but we didn’t eat much German food. We usually just went to the little Italian restaurant downstairs from the studio for pasta, though we did have a curry on one night. A modern German curry. It was odd, different from an Indian one. Still, better than the currywurst sausages they have. They’re hideous.
“We made the previous album in Normandy. That was better for food. There was a local market three days a week and we were staying next to a farmer who would bring us over fresh milk each morning, still warm from the cow.”
“Most of the band can cook a bit [says Gaz, second from left]. Baking’s my thing. Cookies, banana bread, drizzle cakes. I remember, on New Year’s Day I had this terrible hangover, but then I got this big burst of energy and made everyone pancakes. Thick and fluffy, proper American ones. There were 12 people around the table and I made about 30 pancakes. I had maple syrup from Canada. And I did some eggs and bacon. It was great. I’m going to make it an annual thing.”
Supergrass’s latest album, ‘Diamond Hoo Ha’ (Parlophone) is out now.
Michael Nyman
“As a composer, I don’t follow any ‘recipe’; I just use my nose, ear and eye to be taken wherever I’m taken. With cooking, it’s the opposite. I’m not a great inventor or risk taker, and I like to follow recipes, often to the letter. I have some authentic Italian recipe books, but I love Nigel Slater, too.
“I occasionally cook for friends, but I don’t do dinner parties. I live on my own so I cook survival stuff for myself; simple things like spaghetti with butter, garlic and fresh herbs. My kitchen is in the basement. It can get quite dark without sunlight streaming in but I’ve brightened it up over the years with items I’ve found. I often find things in markets near my house in southwest France.
“I usually take food upstairs to my recording studio to eat in front of a computer screen or the television. I keep up with all the soap operas – I tend to run the whole gamut from England to Australia. That’s either the curse or the joy of working freelance.”
The Michael Nyman Festival will be held at Cadogan Hall, London SW1, from 6 to 8 June. For details and tickets, visit cadoganhall.com.
Will Young
“They have a great café in these studios, but when you’re recording it can be hard to remember to eat well. You can forget to eat all day because you’re concentrating on the job in hand. I try to take stuff with me now when I’m recording, some fruit or some nuts and raisins maybe, to keep my energy going.
“I haven’t really had to eat too much weird food when I’ve been on tour. Actually, I eat quite well. We have great caterers. I can’t eat before a show, so they try to make me have a salad or something afterwards. The strangest thing I have eaten was when I was travelling in Africa. I was on a 12-hour bus journey from Mombasa to Dar es Salaam and lunch was included with your ticket. They told me it was fish and chips, and I thought, Wow! Great! That was until it arrived, and I discovered it was a fish head surrounded by boiled potatoes. Still, I made a bit of an effort.”
Will’s fourth album will be released this autumn and he will be on tour during 2008. See willyoung.co.uk for details.
Sandi Thom
“I love sushi. I always put it on my rider when I’m playing a gig. You have to aim high because you don’t always get want you want, unless you’re someone like Elton John. So I ask for sushi, and it’s a good surprise when I get it.
“When I started out, in Aberdeenshire, I used to travel to gigs in a fish van. It was from the local village and was the only transport we had. Two people would be lucky enough to sit up front; everyone else had to go in the back with the drums and the lingering smell of fish.
“It’s hard trying to be healthy when you’re on the road. I try not to eat a lot of junk food, but if you need to eat and you’ve only got two hours before you go on, then chicken ’n’ ribs it is. But I think with playing music you burn off as many calories as you take in. My band always say that if they weren’t doing this, they’d be really fat.
“On tour, we have a bus with a microwave and a hob, but there’s no oven. So it’s a real joy to come home. It’s great to be able to cook again.”
Sandi’s latest album, ‘The Pink and the Lily’ (Sony BMG) is out now.
Nicola Benedetti
“Food was a big deal in our family. I grew up in Ayrshire – my father is Italian and my mother is half Italian, half Scottish. She is a great cook; she does lots of pasta, and simple dishes like chicken with potatoes but always in a very Italian style. I ate the odd bag of fish and chips, but other than that, Scottish food didn’t really feature.
“I live on my own in London now. When I first moved here, I’d have people round for dinner, but now I’m always touring. I’m rarely at home for more than a week at a time, and often come back to a bare fridge. On the road, it’s tough to eat three meals a day; you grab something when and where you can. All the same, I do like to try to eat healthily, so I’ll suss out a good local place or the best thing on room-service. I don’t have a backstage rider or anything fancy like that.
“I like to finish meals with an espresso. It’s an Italian thing. But often on the road, especially in the US, the stuff you get is closer to black water.”
Nicola will be performing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto at Hampton Court Palace Festival on 21 June. Her album of Vaughan Williams and Tavener is out now on Deutsche Grammophon.