Tram driver’s concert dreams stay on track
REUBEN IS A PIANIST IN HIS SPARE TIME
REUBEN Lee from Lenton has two loves in his life.
By day, the 25-year-old, who was born and grew up in the city, is a NET tram driver.
But he is pursuing a career as a concert pianist by night.
The two professions aren’t immediately associated. But it’s all Reuben has ever known. And he says he doesn’t know which he’d put first.
“It’s splitting hairs because I have a passion in both,” he explains.
“I love music, but I also love trains and trams and transport. It’s about trying to find a balance where I can do both.”
A lifelong train fanatic, Reuben dreamed of one day growing up to work on the railway.
Admittedly unsuccessful in traditional academic subjects, he didn’t go to university and instead went straight to work at Deliveroo, then Subway and KFC.
When a job came up to work on the refreshment trolley on the trains, his customer-facing experience in the food and drink industry was ideal.
He took up the position and, when trains stopped running during the pandemic, worked in the depot cleaning the carriages.
“It’s a lifelong passion I’ve had,” he said.
“I’ve always loved trains, been interested in railways, architecture and public transport, that sort of thing. I had all the Hornby train sets when I was little and used to go on day trips on trains.”
But it was the tram that gave him his break. In his younger years, Reuben had brushed off a suggestion from a job supervisor at a careers fair that tram driving might be a good way into train driving, as it “wasn’t the same”.
A few years later, he looked into it as a way to get a “foot on the ladder”. He started applying.
He never heard back from a number of applications. Then, one day, he was invited for an assessment day, and they gave him the job there and then.
“It’s a dream position really and the best job I’ve ever done,” he says.
“It really fulfilled a stepping stone for me. It’s similar to train driving in a lot of ways – looking after a lot of passengers, stopping at stops, letting people on and off.”
The one subject he did excel in at school was music. Following in his mother’s footsteps, he started learning the piano at the age of five, his parents giving in to his incessant bashing of the family instrument’s keys.
After he’d reached the maximum level with his first piano teacher, he was playing on the Victoria Centre’s piano one day when he was approached by Carly Collingwood, who asked if he had a teacher.
He said no, and she asked him if he wanted one. It was the start of a new dawn for Reuben, then aged 19.
Through his current teacher, Brenda May at Nottingham Trent University, he met the Royal Concert Hall’s Director of Music, Neil Benneson.
It was through Neil that he got the opportunity, after a successful audition, to join the pool of pre-concert pianists for a season at the venue.
His first performance was as the pre-concert entertainer at the Royal Northern Sinfonia Orchestra’s show on February 20, with worldrenowned clarinettist Julian Bliss.
It’s the first step in what he hopes may become a career. But not just yet.
“I’m probably going to stay on the tram for quite a while,” says Reuben. “I love this job!”