shadows of echoes of memories of songs

Chess: the musical
Oxford Playhouse, Thursday 27th November

I wish I'd written at the time about the semi-staged production of Chess that we saw in the summer -- a marvellous birthday present from Owen, who knew that I'd've travelled a long way to see any production of Chess, so a concert performance at the Albert Hall hosted by Tim Rice (and starring Marti Pellow) was the icing on the cake. If I'd had the review of that to refer back to, I'd've been able to compare notes more easily; tonight's production at the Playhouse was very different in all sorts of ways. For a start, it was fully staged, with an incredibly busy stage: I've always thought of Chess as a very static story, but this production managed to fill the stage with dancers and chorus nearly all the time -- which of course threw the one- and two-person scenes into much sharper relief, gave them much more of a sense of showing the private face of public characters.

( Probably only of interest to people who know the musical )

For those who haven't heard the musical (and therefore hopefully skipped all the dissection above!), I thoroughly recommend it: it's got a serious plot that's not your usual musical "girl meets boy/becomes famous/becomes a nun/flees Nazis" stuff, it's got clever and witty lyrics, and some really fantastic tunes -- several of which are available on last.fm.

I have a bit of a dilemma. It's a bit of a long rambly explanation, sorry.

At the beginning of this term I was asked if I'd like to play violin in Hertford College Orchestra, who would be playing Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll, Haydn's Surprise Symphony, and Britten's Simple Symphony. ( from apparent organisation to total shambles: stressful rehearsals, why attendance is important, and some bitching about conductors )

Anyway. The point is I'm not enjoying it at all; I don't think anybody else is enjoying it either; and the music sounds appalling because there just isn't enough sound there -- honestly, even Haydn doesn't sound convincing with only a dozen people, and Wagner is just out of the question. Okay, maybe if you had a dozen members of the LSO you could carry it off; but, really, it's not like that.

So my instinct is to say "This is not doing me or anybody else any good" and resign now, with 2 rehearsals to go before the concert. HOWEVER: having missed two rehearsals I feel like I have no moral high-ground from which to complain about poor attendance, and it would be hypocritical to cite that as a reason for wanting to give up. (But I did warn them before even joining, and they could quite reasonably have said "no, sorry, not good enough" when I did so; but they may not have been confident enough to say that to a Grown-Up; but that's not my fault!) And if I resign, they will be even worse off than they are now, and I'd feel like I was letting them down. (But that may be a good thing in a way, as it might either make them make more effort to round up their fellow students or push them into cutting their losses and saving everybody a lot of stress and disappointment -- a rubbish concert isn't going to benefit anybody, really.) ALSO I worry that my judgement is being coloured by the fact that I am fairly busy at the moment and honestly, there are more interesting things that I could be doing with my time. But half of my irritation with the bad attendance is that lots of people have made a commitment and then not made good on that, and if I do the same, I'm Part Of The Problem (but at least I'd be telling them openly rather than just Not Turning Up). And ye-es, I could just claim that I had to stop because of work commitments and duck the issue altogether, because as a Grown-Up I have that get-out-of-jail-free card, but that really wouldn't be right.

And if I don't do something soon it really will be too last-minute to drop out; but I fear it's already too late to turn this into a good performance, which paradoxically may mean it's already too late to drop out and the only option now is to grit my teeth and live with the fact that we're going to have another 6 hours or so of miserable rehearsal and then look a bit stupid in public for a couple of hours (but hey, it's not my friends and classmates who'll be watching), and maybe that will make people realise why it's important to turn up to rehearsals.

ALSO (meta-angst) I feel like I'm being so bloody pompous in trying to ascribe so much moral weight to something which is so trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I do think of things in these terms, and even trivial choices are still choices. I blame the Chalet School for this attitude, incidentally.

So, er, your advice and thoughts welcomed...

With just three weeks left in which to pack up, up sticks, mix metaphors and move house, clearly the most sensible way to spend the weekend was in the heart of the Midlands, at the first ever Loughborough Folk Festival.

Regulars of Cambridge Folk Festival (and readers of smallbeds's eloquent rant about Cornbury Folk Festival) will be familiar with the peculiarly middle-class Gazebo-Rage-inducing type of Folk Festival, frequented by belligerent real-ale-drinking Guardian readers and people who don't-know-much-but-they-know-what-folk-isn't (and it usually isn't at least two of the main acts at Cambridge)...

Well, before you get too carried away with vicarious indignation, Loughborough Folk Festival was nothing like that. For one thing, it was indoors, and on reflection, I think this is a much underrated location for festivals. Throughout the weekend I found myself completely untroubled by nostalgic thoughts like "Wouldn't this be improved by six inches of mud?" and "It's good, but I'd feel more at home if I was trying to watch the act through rain-smeared glasses and a forest of other people's umbrellas". This also meant that real sound systems could be used: that is, ones that allow sound to be heard. It's jolly good, this amplification thing. They should patent it.

Secondly, the gigs were seated. Again, I didn't find myself yearning for the uninterrupted view of a bald chap's shiny head, or the smalls of tall men's backs; instead, I enjoyed a clear view of the stage and the performers. Clever idea on somebody's part, there!

Thirdly, there was real ale in abundance -- never mind your usual two-varieties-of-Charles-Wells-and-count-yourself-lucky, we're talking about 12 different varieties including a very nice stout (Grantham Stout, IIRC), which is not bad for a mini-festival in a town hall. (Unfortunately there wasn't really any food to speak of, which was probably the festival's only major deficiency; but with half-hour breaks between most sets there was time to nip out and sample, er, Loughborough's finest -- or in our case nip back to my parents' house for meals.)

Fourthly, there was some kind of respect for the performers. No mobile phones allowed (and I didn't hear a single one go off), no nattering through the gig, and no wandering in and out of the concert rooms except during the applause between songs (as I found to my surprise when we arrived late for one of the acts we'd wanted to see); and a general expectation that you'd sit and watch the performers instead of doing the crossword, eating pies, or playing games with your kids. A bit of a culture-shock after the usual festival fare, but a very welcome one. Imagine, actually listening to the music you've paid to hear!

And now, about that music... ( Demon Barbers Roadshow; Coope, Boyes & Simpson; Tiny Tin Lady; Tim van Eyken; Rachel Unthank; Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick )

There are few things as annoying as a boast disguised as a complaint (though praeteritio may come close), so I won't say that I've been to too many gigs recently (see?). It has created a bit of a backlog, though, so apologies in advance to regular readers for the coming batch of reviews.

The weekend before last was the Cambridge Folk Festival; I've never yet been to a bad Folk Festival, but this year we were particularly lucky with both the weather and the music. ( More about the music! )

Recommended music:
• Rachel Unthank and the Winterset [also see myspace]
• The Broken Family Band [also see myspace]

Reviews of the festival:
• addedentry reviews more concisely from his own perspective (by which I don't just mean being able to see over people's heads)
• sion_a has some interesting thoughts on definitions of 'folk'
• A more balanced review from the Independent, but hey, they get paid to do this properly

Cambridge people! A friend of mine is organising a concert this Friday in aid of the Leukaemia Research Foundation. I'm intending to go, and I'd love some other people to come with me.

Who?	Cambridge Voices, a 16-strong chamber choir with a passion for sensual music, a love of liturgical ceremony, a keen eye for choreographic musical illumination, a devotion to French cuisine and an unconventional sense of theatre. For this special concert a reduced choir of eight voices, conducted by Ian De Massini, will present a dramatic, mixed, multi-part programme, ranging from sacred motets to secular madrigals and close harmony.
Where?	St. Paul's Church, Hills Road, Cambridge. [Map]
When?	Friday 30th June, Doors 7:30-10:30pm, music 8:00-10:00pm.
Go on then... how much?	Pew Seats, £6 Table for 6, £50 (includes 1 bottle of wine and snacks). I'm aiming to get together a table of 6.
Sounds great! How do I get tickets?
If you want to make up a table with me, please comment here or email me before Wednesday evening. Otherwise, you can buy tickets from Miller's Music shop / Ken Stevens Instruments, Sussex Street, Cambridge. To avoid disappointment, pre-booking is recommended.

Full details of the concert are on the Raise1000 website.

I went to a previous event in this series, a concert given by the Silicon Edge Big Band, and it was great fun -- an evening of toe-tapping music, food, wine, and generally a really good atmosphere. I suspect this concert will be a slightly quieter affair, but the music promises to be absolutely fantastic. So let me know if you want to come along!

The Organ
Club Goo, The Soul Tree, 29th March 2006

addedentry and I went to see The Organ last night. He doesn't think I'm going to say anything about the music. Now, admittedly, if I try to describe the sounds I risk backing myself into pseud's corner: I could talk about hard drumbeats driving like the stroke of an oar through rising waves of synth and bass crested with the bright whiteness of a single guitar; I could talk about a yearning voice shimmering in the darkness ... but I suspect you'd rather I spared you that sort of thing. Or I could do that old triangulation trick, where I tell you that they sound like the Editors collaborating with the Cure, fronted by a female Morrissey; and let's face it, there's nothing really radical or new in there, so that would probably tell you pretty much everything you needed in order to decide whether you were likely to like them, though it wouldn't tell you how the music surrounds you like star-studded darkness. But then, in the end, none of it tells you anything, and frankly I might have been better going along with Owen's expectations and just telling you that if I was still a teenage fangirl I might well have taken down my posters of Toni Halliday and Alison-out-of-Cranes to make room for The Organ's Katie Sketch (vocals) and 'Schmoo' (bass). So there you go.

There was an almost comically bad support band, too, but since they couldn't reliably remember what they were called, I think I'll spare their blushes and pretend I've forgotten as well.

The Sultans of Ping
Highbury Garage, 18th March 2006

You know how it goes: I bought "Casual Sex in the Cineplex" as a teenager (on vinyl, of course), and was faintly embarrassed by the jokey smuttiness of the title, and yet somehow proud of being grown-up enough to know about casual sex, to know what "one night of mischeva in a yellow Vauxhall Viva" implied, to know the lyrics to songs about leather boots. Sure, on the outside I was a fat kid with acne and oversized glasses, but inside I was a Teenage Punk From Planet Sexylove.

So fa so good (as fellow 90s novelty punk act Carter USM said, before they got embarrassed by their "Unstoppable Sex Machine" epithet and swept it under the acronym). But it wasn't just the image: it was the songs. They were funny, and you could jump up and down to them, and imagine shouting the chorus out really loudly, and dream of the day when some floppy-haired indie kid would be impressed that you knew all the words to the shouty bit at the beginning of "Where's Me Jumper?", even the 'Latin' bit that didn't make any sense.

[looks at addedentry shyly from under an imaginary fringe]

So Saturday night was, at least in part, an exercise in time travel. It was going back home and picking up my teenaged self, giving her a gig ticket and a train ticket and enough cash to buy alcopops, and promising to tell her parents that she was sleeping over at my house if they called. And, for the full-on fairy gothmother effect, transforming her 8-hole Doc Martens into 6-inch-platform New Rocks. Cinderella, you shall go to the gig.

And it could have been purely an exercise in ironic nostalgia; it could have been a sing-a-long from the sidelines, with archly self-deprecating dance-moves. It could have been all that, until Niall strode on stage through the dry ice. White vinyl trousers, shiny black boots, white fur jacket, black tshirt, a string of pearls, a curl of the lip ... and the crowd surged forwards, and before I knew it I was shouting all the words and screaming myself hoarse in the gaps between. Oh, there was still plenty of irony; but it was kitsch, it was camp, it was laughing with Niall as he pretended to tease and we pretended to swoon as our fingertips finally managed to brush his fur coat, his pointed boots.

You've been away a long time. ... Good to see you're laughing, baby.

They played all their hits, a non-stop barrage of three-minute punk/pop songs that kept the temporarily-teenaged twenty- and thirty-somethings pogoing, and kept the stagedivers diving for dear life. It was all every bit as good as I'd remembered or imagined: the token harmonica solo was hammed up, the shoutalong choruses were shouted, and jumpers may well have been lost in the melée of the moshpit. After sustaining a degree of bruising from the barrier that I hadn't managed for a good 6 years, and after my glasses got knocked off for the second time (though remaining miraculously intact), I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and ducked out for a breather... but soon handed my glasses to an indulgently grinning addedentry and launched myself back into the fray again.

Dancing at the disco! Go go go!

Standing at the front and seeing the setlist spoils some of the surprises, but we all knew they were going to end with "Where's Me Jumper"; what we didn't know is that they'd then play another few songs, shouting their defiance of the curfew in between. "We're going to play ALL NIGHT!" ... "They're telling us it's time to stop. But I don't believe in time! Do you believe in time? I NEVER BELIEVED IN TIME!!" I don't think most of us realised until afterwards that Niall had claimed it was curfew-time fifteen minutes early just for the pantomime of playing on in spite of it: that's showmanship. At the end, he threw his string of beads into the crowd at the end. I was too far back to catch them, but when I rejoined lnr at the front as the crowd started to disperse, I picked up a handful of loose beads from the floor, diving between people's boots, diving for pearls.

We bounced back to Highbury and Islington, and caught the tube to King's Cross, and then ran all the way from the entrance of King's Cross to the front four coaches of the furthest platform just in time for the 11:11 train, and I don't think any of us turned into pumpkins (though the crowded train was a bit of a squash).

All in all, the 1990s are proving so much more fun this time round.

[see also: lnr's review.]

Yesterday was my first full choral evensong with Peterhouse choir. (There was a shorter evening service on Thursday, with no sermon, no hymns, and only spoken responses.)

It's amazing what the body remembers. The walk, measured and dignified but not too slow, for processing and recessing ("For a proper Anglican procession, you should walk as if you're holding a 10p piece between your buttocks," a particularly camp organ scholar once told me, and I wish I could lose the memory, but I remember him and his lurid Warhol waistcoat every time I walk in and out of chapel); the bow to the altar at the beginning and end of the service. The standing, the sitting, the half-kneeling. The constant awareness, without self-consciousness, of where the body is and what it's doing.

The brain remembers too, though with singing and speaking it's a fine line between mental memory and muscle memory: the whole of Tallis's If ye love me, for which I only realise halfway through that I've not needed to look at the music, though the miracle there is that I've not sung the tenor part by accident; the arcana of Anglican chant; the Apostles' creed; the collects, which are buried somewhere deep enough in the brain that the shivers along my arms at the Lighten our darkness catch me by surprise.

I remember the general confession that we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and how the simple phrases cut through the modern language of stress and faff and guilt and angst like a knife, like a flaming sword.

What I had forgotten, though, was the pace, and the peace; the way each word is weighed and set in place; the solemn gravity of the dance. There is space for contemplation, or for merciful release from contemplation; there is fragile, precious space between people and words and notes like the inch of air between the flame and the glass. Inside the chapel time slows down, falling like flecks of dust through the candlelit shadows. Even the flurries of activity are quiet: the choir creaks and scurries its way up and down the stairs to the organ loft, depositing bags and coats and folders out of sight; the Master and the Chaplain walk swiftly past, gowns swirling and billowing through the small doorway as the choir rustles into white surplices, fluttering in the gathering dark like wings outside a window.

venta is officially the coolest person in the world for, ooh, at least all the rest of this afternoon. :-) The reason for this accolade: in the course of her excellent (recommended, readers!) Friday afternoon Boogie at your Desk feature, she has just successfully identified a song that I loved every time they played it at PANIC but never managed to find out what it was.

The song is "Time Bomb" by Rancid. If it's at all representative of the band's output, then they're much better than the rather inauspicious name would suggest!

It's not as if I needed more CDs to add to my wishlist, but it would be really churlish to complain about discovering more good music. :-) Talking of which, I should also probably take this opportunity to thank acronym for constantly recommending Pink Flag by Wire, which I finally got round to buying (£5 in Fopp at the moment!). It's great: now a) I know where Elastica got that fantastic riff that kicks off "Connection", the thieving so-and-sos, and b) I can say "they sound a bit like Wire" about all the good-ish new bands instead of having to flounder around somewhere on the Cure / Joy Division axis (AXIS OF GOFF).

World exclusive first play of Kate Bush's new single "King of the Mountain" will be on the Ken Bruce show today! That's Radio 2, 9:30-12:00. If you're online, you can listen live with RealPlayer.