I expect that, by now, septuagenarian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen will have his feet up, having completed a remarkable series of gigs in Europe, largely, it seems, to supplement his pension after being ripped off by his accountant. It was quite a coup for the Manchester International Festival to book him for a series of concerts in the intimate surroundings of the City’s Opera House, especially since the festival is due to begin, er, next year. One in the eye for the Scouse capital of kulchur, methinks. I was there for one of these concerts, with ‘er indoors, who has always been a big Laughing Len fan, courtesy of The Guardian. They advertised a free prize draw, and, extraordinarily, I won- so, two prime £75 tickets on row D were mine. We went with a friend, Rachel, who was going for the second time. She is a stalwart of the Len discussion forums, and we met up with some of her correspondents at the Deansgate pub beforehand where I learned that tickets were going for £400 on ebay. What a lovely bunch the Cohenites are – a man in a pinstripe suit bought me a drink before scurrying off to the venue, and afterwards, we had a great chat with some fans before they got their bus home. The concert itself was fabulous, and I won’t go into the detail here – you can read very good accounts at the Leonard Cohen files and at the Guardian. I was hugely impressed at the professionalism and intensity of the presentation. Despite the rather snide reference in the Guardian review, I thought Dino Soldo’s energy and humour added a great deal to the band sound. The youngest people on stage were the sublime (Len’s word) Webb Sisters, who judged their contribution perfectly. They were really impressive, especially when they took over the very moving song If It Be Your Will. A really brilliant multi-instrumentalist band, and some very sensitive singing made this as good a show as it gets- one of the most memorable nights I’ve experienced in my concert-going career.
Playing tunefully away on the right is music by Pantagruel, whose album is available from the estimable Magnatune. They are appearing on simpering Sean Rafferty’s In Tune tonight on Radio 3. I’d love to see them perform. Update: I’ve taken the link down, because I got fed up with the same tune starting up every time I visited the blog. But it’s still available on Magnatune.
I haven’t read Clare Wigfall’s short stories, but with a bio like this, she just had to become a writer, didn’t she?: “Wigfall was born in London, but spent the first years of her childhood under the liberal sway of late 1970s California. She returned to England for most of her schooling, but her vital early impressions of travel are reflected in the places she has considered home and put pen to paper – from Morocco to Norwich to Prague. She now lives in Berlin.”
If you go, and you should, regularly, to the Clive James website, you’ll now find, in the links on the Cultural Amnesia page, a link to my review. I’m chuffed at that, and so I bring you, by commodious vicus of recirculation back to Topsyturvydom.
To Victoria Baths, star of BBC’s Restoration programme, and also star, I now know, of Life on Mars, for which it provided some atmospheric locations. Our object was to see and hear the Clerks, best known for their performances of medieval and renaissance polyphony – so why are we at the baths? Because, dear reader, in an innovative and imaginative step, the Clerks are performing a new programme in some unusual places, and the acoustic of the empty pool is ideal. The ambience is ideal too, and more of that anon. First, we had a tour of the building, which is essentially still derelict, even some years after the votes of viewers made it the winner in Restoration. We were told about the various difficulties that the council, who own the building had had with the people they contracted to work on the building, and the various plans that had been proposed and rejected. It seems though, that there is little chance that the baths, with its three pools (First Class Men’s, Second Class Men’s…and Ladies) will be restored to the condition it was at its opening in 1903, but the aim is to have at least one of the pools operating again. We saw all the pools, heard tales of famous swimmers, and of the local people for whom the baths was an important resource in the days before washing machines; we inspected the tanks and the chimney, and nodded sagely as we were told about the filtering process; but mostly we admired the scale and grandeur of the place, redolent of the civic optimism of the time. The Clerks were arrayed in the main pool, and we watched from the dusty seats in the gallery above. The programme is an unusual one. It’s called In Memoria, and, whilst part of it is familiar territory for them, one piece is a new commission, and the whole is performed as a single piece, interwoven with a recorded collage of sounds and voices, mainly children’s, speaking about the topic of death. That might sound unbearably pretentious, but it worked brilliantly. The programme features ancient chant from the Mass of the Dead, motets by Josquin Desprez, Guillaume Dufay and Jean Ockeghem and a new work by composer and sound artist Antony Pitts. Visually, the sight of the six black-clad Clerks gathered in the pool was arresting, and as they sung, their voices rose up through the building to the glass roof, where the evening sun shone through the cracked and broken panes. It seemed somehow appropriate to be listening to these laments in this noble but fractured building, in the dust and the peeling paintwork. The Clerks are to be commended for going way beyond the normal confines of early music, to produce an intense and vibrant experience.
Encyclopedia Britannica has made all of its content available to bloggers and other “web publishers”. Which is nice. It means I can link to their “On the Day” feature, which today is about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. There was a certain resonance in this, as nestling in my inbox today was the latest “Stop the Boycott” bulletin. When academic freedom is attacked in the way that some members of the UCU propose, it is salutary to heed the warnings of history. Update: So, rather predictably, UCU have decided to keep the boycott as a live possibility, without even having a debate. How marvellously democratic.
How many millions of words, what seas of verbiage, what torrents of tosh have been expended on the problem of public service broadcasting? And to what end? Into the debate steps Stephen Fry, and in a speech of forty minutes absolutely nails the problem. He was invited to make a contribution to the current inquiry into public service broadcasting. And this is some contribution. I defy you not to be impressed with this serious, but witty and incisive analysis. No fancy graphics, no sound or video clips, just that highly intelligent talking head. Go on – get a cup of coffee, and watch- and if you want a further incentive, you get to see Kirsty Wark telling people where the fire exits are.
