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France Sud - 2011

2012-01-16T00:39:00.001Z

France Sud - 2011, a set on Flickr.

A set of images taken in 2011 in Montpellier, Marseilles, Nimes, Carcassonne, the Camargue and Aigues Mortes - all beautiful places to visit.

I went there in Spring 2011, and based myself in Montpellier. This is the eighth biggest city in France, and probably the one with the most progressively modern approach in the country.

It really has got everything - weather, decent food and access to the sea and some of the great sites of Roman Provence.

A Day in Perugia

2012-01-10T19:45:00.001Z

A Day in Perugia, a set on Flickr.

Last Autumn, I took myself off to Tuscany and Umbria for a few days just wandering around and taking pictures – as well as filling up on more than a few Italian meals. A couple of days in Pisa and Lucca, followed by mooching around Siena and the beautiful hill villages of the Val d’Orcia. My last day was spent in Perugia, the capital of Umbria, right in the centre of the country.

It’s a city of some 350,000 people, and one which in the past has clearly been a very affluent part of the world. The buildings are ornate, large and very impressive. Like so many of the important Italian towns in this part of the world, it’s built on a hill, so getting up to it is a bit of a trek. Perugia however has spent a fair amount of money building a dinky little metro system which winds its way from places like the railway station, up through sinuous tunnels bridges right into the heart of the city. Very welcoming to me after five days of trudging up from lowly positioned car-parks up into vertiginously located villages.

I took a fair number of pictures of the city – it’s a real joy to wander around. Located where it is, a fair distance from any of the “major sights” in the country, it doesn’t immediately jump out at you as the “Must See” attraction which it is – hence a pleasant lack of tourists (hypocritical sod!).

These pictures however are not the classic Umbrian Tourist Board views of the place. As I set off back to my base in Siena, I chanced across a young guy spray painting a graffiti painting on a wall next to the railway station, and after convincing him I was not after fingering his collar, I spent a while talking to him. Whenever I disappear off on one of these jaunts, I always write a diary, jotting down what I saw, what I felt, what impressed me and what didn’t impress me on my travels. For the five days of this holiday, the dairy ended up just over 16,000 words. Here is the extract (of 492 words) which relates to my introduction to Perugia’s new Caravaggio.

“As I left the station, I looked along the road and saw an Underpass with a couple of interesting looking graffiti on the concrete walls leading into it. I wandered along to get a better look and take a couple of pictures, and as I neared them I could see a few more bending round the corner. I started taking a few pictures and as I got further round, Lo and Behold there was a guy painting one. He’d got his ladder and his spray cans out and was in the throes of doing the outline for a new one. It was pretty big, about 10 feet high and 40 feet wide.

The guy saw me snapping away, stopped and came over to me. He was very suspicious at first, and we had a funny old conversation with me in very stilted Italian, and him in much better English about what I was doing. He was standing there wearing a handkerchief over his face, with the dual purpose of protecting him from the paint spray, and also making him far more difficult to recognise if the fuzz came along the road. He said he had to do it all with a very weather eye out for what he saw as “snoopers”. To start with, he suspected I might be an undercover Italian Cop trying to catch him out, but it didn’t take too long to make him realise that I really was a genuine English tourist just looking for a decent picture to take.

We had a good half hour talking about the politics of graffiti, and he came across as a hugely dedicated young man, mad keen and committed to what he was doing. He explained that the “Old Guys” art was up in the town’s Art Galleries, whereas all he and his fellow accomplices were doing was the same thing, but down here in the city’s underpasses. I’d never thought about it like that and it was hard to argue with him.

The city seemed to have come to a tacit arrangement with him and his fellow Banksys. The underpasses were pretty dismal, being just blank slabs of minimalist, flat concrete, and the authorities seemed to be prepared to let them carry on down here as long as they left the main part of the town alone. I must say, although I can’t quite reconcile the act of defacing someone else’s property with it all, I do find some of them very inventive, clever and often impressive. Most of them have a real zest, colour and a life to them which is hard to resist.

Anyway, I agreed to take a few more pictures and to e-mail them to him when I returned to England, although I did agree not to put any of him up on the Internet, just in case the local plods were looking on the web for evidence to nab him. All in all, he was a really nice guy and it was a totally unexpected and enjoyable half hour in his company.”

Blot on the Landscape - Theatre Severn

2012-01-04T21:35:00.000Z

Look at it, I mean just look at it. This is the TheatreSevern in Shrewsbury. It has to be one of the most unattractive modern buildingsyou’ve ever seen.

Architectural Mediocrity by the River

Every time I go there (and I go there quite a bit) I drive outof the car park mentally scribbling away at a piece for my blog, ranting aboutjust how boring and ugly the place is. I must have written the piece inmy head about a dozen times over the last year, but finally, I’m sitting downto put “pen to paper”, so to speak.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s just the outside that upsets me. Whatgoes on inside is really good. I am a great fan of live theatre. If ever themarketeers who look at these things tried to home in on the typical potentialcustomer for such a venture then, Yep, I’m Yer Man. Over the couple of yearssince the new theatre has been open, the shows they have put on have given me aserious amount of pleasure. Alan Ayckbourn plays, concerts, several Ballets, acouple of brilliant Pantomimes, singers like Elkie Brooks – even GilesBrandreth rabbiting on for an evening – all have entertained me extremely.

But that’s on the inside. It’s when you get outside it thatyour (or at least my) head drops. Who on earth designed the thing? Shrewsburyis a really attractive town which sits on Britain’s longest river, the Severn, asit flows around the Town Walls in a beautiful sweep. So you’ve got a Heaven-sent,once in a lifetime site for it all, sitting alongside a lovely stretch of theSevern that most towns would give at least their eye teeth for. As a backdropto the theatre, there is a lovely graceful bridge which elegantly arcs over theriver. So what then do “they” do? They erect a showpiece building, using MYmoney I might point out, which looks for all the world as if their design inspirationwas a dilapidated and unloved 1960s Secondary School.

Yes, Yes I know Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder and allthat, but apart from the Architect’s mother (and, having thought about it, Iwouldn’t even put a huge bet on that actually) and possibly the wretched individualon the Council who had responsibility for its final approval, I refuse tobelieve that there is a single person in the town who can look on it withanything other than varying degrees of loathing.

Go on then, find one. And when you’ve got past the sheeruninspired blandness, unconnectedness and nothingness of its shape, then look at the detailingon it. It seems to have been constructed from nasty beige Breeze Blocks, oldlavatory bricks and some reclaimed bits of fencing nicked from one of the localCouncil’s allotments. Even the naming on it, which should proudly proclaim suchan important undertaking seems to have been a total afterthought, designed tobe unreadable and invisible from anywhere it might be viewed.

This is what it looks like after about 2 years - very, very depressing

This is the entrance - a structure for which the word
"unprepossessing" was coined

Now I am absolutely and utterly NOT a “Prince Charles” Ludditeas far as modern architecture is concerned. Some of it is fabulous, and, doneproperly, can change for ever the way a town or city is perceived.

As an example, go to Birmingham and marvel at the Selfridgesbuilding. It’s only a department store, but what a terrific looking building.

Wander around the City of London, and you will still be astonishedat Richard Rogers’ incredible Lloyds Building, so fresh after 20 years.

Further afield, think how Geary’s fabulous Guggenheim Museumin Bilbao has completely transformed that city into a major visitor attraction.

Look with unprejudiced eyes at London’s Millenium Dome. Seeit at sunset from across the river, and it’s a remarkable sight.

Think about how a building like Utzon’s Opera House inSydney, once derided for looking more like a Nun’s Scrum, became an icon fornew Australia.

Be amazed at the daring of the Pyramid outside the Louvre.

The common factor in all these buildings is Bravery. Havingthe vision, and the balls to do something out of the ordinary. Not taking thesafe option. Yes, occasionally it goes wrong, but so often, over the years, theleap into the unknown turns into something great.

Yes, I know that Shrewsbury is not Paris or London orBirmingham, and it has far less resources at its disposal than these otherlarge cities. But the fact is that the new Theatre Severn cost around £28million, and, however you look at it, that’s a lot of money. Enough, you’d think,to buy you a design you can be proud of – if that’s what you want and set outto achieve. This building is going to be around for many decades, and there areenough examples around where inspirational design does not cost the earth. Allyou need is the person with the inspiration.

Architecture is the only art form I know where the generalpublic are exposed to it, whether they like it or not. If you don’t want to goto a concert, or a play or visit a museum, then the answer’s simple – Don’t Go.Which fact, on its own, is a good enough reason for those responsible to tryharder when they are building something new and important with public money. I don’t know whose fault it all is. Architect or Client? Orconceivably “person or persons unknown” as the police like to call it, but Ican’t for the life of me think who they might be.

So on the one hand, there’sthe Client, who I suppose is, or was the Shrewsburyand Atcham Council, and on the other there’s the Architect – Austin-Smith:Lord. To my simple mind, ifthe fault in it is the design brief from the Council, then any self-respectingarchitect should be prepared to decline the work, or make such a fuss that theclient realises the error of his ways, and gets them to pull their socks up andimprove the brief. You'd like to think of them as the conscience of the observer.

If it’s the Architect who isn’t coming up to scratch, thenthe Council should tap them firmly on the shoulder and get them to put someoneon the job who can fulfil their (and our) expectations. No doubt, if you evertried to get to the bottom of it, all you’d get is a gaggle of mutuallypointing fingers. ‘Twas ever thus. My only wish is that someone had asked myopinion before signing it off! That would have been one fence on which I wouldnot have sat.

If you look around it all now, it’s all a bit sad. TheArchitects Austin-Smith:Lord are inthe process of filing for Insolvency and the Shrewsbury and Atcham BoroughCouncil disappeared in 2009 as one of the consequences of this country’spermanent process of local government rearrangements, so any thought of actuallyfinding anyone to shout at has probably disappeared as a result. The outside ofthe building looks in desperate need of a bit of TLC, with the recycled allotmentfencing crying out for a lick of something to stop it rotting in front of us, making an unattractive building even worse.

So I will continue to be disappointed and a bit depressedwhenever I look at it on my visits there. The only good thing resulting fromthe current financial squeeze is that the Council don’t seem to want to spend anymoney on lighting it at night, so for the most part, it’s shrouded in darknesswhenever I go.

It’s an Ill Wind …….

Tabs:

shrewsbury, theatre severn, austin-smith:lord

Beethoven's Choral Symphony

2011-12-28T10:51:00.003Z

Is Beethoven’s Choral Symphony the greatest piece of musicever written? It’s there or thereabouts as far as I’m concerned, and it’s beenthat way now for many decades. A towering piece of invention with anoverarching structure, a staggering opening, a beautiful slow section and a finalmovement which changed music for ever. Immense power combined with great warmthand humanity, it always leaves me speechless.

I’ve heard it a few times during my lifetime, not too oftenI have to say. This is NOT background music to be played on an iPod as you jogaround the local park. It demands and deserves your full and undividedattention. The best performance I ever heard was at the end of the BeethovenCycle which Simon Rattle gave as his last concerts with the City of BirminghamSymphony Orchestra, in around 1995. It made such an impact on me, I can stillhear it today.

The LSO taking the applause.
(There's definitely something going on
between the Piccolo and the Horn Player!)

In my life, a fair amount of water has flowed under areasonable number of bridges since that performance, and tonight was the firstperformance of the 9^th I’ve been to since that night. A few days ago,I trooped off to Symphony Hall to hear it performed once more, this time performedby the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

Sir John is at the vanguard of the revival of early music, andits playing on instruments of the time. His performances are often described as“blowing the cobwebs” off the music, with consistently faster tempi than thoseperhaps we (certainly I)have become accustomed to experience over my lifetime.

The curse of music – the record, CD or LP – comes into playhere. Ever since I became addicted to music I have bought recordings to playwhen ever I wanted. The inevitable downside of this is that it is all too easy toimprint a “standard” recording - one which becomes the definitive performance -into one’s brain. So, when someone comes along with a different way ofperforming it, you have to approach it with an open mind, something which isoften not easy since you may have heard your “standard” performance hundreds oftimes. Anyway, I flung the doors of my mind open as far as possible and hingedthem back as I set off for Symphony Hall.

There’s almost a classic programme which is played when theChoral Symphony is performed. Beethoven’s 1^st Symphony is often usedas the first part of the programme. Written about 20 years apart, the two worksdocument and demonstrate the vast distance Beethoven moved the whole of music over his lifetime. His First Symphony is a homage to Haydn and Mozart, and his last, twodecades on, sits literally in another world. This comparison shows the power, the vision and the importance of the man, and why to me he is simply the Greatest Artist the world has everknown.

The 1^st Symphony suited Sir John’s styleperfectly. It was lively but with a great degree of power and muscle, and itshowed up the LSO’s virtuosity quite superbly. His conducting places significantdemands on the orchestral players, but they handled it with great panache. Ican’t recall hearing it played any better than this.

Now the Choral Symphony is a beast of very different shape anddimensions, literally music from another age. The LSO’s forces were notmassive, as Sir John’s approach was for precision, accuracy and fleet offootedness rather than the huge orchestras I have been used to. He positionedthe violins all across the front of the soundstage, and sited the deeperStrings on the left rather than the right. The Monteverdi choir numbered “only”about 40 strong, which was about 25% of the size of the forces under Rattle’sbaton 15 years ago. For reasons I for one couldn’t understand, the foursoloists sat on chairs on the far left of the orchestra, almost as if they wereon the Naughty Step for musical misdemeanours unknown to the audience. Surely,they were not going to perform their roles, which are central to the lastmovement, from the wings? Intriguing.

There were a lot of extremely good things about theperformance, but, sadly, I was not won over. Maybe it’s my inbuilt “Ludditeness”,I don’t know, but it all seemed a bit of a rush. The LSO’s playing wasterrific, giving the aura of a powerful car under the conductor’s baton, whichresponded instantly to his every demand. A special mention is in order here for twoof the players. Firstly the percussionist who I thought had a fantastic touchand a great technique. Secondly the Piccolo player, a lady who sat on the stageunmoved for almost all of the performance like an admiring groupie for thewoodwind player next door. When her time came, she stood up and her little setof pipes soared way above the rest of the orchestra – she played it extremelywell.

I enjoyed the precision and beauty of the playing, but tome, this is music which needs space to breathe. The slow movement wasn’t thatslow. It is a piece of serenity to me in the midst of some of the most tempestuousmusic you can find, and here it seemed to lack that air of stillness I wantfrom it. I’m sure Sir John, who is 3 years older than I am, would look over hisglasses, muttering something about “fuddy-duddy”, but it didn’t work for me.

The last movement took on the air of a man who had glancedat his watch and had realised that if they got a bit of a Wiggle on, they couldjust about make it onto the earlier train home. It rocketed off at a hell of arate, and when the soloists each walked onto the centre of the stage, midperformance (very distracting I have to say), I felt they were hanging onto theconductor by his coat-tails. They then, as their individual contribution wasover, trooped off to their seats in the wings. All too “Brian Rix” farce forme, and quite unnecessary and theatrical. It took something away rather thanadding to the performance.

The whole performance was all very virtuosic, but in itstumultuous surge, to me it lost the essential importance, size and impact ofthe composer’s message. This is after all one of the greatest and most powerfulmoments in all music, and the speed it was played, whilst giving a real senseof forward motion, seemed to me to leave the essence of the music behind in therush. Perhaps it was just me, but Sad.

So there you go. The whole place rose as one to applaud theevening, as I did. You couldn’t fault the energy, the precision or the passionof the playing. I just wanted a bit more grandeur and space.

Tabs:

beethoven, choral symphony, eliot gardiner,symphony hall, lso

Santa - MPRP (Mince Pie Replacement Programme)

2011-12-22T11:55:00.001Z

As part of the author's household's Continuous Improvement food diversification and development programme, a decision has been made that Santa's unremitting annual diet of Mince Pies and Sweet Sherry needs significant overhaul and modification. A full strategic review concluded that he must endure an almost unremitting boredom of around a billion separate mince pies in an evening each Christmas Eve, as well as explaining precisely why this makes him the size he is.

My daughter is the Head of Development for the new Santa "Taste Sensation" project and I have taken on the vital role of Chief Testing Guinea Pig as the development programme moves forward. The project has been under-way for a couple of days now, and the first batch of development prototypes have emerged from the Experimental Workshop's finishing oven. The picture below shows one of the prototypes in its current early stage of proof testing.

Sneak picture of the first development Florentine

It is a Nut free (we have inside knowledge that Santa is not too partial to nuts), Stem Ginger, Sour Cherry and Mixed Peel Florentine on a base of Dark Melted Chocolate. The exact number of early prototypes is classified, but rumours are circulating that a number in excess of 12 are currently in existence. These rumours are difficult to corroborate as subsequent rumours appearing no more than an hour later offer conflicting evidence that the whole batch is no longer in existence.

Details of the early tests results are, of course, highly secret, but a Likileaks report indicates that the taste is sensational. The bite of the sour cherries and the warm buzz of the Stem Ginger mingle together extremely well. The tiny espresso mug, again produced by my daughter, is smaller than 2" in height and gives some scale to the Florentine, as well as holding a perfect accompaniment to it.

It is expected that very few design and development changes will be needed before Production Volume Approval is given, although a modified design with a larger surface area, capable of holding a significantly increased payload of glace fruit is rumoured to be under consideration. Stress and Cost calculations for this upgrade are underway with a detailed Cost/Benefit Analysis expected shortly. Decisions on the final size and resultant calorie content of the first production version will be made during today, and commitment to volume production is expected very soon, allowing quantity production to be well on stream by December 24th. Inventory channels are being filled and supply chain optimisation for Class A ingredients on a Just in Time/Lean Sourcing basis is almost complete. A local launch programme involving intense house based marketing is thought to be in final development.

Leaks obtained from Secret Plans seen by the author suggest that the first of the fully productionised Florentines will be made available on the night of Christmas Eve as Santa makes his annual visit to Shropshire. These leaks also indicate that the Sweet Sherry accompaniment of previous years will also be phased out and replaced by a small glass of locally sourced Marmalade Vodka.

It is anticipated that this major food development programme will make improve Santa's HQ (Happiness Quotient) by up to 87%, and any idea of him just taking a nibble out of the pie and a sip out of the glass, as was usual in previous years, will become a thing of the past. Evidence of both licking of the plate, and fingers being wiped round the inside of the glass are fully expected as a result of this major product Upgrade.

A short Situation Report on the early Performance of the Christmas Eve launch may be available soon after Christmas, as well as any proposals for subsequent wider Market roll-out.

Please note that this information is embargoed until 23.59pm 24th December.

Tabs:

christmas, santa, mince pies,florentines

Mayday, Mayday ......

2011-11-25T00:33:00.001Z

MayDay, MayDay ......, a set on Flickr.

On holiday in Devon, near Salcombe. The house we were renting was literally 10 yards from the sea, and one Saturday afternoon, the gentle rustling of the waves was interrupted by a siren. Looking out of the window, we could see a largish boat wallowing in the sea about 5 yards form the shore.

It gradually sank into the water, and very soon, the local Coastguard vehicle and lifeboat appeared, as well as a sizeable posse of local people, all hell bent on sorting it out. Over the next couple of hours, as much of the boat's contents as possible were recovered, but it all got in a fair old pickle in the water. At the same time, the local youths set about getting a very thick rope around the hull to allow a JCB brought onto the beach by a local fellow to haul the sunken vessel up the steep slope onto the beach.

This took a fair length of time, because the rope did not want to stay in place, but with a good deal of determination, they finally managed it.

Meanwhile the poor souls who owned the boat were looking at all this going on with a bit of a shell shocked attitude, as what started out as a gentle potter around the South Devon Coast turned into a fair old nightmare for them.

It turned out that the boat's prop-shaft seal had gone and that had started to let considerable quantities of water into the rear of the boat. When the owner realised what had happened, he rammed the throttle wide open and tried to run it onto the beach before it sank, failing by about 5 yards.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Lowry Theatre, Salford Quays

2011-11-20T20:25:00.001Z

Lowry Theatre, Salford Quays, a set on Flickr.

The Lowry Theatre last night – inside and out.

I went to Salford Quays for the first time yesterday, and was mightily impressed. It’s a really modern transformation of a big city, and it hums with life on a Saturday night. That’s another one on the list to return to with my proper camera to record my photographic impressions of it all.

Man's Best Friends .....

2011-11-15T16:08:00.001Z

Man's Best Friends ....., a set on Flickr.

A few pictures of our dogs. These were taken in Norfolk, Shropshire and the odd one in Devon. As you can see, water seems to play rather a large part in them. The beach is their idea of paradise!

Inspired by a friend of my wife's, whose canine pictures are really, really excellent. Thanks Jan!

Mind You, a Lot can happen in a Week ....

2011-11-13T18:26:00.001Z

The last post on this blog talked about the extraordinarygoings-on on Day 2 of the South Africavs Australia Test match in Capetown last week. I can’t recall a day quite like itever in the 50 years of my cricketing memory.

South Africa went into lunch on 49 for 1, and the story goesthat their coach, Gary Kirsten then left the ground to visit his wife and thirdchild who had been born a day or so before. He returned after three or fourhours, midway through the evening session, to find his team on 72 for 1.Wondering whether there had been rain at the ground which had restricted hisside to a paltry 23 runs since he’d been away, he found out that he’d missed 20wickets and two complete innings.

I only hope that’s a true story!

The next day the pundits on Sky TV were Rob Key and Dominic Cork,both very good ex-England players. Even after a night to ruminate on thesensational day’s play neither of them could offer a real explanation ofwhy such a spectacular implosion had occurred, and on Day 3 the match went on withcenturies for both Amla and Smith, and in the end, South Africa won easily.

Later that day, I looked at my Twitter feed to see what the cricketing world had made of it all, and alightedon a report from an Australian writer I followed. His few paragraphs analysedit perfectly simply and logically. A difficult, but not impossible pitch, some classybowling from the South Africans and a complete abrogation of the defensive and strategic fundamentalsof playing the game from most of the Australian team, allied to an increasinglylemming like sense of panic down their batting order. The piece was at the same time deceptivelysimple, accurate, logical, incisive, perceptive, well-argued and beautifullywritten. In impeccable English, it addressed, dissected and answered the questions Key andCork couldn’t.

The writer was an ex-Somerset player who captained England once.After his career ended, he upped sticks and settled in Australia, becoming oneof the most outspoken, intelligent and thoughtful writers on the subject, a manwith a real conscience. His name was Peter Roebuck, and I thought he was one ofthe best cricket writers on the planet. To me, his articles and books were something special.

One of his books

A few hours after witnessing this extraordinary day and writingthis piece, he threw himself off the sixth floor of his hotel and killedhimself. No doubt the reasons will come out in time, although I can’t say I really want to know. His beautiful writing is over, and for me, that is that.

For almost 100 years, the number of people involved in thegame who have taken their own lives is horribly high. Men who have played thegame at the highest level like Stoddart, Shrewsbury, Gimblett,Robertson-Glasgow, Bairstow, Trott, Iverson, Barnes all ended their own lives. Andnow Peter Roebuck joins that ghastly list. Does the game create conditions in men’sminds which ferment and develop a sense of despair or hopelessness resultingin suicide? Or is it the sort of game which tends to attract the melancholic andintrospective - individuals who end it all with a gun, a noose or a box of pills?I simply don’t know.

All I know is one minute you’re reading an article thinking “Spot on Peter, Nail on the head again”, andthe next thing you hear is that he’s gone. It’s all desperately sad. The closingwords in the last article he wrote on the day he died were “Mind You, a lot can happen in a week.”

Right again, Peter.

Tabs:

peter roebuck, cricket, suicide

All the Elevens

2011-11-11T22:10:00.001Z

11/11/11, or as our contrary American cousins insist,11/11/11.

I know it’s only a number, but there’s something rather disturbingly“Druidy” about it. I’m a reasonablysane individual, but it’s been on my mind for a few days now. This morning,after a bit of test work, I ended up taking a picture of my alarm clock at theappointed hour. I’d even taken the trouble to ensure that the section on theclock face which showed the ambient temperature didn’t disturb the awfulsymmetry, by the simple ruse of putting it in the fridge for a while. I can’tbelieve I’m the only one who did that. I’m not a nerd, for Goodness sake!

Another 88 years before it all repeats!

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been wondering ifsomething cataclysmic was going to happen to the world on this “Once in a Lifetime” day. We’ve seen theeconomic situation in Europe disappearing off, in the words of more than onenoted pundit, “to Hell in a hand-cart”with Italy clutching on increasingly desperately for economic survival. Wasthis the day when the whole Euro debacle would suddenly detonate?

On a much more important level than this however, I’ve beenwatching the South Africa vs Australia Test match in Capetown, and seenthe game twist and turn over 24 hours in a way that has never been seen in a Test match forover 100 years. Yesterday, the fanatic statisticians had something approaching multiple orgasms overthe number of cricket records which were re-written during the day. I wokeup early wondering what was going to happen today on the field in South Africa.Clearly yesterday was only a cricketing “clearingof the throat” for today’s man event. The TV was on early from 8am – I wasn’tgoing to miss today’s drama.

It turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax, although thingsgot a bit spooky as 11.00am approached. Now cricket is the game where superstitionsand fads run riot. You’d think many cricketers were on the way to the funny farmif you knew what went on in their minds when the game is being played. X willonly if he puts his left pad on first. Y will only go out to bat if the toiletseats in the dressing rooms are down. Z would only bat with a red handkerchiefin his pocket, while A would only venture into the middle if he had his luckysilver clover leaf with him.

Out on the field, if a player or a team is doing well, yousit tight. I mean, you don’t move, even if the Nature is calling youincreasingly stridently. Moving or standing up, even if you are sitting way upin Row 324 of the Grandstand, immediately transfers the vibes to the player anddestroys his concentration, and that would never do.

The weirdest ones however are the “nasty” numbers. In Australia, the “Devil’s Number” is 87. Over there, they firmly believe that this figureis toxic, and to be avoided like the plague by any batsman. They get quitenervous when this is their score. The odd thing is that when some guy delvedinto the statistics of the 2000 Test matches that the World has played sincethey started in 1877, it was actually the numbers around 87, ie 85, 86 and 89which were far more often the scores when batsmen perished. But no. 87 it was, andis.

In England, the mystical number is111, hence its importance for today of all days. For reasons which no-onereally knows this number is referred to in the cricket world as “Nelson”. Now, as far as I know, Nelsonnever played cricket, but it’s a totally ingrained cricketing superstition theworld over. There are resonances and echos in a match when a side gets to 222,or 333, referred to as Double Nelsons and Triple Nelsons, but the full force ofthe heathen pressure is felt on 111.

It gets worse – totally bizarre in truth - because the “release” for Nelson is to stand on oneleg while the team is on that score. I mean, seriously, you’ve got 24 grown men(including the 2 umpires) playing a game at the top International level, and,on 111, you can see a smattering of them standing around like a white flamingo.David Shepherd, one of the great umpires of all time, who was a tad on thelarge size would stand at the bowler’s end, hopping from one leg to anotherwhile the game went on around him for as long as the score was 111. It musthave completely put the batsman off. You couldn’t make it up.

Today, of course, I couldn’t fail to wonder what was goingto happen. The Italian financial crisis had abated a little so it wasn’t goingto be that. James Murdoch wasn’t on in front of the MP’s committee just yet, andwe’d already had an asteroid the size of Belgium whizzing past the Earth a few hoursbefore, so clearly there must be something else on the cards. The time crept upto 11.00am, and South Africa ominously reached the score of 111 for 1. Couldthey hang on for another 11 minutes without scoring a run? If that happened thescorers would set fire to themselves and combust in a blaze of glory. However,this “David Eyke” moment passed about 9 minutes too early, and the two South African Batsmen went on their wayscoring runs.

The scoreboard at 11.11

The South African Team Bench Flamingoes

On the field a few minutes later, the score-boards finally flashedup the time showing 11.11am on 11/11/11. To a huge cheer, the crowd all stoodup on and tried to balance on one leg for the whole minute, with a fair amountof “beer induced” wobbling nothelping greatly, but they really tried their hearts out. It was really rathertouching, and just the thing you’d expect a cricket crowd to indulge in. Greatto watch.

And exactly how many runs do you think South Africa neededto score to win this extraordinary match at that precise minute, when thisStand of Flamingoes (for that is the Collective noun for a herd of these pinkthings) got to their unsteady human feet?

Yep – 111.

Tabs:

11/11/11,
cricket,
nelson

Bletchley Park - Station X

2011-11-07T00:24:00.001Z

A building with a tale to tell

This could well be the most important building in Britain. It’s situated in an anonymous little town in Buckinghamshire, about 100 yards from the main London to Birmingham railway line. To look at, it’s a second rate mid-Victorian Pile built in what can only be described as the “Dog’s Breakfast” style of architecture. But it’s not the building that’s important here, it’s what went on in it inside.

This is Bletchley Park, also known as Station X, the home of the UK’s code-breaking activity in the Second World War. If it hadn’t been for the work of the people in this building, this blog, if it existed at all, would be written in German. What was done here 70 years ago quite probably made the difference between winning and losing the war. It certainly shortened it by two years, some say four. It is a unique piece of this country’s history.

Here, people like Dilly Knox, Tommy Flowers, Gordon Welchman, Max Newman, John Tiltman and Alan Turing, together with the other 8,500 people who worked there systematically broke the German Enigma codes, and the even more complex Tunny Codes to put the British Government in a position where they often knew what the German High Command was intending to do, before that message had reached their own German generals in the field. This one achievement tilted the war dramatically in the favour of the Allies.

A German 4 Rotor Enigma machine

A Lorenz 12 rotor machine used by Hitler for his
personal High Command "Fish" codes

The issue which worried Churchill above all others in the War was the possibility (and for much of the time, the probability) of the country being starved into submission by lack of food, fuel and equipment coming over the oceans from other countries around the world. The astounding change in the rate of detection and subsequent destruction of the German U-Boat fleet, when Enigma was working, made all the difference. Who knows what the result would have been if the men and women in Bletchley had failed to break the code? Quite simply, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

If you read about the way they all achieved this, and the unbelievable intellectual power and unremitting dedication that was needed to make it happen you cannot fail to be totally astounded.

There are enough books and articles available on the internet where anyone can find out all the details they could wish for, but two things keep knawing away at me. Firstly, how did it all remain a secret? Over 12,000 people worked at Bletchley Park during the war, ranging from weirdo-intellectual giants whose brains were the equal of anything anywhere in the world, to local girls from just down the road, who did the filing, and served in the canteens. The secret of what went on there did not get out into the big bad world until the mid 70s, some 30 years after the end of the war. You couldn’t imagine that happening today.

Everyone involved at Bletchley Park had signed the Official Secrets Act, and the stories about how they all kept their mouths firmly shut is almost unbelievable in the Twittery, Facebooky world of today. There are stories of people who went to their graves with their children not knowing what they had done there. One of the elder guides there yesterday told me that they had sent out Reunion invitations not too long ago to people who had worked there. A married couple had received two letters, each addressed to one of them. Inadvertently they had opened the letter addressed to the other, and it was only then that they both became aware that their partner had been working there. Extraordinary.

An original 1940s poster

I suppose it was what happened in war. Your country was in the gravest danger of invasion, and you knew that, if the information you were handling became known to the enemy, the results could be utterly catastrophic to the future of England. People working there didn’t even talk to the man or woman on the other side of the Hut they worked in unless their work necessitated it. “Careless Talk costs Lives” wasn’t an idle slogan. After the war, they were all told to say nothing about it to anyone including loved ones and family, and this was exactly what they did – to a man.

The other thing which I still cannot come to terms with is why the Germans went all the way through the war not realising that they had been compromised. I suppose it stems from the fact that, when they developed the Enigma system, they believed it was infallible. And, if you are German, that is it. It had been designed to have in excess of 158,000,000,000,000,000,000 different combinations in the way the settings could be made, so logically, there was not enough time in any wartime scenario for any decryption to be made. So because they could not dream of solving it themselves, then the logical consequence was that nobody else could do it either. It’s an arrogance of course, and one which quite possibly lost them the war.

In truth, their own human fallibility and the genius of British intellectual brainpower undid them. Their operators, once or twice, made huge errors which allowed massive shafts of detective light to shine into the darkness of the code’s secrets. And once the light had shone once, that was all the Bletchley brains needed. They were in.

For all the Germans’ formidable skills in so many areas, their code and cypher organisation were riven with political infighting, and there were something like 17 different organisations within Germany using the system. They were not all as diligent in their operations of the system as they should have been. The Navy was by a long way the most professional, and the Army and Air Force were the most slap-dash.

On more than one occasion, Admiral Dönitz, the German Navy Chief, suspected that their codes had been compromised and cracked, but others around him convinced him that this was not correct. At one time, because of Dönitz’s feeling that the codes were vulnerable, the Navy had a further, 4^th rotor installed in their Enigma machines, a development which suddenly left Bletchley Park completely blind to the German Navy codes for a period in 1943. Still the Germans didn’t twig what was happening in deepest Buckinghamshire.

The huge volume of data needing decoding made the need for more and more mechanisation an imperative to allow Bletchley Park to deliver the plain text of the German codes to the Intelligence services promptly. Information has a half-life of usefulness. Knowing that a convoy is going to be attacked a day after its ships had been sunk was not much use. So they set out to automate the process to allow massive increases in the speed of decoding, and hence the usefulness of the intelligence they discovered. Go to Bletchley, and you will see fabulous pieces of machinery they developed to do this, codenamed in the weird way this country has - Bombe, Heath Robinson and Colussus.

A replica of the "Bombe" machine

The rear of the "Bombe" machine, showing
the internal workings

After the equipment was destroyed following orders from Churchill at the end of the war, volunteers have painstakingly rebuilt Colussus. Forget what our American friends will tell you, what you are seeing when you crowd into the hot electronic valve heated room in one of the rickety wooden huts there is the world’s First Electronic Programmable Computer. It looks like something out of a Dracula Science Fiction film, but, in the early 40s when it was built by Tommy Flowers and his men, it was a staggering achievement. So, just go to Bletchley, admire and pay homage. And also wonder why Tommy Flowers’ name is not revered throughout this country.

Colussus showing the Tape reading section

Colussus - World's first Electronic computer

You will have realised by now that I think Bletchley Park is a stunning place to visit. The atmosphere there reeks of the 1940s. The shabby huts, many of them with peeling paint and rotting windows, and the austere Wartime no-nonsense architecture of the outbuildings takes you straight back 70 years. The guides there are superb. The subject of code-breaking, at this level, is not an easy one, and they wear their knowledge lightly and can answer any question you throw at them.

Outside Hut 6

Hut 1 - Diplomatic Wireless Station

The overwhelming feel there is of being in the midst of real history, where hugely important things occurred. You wander around the huts and tread the floorboards in rooms where monumental decisions and discoveries were made. The museum which venerates Alan Turing is quite moving on many levels. Here is the celebration of a man who was one of the greatest intellects of the 20^th Century. A man who did more than almost anyone in this country to stave off Germany’s advance, who led the way to the development of the modern computer, and who, because of his homosexuality, was hounded and prosecuted by the authorities to the extent that he died, presumably from his own hand, with a cyanide filled apple next to his body.

Alan Turing Statue

"On Computable numbers" - Alan Turing
One of the most important Scientific Papers
of the 20th Century

In the part of the museum dedicated to him is a wonderfully moving statue of him, made from Stacked Slate by Stephen Kettle. Also there is a formal letter of apology from the nation written in a slightly uncomfortable New Labour way and signed by Gordon Brown – 60 years too late.

The Government's formal apology to Alan Turing - 2009
Signed by Gordon Brown

It’s all very moving – I keep using that word – and I can’t recall a museum which has had such an effect on me as this one. It’s all held together on a bit of a volunteer based shoe-string, and you have to wonder if there is another country in the world which would not feel ashamed at not funding the upkeep of such an important place through a miniscule allocation from the public purse.

Go there while you can.

Tabs:

bletchley park,
enigma,
colussus,
alan turing,
bombe

Rain Stopped Play

2011-11-02T01:16:00.001Z

Rain Stopped Play, a set on Flickr.

Pictures of the Test Match Crowd - Birmingham - July 2010

Hows about that, then?

2011-10-29T20:41:00.002+01:00

Jimmy Savile is dead.

I suppose if you’re less than about 30 years old, you may not even know who he was. If you are a little older, then you probably have an image of a guy with a ridiculously long cigar and brittle white hair fronting a Saturday night TV programme called “Jim’ll Fix It”. A weird looking bloke making peoples’ dreams come true.

If that’s what you think, you don’t know the half of it. He really lived one of the oddest lives you could imagine, and he was someone who impacted on me immensely when I was a teenager in the late 50s - the most impressionable years of my life.

JIMMY SAVILE with ELVIS PRESLEY

As I grew up in the late 50s, pop music simply didn’t exist. It hadn’t been invented. Commercial Radio, Radio Caroline and the like was several years away. You couldn’t even be “cool” in those days because the word had not then been invented. But those of us in the know used to listen to a strange radio station broadcasting from Luxembourg - wherever that was. Its signals arrived via the Medium Wave, 208 metres, and its reception, in Bedford where I lived, was the 50s equivalent of a lottery. The signal came and went like the tide coming in and out at the sea-side. Some evenings it was great, others you had to believe that the signal was coming from the Dark side of the Moon.

I used to be sent to bed at around 9 in the evening in those days, and one of life’s childishly clandestine pleasures was to sneak the (just invented) portable radio up to my bedroom, secrete it under my bedclothes and listen away very quietly to Radio Luxembourg, a bit like a wartime spy with one ear clamped to the radio and the other on the creaking stairs listening for my parents’ footsteps.

This was the way in the late 50s we all “found” pop music. It was the only real source of people like Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and the other great singers in the vanguard of Pop. No-one else played that sort of music. The BBC was still a million miles away from that sort of thing. They had the Home Service (R4), the Light Programme (R2) and the Third Programme (R3), and that was it.

Radio Luxembourg was the first meaningful commercial radio station, a total trailblazer and was funded by adverts at a time when ITV was still a figment of someone's imagination. To this day, anyone who knows how to spell Keynsham – K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M, and who smiles knowingly when the name Horace Batchelor is mentioned, will be over 50 and will, almost like one of Pavlov’s Dogs, be immediately transported back to the heady days of Radio Luxembourg.

The highlight of Radio Luxembourg’s week was a programme on Wednesday nights at 10.30pm called the “Teen and Twenty Disc Club”, a half hour programme introduced by a guy from Leeds named Jimmy Savile. He ran it as a club on the radio, where you could send in and join up to be a member. One of his never to be forgotten achievements was to have signed up a young American singer named Elvis Presley as a member. Presley’s membership number was 11321, a number which rather worryingly, I will remember till the day I die. That’s what happens when you’re in your early teens.

Jimmy Savile was the John Peel of his day, introducing us to new bands who later became household names. But, almost solely as a result of his programme, we all knew about them before they were well known. At that age, that knowledge was seriously important.

If you care to look up his history, you will find references to the Mecca Dancehall in Leeds, and him starting the first Discotheque, to his career as a wrestler, as a prodigious marathon runner, as an amazing philanthropist and bizarrely as an unpaid Hospital Porter. He absolutely doted on his mother – The Dutchess – and drove around in the most ostentatious Rolls Royce you could imagine.

Fast Forward now about 25 years and we lived in Aylesbury, about 40 miles north of London. The local hospital was at Stoke Mandeville, and it specialised in nursing spinal injuries. The stories put around by the media were that Jimmy Savile, the famous DJ and TV presenter worked there as a porter, something which any follower of the music world would scornfully dismiss as spin and rubbish – the invention of some sensation seeking newspaper hustler.

One evening, when one of my daughters suffered an accident, we had to rush her off to Stoke Mandeville for treatment, and as we shot in to get her attended to, I glanced into the Porter’s lodge next to the door.

Guess who was there.

There was a man who had made an enormous amount of money for himself, but someone who also had raised millions of pounds for charity, someone whose face was immediately recognisable by almost everyone in the country, and there he was working away for nothing in the Porter’s Lodge at my local hospital.

“Evening Jim.” was all I could manage as we rushed off to the Casualty department.

Forget whatever rumours you may have heard about him. He was a truly fascinating man, a One-Off and someone who played a large part in the development of my love of music.

How's about that, then?

Tabs:

jimmy savile,
radio luxembourg,
208,
teen and twenty disc club

Pictures at an Exhibition - April 2008

2011-10-23T21:57:00.001+01:00

Pictures at an Exhibition - April 2008, a set on Flickr.

Some pictures taken on a very rainy day in New York's spectacular Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Spring a couple of years ago.

Watching the people watching the pictures, with Elliot Erwitt, the Worlds's greatest living photographer as my inspiration.

New York - April 2008

2011-10-23T00:08:00.001+01:00

New York - April 2008, a set on Flickr.

I took these images a couple of years ago when I had 5 days just wandering around the city. It's a hell of a place, with a real buzz of excitement about it, and I'd love to go back!

THOSE WHOM THE GODS LOVE, DIE YOUNG

2011-10-09T20:06:00.001+01:00

The sad event of someone important dying way before their time last week has set me thinking. Especially about the ability of an individual to change the world and by their own actions make us all think differently. It doesn't happen all that often, which makes it all the more meaningful when it does. Sometimes it happens with an individual working on their own, and sometimes it is the result of a couple of them finding the personal symbiosis that makes the sum of them together much more potent than either of them individually.

The story which I couldn’t get out of my mind as a result of this began with two men who started out life in very different ways and came together as a team. What they achieved between them made the world a considerably different place. They changed the way we thought about things, and as they went about their work, even brought new words into our everyday vocabulary which are now in use all around the globe.

These two men were quite different from each other. Every individual has his own strengths and weaknesses, and in most relationships therefore it seems sensible to take on a partner whose skills complement rather than duplicate one’s own abilities, which is what they did. Most marriages (or at least the successful ones!) work like that, and I suspect most effective business partnerships achieve their success for the same reason.

In this partnership, one was the Engineer.

Let’s call him Mr. A.

He was the man who understood completely how the technology that they both worked in, actually worked. He was the man who could not only do it himself, but believed he could do it better than all the other people around him who were trying to do the same thing. He got fed up with the failings of what was going on around him, but, unlike most of us, had the skills to go about changing it for the better. To do this, he had to be, and was, a perfectionist.

The other guy was much more of a salesman and a market oriented man.

Let’s call him Mr. B.

Now this man was a person who understood in a unique way how customers, and those who were not yet customers, but would be if he could only get them to see things the way he saw them, would actually react to the new products and ideas which were swirling around in his head. He had to have the vision that could see, not just where everything was in the present, but where he and Mr. A could shift the market if they could manage to turn their future plans into reality. He was a bit of a showman, someone who understood the aesthetics and the importance of design, someone who understood the benefits which flow from engineering excellence, and an individual who had the marketing skills to turn these thoughts into reality. He also had to have a streak of ruthlessness to ensure that, when lesser mortals would have given up and changed course, he continued to sail his ship resolutely in what he thought and believed to be the right direction.

Fate brought them together, and in a very short time, the combination of Mr. A and Mr. B designed and produced things which literally changed the world they lived in. In a short time the names of their products became symbolic with excellence, not only in their own field of activity, but in a much wider and more general sense.

Their success resulted in some of those few generic words which become known everywhere. I am reminded of a very telling little “Tweet” I saw the other day which went something along the lines of “I got a new Dyson the other day. It’s the best Hoover I’ve ever bought.” If you get it right, the brand name literally becomes the product. Think “Coke”, “Biro” or “Transit”. In their chosen hi-tech field, Mr. A and Mr. B achieved the same thing.

Neither of the two men was prepared to accept second best, and they might have seen it as a compliment if they had been described as “unreasonable”, on the basis that the “reasonable” among us put up with second best. These guys didn’t. There are those around who called one or both of them geniuses, and who’s to say that it isn’t true.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, the story doesn’t have the Hollywood Fairy Tale ending that you’d like. One of them, in this case Mr. B, died early, way too early in fact. This left the whole venture they had built at a potential cross-roads, and with a set of visionary unknowns which, had they been able to have had a choice, they would much rather not have had.

And having read all the newspapers, Internet articles and “Twitter” postings over the last couple of days, it is this thought that drove me to pen this little piece. Things like this don’t happen very often, and when they do, their importance should be noted, appreciated and applauded.

I’m sure by now you will have worked out the identities of the two men in my story.

Mr.A was named Henry Royce, and the unfortunate Mr. B was Charles Rolls.

Tabs:
steve jobs,
apple,
rolls royce,
rolls,
royce

... YOU FEEL ALRIGHT WHEN YOU HEAR THAT MUSIC RING ...

2011-10-05T15:04:00.001+01:00

Same train up to Birmingham as a fortnight ago for the Verdi Requiem, same place for a meal, same Concert Hall, but tonight it was music of a very different kind from one of the three best bands I know – Dire Straits.

THE BAND IN FULL FLOW

Click on any of the images to enlarge them

Well, nearly Dire Straits. Dire Straits was one of those bands which was really built around one person – Mark Knopfler. He is a rather introverted Geordie who, as well as writing some of my very favourite songs, is one of the best pop guitarist in the world. The band started in the late 70s with Sultans of Swing and gradually the songs, many of them reflecting Knopfler’s inward looking character (is that why I like them?) became more complex and longer pieces of work.

The band was in almost continuous change mode for most of its life, with members coming and going, especially going, with unusual rapidity. But Yer Man was always there, and a string of amazing albums came out in the 1980s. Love Over Gold, Communiqué, Making Movies and Brothers in Arms were iconic pieces of work which, for me at least, defined the music of that era. Long, laid back, somewhat melancholic, often autobiographical songs dressed up in the third person to hide, or at least act as a cover for Knopfler’s privacy. And here was pop music where the power of loud and soft, quiet and loud, sometimes even silence made you realise that it’s often the difference in sound levels and not the number of decibels which makes for the dramatic effect.

ALAN CLARK and CHRIS WHITE

The band became one of the biggest in the world, and toured relentlessly everywhere. I went to see them a couple of times, once at Wembley in 1985 and again in around 1993. I think he finally got fed up with it all a couple of years later, and it all dissolved around 1995. He moved onto other things with the Notting Hillbillies, writing Film music (Local Hero and The Princess Bride are both written by him) and playing with and writing for other musicians like Emmy-Lou Harris, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan and Chet Atkins.

His songs were often about very unusual subjects – the decline of American Industry (Telegraph Road), the sleazy, almost Mickey Spillane-like Private Investigations, the simple beauty of Romeo and Juliet, the bitter wistfulness of wars fought and friends lost (Brothers in Arms) and the glitzy pointlessness of consumer goods (Money for Nothing). These are great pop songs and the 10 minute long, slow, languid, looking back over your shoulder versions of Romeo and Juliet (far, far better than the bouncy 3 minute original) and the heartfelt Brothers In Arms are permanent members of my All-time Top 10. If they didn’t appear on the playlist tonight, then multiple murder was a real possibility.

The problem for bands like Dire Straits is one faced by all the bands I really liked in my life. They all wrote their own songs, and they are the only people who performed them. No other bands were daft enough to try a cover version or offer a different way of performing them. So, if you wanted to hear them live, you had to catch them when they were performing it on stage, or basically you were stuffed. It’s the same with the two other great bands in my life. With Pink Floyd, two of the original four members of the band are now dead. With Genesis, Phil Collins is not performing anymore, and Peter Gabriel is doing his own thing. With Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler today seems to have zero interest in the songs he wrote in that era. So, until tonight, I thought the opportunity to hear these bands live had effectively gone.

I went to the last Genesis tour in 2007, and I do not expect to hear them live again ever. Pink Floyd, given that they always performed in a very anonymous way, seem to have allowed a couple of very good Tribute bands to take over, one British and the other Australian replicating their music and to a significant degree their light show. Having seen both of them more than once, it’s fair to say that they fly the flag as well as it could possibly be done.

Last night was the first concert I’ve heard live of Dire Straits’ music for nearly 20 years. The problem was that Mark Knopfler, the centrepiece and focus of the band would not be there. In a similar way to Pink Floyd, the essence of Knopfler’s music is in the writing, and he was always a bit anonymous and somewhat reticent on stage. He collected some extremely good musicians around him, particularly towards the end and these are the guys who have reformed to take his music back on the road. Alan Clark and Chris White were the guys who were with the band in their heyday, and they were there last night to carry on the thread of continuity.

It’s not the real thing, and as long as the main man is not there, it never will be. But this is the real world, and you have to realise that if you want to hear this music again, there is only one option and this incarnation is it. So take it or leave it.

So there I was in Symphony Hall, waiting with a good deal of expectation and looking back to hear this music which is a real part of me and hoping to recapture a little bit of my long lost youth.

JON ALLEN -
a very good support act

The audience did not include that many young kids, but I suppose this was music which faded from the front line in the mid 80s. The ticket, in very small print, alluded to the “special guest”, who turned out to be a singer/songwriter with a slightly twenty years on Gerry Rafferty feel in some of his work - and that’s praise indeed in my book. His name was Jon Allen, and I have to say I didn’t envy him, wandering out on his own with just a guitar into the cavernous interior of Symphony Hall to warm up the audience for the main act. Like the people around me to whom I spoke, I liked his music a lot, and am heading off to Amazon.

The Straits, for that was the band’s name, came onto the stage and I counted 8 of them. The keyboard player Alan Clark and Saxophonist Chris White were the old stagers of the original band, and the poor guy who was going to play the part of Mark Knopfler was Terence Reis. I bet he felt a bit nervous, as this was still at the very early part of their tour.

They played all the songs which Dire Straits made famous, and the sound was very faithful to the original. Terence Reis’s voice, to me, sounded more like Knopfler’s the longer the concert went on, and his guitar playing was very good. If I’m being ultra-picky, he couldn’t quite match Knopfler’s fabulously liquid quality of playing, which I have always thought the best I’ve ever heard. But that’s almost unfair, and in the end I thought he did an amazing job. The encore at the end, a very gentle, “close-in” version of Portobello Belle, to these ears at least, was better than the original.

TERENCE REIS SINGS "PORTOBELLO BELLE"

All the signature sounds were there with Alan Clark’s almost classical piano playing and Chris White’s excellent sax playing bringing back some of the best musical memories of my life. In my mind, the water flowed back under all the bridges it had been passing under for nearly three decades. I was transported back to days when I was a lot younger, and for that I am very grateful to all the guys on stage for playing it. I know I will sound a bit like my grandfather when I say it, but they don’t write music like that anymore.

Was it perfect?

No, it wasn’t. The show had a slightly unfinished air about it. No-one in the band seemed to be “in charge”, so, at the beginning at least, it took on a slightly anonymous, unowned feel. It was almost as if Reis felt he ought to be stepping up and taking Mark Knopfler’s place, but only built up the confidence to start projecting himself forward a bit towards the end of the evening. They’re big shoes to fill, but he did a good job.

Chris White played excellently when he was involved, but, when he wasn’t, he looked quite unconnected and uninvolved, picking up and putting down his various instruments and almost wondering what to do. At one point he looked for all the world to me as if he was almost going to get his phone out and start checking on his e-mails and his Twitter stream. Alan Clark, who was directing operations musically, had the back of his head to the audience as often as his face, which was a shame, as he is a wonderful pianist and has a very expressive and watchable style of playing.

ALAN CLARK IN ACTION

The lighting also had a slightly unpolished feel to it in places. A couple of times, when, at least to me, it was really important that the pulsing of the lights exactly matched the beat of the music, they were either not on the beat or not pulsing at the right frequency. The individual spotlighting on the main soloists, particularly Chris White, could often have been more crisply focussed, as on a few occasions he was playing his solo beautifully - but in the dark.

Symphony Hall, as I keep banging on when I write about concerts there, has fabulous acoustics, and this was of great help to the band, although Reis’s guitar was occasionally a bit submerged in the background when, to me, it should have been a little more prominent and more clearly defined.

I also haven’t had my rant about people who think it’s OK to get up in the middle of a song, disturb everyone else in their row so they can go off to relieve themselves of some of the excess beer they’ve consumed. They’ve paid a tidy sum for their ticket, to hear some music that quite likely they won’t ever hear again, but nipping off to the loo is more important. Can’t they wait until the song finishes? Rude, inconsiderate bastards. And why, in heaven’s name, do the stewards allow them to come back without waiting for a lull in the proceedings? At least that would halve the irritation. I have to confess I wish I hadn’t left my Kalashnikov in the car again. Aaaaaah!

These are however, minor and trivial comments which do not begin to detract from the music. It was a really good evening, and the spirit of Dire Strait’s music shone through as I had hoped it would. I hope the band is a success and that they become the “tribute” band for this marvellous music. The music is so good that it needs to be kept in the public’s mind for a long time, and until this tour all happened, it was starting to disappear off the new music fan’s radar.

The guy next to me had his two young children there, both of whom were clearly under 10 years old, with the band folding up several years before either of them were born. “They’re a bit young for this sort of gig”, I said to him jokingly. “No”, he replied, “They’re here to listen to some of the best pop music ever.”

How right he was.

Tabs:

dire straits,
the straits,
jon allen

CBSO PLAYS VERDI's REQUIEM

2011-10-04T23:12:00.001+01:00

If I’ve got any regular readers left after my somewhat sporadic and random postings of the last few months, they will have seen a theme within the posts developing about various concerts I’ve been to during the year. Earlier in 2011, I decided to go to a few more such events than I’d managed in previous years, and these occasions have tended to turn into short pieces here.

Two weeks ago I jumped on the train to Birmingham, had a decent supper in Carluccio’s in Brindley Place and rolled up at nearby Symphony Hall to hear the first concert in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s 2011/12 season. They had decided to go for broke and start with Verdi’s Requiem, one of the greatest pieces of religious music ever written.

WHAT A FABULOUS SIGHT - THE CBSO AND CHOIR
Click to Enlarge

I wrote a piece a while back about the various ways the major composers over the past five centuries had tacked the Requiem Mass. In classical music terms, it’s a bit like climbing Everest, with some composers following well-trodden routes and others carving out new ways to the summit. Between them all, they have written some of the most moving music the world has ever heard, and Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, first performed in 1874, is one of the very best.

Verdi’s main claim to fame is a staggering series of Operas, some of the best known ever written. His melodic writings have often transcended the relatively limited appeal of the original operas they came from and various sections from them have become iconic and popular shorter pieces known by many people who ordinarily would profess no knowledge or even liking for opera.

He wrote almost exclusively for the Operatic theatre, and there are at least 28 major melodramatic works to his name. On a visit to the city of Parma in Emilia-Romagna in late 2010, I went to the Opera House there, and they were in the middle of performing every single one of them, a different one on each day for 28 days without a break!

In the middle of this outpouring, he produced his Requiem, and you do not have to be any form of genius to recognise that it is as near as you will ever get to an Opera with a religious text to it. It is written for a vast orchestra, four soloists and a large double choir, and contained within its pages is some the loudest unamplified music ever written. The “Dies Irae” which is famous all over the world, is written to scare the living daylights out of you, so I’d got my new Hearing Aids tuned to 11 for the night to ensure that I got full sonic value from the evening’s performance.

I’d managed to get a fabulous seat, in the centre of the front row of the circle, and as I sat waiting expectantly the massive orchestra and choir of around 150 people were spread out completely filling the large stage in front of me. The place was totally packed out, and you could feel the expectation. Because of the large scale of performers needed, it is not a work that gets performed every day, and the CBSO is one of the world's “great” orchestras, so this was going to be a bit special.

The work has one of those fantastic openings, where the audience, as soon as the Conductor raises his baton, falls into complete silence. And I mean complete silence. There were over 2,000 people there, and you could have heard a pin drop. The expectation was incredible. After what seemed like an age of absolute nothingness, you gradually made out the sound of the strings playing the introduction of the Kyrie as softly as they possibly could, and I for one could feel the hairs on the back of my neck grabbing at me as this happened. Fantastic.

The second section after the Introit and Kyrie is the Dies Irae, and Andris Nelsons, the CBSO’s Latvian conductor blew the roof off the Hall with an incredible volume of sound. Good old Verdi. Even though it is such a well known piece of music now, when it’s played live with such immense forces, it does have an amazing effect on me.

The soloists were extremely good and the chorus was very together and responsive. It’s a piece with no intervals and lasts around 85-90 minutes, at the end of which I felt quite drained. Some people pooh-pooh it a bit as “just another opera” it but I think it is an extraordinarily affecting work, bizarrely as Verdi was an atheist. Yes, it wrings and tugs at your emotions, but what on earth is wrong with that. It’s supposed to do precisely that.

A very good night indeed.

I loved it.

Tabs:

cbso,
verdi requiem,
symphony hall

INDIA AND THE DRS SYSTEM

2011-10-02T21:53:00.001+01:00

The English Cricket season is over, so some thoughts on it all at the end of 2011, mainly around the Decision Review System (DRS) which has grumbled its way along in the background of this year’s proceedings.

Question: How do we know if a batsman is out? Ignoring the more esoteric ways like “Obstructing the Field” and “Timed Out”, apart from being “Bowled”, there is always an element of doubt in every other way a batsman can be dismissed. Sometimes the doubt is vanishingly small, but often, when it’s not, it all comes down to a human judgment – that of the Umpire, or more accurately the Umpires.

Until a few years ago, it was quite simple. The umpire was “God” and if, he said you were out, you were out. The Rules of the game, to my non lawyerly but reasonably logical viewpoint do not actually say that, but the structure of the rules seem to have that axiom rippled through their very fabric. Nowhere in the 42 Laws, as far as I can find, does it allow or even consider the possibility of any appeal to an outside agency if anyone on the field does not concur with the umpire’s decision. So, right or wrong, good or bad, the Umpire’s decision is final. Simple, straightforward and clear.

Having said that, it is also clear that the umpires are human and therefore they make mistakes. The logical consequence of that is that players will be given Out when they are not, and given Not Out when they are. The only reason that Jim Laker took 19 wickets against the Australians in 1956 was because the umpires said he did. If you look at the scorecard (and Yes, I just have) he bowled 5 of them, had 3 LBW, 1 Stumped, and 10 caught. So how many wickets did he actually take? Don’t bother to answer that, mainly because you can’t, but you get my point.

I hold it as another axiom that the umpires try as hard as they can to make the right decisions. The game completely loses its point if they don’t, but it still doesn’t prevent them from making a genuine mistake. So anything which offers an improvement to the accuracy of their decision making should be looked at, to start with at least, as something positive for the game rather than negative.

In those days, the umpire’s judgement was all that was available, so that was it. Today it’s different. The application of money and technology has given us other means by which these decisions can be evaluated. Slo-Mo and Freeze frame replays going backwards and forwards as many times as you want, tens of cameras all over the ground giving multiple views unavailable to the umpires, stump microphones, Hawk-Eye, Snicko and Hot Spot are all available if both the money and the desire are there to use them.

We have grown increasingly used to the TV pundits running these various bits of kit endlessly to put us, sitting in our armchairs, often in a better position than the poor soul out in the middle in the metaphorical white coat. The simple truth however, for all these various pieces of ironmongery, is that they are all machines built by Man. They therefore have a built in inherent failure rate, and this is something that cannot be avoided.

When a cricket team plays against another team on another continent, they trust their lives to the aeroplane and the pilots who fly them there. That aeroplane and the people who fly it have a built in failure rate. It may be small but it’s still there. Just think Munich 1958 if you’re not sure you agree with me.

And yet, the cricketers climb aboard and accept that risk. Everyone involved with the flight tries their hardest to minimise the risk, and as time has passed the advent of new technology has progressively improved the safety record of gadding around the world in an aeroplane. It is many times safer to fly today than it was 40 years ago, and this is down to a large extent to the impact of technology to improve the pilot’s lot. But the fact remains that the risk is not zero, and never will be.

Back now to the DRS. I think the way the whole DRS discussion has been presented is the wrong way round. I am only a simple bystander in all this, so may not be privy to the latest information, but I recall hearing recently that the average accuracy rate of decisions made solely by Test umpires is around 92%. Given the speed at which things happen on a cricket pitch, I am frankly amazed it is as high as that, but there you go.

The use of modern technology (and I don’t know which bits, but the guys in charge will know precisely) improves that figure to nearer 96-98%. Now at face value, that’s not much. But look at it the other way round. That all says the umpires get it wrong 8% of time, and, if you bring the technology into play, that error rate reduces to 2-4%. That means an improvement of between 50-75%.

Just read that again. An improvement factor of 4! If you were running an airline, and someone offered an improvement of that magnitude, your hand would be a blur as it snatched it off them. So why do some of the Test Playing countries reject DRS so vehemently.

Good question.

My simple logic says that the International Cricket Council is the governing body for the sport, and should be able to dictate, not advise, what umpiring and decision making systems are to be used for all international matches. Either the technology available is acceptable everywhere or it isn’t. That’s a binary decision to my eyes at least. It should not be up to an individual country whether they have a veto as to its use or not. But unfortunately, it is.

I understand that there may well be a significant financial cost in the use of all the equipment involved, but, given the will, it can’t be beyond the wit of man to find a central source to fund it all (ICC subscriptions?) and send it around the world to whichever tournament is being played at any given time. Yes, that may mean more than one set because there are overlapping match series being played, but cricket is a billionaire business these days, so Come on guys, please don’t say that can’t be sorted. It can if you want it to.

The other rather more contentious side of the problem is whether there is actually a universal desire to improve the decision making accuracy in the game. I well remember the film about the uncovering of the Watergate scandal “All the President’s Men. “Deep Throat”, the White House spy was meeting the two investigative reporters Bernstein and Woodward in the Multi storey car park in the dead of night. He wouldn’t tell them who in the White House was involved, or how they were involved, but he just said “Follow the Money”. Which they did, and the rest, as we say, is History. That phrase is actually a universal dictum in my view, and I suspect one which can be used here.

The Indian Cricket Governing Body, the BCCI, say that they insist that the technology is 100% accurate before they sanction its use, particularly for the predictive elements of the system, as used in the LBW decision. Now, assuming that they’re not stupid (and I don’t for one minute think they are) they must realise that no technology is 100% accurate. I think the manufacturers agree it is not 100% accurate. Indeed, on the predictive element of Hawk-Eye for LBW decisions, the makers themselves have imposed a restriction on its use when the ball has travelled less than 40cm between bouncing off the ground and hitting the batsman. This I presume is because there is not enough information available when the system follows the ball for less than 40cm to allow the tolerance spread of the prediction to be within the level of accuracy needed for a reliable decision. The important fact here is that it’s not perfect, but that it’s a lot better than not using it at all. From my understanding, however you look at it, using the system in conjunction with the umpire, gives a greater accuracy than not using it and relying upon the umpire’s judgement on its own. So why do they rest their case on a demand that can never be met?

As far as I’m aware every other Test playing country in the world has accepted the system in principle, so what is so different about India which results in them being the only one in step. It can’t surely be money, so it must be something else.

I have puzzled over this and I can only come to one conclusion. They must think that its use would disadvantage them. Perhaps I am too cynical but I can imagine some Indian Cricket analyst sitting in a darkened room somewhere not a million miles from Delhi poring over umpteen replays of dismissals in matches where India were playing. I am convinced that, because the cricket ball in India and the Sub-Continent swings far less than it does in England and other parts of the world where International Test Cricket is played, the majority of Indian batsmen have less experience of playing such bowling than say, England, and therefore the chance of their players succumbing to an LBW appeal is higher than any local team. I can imagine this poor soul concluding that, over a long period of time, there was therefore a net benefit to India in terms of wrong decisions which favoured them compared to wrong decisions which favoured the opposition, and thus it would give the opponents an advantage to allow the predictive Hawk-Eye system to be used.

Somehow or other, presumably because of the massive, and in my view disproportionate Indian political strength within the International Cricket world, they have managed to secure an overall agreement that each individual country’s Cricket board, in their case the BCCI, has the right to overrule the Sport’s governing body and make a unilateral decision to avoid its use if their team is involved. Crazy, but true.

Obviously, I have no proof whatsoever that this is the case, and it is simply the only opinion I am left with, having personally mulled over the facts that are available to me. If someone can convince me that another scenario exists, then I’m all ears. I would like to think that this running sore, for that is what it is, will be resolved quickly, hopefully at the next ICC Get Together, but I have to say, I am not overly optimistic. Having personally read an awful lot over the last few weeks following their disastrous tour here this summer, it seems that the Indian cricketing authorities are in total denial of just about every suggested failing on their part, so the chance of any constructive move on their part does not seem very likely. I hope I am wrong.

So, if nothing changes, for games involving India we will end up with the TV pundits continuing to share these incorrect decisions with the general public, the umpires being faced with a continuing and gradual drip feed of unresolved errors and a consequent erosion of the belief and trust in their invulnerability, which can only do the game a significant dis-service. Whatever we, or the BCCI, or the ICC think or would like to think, Pandora’s box of Technological Tricks has been opened on the cricket field and there is no way on earth that, to mix a metaphor, the Genie is going to be stuffed back in the bottle. Sky Sports will see to that.

My own personal view on India’s tour this year is that they arrived here with a massive lack of under-preparation, a ridiculously unrealistic plan for meaningful practice matches, a staggering lack of effort to ensure their players were fit and ready for a series against England, a failure to plan effectively for back-ups in the event of the inevitable injuries that occur to cricketers everywhere these days and, in the case of too many of the players, an all too apparent desire to be anywhere else other than facing England on their own territory. For the avoidance of any doubt, Rahul Dravid, none of this applies to you. I thought you were quite magnificent!

And I haven’t even mentioned the skill shortfall so many of their younger One day cricketers exhibited when faced with what is certainly one of the two best Test Bowling attacks in the world. Whether these younger guys, faced with the money, the adulation, the simplicity and the glitz of the Indian Premier League and its spin-offs have the desire to address the discipline of learning how to play Test Cricket well all round the world is a question to which I do not have an answer. So any possibility that they are going to agree with my personal view and hope for short term change has as near zero a chance of happening as I could imagine.

I have read a fair cross section of the Indian cricketing press following their team’s return to the home country, and the authorities, bless them, seem to be in complete denial about it all. If it wasn’t so serious for cricket, you’d laugh, but there you go. Just look at the shake-up that’s underway in Australia following the Ashes and compare that to the Indian response. Apart from sending each of the Indian team Managers and Planners a large hand mirror to look in and ponder, I can only conclude that they think their future cricketing interests lie elsewhere. I really do hope I’m wrong.

My increasing fear for the long term future of International Test Cricket, the greatest game man has ever invented is therefore rather a depressing one.

Tabs:

cricket,
test cricket,
drs,
indian cricket

ENGLAND v INDIA - SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?

2011-08-26T22:32:00.001+01:00

A four match Test series of England v India means 20 solid days of cricket to watch, with every ball recorded in High Definition. Hence, with only 24 hours in a day, no Blog Posts over the last month – it’s as simple as that.

Before it all started, it was being hyped as a really juicy contest between the two best Test sides in the world, and everyone was looking forward to a massive contest between two almost equally gifted sides.

THE ENGLAND TEAM WARMING UP. WHERE WERE THE INDIANS?

Oh, how wrong that all turned out to be. It’s all over now, and England didn’t just beat India, they utterly demolished them in a way no-one expected. Cricket is the sport where the conditions affect the way the game is played more than any other. The heat (or the cold), the humidity, the weather, the pitch, the outfield, the way the pitch changes over the 5 days of the match, the light, all make a massive impact. Playing on a damp, cloudy day at Headingley, and a blazingly hot day in the Sub Continent creates two different games, and learning how to come to terms with both sets of conditions is the mark of a top class player.

India playing at home is one thing, but India (or indeed any of the Indian Sub Continent teams) playing in England is a quite different proposition, and this factor did not seem to be given the importance it deserved. In times past India have come here and played brilliantly. Their batsmen are always among the best in the World, because batting in India is almost the most important part of their game. They usually bat a long way down the order, and patience, concentration and dedication are their long suits. They have often lacked real pace in their bowling, but their spinners have always been a real handful. Fielding has never been one of their strengths, and it is difficult to name a world class Indian fielder however far back one looks. They work on the basis that the batsmen will always score enough runs for their limited bowling and fielding not to be a problem, which, up until now is something they have usually done.

Only a couple of months ago, they have just beaten every other team in the world in the 50 Over ODI World Cup, and they came to England as No. 1 in the ICC World Test Rankings. India is the hub of world cricket, with more people playing and watching than anywhere else. Their top players are feted as Gods in a way we don’t even understand over here. Cricket there, is as close to a religion as a sport can get.

Just read down their batting order, and the spectre of immediately facing a score of 600 for 5 instantly swims into your mind. Gambhir, Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman, Dhoni, Yuvraj – the list just goes on and on. Harbhajan, their off spinner has taken more wickets than any other bowler playing Test Cricket today, and Zaheer Khan is simply a magician with medium paced swing bowling. And Harbhajan, the bowler, batting at No. 8 has scored back to back centuries in the last couple of years.

So, what could possibly go wrong?

Good question, because in the end the answer for India was - Almost Everything. They were woefully unprepared, playing just one match to acclimatise themselves to the English conditions. Apart from one shining example, the incomparable Rahul Dravid, their batsmen were a disgrace. Their fielding was uniformly dreadful. Their captaincy was uninspired, and often simply wrong. Their bowling was, at best, innocuous, and their overall attitude made you wonder if most of them even wanted to be here at all.

It was so embarrassing that it makes you wonder, or at least it makes me wonder, if the Indians still have an appetite for Test Cricket. Nowhere in the world has the Twenty Over game taken such a hold as it has in India. Watch a Test Match in India, and the grounds are almost deserted, but watch the Indian Premier League 20 Over games, and there are grounds with capacities nearing 100,000, and they are all heaving with spectators.

The really great players in the Indian team – Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman and possibly Sehwag are nearer to the end of their careers than the beginning, and the evidence of this tour is that the younger team members either have no appetite for the 5 day game, or, because of the emphasis on the short game, simply do not have the skills to play it. This could easily result in them turning against it. There’s nothing like failure to turn your face against the difficult version if, with a more limited skill set, you can get success, adulation and a very decent living playing the One Day Knockabout version.

People like Gambhir, Yuvraj, Raina and possibly even Dhoni need a lot of strength of character to go home to India set on improving their game to remedy their deficiencies, rather than putting it in the “too difficult” box. In truth, I fear that this drubbing could all too easily lead to a further slide down the slope of the disappearance of Test Cricket in the Indian Sub Continent.

If indeed they actually want to improve the situation, the Indian authorities, who are currently in a classical state of complete denial about it all, need to grasp this nettle firmly, and do so in the knowledge that grasping it is going to hurt. The Indian cricket temperament is not one of hard work and toil to perfect all aspects of their game. For many years now, they have relied on an abundance of a group of individual natural talents to shine through. Being good in one facet of the game used to get you through, but England have shown just how much that approach has been discredited. Every England player has at least two strings to their bow, and a few (Broad, Bresnan and Trott) have three.

Contrast the Indians. Look at Tendulkar, an utterly brilliant batsman, who is no more than a moderately good fielder. Look at Sehwag and Zaheer Khan, neither of whom who should have been anywhere near the team given their fitness levels, with fielding which is pretty mediocre. Look at the bowling attack when Zaheer Khan collapses after one match. There are no replacements available or even thought about, and this from the nation with the greatest number of players anywhere on the planet.

In England, when Tremlett picks up an injury, what happens. We get Bresnan as a replacement, and he is so good that Tremlett is now going to have a big job getting back into the side. Lose Jonathan Trott, a brilliant No.3, to injury and what happens? Ian Bell steps up to take his place and plays some of the most brilliant cricket you’ll ever see, scoring a phenomenal number of runs in the process. Now the selectors have a problem about what happens when Trott returns.

All of the above concentrates on India’s failings and makes no allowance for the class of the England team at the moment. Just as much as India’s failure, you need to applaud England’s ability. They can bat long and quickly. There have been 3 Double Hundreds (as well as a 175 and a 153) in six England Innings. They bowl relentlessly with no let up. You see off Anderson and Broad, and on comes Bresnan and Swann, building pressure continuously. When did that last happen in any series anywhere? The Australian 1990 side and the 1980 West Indians come to mind. The England players dominated the game for almost every session played, and simply didn’t allow India a look in. At the top level, that is what wins games.

None of this happens by accident, and it all started when England were humiliated in the Caribbean by being bowled out for 51. That was the turning point, and perhaps this 4-0 whitewash will do the same for India.

There’s some serious planning behind all this change in the England camp. A total commitment to all aspects of the game - batting, bowling and fielding. Everyone in the squad has to buy into the ethos. Samit Patel, quite possibly the best all-rounder in the country doesn’t get picked because he’s not prepared to go down the fitness route which Andy Flower and the other England managers demand – a message to all the others, I have no doubt.

Until a few years ago the bowlers could get away with the “rabbit” approach to batting. Now, even that’s all gone. In the last match England batted all the way down to No.11. Even James Anderson, the least good batsman in the team is OK for a few runs. Bresnan, who must be the best No.8 in the world right now, got a 50 and a 90. And when he’s out in comes Broad and Swann! And having that immense strength in depth gives the Upper Order batmen the confidence to play without the degree of fear they used to show. They can almost guarantee that the guys down the order can dig them out of a hole if the top Six get out cheaply, so they can play with a degree of freedom which allows them to express themselves.

Unfortunately, the vast disparity between the two sides became almost an embarrassment, and took away the huge pleasure one feels when two sides battle each other in a way which reduces your fingernails to the quick. It’s good to see your own side triumph, but the feeling in 2005 with the Ashes is far greater, simply because of the almost unbearable tension which built up in so many of those games.

It’s interesting that today, the ICC have announced a “World” Test Eleven, selected by the Great and the Good from the Cricketing world. It’s all based on individual’s performance from August 2010 – August 2011. In the Eleven, there are 5 England players – Cook, Trott, Swann, Anderson and Broad. From India, the ex No1 Test Team, there is one player – Sachin Tendulkar. I even think they’ve got that wrong. Rahul Dravid should have been there. But the main point is that only one of the eleven players comes from India, which does tend to make you wonder about the robustness of the ranking system which left India as No.1 Test side until a few days ago.

The other 5 players in the team come from two countries, South Africa and Sri Lanka. Sangakkara is chosen as captain, and the other four places belong to Hashim Amla, Dale Steyn, AB de Villiers and Jacques Kallis. The fascinating thing about selecting such a World Team is – Who do they play? Mars away or Jupiter at Headingley?

All of which makes for a mouth watering Test series in 2012, when the South Africans visit England. Are we looking forward to that?

What do you think?

test cricket,
england v india,
cricket
npower tests

THIS IS REALLY QUITE FASCINATING ......

2011-07-28T00:03:00.000+01:00

If you haven't seen this, as I hadn't before today, you can spend quite a few enjoyable minutes just planning some seriously surreal virtual journeys around London. Leonardo da Vinci to Leonard Rossiter is only three stops, while Richelieu to Bernard Manning, perhaps understandably, is almost all the way across the city.

I've no idea who thought it all up, but they've got a mind that's weirder than mine by at least an Order of Magnitude!

Mornington Crescent, eat your heart out.

To retain the detail, it is a big file, but just click on it to enlarge it

THE LONDON UNDERGROUND AS YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE!

ROGER WATER'S "THE WALL" IN BIRMINGHAM

2011-07-26T22:01:00.003+01:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece entitled “We don’t need no Education ….”. This was me reminiscing about my Schooldays 50 years ago, having been set thinking by a book I’d just read about a teacher's life in a modern Secondary School.

THE START OF IT ALL - 20,000 PEOPLE WATCHING

The name of the post was nicked from one of the grand Set Pieces of Rock Music - Roger Water’s “The Wall”. This epic piece of music, a Rock Opera if you wish, was first performed around 1980, and for reasons I can’t now recall, I managed to miss seeing it first time round. My love affair with the music of Pink Floyd has continued unabated ever since that time, but for 30 years now the “Seen That, Done That” box for "The Wall" has remained unticked. Unfortunately, because of the massive scale of its conception, and also I suspect because Mr Waters did not want to get involved again, it had only been performed a total of 31 times, so there had been precious few opportunities to catch up on it.

So, a year ago, when I saw that Roger Waters had decided to take it out on tour again, I jumped at the chance of a ticket. The man is not far off 70 years old now, and I suspected that this would be the last time he would ever undertake such a venture.

The crowds heading towards the Birmingham NIA were enormous that evening, and there was a palpable air of excitement as a full house of 20,000 waited expectantly. The rumour was that they’d spent £37 million putting it all together, and with the Floyd’s unrivalled reputation for spectacular lightshows, massive Gerald Scarfe designed puppets and totally over the top production values, I wondered what lay in store for us.

The NIA is a very big arena, about 300 feet across, and a partially built wall stretched completely from one side to the other, so perhaps there was a clue there as to what was about to happen. I must admit that I don’t think that “The Wall” is the greatest thing Roger Waters ever wrote, mainly because it seemed to me to be a bit too self-indulgent and “Rich Rock Star sprays Angst everywhere” but that doesn’t stop me thinking it has some fantastic songs in it.

It was Roger Water’s baby almost entirely, and the whole thing was written when he was getting really wound up about his own personal alienation and feeling for a need to withdraw from the pressures that the fame he/the Band had created. The story goes back to his childhood, starting when his father was killed at Anzio in Italy in 1942. His sense of abandonment seems to be then blamed sequentially on his father’s death, his mother, his teachers, his wives, his fellow Pink Floyd members, and seemingly almost everyone except himself. Each of these becomes a “Brick in the Wall”. You could argue that the storyline is a bit thin, but then you should look at some of the libretti of the classical operas, and any argument about this one pales into insignificance.

Some of the songs, in truth, are a bit run of the mill, but there are a few absolute gems in it. The great songs in it (and they are great) – Run Like Hell, Hey You, Another Brick in the Wall, and the incomparable Comfortably Numb, stand out, in my view, as Rock Genius. It’s probably something which will niggle Mr Waters but three of those four songs have Dave Gilmour’s name alongside him in the writing credits. Given the subsequent multi-year spat between both of them which brought their collaboration to a permanent, shuddering halt, there’s a real message there for both of them.

Before it started, I wondered whether he would have changed the way it was presented, given that 30 years had passed since its first performance. Perhaps, as a 68 year old, his feeling of personal persecution which he obviously felt very keenly in the early 80s, may have changed.

It had. There was now a wider overlay of an anti-war attitude, where instead of a purely personal take on it all, it had now become a musical and visual tirade against all the conflicts and wars which had disfigured the world over the last few decades.

ISOLATION - ROGER WATER'S STYLE

THE WALL IS COMPLETE

The Wall, as it was progressively built up across the huge arena, gradually became a massive video screen showing sound-bites and photographs of soldiers killed in action, tortured, as well as some who had returned home to the obvious pleasure of their loved ones. I found much of that very moving.

SOME OF THE ANTI-WAR IMAGERY BEHIND ROGER WATERS

The overall impact of it from a performance viewpoint was overwhelming. The scale of it all was simply extraordinary. The way it had been put together from a technical viewpoint was incredible, with the full force of modern photo-wizardry and animation being given full rein. The images were presented in an amazingly effective way, and the way the wall was used as a continuously changing backdrop to the action was immensely well done. The sound was something like I’d expect to feel in Beirut in the middle of the war there. It was physical in its effect on you. Overall, the lights and the imagery, the aeroplanes flying over the audience, the huge 40 foot Pig, the equally large 40 feet high Scarfe puppets and the grotesque cartoon effects projected onto the wall were quite incredible. I can’t remember anything personally which compared to it, and I came out of the concert in a complete daze. A total sensory overload.

THE WALL AS A 300 FEET WIDE VIDEO SCREEN

COMFORTABLY NUMB

So there you are. One of the great “Set Pieces” of modern Rock Music. Yes, you could be a bit negative and whinge about bits of it, but quite frankly I thought it was a triumph. Just watching the people coming out, and catching snatches of their conversation as they walked along or stood on the railway station platform waiting for their train home, you got a real feeling that they’d all been quite overwhelmed by the whole evening, and that they’d go home telling their families that they’d all missed something unrepeatable.

I know that was how I felt.

Tabs:

the wall,
roger waters,
pink floyd

THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES

2011-07-18T17:04:00.007+01:00

De HAVILLAND COMET

Note - Double click on the individual pictures to enlarge

them in a new window

My journey into the world of British Industry started in 1964 when 12 of us started hammering and filing lumps of metal in the Apprentice Training School of the British Aircraft Corporation (now BAe) in Weybridge Surrey.

Today, 47 years on, we have a reunion once a year to chew over how we all are, what we’ve been doing, what we can’t do anymore and generally look happily backwards over a decent meal and a not inconsiderable number of drinks. We discuss our bodies and our minds to compare notes as to those parts we can’t see anymore, what’s not working as well as it used to, what has become atrophied and those bits which may have finally fallen off completely. All in all, given such a morbid agenda, it's probably a surprise that it’s actually an event we all look forward to.

This year’s bash was held in Bedford, with the intention of eating and drinking our way through Friday evening (and significantly into early Saturday morning for a couple of the hardier and less wussy members) and then spending Saturday at some vaguely Aeronautical event. This year, we went to the Shuttleworth Collection in a delightful village called Old Warden in rural Bedfordshire. This looked like a pretty decent Museum of old aeroplanes, and the plan there was that the day would finish with a flying display on the airfield next to the museum.

Waking up early on Saturday, the view out of my bedroom window was seriously unpromising. Wind and rain lashing down. The prospect of standing out in the middle of an open field in such weather was not one I even began to relish. But, optimism is all, and we finally set off in a rather shambolic convoy to Old Warden.

Our arrival was met with an encouraging improvement in the weather, and we spent a good few hours wandering around the eight or so hangars which housed the collection. I had been born in Bedford, even going to School with the son of the man who ran the collection in the Sixties, so I had been there before, but I was not expecting what I saw today. The collection had been significantly added to and was now huge, totalling around 100 aeroplanes, most of which were either in flying condition, or were being restored to a condition where they would be able to fly in the future.

They were really beautiful to look at, most of them from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. There was a decent section of really ancient and historic planes, and one of the prize exhibits was the oldest aeroplane in the world which was still flying – a 1909 Bleriot. A seriously important piece of history out here in the middle of nowhere.

THE OLDEST AEROPLANE IN THE WORLD STILL FLYING

Even the lunch there was a step up from what is normally on offer in such places, and I had a slice of Pear Charlotte which was absolutely scrummy. By mid afternoon, the weather had really started to clear up, and the clouds turned into those lovely white, fluffy jobs which enhance anyone’s outdoor picture taking. We all progressively took off the various layers of protective clothing we’d come in, and in the late afternoon sun, albeit with a bit too much wind, the flying display got under way.

For two hours or so, about 20 of the Collection’s planes took off, buzzed around, and did a few aerobatics and stunts like cutting ribbons held across the runway in front of us. It was absolutely delightful. The result of the wind was that a few of the older aeroplanes were unable to fly because they were in danger of turning over on the ground, but if there’s a better place to see the foundation of this country’s place in the development of the Aeroplane, then I don’t know where it is.

De HAVILLAND TIGER MOTH

Because the planes were not as fast as those of today, they spent far more time in front of the crowd than a jet doing 500mph or so. One of them could only just fly faster than the wind, so in one direction, it almost hovered in front of you as it passed, and as it climbed it looked almost as if it was ascending like a balloon.

The light was perfect for such an event, with a deep blue sky, lovely cloud formations and occasionally a long raking sun picking out the planes very dramatically under a darker grey background. Wonderful conditions for photography. With little or no commercialism there, the overall atmosphere was like going back 30 or 40 years. Totally professional with everyone seeming to know exactly what they wee doing, and yet the feel was of a very slick and well run County Show.

Very highly recommended.

They put on displays throughout the year, the next one being on 7th August. Their website is here -

http://www.shuttleworth.org/tickets/event-details.asp?ID=111.

Here are a few more of the pictures I took of the planes on display.

PERCIVAL PROVOST

GENERAL HANGAR VIEW

GLOSTER GLADIATOR

PROPELLOR AND RADIAL ENGINE

HAWKER SEA HURRICANE

MILES WHITNEY STRAIGHT

HAWKER HIND

HURRICANE PLAN VIEW

CHIPMUNK CUTTING RIBBONS

Tabs:

shuttleworth collection,
old warden,
aeroplanes

NOW THIS IS A DASHBOARD!

2011-07-11T14:33:00.001+01:00

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah .....

But where are the Cup Holders??

http://360vr.com/2011/06/22-discovery-flight-deck-opf_6236/index.html

THE SCHOOL REPORT - 1960s STYLE

2011-07-09T21:56:00.008+01:00

It’s July, and my daughter has just read out my youngest Grandson’s first School Report.

Cue immensely proud Grandfather, Stage Left.

Coincidentally, yesterday I was rummaging around in my garage for some errant piece of paper, and I came across a small bundle of documents, contained within which were a couple of blue bound books emblazoned with the Bedford School Crest – my School Reports.

Ye Gods. Was I really ever 4 feet 10½ inches and 6 stones 8 lbs. Units and measures of a bygone age, which I even had to translate and explain to my children. Gone for ever it would seem are the days of the Rod, the Pole and the Perch.

But, just read the reports. The style is of another age. They were all written between around 1957 and 1964, and encapsulated the ways and the mores of that era. Now what follows may all end up sounding like a blend of “Outraged of Tunbridge Wells” and “They don’t know they’re born”, but the extracts are a clear example of how it was done by the Men in Gowns of Bedford School at that time.

The modern idiom of only praising the positives, and writing any withering criticism in a way that makes it look like a complement was something only invented much, much later. At that time, the schoolmaster wrote his report with a degree of individuality, saying exactly what he wanted to say, with an occasional wry piece of wit, and also the odd sardonic or even sarcastic jab at the poor recipient. You sensed that the School Report offered a rare opportunity to the teacher who often seemed to possess a barely suppressed desire to be a writer of some renown. Here, through the medium of the School Report, they could release a few of their choicer phrases onto the Great Unwashed. The current vogue for Political Correctness, and the construction of School Reports to parents from a Multi-Choice selection of bland, pre-determined and often meaningless sound-bites was most definitely a thing of the future.

The end result of all this was formally handed out at the end of each term in a sealed envelope to be taken home for review by one’s parents. Even 45 years after the event, the possibility that the Report may not have actually arrived home in the same envelope in which it was handed to me at school should probably remain shrouded in mystery. But as they say, Forewarned is Forearmed.

The school authorities however, on whom (to quote the late, great Henry Longhurst who attended the School for two terms in 1915) there were no flies at all, demanded that each term’s school report had to be signed and dated by the scholar’s guardian. This was presumably to confirm that they had read, learned and inwardly digested its contents, however indigestible they might have been. I’m not sure however if the idea that a parent’s signature could conceivably be forged had crossed the minds of the purer intellects which ran the school, a possibility which is now thankfully lost in the sands of time.

Just to show that, as one gets older, one develops a modicum of humility, as well as the ability to laugh at oneself, here are a couple of pages from my own reports. Schoolmasters then, like doctors seemed to revel in a writing style only just this side of incomprehensible, so there is a translation below.

You may possibly gather that English was not one of my “star” subject.

Aged 11 years 9 months –

English - Good competent work. He can express himself clearly and shows interest, though I have yet to persuade him of the importance of the paragraph.

Rugger (note NOT Rugby!) – Not very outstanding, but quite useful. (Author’s Note. I was almost blind, and played without my specs. It was not much more than a 50/50 chance that I even played towards the correct goal-line. So I took this comment as a glowing tribute!)

Aged 12 years 8 months –

English – Much more effort was forthcoming in the last two fortnights after a miserable start but he finds advanced work very hard. His paragraphs have improved, but comprehension and paraphrase show him to lack perception.

Aged 13 years 1 month –

English - There is no hint of anything profound coming from his pen yet, but he has tried extremely hard to master the art of writing with fair success. Comprehension continues to show his limitations.

Aged 13 years 5 months –

English – He has not found it easy to write convincingly, although he has tried hard. He must try to expand his vocabulary, and be a little more realistic.

Geography – Sound knowledge. Appears interested. (Author’s Note - Appears?)

Mmmm.

Without wanting to blow my own trumpet above a sotto voce, my position in the School Year was 4^th out of 86 boys, so I can’t imagine what the poor soul who came 82^nd must have been faced with when Pater opened the envelope at the end of term. It would be interesting to find out.

I assumed that the above extracts were the ways of a peculiarly “Bedford” approach to these things, but this would seem not to be the case. A while back, I came across a little book, cleverly entitled “Could do Better” (by Catherine Hurley) which captured some School Reports from the Great and the Good. To my slightly warped sense of Humour, they seemed very funny and left me with a feeling that I wasn’t the only one in the world to be have been slightly singed by the Schoolmaster’s delicately acid wit. Try these for size.

Richard Briers (The Good Life) - "It would seem that Briers thinks he is running the school and not me. If this attitude persists, one of us will have to leave,"

Dame Judi Dench (National Treasure) - "Judi would be a very good pupil if she lived in this world."

Peter Ustinov – (Wit, and general Good Egg) - "great originality which must be curbed at all costs"

Sir Michael Heseltine (Tarzan) – “rebellious, objectionable, idle, imbecilic, inefficient, antagonising, untidy, lunatic, albino, conceited, inflated, impertinent, underhand, lazy and smug”. (Author’s note – Come on, get off the fence and tell us what you really think!)

Alan Coren (Journalist and Broadcaster) – “Coren's grasp of elementary dynamics is truly astonishing. Had he lived in an earlier eon, I have little doubt but that the wheel would now be square and the principle of the lever just one more of man's impossible dreams.”

Sir Norman Wisdom (Actor) – “The boy is every inch a fool but luckily for him he's not very tall.”

Stephen Fry - "He has glaring faults and they have certainly glared at us this term."

So, make of that lot what you will. It’s probably just a sign of the times, but something tells me that it will not be quite so entertaining to read a collection of such extracts in 2050. Unless of course, the spirit of such teachers lives on in some schools today. Who knows?

I’ve shown you mine, so now you show me yours!

A GARDEN IS A LOVESOME THING, GOD WOT

2011-07-04T14:41:00.001+01:00

Words from a long time ago, written by Thomas Edward Brown.

A week ago, I'd made plans to buy a ticket and drive down to Goodwood in Sussex for this weekend's "Festival of Speed". As these things go, it's probably the best event of its type in the World. But, what with one thing and another, I didn't get round to it.

Over the last couple of days, we've had pretty good weather up here in Shropshire, and my thoughts have randomly wandered off on the "Wish I was there" track. For anyone keen on motor cars, Goodwood in the warm weather is a real magnet. But this morning I got up, took our dog Milly out for a walk, and then sat on the deck eating my breakfast in a very leisurely way. Orange Juice, Scrambled Eggs and Coffee. There was not a breath of wind, the sun was warm, with not a single cloud in the sky and I looked out onto the garden pictured below -

I have to say that, by the end of the second cup of coffee, the idea of getting up at 4am, driving 200 miles down to Sussex and fighting my way around somewhere even as nice as Goodwood with about 200,000 other people had lost a fair amount of its allure. I ended up pottering around all morning, and then spent the afternoon at the Grandchildrens' local School fete with all of the family, wanging wellies, eating waffles and sitting on the grass in the sunshine doing very little, just soaking up a lovely couple of hours.

Back home onto the deck, nothing much changed. I ended up sitting, no actually it was lounging, under the gazebo reading a book with a glass of wine. All of which was followed by an alfresco meal in the warm evening sunshine of Plaice, Seared Scallops, Roast Tomatoes, Cauliflower Cheese and some crisp Asparagus. Oh, and another glass of wine. The sun had by now moved around, lighting the garden up from a different direction. It was still warm, with no wind and the sky was a brilliant blue.

I thought that if I'd shot off to Goodwood this morning, I'd now probably be sitting in a traffic jam on the M25, wishing I was at home doing exactly what I was actually doing. Perhaps it's a sign of getting old, but I can't think of a much better way to have spent a Sunday than the way I'd ended up spending it. Sometimes the simple things are the best.

Goodwood will have to wait until next year.

AN ARTIST IN THE FAMILY

2011-07-03T19:08:00.003+01:00

My wife is a very good water colour painter. She has been developing her skills in this difficult art very steadily over the last four years or so, to the point where she is now very accomplished in what she does.

A couple of months ago, a magazine contacted her and asked her if she wanted to submit a few pictures with a view to having one of them published on the front cover of the July issue.

Here it is.

As you can see her style is very open, loose and free, and she uses the colours in a way which blend together in a way which I really love. The colours mix on the paper and not in the palette, which gives them a real vibrancy and life. The one below is of Yours Truly painted in the Autumn last year.

THE GENIUS OF THE CARTOON

2011-06-27T00:25:00.007+01:00

Is this the funniest cartoon ever?

I’ve often thought that Cartoonists should run the world.

The day after Michael Jackson's Death

They seem so sensible, so clear about the problems we face, and about the stupidity which we all seem to get into as an inherent part of our daily lives. They can see so simply the continual juxtaposition of illogicalities which seem to by-pass all of our politicians and leaders completely. And, if they were in control, anyone with a sense of humour must be a decent bet to take it all in their stride.

A lot of people, when talking about Americans trot out the same old thought that they have no sense of humour. Now, I’ve me a fair few about whom that accusation is spot on. But, America is a big place, and within its 300 odd million people are some seriously funny and witty people. Just look at their TV series. The Simpsons, MASH, Sex and the City, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Cheers. Need I go on? This sharp humour also makes its way into their individual cartoon output. On the comic strip front, think Peanuts and Dilbert, two classics.

The New Yorker magazine has been home to some of the better American cartoonists for a good few years, and when, at work, we became involved with a Venture Capitalist Group named 3i, one of the benefits of this arrangement was their annual calendar which they sent out to all their companies. It contained a range of cartoons from the New Yorker, and looking through these when next year’s calendar arrived, converted me totally into the belief that a fair number of them had a very witty, sharp and truly funny sense of humour.

I have a theory that judging cartoons would be a novel alternative to the Psychometric testing which we all used to love so much at work, particularly when we were in the throes of interviewing someone for a job. Choose 100 varied cartoons and get the interviewee to select his Top 10, and I’ll bet that a psychologist could pinpoint the man’s personality almost to an inch. I bet it would turn out to be really accurate over the long term. And anyway, in a business where you get into any number of difficult situations, what better than to have someone near you, when the Muck and Bullets are flying around, who sees the same funny side of it all as you do.

So, I’ve rummaged around in various drawers and books I own, and picked out 10 of my all time favourites. The one of Einstein's Cat at the foot of this piece spent ten years on my wall at work, and every morning it made me chuckle at just how clever and funny it was. To my way of thinking, Gary Larsen, Matt, Barsotti and all the others here are simply geniuses at their trade. All of these made me howl with laughter when I first saw them. As I say, I would guess that any shrink worth his salt could have me sussed in a few minutes by just looking at this collection. Thank goodness I don’t work anymore, so their opinion is no longer of any consequence.

For forty years now, the last page of the Sunday Times Colour Supplement has been a write up by someone, famous or unknown, under the title A Life in the Day of ... , where, in their own words they simply describe an average day in their lives. I have read this for decades, and each time I wonder what sort of impression the person writing it thinks he or she is giving the reader. Some are unbelievably pompous, some are utter control freaks, while others are so self absorbed, it's almost untrue. Very few of the famous people come across as someone you'd really like to go out for a beer with, let alone want to meet. But one of the handful who I've thought sounded utterly together, and a smashing sounding person was Gary Larsen. If you like the "Bummer of a Birthmark" cartoon or the "I'll get him for this ..." one of the Snakecharmer, get hold of his book The Pre-History of the Far Side. It's quite amazing, and you can only wonder how one man could possibly have thought up such a torrent of humour.

Click on any of the images to enlarge them in a separate window

OPERA NORTH - DAS RHEINGOLD

2011-06-26T02:12:00.001+01:00

THE CAST AND THE ORCHESTRA TAKE THEIR OVATION

Click to enlarge

46 years ago, I had just begun studying Aeronautical Engineering at Imperial College in London. Presumably as an attempt to expand the minds of the students and ensure that at least some of them ceased to be complete Philistines, they offered a set of lunchtime lectures on a range of subjects far removed from Engineering.

I soon found myself immersed in a series of talks on Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I learnt about leitmotivs together with a smattering about the German and Scandinavian legends which form the basis of the vast story. The main thing the lecturer wanted to explain however was the music, and the way Wagner moved the tonality of music on over the 25 years or so it took him to write it. Listen to music before him, and after him, and there is no doubt that Wagner changed the sound of music for ever.

Although I dutifully went to all the lectures, I’m afraid, at the age of 19, the lure of other student activities, mainly those involving the many pubs which littered Knightsbridge and Chelsea, took over my social life, and, as a result, the next stage in my exposure to Wagner’s Operas lay dormant for several decades.

Until, that is, last night.

I had booked to see the first of the four Ring Cycle Operas, Das Rheingold, which was being performed in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. Opera North, based in Leeds was taking on the enormous undertaking of performing the four works, one a year ending in 2014. It was described as a Concert performance, and I confess I didn’t quite understand how it was all going to work.

I had chosen a ticket up in the circle where the whole stage was laid out in front of me. The orchestra, which being Wagner, was definitely of the Full Fat variety and completely covered the stage. He wrote his music for huge forces, and here laid out in readiness, as well as the normal complement of instruments, were six Harps, a hugely augmented Brass section and a range of anvils and other percussion which would be brought into play during the evening. In front of the players there was a narrow strip, maybe 8 feet wide which, I presumed, was going to be the “stage” for the singers.

Das Rheingold was the shortest of the four operas, although it lasts for about 160 minutes - Without a break.

The music is continuous for the best part of two and three quarter hours. It starts with one of those spine tingling moments when you’re not sure if the first bass sounds are actually there or not. One minute the Hall is in total silence, and the next there is a sound of almost "somethingness" which, Oh so gradually, emerges and becomes the orchestral Introduction and Prelude.

From that moment, I was swept away, only coming back to earth nearly three hours later. The orchestra played beautifully under its conductor Richard Farnes. The Opera company clearly faced a dilemma over how to stage it, without any scenery or any costumes. They solved it by dressing the cast up in varying forms of evening dress or lounge suits for the men and long, dark dresses for the female singers. Above the stage were three vast projection screens, onto which were fed various image sequences, suggesting the mood or location of the current action. We had water, clouds, high mountain peaks and underground caverns, as well as molten metal bubbling away. Also appearing from time to time was the odd caption imparting a bit of story telling information.

The singers were uniformly excellent, although I thought Fasolt (James Creswell), one of the two giants, who, to me at least showed a startling resemblance in both dress and manner to the Kray Twins, was exceptional. He had a voice which was both beautiful and strong and he came across as extremely “Giant-like”. The German Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke who played Loge as a devious character with more than a hint of Graham Norton about him on occasions, was also terrific to watch and listen to.

The Hall itself added greatly to the enjoyment of the evening. Every time I go there, I am astounded at the acoustics of the place. From the quietest, almost soundless passages to the enormous climaxes, where you hoped someone was holding the roof of the Hall on, the clarity and subtlety of the music was perfect. Every instrument could be placed individually, from the gentle harps to the “calico ripping” brass.

I thought Richard Farnes paced the music excellently. To my ears, it had an open feel to it, and it all flowed in an uncoloured way which allowed the textures to breathe and develop naturally. The climaxes were quite breathtaking and hit me almost physically.

I was worried that the sight of such a huge orchestra in front of me would impose itself and always be in your mind, but in truth, it just disappeared from your thoughts as you concentrated on the singers.

It’s a small gripe but I don’t think the large screens worked as well as they might. To me, the images were neither Fish nor Fowl, and when, sporadically, a piece of information appeared and disappeared, I found it all a bit distracting, in a Powerpointy sort of way. With the whole work being sung in German, there were half a dozen or so large LCD TVs littered around the Hall, displaying the English translation. Unfortunately, they were all mounted at the front of the auditorium, so the poor souls up in the Gods (ie me) were just unable to read them. There was clearly room for a couple of additional screens closer to the back of the Hall, and this would have been much more helpful. Personally, I would have been quite happy if they’d projected the words directly onto the centre of the three screens, and everyone (ie me again) could then have read them without difficulty.

However, that is a minor point. The time simply rushed past, and I was completely carried with it all away into another world for the evening. Beautifully played, beautifully sung, it was an absolute and utter triumph. Very powerful and quite overwhelming.

I caught the last train home to Shrewsbury, after walking to the station in the pouring rain, with the music still driving its way around my brain. I’m writing this a day later, and it’s still there. I’m already onto the website to book early for next year. By the time the story is finished, it will be 50 years from the time I took my first steps at University to learn about this glorious music, so - Roll on 2014.

Tabs:

opera north,
das rheingold,
wagner
symphony hall

WE DON'T NEED NO EDUCATION .....

2011-06-24T00:15:00.001+01:00

I’m reading an enjoyable but dreadfully depressing book at the moment called “It’s your time you’re wasting”. Written by a teacher who calls himself Frank Chalk, it’s an exposé of the way an inner city school actually runs these days. Ghastly simply isn’t the word for it.

I strongly suspect “Frank Chalk” is a pseudonym, as details about the gentleman seem to be extremely thin on the ground, to the point of being non-existent. This is probably his way of keeping his job and its attendant luxuriant Final Salary Pension Scheme, while remaining alive as he plots his way towards retirement age. The book is one of those rarities – very wittily written, but about a very serious subject. All I can say is Thank God my education was not like the one described in Mr Chalk’s book.

In retrospect, I think my schooling took place during the Golden period for Education in this country. In 1957, the 11-Plus was in full flight. When I was 11, and being passably bright, I gained one of the six places available in Bedfordshire each year which sent me, at the total expense of the taxpayer, as a Day Boy to one of the country’s great Public Schools. It was Bedford School, founded in 1558. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, this was one of those happenings which was to change the course of my life completely.

My mother had raised me as a One Parent family, and, in the late 50s she had to work all hours God sent, scrimping and saving just to put bread on the table. And yet, the education system worked and I was awarded a free education that today would cost around £20,000 per year.

Reading this book, my mind has been casting back to the years at Bedford, and the comparison with school life then and now is simply staggering. So, a few random thoughts on how it was then. Anyone from my era choosing to read Mr Chalk’s book would simply not recognise what he describes as being an education at all.

We had a very formal uniform, which was insisted upon very rigidly. In term-time, it was to be worn whenever I was outside my house. One Sunday evening I was caught out cycling around the town wearing a sweater and non-school trousers by a School Monitor, and subsequently beaten by a Master for the crime.

The uniform included a White shirt, with a separate starched collar and collar-studs. The first day I wore it my mother hadn’t realised you had to polish the collar with an iron, and I came home with a fabulously luminescent bright red ring around my neck where the sandpaper like surface of the unpolished collar had worn an angry groove. In Summer, I also wore a rather snazzy Straw Boater which met a sad and untimely end under the wheels of a lorry which was following me on my bike. I looked up to see where I was going, and the hat, reaching a critical Angle of Attack in the wind, launched itself beautifully upwards off my head and the “Crump” as the lorry flattened it was really rather satisfying.

In order to ensure that homework was done, and that the dangers of the night were not visited upon us, we had “Lock-Up”. This meant that I had to be indoors at home no later than 6.30pm in Winter, and 7.00pm in Summer – without fail. My father had to sign a formal register each night to confirm that I was safely ensconced inside the house before the witching hour. I was once spotted in town after the time of the curfew by some nerdy Monitor, and had the Riot Act read to me in no uncertain terms. Transgress again, and a beating (“Six” was mentioned) would be the result.

In the late 50s, corporal punishment was a perfectly acceptable arrow in a school’s quiver of punishments. If a boy was ever made up to be a School Monitor (something which happened in the Sixth Form), he was given a cane, and he could use it on the other boys. In the School’s Morning Assembly which was attended by every boy (none of this Sectarianism that exists today), the great unwashed of the School were kept in order by the School Monitors strutting importantly around, and swishing miscreants on the top of the head with their canes, if they felt they were misbehaving. Those of my readers who have seen the film “If” by Lindsay Anderson, need to know that the sadistic scenes of masters beating pupils are not a figment of Mr Anderson’s imagination.

Compared to my previous Primary education, the attitude in the classroom was utterly alien. The masters wafted around wearing Gowns and Mortar Boards. One of them used to cycle into the classroom on an old bike which he parked against one of the walls, which may not sound very impressive, but the classroom was on the First Floor. Whenever one of the Masters asked the class a question, there was a great degree of “Me Sir, Me Sir” competition among the brighter of the inmates, of whom I have to say, I was one. In Maths, the electronic calculator was a thing of the Future, so the Slide Rule was king. In my hands, one of these became a blur as I set out to beat the other swots in the class by a millisecond. What a creep!

But, who says competition doesn’t sharpen the mind? Knowledge of Naperian and Base 10 Logarithms was mandatory, and the concept of Near Enough accuracy rather than the completely inappropriate Eight Significant figures provided by modern computers and calculators was very much the way to go. After all, every aeroplane built up to that date had all its calculations completed using a slide rule, and most of them were still flying.

You had to pick which teachers you offended by giving a wrong answer to a question. This, remember, was the age of the Blackboard, rather than the White Board. With the Blackboard came the wooden Blackboard Rubber. And with that came the well-directed Flying Blackboard Rubber aimed, often not too accurately, at the offending miscreant who had provided the wrong answer to a question. It flew unerringly across the classroom. Unfortunately, it often hit the wrong pupil, and the Schoolmaster’s rationalisation to this early form of “Friendly Fire” ran something along the lines of “Well, if I hit you incorrectly this time, it probably missed you previously when you had committed a sin, so on the balance of probabilities it all evens out.”

The only language I could speak when I entered the school was English. Along with the other 11-Plus entrants, I was immediately thrown into a series of language classes with boys who had already been learning French and Latin for 4 years. They had been doing this in the Preparatory school, called, in Bedford, the “Inky” (short for Incubator). The concept of allowing time for the new boys to catch up was not one even remotely visited upon the masters in charge of those subjects. I have to say that, for the first 6 months or so, both French and Latin were Double Dutch to me. And to demonstrate one’s shortcomings, each term we were resolutely marked in each subject as to our position in the form, and equally in Latin and French, I sat resolutely at the bottom of the class in 24^th or possibly 23^rd place.

And then, in what to me was almost a Damascus moment, over a period of no more than a fortnight, the fog lifted and the structure of Latin suddenly became clear. It really did have a bit of a religious feel to it. Previously, I had been the form “idiot” in the language, with the master shouting out metronomically to me “Cable, Gerund or Gerundive?”, knowing full well that I hadn’t a clue. The issue of whether a sharply square edged Board Rubber winged its way towards me depended on the 50% chance that a random guess would provide. In the fortnight during which the “Lourdes” moment overwhelmed me, I twigged the rules for Gerunds and Gerundives, and at the end of that term, I found to my utter delight I had rocketed up the Latin rankings to 8^th position in the class. Nowadays, along with I suspect 99.9% of the population, I can’t even recall what a Gerund or a Gerundive is, let alone do I have the ability to differentiate one from the other.

I say “Cable” above, because that was how I was referred to all through my days there. No-one used one’s Christian name, even one’s friends. It happened that, although Cable was a very uncommon name, there were three of us in the school, the other two being brothers. Via some form of logic which I will go to my grave not understanding, the authorities differentiated between us by giving each of us a different initial. Given that my Christian name was Roger, the initial with which I was bestowed was “L”. Throughout my days there, my official name was L Cable.

And yet, the other side of the coin was the quality and inspiration which some of the masters exhibited and passed on to me in their chosen subjects. A couple of them, by their own passion and teaching skill turned me from an 11 year old Philistine, into someone with a life-long love of the Arts. Ted Amos, the Music Master, and Ron Dalzell, the Art Master, are two men to whom I owe an unrepayable debt. One of the things I regret having failed to do is to have written to them in subsequent years just to tell them how much their own individual efforts changed my way of life. They both went to their graves not knowing the effect they had had on me, and I regret that immensely.

In those days, teaching was much more hands on and experimental, particularly in Physics and Chemistry, which along with Maths were my chosen Specialist subjects. Take the way we were taught something like the Conservation of Angular Momentum in Physics. We had a stool with a seat which was mounted on a bearing which allowed it to rotate very freely. We chose the most obnoxious boy in the class, sat him on it and asked him to hold his arms stretched out as far as he could, holding a weight in each hand. We then all spun him up on the seat so he was rotating as fast as we could make him, and the Form Master (he must have disliked him as well) told him to pull his arms in quickly into his sides.

In the blinking of an eye, he became a total blur, a human Gyroscope, before he fell off in a crumpled heap. The benefit to the rest of us was that for the rest of our lives, we had imprinted in our minds the Concept of the Conservation of Angular Momentum. 50 years on, I can see this in front of me as if it was yesterday.

Another Physics favourite was the Van de Graaf generator, with its deliciously effective 500,000 volt charge which made your hair look like Ken Dodd as you stood on the thick insulating plastic pad. The real pleasure was the immensely satisfying crack it gave off as you folded your knuckle into a point and held it surreptitiously against the unsuspecting earlobe of one of the class Thickos. Survival of the Fittest, I think.

In Chemistry, most of the time the facts we absorbed were taught by experiment. We made Soap, we played around with Phosphorus, burnt Magnesium and dripped Sulphuric Acid onto the socks of those boys who we didn’t like that much. We removed the Aluminium Oxide on saucepans to get at the unstable aluminium underneath, and held the resultant hot metal against each other to demonstrate its properties. I blew the fume cupboard up by making Di-Methyl Hydrazine and mixing it with Red Fuming Nitric Acid creating remarkably explosive results. Mind you I had just read that these two compounds were what the Americans were using to power their latest Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. One boy, who shall be nameless demonstrated in practical terms that Acetylene gas could be produced using Calcium Carbide interacting with water. Unfortunately, it resulted in the pigeon to which he had fed it, exploding.

Anyone who thinks that the best way to learn is by watching such things on a Video, or reading about them in a book, simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

And I haven’t even mentioned the Cadet Force, with its distinctly Dad’s Army overtones, or the School’s manic obsession with sports, mainly Rugby, Cricket and Rowing. Neither have I written about the totally different exam structure in those days. Perhaps I’ll write a follow up to this when more such thoughts have collected in my mind. It’s odd really. I haven’t thought about any of these things for an age, but the appalling things I have read in Frank Chalk’s book have immediately set me off musing about it all.

The one over-riding benefit I feel I ended up with at Bedford was an insatiable sense of Curiousity, which I’ve had all my life, and which I hope has led to whatever I’ve achieved along the way. Indeed the Inscription above the entrance to the Science Block, under which I passed every day was from Ecclesiasticus 43:32. It says it all.

There are yet hid greater things than these be, for we have seen but a few of his works.

How very true.

Not everyone there ended up like me, and others left with a very different set of benefits, which was, I suppose one of the aims of such an education. As an example from around my time there, I note that one class member (almost my “Best Friend”), is now the Member of the European Parliament for the West Midlands, whereas another became a Trotskyite MP. Of the others who were there around my time, one wrote “The French Lieutenants Woman”, another became the England Rugby Union Captain, and another the Leader of the Lib-Dems (name of Ashdown). Of those who followed later in my footsteps (although they probably haven’t heard of me!) one is currently England’s Ashes Hero Opening Batsman, one has twice won the Indianapolis 500 race, and one is a comedian named Al Murray. So, to produce such a diverse mix of individuals, the system which operated in such a school must have been doing something right.

The depressing thing is that if I, and presumably they, had ended up with the sort of education dished out in Frank Chalk’s school, none of us would have ended up where we are now.

I, for one, feel so lucky and grateful.

tabs:

school,
bedford school,
frank chalk

AN UPLIFTING STORY

2011-06-22T17:32:00.000+01:00

Just read this if you think that everything printed in a newspaper these days is "Gloom and Doom".

To read the story, click on each of the images above

to enlarge them in a separate window

The two pages are from The Times yesterday (21 June), and tell the story of a family's efforts to bring a stray dog from Afghanistan back to their home in the West Midlands. The dog had befriended (and/or been befriended by) a 22 year old soldier, Conrad Lewis, in Helmund. Earlier this year, Conrad was killed whilst on patrol out there, helping to make sure all of us in this country could sleep a little more safely at night.

I worked alongside Conrad's father for the best part of 10 years. He was Sales Director and I was Finance Director, and (apart from periods during Annual Budget times!) we worked together to help run a large vehicle manufacturing plant in Birmingham. The fact that our next smallest competitor was probably 100 times larger than we were meant that we had to punch way above our weight just to be in with a chance. Hence my particular interest in this story.

Conrad's funeral, in the main church in Warwick was the most memorable church service I've ever been to. It was attended by many hundreds of people, and you could be forgiven for thinking that it would have been a good day to invade this country, given the number of Army personnel of all ranks who were there. And if anyone ever says to me now that the young people of today are not what they were "in my day", I simply tell them that they should have been alongside me on that Friday.

That was three months ago, and yesterday the lovely story above appeared in the newspaper. Conrad's family had managed, by means only hinted at, to recover the 3 year old pooch, whose name was Peg, from the depths of Afghanistan, and it is now in quarantine in Nuneaton until December. We are a Grade 1 Dog family, and understand only too well the unique power of the bond which exists between dogs and humans. One can only imagine what Conrad's family must feel in these special circumstances. It must be almost like having a small piece of their son back with them.

I have to say that I can't remember reading a newspaper article which gave me as much pleasure, and which gave me such an uplifting feeling.

If when you read this, you feel the same, you can record your appreciation by giving a small donation to justgiving.com/conrad-lewis/.

If you're in any doubt, just think what Conrad Lewis gave.

tabs:

conrad lewis,
nowzad dogs

RAVI SHANKAR IN CONCERT - JUNE 2011

2011-06-18T11:40:00.002+01:00

RAVI SHANKAR IN CONCERT - JUNE 2011

More Music I’m afraid.

Until last night, my knowledge of Indian music could have been written on a very small piece of paper. In the background of my mind,it has always intrigued me, although clearly never quite enough ever to get me off my backside to do anything about it. In 2011, as part of my “Get your Arse in Gear” Year, I had booked to see Ravi Shankar in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. He was playing a 90th Birthday Celebration concert last night, and along with the faithful, I presented myself in the fabulous auditorium for the 7.30pm start.

I thought the evening was fantastic, a real breath of fresh air. He’d written a really decent and understandable synopsis of the structure and history of Indian Music for the programme, and, for once, three pages of explanation seemed to cover the basics really well. I am a firm believer in a little knowledge being a great help in such things.

His group was made up of six players including himself. Two percussionists, two additional Sitar players and a flautist. They were all brilliant instrumentalists, the percussionists especially so. They could make the drums talk and seem as if they were almost alive.

The first thing which strikes me about Indian music is that it is driven by rhythm and a gradually unfolding melody. No chords or harmonising occurs, which is very different from the way Classical music in the West is structured. Given that the Sitar is a multi-stringed instrument, I find that a bit strange, but that’s the way they do it, so there.

The music uses a different tuning from the Western eight note octave, and it all seems to move along a bit like a complex version of Tubular Bells with a phrase being repeated and then being very gradually modified with one note changing at a time. There is considerable use of what he calls microtones which send shivers up my spine. The dissonance which this causes, and the subsequent transition and resolution back to a more comfortable harmonic base is something I don’t experience often in conventional Western music.

The Raga, which is the central core of Indian music is quite a rigid structure. They all seem to start with a contemplative, almost introspective, slow section played by the soloist. It then develops into a section where there is much more rhythmic freedom, and a series of variations is worked out by the sitar. On a nod or a pointer from Ravi Shankar, the “rhythm section” joins in, with a marvellous ever changing support to the lead instruments. Sometimes they are in opposition and sometimes in beautiful synchronicity with the sitar, and the transitions from one to the other are really pleasurable.

It develops almost in a jazz style, with Ravi Shankar pointing to the various other players to take what sound like their own improvisational solos. The musicians interact and play off each other, leaving it all with an odd balance of individual freedom and collective togetherness.

His programme notes explain that none of these Ragas are written down, and the players learn them directly from the Guru, with no musical notation involved. Presumably this means that each performance although based on a base “melody”, is unique and depending upon how the leader wants to lead the variations, it can go off into one of many directions.

As the piece develops, the tempo continues to increase almost imperceptibly until, at the end it has built up to a brilliant and frenetic climax.

Symphony Hall is a wonderful venue for such music. I don’t know anywhere with better acoustics, and a combination of newly acquired Hearing Aids, a beautiful sound from the instruments, and the Hall’s razor like clarity of sound made for a perfect acoustic experience. Within the group, the sharp edged Sitars, with their mesmerising and slightly soporific bagpipe-like drones were complemented by the lovely breathy flute playing, it all being underpinned by a gorgeous range of percussion. Sonic perfection, to my ears at least.

I came away quite exhilarated. His group of players clearly revered him, and they had been obviously playing with him for many years, the whole ensemble being very tight. You could feel an almost religious respect towards him from the others which was rather beautiful and touching to watch. When he walked very slowly onto the stage, you could see and feel his obvious frailty, and quite frankly you wondered how he was going to cope with it all. But when the Sitar was placed into his hands he was almost electrified into action, and if you closed your eyes, there was no way you’d ever have thought the person playing it was in his tenth Decade. Quite remarkable.

I feel a bit as if a door, which I had left shut for all my life, has been opened just a bit. The music is literally a different world from what I’m used to and know, and its freshness, beauty and different tone structure is really exciting.

I can feel an ominous click onto the Amazon website coming on.

Tabs:

ravi shankar,
sitar,
symphony hall

SEVE

2011-05-14T12:41:00.000+01:00

There have been three sports in my life. Motor Racing, Golf and Cricket. Put like that, the common thread between them is individuality. One person drives the car, One person swings the club and one person bowls the ball or one person holds the bat. Yes, there are others involved, but when push comes to shove it’s all down to one person either succeeding or failing.

I fell in love with Motor Racing when I was very young, and it was an absolute passion with me through my teens. I hoovered up information about it and followed it as best one could in the days when live TV coverage did not exist. The passion ceased abruptly on April 7 1968 when Jim Clark, the greatest driver I ever saw, was killed in a meaningless little race in Germany. After that, I was merely a fan of it all. If the pleasure I gained from it cost a man’s life, then it simply wasn’t worth it. I followed the greats who followed Clark – Stewart, Petersen, Senna, but it wasn’t the same. I admired what they did but they didn’t move me like Clark did.

From the ear splitting din and ever present danger of the racing car to the calm deliberations of the golfer. I’d been watching golf for as long as I could remember. Even as far back as the days of Arnold Palmer and the rise of the young upstart Jack Nicklaus, who was not universally liked when he was young – people thought he was a porky, jumped up rich boy then. The two of them plus the South African Gary Player became known as “The Big Three” as TV marketing of the golf personality started out on its faltering first steps.

When you watched them on TV, golfers came across as a bit impersonal, with only Palmer shining through as a personality, rather than someone who could hit a golf ball rather well. This feeling of golfers as automatons carried on for a good twenty years. I went to a fair number of tournaments, and watched a huge amount of golf on TV once they’d got the presentation sorted out, but you admired them rather than were excited by them.

Then, towards the end of the seventies a young Spanish guy hit the screen. He played in the Open, and was only beaten by Johnnie Miller, coming 2^nd equal with Nicklaus. He was only 19, and his name was Severiano Ballesteros. He blew me away, and immediately I felt that here was a guy with the common touch, someone the average golfer (and I wasn’t even as good as that) could empathise with. This one got into scrapes just like I did.

Over the years, I became a committed and total fan of his. He was a stunning golfer, and for a few years there was no-one better than him on the planet. But it was the way he played that captivated you. He wasn’t that straight off the tee, so often he got himself in a God awful mess. But then he’d play a magical shot to get back into contention, a shot which simply wasn’t in the book.

Perhaps his record doesn’t quite match the Nicklauses and the Woods of this world, but anyone who manages to win 2 Masters and 3 Opens in the UK has got nothing to worry about. The thing about Seve was the way he did it all.

People should look at his record in Match Play if they want to see his true strength. He won the World Match Play Championship at Wentworth 5 times. And his Ryder Cup record is simply amazing. Beating the man, rather than the course, - he was simply the best there was. Quite frankly, if you had to pick anyone to play head to head for you if your life depended on the outcome, you’d pick him immediately.

One of my life’s little pleasures was getting an invite to the 1988 Open at Lytham St Annes. The invite was from the business partner of someone who handled the Insurances of the company I worked for at the time. It so happened that this man was a Member of the Royal & Ancient Committee, and the ticket allowed entrance into the Clubhouse during the tournament. “Would I like to go?” You bet.

Part way through the day, my Insurance man and I went into the hallowed ground of the Locker room, and just sat there on the wooden benches for a while. The golfers came and went either at the start or the end of their round, a few feet away from me. I kept schtum, as I thought that some chirpy comment from me would not be overly welcome. I did the nonchalant, seen it all before bit, not too well I suspect, until Mr Ballesteros walked into the room. I just sat there gawping like an idiot, simply registering that I was in the same room as my hero. I doubt if he even registered my existence, but I sure registered his.

There have been a blizzard of newspaper articles in his honour, and two of them, coincidently came up with the same thought. They were both written by sports reporters who played golf, of the hacker variety. They both headed their article of homage “What would Seve do?” Whenever they got into a golfing scrape, this is the thought which immediately went through their minds. In spite of Seve’s genius, they still thought he was one of them. The way he played his golf was vulnerable, getting into scrapes and getting out of them with a flash of brilliance. These two hacks got into similar scrapes, but the only difference was that Seve got out of them.

Thinking back through watching golf over 50 years, there are only three players who were universally referred to by a single name. Arnie, Tiger and Seve. The others, people like Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, Greg Norman were all players you admired. Seve was different. His smile, his audacity, his ability to bond with his fans made him very special, and to me a golfer apart. You just had to watch him, because you didn’t know what he was going to do. He seemed to make it up as he went along. If I went to a tournament and he was playing, the choice of who to watch for the day was trivial. You just got to the tee and trooped round following him.

It’s was very sad watching his demise, both in the late Nineties when he didn’t know when to give up playing, and recently as he battled the brain tumour that ended his life. Watching a great sportsman in decline is very sad. Then, when he announced his medical problems a couple of years ago, I had this horrible feeling that the Gods were going to claim him early.

Probably more than any other single player, he pushed European Golf forward and showed the Americans, some of whom can be a bit overbearing about the exclusivity of their own skills, that there are people over here who also know how to play the game.

But forget all that. I think he was simply the most exciting golfer I’ve ever seen by a country mile, and a man who gave me more pleasure watching a game than any other I know.

RIP

Tags:

seve,
ballesteros,
severiano

THAT WEDDING, AND AN INFLATABLE PIG

2011-05-01T21:00:00.002+01:00

Saturday.

Yesterday was a great day. In the morning the Royal Wedding, and in the afternoon and evening we went into Birmingham for a meal and a concert. Compare and contrast, as the Exam papers say.

What is there to say about The Wedding? As a partly paid up member of the “They don’t know they’re born” group, it’s all too easy to disparage such things these days. But, seen on my HD TV in Shropshire (my Invitation has still not arrived, by the way) it was an absolute, unmitigated triumph. I haven’t read the reports in the newspapers yet, but I’m sure they’ll all say that here’s something that we, in this country, do better than anyone else on the planet.

Apart from paying my taxes, a small amount of which presumably went into paying for it all, I had nothing whatsoever to do with it. That however doesn’t stop me from feeling proud that such an event can be staged by my fellow countrymen. Starting with my first view of the nave of Westminster Abbey, with that utterly inspired choice of six maple trees lining the aisle, and the breathtaking wide angle TV shot looking vertically down which panned slowly round on the couple and stopped, accurate to a second, as they reached the business end of the church, I just sat amazed through it all.

Throughout the brilliance of it all, I couldn’t stop a few rogue thoughts going through my head as the service progressed. Is it just me, or is Elton John starting to look like the Queen? Or is it the Queen starting to look like Elton John?

And the hats - scary or what? Especially those belonging to Andrew’s brood. Poor Beatrice’s creation looked like a Sky Dish supported by a couple of angry Cobras, while the other sister’s made me think that a large Bird of Prey with a fluorescent blue beak had climbed up her back and was just about to bite her head off. The only rational explanation I can come up with is that they were wearing them for a bet.

And, given the remorselessly detailed resolution of today’s TV coverage, you’d think that if you were going to the future King’s wedding, to be seen by one of the squillion TV cameras there, you’d make some effort to learn the words of Jerusalem, or at least read them off the songsheet as it was being played. Blake’s immortal, patriotic words do NOT include the line “La, La, La, La, La”.

The only thing “they” got wrong was not inviting Blair and Brown. In my view that was inappropriate and small minded, although I suppose at least we were spared the worry of what Cherie would have turned up in.

Anyway, it was a fantastic piece of pageantry, quite faultless in its execution. The Middletons played their part excellently, with their son reading the lesson to perfection. The music was spot on – good old Parry – and the Sermon was inch perfect in my view - let’s hope the happy couple were listening. And from a slightly baser perspective, Prince Philip wasn’t the only man taking a real fancy to Catherine’s gorgeous sister.

Marvellous, marvellous, marvellous.

So, onto the evening. An early Italian meal, and onto the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham.

I’m never totally sure about “Tribute bands”, but we were off to see “Brit Floyd”, one of the best of this sort of band there is. When you think about it, at many pop concerts, you sit so far away from the stage you have no real idea about who it is on the stage, and for some sorts of music, and Pink Floyd definitely comes into this category, you go (or went) to a concert of theirs to hear the music rather than see the people playing it.

Mick Jagger or Freddy Mercury, they were not. But, they wrote some amazing music, music which sits right at the top of my personal List for a Desert Island. You can get a bit stuffy about plagiarism, or copying or whatever, but the simple reality is that if you want to hear music by such people played live, then this is the only way you can do it. And Pink Floyd is not something you can get the full flavour of at home, even on a decent hi-fi set up. You want the atmosphere, the light show, the whole, over the top sensory overload experience. They were the absolute leaders in the integration of visuals into a music concert, and even back in the late 60s, they were experimenting with visual overlays to all their performances when no-one else was even on the board.

Nowadays, it’s something most pop bands do as a matter of course, but even when they last toured, in 1994, the light show they put on in Earls Court was out of this world. Now, the Tribute bands put on a decent copy of it all, but do it so that they can erect it all, do the concert, and be in the next town within 24 hours. Such is Technology.

It all sounds a bit soul-less, but the alternative is simple. Roger Waters has been out on his own for nearly 30 years, and Rick Wright and Syd Barrett are dead. So, if you want to hear the music they wrote, played live, then this is the only choice.

These guys, and there were 10 of them, 2 guitarists and a Bass player, all who sang, 2 keyboard players, 2 drummers and 3 girl backing singers, sounded pretty well like the real thing. Yes, you could tell it wasn’t David Gilmour singing, but the quality of the musicianship was such that, close your eyes, and the original group was playing in front of you. If you opened your eyes, you saw vintage, iconic Floyd images. The cycling population in Us and Them, the flowing flags from The Division Bell, and the timeless and child-like Black and White film on the beach from the late 60s. We even had a 30 foot long inflatable pig appear above us.

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

BRIT FLOYD IN ACTION

THE GREAT GIG IN THE SKY

THE INFLATABLE PIG

VIDEO OF THE CLOSING MOMENTS OF THE SHOW

Well it would wouldn’t it. It was a Pink Floyd show.

They worked their way through all the Floyd’s best music, including an excellent 25 minute long version of “Echoes”, something I’d never heard played live before. They did a set of two and a half hours and with a light show that was pretty mind blowing, they gave the audience a really good evening.

There’s undoubtedly something unique about being in the same venue as the originals band members, but the time has come when that’s no longer possible, and this must now be the best alternative. Anyway, I really enjoyed it, and as a “Rave from the Grave”, it was excellent.

I’m off to see Roger Waters performing “The Wall” in a couple of weeks in London, so we’ll see what a difference is made when the guy who wrote it all 30 years ago plays it. Am I looking forward to it?

What do you think?

THREE CONCERTS IN THREE WEEKS

2011-04-21T18:00:00.000+01:00

I’ve been to a few more concerts recently, and the latest was the third in as many weeks. There’s something quite special about the immediacy and one-offness of hearing a live performance that leaves most recorded performances as pale imitations.

As it happens, all three were from the Classical side of the Music house, but just to get the balance a little more even, I’m off in a couple of weeks, along with about 20,000 other souls to hear a Pink Floyd tribute band.

First off of the three recent ones was in the recently revamped Birmingham Town Hall. When I say revamped, I do mean revamped. It has had £140 million of yours and my money spent on it. From the outside, it’s high class Victorian/Greek Acropolis. Inside it looks great, with a massive organ dominating the back of the stage. The subject of tonight’s concert was all religious music. It’s a bit odd really – I find endless fascination and power in religious music, the strength of which is oddly unmatched by my beliefs. Can’t explain it, but never mind.

On the bill was Beethoven’s Mass in C, a strangely neglected work which always lives in the shadow of his later Missa Solemnis. I had never heard it before and was looking forward to it, although the faint praise with which it has always seemed to be surrounded did make me wonder a bit. There was a choir of around 70, and an orchestra of 30 or so. So when the “fff” bits in the score came around, there was a decent chance of the roof lifting off just a bit.

THE PERFORMERS TAKING A BOW AFTER THE CONCERT

I found it a much more mature work than I’d expected, almost operatic in its feel. Much of it had the classic Beethoven chromatic giveaways, and I came away surprised that I’d managed to get to the age I am without once ever hearing it. It was much better than I’d expected. Odd.

The other piece, Haydn’s Harmoniemesse, is one of my favourite pieces of choral writing. Haydn wrote 12 masses late on his life, and this to me is the absolute pinnacle among them, a truly beautiful thing to listen to. I’ve known it for around 50 years now, and its approachability lets you listen to it quite frequently, which I do.

The performances were good to excellent, and as an uplifting tonic to the soul on a cold Saturday night in the centre of Birmingham, it was great.

Next up was the Shropshire Young Musician of the Year in the new Theatre Severn complex in Shrewsbury, our nearest town. Our local Council tax payers have, whether they realise it or not, spent £28 million of their hard earned money on this new building, which sits in a prime position on the bank of the Severn near the Welsh Bridge.

As a building I think it is appalling to look at, a disgrace. It reminds me irresistibly of a failing 1960s Secondary School. The wooden cladding on it is already fading and peeling, looking as if someone has nicked the panels from a local allotment fencing scheme when no-one was looking. I applaud greatly the idea of a cultural centre like this in our town, and we use it quite a lot. But, as an eyesore, a blot on the landscape, it gets full marks from me. A Pox on the architect, or the person who thought up the design and the look of it is what I say. I bet he doesn’t live in Shrewsbury.

Anyway, inside is what really matters. There are two theatres, a larger one seating around 800, and a smaller one where we were for the concert. Four young performers, all still at school, were playing a major Concerto supported by a 55 piece orchestra, for the honour of claiming the title of Shropshire Young Musician of the Year. Some 32 individuals had entered, and the preliminary rounds had whittled them down to the final four.

The local radio station was there to record it, and the theatre was filled to the brim with around 250 people. One of the four soloists playing was the daughter of some friends of mine, so I went along to add a smidgin of support. We had a Trombone Concerto, A Bassoon Concerto, a Cello Concerto and my friend’s daughter tackled the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. She is 16, and played the 35 minute long virtuoso piece from memory, a quite astonishing achievement.

THE FOUR SOLOISTS AFTER THE CONCERT

The whole evening was a real wake up call to those who think the younger generation today are a bunch of wastrels. The four soloists were all remarkably good. It must be immensely nerve-raking to stand up in front of the Musical Great and Good of the County, as well as 200 or so other mere mortals and the local radio station recording it all, and play such difficult pieces so well. I know that there is no way on God’s earth that I could have contemplated such an undertaking when I was their age. I thought they all managed it exceptionally.

I’d never been in the small theatre of the new Complex before, and although it’s quite “swish”, the acoustics are horrible. It’s so dead and dry, sucking the vitality of the instruments away from the sound that reaches the audience. I understand they didn’t bother to do any work on the acoustic performance of the space, and didn’t it show. No life, no vibrance and no resonance to enhance the sounds coming from the players. It must have been quite dispiriting for them. Ships and Ha’porths of Tar, I think.

And now to the last of the three. I love the cello, it’s probably my favourite instrument in the orchestra. It’s the warm, autumnal, dark chocolatey sound it makes that appeals to me. And some of my favourite music for the instrument are Bach’s six Suites for solo cello. Richard Jenkinson, Principle cello with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was coming to play two of the Bach suites as well as one of Britten’s Three Suites for the instrument, a piece I’d never heard before. It was in one of the local Churches, which dates from around 1300. There were only about 50 people in the pews, but the church is quite small and it had a really pleasant feel to it all.

The acoustics of the church space were utterly glorious for the cello. The resonant interior let the instrument shine and glitter, and in Richard Jenkinson’s remarkably capable hands, it made a fabulous sound. He played the two Bach works bookending the Britten piece, and gave a mini Masterclass on them, which gave us all an insight into what the music was about. You can be forgiven for thinking that a solo Cello is a bit of an arid and depressing instrument, but in his hands it came alive with a terrific range of sounds and textures. An absolutely glorious feast for the ears.

RICHARD JENKINSON PLAYING BRITTEN

The Britten was an amazing piece, fiendishly difficult to play but with an underlying lyricism which I found unexpectedly enjoyable. Parts of it sent shivers down my back. A real find for me at least. The good thing about such a small, intimate gathering is that I could spend a few minutes at the end chatting to him, and asking the sort of questions I always want to ask after any concert. Normally with 20,000 other inmates trying to get out and a bank of Neanderthal security men herding you around, you have no chance of getting anywhere near the performers. I thought it was a real gem of an evening, and the good thing is that he’s coming back to play three more of the Bach and Britten suites in a month’s time. This performance is in our local church, where both my daughters were married, all the grandchildren baptised and where my mother is buried.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to that with great anticipation.

IF YOU DON'T LIKE CRICKET, LOOK AWAY NOW!

2011-03-09T16:11:00.000Z

My Regular Reader will be uncontrollably agog by now, wondering why I have managed to reach Day 18 of the ICC Cricket World Cup without a single mention of even its existence let alone any of the goings on in the Indian Sub-Continent.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that there are two England Teams playing out there at the moment – the one playing the classy opposition, which they seem to beat or tie with, and the one playing the minnows or Associates, as the ICC likes to refer to them, to whom they manage to lose with worrying regularity. Don’t ask me to explain it – I can’t.

Half way through the tournament, it seems to be England who has been the sole team employed to energise and excite the people watching it all. The only games worth watching (and I’ve watched them all so far) have involved England.

Firstly, they played India at home, a task something akin to climbing Everest in a zipped up Sleeping bag. India put 339 on the board, an ominously large, and you’d have thought, totally unapproachable score. England, bless them, set about it all with a vengeance, and when they realised, thanks to a blinder of an innings by Strauss, they had it in the bag, immediately threw it all away, and just managed to scrape a tie. It was a fantastic match, and the teeth-marks on the arms of my sofa bear witness to that fact.

Then a couple of days later, up against the minnow Ireland, England scored 320-odd, and then watched helplessly as Ireland went from a dead and buried 120 for 5, to winning the game, via a prodigious “Innings of a Lifetime” from Kevin O’Brien who managed to hit almost every ball exactly where there were no England fielders. Talk about snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory. At the end, the look on the England player’s faces told all, although none was as thunderous as that of the England Coach, Andy Flower.

After a brilliant defeat by Ireland, out they came to face most people’s Tournament favourites South Africa. England were bowled out for 171, and, with a score as low as that, the game was clearly lost. Except the other set of England’s bowlers, the ones with the same names as the first team but the good ones who haven’t played so far, came onto the field and bowled the South Africans out for 165. More chewing the sofa. You couldn’t make it up. Brilliant.

Every time I decide on the best team in the Cup, they turn out for a game and make a real dog’s breakfast of it. So far, the teams I’ve fancied to win are India, Sri Lanka, England, South Africa and until today Pakistan, and every time I announce my preference, they play a match and collapse in a heap. Take today. New Zealand vs Pakistan. Pakistan have just played them in a One Day series, winning 6-1. The Pakistanis were unbeaten in the Tournament to date, and you felt like the New Zealanders were going to get smashed.

The New Zealanders batted first, and ground their way to a very pedestrian 170 for 5 with 8 of the 50 overs left. Led by Ross Taylor, or Rose Taylor as one beautifully misspelled placard in the crowd proclaimed today and whose 27th Birthday it was, they then went totally mad. In the last 5 overs they scored 100 runs. If they’d done that for the whole innings their score would have been 1000, compared to the best ever total of 440 odd. It was savage hitting of the highest order, and you could feel the Pakistan team urging themselves like green lemmings towards a mass suicide, minute by minute. Nothing they tried worked for them, and new Zealand ended up with over 300 on the board. Predictably, Pakistan then came out to bat and got to 46 for 5, and just managed to work it all up to a total which wasn’t quite a disgrace, but only just.

So, who to go for? My own fancy is Australia.

England have lost Pietersen, who to me is not the great loss everyone else thinks he is. Broad is also on his way home, which is a great shame. But the rest of the bowlers just don’t seem to have adapted to the conditions out there. If they do start to bowl the right line and length however, they’ll do well.

South Africa still show this tendency to c**** (the unmentionable 4 missing letters being “hoke”), and there’s definitely a “here we go again” feeling about them in the big games. If you look at the line up they’ve got, they’re the strongest side, but ….

India also look to have the batting bases covered, but their bowling is a bit threadbare and the like of their spinners Harbhajan and Chowla look very ordinary to me.

New Zealand are a great team when they click, but there are too many times when not enough of them turn up on the day. At the end of the tournament, you have to play the best teams in the world and win three games on the trot. I don’t think they can manage that – not enough depth oto their batting and bowling.

Sri Lanka could do it. Their batting is a bit short, but if Dilshan, Tharanga, Sangakkara and Jayawardena get somewhere near their form, they will post a big score. Murali, Mathews, Mendes and my all-time favourite Malinga are also a bowling line up to die for. I think they’ll be in the final.

West Indies? Not yet, although their batsmen are getting better all the time. Watch out for Dwayne Bravo’s brother, Darren. They just don’t have the bowlers, and the simple fact is that you’ve got to stop the other side getting more runs that you get.

So my money’s on Australia. Shane Watson is a great one day player. Ponting is due some runs, and he’s not far off being the best batsman in the world. Haddin is good, Hussey can be fantastic, Smith is going to be a good player, and with Tate and Lee, and possibly Mitchell Johnson, they have a genuinely fast pace attack. The weak link is their spin bowling, which may be their undoing.

Anyway, the games trundle on. All 42 days of it. I’ve now got to endure the blissful excitement of Canada vs Kenya. Thank goodness for the Fast Forward button on the Sky Box.

A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE KINDLE

2011-02-16T00:49:00.001Z

I read a fair amount. One of the results of that is an ever increasing pile of books in the house, which have to be located somewhere. At least that’s my view. The view of the other member of the household does not quite coincide with that conclusion.

1 – “Have you finished your book?”

2 – “Yes”

3 – Did you enjoy it?”

4 – “Yes, it was very good”

5 – “Do you think you’ll ever read it again?”

6 – “No, probably not”

7 – “Are you going to throw it away then?”

8 – “I don’t think so, No.”

This discussion usually then follows the somewhat “Fortran” like programming process -

For i = 1 to x (x being a very large but undefined number), Repeat Steps 1 to 8.

This “discussion” has been ongoing for most of our 43 years of marriage, and the result is (as I currently speak) a collection of very densely populated bookcases (Ikea “Billy” in semi-industrial quantities if you must know) distributed around the house.

They are completely full. And I do mean “completely”. I don’t think I could get another one in if I tried. I say that with more than my normal level of authority because I have, and I can’t.

I am led to understand that the chance of negotiating the purchase, let alone the installation, of another one is “Remote”. That’s the “Remote” that sits right alongside the chances of the Monkeys diligently typing away and so far failing to duplicate Shakespeare.

That’s defined the Problem. Now Enter Stage Left the possible solution – The Kindle.

Steve, in our Photographic Society, an Early Adopter if ever there was one, owned up to possessing one last year way before the date by which Santa needed his present lists to be e-mailed to him. Of course, I immediately rubbished it.

I like the heft of a book, I said.

I like its weight, and the fact that I can flick backwards and forwards to see things in a book. I can scribble in a book’s margin. I can, but I don’t, so I can never actually find anything when I look back for it. And so on, and so forth.

Then he brought one in to look at, and 20 minutes later, I was hooked.

Yes, you can’t see to read it in the dark, but then neither can I do that with a book. You'd never replace the Coffee Table tomes with their beautifully printed colour pictures with one. But it’s as light as a feather, and can slip in just about any pocket. The Black and White screen is very soft on your eyes, with nothing like the wearysome glare of a Laptop, and the battery lasts for ever. The blurb says it can hold about 3,500 books on it. It even keeps track of where you’ve got up to, and via a nifty little App on my phone, when I start to use the Kindle on my phone instead, the little blighter knows exactly where I’d got to.

With many books, it can even read them out to you. Now I know that the voice of someone like Steven Hawking reading Brideshead Revisited might jar a tad, but it’s still better than nothing.

You’ll guess by now that Father Christmas brought me one, and I find it a real plus in my life. It can go anywhere with me, and, rather than twiddling my thumbs whenever I’m just waiting for something else in my life, I can pick up a “book” . So I read more.

But now think back to the beginning of this piece. You could feel a potential hot-spot forming in the Marital arrangements here. The Immovable Force of “I want to keep every book I’ve ever owned” coming up against the Irresistible Object of “If we get another book in this house, I will NOT be pleased”. And we all know just how unpleasant “NOT being pleased” can be. This machine has probably saved my marriage.

Yes, it has its faults (the Kindle, not my marriage), but anything which can simply, by its very existence, take the heat out of such a major problem, is a rare piece of technology. Praise be to Amazon.

And just think how easy it will be when I’m filling my suitcase to go away prior to doing battle with Ryanair’s weighing-in scales. The book I’m currently reading is 1,530g, and my Kindle weighs in at 237g, a saving of 1.3kg – that’s nearly 3 lbs! I can now take a second set of underwear!

Yabba, Dabba, Doo.

ROXY MUSIC IN CONCERT

2011-02-02T21:51:00.002Z

More music I’m afraid.

On Monday night I took myself off, together with about 20,000 other people, to the National Exhibition Centre to see Roxy Music. It was a slightly strange experience, almost two concerts in one.

Let’s get the whinges over first. I turned up at the time advertised on my ticket, but for the next 90 minutes after the allotted time for the concert to start, I listened to two other bands, neither of whom I’d ever heard, one of which I didn’t like, and the other which I did, and neither of which was shown on my ticket. I paid a tad over £70 for a ticket to see Ferry etc, and not a band which wanted to thrust Ska, Bluebeat and UB40 lookalike music down my throat.

When Roxy Music finally made it on stage, I thought the sound, and to a degree the layout of the stage and the lighting were not that great. Being generous, you’d give it all 5 out of 10. The sound was very muffled in places, with the piano very artificial and over amplified. The lighting was bad. The performers often played unlit on their solos, and for some daft reason, when Ferry sat at the piano to play instead of being out front literally and physically in the spotlight, he melted into the background, verging on invisibility.

Normally, the saving grace here is the bank of huge Video screens where the players’ faces and all the details you want to see, are displayed in 20 feet high glory. Not here. I was sitting quite close to the stage and I couldn’t see a great deal. So, I’ve no idea what the poor people right at the back saw of the band. Well, actually I have. Nothing.

It felt like a slightly shambolic first night, the sort where you know they were still trying to organise themselves and that in a couple of evenings time, they’ll get it all sorted out. Except that I’d paid £70 to see them tonight. Oh well.

BUT .....

There’s always the music, and the simple truth is that it was the music I went to hear. They did a 90 minute set straight off. All of the original members were there apart from Brian Eno. Yes, I know there were a few even more original members, but you have to be the Roxy Music Archivist to remember who they were. I certainly don’t.

Ferry, Phil Manzenera and Andy Mackay took centre stage, playing the part in their smooth suits, and all looking very lounge lizardish. But that’s part of the group’s image, Louche, laid back, slightly dissolute, and ever so slightly world weary. They’d got all the usual Roxy Music accompaniments, the girl instrumentalists with legs that never ended and black sequined shorts that almost never started, a new skinny, long haired, but very good guitarist (Oliver Thompson) and a couple of diaphanously, almost clad dancers who most definitely took your mind off the music on occasions.

I suppose the two concerts I referred to at the beginning of this piece mirrored the life of Roxy Music. They started chronologically at the beginning, in the early Seventies, and played a fair number of songs from their “experimental” phase. The album “For your Pleasure” was raided for quite a few of them, which, given that that also was the name of the Concert should have been a bit of a clue as to what was going to happen tonight. In truth though, for the first 40 minutes or so, there were quite a few of their songs I’d never heard before.

I actually spent most of the Seventies in a rather snobbish Classical Music only frame of mind, so managed to miss the likes of early Genesis, Pink Floyd and all the other bands I love today. It was a Hi-Fi exhibition around 1980, where I happened upon to a new record, “Funeral for a Friend” by Elton John off his “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” album, which literally blew me away, and thankfully knocked me off my Classical Music only Poseur’s perch. It’s taken me twenty odd years since that time to work my way back to the roots of these bands. And it’s the same for me with Roxy Music.

But you could either close your ears for the first half of their set, and wait for the more familiar strains of songs from “Flesh and Blood” and “Avalon” (which some people around me were clearly doing). Or you could marvel at some very original sounds which must have sounded even more original 35 years ago. It was quite a brave thing to do in front of 20,000 people for the band to make a real thing about dusting off songs which I suspect had not seen the light of day for many years, and which they knew would be unfamiliar to most of the audience.

The pundits write about how most people underestimate just how important and influential this band was, not just in what they themselves sang, but in the way they led other people into new avenues of music, you could sense that coming over loud and clear from somewhere 35 years later. Well, not always CLEAR, because of the slightly iffy sound set-up, but you know what I mean.

About half way through, the songs “Us Proles” know started to appear, and the place literally came alive. You could almost feel the anoraks there bristling at the change to what they saw as the commercial sell-out of “Manifesto” onwards, but I reckon 90% of the audience felt that the concert was finally getting under way!

You can’t please all the people all of the time, and this was a classic reminder of that fact. The place got on its feet, the hands started clapping, the geriatrics rewound and replayed their lives from about 25 years, and the smiles appeared. They stopped just short of throwing their Zimmer frames in the air to celebrate, but you could certainly feel a sigh of relief around you.

To me, the guitar of Phil Manzenera and the saxophones of Andy Mackay were the real stars of the evening, both of them serious Class Acts. They both played brilliantly, with Andy Mackay blowing so hard, you feared occasionally for his health. Bryan Ferry’s voice was not that strong now, and to me he seemed almost disconnected from the audience for much of the show. He got his act together towards the end, but for much of the time it looked like he was going through the motions. Maybe he’s just like that, I don’t know.

Anyway, I came away having heard a lot of new (actually very old) stuff I would need to follow up on, heard a few of my all-time favourite songs and also seen the guys in action for the first time in my life. Not, I have to say, the best concert I’ve ever been to, but certainly not the worst.

Seven and a Half out of Ten for me, with the dancers easily rounding it up to Eight!