Ragtime Parlour!

One of my favourite covers.

Here's something you don't get very often. A combination of stompingly good Ragtime, and the Parlour songs that preceded it, and the songs that were informed by it after, and a band that doesn't really need amplifying. It's genuine, hundred-year-old fun. If there are ANY Titanic Centenary events that do not call on us to perform, they are extremly silly. Beyond silly; certifiable.

My first-ever piece of sheet music.



This IS the RMS Lusitania Ragtime Orchestra, Matt on piano.



I've collected old sheet music since I was at least nine. I've gone through mountains of it. I collected it from neighbours, abandoned shacks, benches in used piano shops, charity shops, and through classified want ads. I put out the word, and people gave me boxes of it.
I still have the same system today: I sit down at the piano, play through it and sort it into as many as ten different categories, then take it out and try it on audiences everywhere. I take it to hospitals and to nursing homes where people are brutally frank. If a song makes it there, it will make it almost anywhere.



I've done gigs for Matthew Redman, wunderkind of yore (he's now a wundermann) with his RMS Lusitania Ragtime Orchestra, and I've done gigs for Nicholas Ball and his Flying Aces. Putting together elements of both, and adding my chintz and parlourishness, what we have is this:

I have had people advise me that I should take all mention of Parlour out before going to North America. There was a revival of Parlour in the 1970s, and it wasn't all good. So, they tell me, it is doubly, triply, stuffy. I ask you! Is this stuffy?

For one thing, you'll never hear a Sousaphone imitate a bumblebee anywhere else.  

We are like a Renaissance "Broken Consort" in a way, because we take on different combinations through the concert. I started a capella with Stephen Foster, then we launched into Oh Johnny all together, then the four instruments did a fresh and bright rendition of "Aeroplane Rag of 1912", then Nick came out and sang a solo, then Matt and I scaled right back with a guitar-and-voice "Love's Old Sweet Song", and then he sat down (not on his tails) at the piano to play "Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar", and then we were all of us back with "Moonlight Bay", and so it went.

Simon can't resist touching it.

Footage is still being edited from this concert, and then you can see Nick's fabulous singing-trumpet and hear how mellow his voice is through it. He made it out of a metal waste-paper basket, part of a vaccuum hose, and some red enamel paint. Works a treat. Simon Marsh's marvellous clarinet, with its beautiful vibrato, developed specially for this project and era, you might remember from "Our Lovely Day". Listen for his little counter-melodies through the music. Bliss.

At Mayfest. Hence my flowers, hence Nick's boater.

And what does one say about the Sousaphone? It is an edifying sight. And played by Dickie, an edifying sound. This is a man who has played in symphony orchestras, but doesn't mind dragging his massive, hundred-year-old instrument on and off night-buses for gigs at the Experimental Cocktail Club, or in this case, to a church in Notting Hill.

The audience was very happy to see us again. We had appeared in the Notting Hill Mayfest 2011 and believe it or not, when I was wandering along Portobello Road a few months ago, a very respectable lady actually stopped me and said "Did you sing all those wonderful songs, with the sousaphone and the banjo and everything? I never had so much fun in my life!"

Crystal Palace Overground Festival...and Victorian Dinosaurs

Staff at the Crystal Palace Museum say that they still get confused tourists asking where the
Palace is. "But the bus said Crystal Palace. I've always wanted to see the Crystal Palace." So have we all.

Travis found an image of it on his smartphone and held it up against the park where it once stood, hovering the phone just above the seemingly endless field of foundation stones. "That was big," he said.

The Overground Festival was in nearby Westow Park. It was overrun with children, teenagers, young, middle-aged and old. Andrea and I had to change into our 20s frocks in the back of an ice-truck. She was in shell-pink, I in fuchsia pink. The bandstand played host to Pogues covers, Reggae, blues, and then...the Lovely Parlour Band.

As John Baker was busy being married, and Nick and Matt busy playing music for the occasion, and Orpheus busy sunning himself in Greece, it was a rather different band. Simon heroically rushed from John's wedding to play his marvellous, creative and sensitive clarinet, and two magnificent musicians became Lovely Parlourites: former U.S. Navy Travis Finch and his mandolin, and Peter Sachett (pronounced Sackett, though I did it wrongly on the stage) on his rich violin. Andrea carefully altered her parts to include John's bass notes, and Travis gave all of Nick's fills and cues for me, as well as being Matt!

A small gaggle of children sat in a line in front of us, and even danced. many other people seemed to like us too. We were given as many drinks as we liked and I got a little wasted on Perry. Staggering around smiling uproariously afterward, the rest of the parlour Band didn't let me get into trouble, and we were asked to pose for lots of photos. After one of them I said "gah, I'm sure I looked like sh*t, but thankyou." A woman looked daggers at me. Beside her sat her young daughter. But only a few places away, some youths were smoking weed.

"Bouncy Castles!" I said.

"I've always wanted to go on a bouncy castle," said Travis.

"You! The U.S. Navy would have to construct one. How much do you weigh?"

At this point we were sidetracked by masked revellers. Five minutes later, Travis said "Two- thirty."

"Is it really? Wow we've got loads of afternoon left!"

We all went to a very classy Italian joint, chosen by Andrea, and then we

walked over to the 1852 dinosaur sculptures (1852! Before the Origin of the Species was published!). I think we all adored them. The day was dimming down. It was magical.

I remember these when they were a few weird heads and tails poking out from brambles and Tesco bags, behind wire fencing.

Now, restored, they look magnificent, exactly what must have haunted the dreams of Victorian children for years and years.

But we have something of a better idea of what an Iguanodon looks like, today.

Ruth from Balfron Towers

A couple of weeks ago I went to look at a flat in East London that had been advertised on Gumtree. It was in the top floor of a brutalist building designed by Erno Goldfinger...yes indeed. Ian Fleming so hated his designs he used his name for one of his villains.

The flat was in the very top floor and along a sort of gangway to another, smaller, chunk of tower. Going along the gangway I felt a horrible swaying sensation. A sweet face poking out of a door said "I'm here..." and that was Ruth.

She had taken this little corner of a cement monstrosity and filled it with art, seedlings, plants, books.

The gangway is anchored in rubber apparently and sways visibly in the wind. Ruth told me I was the first visitor to detect this, which I find enormously hard to believe, but she has an honest face.

She's right above the Blackwall tunnel and so there's a constant buzz (I felt like yelling down: "rather you than me, suckers!"), and you can see for MILES around. It feels as if you can see France. City Airport glows, and off in the distance there's the Gherkin, the London Eye all tiny, and everything.

I couldn't imagine how many trips in the tiny lift my concert dresses would need, and then she has to move out in a year, poor thing, while they do Balfron up all chic and then charge City workers a mint to buy them.

But Ruth is a new friend, and a very, very talented artist. She paints abstracts, but that's like saying someone cooks food. Most abstracts in this world are processed cheese on Wonderbread.

Hers are pea and mint croquettes, roasted aubergine with sofrito and chickpeas.

We both went to the Vortex on Saturday to see Vila Verde.

The Vortex club is in a box in a public square just around the corner from Dalston Kingsland. Ruth used to go to the Vortex back when it was in Stoke Newington, years ago. A large black man with a gold Nefertiti-head pendant around his neck said to me "It's been a while since I've been to the Vortex. Stoke Newington's changed a lot." He genuinely had no idea he was in Dalston. I think he was posh. Anyway, this square had an outdoor ping-pong table which saw constant use the whole time we were there. When we left at 10-ish (I had to play the organ the next morning) two young guys with corn-row hairdos were still playing. The club is at the top of the building and all the blackout blinds were down for a clubby atmosphere when we got there at 7:30. The sun tried to stream in through the cracks. Ruth said "It's raining...there'll be a rainbow." and so we pulled up one of the blinds and there it was, huge. Vast. A full double arc. They aren't Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet. They're Pink Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet Aquamarine and a tiny bit of pink.

We raised a few of the blinds and saw that the ping-pong players hadn't stopped, but everyone was posing in groups on the wet cement against the rainbow while cameraphones were busy. Ruth said that from her flat she sees rainbows that describe a circle. We only see an arch because of how close we are from the ground. I'd like to see that.

Vila Verde was excellent as always. Two of them are playing with me in the Crystal Palace Overground Festival on Saturday: Simon Marsh on clarinet and Travis Finch on Bandolim. He has a tattoo he got while he was in the U.S. Navy. How cool is that?!