All fun at the Gilbert Scott!

I'd like to pay homage to two marvellous things: the restored St Pancras Hotel, and the photographer Debee Calveche.

 

Here's a photo by Debee of part of the Gilbert Scott bar.

This is part of the magnificent restoration of Sir George Gilbert Scott's St Pancras Midland Grand hotel, now the St Pancras Renaissance.

I was on my way to the Illuminated Manuscripts exhibition at the British Museum one day when it was raining, and I cut through the covered portico at the westerly side of the building. I stopped dead in my tracks when I caught sight of the ceiling! With bells hanging from it! I thought of my Parlour band, and it occurred to me that any other music would be out of place there. What goes with this sort of splendour? Ragtime and Parlour, that's what.

So here I am.

With a new band-mate, the ever-grounded, ever-proactive Emily O'Hara.

We were given a room to leave our things in, and sort out music. Here we are sorting music.

Emily suggested that I make banners to cover music stands, so off I went to Shepherds Bush Market, where I found exactly what I needed. Felt! I don't want to sew, particularly, so I designed the banners on the back of a Music in Hospitals contract, inspired by 78rpm record label designs I've seen, and using Suffragette colours (Green, Violet, White = Give Votes to Women. Occasionally you'll find Edwardian jewellery in emeralds, amethyst and diamonds, meaning the same thing). Then I just got felt, and scissors and fabric glue. It was pretty much all free-hand, with a few little pencillings. I used an exacto knife too.



Emily O'Hara, John Baker, Simon Marsh



I think they're very pretty. Good idea, Emily!



We did all sorts of things. Songs from the forties, the thirties, but mostly the 20s and before. We got very good reactions to "Moonlight Bay" which really worked well. We did it all without amplification, and I could feel my voice soaring up to G. Gilbert Scott's ornamental, vaulted ceilings.

Divine.

Emily in her turn did some of her Annette Hanshaw songs, impressive multi-talent she is. She's younger than me, slimmer than me, and plays the guitar. Aren't I the opposite of a diva to have her anywhere near me? Just needed to say that, you know. To be appreciated as the selfless one I really am.

Debee Calveche

Now. Debee here has come along, often at her own expense, to most of my gigs. She has taken the most stunning photos, and footage of me including those two clips of me singing at the Clerkenwell vintage fair sitting on the top of a piano. She has a creative, artistic eye. Most of these blog posts feature her work: the Lucky Dog Picture House, the Clerkenwell Vintage Fair, the Scoop gig...and many marvellous others from Passing Clouds and the Experimental Cocktail Club in Soho (which I didn't blog about, but which I give an example of below). If any musicians are reading this and would like to have something that really shows not only themselves in action, but the true atmosphere of the place, and moments of beauty and surprising, poetic and humorous juxtapositions, they need look no further than Miss Debee.

I was also lucky to have another photographer drop by, Commander Charles Giles, Retired. Pilot for the Royal Navy, and many other acheivements in sea and air!

I love how he's captured a camera-in-a-camera effect here.

Photo by Cmdr Charles Giles

Well in any event there was some talk of a possible engagement for the Jubilee weekend, so watch out for announcements, as they say.

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!"

End of the year gigs...

At the Forge...




...the Camden Forge

Blogging requires time, and photos to hand. I didn't have much of either in November and December! So here I am in the snows of January with my memories of the end of 2011.

There was the gig at the Camden Forge with some Flying Aces. Earlier that day I'd rescued a sick fox at the back of a pub in Hanwell.

A week later, or was it the next day? The Lovely Parlour Trio and I were on BBC Radio London's Saturday Breakfast Show, performing live. Jon Butterfield played their wonderful trusty studio upright, Matt Redman treated us to his guitar, and Nick Ball played spoons and washboard, a first for the studio. We did Button Up Your Overcoat and The Honeysuckle and the Bee. Listeners phoned in to say how good it was to hear something that wasn't anything to do with "X Factor Crap". I only quote. Joanne Good and Simon Lederman are the most fun, generous, fabulous people possible.

Photo by David Rowley. Ellen Smith, Patricia Hammond, Zita Syme.

Then I joined Ellen Smith, BEAUTIFUL harpist and Zita Syme, BEAUTIFUL soprano, to adorn the library of the Reform Club. We all wore red, and processed in singing the Hodie from Britten's Ceremony of Carols. Ellen can sing, too. I found a fabulous book on the shelves there: Ronald Firbank's "The New Rhythum" and other pieces. 

A random quote: 

"'He looks ever so much more like Narcissus than Apollo,' said Wildred, and seating himself on the river bank he recited to the first moonbeam that touched the lake, a poem of Verlaine." 

Then went to Switzerland to sing Rossini in a church at the top of an icy hill. It was recorded and photographed, but I have neither...yet.

Hugely looked forward to Ragtime Parlour's return engagement when I got back, and we tried out "Moonlight Bay", as it was written in 1912. A nice, neat century ago. Some dandy footage was taken, but if anyone knows how to edit MTS files, and intercut them with MP4 files, and overlay a WAV recording, please let me know! Then maybe those who weren't there can see how much fun we all had.

But as to the voice and harp combination, here's one Ellen Smith and I did a year ago. I'm wearing my pioneer grandma's pearls.

Nick Ball's new drum demos, fabulous Choro, and Time for Tea

Yesterday I paid a visit to Shoreditch's "Time For Tea". I'd met a man named Johnny and his lovely daughter over a stall at Vintage on the SouthBank. The stall sold fairground tat from the fifties....the REAL thing. Hideous buck-toothed, red-nosed and ginger-moustachioed masks, boxes of tiny plastic babies, novelty brooches (cannot hope to describe). If you really want to see (and you ought to!) go HERE. But there's nothing like running it all through your hands!!

In any case I said "It's like that shop where Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard steal stuff on a dare," and a girl in a leather jacket with an angelic face said "Exactly!!" Her name is Tillie. She tap-dances, and her dad owns Time for Tea.

I bought three of the horrible buck-toothed masks for the band I was going to see later that evening.

This was Vila Verde at the Jamboree in Limehouse. Vila Verde plays Choros, which could be described as Brazilian ragtime. Delicate, melancholy filigree masterpieces, these Choros. The lovely Emily O'Hara started the band and they have gone from strength to strength. Her passion has translated itself into a thing of beauty. They even sell green t-shirts for a fiver.

Showed off my "Chic on a Shoestring" book and gave the masks to the band. Emily says that she had nice dreams that night, and that my evil plan had failed.

In any case! Yesterday went to Time For Tea. Johnny Vercoutre is remarkable. We had an interesting conversation on how "vintage" is getting too predictable. He suggested I shave my head. I felt very complimented but couldn't help concluding that the man didn't really get a good look at my ears. He effectively lives in a shop on Shoreditch High Street, which he has gigs in, rents out for parties, and opens for tea on Sundays. The rest of the time it's his home, and people stop by to pet his MASSIVE dog, talk about old bikes, and generally be neighbourly. All on a high street. More people should do this; the world would be a better place.

Nick Ball has uploaded a series of early drum demos! VERY impressive. This is important work, to get the word out on how to perform music from the first two decades of the 20th century. I am honoured to be his colleague.

New clip on YouTube, plus Vintage on the South Bank

I think I must have said "Sorry, that's my bag not my hand" about six times at Vintage on the South Bank on Saturday. Great fun though. Bought a book from the Fashion and Textile Museum stall called Chic on a Shoestring. It gives instructions on how to make a fascinator out of feathers and a bit of felt, how to make a plain pair of shoes look like really expensive brogues with some glue and scissors and suede (VERY clever. I shall be sexing up several pairs I hope) and also how to make an 'emergency pillbox hat' out of an old CD, a cereal box and some fabric. Oh, and of course, glue!

I was with Andrea and her Czech friend, who did not understand vintage at all. "My grandmother still has this stuff. We don't like it."Andrea fell under the spell though. I think that one aspect of vintage opens up others. So if you came for the clothes, you'll probably grow to like the music. In Andrea's case, it's the other way round!

Andrea bought a gorgeous hairpiece from a fabulous milliner called Valerie Corona. She makes hats at Walter Wright, the oldest hat factory still run by its founding family, still actually making hats in Luton. "We stay alive because of events like this," said Philip Wright amidst all the Chaps, Chapettes, Swing-dancers and tea-and-scone drinkers. "If we'd catered to the high street we would have been forced to base our operations in the far east." So next time you hop onto one of those orange planes to Malaga or Geneva, remember that Luton was originally the town of hats.

Someone has posted footage of me singing an aeronautical (and in the second verse, prohibition) song from 1917. I like the fact it's in black and white. And that it's Albert Ball's Flying Aces! Woooooo! I adore singing with them! Nick Ball on spoons! Ellie Smith on Trombone! Dickie Evans on Sousaphone! Matt Redman on guitar! Simon Marsh on saxophone! Playing pop songs from the first world war.