Lucky Dog Picture House, Emily O'Hara

Splendid Emily O'Hara is an inspiration! Here I am being inspired by her proximity.

Emily made her own cloche hat, too.

Long before she knew about the fabulous film "The Artist", Emily had wanted to put on a Silent Film night. So she hired the Jamboree in Limehouse (once a sweet factory's worker canteen), pinned up a sheet, chose some films and asked some pianists to play. Oh, and also made the signs, flyers, popcorn-containers and vending boxes and had her lovely family come and help.

The hair is real, but it's not mine.

Debee, Matt

Matt Redman,
Lovely Day arranger & guitarist & banjo player & mandolin player & bass player & pianist & ukulele player & you get the idea, and Debee Calveche, whose photos you've seen a lot if you've kept up with this blog, were an astonishingly well-dressed couple.

Debee went around with a little box full of cards, on which were written different emotions. She'd ask each person to fish one out, and then express that emotion for her camera. She got quite a lot of different faces from people, and what it really showed was that these silent film actors and actresses were quite talented. It ain't as easy as it looks.

I'm supposed to be 'in love' here. I look more like I'm trying to be Shirley MacLaine, praying.

The Lucky Dog film was accompanied by the wonderfully jaunty and appropriately frantic Ragtime stylings of Julio Schwarz Andrade, a fascinating, multitalented fellow of Brazilian origins who talks like Woody Allen. 

This, the first-ever film, gave Emily the name for her venture. The first of many! The Lucky Dog Picturehouse!  

Then I got up and sang some songs with Jon Butterfield playing. He's the cute pianist in the Lovely Parlour Trio, remember? The crowd represented a wide age-range, but they were primarily young. So imagine my surprise when I made a gesture for them to join the refrain of Always and the whole room sang "AL-WAYS!" I love it when that happens. By the way, does anybody like Sir Paul McCartney's version of this song, on his new album?

Then it was time for Jon to settle down to accompany the Buster Keaton film, "Cops". I love this film. I love all Buster's films. Those eyes of his! Like the eyes of all great silent movie stars, they're deep, deep pools, unfathomable, expressive. How this man could be so soulful and yet come up with sight-gags that leave you stunned, laughing before you even knew you'd smiled must be one key to his genius. Also, this is the fellow who, as a child, toured vaudeville circuits with his parents as 'the human mop'. In other words, they'd throw him around like one. He was the only man in Hollywood who was not doubled by a stuntman, because even the most ridiculously daring ones couldn't match his particular style. Okay, I confess it. I adore Mr. Keaton. 

Well, Jon composed and improvised one hell of a soundtrack for this feature. It was FABULOUS. Nobody, hearing it, would believe that this was his first silent film-accompanying gig. Here's the first part of the score. The fun had by the audience is audible. The piano was hellishly bad. Yet all three of the evening's pianists made it work.

The pictures below give some idea of the atmosphere of the event, but in giving an exposure to reveal the room and the audience, the film looks overexposed. It wasn't.  

There was a very bizarre Felix the Cat, which Peter Coldham accompanied in fittingly bizarre music. It was quasi-experimental but really really worked. All the more stunning when he told me that he'd only known about the gig the day before. The story was about the terrible conditions in Russia. Considering that this was the twenties, and knowing what we do now, I guess it wasn't so inaccurate.

The night concluded with Charlie Chaplin's "The Pawn Shop." Jon played superbly for this too. But Charlie has no place in my heart really. It's all full of Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd (SEXY!!)

Emily has also composed some settings of William Blake for voice and classical guitar, and her current project, other than this one, is composing incidental music for the Vectors of Tropical Disease for Resonance FM, something I hope to blog more fully about in the future. This one will be fascinating. She's just finished the louse, and is working on the bedbug now.

Matt, Nick, Peter

London's musical power couple, Emily and Nick. Watch them in the next few years. I promise you will not be disappointed.



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.

Album: 'Our Lovely Day'

'Our Lovely Day' has now been released! Really, this thing's a lot of fun. Even if I weren't singing on it I'd like it. Fancy a song using only spoons as percussion? It sounds as if Fred Astaire's in the room! And have you ever heard a 1930s Novachord organ? There's a solo on one in the second track. It is the sound of nostalgia! A Nice Cup of Tea has a kazoo solo, glockenspiel, a whistling chorus and a ukulele! Track four is accompanied by two guitars and a mandolin, and track five is my most-requested number, ever.
The CD is a lovely thing to have and to hold, and the booklet tells the stories of all these songs, how I came to know them, and how they've affected others. You can buy it and it will arrive in the mail, a physical fact (how retro is that, to put out a CD?) if you go HERE.
Otherwise it exists in these online sources:

Amazon

iTunes

Play

HMV Digital

7 Digital

Spotify

For more information please go to: 'Our Lovely Day'

Thank you all for the support and please enjoy, and please, please share. 

11.11.11 at 11.11

I always try to have gigs on Remembrance Day. It's good to spend the day remembering with the people who had their entire lives changed, defined by the war, and who remember their parents and grandparents who were in WWI. And I hope I'm a good enough musician to benefit them by my singing of the old songs we all love so much.

This year was especially busy, because my manager was clever enough to get me in to sing at the Poppy Factory in the morning, in Richmond. So I had four places to go rather than just the three.

I HIGHLY recommend a visit. They make poppies all year round, and have been doing so since the 1920s, when it started up as a way to give an income to the enormous number of injured soldiers. Read about their work here. As far as I know, they don't often have people coming to perform. It's a factory.

This photo was taken at 11:11 on 11.11.11

You can see, framed, dried poppies from Flanders Fields sent by a soldier to his wife in 1917, and the poem by John McCrae, which we Canadians know off-by-heart. Also you can buy lovely ceramic teacups and pots and saucers with poppies on them!


With Judith, post-gig, last month.

I was lucky to have Judith Flint, pianist-saviour, colleague and comrade on many a tour, performing with me. Melanie, the Chief Executive, greeted us warmly as Judith lugged in the piano that weighs as much as she does. General Manager Bill showed us around and asked us what we were doing for the rest of the day. I mentioned our three other concerts. "All on the same day?" I said that Judith and I often did tours with three concerts per day. "So you're not like that Katherine Jenkins who drinks liquids and doesn't talk for two days before a concert," he joked.

Well let's put it this way: I wouldn't get to very many retirement homes and hospices if I was.

Judith, dwarfed by a Yamaha and poppies

We started with "I'll be loving you, Always" and suddenly a whole bunch of German members of the British Legion filed in. They had all married British soldiers, or were children of British soldiers. The men and women making the poppies slowly put their fabric petals, plastic stamens and studs down and came toward us. We were surrounded by warmth. I made a gesture at the repetition of the chorus and they all started to sing!



We went on to "Did you ever see a dream walking" and I started to dance around the room, and held out my hand to factory-worker Julie, who joined me. We did "Let Him Go, Let Him Tarry" and got a real call-and-response going. It was like a scene from a WWII film. All this time I was watching the analogue clock on the wall. We had to stop for the radio to come on, for the silence, for the sound of Big Ben. I watched that minute hand. I knew we had to end with "We'll Gather Lilacs" but I didn't want to have to stop halfway. Judith, as always, read my mind, and after playing the piano intro, she flipped the pages forward and started in on the chorus. We did it once through and ended on a nice, long note. After the applause I thanked them for having me, and AS SOON as I shut my mouth, the radio:

"It is now eleven o'clock". And Big Ben.

How easily that could have gone wrong! It was so perfect, the photographer thought that Bill had put on a pre-recorded version!

At Chorleywood

We piled Judith's piano and music back into her car, got to Chorleywood, and gave a full hour's-worth there for Music in Hospitals, and Chris, who has MS and is in a wheelchair, asked us to do "Jerusalem". Judith knew it and I only had to look down at the sheet she gave me (did I say she was my pianist-saviour already?) a couple of times. It's a memorable text. I noticed from the footage of the Royal Wedding that everyone had their eyes glued to their sheets for Jerusalem. Not the residents at the Chorleywood Beaumont Home. They sat at attention, eyes straight ahead, word-perfect.

Off to the nursing home in Rickmansworth, considerably more humble, and all the ladies (they were all ladies there) assembled in the cafeteria to hear us. A woman was having her 78th birthday, but she'd had a stroke and couldn't speak. Her husband had brought a bunch of silvery balloons and some cards. He held her hand. But when we performed "Smilin' Through" she opened her mouth and sang every word. There were so many smiles in that room I can still feel them today, three days later.

We'll Meet Again

The traffic was kind to us, and we got to the Royal Star and Garter on time. Always try to be on time at the RS&G! The army, navy, air-force, engineers, merchant navy...time means a lot to them. The atmosphere in the huge Queen's Ballroom was intimate, hushed. I could try and write a book about a concert like that; it would involve finding every life-story for every person in the room, and each song in relation to that person.

Back at the Royal Star and Garter's Queen's Ballroom

All I'll say is that you've never sung "We'll Meet Again" until you're holding hands with a WWII veteran in a wheelchair, looking into his eyes and KNOWING that he's thinking of his lost comrades. Seeing them through his eyes, focussed on these people and their stories because of the song you're singing, a magical creation hovering all around you.

(Previous posts about the Royal Star and Garter: Part 1 and Part 2)

Unexpected gig, unexpected aroma.

On my list of people who ought to be famous but aren't (yet) is a composer called Michael Brough.

Here's a video of me singing one of his songs. I think it's as good as anything Schumann has written...better than any song written by a living composer, and a joy to sing. And there are 80 more from the same source.

Brough is one of those genius-musicians who think in colours, shapes, keys, and look abstracted in company when there's music on, because it's a stronger language for him than speech.

He has a solicitor's office he tires himself out in during the day. You can't pay for a mortgage if you're a composer who is intent on creating pure, meaningful art. And Brough refuses to write for commercial ends, for that tiresome reason so many people of genius have: an inability to compromise. So posterity goes without the symphonies, the string quartets, the oratorios, the sonatas. And wonders why we in the 21st century have such a dearth of those works compared to, say, a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago.

He also plays the organ, and a couple of days ago had an organ recital in Notting Hill, which I was looking forward to. There's no better way to sort out any problems in your head than sitting through an organ recital, even when played by a visceral performer like Michael Brough.

The night before the concert, the organiser frantically rang me up. Richard Carruthers, of Music Chamber. A true supporter of the arts, Mr. Carruthers.

"I can't get hold of Michael. The recital will have to be cancelled...the organ's broken!"

I told him that I have seen Mr. Brough casually walk into a church where they'd not had the organ played in 20 years, claiming it's beyond repair, only for Michael to strip to the waist, grovel about a bit amongst the dust and bat-droppings, and have the thing up and running in ten minutes flat. Also that this is an organist who once was playing a hymn for a wedding when the organ broke at the beginning of the 2nd verse, and while the congregation continued to sing, raced up the spiral staircase, fixed it, and got down the staircase to join them again for the last verse.

"Well, I don't think this can be fixed. It'll either be cancelled, or here's a bright idea, the two of you could do a voice and piano recital! Less than 24 hours' notice...ha ha!"

I tried ringing Michael. No answer. I put my mobile on speakerphone and just kept redialling and having the thing ring until it refused to keep ringing, then I'd start over again. After about half an hour of this, he answered and I told him of the possible change of plans. He hadn't heard the phone because he'd been practising for the recital.

The next day I was almost completely certain I wouldn't have to sing. Michael Brough could fix any organ. I dawdled, looked through some music, and dug out songs that I've done with Michael in the past, but haven't done for a while. Thine Alone, by Victor Herbert. Fair House of Joy by Quilter. French salon songs I recorded back in 2002. Some of Michael's compositions.


A pretty, but silent, organ behind.

But I dressed as an audience member on a chilly day. Ended up running through the park to the railway station, as I'd have been late even as an audience member if I hadn't.
Anyway, not even Michael could mend a disintegrated plastic connector tube to the blower, held together by somebody's duct-tape that came off whenever the organ needed more wind. Michael played three substantial piano pieces and I did three sets of songs. Thine Alone? The voice loved it, and it loved the voice. But the words...my oh my. Is it that long since I've sung this? Seems like yesterday. Funny: I wouldn't have expected to stand up and recite a poem I haven't thought of for six years, but I expect to be able to do it with a song. I sang "In thine eyes enfold me my beloved..." and "let thine arms look fondly into mine". Some in the audience said they hadn't noticed. But when you have it within you to do a perfect job...oh how annoying three missed words is! And it's just plain unprofessional.

Having got that out of the way, the rest was fine, and quite fresh for being spontaneous. I did notice a funny smell, especially when I breathed very deeply for long phrases. Sitting down during Michael's electrifying rendition of a sontata by Issay Dobrowen, I tried to get a cluster of autumnal foliage off the bottom of my shoe. Yes, the leaves were being held there. By something brown. By something in the park I hadn't noticed. Yes, I sang two-thirds of a recital with a good two tablespoons' worth of crap on my shoe.

Later, I went to the Experimental Cocktail Club in Soho and sang with Albert Ball's Flying Aces from 11pm to 2am. The gold dancing shoes from Freed's were clean, and I wore a tight, simple black dress with a large poppy as the only ornament. Introduced a new/old song with the Flying Aces: There's a Long Long Trail a-Winding.

Endurance and Artists



Next to the James Caird. Really and truly, there it is.



Dulwich College is a very surprising place. First of all, its motto is "God's Gift". You HAVE to love that. And not only did P G Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler both attend, (ooh think! The man who invented hard-boiled American 40s slang and the man who invented upper-class 30s twit slang; friends and students in Dulwich) but this is also where you can goggle at the James Caird, the life-boat from the Endurance, the ship that was crushed in pack-ice in October, 1915, in Antarctica. If you want to read a great adventure story that would still be gripping even it were all made up, find a copy of Alfred Lansing's book "Endurance". It was written in 1959, and so the author met and spoke with a number of the people who were on this expedition. When the lot of them realised there was nothing to do but wait, probably for months and months, with no way of communicating with the outside world, they performed minstrel shows, had dog-races - "the Antarctic Sweepstakes" -, put on mock-trials, performed plays, and wrote songs and poems.

There was an artist and a photographer on the expedition, and diaries written by these explorers show an appreciation of beauty, sitting as it does beside a keen understanding of science, that is staggering.

Well, the James Caird Society has two meetings a year at Dulwich College, and my good friend and devout fan Commander Charles Giles (commanded, for the RN, a Minesweeper, a Frigate, and a squadron of Buccaneers, and also flew formation and solo aerobatics) is a member, and took me along. There were drinks, loads of them. And some lovely Whisky, a replica of the Whisky found in Shackleton's hut where he and his men stayed during the 1907 "Nimrod" expedition. A rather grande dame leant over to look at the bottle and asked the two young people serving, "What year is it from?" The young fellow looked at the young woman next to him, and then they both looked at another woman, also in an apron, dispensing the booze. She came over, picked up the bottle and read the label. "1907," she said, matter-of-factly. "Oh," said the woman complacently, taking a glass of it with her. Well all I can say is that, if this is a replica of what Shackleton had down there, those men didn't do too badly in the whisky stakes.

It could be yours for a two-figure sum.

Earlier that day I met up with Ruth Solomons - see previous blog about Balfron Towers - who finds abstract shapes when she looks at figurative art, and whose own abstract artworks are a constant source of wonderment to viewers who see faces, flowers, landscapes and leaves that Ruth never intended. We were taking down some of her works that were in a cafe. Her exhibition slot had ended. The prices for these lovely unique silkscreen prints were extremely reasonable - 30 to 60 each - and I asked her how many had sold.

"Oh, none."
And what kind of people come to this cafe? Idiots? 

"Mostly artists."

Poor artists?

"Mostly."

Her friend Ben Walker was there, helping her pack the framed silkscreens away in bubble-wrap and take them on the DLR back to her flat. I brought up the subject of Jack Vettriano for a laugh. All our objections were specific to what we did for a living.

You know The Singing Butler.I'm not going to reproduce this thing here, because Jack doesn't need the publicity, and Jack might sue me, and you'll all have seen it. 

Ben's very non-kitsch work...

I told Ruth and Ben that it's cringe-making to have a domestic servant stand huddled in the rain, holding an umbrella so that his Lord-Master and his LM's floozie can have a waltz on a beach, and it's even more cringe-making to force him to sing, with no accompaniment, with the damp wind whipping about. Whatever he's singing (a waltz, so let's pretend it's "Always", see my CD, in shops and online on Monday, step right up folks!) it's going to sound pretty thin and awful in that situation. Nobody would be happy. So it doesn't ring true, and is like a joke that isn't funny and wouldn't happen in real life anyway.

Ruth said "It's trying to be a photograph. It's denying the medium. It's as if he wishes it weren't a painting." She said it would be best used in a colouring book.

We waited for Ben's opinion. Ben's artworks are worth a look. They're like memories seen through a mist. Sharp outlines mixed with yellow, rose, earthy haze. Often, the memories are painful ones.

"It's Vettriano's kitsch interiors, trying to be atmospheric and mysterious when they're not." Ben is soft-spoken and we nearly didn't hear his next comment: "It's offensive."

That evening, I wished Ruth and Ben could have seen the paintings and sketches from the Shackleton Antarctic expedition, shown in slide-show to a packed audience. They are atmospheric, and combine a need for record with a sense of poetry.

I sat next to an elderly but very fit gentleman who asked me what my Antarctic connection was, and I feebly told of my love of the book "Endurance", the fact that I'd been to the exhibition at the Liverpool Maritime Museum last year, and that I was Cmdr Charles Giles's guest. "And what's yours?"

"I've been there a few times."

Dr. Charles Swithinback tells an excellent yarn.

Ha! Dr. Charles Swithinbank has had six geographic features named after him in Antarctica, and has seen more of Antarctica than any other living person.

He has written "An Alien in Antarctica", "Forty Years On Ice", "Foothold in Antarctica" and "Vodka on Ice". He was fabulous company, and this photo shows him mid-yarn. Note the hands. This is a man who can tell a story. Please believe me that I'm listening to him. I only looked briefly at the camera. He loved to speak of his Pianola in Cambridge, where he lives. He took the train back after the banquet, and sent me a copy of "Forty Years On Ice" the next morning. I sent him a copy of "Our Lovely Day", and he wrote a letter immediately, saying "Our Lovely Day gives me great joy. At my age (almost 85) and partially deafened by gunfire in the WW2, I find your instrumental accompaniment too loud, tending to drown your lovely voice. Nobody's fault, just a fact of old age." His book is quite riveting. Informative, economical, full of joy. I had asked him during the dinner if it wasn't a shame that there were so few frontiers left on our earth.
"Absolutely not! There are oodles of things we haven't discovered yet! Many, many things to find out, many places to go..."

His favourite piece of vocal music is Schubert's Shepherd on the Rock, and has said so on the Russian version of Desert Island Discs.  

I didn't say to anyone that evening that the room where we were eating was where they filmed the graduation scene in Legally Blonde. So Dulwich College has effectively been a stand-in for Harvard. With "God's Gift" carved into the rafters, over and over again.

Jewellery storage and display. And a video.

First off, some footage of the Lovely Parlour Trio and Patricia Hammond at the Vintage Fair! Filmed by Debee Calveche! Featuring Jon Butterfield on piano! Matt Redman on guitar! Nick Ball on spoons, washboard, bits of tappy things!

Now it's hints-and-tips time: I'm going to come over all 30s-magazine on you all. Like any female vintage-lover (or transvestite/fancy-dress/pantomime artiste vintage-lover), I have a lot of costume jewellery. And I HATE throwing it into a box, and having it all jostle, chip, tangle, become invisible at the bottom. I also hate having a whole load of boxes cluttering up the place. 

In my new abode I've come up with a few solutions which I thought I'd share! They're all extremely easy! 

For necklaces, I strung a length of suede (a design feature on a pair of boots that was just one fashiony step too far) with two thumbtacks. Minimal damage to wall, plenty sturdy. Then I hung the necklaces! Look! A festoon! A rope of ropes! 

I looped all the glittery glassy necklaces up together through a gap in the side of a bookshelf. Note that said bookshelf is also where I store my silk flowers. I suppose you could say that the flowers could get dusty here, but as they almost all came from Accessorize, they could do with a bit of dust to make them look more venerable. 

Dangly earrings are hooked into a length of chain which is set up rather like the necklace cord. 

Brooches are pinned to a rope. I wish the rope was plain black, and then the brooches would stand out more. But actually this bright red, white and blue pattern makes the result extremely festive. You can put your brooches on all sides of the rope. So your display is circular as well as long. The image above is only a small section of said rope. It goes from ceiling to floor. I'm silly with brooches. Must wear them more or it's just weirdness on my part. 

My stud-earrings arrangement is what I'm most proud of. The frame was from Help The Aged in Slough, and it had a cheap and nasty Balinese leather painting in it. I threw that away (thus undoubtedly helping Balinese leather paintings become valuable in future), stapled this stretchy velvet to it, and because it's rubbish velvet, the earrings poke easily through it. I can't buy many more earrings though. Running out of space.