What: Paul Cookson Poetry Workshop
Where: Ravenscourt Arts, Hammersmith, London
When: June 2,3,4, 2014
Just under 300 children booked places for the poetry workshops which were scheduled for the 1st week of June in Ravenscourt Arts. Paul Cookson was the poet and Darren Hirst the M.C. as the schools’ groups came and went, over a three day period.
In February, I performed at Ravenscourt Arts Theatre in an event called “A Gospel Night”. Also on the bill were Dimitri McIntosh, Mick Chwedziak and the Ravenscourt Arts Choir.
The Doobie Brothers
October 29th 2010
Hammersmith Apollo, London
Steely Dan stopped touring in 1974. Halfway through a UK tour, vocalist Donald Fagen was taken ill and the tour was going to be reorganised but it never was. For the next six years, Dan became the consummate studio band …… but they never returned to the stage. After 1980s “Gaucho”, they called it a day and Donald Fagen’s solo career was launched with the very successful “The Nightfly”.
Fast forward to 2009. Steely Dan playing live in Hammersmith, London. These days they spend far more time on the road than they do in the studio. Since Walter Becker and Donald Fagen decided to do it again, they’ve made only 3 albums – 2 studio, 1 live. And tonight, they will feature only 1 song written since the aforementioned Gaucho album. The difference is that now that Becker finds long periods spent in the studio finding the right note a little tedious and both principals are now very comfortable on the stage. And so you go back, Jack,……..
The band minus Becker and Fagen open the show with a mellow reading of Oliver Nelson’s “Teenie’s Blues”. The crowd react as Walter and Donald enter. They’re an ungainly presence. Walter now quite portly. You wouldn’t notice him if you passed him in the street. Donald with that “skeevy look” in his eye. They lead the band into a blues which turns out to be a massively overhauled version of “Reelin’ in the years”. Memories of the recent Dylan tour where the words were the same but the melodies were a distant memory. This one works quite well but it is a very different sound than the original.
Much more faithful to the album is “Time Out of Mind” from the 1980 set. Becker and Fagen have managed to coax their audience into responses which match a jazz performance than a rock show. Solos are politely applauded and professionalism is very much the order of the day.
The live Steely Dan experience depends on a full band to make these songs come alive. Lead guitar duties are shared by Jon Herington and Becker with Herington taking the lion’s share. Keith Carlock has been handling drumming duties with the band for 10 years and he is a crowd favourite. Bass is Freddie Washington. Hidden away from sight on a second keyboard is Jim Beard. In addition, we have a four piece horn section and three backing vocalists. Fagen describes them as the “Left Bank Orchestra” (Left Bank being the chosen name of the tour) and he is not far wrong.
Another reshaped early hit follows with “Showbiz Kids”, driven by a slinky bassline by Washington and a remodelled chorus which is led by the vocals of Tawatha Agee, Janice Pendarvis and Catherine Russell.
1973 is the flavour of the day and we move on to “My Old School” with the horns making a powerful presence. Jim Pugh is on trombone, Roger Rosenberg is on baritone sax with Walt Weiskopf on alto and tenor. Marvin Stamm completes the quartet of wind instruments with his trumpet.
“Bad Sneakers” originally appeared on 1975’s Katy Lied and its jaundiced worldview suit Fagen’s voice well. He looks and sounds world weary. He resembles that Uncle who knows better than we do but is too polite to mention that our optimism and enthusiasm will soon be crushed by the weight of the world we live in.
Carlock’s rhythmic sense is called upon in a vigorous reading of “Two Against Nature” which reminds us that there has been life since “Gaucho”. The album that this was the title track of was lauded by their peers back at the turn of the millennium but the boys mean to pay little regard to it or to its less successful follow-up “Everything Must Go”, this evening. Tonight, we’re stood squarely in the past.
After that momentary wander for perhaps the best performance of the night, it’s back to ’75 for “Black Friday” for a very bluesy version of that track. After that we push forward just a little for 1977’s “Aja”. This is a song with lots of space for the soloists to excel and spread out. Fagen’s Yamaha Melodica leads the melody for the first section before Weiskopf on tenor is spot-lit with accompaniment from the full drums of Keith Carlock. The doubting lilt on Mr Fagen’s voice on “they think I’m okay, or so they s-a-y” is just wonderful before a Carlock solo takes over. All of this adds up to a wonderful moment in time.
“Hey Nineteen” is one of the a large number of songs in the Dan repertoire which features the story of an older man hitting on a younger girl. Becker’s guitar work is always clearly thought-out and never uses one note where nine will do. His rap about the wonders of the “Cuervo Gold” in the midst of this song, however, is one he has been perhaps doing for just a few too many years and its perhaps time to give it a rest. Great trombone solo here from Jim Pugh.
The lady vocalists take over the lead in a reading of “Parker’s Band” from Pretzel Logic before the song becomes a work out for the horns. They are more than equal to the task.
A pair from “Gaucho” is next. Prior to the show I’d said to a companion that tonight I would settle for the inclusion of “Glamour Profession” and the exclusion of “Bodhisattva” (perhaps one of the more over-worked Dan live choices). After a perfunctory “Babylon Sisters”, the opening chords of “Glamour Profession” are struck and I’m a happy man. This tale of how extra curricular activities threatens to derail a West Coast basketball team is well-handled with great keyboards from Fagen and Beard.
Every Steely Dan show features at least one lead vocal from Mr Becker. On his latest solo effort, Circus Money, his voice sounds more confident but singing live still doesn’t seem a comfortable fit. He gives us a passable run through of “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More” before stepping back to his comfort zone.
Then its back to the Aja album for three tracks: “Deacon Blues”, “Josie” and “Peg” which provide the fullest audience reaction of the night so far. These are divided by the old Supremes hit “Love is like an itching in my heart” which provides the backdrop to the introduction of the various members of the band.
After “Peg” the band leave the stage to tumultuous applause only to return moments later with an extra member. Elliot Randall played the original lead on “Reelin’ in the Years” and because they are in the guy’s hometown and even though it means it’s the second performance of the number tonight, it’s time to revisit that song like it used to sound in 1972. The performance brings the house down.
During the encore, it all became too much for one old gent who leapt to the stage and led Security a merry dance as he sprinted ‘round the band. And the band played on…..
Final encore was “Kid Charlemagne”. Elliot remained on stage but left the major work to Jon Herington who rounded a sterling night for him.
This performance at the Hammersmith Apollo (nee Odeon) recalled some great days gone by. It remains to be seen whether the Dan can grasp the difficult nettle and produce a new album which they can embrace with the same enthusiasm that their audience brings to their old material.
Walter Becker
Freddie Washington and Donald Fagen
Jon Herington
Donald Fagen
Joyce lived on her own. She’d pretty much given her life caring for her aging Mum. When Mum died, Joyce lived on her own. Each Sunday, her friends from the local church would come and collect her to take her to a service. Her neighbours avoided her. Joyce lived on her own.
Joyce died on her own. One Sunday, her friends from the local church came to collect her to take her to a service and there was no answer. Her friends from the local church called around the hospitals. The strain of life had given Joyce some mental health problems and it wasn’t unusual for her to need to go away for a week or two. But the hospitals didn’t know. Her friends from the local church called the police. They came and opened the door to Joyce’s lonely house and found her in her bed. The coroner said that she had stopped breathing. Her heart wasn’t in it. He said it was good that her friends from the local church noticed. Joyce died on her own.
When you’re poor and you die on your own, you become less important than you were in life. The local authority had to wait “for a convenient slot” for Joyce to be buried. There was no money in this departure. It was a little inconvenient. Nobody wanted to know. Her friends from the local church felt that this wasn’t right. So they told the local authority so. It didn’t make a lot of difference. They offered to pay for the funeral. The money was declined. But slowly, because they were a nuisance, things began to change. Finally six weeks after her death, Joyce was allowed to be buried. Joyce was not buried unnoticed. Her friends from the local church saw to that.
Some tell me that religion divides and cause war. I think they’re right. But a true faith in God and the proper understanding of the nature and worth of humanity – now that can be something else. It brings dignity and respect in a society that fast seems to be losing those things.
Harold Pinter does strange things with words.
It’s not just the obligatory Pinteresque pause that everyone mentions. He takes them from their normal surroundings and imbues them with a sense of tension which, in his best work, is never resolved. It simply hangs.
A few days ago, I caught the production of his “The Birthday Party” at the Lyric theatre, Hammersmith, London (just down the road from the place I live, which is handy).
I first read the The Birthday Party a long time ago. This was in the early 1980s. I’d started reading Beckett and Brecht and then I stumbled on Pinter. In the town I grew up in, you didn’t get productions of Pinter, Beckett or ANYTHING. It was like living in a cultural vacuum. So if you were young and precocious, you read play scripts and tried to visualise what it would be like. I visualise better than most. I learned earlier. It was about putting a little colour into life – you get so sick of black and white.
So I read everything that Pinter had written that I could lay my hands on. The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Dumb Waiter, Betrayal, A Kind of Alaska (maybe that was later, it seems that way), Old Times, No Man’s Land were some of the plays I remember reading back then and always in his best plays it was the tension and the transitions that he captured that got me and kept me reading. There was also a screenplay for “A la recherche du temps perdu” by Proust which I loved and admired greatly.
There are many writers whose best work is in the past and, for myself, I regard Pinter in that way. I can’t admire his politics and his recent public pronouncements just simply needed a certain degree of proportion and that is what a writer should have. I think Pinter has lost some of that measure that he had when he was a younger man.
So it was good to see one of his old plays. “The Birthday Party” is, if anything, perhaps a little too early. He is still learning the craft that fired that tension that interested me, at this point. The third act largely exorcises that malevolence that he has spent two acts creating. It resolves some of the issues and if Pinter has a strength it is that he taught the theatre that things don’t have to be resolved.
In The Birthday Party, Meg and Petey, a married couple, live with their guest, Stanley Webber. Nothing much changes in their lives. Lulu, apparently a neighbour, flirts with Stanley but nothing much goes on beyond the routine of daily meals, newspapers, a time for bed and a time to rise. All this changes when Meg is told that two visitors are coming. It is then that all of life’s possibilities break out and things begin to fall apart.
The words are clever and even some times funny. It is the characters’ response to simple words and simple encounters that places them on the rack and stretches them and allows their potentialities to burst open.
Stanley (advancing): They are coming today.
Meg: Who?
Stanley: They are coming in a van.
Meg: Who?
Stanley: And do you know what they’ve got in that van?
Meg: What?
Stanley: They’ve got a wheelbarrow in that van.
Meg (breathlessly): They haven’t.
Stanley: Oh yes, they have.
Meg: You’re a liar
“The Birthday Party” teaches us that those who are fully awake are changed by encounters. Those who prefer not to change (like Petey in the play) can remain that way but only by sleepwalking through life’s experiences.
The play is loaded with possibilities. The fact that McCann and Goldberg (two visitors at what is apparently <perhaps> a coastal boarding house are Irish and Jewish respectively loads their mission <should it exist> with all manner of possibilities – religious, political, cultural. All we know is that this is the twentieth century and their purpose, should they have one, could be sinister. We’re not sure how much of what happens is real or if any of it is dream. The import is not in the action but in the words – what is said and what is not said and how the characters and the audience react to what they hear and what they are not told.
The current production is at a close now. For the record, Nicholas Woodeson and Lloyd Hutchinson as McCann and Goldberg were excellent with the right air of purpose but with so much hidden. Sian Brooke as Lulu had just a little too much class and was a little too pretty (if you’re going to come up short, it’s not a bad way to do it). Sheila Hancock as Meg was a little too aware of herself and the play and her costume in the first act was just a little too stereotyped. She played for laughs sometimes that the play did not need.
Meg’s character is potentially the most mysterious of all in a strange way, if handled well. On the face of it she is almost moronic and easily satisfied. Simple. But she has many layers. She wants to be sexually alluring to the guests (even Stanley). She wants social standing – her dwelling is “on the list” she insists, her guests found her to be the belle of the ball. She wants to mother Stanley. His birthday present from her is a child’s drum. She is made more distraught by its brokenness than by anything else. Petey assures it that it can be easily replaced but then he also assures her that Stanley is still upstairs at the conclusion of the play. Is he or is Stanley broken too? She wants the danger but not the threat of change but most of all she wants things just to stay the same.
It is a thought-provoking play. I’m glad to be still thinking about it.
So until about 8 months ago, I lived in Greenford (Middlesex, outskirts of London) when I moved to Hammersmith. I have 3 cats all of whom are in good health but occasionally need to go to the vets for their checkups and vaccination boosters. For two of them this was no problem, but for Shadow this was always an unpleasant experience. She was very nervous of the catbox and hated going in the car. This usually meant that by the time the car had left our street, she had begun to vomit and always meant that the catbox arrived at the veterinary clinic in a disgusting state. Consequently, each visit became more and more of a trauma for her with the same difficult results. Imagine for a while sitting in your own sick in a plastic box. Even bringing it down to the level of a cat (or up) this can’t have been Shadow’s idea of a good time.
Anyway, the date for her jabs has come round for the first time since we moved to Hammersmith. Careful planning required. Cut out the car by making the appointment at that small practise somewhere between my house and Ravenscourt Park (you have no idea how close that is). Then great scheme comes to mind – cut out the catbox by attaching Shadow to a lead. This was a big risk. If she was sick it was probably going to end up on my nice black velvet jacket. Should have thought of this before leaving home and worn something more practical. Too late to stop now!. We make the short journey to the vets. Some of the time, Shadow walks. Some of the time, she prefers to be carried. All the time, she miaows. But she is not sick.
We arrive at the clinic. The gothy receptionist doesn’t even blink at the sight of a cat on a lead (Shadows appreciates her colour scheme) and we are handed onto the vet who does his work with Shadow hardly noticing. Shadow is declared in good health although warned she might be overeating.
We begin the journey home. Same routine as before. Lots of miaowing but nothing else. Once inside the gates of home (and they’re pretty impressive gates!), Shadow makes a break for it and runs for the door and safety. For the first time ever, Shadow has been to the vet without being sick! She is not hiding from fear of another visit and we are the best of friends. I’m not even phased by the looks I got from those who wondered why a bloke was walking down the street walking a cat.
Hooray for Shadow!!
Forgot to mention. Eating out tonight at the Robin Hood Zorro in Hammersmith. I go there a lot. It’s the best little restaurant in my neck of the woods but it seems like its my secret. Great food, wonderfully trash decor, imaginative cocktails. What more can you want? Go to the Robin Hood Zorro!!!
twilightdawning 