Sometimes you just hear something that is so unusual and innovative that you just know that there must be an audience out there for it…….
Something like that happened to me the first time that I heard Perkelt. I was wandering around Stratford-Upon-Avon trying to visualise in my head the structure of a Shakespearean production that I was eager to develop ……. when I heard some folk music.
In my last article I argued that Joe Girardi had shown the paucity of the Yankees bullpen and that it was now time for Brian Cashman to deliver if the Yankees were at all serious about catching Boston in the regular season.
(I’m posting this slightly out of sequence as the May baseball updates aren’t up on this site yet!)
Yesterday, Joe Girardi looked hesitant and under-managed the Yankees as they allowed Boston to sweep the series at the Stadium. Sabathia faded quickly in a game that he had largely dominated and Girardi allowed him to wilt and die and a small lead became a huge deficit. Girardi’s indecision showed all the traits that would have cost him his job in a different era under a different Steinbrenner.
Date: 29th March 2011
Where: Ronnie Scott’s, Soho, London
Artist: Ron Carter’s Golden Striker Trio
I grew up in a coal mining town in Yorkshire. Descendant of a long line of coal miners. In 1979 / 80 or thereabouts, I would have been playing Subbuteo on my Mum’s kitchen table with my friend, Andrew Spence. He’d always be Barnsley, I’d always be Leeds. At the side of the pitch on a chair, I’d have a cassette player set up where I would force Andrew to listen to my taste in music. Around that time it would be Sad Cafe’s “Facades” album. He didn’t rate it. That year he got me into John Foxx, Gary Numan, David Bowie. I got him into precisely nothing. Last time, I was in Barnsley, I called in on him as a a surprise. I looked through his cd racks. I spotted “Aja” by Steely Dan which was one of the albums I would have recommended back in the day. He just said he’d got it because he’d read about it in the music press but he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
Somewhere along the line life became too busy and my opportunities for posting here became too infrequent. Consequently, I never got to post last season’s Yankees October and post-season reports here (and I’m secretly glad that some of you noticed) and didn’t get to award my TWiD player of the season prizes. Over the next few days I am definitely going to rectify that before posting about Spring Training and the 2011 season.
John Shuttleworth
Ambassador’s Theatre
London
November 2010
Judie Tzuke UK tour
Martletts Hall, Burgess Hill and elsewhere
October 8th 2010 (tour 1/10-18/10)
Alice Cooper
The Theatre of Death Tour 2009
Hammersmith Apollo
6th December 2009
A couple of years ago I did an interview with Alice Cooper when he was touring the UK promoting an autobiographical volume “Golf Monster” which taught me more about that game with the stick, the little ball and the hole than I’ll ever need to know. As a consequence, I was invited to write a little promotional material for his SPV release “Along Came A Spider” which is for my money the best album he has made for several years and one of the best of his career. After that there was talk of touring the album which came to nothing and in its place, Alice has been touring a show called “Theatre of Death” which finally reached London this weekend.
“Theatre of Death” is essentially a Greatest Hits show with the added visual attraction that Alice dies five times during the course of the show. Support for the tour is Manraze. Manraze feature Phil Collen from Def Leppard and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols and certainly have the fire and panache to carry off a great visual show but on this evidence, they just don’t have the songs. If you were going to return home after the show with memories of any of the choruses, they were certainly going to come from Alice’s portion of the night and not from Manraze.
Alice’s set was being filmed for a prospective future DVD release and he showed that, like him or hate him, he is still the consummate showman. Tonight he was given a lethal injection from a huge comedy syringe, he was hung by the neck until dead, he was executed by guillotine and died in a magician’s sword trick or two but still came back to thrill the audience with a full-blooded encore of “Schools Out”.
The songs ran the whole gamut of his career from his first group of albums through his commercial rebirth with “Poison” to “Vengeance is Mine” from the recent “Along Came A Spider” record I mentioned.
However, that song aside the set was light on songs from his most recent albums and this is the downside of playing the hits. The commercial market for singles from someone like Alice is dead and so while the albums continue to sell well you’re unlikely to see him locking horns with Lady GaGa in the UK Top 40 singles chart anytime soon. If I was selecting Alice’s set I would choose more material from the new album, from “Last Temptation”, from “Brutal Planet” but it is a small complaint when we have just a rich smorgasbord in front of us.
And it is the visuals with Alice that will keep you coming back for more. He goes through more costume changes than anyone in the rock world this side of Stevie Nicks. He waves a sabre at the crowd, unloads “Alice” dollars in their direction and throws out necklaces of “Dirty Diamonds”. That he manages to do all this without hardly missing a beat is truly a feat of energy and stagecraft. Alice is not going to see 50 again but he is lean and has enough momentum to carry him for the beginning of the show to the end and then some.
Vincent Furnier with his golf club and his Bible has, thankfully, cleaned up his act, but Alice is still the reprobate villain of the stage we know and love and long may he run.
