Ghetto Warriors - Minority Boxers in Britain - The Jewish Museum

A small but perfectly formed exhibition about “minority” boxers at the small but perfectly formed Jewish Museum in Camden. To my shame, I hadn’t been there before, and they had some great stuff in their permanent exhibition, including a Pesach moustache cup – a cup with an internal strip of ceramic I guess intended to keep one’s ‘tache dry. But I was there for the boxing.

The exhibition began with some of the great Jewish pugilists of the 18th Century like Daniel Mendoza (who wrote the first boxing manual) and “Dutch Sam” who invented the upper cut, and featured some amazing prints and souvenirs from this period.

The second period covered was pre WWII where many Jewish boxers from the East End came to prominence - I particularly enjoyed the display of cigarette cards from these times, and Elliot [of Yabbok – see March 07] Tucker’s film featuring various cigar chomping old timers (did you know Mickey Duff’s grandfather was the Belzer Rabbi?).

Finally the exhibition covered the rise of Black and Asian boxers after the war, including a great picture of Chris Eubank in all his pomp.

A must see.

The museum is normally only open in the day, but I went at night as part of a talk given by Professor Sander Gilman on “Imagining Jewish Bodies”, a disconcerting rollercoaster ride through 2000 years plus of anti-Semitic stereotyping, deconstructing the physical characteristics associated with “the jew” through the ages. For example, “the jew” was often portrayed as having flat feet, signifying his unsuitability for military service, thus his inability to serve his [adopted] country, hence highlighting his innate disloyalty. I will be raising this issue with my podiatrist when I next see him about my collapsed arches. Prof Gilman was as stimulating a speaker as I’ve had the pleasure to come across in recent years.

Carlos Acosta - The Lowry, Manchester

And so to Manchester, to the Lowry indeed, for Carlos Acosta and friends as part of the Manchester International Festival. I was taking Mama Grebson as a birthday treat and boy did she enjoy it.

Carlos Acosta is by repute the world’s best male ballet dancer. What never occurred to me before hand is that, for thinking ladies of a certain age and disposition, he is their equivalent of a night at the Chippendales. There were so many hysterical screaming women, it was like Barry White all over again.

The first half featured two Acosta-less pieces from Danza Contemporanea de Cuba , and a brief but powerful appearance from the main man dancing the pas de deux from Le Corsaire (that really does sound like a euphemism for something unspeakable). He was accompanied by Yiensgay Valdes, Prima Ballerina of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba.

The second half was edited extracts of a piece by Acosta called Tocororo: A Cuban Tale, to a live Cuban band. It was supposedly his life story but in reality more of a Fame-style dance off between geeky classical boy (Acosta) and a Huggy Bear style cigar smoking pimp-rollin’ cat (dunno who played him). Acosta won of course, and the two traded hand shakes rather than fists as the girls on stage and off watched on adoringly.

It was all great fun. Ballet really isn’t my sort of thing, but I could appreciate Acosta’s physical and athletic approach that made most European dancers look a bit feeble and listless in comparison. Anyway who cares what I thought, this was very much ladies night.

rainy day, dream away

I received this greeting from my friends at japanesepottery.com:

"Greetings from Mishima, As mid-summer greets us, we'd like to extend a traditional Japanese shochu mimai greetings to all (a summer greeting inquiring about how one's getting along in the summer heat) and hope some coolness in harmony with nature---cold barley tea!--will find its way to you."

Oh if only they knew. Won’t it ever stop raining?

Cornelius - RFH - 1/7/07

I was slightly unprepared for the sonic onslaught of Cornelius, or the Cornelius Group as they were styled, and their Synchronsied Sensuous Show. Known to some as the Japanese Beck, and to me as a DJ, remixer / producer, this show was alchemy of a different kind to Matmos’, a thick and heavy fusion at high temperature of many prefixes to the word rock – surf, punk, angular, funk, noise and post being just a few.

The four piece band, dressed in grey shirts with white collar and tight black jeans, were effortlessly cool, as were the lightshow and visuals. And it was all ever so tight. The synchronisation with the visuals was quite amazing, particularly given the speed of some of the playing. In the best number for this, a magical stop-animation scene set in a kitchen matched every pulse of the band, every vocal click coordinating with a sugar lump defying gravity and rolling across a table.

I preferred the more mellow numbers, although this was all relative, as even the slow tunes were heavy and the quiet ones loud. But for a finale, the band swapped position, the lady drummer who had been bashing nine bells of hell pout of her kit all evening took centre stage with a flute, and they lullabied us into the night with a lovely rendition of the old Dean Martin croon, Sleep Warm.



Which I did.

Matmos - RFH - 1/7/07

A gig this disparate can really only be reviewed in two parts…

First up were sonic alchemists Matmos.

When I saw them a few years ago, they were generating sound from the most unlikely sources, notably the spanking of a bare bottom and the pouring of beer onto a metal sheet.

For this gig they were augmented by an extra guitarist (though this being Matmos guitars aren’t played as such, they are bowed, or played directly into the hardware to be processed and manipulated) and by a member of New York’s So Percussion ensemble, here playing timpani, marimba, tubular bells, plant pots and bird whistles).




They’ve expanded their musical palette too: less driving beats, an infusion of latin rhythms, touches of contemporary classical, and generally more mellow. They were just back from Verona where they had been commissioned to produce an electronic version of Aida, and treated us to a couple of tracks.



For the finale we had a brilliant reading of a story from the libretto to Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives opera (from googling him today, I learn that Ashley is an avant garde American electronic / contemporary classical composer).

All in all this was a wonderful set, with moments of real imagination, touching on the sublime.

Candi Staton / Al Green – The Royal Albert Hall

I might as well get this over with from the start. The sound was terrible. Like a church hall, all boom and echo and fuzz. It completely ruined Candi Staton’s set and all but did the same to Al Green’s. Queuing up at the end to complain, I got talking to someone doing the same who told me he had had the same problem at Simply Red (I pass no comment) last year. It would take a phenomenal legend to get me back to the RAH for anything other than classical music, which I presume is what the acoustics are designed for.

But what a performer the Very Reverend Mr Al Green is, like the bastard love child of Barry White and James Brown (imagine the grunting at the conception!). You couldn’t take your eyes offa him, whether distributing roses for the ladies, jigging about one foot, dropping down on one knee, yelping and moaning. Legend! And a shit hot band.

The weirdest thing here was the crowd. Remarkably warm and friendly (people talked to each other, like strangers and all, imagine that!) but, how can I put it, elephantine? I have never seen so many clinically obese people in one place. I don’t mean overweight, I mean the sort of people you see in a Channel 5 documentary. The sort of people who need to invest in serious pot-holing equipment if they are to even contemplate sexual intercourse. I don’t know how the tubes back to Essex coped! And if you couldn’t get a black cab on Thursday night, this was why, all the cabbies were here (well those that haven’t already disappeared to the Costa del Cab). And gawd help anyone in the City who was trying to get their secretary to do overtime that night, cos they were all here as well. There were even (I heard people saying) several “stars” “out of” (pronounced eht awf) East Enders.

There is something worrying about seeing so many whiteys joining in gospel inflected call and response sessions (can I get a witness!) but in its own way, also something quite lovely (do you believe?!). But boy oh boy, the white man cannot clap to save his sorry little ass.

After I had booked my £50 ticket, I found out that Ms S and Mr G were also appearing at Hammersmith Apollo. It was too late to do anything about it, but I’m sure it would have been a much better venue. Still, legend!

Art Marathon Part 5 - Rites - Royal Festival Hall

The art marathon reached its final destination at the RFH for a performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (and others).

The programme began with Philip Glass’ Prelude from Akhnaten. As you would expect from Glass, this was a piece of interlocking repeating phrases with variations. “You’d have loved it” I heard someone saying on his mobile after, “it was like house music” , but the interesting thing for me was the subtle differences between this and electronic music. The way the phases were mixed in never quite followed the beat, there was arrhythmia, syncopation, sometimes it would come in on the one as James Brown might have said. The syncopation was what most interested me, the way notes came in a touch early or a touch late – was this in the score, or was this interpretation by the orchestra?

The second piece was Arcana by Edgard Varèse, but before it began, the conductor, Marin Alsop, gave us a talk about the piece. She was wonderfully sardonic. Varèse, she told us, only wrote 12 pieces, and once we had heard this we would know why. She got the orchestra playing snippets and themes to help us understand the construction of the piece. Varèse, she told us, was the 13 year old Frank Zappa’s favourite composer. I don’t know how unusual it was to give such a talk, but what a great idea, especially for an event like this which was designed (as you will see) to get all sorts of punters in. It took a few moments for my ears to adjust to the piece, but once they did, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I could see why Zappa liked it, it kind of rocked. A vast number of percussionists played all sorts of instruments, clappers, bongos, gongs, those Latin American things you scrape a stick across.

For the second half we donned our 3D glasses (oh yes) and settled down for The Rite of Spring. In the corner, a lone dancer, the lovely Julia Mach, performed in a grey box (another box!!). The images were treated live by digital artist Klaus Obermaier with technology from the Ars Electronica Futurelab and projected in 3D on a giant screen above our heads.

The 3D effects were astonishing. As Julia Mach waved her hand in the air, invisible slipstreams were rendered in thick red marks on the screen, and began to rotate around her onscreen avatar, faster and faster, sweeping over our heads, until they started to unravel and dissolve. Her avatar elongated and crawled towards us through the air, or was tossed on the choppy waters of a virtual sea. As the piece reached its climax, the vibrating molecules of the avatar’s flesh loosened their gravitational hold on each other and pixellated and exploded into galaxies of stars (a counterpiece to Gormley’s exploded Matrices).

Unlike much vj type video work (see earlier reviews of Optronica and Turning), the images were quite subtle – there was no bombardment or overload of visual stimulation. Some of it was even quite spare.

There are some buts mind you. I thought it was great on its own terms, but equally I would have been more than happy just to watch the remarkably sexy Julia Mach on her own.

The visuals were not really an attempt to recreate the narrative of the piece, but rather existed as their own improvisation from the music.

And it must be said, the orchestra were brilliant!

It’s been fun watching the newspapers struggle to know how to review the work. The Telegraph sent along their music critic, the Guardian their dance critic, neither seemed to have quite the range to be able to review the event properly. They lacked a Grebson, a polyglot polymouth prepared to spend a very long afternoon sucking it all in and spitting it out for you, my lucky one and a half readers.

Art Marathon Part 4 - Lynette Wallworth - Hold:Vessel 2, 2007 - BFI

Still in the BFI, I wandered into an installation by Lynette Wallworth called Hold:Vessel 2, 2007.

Me and Ms Wallworth, I think we share the same punctuation culture.

I loved this.

At the entrance you pick up a large white glass bowl (the bowls sit in a golden glow on a black pedestal, beautifully lit from above) and wander gropingly into a thickly black room (echoing in negative the experience of Gormley’s negative Blind Light box).

Four showers of light fall from the ceiling, like the early stages of transportation in Star Trek. The idea is that you catch the images in your bowl. The images are microscopic, organismic, liquidy. A heavy ambient soundtrack fills the room.


As a method of presentation of images, how much more interesting this is than the image wall. And as a method of projecting video art, how much more imaginative than Mathew Buckingham.

Art Marathon Part 3 - Hitsville UK

With some time to kill, I decided to check out the DVD shop at the BFI. In the foyer was an exhibition about Punk, basically a flow chart with lots of album covers.



You see a lot of this sort of presentation of information about these days. I think it started with the Lomographic camera cult – this was a Russian camera built with Soviet era military optical technology, which was meant to produce pictures saturated with colour. I bought one but could never get it to do anything for me. The lomographers often present their images in walls of pictures. The outside of the Royal Festival Hall had a lomography wall for a while last year.

Although the camera was film, not digital, the method of presentation connected with the digigeist (I just made that word up, but isn’t it good!) and image walls are cropping up everywhere.

To me, the image wall represents the triumph of data over knowledge and appreciation. Presented like this, you really can’t focus on any one image. It is all flat, every image reduced to the same as its neighbour, no scope for selecting good from bad.

It is particularly sad to see the wall used to present record covers. The art of the record sleeve was all but killed by the advent of CDs; it still exists with 12 inch vinyl but the digital onslaught is mopping up the survivors. All that’s left is nostalgia. At least The Wire devotes a page each month to the depictiction and analysis of classic sleeves.

Art Marathon Part 2 - Antony Gormley - Blind Light - The Hayward

To the Hayward for the Antony Gormley exhibition...

The first room is dominated by Space Station, a huge structure. It looks like a weird space city, but like almost everything in the exhibition, it was modelled on his body, then processed, in this case into perforated metal blocks. It explores the relationship between man, the space occupied by a body and the environment in which the body lives, and this lies at the heart of the exhibition and the related sculptures, which line the skyline around the Hayward for miles around.

Blind Light is the cloud within a box. The feeling as you enter the glass box is like walking into a pitch black room, where the darkness is so heavy as to be physically oppressive, visceral, material, only in negative, for here it is “pitch whiteness” that envelopes you. It is not just a mist, it is a solid. You can’t even see your feet.

self portrait inside Blind Light

In the oppressive whiteness, I became acutely aware of how much debris floats on the surface of my eyes, little spots and wisps like tiny cotton fragments. The air is saturated with moisture; you are encased in a clinging cool wetness. You don’t want to be in here for too long.

Upstairs is a room of Matrices and Expansions which I really liked. They look at first like delicate exploded fragments, filigree structures of delicate rods. As you look more closely, some of the rods are darker and, when viewed from different angles, body form emerge, often hanging upside down, suspended within the structures. They make me think of computer modelling, DNA, space age pods, string theory, and exploded consciousness.

Lining the walls are a series of Quads, collections of four photographs, which share or comment on the others in the batch. In one set, a lone Gormley statue on a beach is echoed by three farmers standing in a field, the horizon of the field echoed in a landscape devoid of people or statues. In another, a v shaped valley shares perspective with a square tunnel, and the V of a building crane.

I cue for ages to get into Hatch, a perforated box. Only two are allowed in at any time. Hollow rectangular rods of different lengths puncture the room seemingly randomly; tiny squares of light hover at the end of the rods. Viewed up close, the effect is kaleidoscopic. The catalgue talks of endoscopy

Throughout the gallery, Gormley body forms lie, hang, and squeeze themselves into corners.

From the terraces, you get a great view of the Gormleys staring at you from the surrounding rooftops.

Art Marathon Part 1 – Camden Arts Centre

It had never meant to be an art marathon. It just turned out that way!

I started at the Camden Arts Centre who were showing two artists.

Mathew Buckingham’s work comprised three pieces of video art based on biographies of people who had lived in three different centuries. It was unforgivably dull. A handful of serious-looking and pretty (always a dangerous combination) girls were sat on the floor staring intently at the screens.

It was David Thorpe’s work that I had come to see but I was disappointed. In a large room a screen of wood and dark coloured glass had been erected. Inside the room within the room were three science fiction-y stars, with five or so botanical drawings hung on the screen. I have a thing for botanical drawings, and those of Thorpe’s that I had come across before looked impressive, but somehow in this setting they looked diminished and uninteresting. I suppose the thing here was the interaction between the organic and the artificial, particularly the star shaped objects (part space satellite, part deep underwater creature) and the more alien looking of the plant drawings, but overall it seemed to me to lack any real depth.

Then on to the most important part of the trip, the coffee shop, which Time Out reckons is the “best coffee in London”. I enjoyed my coffee, but it was a bit odd – perhaps another interaction between the organic and the artificial - it managed to taste both good and strong and bitter, and to be a little bit watery, all at the same time. My coffee cheesecake (another odd combination) worked really well, probably the best juxtaposition of the day. No doubt the Latte Days will visit one day soon and give us the official verdict.

I really liked the CAC – from the outside it looks like one of those mansion blocks that litter this part of Finchley Road, but inside the vibe is great, classic gallery stuff, light and airy, clean white walls, parquet flooring, with a steel and glass extension housing the coffee shop and leading to a nice little garden area which I hope to enjoy later in the summer once the rains subside. Lets hope they find some art worthy of the environment.

Lost Ladies of Folk - QEH

I was in two minds whether or not to go to this event, but in the end took a gamble based on the provenance of the people behind it. Part of Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown Festival (or Jarvis Downer’s Cockmelt as I prefer to call it), the gig was put together by Andy Votel, one of the movers behind last year’s terrific Jean Claude Vannier / Serge Gainsbourg gig, and a man who through his labels B Music and Finders Keepers has proved himself to be a remarkable picker upper of unconsidered weird rarities of the 60s and 70s, and the music was arranged by Sean O’Hagan, who arranged the music for the equally terrific Tropicalia gig last year, and appeared here with his band The High Llamas, supplemented by strings and sitar.



The Lost Ladies were Susan Christie, Wendy Flower, and Bonnie Dobson, and the gig began with three young British folk singers (bearded ladies as B Music likes to call them), Emma Trikka, Cate Le Bon and Jane Weaver. All 6 singers had remarkable pure clear honey-toned voices, which worked wonderfully with the warm and bouncy sounds of the High Llamas. Generally the feel and spirit was 1969, mostly folk pop Americana, with occasional moments of funk, psychedelica and country. Not quite my sort of thing, but really very pleasurable, and free from of the self satisfied matronly whimsy of other folkies of that era (eg Vashti Bunyan).

Wild Cursive – Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan

If the British Library left me in need of some textual healing, luckily I did not have long to wait, for I was straight down to Saddlers Wells for the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan.

Wild Cursive is the last of a trilogy of works inspired by Chinese calligraphy and in particular the focused energy of the brushstrokes and the way that the calligraphers “dance” during writing. The programme tells how the dancers were asked to improvise by facing blown-up images of calligraphy, and how they absorbed the energy, or Chi, of the writer, and imitated the linear “route” of ink, full of lyrical flows and strong punctuations, with rich variations in energy.

For Wild Cursive, choreographic ideas were taken from Kuang Chao, “wild calligraphy,” considered the pinnacle in Chinese cursive aesthetics and which frees characters from any set form and exposes the spiritual state of the writer in its expressive abstraction.

Even writing this now, I am struck immediately with how much more interesting an approach this is to calligraphy and the act of writing and the spiritual value of text than anything in Sacred, which barely touched on these aspects.

On stage, large banners of rice paper drop down from above. The paper is richly textured. Ink is dripped onto the paper from hidden pipes above, and during the performance, the ink meanders down the paper. The lighting design plays with the effects; for example when back lit patterns embossed on the paper emerge which were otherwise hidden. Sometimes the lighting gives a golden mystical glow to the paper and the ink.





But it is the dancing that is the start of the show. What originally attracted me was the fact that much of the movement is derived from Tai Chi Tao Yin and Chi Kung. As I am now in my 6th month of Tai Chi practice, I was able to appreciate just how incredibly difficult the movements were, and how unbelievably graceful and fluid the dancing was. Generally the scenes comprised between one and three dancers performing a series of linked but subtly different movements. The articulation was astonishing – some dancers seemed able to move separately each toe and finger at the same time. A cartwheel was performed with such grace that the dancer appeared to float above the stage.

The sound design was also fantastic: as well as the deep breaths and occasional yelps from the dancers, the theatre was filled with ambient sounds - the hum of cicadas, gusts of wind, waves breaking on a pebbled beach, dripping water, rainfall, foghorns and temple bells. And the Japanese chap behind me sniffing profusely.

For the finale, the full company of about 20 crept onstage in a tightly packed seething mass, slowly separating out to fill the stage. The cumulative effect of their movements made my brain feel like it was being stretched, like rubber, gentle gaps opening up, solid melting into liquid, splitting and folding on itself.


As the dancers magically disintegrated, a powerful flow of ink down one of the rice paper banners generated three thick feathery fronds whilst a pool of black ink formed on the stage.

The curtain descended with a solitary dancer sinking lower and lower to the floor until finally defeated by the curtain.

Mesmerising, meditative, and utterly brilliant.

Sacred - The British Library

One of the most extraordinary exhibitions that I ever went to was “The Writer in the Garden” at the British Library a couple of years ago. Although roughly chronological, it did not really have an overarching narrative or theme, but instead allowed ideas to ping around the room. It started with depictions of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and managed to take in, amongst many other things, the Song of Songs, the Pearl and Chaucer, landscaping in Jane Austen (where a character’s opinion on gardening was used as a window into their soul), the Romantics (Keats’ garden obviously, and Wordsworth, but also an original manuscript of Kubla Khan), recordings of Alfred Lord Tennyson and various Bloomsbury types, Philip Larkin’s lawnmower, automata, field recordings of gardens, midnight/secret gardens, Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness etc etc. It was so exciting and stimulating. I was there for hours, and in the end had to be forcibly ejaculated by the security guard.

Digging out my notes on that exhibition (which finished “that exhibition was FUCKING AWESOME – it felt like it was curated by my sub-conscious"), I see that afterwards I went to the BL’s semi-permanent exhibition of religious artefacts, and still in an excited state, noted that they had 10th century Torah scrolls, various Jewish artefacts from the 14th to 16th centuries, and a touchscreen display of the so-called Golden Hagadah of Barcelona circa 1320.

Those religious artefacts and others from Christianity and Islam have now been collated into a new exhibition at the BL, titled “Sacred.” And what a disappointing exhibition it is. It is everything that The Writer in the Garden was not: bland, flat, dull. The clue is in the tagline “discover what we share.” There’s that dreadful flat tone of voice again. This from the exhibition guide: “Religion is one of the main aspects of life by which we define ourselves, and from which we derive our sense of community. In the 2001 UK Census, 76.8% of people said that they had a religious faith”. I’ve commented on this voice before – patronizing, simplistic flat. Any excitement, any vibrancy, any passion, any violence, is brushed under the carpet and trodden down. Note that terrible word “community”. Note that meaningless statistic, and bear in mind that the 2001 census was the one where there was a huge underground campaign for people to declare their religion as “Jedi”.

There was much talk in the exhibition of “diversity” but, of course, none of difference or conflict. In the spirit of diversity, I largely focussed on the Jewish objects and took little interest in the Christian and Muslim objects. The highlight for any reader of this blog would have been a 13th Century copy of Moses Maimonides’ Guide For The Perplexed.

I would also have liked to learn more about micrography but the exhibition gave almost no consideration to the aesthetics or practice of calligraphy,

This was a stuffy, uncomfortable exhibition – the essence of three religions reduced to just a lot of book at low level behind glass, with explanatory notes even lower down.

God was barely mentioned.

Despite the BL’s best attempts to gloss over the nastier aspects of eg Christian anti-semitism, or violent factionism in Islam, little hints crept through – a Christian object depicted the Jew as blindfolded because of his refusal to accept Christ; a section on the Sunni/Shia split notes the almost immediate murder of Shia figures by Sunnis.

It is odd, because (for all that it ignores the class of civilisations) in some ways this exhibition perfectly captures life in Britain at the end of the Blair government – what Sukhdev Sandhu, in his review of the (hype surrounding the) Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer film calls a culture of “coercive banality”. The language of government speak. The closed-eyed attempt to ignore the reality of religious conflict. The flattening of all experiences, so that they are all equal and all bland and all meaningless – just stuff behind glass cases in a museum. He is so right about that notion of “coercive”. At the end of the exhibition is a screen on which you are asked to give your thoughts, which (once vetted of course!) flash up around you. Time after time, messages appear along the lines of “wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone realised how much they had in common”. This exhibition is an exercise in brainwashing. You come along, are battered into submission by banality, and then prove what good little boys and girls you are by parroting dull sentiments back into the system, where they will be used to brainwash other people.

This, for the record, was my entry, which I doubt you will be seeing up on the screen:

“Although people keep trying to persuade me of the powers of the British Library, nonetheless I have increasingly difficulty in believing that such a body actually exists.”

CocoRosie at the Bloomsbury Ballroom

Lying in bed after the gig, I was in a dilemma. I was in such a good place, so happy and buzzy, that I didn’t want to go to sleep. On the other hand, I knew that to sleep would be to dream and in dreams I would find myself back in CocoRosieLand.

What a tremendous show this was – a perfect marriage of artist, crowd and venue. In reverse order, the Bloomsbury Ballroom is a recently restored and very plush Art Deco Ballroom in the heart of Bloomsbury, and it just had a great vibe from the moment you went in (albeit that the heavy handed bouncers did their best to spoil it). The crowd were, to a woman, beloved fans, so there were none of the strafes one tends to find at bigger venues, the ones who don’t seem to know why they are there, get horribly drunk and heckle and talk and generally spoil it for everyone else. As with the legendary Scala gig a few years back, there was a lot a love of love in the room, and the volume of noise was quite something.

As for the sisters, they have benefited from almost constant touring since I saw them a few months ago, and the smaller stage suited them. Some of the weaker numbers from the new album have been dropped since earlier in the year.

Both sported tears and rubies drawn onto their faces, and Bianca had drawn on her tradition Victorian-style moustache.


Sierra wore men’s long john’s and rubber wellies with the feet ripped off.





















Bianca wore a hat and veil, with very very low rise jeans over big pants.




















I was to be found very near the front, gazing up lovingly.

Despite this being the 4th time I have seen them live, they remain as elusive, enigmatic and contradictory as ever. Their act is playful but they maintain an air of seriousness. They come across best in smaller and more intimate venues, but engage little with the audience, yet they invite people up onto the stage until the bouncers intervene, and they are visibly moved by the warmth of the feeling in the room. And what a Bitches Brew they stir up: crotch-grabbing hip hop macho posturing is lesbianically appropriated; toy instruments, eurthymy, opera, harp, piano, imaginary trumpet and beatboxing all go into the pot, but it is not gratuitous, it works. And unlike many artists hovering around what is sometimes referred to as the freak folk scene, they have always avoided whimsy and exude cool



You can start to see CocoRosie as a knowing art project, but then they sing songs about their bastard father breaking up the marriage to their mother, and about the death of their brother. They often wear masks but you feel the songs come from the heart, the disguises allowing them to be more honest.

They seem to be channelling some shamanic, ancient and deep wisdom, but at the same time play with any patronising misconceptions that might lead one to connect this with their part Native American lineage. They are sexy and sexualised but sexually ambiguous. Woe betide anyone who tries to put them into any preconceived box.

After the show Bianca is standing opposite me as I buy my t shirt. She is covered in a film of sweat and with the intensity of the performance. There is nothing I can find to say to her, nothing worth saying. Perhaps I have might have if it had been Sierra, she seems warmer and more open, Bianca is sterner and (I imagine) more pricklish. But that’s the things. Who knows? It is inconceivable to imagine them not being CocoRosie. The documentaries and interviews on the web give the impression that they wake, inspect their hair to see if the fairies have been cutting off their locks in the night again, paint on the tears, pick up some instruments, summon a ghost or two, and start singing, and that they stay like that until bedtime. And I would hate to think that it might not be so.

Ticket trouble

There is a specific frustration caused by organisational inefficiency. Its just part of the basket of psychological ailments perched wobblingly on the end of the bicycle that is modern life, deflated tyres and all.

Tickets don’t arrive in the post. Have they been nicked again by a quickfingered postie at the sorting office? Or not sent? Wrongly addressed? Computer error? Not printed yet? Sitting on someone’s desk?

So I ring the ticket office but a soft voiced girl shows complete indifference. She says that tickets are not normally sent out until a week before the event. I know this to be untrue, having just checked my collection of tickets for this venue, which covers the next 18 months, all tickets having been received by me within days of making the booking. She says that she cannot check if the tickets have been posted. She tells me to ring customer services, that they can tell me. But customer services turns out to be a recorded message telling me to ring the ticket office for tickets enquiries, or if I am ringing about access, to contact the security officer at the stage door. I shall leave the security officer until nearer the time.

There is of course nothing remarkable about such encounters. They just swim up to the shore and beach themselves in front of you, sapping your time and energy.

I reply to the sender of the e mail which confirmed my booking, but that bounces, as I knew it would. The website only offers me someone called “webeditor” so I e mail him or her, in the hope that at least I can make them waste some of their time, if only in forwarding my e mail to someone else within the organisation, someone who will probably also be the wrong person, or who will forget about it, or will try and steal my identity, or will be so inundated with all sorts of e mails that they will not realise that mine is sitting there waiting for their attention.

So I shall visit the ticket office in person, and affecting frailty, shall beg and wheeze until I achieve some resolution.

In such situations I find it best to adopt the persona of Alan Bennett: a sense of being out of one’s time and permanently baffled and befuddled normally does the trick.

Maurizio Pollini - Barbican

Time to dust off that kimono again…





As I saunter down to the Barbican for the first in a series of piano recitals I shall be attending over the coming months…

It started the night I went there for the Icelandic Peer Gynt production and was struck by the excitement in the audience waiting to go and see a recital by Evgeny Kissin. I want some of that excitement.

So last night was Maurizio Pollini playing Chopin and Liszt. The Chopin half was a little flat and dull to be honest, listless you might say, but things picked up with the Liszt, especially the last tune, a sonata in B minor. There then followed a series of encores but of course I can’t tell you what they actually were, although I overheard someone mentioning Debussy. Anyway this was definitely a concert that got better as it went on, partly because the numbers were more melodic, and partly for me at any rate because mental tiredness brought with it a certain relaxation and mellowness which allowed the music to wash over me .

But what really struck me was the audience. Albeit less excited than for Kissin, two things stood out:

First was the sense of joy people emitted as they left the Hall. These were smiley happy people and they hadn’t need pills to get like that. “Oh it was wonderful” gushed strangely attractive girls all around me. This contrasted with the dowdy smelly too cool to actually enjoy themselves crowds at the gigs I normally go to.

And second was diversity. I read recently about how the English Lit school syllabus is now geared towards “equal opportunities to such an extent that there is not one English or Welsh poet in a prescribed list of poetry" so pupils are studying Carol Ann Duffy (whoever the hell she is) rather than Milton. The myth is that somehow this represents diversity and inclusiveness. But looking around the Barbican, at an event which one might have expected to represent the pinnacle of elitist conservative western high culture, gave lie to the myth. On every level – age, sex, gender, ethnicity, nationality, eccentricity of nasal discharge, this was a more varied and diverse audience than at any other event I have been to. And a happier one too.

One only hopes that one day this crowd might rise up and sweep away all the bullshit and nannyism that infects this sceptred isle.

Funny that

So the Sunday Telegraph felt unable to print an article in the travel section by Stephen Berkoff about a visit to Tel Aviv without initiating a discussion about whether or not one should be boycotting Israel. It asked for contributions to its website.

So I submitted my comment, namely that it was a stupid question and wasn’t it odd that they didn’t feel it necessary to initiate that sort of discussion when writing about Russia, China etc etc. Funny that, I said.

They didn’t post my comment.

Funny that.

Murcof - Luminaire

Murcof sits in front of a black curtain, staring at a black laptop. He wears black, and has black hair and a thick black goatee. This leaves only the rest of his face to look at during his performance, and it is a face that remains passive, barely moving. He might as well be made of wax.

He builds a fiercely static set, tonally very pure. What beats there are, when they come, have punch and bite, but the rhythms are languid. For the finale, a note builds like the largest church organ conceivable, a nothing, but an overpowering nothing, the audience struggling not to bow down before the new pagan gods of the sine wave.

His set lasts only 45 minutes, but it has eternity within its grasp.

Batik Dance Company – Sadler’s Wells

“So if I understand this correctly, my choice for this Saturday night is between a “Jewish Facebook party” in Hampstead, and 7 Japanese lovelies dancing in their skimpies in a work about masturbation and saphic love?”

Sadler’s Wells it was then, for the Batik Dance Company’s performance of “Shoku” led by dancer and choreographer Ikuyo Kuroda. It proved to be a very physical piece, pushing the dancer’s bodies to the very limits. It seemed to be drawing connection between the physical exertions of dance and of sex, arms flailing, bodies crashing to the floor time and time again. Shoes and torches were big themes, carrying and lighting the dancers, but also doubling as sex toys, constantly disappearing and reappearing in the dancers big frilly pants. On occasion, Ikuyo Kuroda dribbled spittle onto the floor or herself. Red hooded capes became bondage strappings or face masks.





Powerful and elusive, violently sexual and possibly sexually violent, it was, all in all, a great way to spend a hot muggy evening in sub-tropical London. Maybe the Facebook party was like that too?