I’d Love Just Once to See You
I spent the weekend just having fun and thoroughly incurring my brother’s jealousy that I live in “the centre of the universe” (his phrase). On Saturday I went round Borough Market, a vast and beautiful market full of lovely, lovely food. I bought some very promising-looking sausages, some fruit and veg and my lunch, which I ate on the hoof.
Later on in the day I went to Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Sir John Soane was the son of a bricklayer who rose to become an architect, most notably of the Bank of England, and was a prolific collector of pretty things. From Wikipedia:
In 1792, Soane bought a house at 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. He used the house as his home and library, but also entertained potential clients in the drawing room. It is now Sir John Soane’s Museum and is open to the public.
Between 1794 and 1824, Soane remodelled and extended the house into two neighbouring properties — partly to experiment with architectural ideas, and partly to house his growing collection of antiquities and architectural salvage. As his practice prospered, Soane was able to collect objects worthy of the British Museum, including the sarcophagus of Seti I, Roman bronzes from Pompeii, several Canaletto’s and a collection of paintings by Hogarth. In 1833, he obtained an Act of Parliament to bequeath the house and collection to the British Nation to be made into a museum of architecture, now the Sir John Soane’s Museum.
It is quite a little gem and not very well-known, but certainly deserving of attention. And free. Don’t forget free. I wandered it very happily for half an hour (I only got there half an hour before closing) and felt my journey had been well worth it. I particularly liked the old-fashioned feel not only of the house but of the administration of the museum; there were almost no explanatory captions attached to anything and, while this must inflate the revenue from the small guidebook to the museum in the giftshop, this dearth of information added to the experience for me. I often feel obliged to read every piddling label in larger museums, which mostly only add to the time spent in the museum, not the information gleaned from a visit. I liked that I was free to ask questions of my own and make up my own explanations for things.
Then that evening at the last minute, courtesy of a friend whose companion couldn’t go, I got to see Brian Wilson (he of the Beach Boys) in the flesh, from a deckchair on the sloping lawn of Kenwood House in perfect weather. The crowd was a hard one to describe – interspersed amongst the silver heads were plenty of younger gig-goers, and while there were many manic nerds up the front, further back where I was the audience were clearly not rabid fans. (At one point we overheard the people behind us discussing whether Wilson was the only original Beach Boy onstage.) The set seemed well-tailored to such a mix of tastes – I had been unprepared for the gig, not knowing I was going before the day itself, and I was prepared for a far less hit-heavy setlist than the one I got. The gig consisted of two roughly hour-long sets separated by a twenty-minute interval; the first set was the Greatest Hits to get everyone on side, with the second set being given over to less well-known songs, such as the one referenced in my title, which made me laugh out loud (“I’d love just once to see you, I’d love just once to see you, I’d love just once to see you … in the nude”), though there were plenty of well-known songs to keep the more casual fan happy, with a fantastic version of Heroes and Villains, a decent rendition of God Only Knows and a great Sloop John B, ending with a barnstorming run of Johnnie B Goode, Help Me, Rhonda, Barbara Ann, Surfin’ USA and Fun, Fun, Fun and bowing out on a new one, Southern California. The band he had were amazing (despite the presence of a woman in the singing troupe, which to my mind is just cheating) and right from the first song (California Girls) the live versions were note-perfect in every way. Not that they were slavishly similar to the recorded versions, but the fact that they sounded so much like the recorded versions, that they were so muscular and rich and replicated the density of the recorded music, where I had been expecting some sort of concession to the fact that they were live and probably unable to do so, made it all the more satisfying that they could pull it off. A good night was had by all.
London Transport Museum
While I’m able to, I want to catch up with some of the other things I’ve been up to over here. One of the highlights of my time in London so far has been a trip to the newly refurbished London Transport Museum in Covent Garden.
It has felt like this place has been closed every time I’ve passed it by for the past four or five years, and so I was very pleased to finally get inside it, despite the disgusting price of admission (SIX POUNDS for a student ticket, I ask you). However, the museum actually was, to coin a phrase, worth the price of admission. It was packed to the rafters with lovingly preserved specimens of London’s public transport of the past – some of the first omnibuses from the Victorian age through to a beautiful Routemaster to a less charming modern bus, as well as a glorious old trolleybus, a fantastic old tram and numerous sections of tube trains. These were the undoubted selling point of the museum for me (and, distressingly, all the under-12s too), as in most cases you were able to climb on to inspect at least a portion of the transport, if not roam about it freely.
As you can only partially see from the photo, the museum is housed in a marvellous building. It was once a flower market in Covent Garden, but its wrought iron supports fit its contents superbly, looking something like a purpose-built stopping station for all manner of old buses and tube trains. Along with the models were very well -done informative displays on the development and building of the underground system, as well as an excellent section on LT’s wonderful design and advertising through the years. I really recommend a trip to it if you’re in the vicinity and not even for the diehard trainspotters and bus spods – there were plenty of young families in there who seemed to find it as enjoyable as I did, a person who has read (and thoroughly enjoyed) The Bus We Loved, an ode to the Routemaster.
Palin and Jones at the BFI
I was at the BFI last night to see Michael Palin and Terry Jones introduce The Complete and Utter History of Britain, a 1969 series of which only two episodes were thought to exist. Last night saw the unveiling of a third recently-discovered episode. I was at a Q&A with Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement only the week before in the same venue, and I had been expecting the evening to take the same form: that night was split into two distinct sections, the first part being a showing of one episode each of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Porridge. This was followed by a short break and then Clement and La Frenais were brought out to sit on the stage, answering questions from Dick Fiddy and latterly from the audience for about 90 minutes. This felt to me to be excellent value, as you had plenty of time in their expansive and highly interesting company. Palin and Jones’s set-up was very different, in that they came out before the showing of the episodes, sat in with the audience throughout, went onstage for a few very brief questions at the end and the whole thing was done by half past eight. The focus was not, as it had been with Clement and La Frenais, on the Q&A but on the shows.
The episodes were quite entertaining, taking the idea that cameras have been around since the dawn of time recording all the important developments. It was arranged around a central long-suffering narrator, Colin Gordon, who provided links between the filmed sketches and the absent-minded history professor (a talking head avant la lettre) played by Roddy Maude-Roxby. One bit that tickled me in particular was the breaking news coverage of the Battle of Hastings, with pictures just in “from our embroiderers”. As Palin himself said before the screening, the series was meant to be a comment on the television of its time as much as on history, and this helps explain some of its seeming slowness now, but it was a very genial and good-natured 70 or so minutes of some very little-seen comedy and interesting for any Python fan, as it contained the seeds of many recurring images in their later work, such as the idea of Robin Hood being a nuisance to the poor. All the same, I had been expecting a bit more work from Palin and Jones on the night, but they seemed keen to get away from the packed house.
The Liberty of Norton Folgate
Being finally happily employed, I celebrated by going to the first of the Madness gigs at the Hackney Empire last night.
The Hackney Empire is wholly unprepossessing from the outside, looking a bit like an IMAX cinema, and so it was a shock to find inside a very grand and beautiful Victorian theatre, if somewhat down-at-heel, making the above flyer very appropriate to the venue. As you entered, you were accosted on all sides by the more sordid kind of Dickensian character – a geriatric flower-seller, a few Bill Sykes lookalikes, a couple of bawdy women leering at the Sykeses. I was of course delighted by all this and, so far as I can tell, it’s greatly in keeping with the upcoming album, The Liberty of Norton Folgate. The title is inspired, from what I can tell, by the story of local opposition in the area of Norton Folgate to a new office block proposed for the area. They are using an ancient administrative loophole to try to get out of it, saying that Norton Folgate is its own parish and not beholden to anyone else. This story appeals to me, not only for the story but also because I pass Norton Folgate on the bus every day.
As a result, the songs from the album of this title are predominantly about London, or at least the songs played at this gig were, and the imagery projected on to the overhead screens during this section of the evening were of Camden and Kentish Town. The band were accompanied by a small orchestra and the songs were all decent, but they lacked the energy of their earlier work. The audience clearly didn’t know these songs very well, but paid attention and cheered at the end of each song, even if it felt a bit polite to me. They put on a great spectacle, especially when one of the Sykeses took to the stage with an enormous drum and another did some juggling, and played very well, but it felt a little lukewarm. There were, if I recall correctly, two acts* during this section of the evening, the curtain coming down briefly in between the two, though there was very little difference between the two sets or indeed the setlists that I could see.
There was a great change, however, when we came to the final act. An announcement was made that there would be a ten-minute interval, and those who had been standing patiently in the centre left in droves for the bar. I zoomed straight in to where these people had been standing at the front, while a couple of the Disckensian characters strummed away on ukuleles** from one of the boxes. My position was to prove untenable, however, once the band actually came back after the interval – Chas Smash came out and started the intro to One Step Beyond and the crowd simply erupted. There was a riot of middle-aged, twenty-stone skinheads where I was down the front and so after One Step Beyond and Embarrassment, I started to hedge my way backwards, where there was a bit more dancing and a bit less manic violence. This last section was what the vast majority of the audience had come for – they played hit after hit in this section, including The Prince, Madness, Baggy Trousers, It Must Be Love, My Girl and Nightboat to Cairo – and it showed in the vast difference in reaction to the earlier section of the evening and the wild abandon of the second section. There was a group of fans on the bus home (they’re easy to spot – they all had matching porkpie hats), all of whom seemed unimpressed by the new material and the compression of the hits to the last hour. I had a good night, though, and I’m glad my first gig in London was a nutty one.
This evening I’m off to the BFI to see Michael Palin and Terry Jones do a Q&A, following a screening of a rediscovered print of The Complete and Utter History of Britain. Tomorrow, I plan to sleep.
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* I did not recall correctly: this starstruck fan points out that there were thee acts in this section.
** An insufferable spod has pointed out that one was “definitely playing a mandolin”.
Still alive
I am still alive but I’m also still looking for a job and adusting to my new place and sadly frivolities have to fall by the wayside. I will be writing about some of the things I’ve been up to soon and hope to begin posting regularly again once I’m settled.
That London
Hello! I’ve been in London since Monday and have been mostly trying to get employed in that time, which is a little bit dispiriting (though the prospect of a bit of the ready is not). However, some good things I’ve managed to fit in include the latest issue of Bust, a feminist magazine (“For women with something to get off their chests”) which is unavailable in Ireland, a really pleasant wander round Primrose Hill, including a cuppa and a fairy cake from the Primrose Bakery and I’m now about to watch Kermode’s reviews live.
Oh, and the filming of two episodes of QI. I’ve breathed the same air as Stephen Fry and Terry Wogan!
