North by Northwest

Just a short note to say that this week I went to see North by Northwest at the BFI, which was, as ever, a delightful experience.  I don’t really know why they’re playing it – it was by no means a new print, though it possibly has something to do with the fact that it was released 50 years ago – but seeing it in the cinema really drove home the colossal importance to the success of the overall work of Bernard Herrmann’s terrific and pacy score, which benefitted tremendously from proper amplification on a real sound system.  The BF, who had never seen it before (film not really being his bag), decided that it was enjoyable hokum; I think it’s fantastic hokum.  Catch it while you can, as its run ends on 9 July at the BFI Southbank.

Raspberry meringue roulade

Leafing through the Guardian Weekend magazine, the BF spied over my shoulder a particularly nice photo in the recipes section and got me to make it (the original recipe is the third in this piece).  I substituted the strawberries in the original recipe for raspberries, as I had just bought a punnet of the latter at the shops, and I think the substitution worked extremely well.  Fearnley-Whittingstall also calls for 5 egg whites, which he claims serves “six to eight” – I thought this amount was probably excessive for just the two of us and went with three eggs, adjusting the rest of the quantities accordingly, and there’s no way you’ll need more than three to comfortably serve eight people for a very filling dessert.

Ingredients for meringue
3 egg whites
165g caster sugar

For filling
At least 150g raspberries (I used 225g, the size of the punnet)
A tablespoon or two of sugar
90g plain or dark chocolate
240ml double cream (or nearest size of tub you can find)

Method

Preheat oven to 200°C/400°F/gas 6, line a swiss roll tin with greaseproof. Clean your berries and douse with some sugar.  Leave to macerate.  Whisk egg whites in a completely clean bowl and, once stiff, start adding the sugar a spoonful or two at a time.  Continue until stiff peaks form.  Spread evenly into lined tin and bake for 8 mins; after this, turn oven down to 160°C/320°F/gas 3 and bake for a further 15 mins.  Remove from oven and turn upside down on to more greaseproof or a clean tea towel.  Remove paper from the base of the meringue and allow to cool while preparing the filling.

Melt chocolate.  Whip the cream and fold the chocolate into it.  Spread the chocolate-cream mixture on to the meringue, again evenly, but stopping short of one of the edges by at least an inch (the edge that hasn’t been covered with the cream mixture will be your outer edge – it will get covered in the oozing filling anyway, so leaving it bare at this stage will simply mean you don’t waste too much filling when it all goes flying out as you wrap it up).  Dot with berries.  Now, using your paper or towel to help you, roll it up, with your bare edge as the furthest one from you as you go.  Dust with icing sugar and cocoa, or as Fearnley-Whittingstall did it, trickle with melted chocolate.  Fearnley-Whittingstall also recommends wrapping it in greaseproof and chilling before serving; we ate it almost immediately with no ill effects.

Yum yum yum yum yum yum YUM.

Jarvis Cocker at the Troxy

Photo by aurélien

I have always wanted to see Cocker live, and I came away feeling that he hadn’t disappointed, but many elements of the show did.  For a start, the venue itself was pretty airless for much of the show, making Cocker’s relentless and dedicated dancing all the more admirable but making the audience experience unnecessarily stifling.  The crowd, or our part of it (we were right up at the front, which doesn’t make for good manners), weren’t the best, with some sustained and ill-natured comments from the people behind us when the BF returned from a trip to the bar and tried to get back beside me, to our original position, y’know, where we’d been before these people had arrived.  Much worse, however, was when just a couple of minutes before Cocker took to the stage we were very uncouthly elbowed out of the way by two photographers, one having the unmitigated gall to actually bring a STEP with her because she was so short.  The step-wielding photographer was directly in the BF’s eyeline and so he was justified when he deliberately blocked her lens a couple of times.  Happily, they pissed off after a few songs.

Now, I’m aware none of the above is down to Cocker, but this didn’t put me in the most receptive mood for the main set; what is perhaps more fair to criticise as part of the gig was the dreadful support act, the very aptly named Horrors.  For those not in the know, the Horrors are very much an Urban Outfitters band, playing music for wankers.  As the BF succinctly put it, they are what happens when you give more attention to your hair than to your songs.

While I did enjoy the thrashy sound of the main set and Cocker’s gung-ho performance throughout, there were some deficiencies here, too.  For a start, there was practically no rapport between Cocker and his backing band.  While this was billed as a Jarvis Cocker gig, the strangely detached way in which the band were treated gave the gig a weird atmosphere – no instrumental breaks or solos whatever, all attention focussed on the singer.  The greatest deficiency for me, however, was the fact that the songs, while fun, while competently performed by the band and passionately performed by Cocker, just aren’t anything special.  Everything last night was from Cocker’s solo output, which is fair enough - I had not come in the expectation that he’d trot out Common People – but there’s no comparison between with the best of his best catalogue.  This was highlighted by the performance of Fat Children, which was tremendous fun but as a piece of music is almost completely devoid of interest, buoyed along by Cocker’s lyrics (which were indecipherable on the sound system to anyone who wouldn’t have known the song beforehand) and the audience’s goodwill toward him.  This latter was plentiful but throughout I felt the adulation was overdone – to paraphrase Morrissey, I just don’t think he’s earnt it recently, baby.

What he certainly didn’t earn, but took anyway, was two encores.  The main set was well under an hour, which surprised me a bit, and he then had the cheek to come back on twice.  I’ve paid my money, now don’t take the piss: give me a properly sized main set and then, if you must, a single encore.  (In my opinion, most bands don’t merit any such attention and would do well to stick to a decent main set and leave it at that, but that’s an argument for another day.)  It was not stagecraft or any other lofty notion motivating the dramatics of a second encore, it was purely milking the audience for all they were worth, and it seemed that most were happy to oblige.  I was not.  Keeping me waiting around needlessly is a sure way to cool my affections.

On the plus side, it was mostly an enjoyable evening, and I am glad to have seen Jarvis while he can still throw shapes with such abandon without throwing his back out, and some songs, such as Big Julie, Black Magic and Leftovers, were very satisfyingly performed by both band and the main man.  Still, though, it was just good where Cocker could so easily be great.

Zappa Plays Zappa at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire

I am as surprised as anyone to report that last Sunday’s Zappa Plays Zappa gig was pretty good fun, all told.  This was very much the BF’s choice of gig – I know nothing about Frank Zappa’s output and anything I do know was told me on Saturday, when the BF had decided he couldn’t put off playing me some of Zappa’s music any longer.  I hadn’t a clue what to make of the recorded stuff or what to expect of the live gig, but I was pleasantly surprised by the experience.  I have to say that I’m unlikely to turn into a massive Zappa fan as the recorded music is still impenetrable to me, but watching a group of highly talented musicians wrestling with and completely nailing some tremendously difficult music was never less than interesting

What really added to it for me was the attitude of all involved.  This was exemplified by bassist Pete Griffin, who had the look of absolute absorption and intense pleasure that I’ve only ever seen on the face of an immense fanboy playing his favourite-ever music, rather than the calmer, more blasé face of one who has had a hand in the music’s composition, of someone to whom the music isn’t of life-or-death importance.  Am I making sense?  Basically, everyone up on stage was clearly playing music they loved, but particularly Griffin, along with the band’s new vocalist, seemed to be having the time of his life.  This was mirrored by the phenomenal audience reaction, including what was easily the most amiably demented dancer at a gig I’ve ever had the privilege to witness – he was exemplary in his behaviour*, in that he didn’t boorishly knock into others or take away from the enjoyment of those in close proximity to him, such as me, but simply danced his legs down to the knees in the most enthusiastic way imaginable.  I was delighted to see him rewarded at the end of the night by getting up on stage with other notable dancers to Bez it up on the last number.

*Unlike the couple beside me.  At one point the woman climbed on to the man’s shoulders but was quickly shooed down by a security guard, though she managed to expose her bra to all and sundry before she was made to regain the ground.  Hanging is too good for such people and they will be the first up against the wall come my bloody revolution.

Another thing that appealed to me was the fact that Dweezil Zappa, son of Frank, seems to be doing these shows for the right reasons – it’s not unreasonable to wonder why the son might be trotting out his much more well-known father’s output well after his death, especially since (according to the BF) the son’s solo career was not a stellar one.  However, these kinds of aspersions are, on the evidence of this gig, completely unfounded – Dweezil is an extremely talented guitarist who plays music he obviously loves and who gets off on the incredible amount of love that the audience displays for Zappa père’s music, to the extent that he sounded a bit choked when he spotted two young kids in the front row (10 and 12, it turned out) and began waxing lyrical about passing this music on to a new generation to appreciate.  (The kids got to go up on the stage too, with Dweezil getting a boy to strum the guitar with him.)

And Dweezil is a very good-looking man, which was completely unexpected.  This didn’t hurt my enjoyment of the gig at all.

Dweezil Zappa and Pete Griffin by bowtieneck

Ben Thomas and Dweezil Zappa by bowtieneck

TalkTalk’s temperamental internet connection willing, I will be posting up the approximate setlist* later on this evening in a comment.  Also, this week I’ll be going to Jarvis Cocker (my gig), Ornette Coleman (BF’s gig) and possibly Charlie Haden (BF again), so while I know I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog for the past while, I hope to have a fair bit of new material online over the next few days.

*The BF wrote it down on the way home from the gig, the way you’d write down the names of your family, i.e. much, much faster than the average bear could write down a setlist from memory (much, much faster than I could anyway, which is why I try to note things down in the gig if I’m trying to preserve it for posterity).  I was marvelling at his Rain Man-ish ability and he was acting smug about it and had put his notebook back in his pocket when, a couple of minutes later, he realised he’d missed out at least one, possibly two, songs and that now he couldn’t be sure of the order anymore.  I’m sure there’s a moral in there somewhere.

QI – “Green”

I am writing this in response to my friend Pádraig’s request for information on the QI filming I went to see a couple of weeks ago.  I have not already put something up simply because I found the night so underwhelming.  The theme of the episode was “green”, this series being the G series, and the guests were Danny Baker, Bill Bailey and Jeremy Clarkson.  Clarkson was overbearing and talkative while Bailey was comparatively quiet.  Bailey’s contributions were uniformly funny, though, and so I expect the edit will represent him well and the broadcast audience will be unaware of his reticence.  There was a longer wait than usual to get in and the night itself dragged on due to a technical difficulty.  The screen behind Alan Davies and Bailey ground to a halt and, quite spontaneously, the two men upped and went to the other side of the studio, chairs and all, to where Baker and Clarkson were sitting in front the other, working, screen.  This spontaneous move was hilarious but unfortunately the cameras, for whatever reason, didn’t adequately pick it up, so they were forced to film another explanation for their decampment to the other side.  This re-take was, as you might expect, very stilted in comparison to the first unplanned change and left a very unsatisfactory feeling in the mouth.  I went to two QI filmings last year and this was easily the least entertaining, though I’ve no doubt they will be able to edit it into a very passable episode.  I hope that helps, Pádraig!