support live music

We went last night to hear Ewan McLennan at the Colchester Arts Centre.  He is a young Scottish musician I first heard on Mike Harding’s Radio 2 folk programme about three years ago.  Mike Harding opined that he was very good, and although Mike Harding is a natural enthusiast with many swans and very few geese, I too was greatly taken with this new and unknown Scottish voice.  I looked him up after the next day, when R2 had finally posted programme details up, and found that he had a modest website but no record company deal yet.  Instead he was marketing his home produced CD himself, so I sent off for one, which he kindly sent back by return of post despite the fact that I’d spelt his name wrong on the cheque and had to send him another one.  You could tell it was a homemade CD because it took about eight times longer than normal to load to my iPod.

Two or three years on Ewan McLennan is on national tour.  Colchester last night, Carlisle this evening.  He has a record company deal, with the first CD out and the next one due soon.  In 2011 he won the R2 Horizon Award, and he has just played at a Martin Simpson gig.  He has had guitar lessons from Martin Simpson (presumably only once he was up to the folk equivalent of grade 8) and it shows, but in a good way.  He has a nice, light, husky voice, good for folk (meaning that in a good way too), and you can hear the words when he sings, even in the slightly muddy acoustics of the deconsecrated church that houses the Colchester Arts Centre.  He has a gentle, amusing line in stage chat, which he needs, having also studied in the Martin Simpson school of guitar tuning.  He sings a mixture of traditional and modern songs, has found good versions of the former, and mostly decent examples of the latter.  He is clearly anti-war, and his politics are to the left of centre, but he wears his convictions lightly and doesn’t ram them down the audience’s throats.  Folk musicians tend to be of the left, a bit like comedians.  His stage manner is still quite reserved to the point of shyness, but he comes across as a very genuine human being.

I’d bought the tickets in advance, although I knew it would be nowhere near a sell-out, to galvanise us into bothering to go on the night.  While I wasn’t expecting us both to be suffering from colds (we were), going out on a Monday night in February after three days at work can feel like an effort, and staying in by the fire seem a very attractive proposition.  But I thought I’d like it if I only made the effort to get there (I did) and having heard Ewan McLennan’s debut on R2 I wanted to see him live and support his fledgling career.  And I felt a certain moral obligation to go because I had asked the organiser of the Colchester folk club if she could book him, though she doesn’t know me and I shouldn’t think she did it for my benefit.  I think Ewan McLennan is poised to go far.  His guitar technique is already superb, and he has a real feeling for traditional music.  Given time and practice to develop his stage persona and confidence he looks like the natural heir to Martin Simpson (though I hope Martin Simpson will not be retiring for many years yet).  If and when he is headlining at the major folk festivals and picking up folk awards for best album or best traditional song, I shall get a little buzz that I bothered to go and hear him on a cold night in Colchester, when he was almost unknown.

non-stop culture

Well, that was a cultured 24 hours.  I took my dad last night to hear a folk-jazz guitarist and an Irish harper at the Colchester Arts Centre.  They are called Chris Newman and Maire ni Chathasaigh, except that there ought to be some accents over the Irish gaelic name that Blogspot's compose a post page won't do.  They are very good, and my dad likes them.  He had them as visitors to the folk club he used to run in Wales for his seventieth birthday celebration, in lieu of a party.  Chris Newman is a great fan of 1930s swing jazz, and Maire is a traditional musician from West Cork, and they play some pure Irish folk, some jazz, and a lot that is somewhere in between.  To get the accidentals on the Irish harp you have to flick a lever at the top, and whereas in a traditional folk piece the same settings would probably last you all the way through, to play jazz you have to flick the levers in mid flow.  Frequently.  As Chris Newman says, it's fun to watch.  The harp seems to take a lot of tuning mid-concert, a process that involves various giant allen keys, and leaves Chris with some time to fill in, but he is a genial chap.  He comes from Watford, he told us, one of the best towns in England to come from.

Today the Systems Administrator and I went to Cambridge to visit the exhibition Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence at the Fitzwilliam Museum.  This brings together four pictures by Vermeer of women in a domestic setting with pictures by other Netherlands artists of the same era, and has reviewed very well (Telegraph, Observer, Independent).  As I looked at one of the pictures in the first section I heard a woman standing next to me say to her companion 'Oh, I see, they're not all Vermeers'.  Well, no, they wouldn't be.  Four is pretty good going, and includes one loaned from the Louvre and on display in the UK for the first time ever.  They are wonderful paintings.  Go and see them.  You have until Sunday 15th January.  Entrance is free, though you are invited to make a donation, and if only I lived nearer to Cambridge I'd drop in often.

We had lunch first in an excellent side street pub which I'd heard get a plug recently on, of all places, The Today Programme.  It is called The Cambridge Blue, and it says something about the organisation of human memory that when I was trying to remember the name of the road I couldn't recall Gwydir Street, but knew that it was something Welsh sounding.  It is CAMRA's Cambridgeshire pub of the year for 2011, and why it came to be featured on the Today programme I really can't remember, but the beer was excellent and the food was nice.  My carrot and coriander soup had a generous amount of coriander in it, and the SA says the sausage was good.  There was no music, and the staff were cheerful.  There were two partly used sacks of coal just inside the door, and packs of tonic all over one of the tables in the other front bar, behind which a little old boy was sitting impeturbably reading, but I don't mind an amount of clutter myself (the coal and the mixers.  I don't mean the old boy was clutter).

A group of men of mature years were waiting for the last of their party to arrive, then all piled into a large taxi.  They were happy and excited, and you could tell they were going somewhere special because they'd put on their tidy trousers (mustard coloured cords etc).  The landlord told us they were going to a Michelin two starred restaurant for the £100 a head taster menu.  'They'll be drunk as lords by the time they get back' he proclaimed joyfully. 'A hundred quid a head.  They might have put ties on'.

I had made a pencil sketch from Google maps of where the pub was, not having a working printer at the time.  It had enough information on it that we would have found it (left hand turning off Mill Road).  The SA has a pocket sized Garmin electronic navigator, which I find impossible to use, since by the time you are zoomed in close enough to see the street names, you can't see more than one stretch of about one road at a time, but the SA likes it and seems to understand it.  Each to their own.

music and plumbing problems

Mitch Benn was very good.  He sang Everything sounds like Coldplay now, which is a parody of mean genius that makes me glad I spent some time watching the TV coverage of Glastonbury, so can appreciate the cruel beauty of his Chris Martin impersonation.  And he sang the heavy metal song about Ikea, though not Happy Birthday War and Size Zero, which are a couple of my favourites.  You have not truly experienced music until you have seen the three minute rock opera adaptation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  A baroque element was added by the black helium balloons that occasionally descended from the ceiling.  Nothing to do with Mitch Benn's show, they were left over from a Goth event the previous day.

Our only gripe was that the Arts Centre printed on the tickets that the doors would open at 7.30pm and the performance start at 8.00pm, whereas the queue (which we had expected to miss by arriving ten minutes after doors open) didn't start moving until twenty to eight, and the show didn't begin until half past.  I wish they wouldn't do that.  I mean, I really, really wish they would just tell the truth about when things start, and then stick to it.  The Mercury Theatre manages it, as has every classical music venue I've ever been to (apart from The Royal Opera House about 25 years ago).  I don't want to spend five minutes standing on the pavement in the cold and then another forty minutes sitting on a not especially comfortable chair, nursing half a pint because I'm driving.

At home the plumbing is slowly disintegrating.  I had been hearing a strange, worrying, deep sort of rumbling hum for some time, and initially blamed the lettuce farm for acquiring some infernal new engine or generator and running it it at anti-social hours.  However, as the noise grew worse the source of it became apparent, and it was not from the farm at all, but emanated from above the upstairs bathroom.  The Systems Administrator thought that a slow leak from the lavatory cistern was causing it to refill equally slowly, and triggering vibrations at the resonant frequency of the pipework.  I was horribly reminded of the episode of Steptoe and Son in which Harold installs central heating.  Fortunately one can get instructions for practically anything nowadays on the net, and spare parts for lavatories, so we have a new seal in a box in the kitchen, awaiting installation.  In the meantime the water inflow to the cistern has been turned off, and in order to refill the tank after flushing you have to temporarily turn it on again, using a screwdriver kept by the loo for that purpose.  The SA was going to fix it, but first of all ran out of the right sort of plumbing tape, and then wrenched one ankle putting it down a rabbit hole and didn't fancy crawling around the bathroom.  The current method of flushing is sufficiently inconvenient that it probably will get fixed, and not join the spare bedroom door which has been held shut with a piece of bent coat hanger since 2003, when the catch broke.

Meanwhile our boiler engineer left a cheerful message on the answerphone reminding us that the boiler was due for a service.  This followed on the from message he left for us in July letting us know that it was time for the annual check.  Then the boiler failed to come on one morning, so I had to leave a message on his answerphone admitting that he was dead right that the boiler needed servicing, as it now wasn't working at all.  He is coming on Monday.  He is a very cheerful engineer, who doesn't do that demoralising thing that so many builders do of tutting about the state of your property, the dreadful job of installation and maintenance done by all previous artisans, and your own poor choice of make and model.  He was fully booked last week when I rang him, but would have squeezed us in on Friday or over the weekend if it had been cold.  We said we'd last until Monday.  We have an immersion heater, and weren't running the radiators yet anyway, though it is a nuisance losing the heated towel rails (which are effectively radiators).  I keep festooning my towel and bathmat in front of the Aga to dry, and then it gets to mealtime and the SA tidies them away.

I have worked in the garden all this week, but there is a limit to how many times you can talk about weeding and picking up leaves.  After a morning spent on the gravel in the front, I moved this afternoon to the back.  A white Rosa rugosa, which has been dying back in parts for a couple of years, is really not looking good, and I think it is time for that to come out, along with assorted seedling trees which have sprung up.  Tomorrow could be time to get out the pick axe, and tackle another big clearance job.  Though the knuckle of my left hand is still tender, so I'll have to see if it's up to pick axing.

I'm off for some more music tonight, as a friend came by some concert tickets at the last minute, from another friend who is ill.  Dvorak and Brahms (I think).  Pizza and The Sopranos has been rolled forward to Monday.