Remembering The Day Before (twice). Amongst the ‘big events’ of the last two weekends ( Leipzig ’s re-enactment and Glastonbury ’s Avalon Fairy Ball) there were a couple of little events that are in danger of disappearing from my blogs. The day before I left for Leipzig I spent an hour queuing around and around a building in Whitehall to see Neil Gaiman read from his latest children’s book ‘Forunately, the Milk…’. This was brilliant. Gaiman’s been reading his own work out aloud for audiences for twenty years or so and is rather good at it… especially when some of the parts are brought to life by (musician/comedian) Mitch Benn, the ubiquitous Andrew O’Neill, old punks TV Smith and Tom Robinson and many others. Chris Riddell is one of my favourite illustrators of children’s books at the moment (read his Edge series or his version of Gaiman’s Graveyard Book… which I’m always amazed to find myself saying is better than Dave McKean’s version!) so to watch him doodling on the big screen to create the live images was a fantastic treat. And Lenny Henry turned up at the end, missed his cue and yet still got a huge round of applause simply for being a big loveable ball of charisma. And Mrs Gaiman (Amanda Palmer) made some noises on a Ukulele. Hurrah! The second ‘lost event’ is that the day before we left for the Avalon Fairy Ball we saw Rasputina support the Smoke Fairies in the rather wonderful St.Pancras church (‘Go for the gravestones… Stay for the music!) Smoke Fairies were an odd band for Cecile and I, as they had lots of elements we loved (great voices, a hurdy gurdy, a folk-music love of the macabre and the depressing) but the songs were all of a similar pace and structure and following Rasputina’s set this seemed nice but a little tame. Rasputina however were well worth the trip as despite being a bit goth (we shared the notoriety that Rome Burns and Rasputina were the only two ‘modern goth bands’ to feature in the Goth Cruise documentary a few years ago), a bit metal, and a bit folk… they are categorically individual and they make noises that I didn’t think cello’s could (or should) make. They began their set with ‘1816’ which is my favourite of the few songs I know of theirs and they ended with some heavy heavy rocking from Melora (the central stable figure of their oft-changing line-up), the female drummer and the androgynous Byron-Bolan-creature on second cello. Absolutely amazing.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:01:52 +0000
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