The German Choir of London go "Oh God"

 Here's matter ghoul adjacent. Back in March I took an iPad out to where Spitalfields borders The City, to see if I could get anything useful for a little promo Big Ben said we needed to make now that the Americans were favouring Harry Potter Tours – which we don't do – over the more nuanced, site-specific contextualising of the tragic murder and mutilation of unaccommodated Victorian women provided by Fred Strangebone's Ripper Walks. "Well, this will look terrible" I thought as it started to rain because I knew nothing about what makes a street look good. 

 The iPad was a gift from the Musical Director of the Deutscher Chor London, Barbara Hoefling. When I came to cut the Strangebone footage together I found a whole file of recordings she had made on it in preparation for a lockdown Hallowe'en Concert. Barbara's developed her own method of directing amateur choirs: instead of training each singer up to the standard of a soloist, she concentrates on perfecting the coherence of their untrained voices into a single instrument, to produce a sound I've heard no other human choir make. I tried playing one of the recordings I'd found over the footage of our route, and was instantly thrilled by how devastating I found the result – far too upsetting to attract even the Canadians however. So I knocked together a new soundtrack from some library numbers, Ben provided text and sound effects – car horns, golf swings, that kind of thing – and you can see the final trailer here, if you like. But Barbara Hoefling's brilliant work is below.

 

Christmas Quiz!

 Thanks for playing! Just the one question: I have always been a song and dance machine. But who am I dressed as in this picture?

You have the entirety of Kate Bush's Christmas Special from 1979 to leave your answer in the comments. Go!

 

 

 (Tangentially: after hearing Paul Putner and Joel Morris discuss the "Divine Madness" VHS on Joel's brilliant podcast Comfort Blanket, I realise I've always been drawn to piano-playing singer-songwriters more than guitar-playing ones, not a distinction I'd previously noticed. Okay, NOW go!)

 

Sometimes this blog will just be Japan's Bob McGrath.

 

 The beautiful Bob McGrath died today, which is also the day I learnt from an old American panel show that a couple of years before becoming Sesame Street's whitest human he'd had a successful career as a singer of Irish ballads in Japan. Telling me facts like this seems exactly what the internet was meant for. I've done my thing of dropping you into this clip at the good bit...

 

 

 

 There's a lot of Bob's Japanese crooning on youtube – is it still "crooning" if you don't have the raw, genital energy of Rudy Vallée? It's very hard to be unhappy listening to him, whatever it is – And it's not all Irish standards. There are Japanese songs sung in Japanese as well...

 

 Here Bob sings something a little more festive, in both English and Japanese. Merry December, everyone! But can we agree "Jingle Bells" maybe has more verses than it needs? It's a simple enough situation; you're in a sleigh; you're not Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts...

 

 Here is the song I know Bob best for. I love how much trouble Jim Henson's giving him here in the preamble, and how unphased Bob is by it. Water off a duck's back to Bob. He was ninety when he died. That's good. As Oscar the Grouch might say, fare forward, Bright Eyes.

Nightwalk in Xanadu

 Having skirted its making in my "research" for Love Goddess, today I decided to actually rewatch Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which happily appears to be available on iplayer forever. The film seems timely now in a way it probably hadn't since it first came out. I initally wrote "frighteningly timely" but, if I'm honest, also quite pleasingly timely...

 

a reference to this

 

 Timely not just in its depiction of one of the richest men in the world maniacally throwing money away in an attempt to buy the love of "The People" and call it Democracy, but also in its depiction of the attempt to use money, and the media that money buys, to remake reality itself, and of the suicide-attempt-inducing nightmare of having to live inside that lie – the fate of Kane's second wife.

 

 Susan Alexander's story probably stands up best as a metaphor; in reality, billionaires' wives seem to be managing okay. Still, as the opening of the film makes clear, Citizen Kane doesn't take place in reality. I was wildly wrong before when I said it began with a news reel. Of course, it begins with this:

 

 In the ruins of the fairy tale that Kane retreated into, to the sound of the same sleepily growling horns composer Bernard Herrmann would later use to accompany Jason and the Argonauts disturbing Talos' gigantic jewellery box: lost monkeys, abandoned gondolas, an absurdly convex golf course, and the suggestion – confirmed in the film's closing shots – that this is just a taste of Xanadu... that you'll never be able to see the whole thing. Immediately, I was reminded of scrolling through my photos after a night walk, deciding what images to use, and how many, and what order to put them in on this blog. So actually, this opening does remind me of the real world. Or whatever you want to call what we're living in until the lights go out. That's what makes it the greatest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Reviews Are In!

  Photo: Roswitha Chesher     

Yes, two reviews are in! 

 Enormous thanks to tried and trusted unatendees A sea lion in a hat and RedScharlach for generously attending the matinee of Love Goddess today. I don't want you to think from their kind words that we do a total hatchet job on Welles, but this is Rita Hayworth's story, and he was "a man of the world", and to quote London Hughes: "Play silly games, win silly prizes."

 Tech week continues into the actual Press Night tomorrow. We'll do two shows tomorrow, and we did two today, but with every show I feel less and less like John Daker, so COME!  (John Daker is the man in this clip. It is a hard clip to search for if you don't know that, so thanks to my sister Susy for knowing what I was talking about.)

  

Sometimes this blog will just be "Venice In Peril"

 Another canal. Maybe you can imagine how much Angus McKie's artwork for Rondò Veniziano's 1983 album "Venice In Peril" blew the mind of a young boy rifling through records in WHSmith, although I didn't know it was called that back then, and having my mind blown by album art was literally the only reason I rifled through records in WHSmith in the eighties. Click to enlage if you like, but don't blame me if you never come back, and here's another.

 

 I've just started watching Dennis Potter's Casanova: its scenes of an imprisoned writer suffering pornographic flashbacks and raging against his cellmates are very reminiscent of The Singing Detective, but its sumptious and creepy Venetian exteriors are giving me welcome flashbacks of my own, specifically to how powerful a role some idea of this city played in my childhood imagination. The mad cover art on a Rondò Veniziano record is probably what started it.

 A decade after "Venice In Peril" was released I would have my first ever pizza (I was scared of cheese) and, as I've written before, I chose a Veniziana because for every one ordered Pizza Express would pay "a discretionary 25p" to the "Venice In Peril fund" and I still hadn't been. In the end Venice did not disappoint, but that discretionary 25p would never change in value over the next three decades of my ordering Venizianas. Then, last weekend, I went to the Pizza Express in Paddington basin and found out it was no longer on the menu. I asked why. Apparently Pizza Express no longer has the necesary sultanas. I blame Brexit. How are we going to pay for that spaceship now?

My Gruelling Journey To Find A Good George Harrison Music Video

  Here's what happened: My brain had gone from thinking about The Lady From Shanghai to remembering the existence of Shanghai Surprise – that Madonna and Sean Penn film nobody saw – so I decided to look up a trailer for it, and found out that George Harrison the Beatle had written the film's score and that there was a music video for it, so I decided to start watching that, and I say start watching because it was... well, it was subtitled for a start, so I can give you a taste:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It was here, just as Harrison sang "hot for me like tofu" that I paused the video to check how much more was left. Guess...

 

 

 Three minutes. 

 I'd already watched two. 

 This was a five minute long song. My sweet lord. Isn't it a pity? I'm not going to post the whole thing but if you want you can find it here. (There is one good bit where Vicki Brown sings "You must be crazy. And you got no money. And you're a liar." I like that lyric.) Anyway, next to that video was a thumbnail for something called Crackerbox Palace courtesy of George Harrison's own youtube channel...

 

(Does anyone know who owns Dummy Princess Margaret these days – not that I fancy her?) 

 

 I'd never heard of Crackerbox Palace, and it turns out I don't really know Harrison's solo stuff as well as I thought, so I decided to check the channel out, beginning with this sketchy, star-studded (not filled, just studded) phantasmagoria... 

 

 

 

 I'd assumed any video would come as a relief after Shanghai Surprise, but uninterrupted peace did not descend upon me as I watched this. I definitely wanted to share it though: It's shorter than Magical Mystery Tour, and grittier than Zardoz. And doesn't George smile like David Byrne? But now I wanted to find a video I could genuinely love, I wanted that peace. (Why not just listen to the songs, Simon? Shush.) 

 So, next up I watched the video to This Song which had a similarly Carollian and unironed look, but was set in a courtroom, here, and I began to be reminded of early Madness videos, which made me realise what I'd been missing: fun. I wasn't sharing the fun. 

 Next up... Of course! I'd completely forgotten about the seven-minute long video put out to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of My Sweet Lord!

 

 

 

 Rewatching it I remembered why. Yes, it has Fred Armisen in it. And John Hamm! And Nate's Natalie Palamides! (Oh man, I keep meaning to post about Nate.) But all these celebrities and clowns, they don't... they're just in it... they don't... It was like Crackerbox Palace all over again, except the video had nothing to with the song. Was this for charity? 

 It really looked like George Harrison's music videos and I were just never going to be friends. There is a happy ending however. A video had also been put out to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Isn't It A Pity? and that's what I watched next, and last. I love cartoons. Peace descended. Journey's end. Hot tofu forgot. This is really lovely. Thank you, George.

 

Now I Lay Me Down...

"I was eternally grateful to Harry Cohn for what he did for me, because I had a musical, Around The World In Eighty Days, and I had to open in Boston, I had a lot of costumes waiting in the railway station, which couldn't go from the railway station to the theatre about eight blocks away unless someone paid Brookes Costume Company forty-seven thousand dollars..." 

 Hm. Transcribing even this almost definitely exaggerated anecdote from Orson Welles, it strikes me how meandering and ultimately inconsequential the story behind the making of The Lady From Shanghai is, especially given it was Welles' one onscreen collaboration with both his wife Rita Hayworth, and her longtime harasser, producer Harry Cohn. 

 

 But that's fine, I guess. It's called Show Business, not Show Interesting. Let's finish...

 "I found myself in the box office trying to think of who could send me this money, and I thought: Harry Cohn. I hardly knew him. And I called him up on the long distance phone. I said 'Harry Cohn, this is Orson Welles. I've just read a book –' and I turned a paperback around which the girl had in front of her who was selling tickets and I said 'It's called...' something or other, it wasn't called Lady From Shanghai then – I said: 'Buy it, and I will make it for you if you send me forty-seven thousand dollars in two hours.' And he did." 

 So I guess Around The World In Eighty Days did happen. Actually this is the internet, isn't it, I can check... Okay that's interesting, there's a contemporary recording on youtube (brought to you by "splendind, splendid Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer even in this time of grain restriction") that sounds like Americans doing The Goon Show, which I don't think I like. The video description suggests the show inspired the pretentious flop in Fred Astaire's musical The Band Wagon. Astaire worked a lot with Hayworth... 

 

"Unidentified young starlet" left. Harry Cohn right.

 

 Anyway, ultimately Welles blamed composer Cole Porter for the failure of Around The World In Eighty Days, and film historians blamed Cohn for the failure of the The Lady From Shanghai, as they blame nearly every one of Welles' producers for the messy, unfinished nature of nearly every one of Welles' films. I don't know who they blame for the messy, unfinished nature of Welles' marriage to Hayworth or his political career, but don't get me wrong, I love Welles probably as much as he'd want me to: I love Citizen Kane unreservedly, I love The Trial unreservedly, and I love F for Fake unreservedly, and that's it, but that's more than enough. Joe Dante below also blames Cohn, and he'll know more than I do. He also mentions in his retelling the surprising involvement of William "The Tingler" Castle. But be warned: Rita Hayworth gets slapped in the face in the trailer's closing seconds. And be reminded: I'm playing both Welles and Cohn in the musical The Love Goddess at the Cockpit in a few weeks. Tickets HERE!

NEW, PARTIALLY BLOCKED SHOWREEL!

 

 Now with added EastEnders, which means that even though I used a clip from EastEnders' youtube channel the video is still "partially blocked", so that only certain countries can see it. I don't know which countries. Has it been blocked inside Britain? Outside Britain? Are you in one of those countries? That's a shame. Let me know.*

 For those of you who can't enjoy it, off the back of Orson Welles' Haitian Macbeth here's more scrupulously researched Vodou. As a kid I rarely experienced a fear of missing out, but I remember never being taken to a massive out-of-town Toys R Us, and never being given Atmosfear or Nightmare or whatever these board games were called. Whoever came up with SNL's David S. Pumpkins sketch clearly had though, so enjoy, and happy season of the skeleton!**

 

 

 

 *UPDATE: Okay. Blocked in the UK. If you still want to see it I think THIS is the link to the Spotlight upload. 

 ** And if you simply want more of Baron Samedi and a man rocking around in a stationary ghost train, THIS is the link to the full music video.

Badphone Does Bucharest

 Last month I spent three nights in Bucharest. Beyond the flight times in my diary and the self tape I'd made pretending to look sad at a dog, I knew nothing about either the job or the city that I was heading to. It was only on the plane that I looked up which country I'd even be in, but I didn't know anything about Romania either. Something to do with vampires? I just knew everything would be taken of, which it was. And Vlad the Impaler was on a mural outside the hotel, so yeah, something to do with vampires.

 

  As I hint or mumble in the video above, heading out onto the streets that first evening after a heavy make-up test – (I'm not sure I can say too much about the job, but it was my first professional experience of waiting two hours for glue to dry: proper acting) – felt pleasantly like taking pot luck through a portal, except the changes this multiverse threw up weren't just that the traffic lights are a different colour now and there are more trees, although there were more trees. God, one month on, does that reference make any sense? Did "Multiverse of Madness" even happen?

 

  It's not just my bad phone's fault that this shoddily-ratioed video is so inadequate a record of how thrilling I remember the place. Also partly to blame was my lack of confidence at filming stangers, and the fact that I was normally out after midnight, so of course some of the city was "surreally deserted". For every empty street I trained my camera on though, there were equally cobbled quarters still bustling and pumping with colour, fresh techno and al fresco you name it, down which I idled avoiding eye contact, and enaged in perhaps that most subconscious-baring of games: making up new titles for Bond films.

 

I still know very little about Romania. I don't know whose any of those heads are in Cismigiu Gardens for example. But I do know the country's a member of the EU, and that the victory mentioned in the place names was over former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, which might explain all the trees – I was thinking of something Helen Czerski had tweeted about an aspect of twentieth century totalitarian civics I'd never considered.

 

 Also, I can now say "Oh, I discovered this DJ in Bucharest," which sounds cool, doesn't it? Why not bung this in your ears next time you fancy a strut?

 

The "The Call to Adventure" Round

 

 

 In the end I decided this round could be a straight steal from Martin White and the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra's typically brilliant, self-directed music video for The Call To Adventure. It's the big opening number to their album "The Hero's Journey" on which I appear briefly as Richard Nixon, reading the speech written for if the moon landing had gone wrong. Identify the following films from the title screens below then – we always give the years now in the quiz – or, more fun still, press play on the video above and shout out what you know. Answers as ever will be in the comments.

1. (1968)

 

 

2. (1985)

 

3. (1959)

 

4. (1988)

 

 

5. (1990)

 

6. (1987)

 

 

7. (1958)

 

8. (1993)

 

9. (1977)

 

10. (1984)

The Fifth Horseman

 

 

 I walked home from Hackney today, trying to think what Friday's Quiz would be about.

 

 The morning had been spent filming with old colleagues from The Crystal Maze, playing imaginary friends in costumes from Sophie Cochevelou, covered with toy cars and Mr. Men. It was lovely to catch up.

 Our old Maze costumes would have been hanging up, unwashed, on the top floor of the Trocadero for a year by now. I had no idea what to make the quiz about, or indeed today's post. The canal by Victoria Park was fenced off and drained for some reason. But these aren't pictures of that.

 

   These are pictures I took of a walk last Wednesday, March the 3rd, listening to a podcast about Chupucabra in the mist. I'll probably do a film-related round. A fortnight ago, the news was full of Mars. Sometimes when I write a blog, I look for the thing I've left out, and then put that down, and delete the rest. Sometimes it's not about finding a focus though, but providing a space.

 

 Nothing on the blog's been received more gratefully than my records of late night walks, so that's why I'm finally posting them, in place of another black square. I don't know if they're really what's wanted. I could always ask. This seems the place to do it. I just don't want to leave Sarah Everard un-named on here.

 

 And I don't want to leave unacknowledged the fact that the hopelessness voiced after her nightmarish abduction and murder – possibly by a police officer – has to do with more than just walking home alone, or being out after dark, but with sharing any space, any time, with the daily terrorism of men – heroes of their own story, keepers of the law. Top billed.

 

  And I want to acknowledge the hopelessness – both perceived and experienced – of reporting these acts of terror. Changing that is something to hope for at least, and demand, for a start. Actionable, structural change. "Inequality" seems too tiny word for a whole reality. I know what a person needs, because I have it. But it's mine, and I don't know how to give it. Again, I could always ask. And this might be the place to do that. And thank you for your company. Really, how are you doing?