Music
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Jazz Baby
So here is your humble blogger as a young hepcat. My parents were in their teens when I was born in October ’59. My father, last glimpsed by me when I was five, worked for a while as a policeman. My mother had served coffee at Ronnie Scott’s club in its earliest days and was…
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Glen Capra
Like many of his friends, I was distressed to learn of Glen Capra’s death on 29th August in Greece. I was one of a group who regularly went for beers in The Evening Star with Glen when he made one of his regular visits back to Brighton after he had settled in Kavala. Glen was…
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Minotaur
I don’t dwell much on past projects. I’m always focused on the next thing. On Friday I had a few beers with Glen Capra, and this reminded me of Glen and I recording my poem Minotaur, which had been set to music by Matthew Pollard, in one take back in 2011. I made this video…
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Is this the year of The Shakespeare Heptet?
I love the The Shakespeare Heptet. I have previously called them the greatest unknown band in the UK. So I was pleased to catch them in one of their Brighton Fringe performances at St Mary The Virgin in Kemptown on Saturday 13th May. The Heptet is designed to have a revolving cast. But on Saturday 13th May,…
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About ‘The Centaur’, an opera written with Helen Russell
I’ve not talked much about the work I am doing with Helen Russell. We met in December 2014. She contacted me after hearing the CD called Clameur I had done with Matthew Pollard, and she needed a librettist for new a project based on a short story by José Saramago called The Centaur. Here is a link to…
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The story of your eyes
Met up with my great friend Matt Pollard recently, with whom I collaborated on the high concept piece This Concert Will Fall In Love With You in the Brighton Fringe back in 2010. It was a strange idea in retrospect, that a concert could be haunted by an entity with a voice who fell in…
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Singing from the soul of Greece
What can you say about a singer who can moves you to tears even when you can’t understand the words. I’ve just returned from ‘The Songs of Greece’ a performance by Eleni Galanopoulou and Glen Capra, with Kostas Katoinis adding some deft and beautiful guitar to the arrangements, and featuring a selection of songs by…
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Remembering Chris Squire
Chris Squire, the legendary bass player with Yes had died. I have few heroes, but during the gawky isolation of mid-teens when I listened to Yes obsessively, Chris Squire was my absolute hero. He was born in Kingsbury, north west London where I happened to live as a teenager. He sang in the church choir of…
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The Shakespeare Heptet – the greatest unknown band in the UK
And great Art beaten down was the phrase suddenly rolling doomily in my head last night. I was drinking a nice pint of bitter in a pub called The World’s End in Brighton while hugely enjoying The Shakespeare Heptet playing in the corner of a pub. As usual, their musicianship was near immaculate. This despite the fact that outside in…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 