RosieBell

Tribute Night to Leonard Cohen

The Spews and the Scum

 

Pisses all over the culture, and then complains of the stench.

Nicked from Impossible Songs.

In red sparkly shoes

Camille O'Sullivan was performing at The Queen's Hall on Tuesday.  She sang Hurt:-

 

She was sitting on a chair in a red dress and very pale fish net stockings banging her feet and legs up and down to the music.  As she moved this song along on its steps of menace and doom, she made the shivers go up my spine.

What a voice - she growls, she rasps, she belts and then she can go sweet.  She inhabits the songs - she delivers them with high theatricality.

She covered Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill, Nick Cave:-


 

She did a big teasing routine before she did In These Shoes - picking up the red sparkly shoes, putting them on, letting the intro go on for ever, and then performed it magnificently:-

 

She is a great cabaret performer. 

Go and see the pandas

In the Captain's Bar last night the duo Rantum Scantum were playing.  Bobby Nicholson on guitar and vocals, Eddy Hanson on fiddle.  Bobby Nicholson, writes funny, satirical songs.  This is a recent topical one, Go and see the pandas:-

 

Things to do when nothin's on the telly (recorded live, so sound quality not good:-

 

Vivat Rex

I've been listening to Vivat Rex, which they have repeated in honour of the Queen's diamond Jubilee.  It was created in 1977 for the silver one.  I've only heard snippets before.  Now, thanks to  Iplayer, I can listen for an hour a day to fine actors repeating great lines dramatising 200 years of English nobles fighting for the crown.  (What a lot of ruthless cut-throats the Queen's ancestors were).

It kicked off with Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. John Hurt played Edward, managing a note of affronted whingeing that made me sympathise with Mortimer and Queen Isabella for deposing him, then his simple and dignified suffering at the end had me pitying him.  I saw this play many years ago done by the Lyceum in Edinburgh, and it has stuck with me - they had an excellent arrogant Mortimer and a creepy Lightborn, the assassin, with big clumsy red hands, quite horrible when he lay them on the broken Edward.  The Lightborn in Vivat Rex was equally cold and sinister.

Edward II was Marlowe's only play set in England.  What a loss it was, his death in Deptford at the age of 29.