RosieBell

Tribute Night to Leonard Cohen

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. 

After the gig

So it was worth it - the rehearsals, the practice at home, the horrible stomach-twisting and cold-sweat nerves I get before performing.  We played a blinder, and went down a storm.  There were a load of bands playing that I've seen over the years, and they were all rocking at the top of their game.  It was a grand memorial gig.  Fritz would have really liked it. 

Kudos to the organisers.  Every band started on time with none of the usual delays.  The sound engineer was excellent.  A brilliant night.

Review of the gig here.

The first act I saw were Fraktured Fingers – an amalgam of (I think) Frak and Nicotine Fingers. Appropriately enough the first song that I heard all night was written by Fritz and it kicked off a hugely enjoyable half hour or so of punky/new wave pop.

Fritz's Memorial Gig - the Video

Great video for Fritz Van Helsing's memorial gig.

 

 

Our last rehearsal was a stormer and I only hope we do Fritz proud on Sunday.

Pre-gig nerves start kicking in.

(This should have been posted a few days ago.  I'd left it in draft.)

I don't know if the video is displaying properly.  It's on YouTube here.

 

 

April 15th Memorial Gig for Fritz van Helsing

One reason I haven't been blogging much of late is that I've been practising for this event:-

The Culture Pulpers

I have to blog one piece about this assault on the culture - the culture that I know best - the poetry reading or small gig in the pub, the singers with their guitars playing in the corner, the modest little festival for local talent - the cultural equivalent of the blog.  This is DIY culture, as necessary to the comeliness of the nation as the millions of gardeners planting bulbs and putting up hanging baskets who know they will not be entries into the Chelsea Flower Show but who make the streets bright and pleasant. 

Here's a good piece on it:-

“Farcical.” That was how a leader column in this morning’s Scotsman described a new law forcing small, free events to apply for expensive entertainment licences.

Shortly afterwards, news broke that Highland Council was planning to charge a community group £153 to have an easter egg hunt. So will children be breaking the law if they roll Easter eggs this year without a licence? Yup, farcical is the word.

What next? A silly season’s worth of similar stories, potentially, if this daft, clumsy piece of legislation - part of the 2010 Criminal Justice and Licensing Act - goes ahead. One strategy being discussed by campaigners against the law (whose numbers are increasing by the day) is to flood councils with licence applications for hundreds of absurd events, such as “putting purple glitter all over the billboard outside the old social security building while my pals watch/take photos/ignore/drink beer”. In Edinburgh a day of artistic April Foolery is being considered for 1 April, the day the law comes into force.

There has been much serious, necessary discussion about the troubling implications of this law. For Joyce McMillan in the Scotsman last week, it is a warning sign that Britain is “drifting towards new forms of an authoritarianism that once seemed in permanent retreat”.

For art historian and critic Neil Mulholland, writing in Bella Caledonia, the law is an assault on human rights that could “undermine the very idea that all Scottish citizens can and should freely participate in the production and consumption of culture”. This is not, in other words, about money - it’s about democracy and civility.

Read the rest - it covers the issues very well.

Made it to Seventy

Born 2 March 1942.

Surprisingly Lou Reed's still alive.

From The Velvet Underground & Nico

 

From Berlin

 

As a contrast to the mood of those two songs, I have to post Perfect Day.  It's an urban love song - the lovers spend the weekend together going to the park, the zoo, the movies.   Then comes the lines:-

You made me forget myself
I thought I was someone else,
Someone good.

which is one of the effects of happy romantic love - that you feel wonderfully virtuous, ready for heaven in fact.

Lou Reed's singing voice is flat and untuneful so I thought I'd see if someone else had covered it.  It's a very popular song, but I couldn't find one pleasing version of it.

There's Susan Boyle - they have souped up the strings and given it full orchestral treatment with a choir in the chorus.  I can't have that.

 

Mind you, Lou's badly used face behind Boyle's smiling nice lady who does the flowers in church is something worth looking at.

Coldplay (look for it yourself) - that's with guitars.  It needs a piano accompaniment.

Bono - not so much singing as half speaking.  Adds nothing to it.  Why all those different voices, jumping up and down the register?  Far too staccato as well.

Kirsty MaColl - I thought this was a real find since I really like her voice but I don't think it's right.  She's duetting with Evan Dando and it's a little expressionless and bland.

 

I googled "Perfect Day Best Version" and found some unknown on YouTube had used "Best Version" as bait to his own terrible rendering. 

There's the BBC Children in Need one where twenty or so artists do a line each.  It's excruciating - some poor belter like Tom Jones is cut off before he's got even into half a stride. 

I couldn't find any version that I liked.  Why doesn't k d lang do it?  She can put across a song and she doesn't overdo the orchestration.  Here, for instance, she does a marvellous version of Joni Mitchell's A Case of You - she gets the emotion but doesn't rant, every word is clear and she sounds so relaxed and easy. 

 

So nothing else but to hear the man himself do it. 

 

Now from Weegieland

I have to say I'm amazed at the amount of coverage Fritz has been getting.  Here's another obituary, this one from the Glasgow Herald, showing him as a child of the punk era, with its 'zines, noisy bands,  gigs in scruffy venues and opportunities for the creative:-

Flushed with the sense of reinvention the punk era inspired, [Fritz] took his diabolic nom de plume from Dracula's vampire-slaying nemesis usually played by Peter Cushing in Hammer's increasingly camp restyling of Bram Stoker's original Gothic novel. Van Helsing took on the very of-its-time pen-name of Lou Kemia for his excitable scrawls in Wrong Time, but kept the eventually legally acquired Van Helsing name to the end, his former pre-teen identity a closely guarded secret.

Where others of his generation moved on to more respectable outlets, Van Helsing kept the faith throughout the next two decades, be it through his zines Asylum and Full Moon, or playing drums in equally wilful bands including FRAK and Nicotine Fingers. In 2000, with two friends Van Helsing began the Full Moon Club in the suitably labyrinthine confines of Bannerman's, the former folk pub in Edinburgh's Cowgate. For seven years on the last Thursday of each month, the Full Moon operated an anything-goes speakeasy policy that could see solo troubadours on the same bill as stand-up poets and punk guitar duos in an off-radar cabaret that attracted a loyal fan-base without ever attempting to curry favour with the rest of the city's music scene.

[I don't know if we started the Full Moon Club in Bannermans, though we were there for part of the time  We held it in The Maltings, the Canonsgait and a huge, rather grand place down in Leith, where our FRAK video was recorded.  My memory is of lugging amplifiers up steep stairs from pub basements.  There were some great gigs - and some terrible ones.]

Evening News Obituary

Another piece on Fritz here:-

Mr Van Helsing was born in Inverness, where he attended Millburn secondary school. He moved with his family to the Oxgangs area of Edinburgh when he was 16.

The name Fritz Van Helsing was adopted by the musician, who was a huge fan of Hammer horror movies. Family and friends remembered him as a creative, eccentric individual.

Sam Barber, 28, a member of the band FRAK with Mr Van Helsing from 2003 to 2004, said: “He had a habit of putting duct tape on the surface of his drum kit.

“It sounded horrendous but he insisted that was the sound he wanted. As if he wanted it to sound really cheap and nasty.

“Most people you speak to in the Edinburgh music world will tell you that he did a lot for the scene.

“In terms of living the rock and roll life on a minimal budget, he took it about as far as you can. He was a punk first and foremost – it was his whole life."

Fritz was a great enabler of other people's talents.  It's a talent in itself.

 

Remembering Fritz

A lovely obituary for Fritz Van Helsing written by Norman Lamont (musician, not politician).

I never knew his real name, but then he wasn’t a guy you would ask. He lived punk, all torn shirts, black leather and spikes, with a Keith Richards sway, and he tried to convince you he was a badassed mean sonofabitch.

“How are you, Fritz?” one might ask. “Too damn sober,” would come the reply. But it only took the briefest conversation to penetrate the image, and find a friendly, considerate – and very organised – character underneath.

From the late 1990s till 2005, he ran the Full Moon Club and fanzine along with Rosie Bell and Malcolm McLean. In Bannerman’s bar in Edinburgh and various other venues he would invite bands he liked and bands he wanted to give a chance to.

It’s a fair bet that more than half the sets I played for a good few years were at his invitation. Because if Fritz liked what you did – and it didn’t have to be anything like punk – he would do everything he could to get you an audience.

Fritz, Rosie and Malcolm were a dream team: organising venue, equipment, instruments, photography and a fanzine write-up, all for the love of it. They just called you, you turned up, plugged in and played. They gave you a great intro and a warm reception. And when you weren’t playing, there were people to meet and great bands to see.

A night in the Full Moon could offer you anything from the power of Shock and Awe, Mutterfly and the Z-28s to solo acts such as Electra Smith and William Mysterious. Vanhelsing wasn’t one for introverted singer-songwriters, but if you did what you did with conviction and even a smidgin of devilry, he was your fan.

At the Full Moon, I played solo and with various bands, any which way but get up there and play.

For a while, Fritz was even the drummer in my band The Innocents, and not in a polite and reserved way. He loved a song we did called The Ballad of Bob Dylan and took manic glee in propelling it to new speeds where I could barely spit out the syllables to keep up. That was fun.

He really came to the fore as a drummer in his own bands, FRAK and Nicotine Fingers. Probably the finest moment in the history of the Full Moon is FRAK’s The Last Band to Play Top of the Pops, which you can still find on YouTube.

When Fritz stopped promoting gigs and long-term illness began to get the better of him, life wasn’t easy and many said he was his own worst enemy. But during his last years, he did get out to enjoy gigs without the pressure of having to organise them. Whatever we heard, it was clear that he loved music, loved his bands, and loved his wife Mary and daughter Jet. If you’re anywhere, Fritz, wherever you are, rave on – and thanks.

Fritz died peacefully in the Royal Infirmary, surrounded by people he loved. Of the last few years, his wife Mary said on Facebook: “He was not just stoical – he was having a good time. He was some machine.”

Fritz loved Norman Lamont's song The Ballad of Bob Dylan.  Norman can never get to play a set without including it.