This weekend I have been subjected to quite a bit of live music, which has been fun. On Thursday evening, I went with some work colleagues to the 21st Birthday party of Beaumont street studios which is a small community- based recording studio in Huddersfield where they also deliver training in music technology, video and radio production. We were subjected to 2 very-eighties acts – Crucial Vibe (old style reggae) and Hotline (the first proper British house single apparently, which got to no. 1 in the dance charts) then a couple of lads with guitars called I.E (who sounded like loads of other lads with guitars). Anyway, after the music there was food and I had some excellent Caribbean chicken.
On Saturday night, we went to see Leon Rosselson and I was quite surprised at the low turn-out – us living in this little enclave of alternative culture (apparently) and him being an old socialist folk singer/songwriter. He did a double-act with a socialist magician called Ian Saville who was quite funny. Amongst his props he had a William Morris ventriloquist dummy and part of the dialogue went like this:
Ian ‘so what are you doing here?’
William ‘Well, I’ve been dead for about 100 years and I thought I’d come back and see how my socialist utopia was doing’
Ian ‘er, well, not very well actually…but people love your wallpaper!’
You get the idea.
We bought 2 CDs – I got a compilation of Leon’s songs performed by other folk artists including Eliza Carthy doing ‘the man who puffs the big cigar’ (which is one of my favourite Rosselson songs and we saw her sing this when she came to Hebden for a gig last year) and Phil got a newer one, from which Leon said he had only sang one of the songs on the night, so that’ll be a surprise – haven’t had chance to listen to them yet.
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