A Night of the Unexpected

We had an interesting night in Huddersfield on Friday, as we went to see what this Festival of Light was all about. This entailed some French performers called Plasticien Volant putting on a show called The Pearl, starting at St Peter's gardens and parading through the streets with a growing array of large flying sea creatures including jellyfish, seahorses, octopus, a whale and some kind of snake, chasing a pearl through the streets to St. George's square, where said pearl ended up in its shell. There were loads of people lining the streets, some intrigued, some puzzled, and some downright scared by the strange Europeaness...Well, it is a bit weird for Huddersfield but it probably happens all the time in places like France and Canada. At the end of the performance, there were fireworks being let off from behind the station, which was nice.

We made a quick exit to beat the crowds out of the town centre, as we had tickets for a Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival event at Bates Mill called 1 Night of the Unexpected. When we got there, there was some what I call bing bang bong music going on, so I distracted myself with a cheap beer and took the piss. my neek partner told me to stop wingeing and accused me of not getting it. Err! I do understand that two tunes were going on at once; I just hate that shit. Thankfully, things got better, with a very interesting violin performance, a fantastic laser show and someone getting toy cars to play records – a cross between spinning plates and scalextrics. There was also a funny DJ who played old random scratched 7” singles, and a woman doing industrial drumming – ah! That took me back to the '80's!

We also experienced a very interesting installation with a Luddite theme (now I got this straight away and hardly anyone else did – including a couple I knew who had just arrived and looked puzzled, and loads of eggheads who just stood there watching people twiddling knobs). We stayed almost 3 hours altogether, then some more awful bing bang bong music started up, this time of the jazz variety so even worse than the brass type, and we made our escape.

All in all, we agreed we had had a very entertaining night; it was certainly different. The HCMF audience made me crack up though – mainly university bods and students, on the guest list of course, chattering on about the last thing they went to rather than actually listening to and watching what was going on in front of them. I wondered how many of these experimental musicians had research grants at us tax-payers expense to pay for their expensive Apple laptops and lasers. Hmm! (sound of me stroking chin and looking pensive!)