Things to know about love, & death, & in between...

Festival time has arrived already in the Southwest, with Bath Festival offering a splendid programme across the range of classic and popular arts, though there's too much also happening in Frome for me to do more than dip in. My chosen dip was Brian Bilston, dubbed 'the poet laureate of twitter', who for many people has redefined poetry for the electronic age in the way the Liverpool poets did for the 'generation gap' era of the 1960s.  He must be used to online followers but seemed slightly surprised by the size of his live audience in the Assembly Rooms - the stewards certainly were, and made a hurried room-swap to assign us enough seating. Brian has a friendly unassuming manner, with little anecdotes about each of his poems - he shares 20 of them - 8 more than Carol Ann Duffy, he confides (and Simon Armitage doesn't do any, just stands on a dais drinking sparkling water while the audience applauds.) In between such pleasantries, and a diatribe about the Daily Mail, Brian reads from his collections, with a focus on his latest Alexa, what is there to know about love?  The hour's talk goes very quickly.

My last glimpse of Brian was behind two tables of his books with a massive line of customers snaking across the big Georgian room with its dazzling chandeliers, all the way down the stairs, each queuing to buy a signed copy of a book by the bloke who wrote a comprehensive character assassination of Boris Johnson (click here). Sometimes Bath can be surprising.

The Predicament of Jackson Scott is the new drama from Black Hound Productions, on stage at Frome's Merlin Theatre on Saturday night. Black comedy doesn't get much more Stygian than this - a warning of strangulation, blood, physical struggle, murder, scenes of a sexual nature, and grief is handed to audience members at the door - but it's outrageously funny and unflaggingly intriguing. On a set that's half nightclub, half nightmare, with a bed that doubles as a grave, Jackson (Yves Scott) is squeezing Ted (Luke Ashley Tame) to death as the play opens.  Ted doesn't take this lying down, and neither later does his sister Bernice - outstandingly well played by Mia Macleod - so the hapless haunted murderer has double the number of persistent visions than even Macbeth, not to mention the attentions of the strange Counsellor (Alex Wallacot).  Written by Josh McGrillen and directed by Lex Kaby with set design by creative producer Patrick Withey, this original and entertaining drama is on its way to Edinburgh where, given its energetic physicality and slick staging, it should be very well received. Great to see something so different on stage.

Musical performance now: The Gugg - Guggleton Farm Arts to give this wonderful  place its full name- is a bit of a shlepp from Frome, being just over the Dorset border, but it's rightly on the radar of bands looking for a popular open-mic venue.  It's worth arriving early, as the Gallery always displays fascinating original art, and the main-street based little town of Stalbridge is delightful: unfortunately it's also a main route across the south-west, but framed around with fields & woods, & with an excellent independent Co-op. This week's Open Mic night featured a series of excellent performers, including local favourite 'Twitch', aka Darryl Rushby (pictured), whose set included Time of Your Life from Green Day and Nizlopi's JCB song.  Bar and pizzas completed the party atmosphere. 

Here in Frome, Bar Lotte has become the go-to spot here on a Wednesday, with its excellent regular live music sessions.  It was the turn of Iain Ballamy's jazz trio this week - here's Dave Smith who gave us a breathtaking drum solo in Dancing Cheek to Cheek.

And finally: good news for Frome's many nature-lovers: large stretches of Whatcombe Fields, the 34-acre community-shared meadows on the western side of town, have been left deliberately and carefully unmown for walkers to enjoy the buttercups...  so now fields of gold join the hedges of white florescence all around the town.

Fast dance, slow art, & Boxes - a week of permitted joys

We live in interesting times, don't we? This is allegedly a Chinese curse but 2022 is taking it literally. Parties and protests, operation Big Dog/ this is the background to January's blog, as Julie Andrews might not have trilled in 1965. However this is an arts blog, so ignoring protest marches & the bumper batch of bulletins about ludicrous misbehaviour in the corridors of power, let's go direct to Frome's Merlin Theatre for a double bill of talent and innovation on Saturday night. First aKa dance theatre presented a speechless solo show of brilliant parody, dance, mime, and mimicry all exquisitely synched to a clever topical soundtrack.  A Real Fiction (do check this link) had the circle of audience transfixed by stunning moves and surreal comedy, including an 'intermission' where we all got jellybabies and concluding with a short series of 'out-takes'.  Next, the fable of Pandora's box was given a new twist with puppetry and current context by Kerchief Theatre in their short performance Boxes - basically a simple piece of story-telling made enchanting by the rapport between the two women performers, Esme Patey-Ford and Maddy Herbert, emerge from boxes with different perspectives which are increasingly highlighted throughout their drama, ultimately resolved not by 'hope' as an  abstract injunction but by their playful Tiktok. There's more about this delightful production here.  

From hi-energy drama to silent art, as Black Swan Arts has re-opened the Long Gallery after its long break for Slow Time, a fascinating exhibition of pin-hole camera photographs taken in Somerset on long settings - a week, a month, or longer. This project began as a creative response to lockdown, inspired initially by Steve Poole & Jannette Kerr who provided neighbours and friends with pin-hole cameras created in cans, and a brief to leave them in any situation for long enough to register the changes of light over time. With support from John Gammans of Somerset Arts Work, this project developed into a fascinating collection of images that in their distorted stillness seem to chime with the strange life-reorientations of our community during these times of stillness imposed by the pandemic. Here's Steve showing me a typical pinhole camera, and one of the images created by months beside an immobilised concrete works when the passing of daylight was its only illumination. (workshops available - check Black Swan site.)

Other than that, my week has had a focus on written word: two live writers' group meetings, now that we're allowed indoors, a meeting of Hunting Raven's Proof Pudding Book Club at River House on Sunday, plus a zoom discussion with Hazel Stewart on the progress of our twin-twin poetry collection (two writers, two reading routes) now that our commissioned cover imagery* has been delivered to our publisher. What's it like for you? and Dance for Those Who'd Rather Not are both pamphlet-length collections jointly devised, exploring & expressing our personal themes as well as our long friendship: we're both beyond thrilled that this Caldew Press, who recently published John Hegley's collection A Scarcity Of Biscuit, has now added us to his stable of quirky poets. *images available soon!

Patchy sun this week has allowed for some very pleasant local walking too, so to conclude this chat on disparate topics, here's Nunney Church looking particularly lovely as the snowdrops in the graveyard start to flower.

A week of dazzling night-lights & sizzling performance

Storm Arwen (the Welsh name means 'fair' which seems  ironic) gave an early fluttering here on Friday causing cancellation of the 'Little Night Market' which should have launched Frome town festive celebrations but the Lantern Procession went ahead, to the excitement of the huge crowd watching Jamma de Samba lead hundreds of lantern bearers down the hill to the town centre where mayor Andy did the tree-lights-switch-on. This parade is really something: Frome artists Mel Day and Alice Vaas for the last five years have been leading workshops for anyone wanting to join in, providing willow wands and  tissues as well as instruction, and results this year were especially stunning, with magical moonflowers and other clever constructions like owls, and a dazzling green frog.

Still in Frome next night, this time with two Olympians of poetry, Liv Torc and Elvis McGonagall.  Fromie Liv features often in this blog; Elvis has performed in Frome in the past, but my role as Spoken Word Co-ordinator at the theatre was on plague-pause until we heard he was booked for a southwest tour - although ironically the other venues weren't able to deliver so Frome was the sole beneficiary - all of which moithering leads to the happy outcome that on Saturday a big & beaming audience in the Merlin Theatre was brilliantly entertained by an award-winning shouty Scottish poet, with a local legend as support act - honestly, you couldn't want a better night than that could you.

Liv established massive rapport from the start and delivered a mix of very personal poems and powerful eco-poetry: as one of the Hot Poets, she delivered her remarkable poem When You Know The Water's Coming at COP26 and her terrific collection The Human Emergency is available from Burning Eye.  

Elvis has published a new collection with Burning Eye too: that link in this case takes you to Complete and Utter Cult, which contains many of the vehement & hilarious political diatribes with which he entertained his audience: you'll find his exasperated satire on emotive reporting Gimme Some Truthiness, his savagely funny 'trip through the sunny uplands of British exceptionalism' What a State and - my favourite -The Immigration Alphabet, in which “P is for Priti Patel, turning back boats like a psychotic King Canute.”  Both these poets have big personalities and amazing delivery, so it's unsurprising there were queues after the show to buy signed copies - at under a tenner, both books should be on your Christmas lists both to give & receive!

So now we've acknowledged that the C word will have to be uttered quite a few times before this time next month,  it's panto time:

Little Women in Black, billed as 'a brand new darkly comic Christmas show from The Wardrobe ' was my choice for a festive drama this winter as I'm a big fan of this anarchic Bristol pub theatre. - it's so niche and locally popular that promotion is minimal, and this image is the only one available of their 'parody mashup' of Louisa May Alcott's tale of dull lives in 19th Century Massachusetts. This "anarchic, sexy, adult-only devised comedy with little women, big guns, scary aliens and a sweet 1990s soundtrack" presents the March sisters as you've never imagined them... Pretty Amy, a wannabe Britney with a passion for pink, is probably the most like her fictional inspiration; her sisters however are sassy sky-roaming galaxy guardians apart from massive Beth, who doubles as Laurie, and he's an alien, but a great singer.  It's all fast-moving and incredibly funny, and the audience rapport is phenomenal - you feel like you've crashed a private party at times, and the four actors - Jenny Smith, Tesni Kujore, Jessikah Wilson, and Tom Fletcher, are brilliant.  Directed by Julia Head, showing until 16th January. 

There's no getting away from the approaching rituals now that the tree lights are on in the centre of town and decorations dangle in all the shops. Frome FM's friendly On Air Book Group once again invited me and Tina Gaisford-Waller, manager of Hunting Raven Bookshop, to join them at the recording of their festive edition edition. Sheila Hedges and Karen Stewart focussed on fiction, I went for non-fiction* and poetry, and Tina  gave us a whistle-stop tour of her hot tips in every genre.  Here's Karen, Tina, me and Sheila enjoying this delightful hour of chat, recorded by James Ellis and enhanced by mulled wine, mince pies, and general booky chatter: the show goes on air on 3rd Dec at 2pm, and the link will stay live for later listening.   (* apart, obviously, from commending my own collection of short stories, Déjà Lu - perfect stocking filler or small gift, available from Hobnob Press, Hunting Raven or me!) 

 

And also on Frome FM radio, Eleanor Talbot's ever-intriguing podcast Variations on a Theme  this week puts a focus on fashion.  As always, the playlist is wildly eclectic and the scope is entertainingly broad, ranging from Bowie and Dylan to Madness and The Irish Rovers: we learn the history of the top hat, or 'beaver', and of the kilt, and various fads & extreme styles of apparel, and I'm using this as an excuse to post a picture of Aiden Turner in a pre-Raphaelite style waistcoat.

Still with audial entertainment this week, but a shift of mood back to climatic and ecological concerns: Last Friday's art openings caused me to miss the viewing at the Town Hall of Rivercide,  George Mombiot's film about our river crisis, but you can hear about this - and other crucial situations, on Frome FM here.  

Annabelle Macfadyen was one of the protesting 'Blackbirds' at COP26: interviewed by Rupert Kirkham about her rationale, she explains  "The blackbirds in Druidic mythology stand at the gateway between the world of concrete reality and the dream world, the unconscious, and if we can open up to the possibility...  the changes we need can be made." 

This programme is well worth a full listen for the discussion, and for Al O'Kane's performing two of my absolute favourites of his songs: Losing It and Animals.  Pic snatched from Frome FM's post, thanks.    (Oh, and the strange looking game is Prometheus, invented by Frome's Christopher Curtis and now a hot favourite as a Christmas gift.)

Community poetry & partying, with bonus paintings

Liv Torc's 'haiflu ever after' show came to the Merlin in Frome this week, magically converting this often-overlarge venue into both a cinema and a small, intimate, club with a lively atmosphere. That's what Liv can do; she is a word-witch and, with added live music from her partner Richard Monks, this experimental session of projected memories plus performance plus audience participation showed yet again that she is a simply brilliant entertainer. As well as reminding us of her 'haiflu' project, which monitored our communities' pulse of emotion as the plague progressed, Liv tracked her personal extreme health crisis, and even managed to create a massive community haiflu-stream of responses from the audience during the interval. 

Still with words: Episode 40 of Frome Writers Collective on radio is now available online, with my short talk about writing short stories 4 minutes into this link, followed by a cheeky review of Déjà Lu by Suzy Howlett @14.30 minutes.  I also had the delightful experience of reading one of my favourite of these tales, Deceiving Mr Pemberley, to the friendly & welcoming Active & In Touch group at the Cornerhouse on Tuesday morning - a delightfully attentive audience and good company too. 

Music now, and  Guggleton Farm - or The Gugg as it's more usually known, is a new venue to me, discovered just in time before the winter closure of this wonderful arts venue in Stalbridge, Dorset. Thursday evening's live music in the open-air barn provided a smorgasbord of delights, from young local acts like Oscar & Georgie (pictured R) to Frome headliners Unit 4 (above),  a newly-formed Frome band already gathering fans excited by their uncompromising funky style.

On a sadder note, this is the week we said a final farewell to one of Frome's major musical talents: PeeWee Ellis, legendary saxophonist and all-round charming man, left us forever.  This example of his style, brilliance and charm is from 2018 and was recorded Ronnie Scott's. 

Friday evening saw the preview of Whittox Gallery's new exhibition Into the Colour, a shared showing of paintings by Jenny Morse & Susanna Lisle which will be on view until the end of October.  'Joyful' and 'playful' are terms which have been applied to these vibrantly coloured abstract images, and they certainly lift the spirits on a dull autumn day.  Jenny has used screen printing to create the colours she saw in a trip to Brazil and Susanna's paintings are inspired by gardens and by Islamic pattern. Results, for both artists, are strikingly gorgeous. 

This has been national Great Big Green Week, and Frome embraced the concept bigly with a splendid programme of events including walks, talks, films, activities and meetings - I managed to join the Frome Heritage Tree Walk led by Julian Hight - not, as avid readers of this blog may recall, my first excursion on this route: it is endlessly fascinating to remember this is the last remnant of Selwood forest, which was never a dense thicket but a meadow initially grazed by sheep then farmed for teasels for the wool trade, and the oldest trees here will have witnessed those times.  

Saturday evening's highlight in this menu of Green events was a live follow-up to the amazing We Feed the World art exhibition which featured in the summer festival: We Feed... Frome was created in Station Approach by stalls from local eco producers with music from fabulous Rosco Shakes.  The combination of balmy evening, amazing food, and a popular local band ensured a fantastic street party.  

Days of wine and rambles...

 Despite living less than 15 miles from Prior Park, on the edge of Bath, I'd always thought this was the property of a posh school and only discovered on a jaunt with friends last week that there's a marvellous landscaped garden here owned by the National Trust. Certainly there is a school there, boasting the motto Deo Duce Deo Luce which sounds quite posh to me, but beyond it lies the landscape garden created in the early 18th Century by Ralph Allen, original owner of the mansion, who took advice from Capability Brown when designing the paths and water features and the crescent vista offering incomparable views across the estate and beyond.

This turned out to be a gorgeous place to wander around at this time of year: the meadows are full of wild flowers with berry-laden brambles alongside the paths up to the summit with its amazing view of Bath stretching from Kelston Round Hill to Bathampton.  Sadly, the system of dams that created Allen's ornamental lakes has fallen into serious disrepair but extensive work to clear & restore them to their original splendour is due to be finished by early next year. 

Big thanks to my friends Eleanor and Gordon for this delightfully varied jaunt, which began with cakes at the Lavender Farm, where sunflowers add golden glamour to the bee-filled purple haze awaiting harvest, and concluded with wine & snacks at The George Inn beside the canal at Bathampton - & thanks also to Ellie for the sunflower field snap, and Gordon for the one of me and Ellie on our circumnavigation of Prior Park.

Back now to Frome, where Tri.art Theatre is the remarkable organisation which provides dance and theatre classes for all ages, holiday workshops, and regular full productions of popular big-cast musicals and dramas: apart from the obvious enrichment provided by this kind of creative group activity, Tri.art has launched several young participants into successful performance careers. This week Merlin Theatre staged their version of Lionel Bart's Oliver, a delightful ensemble production with some stand-out performances by the young cast - I especially enjoyed Florrie Walker's Artful Dodger. Here's a production image of Oliver with wicked Fagin and his sassy Dodger chum. And while we're at the Merlin, in a brief departure from this blog's usual retrospection,  do check out Liv Torc's touring show which will arrive here on Wednesday 22nd September: it's the incredible story of Haiflu, a newly adapted version of an ancient poetic form, invented by Liv and now celebrated across the world.  

Regular followers of this blog will know by now that my big literary event of the summer is the publication by Hobnob Press of Déjà Lu, a collection of 37 of my short stories, nearly all of which have been previously published in anthologies & magazines or read on BBC4 - hence the title (pretentious, moi? pas du tout) and my website is now updated to give more details: When I checked that deja lu did really mean 'already read', it turned out there's also an Urban Dictionary meaning for the phrase, viz: somebody telling you something you already know about from reading it on the internet.  So if you order a copy from me after reading this, you will have completely fulfilled the on-trend definition and thus definitely be le dernier cri ...

Wake me up when September ends...

23 Bath Street is the unassuming name for one of the town's best pubs, especially in these difficult times when staff and premises struggle to create a space both welcoming and legal. The small upper terrace at the back is a great place to enjoy a cool drink on a hot day, and owners Lark & Toby well deserve the Arts Council grant they've been awarded as part of the Culture Recovery Fund. Last Friday night they gave us the popular Gundhi Brothers in a mission to Make Frome Fun Again, with a hybrid set of Bhangra combined with Hip Hop, Garage, Drum n Bass and Soul.  Table-discipline doesn't really allow for dancing, but can't stop a great atmosphere.

More music in another short-notice-while-we-can live session, also with careful social distancing, as host John again welcomed the Tribe to The Mill at Rode. This is always a lovely event, and the line-up this time included brilliant work from Jim Cook, the only man I know who can play two saxes at once...  music included some great blues numbers. Here's the line-up, with David, Paul, Steve, Chris Chapman, and Jim.

Moving to art now, with a fascinating exhibition at the WHY Gallery in Stony Street: Dan Morley has been painting butterflies, life-size and in immaculate detail and vividly exact colours. His 'boxes' of various species are exquisite, and there's a tale behind the prize of his collection, on camera obviously: the incredibly rare Large Blue, now a protected species which can be seen only on  Collard Hill.  Really worth a visit, to admire the paintings and read the story. Here's one of the 'boxes' - the one with my favourite butterfly, the Adonis blue. 

As September sunshine continues, the Silk Mill yard once again brought entertainment to the customers of 42 Acres fabulous al fresco meals, with a musical session from Paul Kirtley's shape-shifting 'Don't Scare Easy Tribe': this time Paul and David Goodman were joined by Ray Bradfield -with sound-man Steve on cajon from time to time. This was a real 70's style 'happening, triggered by the poetry event by the inspiration of Steve & support of 42 Acres' Jo Harrison and Sarah Callan, with drop-in additions too. Here's Sarah on the other side of the counter, with husband Vin Callan also commandeered... a really great session.

Meanwhile Frome artist Sarah Godsill has been using the summer to create snapshots commissioned from around the world. Sarah says her 64 snapshots from England, Spain, Chile, Canada, USA, Venezuela, Scotland, Mexico, Singapore, Northern Ireland have "kept me relatively sane over three months this very strange Summer 2020 whilst I've thought about each person or family as I worked on each section." - you can commission your own memory here: 

And prolifically-successful writer Clare Reddaway created a story-trip round Bath you can find here. This linear walk from Walcot Memorial Chapel to the Botanical Gardens has regular stops to listen to stories about the cityscape that inspired them, written by  local writers and read by the equally talented Kilter Theatre team.

Also in the wordy-information bit, I was interviewed on Tuesday about my book The Price of Bread by the inspirational Eleanor Talbot for her Variations on a Theme show on mtri - that's Mixed Tape Radio International, broadcasting in buzzy forward-looking places all around the world and thus, of course, Frome. We sat on River House Cafe terrace talking about the violence of the Troubles in Belfast, as the newspapers of the week featured lead articles about fears that the Good Friday agreement has become precarious because of the ignorance, indifference, and stupidity of our current leadership. Eleanor is an incisive reviewer and an excellent interviewer so I'll be interested to hear the broadcast result - with musical interjections - in a couple of weeks.

This will be the last blog from Frome, and indeed from the UK, for a while, so I've held it over to include Bottom's Dream from on Saturday afternoon on the Merlin's ECOS amphitheatre.  Devised by 2m Theatre with the aim "to create socially distanced performances during the current pandemic",  this  talented young company demonstrates how Shakespeare never goes out of date. Bottom, dreaming that a beautiful woman might fall in love with a donkey like himself, is maybe a more interesting story than the upper-class couples bickering in the woods, and this one-hour devised show cleverly uses Shakespeare's text with a shift of focus.

Ending with another session at the Silk Mill from Paul's tribe, now named Fair Play for Frome and raising money for the town's charity: sadly I missed some good guest acts as this clashed with the Merlin show, but arrived for the final hour - and a bean stew from the excellent cuisine of 42 Acres. 

Past times in cabaret, slave-ship, and pit - with music, of course!

Victoria Art Gallery in Bath sometimes seems like the modest little sister to Holburne Museum with its big glassy café, grand garden, and costly ticketing. Sitting unobtrusively on a busy corner by the river, Victoria has a tea-machine, a tiny lobby, and reasonable prices, yet some of the most exciting touring shows have come there - the Grayson Perry tapestries, to name but one. Their current exhibition of Toulouse Lautrec posters and other art work from  fin de siècle bohemian life in Montmartre beautifully evokes an era & location at one time associated with wild decadence which now, with its sense of passionate living and romantic pastel-coloured posters, evokes mainly a longing for simpler times.   On till 26 May, well worth a trip.

A double-book night this week, as Pete 'the Temp' Bearder brought his stage presentation of the history of spoken word From Homer to Hip Hop to Frome's Merlin Theatre on Thursday: with projected images to support his solo narration, Pete showed how the bardic oral tradition linked generations and movements, from the first griots in Africa through to beat poets and the rappers of today, the language of story-telling, celebration and protest: "Poets are the gobshites of the tribe," he concluded, proudly. You can buy Stage Invasion, Pete's account of the oral poetry tradition, here.

Hunting Raven Books that evening overflowed with avid visitors to the launch of Andrew Ziminski's history of a different kind: The Stone Mason, a History of Building Britain is an archeological and personal story, already acclaimed as 'book of the year' by expert Francis Pryor. That's actually the celebratory cake in the photo but the book looks exactly like it - you can buy it online from Waterstones if you don't live near Frome.

Still with words, Frome Writers' Collective meeting this month at the Three Swans featured several members' current projects, all of which (apart from a charming children's tale of slime parties and pig wrestling) are historical, inspired by personal interest or family tales. The question that recurred in all (except for the slime & pigs one) was whether to present the research fictionalised. Opinions vary and, as Miss Jean Brodie said, 'for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like'.

Socialist historian Dave Chapple, who gave a talk for the Frome Society for Local Study on Saturday, can be considered firmly in 'team authentic'. Dave's  meticulous research, well supported by his excellent handouts, gave a grim picture of the Social and Political History of the Somerset Coal Miners. Their long journey for fair treatment and equitable pay spanned strikes, riots, pit tragedies, and other struggles and Dave brought the story vividly to life with readings from miners' own tales, newspaper accounts, and even a replica 'gus & crook'. This was a tough rope and chain worn by boys as well as men to tug the putts of coal along the narrow seams, often dangerously slanted due to the geological formations of the mines. This outrageous device which caused bleeding and permanent scarring, as well as psychologically reducing them to beasts of burden, was deemed acceptable by the Home Office in a report as late as 1912. Here's Dave, demonstrating its size and weight.

Before we leave Somerset's mines entirely, my week ended with a long walk over the hilly area of Browne's Folly 'site of Special Scientific Interest' and nature reserve. Quarrying here was for Oolitic limestone from the Jurassic age, apparently providing stone for the façade of Buckingham Palace, and these relics are now maintained by cavers as they house roostings by the Greater Horseshoe Bat.

And now to music: we binged on singer-songwriters at the Grain Bar Roots session on Wednesday, with Sean Snook and lovely Holly supporting the Rob Lear Band - a double helping of original work played with energy and impact, and strong audience rapport.

Paul Kirtley's They Don't Scare Easy Tribe once again entertained Friday night's diners and drinkers at the George in Nunney with classic song covers, superbly performed to a hugely receptive crowd - Paul's sessions are always delivered party-style, with requests encouraged!

And on Saturday night, a fantastic performance from The Back Wood Redeemers in Frome's iconic 17th Century pub The Sun. It was difficult to imagine this high-energy septet fitting into the available space with their ever-theatrical mobility, but they did, and their set & sound was outstanding.