Early Autumn: Vivid art & vibrant music for greyer days

With the wonderful Berry Bus going direct to Hammersmith from Frome for less than the cost of a pair of posh candles, days out in London are accessible as well as great fun for a capital-culture fix. This week my focus was art: The Procession at Tate Britain, a long and extraordinary historic cavalcade of all the cultures involved in the iniquitous sugar trade, created by Hew Locke.  The Tate galleries were built by that family from their exploitative wealth built on the labour of African people and their descendants, subsequently relying on the indentured labour of Asian people. The information on display quotes Locke's intention also to 'make links with the after-effects of the sugar business' so there's an enormous range of figures in this mesmeric procession.  (Guardian review here.) It really is extraordinary: beautiful and provocative, and showing until 22 January so do consider going...

As a footnote, it's a good thing the exhibition was so stunning, as the heavens opened torrentially in the afternoon...not sure I've recovered! So here's a picture from a dryer day : a family walk to Nunney.

Autumn seems to be arriving early here: lords & ladies have been glinting through the trees for over a month now, blackberries & other hedge fruit are ripe, while beech nuts & even conkers are falling and lots of trees are turning gold. Apparently, sadly this is a 'false autumn' caused by stress on trees on foliage by the drought. It's all explained here but, like most of what's happening these days, makes grim reading.

Some excellent news for Frome now: the Mayday Saxonvale team have finally succeeded in gaining acceptance, in principle, for their plan to develop this contested site in the heart of town, despite opposition from an alternative project which would in no way suit the ethos of our town. This not-for-profit social enterprise has been favoured by Frome residents from the start, and its fantastic that the immense hard work done by its originators and directors has won - with over 1,300 letters of support from local residents. This is not my photo - it's nicked from the Mayday facebook page, but speaks for all of us!

Music now: 'The Gugg' Open Mic at Guggleton Farm Arts did its usual thing on Thursdat: great live music, free, in a convivial atmosphere. There's always a mix of ages and music styles: this is Greg, reminding us you can't always get what you want, among other 60s & 70s classics.

And a final camping session of the year, at a private festival deep in Exmoor, with fabulous views as well as an amazingly sophisticated performance area, concludes this week: Campfire, bar, and great bands - here's the impressive finale of Rosco Shakes' set, and the extraordinary David Smale, creating psychedelic sounds not only on guitar but also & simultaneously by toe control, on keyboard.  Unforgettable.

The hot, late, one - with bonus supermoon

Avid followers of this blog, who've probably been sighing 'it cometh not' like Tennyson's Marianna mooning around mossy flowerpots, will have noted a week's delay in this bulletin. This is because last week's planned highlight, Folksy Theatre's Much Ado About Nothing on Frome's ECOS last Sunday, was sadly cancelled due to a vehicle crash, and the blog felt a bit thin without dramatic focus. So instead here's a bumper sunshine special with a music focus.  

As the warm dry evenings continue, the Thursday sessions of Open Mic at the Gugg in Stalbridge are increasingly popular. With fresh-made pizza on site and 3 hours of live performance free (though donations to this community project are encouraged) it's not surprising every seat in the courtyard is filled. The last two sessions provided the usual wide-ranging variety of sets and some stella performers. Here's Nick Coleman last week, powerfully recreating 60's songs Simon & Garfunkel's Mrs Robinson and Del Shannon's Runnaway. And here, from this week, is Frome's Carl Sutterby who wowed the crowd with hi-energy classic punk ( Babylon's Burning specially smashing) played on ukulele. 

Among other highlights for me in this latest event were the Beagles playing Lindisfarne's Mr Dreamseller, and I still believe from 'Twitch'.

In Frome, despite the annual exodus to Boomtown & other festivals, the pubs have been throbbing with music. Last Sunday saw a Jazz Jam at the Cornerhouse, a session of fearsome talent and unrehearsed splendour.  This is a totally inclusive night, with musicians from local funk bands playing alongside trad jazz aficionados, and numbers ranging from Miles Davis to Herbie Hancock. 

A different musical mood, though still just as hot, on Saturday when Unit 4 fulfilled their pledge to make it funky  at The Sun, 

and on Sunday we enjoyed the return to Bar Lotte of mega-popular Rosco Shakes with their 'jump jazz' versions of blues classics.

  

There's some great visual art around, too: Bath's Victoria Gallery has an exhibition of work by Mary Feddon, showing until mid-October.  'Simple Pleasures' is a celebration of the work of this artist originally from Bristol who painted still life and flowers with a delightful quirky style until her death in 2012. The show is beautifully curated, and includes some work from her husband, fellow-artist Julian Trevelyan.

Frome's Black Swan Arts gallery is still buzzing with interest in the Arts Open Exhibition, where 185 selected submissions now fill the Long Gallery, the Round Tower, and the shop too - all for sale, though quite a few have now been taken. Sadly I missed the judges' talk on criteria & judging process, but 'Writers at the Black Swan', our regular ekphrastic poetry group, enjoyed exploring the works in thoughts & words on Monday. Thanks Jane Hughes tor this snap of us waxing lyrical.

The first Sunday in the month always brings the Frome Independent, a wonderful chance to wander through stalls in the car-free streets, enjoying the market atmosphere & street food, especially under the azure skies we've had for several weeks now. I did a bit of onstreet-sales myself, outside Hunting Raven Books, inspired by some great reviews sent me about my new novel Blow-Ins. You can hear more about the book, and how it came to be written, in this week's Variations on a Theme, the regular mixed-bag-culture show of Eleanor Talbot which you can listen to online as broadcast on Frome FM. My interview starts at 1.23.50, but the eclectic music on Eleanor's shows is always great!

Final footnote goes to the weather: love it (I do) or worry about it (as we all probably do, for -literally- existential reasons) this fortnight has brought solid sunshine and cloudless azure skies to Frome. Our grassy meadows are turning to straw and our river is become drying sludge in many places, so to end here's a typical image from my walks this week: Whatcombe fields, on the edge of town.  Rain, apparently, is due soon....

 

Much Ado about lots

This week's bulging bulletin begins with a trip to London's South Bank for a National Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing - the final splurge of a gift-token from son2 last year. Directed by Simon Godwin with a lavish two-storey set designed by Anna Fleischle & Evie Gurney's amazing rag-time era costumes, this seemed at first a bit too 'Post-Modern Jukebox meets Hi-Di-Hi' for dark themes of betrayal and redemption but, after a frivolous start, it steered its way into a lively, funny, clever production.  Much Ado is notoriously 'difficult' although a comedy: we have to relish a happy ending that involves a mistrustful bridegroom who publicly humiliates his bride, whose sassy friend promptly demands his death from her own fiancé… some productions simply give up on resolving these aspects, but this production really has a go and, for me, really succeeds. Much credit for this is down to Ursula Dowel, Beatrice’s delightful maid, and the director's decision to created a balcony scene which tricks her as well as the watching spies - there’s quite a bit of this kind of softening of some of the bard’s rough edges, which helps to maintain much of the glamour of the upbeat opening scenes throughout. 

The sequence when a team of inane watchmen ineptly uncover the treacherous plot to discredit Hero is direly unfunny in most productions, but in this one it's somehow hilarious - big credit to David Fynn's Dogberry and his Watch. Here they are (above), and here too are Benedict (John Hefferman) whose friends tricked him into wooing and Claudio (Eben Figueiredo) whose boss did his wooing for him, though both got their girls in the end. A great interpretation of a play that's mainly about gossip, well presented and performed.  (Press image credits Manuel-Harlan)

Still with the bard, this time al fresco with the wonderful Lord Chamberlain's Men at Dyrham Park. There’s something intrinsically funny about men dressed as women, and when a man dressed-as-a- woman dresses as a man, and is played by a man-dressed-as-a-woman-dressing-as-a-man, the comedy is inevitably compounded. It can get chaotic, of course, so this company deserves huge credit for their brilliant, clever, production of As You Like It, in which seven men played every role with clarity and enormous humour. Rosalind (Ben Lynn) and Celia (Jonny Warr) are both adorable, and the rest of the team are funny and feisty, as necessary.  Handsome Orlando (Andrew Buzzeo), smitten with love for Rosalind, is excellent; Jaques’s melancholy is less turgid than sometimes, and the romance between tiny clown Touchstone and beefy Audrey is funnier than sometimes, so win-win all round. 

The set was a bit odd, though: a turd-like monolith neither palace nor forest, but probably easy for touring. The company will doubtless be exhausted by autumn - their tour schedule involves 73 locations - but they will have made a lot of people very happy.  At Dyrham Park at least 200 of us gathered on the lawn with chairs, rugs, and picnics (in one instance with a folding table) and the multi-talented cast organised us seamlessly into best-viewing positions for all. It’s a great show - go if you can.

This double-drama concluded my week-long birthday bonanza which also involved classy dining & bibbing and wonderful walks with son1 and with friends, discovering places nearby but somehow previously unknown to me - here's  Horningsham Independent Chapel, the oldest Free Church in England, build-date of 1556 and still in regular use for worship. This is within the 9,800 acre Longleat estate, famous for costly attractions - stately home, safari park - but free for walking around the lovely wooded environs where workers' cottage gardens look like flower-packet pictures and new-laid eggs from free range hens are £1.50 a dozen.

Moving on to music now, with another session at The Guggleton in Stallbridge, the Arts Centre with a difference, a wonderfully supportive community venture to foster arts of all kinds, with the Open Mic nights regular well attended. The session on a sultry Thursday evening had some real highlights, one of which was talented duo The Davenports, aka Annie and Roger, with a moving version of that country classic Please Remember me, and a very lively finale from Alan, aka The Rhythm Junkie, with a Bob Marley mashup and mass Oasis singalong. Always a good night at The Gugg outdoor venue - with pizza and bar provided too.

A fizzing finale to this week and this month, at Bath's Komedia, Chortle award-winning 'Best Venue in the West & Wales' for comedy: here Rosie Holt, aka twitter's @RosieisaHolt, on Sunday night shared a preview of her Edinburgh Festival show. 'an hour of character comedy based on her hit satirical videos'. 

Rosie's horribly accurate parodies of political personalities both real & imagined are side-achingly funny, and the evil simpering of her inventions so appallingly realistic that confused commentators become apoplectic with virtuous rage. Rosie's show is already tipped by Time Out in their top 10 best comedy shows in the Festival - if you're up in Edinburgh in August, don't miss her!

Big week for images & memories in Frome

This week saw the launch of our town's first Festival of Photography: Photo Frome,  Nine venues will be showing, free, exhibitions of work by photographers both local and international, with talks, discussions, seminars and even walks, all designed to put the spotlight on photography in Frome. The project has already had a fantastic start,  and will continues with more events until 15 July, all through the town festival - look out for the brochures if you live near.

The first opening was on Tuesday, with two splendid sets of  B&W studies of local life in Black Swan Round Tower, featuring farming & rural life images by both James Ravilious and Chris Chapman, who will be giving a talk on his pictures of Dartmoor on July 1st.

The following night, Gallery at the Station hosted an impressive showcase of the wide variety of themes and styles represented in the personal work of Frome's photographers. The woodland dance set above, by Mark Brookes, celebrating feminine power in a collaborative project with Feraline: Freedom, Sensuality, Power, is there. So too are the images of Frome at night by James Butler-Bartholomew which Frome's Mayor, Sara Butler-Bartholomew, is viewing here. 

Thursday's event was Culture Pool at the Makers Yard, featuring a large-format poster show - and great sound, by all accounts, though sadly this clashed for me so I missed the party but the yard is still full of great fly-posters, well worth a look.  

And on Sunday, Rook Lane Chapel opened its doors to a spectacular exhibition filling the walls below those iconic high windows, with stands displaying work from a diverse range of high-status international photographers. Here is where you'll see the full-size image of Dave Grohl featured on the brochures, and here too are atmospheric black-&-white shadowy images, and feminist subversions, and biofuturist imaginings, and intimate street portraits, and much more... including a fascinating series of images by Hanna-Katrina Jędrosz taken along the 'European Green Belt' - the former Iron Curtain borderlands - which runs from Norway to Bulgaria as a no-man's land where wildlife flourishes and locals erect their own symbols. Each of the six featured photographers has amazing work on show so it's hard to select one image but this is from my personal favourite set, the portraits from East London by Trinidadian Robert Huggins. - somehow both honest & theatrical at the same time.

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Moving on now from images to words, as my own personal big event was the launch of Blow-Ins published by Hobnob Press, held at Hunting Raven Books on a sunny Tuesday night with a gratifyingly full room - thanks to Pete Gage for the photo as I forgot, thanks to everyone who asked questions &/or said nice things about the book, and to Iona for hosting. Blow-Ins is also now available by post, with a mystifying array of prices including $20.73 on ebay, but do support your local bookshop - it'll be less than a tenner there.

Thursday evening is open-mic night at Guggleton Farm Arts, always a fun event with a wide range of offerings from the floor. This week's highlight for me was an entertaining set from Leon Sea with a strong line in political comedy, including a version of that wonderful Phat Bollard satirical classic I give my money to the millionaires and Donovan's Goldwatch Blues in support of the train strikers, with its plangent chorus 'Get them to sign on the dotted line and work for fifty years.'     

But this week's big music news is, of course, the drop-in visit of Paul McCartney, doing a Foo Fighters with a surprise instant concert at the Cheese & Grain just for Frome.  News broke on Thursday while I was camping in Dorset after the Open Mic session at Guggleton Farm and tickets were all gone two hours later, but cameras weren't allowed anyway, so here's the image from Paul's twitter feed

plus my personal memory of Macca, from 1980's London when my photos & articles on photography were published in various magazines, and Hot Shoe Magazine commissioned me to interview Linda McCartney about her upcoming book of Linda's Pictures. We met at the Apple Studio and half-way through our chat someone could be heard approaching along the corridor, whistling Long Winding Road. 'Oh, that's my husband Paul,' Linda explained as the someone entered, and she introduced us. I still have that tape, with Paul saying 'Hullo, Crysse' and me trying to breathe...  

And now that days of midsummer blue-sky sunshine are less sparse, Frome's gardens and lanes are thrumming with bees & insects and damsel-flies are flickering along the river. Your local view this week is from the north side of town, the start of a field-and-woodland walk which passes the never-used canal bridges beside the river. Fingers crossed for more days like this next week. 

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.

Art & music, needed more than ever

March is the month we welcome back the Frome Independent, our massively popular monthly market for all things independently produced, whether they're to be eaten, drunk, worn, played with, or looked at admiringly. This first-Sunday-of-the-month initiative really is a great day out, even on a very cold one, with all the central streets of town crammed with stalls of amazing produce and a wonderful atmosphere.  Here's the main street with the busking stage and eatables: there's also craft on the hill and snack stalls everywhere. After the long months of home confinement, this Independent felt like a massive party.

As we shift slowly from winter to spring, the Silk Mill has an exhibition with a focus on Transient Phases. This features eleven artists who all work at the Bruce Munro studio at Long Knoll, and interpretations are fascinatingly varied: here's Louis Neale who curated the show, a 'forage' artist whose themes are always seasonal: his real passion is fungi, but during winter months the land offers only  bits of crockery thrown up after the harvesting - this is one of his recent works.

Still with visual art, there's a new exhibition in the Black Swan Long Gallery: A Duet of Lines features the very different linear art of Guy Watts and Daniel McGirr.  Guy is well known in Frome for his pen & ink images on prints & postcards, each taking months to complete: this one is 'The oldest Chinese tree in the world', an imagined bonsai designed to create a sense of tranquility. Daniel, from Bristol, works on a massive scale - this piece Late Lights fills a wall - and aims to change perceptions of art. 

Art going viral now: this was the weekend Window Wanderland took over the town for the fifth year, with scores of houses across the town creating illuminated window displays with coloured paper over one weekend in the darkest coldest time of the year. This 'magical walking trail to light up our streets' has become so popular there's no longer a single map of all participating buildings -you download the section of town you think you can cover in an evening! These displays are very varied and often really impressive, with many pleas for peace and love - there's a wonderful visual tribute to the artwork of Charles Rennie Mackintosh too. This incredible peacock display in a bay window in Sunnyside features blue and yellow in a wonderfully hopeful image of connection.

Music now: since restrictions on indoor performances were lifted there's been a performance renaissance in Frome's pubs but the farmyard stage of The Gugg arts centre in Stalbridge also continues to be popular. Friday's relaunch of Open Mic evenings saw diverse acts onstage, ranging from soloists to a lively septet (including me doing a bit of spoken word) Pizzas & a bar made this a great party night.

Back at the cinema again, this time for The Duke - a movie about a working-class socialist activist who pulled off a heist on the National Gallery, and holds a painting to ransom in protest at penalties on old people who can't afford a TV licence, and it's an actual true story, set in in early1960s London (my era, my stamping ground), with Jim Broadbent & Helen Mirren and to top it all, film-rating site Rotten Tomatoes critics ALL gave it the red-tomato of approval... altogether irresistible.  

The duke in question is Wellington, in a portrait by Goya for which the British Government in 1961 paid £140,000 (nearly 3 million in today's terms), a sum which incensed Kempton Bunton, a retired bus-driver & veteran who had already been imprisoned for refusing to pay for his TV licence. He tasked himself with a solo campaign on behalf of the nation's elderly, the climax of which was the theft of this portrait as a bargaining tool.  This is a gentle story; it's been likened to an Ealing comedy, but there are so many searing moments of historical reality, so much tender observation of absurdity, so much humour, and history, and brilliant acting, which all combine to make it much more than that. Check out the promo video here: Roger Michell’s final feature film was designed to make you both laugh and cry, and it will. 

I'm ending this week's 'arts' report in a town where people are free to create and connect - there was a Kindness Festival, too, this week, to "appreciate and celebrate the kindness that already exists in Frome" - at a time we've all been reminded that this is not as normal for a community as it should be, with an image that appeared on Facebook uncredited. Even in desolation, art can bring hope.