Striking art, funky music, & other entertainments...

Regular followers of this blog may recall that one of my much-lamented covid losses was the Ida Applebroog exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Bruton. This box has now been ticked, and exploring this extraordinary work on Thursday afternoon gave, probably, a better viewing experience than the party on opening night could have allowed. Both galleries are filled with Ida's bizarre 'scavenging' art style, involving repeated themes of pain, gender politics, and family relationships. There's a lot of violence and violation, expressed in story-telling that varies from comic-book jokiness to savagery: it's extraordinary to realise that this boundary-breaking woman was born in 1927 and has been producing challenging artwork for half a century. 

The current exhibition is curated really well, and visitors can take home a 'goodybag' set of reproductions of some of Ida's key works - a really generous touch, especially as the show is free to enter (though you do have to pre-book and choose a time, to ensure no overcrowding.) Showing till May, lots of time to book see it, and the ever-lovely gardens too.

Back in Frome, where a new art gallery is always exciting: This one at 22 Christchurch Street West is called simply The Frome Gallery, and is a sibling of the Woolverton Gallery, displaying work from several of the same artists and also curated by artist Ray Jones. Here (above) is Ray with one of his trios of famous faces. Strong colours are important to him when selecting work to exhibit: he has some wonderful pieces from highly regarded local names like Amanda Bee, Moira Hazel, and David Wilkie - who created this painting She Sold Me Magic - and several others.

Still with visual art: the National Gallery in London has released more its excellent - free - short online talks about the treasures in its collection. Among various options, there's a fascinating surmise of Bart Cornelius, curator of Dutch & Flemish paintings, about the  real story of Rembrandt's painting of 'A Woman Bathing in a Stream.'

Moving on to music now - and yes, it's wonderful Rosco Shakes again at Bar Lotte - the full team this time: (L-R) Josh, Dom, Ned,Tim, and Steve all on fabulous form. These lads either rehearse every waking moment or they're intuitive geniuses - there never seems any doubt who's doing what when - and their sound is instantly exhilarating, so there's dancing in the bar from the start.

 

Also accompanied by energetic audience action, the annual Frome Punk Festival at the Cheese & Grain offered an evening of popular local live bands.  Here's the ever-wonderful Raggedy Men, recreating the incendiary sounds of the late-70s with a few added riffs - lighting in the hall, as evidenced here, was more for mood than clear illumination, but that didn't matter to the avid audience and dancers.

Theatre now, as New Old Friends deliver Crimes, Camera, Action, their spoof tale of a hard-boiled private-dick negotiating murder and blonde bombshells in golden-era-Hollywood.  Most of the entertainment is provided by the ever-more-elaborate negotiation of props and costumes in ever-more-unlikely crime scenarios, and while some of it incomprehensible, a lot of it is very funny indeed.  Great to see a full house at The Merlin, & a young audience clearly enjoying the show. Here's a sneaky shot of one device they used to boost the (apparent) number of performers, in one of the most hilarious moments. 

Frome's Proof Pudding Book Club, the brainchild of Hunting Raven Bookshop's inspirational doyenne Tina Gaysford-Waller, met on Sunday to review & discuss new imprints - and eat cake - at River House. It's a great format: small group discussions, plus a final feedback to share the most interesting titles. And we keep our proof copy! My lucky random choice this month was Who Are We Now? by Jason Cowley, a non-grabby title for a profoundly felt & well-argued analysis of post-Brexit Britain - how it happened, and what next.... 

Ending this edition with a view from the sunnier start of the week: the field beyond the beautiful church of Mells. This lovely little village tracks its fascinating history from Mesolithic days (c. 6000 BC) and that quaint circle of trees, according to a local historian, is the remains of a round barrow, one of only a few of these Neolithic burial places still surviving. 

 

Words and music - and more cake than usual

As this week's bulletin is mostly on a writerly theme, let's start with a blast of music: Saturday evening saw the much-anticipated return of Frome's hugely popular quartet, The Raggedy Men, playing at The Sun to an enthusiastic audience. The songs are all punk classics, but the skill and polish of the presentation isn't '70s-rough: these are all seriously good musicians and terrific  entertainers. The Guns of Brixton is still my favourite, but Andy, Bugsy, Pat & Carl make every song special.   

Now buckle up for a lot about writing. It's been five years since Frome Writers' Collective launched 'Silver Crow', a quality-control system to support self-publishing authors, so Friday night saw a birthday party at the Masonic Hall, with all FWC members invited.  This was a chance for authors to mingle, with a complementary drink, and show off their books, perhaps selling copies too. The sitting-down part began with a few words of encouragement from Mayor Andy, before Alison Clink, well-known in Frome for leading writing groups & classes in Frome, spoke of their benefits for writers.   

There are currently 18 books boasting the Silver Crow logo, and Nikki Coppleston, who launched her 'Jeff Lincoln' detective series in 2016 this way, talked about her experiences and her new novel The Promise of Salvation. Gill Harry shared the story and images of her engaging new book for children with an interest in history: Zoe and the Ancient Egypt Adventure - superbly self-illustrated. Here's Alison, soon to be published by John Chandler of Hobnob Press (on R) who has added several  Frome writers to his list, including poet David Thompson (on L). There are more pictures of this event on the FWC facebook website.

Writing continued the theme of my week on Saturday: Following my talk on writing short stories at the Library to a small but delightfully enthusiastic group, I headed for the upper rooms of the Black Swan, where The Write Place was hosting a tea-party, partly for self-promotion and partly for fun and mince pies with mulled wine. This popular project was the inspiration of Frome writer Kate McEwan, and has a big following now among writers who like to write in a quiet place but with a sense of surrounding support - sounds like the perfect combo. There are monthly one-day writing retreats which include a starter-session, too. The 'Chat Room' was full and very friendly - here's Kate (on the right) at the end of the event. Kate started her literary success in 1983 with an illustrated history of the south-west suburbs of London, and she reminisces entertainingly about initial struggles,  until Ealing Walkabout sold out its first print-run of 3500 and rushed to reprint 5000 more.

Proof Pudding Club night at River House nicely rounded off this wordy week: this group's role, devised by Tina the ever-inventive custodian of Hunting Raven Books, involves appraising the promotional proof copies of new titles, and eating cake. In the final roundup, Ai Weiwei's tale of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows emerged as an absolute must-read - this isn't surprising: I still have disturbing memories of his exhibition in London six years ago filled with courageous criticisms of the Chinese government, highlighting their callous treatment of their people. The odd, jelly-baby, look of the book jacket almost, but not quite, evokes the collections of little faces released by campaigners attempting to stop human traffic of hundreds of thousands of children in China...  One to read, if you can.   

And while we're still on the subject of books...this was the week that should have seen a high profile party launch for Struck Off at the Silk Mill - another Hobnob title -but, sadly though wisely, author-host John Killah decided to cancel rather than cause Frome the anxiety of a large group gathering from other areas. His novel now has its own private window-party in Hunting Raven, ready to delight fiction readers who may wonder what goes on in the world of a successful trial lawyers... think insider knowledge plus satirical humour, this tale may do for the legal world what David Lodge did for academic life in the '80s.

So this week's verbosity ends with an apology to Walking Festival, and the '6x6' Art exhibition at the Silk Mill, both of which sadly were squeezed off my to-do list, and with a picture of dawn over the Cooperage estate.

 

Lights, music, curtains...

Frome Festive Poetry Cafe on Monday evening had a focus on the community aspect of these bi-monthly-ish get-togethers at the Garden Cafe: we've enjoyed some fantastic guest poets at these events, and will continue to do so, but this time the metaphorical mic was given over entirely to the floor - or rather to the creative people who come as audience. Here's me somewhat randomly allocating the gifts donated by Hunting Raven Books and Merlin Theatre but the prize for everyone was a really lovely night, rich in imagery with poems ranging from poignant memories to witty word-play. Several 'debut poets' took the plunge, including a touching 'thankyou letter to Frome' from Chloe Rayburn, joining popular regulars like Mike Grenville (with a piece inspired by the current Black Swan exhibition you can read here) humorists Moira Andrew and John Christopher Wood, and John Payne, who read and distributed a moving poem from his current research on the workhouse in Bath, consulting leather ledgers in the Guildhall basement: They list the money spent, the figures, / but not the suffering / of children, elders, the mad, the sick./ We must hold them in remembrance ourselves.  Thanks David Goodman for the photos.

Next night's illuminating imagery was the literal kind, with an evening walk over the Wiltshire border into neighbouring Longleat Festival of Lights rewarded by an awesome scene of myths and legends in massive scale filling the park right down to, and including, the lake. This extraordinary spectacle is on until Jan 5th and it really is, also literally, fabulous: I've been critical of this costly 'spectacular' in the past for tacky cartoon figures and badly re-envisaged storybook characters, but this year's theme-envisaging is truly awesome - every mythic monster and hero from legends around the world is here, aesthetically beautiful as well as posed in thrilling story-telling moments - the illuminated tags beside each were being extensively used by visitors, I noticed, to succinctly fill the sad omissions in our 'education' system. There are hundreds of beautiful images there to enthral and photograph - I picked two that chime currently for me.


For the rest of the week Frome seems to have been wall-to-wall music. Raggedy Men at the Cornerhouse were a perfect choice for Friday, with dancing from the start and lots of shout-along moments to great songs from Jonny Rotten and The Clash - classic smashing punk, but with riffs! Andy, Bugsy, Carl, and drumming dervish Pat - you were just what we all needed.


Dancing-from-the-start at Cornerhouse again next night for amazing Bristol band Flash Harry, who claim to be a folk rock-balkan-cajun band but it's not that simple (!) to describe them - they can sing&play at fast-forward, make a sea-shanty sound like Deep Purple, make a hoe-down song jazzy or the other way around, and have a penchant for hamsters. I can't find their wonderful Get Out Of Bed song online but here's a sample of their style from a Bristol gig.

Sunday afternoon Acoustic Club in the Three Swans, co-ordinated by Paul Kirtley, was a pleasantly casual affair, with a series of enjoyable performances including a great set from Mountain Speaks Fire who were joined for their version of Where Did You Sleep Last Night by guest singer Anna Callan making an early debut. (I always thought this was a Nirvana original, but it's actually traditional, first recorded in 1939 by Lead Belly)

And the tempo stayed relaxed back at the Cornerhouse for Graham Dent's Sunday jazz night, this time with Caroline Radcliffe as guest singer with Graham's regular Piano Trio and John Plaxton on trumpet.

As this is primarily an arts blog, there will be no comment about what also happened last week and I'll leave you with a seasonal poem from William Yeats: The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spirtus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
 Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
 That twenty centuries of stony sleep
 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The 'Showtime' edition, mostly

Let's start with a costume drama: Pride and Prejudice (Sort Of) is a refreshingly hilarious version of Jane Austen's most performed story presented by Bristol Old Vic with Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh as a Trom Theatre Company & Blood of the Young production: Six energetic young women take on 21 key roles with entertaining indifference to plausibility, Lizzie's father being played with surprising conviction by an armchair, and there are frequent expletives and bursts of cheesey pop songs, with several nods to other classic productions, as when Darcy arrives home and his baffled servant comments 'You're very dry, sir...'  What's particularly good about this high-spirited, wickedly funny, version - apart from the costumes and the general absurdity - is the clear focus on the economic situation which was Jane Austen's real motivation in creating a household where the iniquitous laws of male inheritance would devastate the lives of six women, unless one of them at least could snare a man - but not silly Lydia's way, causing her mum to lament ‘who would touch any of you with a shitty stick now?'
There are so many moments of sheer delight created by this multi-roling cast it seems unfair to have a favourite, but Meghan Tyler's vulgar, outspoken, lovely Lizzie would be mine - here she is with wicked Wickham (Felixe Forde) at a moment of temptation. Isobel McArthur, also Mr Darcy, was the writer and Paul Brotherston directed. On in Bristol till 27 September before touring until spring 2020.

It takes a really special talent to range from witty impro chairing of  TV's HIGNFY to the sinister hitman in Pinter's The Birthday Party last year at the Harold Pinter Theatre  but Stephen Mangan can, which is why I was really keen to see The Man In The White Suit on stage at Theatre Royal Bath this week. So keen that I actually bought a ticket - press seats are unavailable before its West End premiere at Wyndhams - and called it my birthday present to myself. So this is not a review, merely a personal appreciation, and as there are no production photos available apart from the promotional one which makes it look truly terrible, here's an image from What's On Stage of Stephen Mangan as Sidney Stratton with Kara Tointon as the skirt interest.

Set in the optimistic 50s. when skiffle dominated the teen scene and the quest for durable, rather than disposable, products was still an industrial aim, the storyline is simple: an amiable young inventor aims to create an everlasting fabric to make life easier for everyone, but neither the profiteering manufacturers nor the salary-conscious workers actually want it... out of this slender cloth a hugely entertaining drama is fabricated, with major credit to the energetic cast, especially to wonderfully endearing Stephen Mangan whose escapes and confrontations must surely have given him some bruises in rehearsals... With a plot-line half-way between Professor Branestawm and the Big Bang boys, it's all mainly slapstick and fish-fights (don't ask) but there's a slender thread of seriousness: the inventor's appeal 'More and more clothes is not the answer -some day it will all catch up with us!' raised audience applause, and there were jeers at greedy capitalist's threat 'For the good of the country, laws can be circumvented, even Parliament prorogued!' At least I think they were jeers, you never can tell with Bath.

After two such dazzling and inventive parodies perhaps New Old Friends was inevitably disadvantaged in terms of creating dramatic impact with their production Crimes on the Coast which premiered at the Merlin on Friday. The concept seemed promising: a Poirot pastiche held by one narrator, with three lively actors playing every other role aided by stand-in costumes when necessary, but the script was long-winded and the narrative voice lacked impact. There were some entertaining moments - the intrusion of puppets, and false legs to create a small boy - but the overall storyline is slow-moving and incoherent. It might work better in a studio setting, with more audience connection, rather than on a large stage.

Part-performance, part-music event, Vicki Burke gathered quite a party on Sunday to film the chorus - with dance - for her upcoming video project Magic Money Tree (Crowdfunder link here.) Vicki has recorded some of the musicians and Sunday's sunshine was a great opportunity to film the song: here's Howard Vause describing his concept as we gather around the oak tree in Rodden Meadow. - sounds like this will be another great video from this innovative director.

Moving now to music performance, and a highlight at Wednesday's Roots Session at the Grain Bar as The Raggedy Men held a full-house audience rapt - though not too rapt for dancing between the tables... There were several new numbers in this high-energy 75minute set but nobody tires of their fabulously-revisited classics like Teenage Kicks, Guns of Brixton, and (always my favourite) No More Heroes...

And by popular demand, Splat the Rat were at the Cornerhouse on Saturday with their rapid-fire take on folk classics like the Irish Rover - sadly without amazing 'box-banger' Sultan Vinegar, but with a strong drummer stand-in. Jazz on a Sunday night at the Cornerhouse is always a great way to end the week, especially after a sunny day: Grahm Dent's trio had as guest for this month's session guitarist Martin Kolarides for an evening of laid-back musicality - I especially enjoyed their version of Thelonious Monk's feisty number Well You Needn't.

A literary event to conclude this bulletin, with the Society of Authors lunch in Bath organised by Diana Cambridge: an excellent light meal at the Bath & County Club in Queens Parade followed by a well-pitched short talk by Nic Bottomly, aka Mister Bee from Mr B's Emporium, the bookshop with a difference.  Self-published books now outnumber conventionally-published ones, with active local promotion more important to authors than ever now amazon has pushed the trade into so precarious a state, but the good news is that this is the third consecutive year of growth for bookshops. Interestingly, the book trade was one of the first businesses to be hit by amazon, but the survivors of that blitz are successfully fighting back with 'extreme customer service and passionate bookselling' - Frome's Hunting Raven Books is another good example of this - and the trend to environmental awareness is helping stabilise high street trade too. A fascinating summary with an encouraging conclusion for writers of all genres.

Spring stirrings & burgeonings

It's been a busy week. April began by doing the TS Eliot thing of stirring dull roots with spring rain while Frome enjoyed a plethora of music, with The Cornerhouse hosting four fabulous events: The Raggedy Men, purveyors of classic punk with attitude, riffs, & harmonica, were featured guests at a massive party last Saturday and were superbly supported by various local musicians including an impro group combining regular favourites plus guests. The gorgeous Screaming Harlots showed a new side to their talents, teaming up with birthday boy David Goodman and others as The Hoodoos, joined by Mike Goodman for an unforgettable version of Wicked Game.
A change of mood here next night for the lively Jazz Jam, with regulars and guests including violinist Jonny Griffiths.
And the excellence continued at Wednesday's Roots Session in the Grain Bar with Glastonbury trio Lazy Daze, song-writing musicians with echoes of Eagles, superbly supported by original folksinger Bob Gallie.

In dramatic news, rehearsals for the Nevertheless Frome Festival production Where the Fault Lies are going well.  Our talented actors are already off-book for one of these 'four short plays to intrigue and amuse' at The Cornerhouse on 10th July - still at our pocket-friendly price of £5. See how seriously they take their warm-ups!

Another of Hunting Raven Books' soiree events saw the Nunney Poetry group led by Moira Andrew launching their first collaborative collection: The poets featured in Hand in Hand read samples of their work and Moira contributed from her extensive oeuvre at this pleasant and relaxed event. Here's Rebecca Davis, reading All the Buildings, and Mike Grenville reading Citatrix, his superb response to the Black Swan exhibition of work related to army devastation on Salisbury Plain.

April doesn't just bring showers and that welcome clock change, the first Sunday is an Independent Market Day for Frome, as always the busiest day of the month.


 Ending this post, which seems to have evolved into mingled events and weather report, with an image of spring flowers in sunshine - these ones in Mells where the daffodils couldn't wait for their official Day on Easter Monday, and yellow is giving way to blue...