Molly Tuttle at St Barnabas Church, Oxford

I only came across Molly Tuttle when her first full album When You're Ready was reviewed in The Sunday Times.

Molly Tuttle is already a phenomenon: she was the first woman to be named guitar player of the year by The International Bluegrass Association (also Americana Music Instrumentalist of the year 2017) then won the award for the second time. But while purists drool over her technique, this debut (her previous release was a seven track EP) will introduce her to a wider audience as a singer-songwriter. Take the Journey echoes kd lang, Million Miles calls to mind Laura Viers and Make My Mind Up and Messed With My Mind are superior soft rock. Alison Krauss-style crossover success looks assured. 

How could I resist. Not all the album was to my taste but enough to get me out on a dark chilly  autumn evening to drive over to Oxford for the fourth night of her UK tour. I found she puts on a great show, her class acoustic guitar was backed by electric bass, drums and a fabulous violin. Apart from the awful acoustics of the church, their musicianship was excellent.

We had nineteen songs, ten out of the eleven from When You're Ready and three from Rise. Of the five covers, the best was when the band left and Molly sang Gentle On My Mind and at last we could hear what a brilliant guitar player she is. The combination of melody and rhythm on a single instrument was awesome. The last song of the evening before the encore ( a clever rendition of Werewolves of London for nearly Halloween) was my favourite Take the Journey. 

The venue: St Barnabas Church in the Jericho district, Oxford. I had never been to this part of Oxford before. It was interesting to see this distinctive part of the city even in the dark. I will make a note to explore more next year. The church itself is a large basilica-style Victorian building with a very high ceiling and wide nave. It was cold. Most of the audience wore coats or consumed much wine and beer. Fortunately I took two cushions for the hard, very narrow wooden seats. As I said before, very poor acoustics and no stage. With the flat seating, all we saw in row eight was Molly's head. All that was very disappointing. It was fortunate that the music was so good.

Setlist:

1. Save This Heart
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2. Sit Back and Watch It Roll
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3. Friend and a Friend
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4. Million Miles
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5. Make My Mind Up
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6. Zero
   (Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover)
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7. Sleepwalking
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8. Messed With My Mind
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9. The High Road
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10. Old Man at the Mill
    (Iain Matthews cover)
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11. Gentle on My Mind
    (John Hartford cover)
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12. Bas-Pelles Eriks Brudpolska
    ([traditional] cover)
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13. Don't Let Go
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14. Light Came In (Power Went Out)
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15. When You're Ready
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16. Good Enough
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17. Rain And Snow
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18. Take the Journey
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19. Encore:
20. Werewolves Of London
    (Warren Zevon cover) 

I Heard It Through The Grapevine

When I watched the trailer for documentary "Hitsville: The Making Of Motown", I was hooked when the loud cinema sound system belted out the first few bars of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine". Wow! I just had not realised what was a fantastic instrumental introduction there was to this song.

On repeat listenings, I still find the combination of drums, electric piano and brass to be overwhelmingly complex. The producer Norman Whitfield created something truly special. There was lots to read on Steve Hoffman's Music Forums, especially about the distortion on the instruments. Bob Ohlsson (Motown Legend?) gives this contribution:

The Wurlitzer piano is pretty distorted to begin with. The drum distortion was mostly our homebrew 12AX7xUTC A-10 mike preamps used without patching in the mike pads. They had a pretty bad resonance above 10 k that was less of a problem on drums than the other instruments we had to record at the same time. The bass distortion was caused by recording the direct bass real hot on track 8 of the homebrew 8-track because there was a lot of hum on the edge tracks. That "sound" went away when we went 16 track in 1968. The Marvin Gaye Grapevine had actually been recorded before the Gladys Knight version but the company was paranoid of putting it out because it was so different and the musically best mix had such poor apparent volume. This is another Motown single where you really want the mono version.

 On the subject of  the best introduction to songs, here are some of my favourites:

Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry

Money For Nothing by Dire Straits

Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen

I Feel Fine by The Beatles

Hotel California by The Eagles

(To be continued)

Lissie at The Stables, Milton Keynes - The Piano Retrospective Tour

This was the poster that caused all the trouble. When I went to update my post from October, another website had the same poster but blew my review when it went on. So here is an update.

Last night at The Stables, Milton Keynes, for her sold out Piano Retrospective tour, Lissie swopped the jeans from her performances with her band in 2016 for a smock, her hair tied up and no shoes. (The barefoot diva I think I said before).

Accompanied on the piano by Joe Dudderidge (who opened the show as Later Youth) Lissie gave a stand out vocal performance of most of her great songs. The uptempo numbers are still better with her band, but the ballads more than make up for this deficiency. Having been far away at her gig at the O2 Kentish Town, it was surreal to see her so close up. But her voice was great and the songs speak for themselves. A wonderful evening. Here is the set-list.

1. Don't You Give Up on Me
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2. Sleepwalking
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3. Oh Mississippi
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4. Castles
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5. Blood & Muscle
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6. Love Blows
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7. Cowboy Take Me Away
   (Dixie Chicks cover)
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8. When I'm Alone
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9. Everywhere I Go
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10. Dreams
    (Fleetwood Mac cover)
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11. Best Days
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12. In Sleep
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13. Ojai

The Goldfinch, Joker and Judy

The Goldfinch was a far better movie than most of the critics would  have us believe. I was a big fan of the Donna Tartt novel and I thought the cinematic device of jumping back and forth through time worked fine. Oakes Fegley and Ansel Elgort were passable as the young and adult Theo Decker, but I was waiting with baited breath to see who would play Boris. so I was completely thrown by the casting of  Finn Wolfhard and Aneurin Barnard. Not at all like I imagined.

As ever, Roger Deakins did a fabulous job with the beautiful cinematography. John Crowley's direction respected the tone of the book, as did Peter Straughan's screenplay. There were also some good songs: "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" by Them and The National's "Terrible Love (Alternate Version)" stood out. As did the second movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto Number 5.

Joker is the ultimate anti-hero movie. A disturbing and uncomfortable experience, but at the same time always captivating and being an excellent piece of film making. Of course it's all about Joaquin Pheonix who is hardly ever off the screen. He completely gets the troubled soul of a mentally scarred loser. As a character study, the movie is a success.

However, for me what stands out is the cinematography of Lawrence Sher who, with director Todd Phillips, has brought Gotham City to life with it's gorgeous verticality. Whether looking directly upwards at that Bronx outside staircase or even at Joker himself, it all adds to the uneasiness of the film's feel. Not only are some of the exterior locations superb, but also the interiors. The view of the bridge through the window of the clown's dressing room is unforgettable.

So no CGI, no special effects, just great camera work. No fantasy stuff, no super hero appearance, just a story about how a mental illness developed into a monster. And while we are on monsters, what an unbelievable choice of music as Joker reaches his metamorphosis late on, again at that staircase, dancing down the steps. Out blasts the opening instrumental of Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2", fortunately with no vocal.

During the movie, I started to hope that it would end just where "Batman Begins" starts. And it does.

This time, a character study of a real person. Renee Zellweger captures Judy Garland in an Oscar worthy performance during what turned out to be some of her last concerts, a residency at The Talk of the Town in London. And only six months before she died. At times a quite emotional story as Judy struggles with drink and pills to put on a show. Michael Gambon's Bernard Delfont made me smile as he watches with a grimace. Director Rupert Goold (a theatre director whose plays included The Seagull for Headlong at the Oxford Playhouse and King Charles 111 at Milton Keynes Theatre) manages to give sense to Judy's past by using flashbacks to her teenage years, particularly those  with Louis B. Mayer.

Tom Edge has written an excellent screenplay based on the book by Peter Quilter. Jessie Buckley gets better and better, swapping her Scottish accent in Wild Rose for a clipped English swagger as Judy's London assistant Rosalyn Wilder. However, I did think one piece of casting was unbelievably awful. Surely that could have found someone more appropriate to play Glaswegian Lonnie Donegan. Did he really appear at The Talk of the Town without his group?

There is one terrific short scene with Judy and the doctor that Bernard Delfont wants her to see. I believe he is superbly played by Adrian Lukis, but there is no mention of him on IMDB. A mystery of which I have my own theory. Watch this space. UPDATE (14/01/2020): He is there now!

In Your Defence, Middle England and Prague Spring

From barrister Sarah Langford comes eleven cases, both criminal and civil, where she has appeared for the defence. All are quite devastating in their own peculiar ways. The best was about Maggie, a young single mother whose first child had been taken into care and was fighting to keep her second. This is a hugely emotional story that leaves you gasping at the end.

Then there is a major drugs and rape trial over two months comprising five defendants and ten barristers. How the judge managed to preside successfully over that lot is a wonder.

What possessed me to read a novel whose main feature was Brexit I do not know. As if we are not fed up to our back teeth with it. The book does start before that dreaded referendum and tries to lighten proceedings with some humour. But overall I couldn't wait to get to the end. The same as I feel about Brexit, or as one government advisor originally calls it Brixit.

A cleverly plotted novel that is constantly readable. It is best when the author speaks to us directly, as if giving a lecture: "We're going further, into the murky world of class". There are two couples whose alternating stories are bound to coincide at some point. James and Ellie are a young couple hitchhiking across Europe, their relationship officially friends but it is more complicated than that. They are a likeable pair, although James can be a prat. In Prague, a little older and wiser Sam is a British diplomat who is involved with Lenka, a Czech girl. It is in these sections we learn about the political tensions that are about to come to a head.

There is no guessing, given it's the Spring of 1968, how those couples will meet. However, their paths hardly cross except towards the end. Simon Mawer is quite the expert on Czechoslovakia. His previous novels "The Glass House" and "Mendels' Dwarf" are based in this country. The climax is a little predictable, but it does make for an exciting ending. 

The Art of Architecture on Sky Arts

Over the last couple of months, Sky Arts has shown a mainly excellent study of  new architecture that showed how they were were designed and brought to fruition.  Some episodes were better than others.

Episode 1  World Trade Centre Transportation Hub

It all started with Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Centre's Transportation Hub in New York. Known as the Oculus, the huge mezzanine leads to the four underground platforms. What the programme failed to show were shots of the interior, and nothing about how the construction was achieved. Instead, this was a presentation entirely by the architect himself, drawings and sketches abound. There was little, if any, mention of the $4 Billion dollar cost: massively over budget and years late.

Episode 2  Battersea Power Sation

Far, far better was Episode 2, the fantastic Battersea Power Station brought back to life by international developers and brilliant architect  Jim Eyre. My visit there this year is on my posting of the 8th August and a piece about the programme on the 15th August.

Episode 3  The V&A Dundee

Episode 3 looked at the V&A Dundee. Interesting to a degree, but too much about architect Kengo Kuma and all his other projects.

Episode 4  The Vessel

Back to New York for Episode 4 and a fascinating study Thomas Heatherwick's funky staircase of a tourist attraction called The Vessel at Hudson Yards. A piece of engineered art that defies it's purpose. 154 Intricately connecting flights of stairs, 2,500 steps and 80 landings it takes a mile to reach the top! Thomas Heatherwick is primarily a designer and artist but not a traditional architect. Although his practice does include such professionals. His work includes two I have seen: the cauldron for the 2012 Olympic flame and the Rolling Bridge at Paddington Basin. I enjoyed his description of how this latest project came to fruition.

Episode 5  Weston Tower

Probably my favourite of the series, Episode 5 looked at Ptolemy Dean's Weston Tower at Westminster Abbey. His design for an access stair and lift up to the new Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries is quite remarkable, blending modern metal and glass alongside the existing building. It respects the vertical aspects of the cathedral and has used sixteen different types of stone cladding to the lift shaft in bands, sampled from the history of the building with the earliest stone at the bottom rising in age to the top. The shape is an intersecting rotated square that looks quite something, with bronze tracery wrapped around the exterior. The glazing is a multiplicity of leaded windows that are extraordinary. The whole effect is amazing. I must pick a nice day to go.

Episode 6  Macallan Distillery

I gave that episode a miss. I watched the four minute video on YouTube and that was enough.

Episode 7 Smithsonian National Museum of African American History

Not an attractive building so also gave that a miss.

Episode 8  The Design Museum

Although the exterior is quite ugly, the programme concentrated on the amazing interior. by John Pawson. The former Commonwealth Institute was a relic from the 1960's and has been transformed with a beautiful modern roof and atrium adorned with traditional oak and marble. A fine juxtaposition of superb materials with crisp rectangular lines. My visit there in August took in the Stanley Kubrick exhibition and unfortunately I hardly had time to appreciate the work that has gone into this £89 Million refurb.

Episode 9  A Hampshire House

A self indulgent piece about the architect John Simpson's own house. Glad I missed it.

Episode 10  Alexandra Palace Theatre

This was a treat. Matt Sommerville described the brief and his vision for transforming a props store for the Alexandra Palace back to it's original glory as a theatre. The space had been hidden for over eighty years and the decay has been incorporated into the final design. Originally opened in 1875 as part of the rebuilding process following the great fire that destroyed Alexandra Palace, the theatre was reopened after the Great War in 1922. Only for it to close as it could not compete with the theatres of the West End. The programme described the planning and construction process that saved the original floor boards and the ornate ceiling as well as parts of the fabric of the interior. I hope to visit in the summer next year.