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Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 11:07:59 +0100
From: "Andrew F Wilson" <andrewfwilson>
To: Babel-list <babel-list>
Subject: Re: Charleston Festival, 25 May 2006
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Just a reminder to those in the UK that there is a short feature on
Patti at Charleston Festival, on BBC Two TV tonight, 3 June 2006, at
8.20 pm (repeated later that night).

Maddie's review of the concert is below.


Andrew

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----
"I'm Going to Take a Watermelon to My Gig Tonight"

It feels like quite a long time since last Thursday now, and I
really was going to write something when I got home from the gig,
and I sort of started, and then I didn't, and then I thought there
was no point because surely lots of other people have reviewed it by
now, and so I did things like Biology revision instead. But since
Biology is making me vaguely contemplate suicide, and Dad has
actually asked me to please write something on the phone from
Singapore, I decided I might as well.

By the way, I don't half go on. Don't start this if you're just
about to go out or something.

Things, in brief, that I learnt on Thursday night:

It will be some years before I understand anything Virginia Woolf
has ever written;
It is worth carrying a copy of Patti's books with you at all times;
Tony Shanahan is a dude;
My dad knows EVERYONE. (Sort of.)
Or, in slightly more detail:

I have not attended an event at the Charleston Festival before. I am
not particularly well read: I tried 'To The Lighthouse' once, spent
twenty minutes fighting my way through the first page, and gave up.
I was therefore slightly worried when I realised I had in fact
arrived at a literary festival, where there seemed to be a lot of
people milling around talking about things like 'Bloomsbury'
and 'heritage' and 'readings', an astounding number of elderly
ladies in floaty scarves, and a noticeable lack of the middle-aged
men with beards and tour t-shirts I have become used to finding
myself amongst.

I realise that there is going to be a higher proportion of reading
and poetry to songs than I am used to, and begin to panic a little.
And when we are seated, and Patti comes out, there's a little bit of
whooping, but mainly polite clapping. I am in unknown territory.

There is, as I suspected, a good deal of reading. Patti reads from
Virginia Woolf between songs and her own poems  extracts from 'A
Room Of One's Own', 'The Moment', and thoughts on art, her mother,
and the story of Louisa Waterford. I manage, perhaps because it is
the beginning of the evening, to absorb some of the first reading 
Woolf's earliest memories of her mother and journeys to and from St
Ives; I remember the description of the black dress with the
coloured flowers  but, as I feared, do not absorb very much else.
Most of Patti's own poems, I'm afraid, are also fated to calmly pass
me by as I wonder if there are people sitting here who actually know
exactly what she's saying, and how they are doing it.

However, I do stop worrying about it all after a while, and just
listen. Although I didn't think of it at the time, my mum pointed
out afterwards that we'd read in Stephen Fry's book on poetry that
it is perfectly acceptable to enjoy this kind of thing without
searching for another meaning, if that makes any sense. There is no
requirement to understand all the levels and the depth in poetry, or
indeed just very confusing prose  you should be able to just read
it, or listen to it, as it is.

This is a difficult concept for me to put down in writing, and I
hope somebody knows what I mean. But the upshot was that I spent
quite a while sitting there, enjoying the fact that the dusk was
closing in and the lamplight was dancing on the sides of the tent,
and letting passage after passage on the sound of the sea and the
death of loved ones and the point of writing float pleasantly over
my head. It is enough to listen to the beat and the rhythm of the
poetry, and the intonation and expression in Patti's voice, as she
talks her way through photocopied collections of essays it will take
me years to understand. But that's fine.

I feel slightly better about my literary ignorance in the face of
Patti's surprisingly professional air of not really knowing what
she's supposed to be doing. She explains, when she arrives on stage,
that she has a pile of cut-and-pasted notes and extracts that she's
going to be reading, and that it's likely that she will get a bit
lost in them and forget what she's doing next. Which is exactly what
happens: there are short pauses between each item while she murmurs
quietly and searches for a particular passage, and she announces at
one point that she's forgotten her copy of her own book.

"Does anyone have a copy of 'Early Work'?  Well, sometimes people
do."

There is laughter as somebody on the other side of the tent from me
provides her with a copy; Dad whispers to me, "Actually, this does
happen quite a lot."

Patti also has to ask for audience assistance regarding both the
pronunciation of 'anemone' and the title of 'Moments of Being'
(it's 'Moments of Being', for the record). It is a tribute to her
experience and obvious feeling of being at home on stage that she
remains completely unflustered, and indeed seems to revel in her own
disorganisation.

It seems that no Patti concert, literary festival-based included, is
complete without a slightly rambling account of the meal she has had
before the gig, or the town she has just visited, or the bizarre
people she met in a local shop. This time, she returns after the
interval wearing odd socks and explains that, caught up in the
moment of a beautiful scene of cows in the mist, she attempted to
climb onto some sort of wooden box or trough to take a photograph,
unaware that it was hollow and filled with water. She briefly extols
the virtues of Charleston's gift shop, which have apparently
provided her with some dry socks in her hour of need. (We later
discover that she also had to borrow a copy of another of her books
from there before the gig started.)

This is also the first time I have seen Patti perform an acoustic
set. Accompanied by Tony Shanahan, she sang some of her  I'm not
quite sure which word to use here, perhaps 'mellow'? Labelling
anything that Patti has ever done as 'mellow', though, is probably a
mistake, so maybe 'quieter' or 'slightly less likely to invoke
revolution'. Some of her 'quieter' songs, then; suffice to say
less 'Gloria', more 'Wing'.

But I digress (really, I do, all the time). In between the readings
and the poetry, they perform 'Mother Rose', 'Grateful', 'Beneath The
Southern Cross, 'My Blakean Year', 'Wing', 'China Bird', 'Peaceable
Kingdom', 'Pissing In A River', and return with 'Dancing Barefoot'
as an encore.

As well as Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, literature, engineering,
geography and the world in general, I turned up on Thursday knowing
very little about Tony Shanahan. I believe my main impression of him
from the past few gigs was that I liked the floppy hair and that he
smiled a lot; I'd always ended up on the other side of the stage,
couldn't really see him, and didn't know exactly what he was
playing. I may have left the gig still baffled by everything else
mentioned above, but firmly convinced that Tony Shanahan is very
much a dude.

I am impressed, first and foremost, by his musicianship: I am always
fascinated when I sit close enough to a performer to actually be
able to see how and what they are playing, and now and again I
realised I had stopped listening to the song and started watching
his fingers. He is, unsurprisingly, a very good guitarist, and
managed to work the bass line into the chords he was playing, which
I liked. He sings beautifully (and very high)  I've always liked
that bit in the middle of 'Southern Cross'  and I also like the
fact that he really looks as though he is enjoying himself on
stage. 'Pissing In A River' is almost like being back among the
bearded, t-shirted fans, with Patti and Tony both rocking their
hearts out on stage, to the extent that he manages to break one of
his guitar strings. Patti says later that in ten years of playing
with him, this is the first time she's seen him break an acoustic
string, and takes it as a sign of good luck.

He also pulls some great faces. And, like I said, good hair.

Imagine, if you will, that I have no interest in Patti Smith, or
indeed any music that has not been churned out in the past couple of
years. Perhaps I would chill out to the dulcet tones of LL Cool J,
or bust a move to the harsh and tasty beats of Snoop Dogg. Or
something along those lines. I think this is a roundabout way of
saying that were this, heaven forbid, the case, I would probably
still accompany my dad to as many of Patti's gigs as possible,
simply to marvel at the fact he KNOWS EVERYONE.

This is not strictly true. He certainly didn't know most of the old
ladies on Thursday, at least. But I like the fact that the Patti
Smith community, if there is one, seems to be so closely
intertwined, and that every few minutes while we are queuing Dad has
to pop off to say hello to someone else he knows who has arrived. In
the tent I am introduced to Gordon and Richard  again  and for the
first time, Mike. We are then accosted during the interval by Colin,
who my dad met in London after selling a ticket to, and Kevin, one
of the most enthusiastic and friendly people I think I have ever
met. I reveal my lack of knowledge of the Scilly Isles to him whilst
Mum and Colin bond over what I gather to be something to do with
country houses.

Dad and I have to excuse ourselves for a moment to get the chocolate
from the car that we set out for, to which Kevin replies jovially
that he'll just get his watermelon.

This only sinks in about halfway to the car.

"What was that? Do they sell melons here?"

Dad considers. "I'm not sure. I think he was joking."

But then we return, and Kevin has actually brought a melon with him,
and a knife, and everything, and I decide that it's the most
wonderful thing that anyone could have brought along. Maybe this is
because I haven't slept much during the past week, but still. I'm
making the point of taking one along next time I see Patti, and
maybe he will bring another, and much melon-based joy will be had.

So there we go. A wonderful evening, a wonderful concert, and a
wonderful memory, although it's all pretty much a big conglomerate
of tents and poetry and guitars in my head, as opposed to actual
coherent recollections. But that's good enough.

I shall try to focus less on foodstuffs next time.


Maddie

[posted by Andrew, on her behalf]