14. Kings of England Ace BAC Freshly Scratched Festival

A belated post, after a mad week rehearsing with Hauser in Leeds on the submarine show...but Good News!

Dad and I ACED the BAC Freshly Scratched festival with a 10-minute showing of recent work. We took to the stage our vintage swimwear (go here for a description), and I narrated through a jump, a fall and a recovery that dad made in 1958, 2001 and 2007 respectively. At the end, Dad sang 'The Aeroplane Over the Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel, his first solo he gave up being a choirboy sixty-one years ago, while I picked the guitar part. I was struck by his bravery and dedication to getting it right, which he did. Despite some pre-performance nerves, he was fantastic, keeping his composure throughout and, he said, genuinely enjoying being up there.
We were joined on stage by Mum who helped out holding texts for Dad and doing other tasks, not a big part but really good to have her there in the background. Saw some other good work by an bunch of ex-Dartington volk called Tinned Fingers, who are based in Bristol.
So it looks like we want to continue with this Kings of England business. We are booked to do a showing in November for peer review as part of the New Work Network Activator programme, run by Peter Petralia of Proto-type theatre, and there is a Pilot Night coming up in Birmingham curate by Talking Birds, which we will also apply for.

So... onward. Next up is "Where We Live & What We Live For", which is just "Recent Falls" +, with added texts and some dancing, at You and Your Work 5, Easton Community Centre, Bristol, this coming Friday, at 6.30PM.

K of E. x x

5. Brother Returned

My Father, before he was my Father, had a son and a daughter. David was 18 when I was born, and Fiona was, I think, 16. When I was 10 or 12, David, who never lived with us, moved to Canada. Now he owns a transportation company, two trucks and several trailers, has built his own house, is a volunteer for the local fire department. And now he is returned, for twenty days. He arrived this morning at about 8, I went downstairs and met him, a stranger from half-way 'round the world.

2. All Time Top 5 from the olden days

I asked Dad to list his top 5 all-time favourite songs and, on the back of an envelope, he listed eight:


(Hey! You can right- click on the image, or whatever, to get it big and legible.)

The bottom one on the list you might note "Alexander's Ragtime Band", composed by Irving Berlin. If you go to the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project and search for the track you can find a version recorded in 1911, performed by Billy Murray.

Doing a quick search I found that 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' is hardly ragtime at all, but lyrically, there's a lot of references to emerging African American Music.

I just listened to the track and there's a kind of percussive thump to the way he sings, belting it out. In the olden days before microphones you used to have to sing into a metal horn to record. Interestingly, Murray's career started to wane when microphones came in. On The Billy Murray Article at Wikipedia (yeah) it says, his '"hammering" style, as he called it, essentially yelling the song into the recording horn, did not work in the electronic era, and it took him some time to learn how to soften his voice'.

But the ragtime connection is a good one. The term is a corruption of 'Ragged time', referring to syncopation, the musical practice of playing off-beat. Ragtime might be one one of the last musical styles to emerge before the advent, or at least widespread use, of recording technology, although it was typical for ragtime compositions to be printed. But all this points towards something old-world.

I found some interesting modern guitar rags on the 'Crumb' soundtrack by Craig Ventresco, (he plays in quite a forthright style, really twanging the strings) but if you're don't know anything about ragtime but want to, then Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, are early(-ish) standard examples.

1. Note on the name & a thematic concern

I have been talking with my Dad about starting a company in which both he and I are principle devisers and performers. As of yesterday, we are agreed. And as of today, we have named ourselves...

"Kings of England".

We are currently writing up a pitch for some cash but in the meantime, we are modestly underway. A conversation we had a couple of weeks ago as I was researching 'Recent Falls', prompted him to quote me the following, from Alan Bennett's 'Writing Home':

...the dull distorting effects of time, in phrases which sound right but aren’t…He said: Oh, I don’t know, I don’t remember, then he says: one always forgets the most important things, it’s the things one can’t remember that stay with you (Bennett, 1998, p258)

Which, essentially, is what our first work will be about - the fictions that will have to stand in for fact, in the event of forgetting.