The Star likes to join in when his Papa sings this song.
Controversially, he has decided that the words are ‘BANANA! Banana, banana, banana. BANANA! Banana. Banana, banana. BANANA!’
He also sings it in a very peculiar rock growl, although that might be because he his trying to copy his Papa, a man who cannot hold a tune and who is rhythm deaf.
You are perplexed.
Mainly by his taste in music.
So you recently went to see a musical version of Dad’s Army put on by an amateur company you are friendly with.
Dad’s Army, for the Britanically challenged amongst us, was originally a long running TV series about a particularly incompetent chapter of the Home Guard, men who weren’t actually in the armed forces during World War Two on the grounds of being old, infirm or bank managers but who were armed to the teeth with pitchforks and expected to help defend the white cliffs in the event of an invasion. It was a comedy. Much bantering in the village hall in drafty uniforms with pauses for tea.
So is the musical stage version. Apparently it’s a splicing together of a few of the TV episodes. With added wartime songs and a singalong at the end.
It was fun. Much of the amusement value was watching the actors doing impressions of their more famous counterparts. Very successfully too. It was well cast. Plus you enjoyed the songs. You are just* old enough to have been around when they were still well-known songs. and young enough** that they have sunk without trace for many many years now.
And of course, you got to boo some Germans, which made it practically panto already and a good way of getting into the Christmas spirit.
Anyway. The men (and, in the musical, the women) of Dad’s Army bumble along, but they are decent people, trying to do the decent thing in difficult times. It was sweet and nostalgic and everybody belted out Rule Britannia at the end with a real feeling of warm and fuzzy pride. Except B. Who waved his red paper napkin and sang Sovietksi Soyuz.
But how difficult? You see because B was there, you suddenly found yourself wondering how gently entertaining a Russian, sorry, Soviet, version would be. Cheerful ditties about eating Granny to stave off starvation in the blockade of Leningrad? Plucky witicisims about Mrs Ivanov having her house set fire to by the invading army, with her and her baby inside of it? Tap dance routines from the cheeky young pioneer leaping across the bodies of his family and friends during the carnage in Stalingrad?
Of course, Dad’s Army doesn’t represent the full gamut of British experiences of World War Two. There are plenty of harrowing tales there and some of them even happened to civilians.
But the comfortableness of the evening worried you a bit.
Although it wasn’t half as bad as the last time you went to that particular venue to see that particular company perform.
That time the entertainment was Jack the Ripper, the Musical.
*Just. Just.
**Easily. Easily.
The Star has discovered dancing. You can’t think where he’s picked this up from. You don’t have a habit of leaping round the living room when a really good song comes on the radio at all.
Anyway, the Star will bop around in his high chair while listening to his portable radio. But it’s when he’s got a bit more space and Papa is listening to Planet Rock that he really likes to go for it.
He spins!
He hops up and down!
He runs on the spot!
He shakes his head from side to side.
And he’s got this one move where he waves one hand above his head and does a sort galloping movement that makes him look as though he’s in some dance off with a cowboy.
It’s all most peculiar and he has about as much sense of rhythm as B, but really very, very cute.
This is your favourite band. Has been for a while now, so you have decided to come out of the closet.
You only really became aware of them after you left Russia, so you can’t blame it on nostalgia.
They are a Post Soviet group so entirely lack the extra cool that surviving as a rock band under communism lends.
Clearly they do not gain much cool from any other direction either, although someone seems to have had at them with the peroxide bottle as their career has progressed, which can only be a good thing.
B says they are lightweights in the lyrics department, which is about as dismissive as a Russian gets. Although as you really don’t go in much for lyrics, you could care less.
But you do like the music. It cheers you up.
Plus one of their songs includes a rock harpsichord. Not here, you couldn’t find that one. But still. A rock harpsichord. Imagine that. It makes you hug yourself with glee.
Your shoulder hurts. Mostly it aches. Occasionally it feels as though someone has replaces whatever nerve connects the base of your neck to the base of your shoulder-blade with a ribbon of white-hot metal.
Clearly spending two hours on a rowing machine, lifting weights and contorting yourself into improbable yoga positions was a mistake when you had woken up feeling a little stiff on that side.
You know what’s wrong. You spent too many years in your teens holding that arm above your head for hour upon hour whilst sawing away at a double bass*. Now your shoulder protests in the damp and has a tendency to throw a full on hissy fit if you sleep in a draft. What it has to say when you over use it in any more energetic way is quite unprintable.
So you are sitting on the bus on your way to work, trying to get comfortable and failing and having a very vivid, sensory flashback to bass playing extravaganzas** where you and your musical, underaged colleagues would stagger out of another interminable rehearsal session*** and flop into tortures positions in a vein to relieve whatever aches and pains their various instruments had brought on. Because playing an instrument, any instrument, means moving your body into abnormal positions and then holding it there. Eventually, that start’s to hurt. Or gives you callouses.
And then 15 minutes later you’d all get up and go back in and do it again.
To be fair, people did try to point out that sitting properly helps. But you are one of nature’s slumpers and this was a hobby. Not worth readjusting your whole posture for. Besides, at 16 you don’t really believe in repetitive strain injury. You’ve hardly had time to repeat anything. In any case, you suspect that it only delays the inevitable. Just like sports injuries. Eventually some crucial part of your anatomy is going to go sproing****.
But would you, you were reflecting, do it again?
Oh hell yes. It was a lot of fun. Music still is an enduring, if extremely amateur, interest. Of course, the people weren’t all that, but you can’t have everything*****. Shoulders like yours are why god invented Deep Heat.
But, and this is the 64 thousand dollar question, let the Star?
And that’s a trickier one.
*Or in the case of Tavener’s Protecting Veil, millenia.
**OK. There were other instruments involved also.
***In the Protecting Veil, the bases have to hold down the same note for 45 minutes at a time. This sort of thing may be a doddle for the violins – who of course would never dream of putting up with a piece of music so pedestrian and lacking in twiddles – but bass strings are thick.
Longest. 45 minutes. Ever. Until you have to do it again in the next practice session.
****Or, if you are playing rugby, crunch.
****Waves at any passing musicians.
The gray sky hangs low, pressing you into the ground, opening out the horizon and forcing everything else to admit its insignificance.
Yet on this unpreposing canvas the reds and yellows of the trees glow. Green grass seems brighter. Buildings are whiter, and every little scrap of litter on the ground shines out in lurid advertisement of its former contents. There is no wind, and no chill in the air. Instead you are wrapped in a gentle soothing clagginess, fine drizzle misting your hair, which is soon warmed away as the fires are lit and bottles of beer are broached.
It is a distinctly autumnal kind of day.
Which is something to be savoured in Russia, a country where your favourite season lasts five minutes between the scorching heat of summer and the first snowfall.
This is also a distinctly Russian works day out.
First, of course, is the enforced dash through culture. A trip around the New Jerusalem Monastery, undergoing, in common with every other Russian Orthodox building at this time, extensive renovations. The money that is being spent on the hand-painted frescoes, re-plastered walls, gold-leafed cupolas and heavily-carved stonemasonry is a testament to just how popular religion becomes if it’s banned for 70-odd years.
Much like any other drug.
The highlight of the visit is a stone heralded as an exact 1:3 scale copy of the boulder which once covered the enterance of the tomb of Christ. A solemn precession of irritable foriegners, resentlful that this is taking up valuable drinking time, shuffle past, intoning “But how do they know?”
But then comes release. Into the park. Head for the windmill. Ignore the replica wooden peasents hut and chapel, ignore Patriach Nikon’s home-in-exile, ignore the riverside baptismal platform, ignore the colourful wishing trees with their penants of hankerchiefs, scarfs and plastic bags. Head straight for the beer.
But there is little time to relax, for the entertainment the Boss has laid on is spectacular. In the middle of a field, in the middle of the sodden Russian countryside, you are seranaded by a full brass band, complete with baton-twirling, bright-smiling majorettes in shocking blue and red uniforms. And then, still reeling from the incongruity of it all, the folk singers come on, persuade a gaggle of capering lads to take bread and salt, chivy the company into the spoon game, and start up the ever popular tunnel procession run, last seen played by teenagers on Red Square before a pop-concert.
And so to bed. Drunken staggering in the half-light, singing, whispering, collapsing.
The Star likes music, especially when people are singing.
Unfortunately, you suffer from a complete disinterest in the lyrics of songs.
So although you’d like to entertain the Star by warbling along with the radio, you have been forced to find a station which has more of an emphasis on instrumentals than on words. Classic rock stations are good for this. The songs are, after all, tailor made for singing twangly wah wah guitar solos and tisch tisch badabadabadabada drum beats while miming madly all over your bedroom.
And the Star certainly enjoys an energetic bout of air guitar.
Your personal favourite is Riders on the Storm by the Doors.
Riders on the storm.
Dum de dum dum dum.
Riders on the storm.
Bedoop doop de diddly doop.
La la la la la born.
Diddly. Diddly. Diddly. Diddly.
Te tada dada da. Da da da da da da da horn.
Riders on the storm.
It does tend to go on a bit though and the Star prefers something shorter and snappier with more actions.
And you like to oblige. Unless you are in your Dad’s car with your brother doing the two hour journey to S________ with no chance of a nap in sight, in which case the family will join forces to steamroller any protests by belting through at least 20 verses of The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.
Adding, of course, whimsical little lines like ‘The mobiles on the bus go bingly bingly bong’, making up verses for everyone there (‘Mummy’s Brother on the bus strokes his beard’) and always remembering your personal favourite ‘The teens on the bus go stab stab stab’.
You are reliving your childhood. Yes, as well as a complete absence of colour TVs, your family were the last to get any kind of music equipment into their car. Yes, you did all sing heartily on long journeys. Yes, clearly you do miss this.
It also seems to be coming in handy in that you are finding the words to nursery rhymes fairly easy to recall.
Up until quite recently, the Star’s audience participation was limited to finding Mama and Papa extremely entertaining. Now he has started clapping wildly at the end of each song. This goes down a real storm at baby rhyme times let me tell you.
Today he actually started doing the rolling arms bit from Wind the Bobbin Up.
And while teaching the Star to get in touch with his early industrial roots is entirely uncontroversial* you may have to start reconsidering using sex and drugs and rock and roll to keep him entertained.
And then there’s this Russian ditty:
Рыжий Рыжий, канапатый,
убил дедушку лапатой.
- А я дедушку не бил!
- А я дедушку любил!
(Carrot top, carrot top, freckle-face,
killed Grandad with a spade.
‘But I didn’t kill Grandad!
I love Grandad!’)
The Star is especially thrilled by his Papa’s accompanying highly enthusiastic killing-Grandad-with-a-spade motions.
*Although perhaps you shouldn’t sell your Star too short. These formative experiences are so important. Instead of lowly worker songs, something with more strut to it might be appropriate. Rule Britania, anyone?
You really should have been paying more attention, but when someone said, ‘Proms‘, you said ‘How high?’ without really enquiring too much further into the matter.
You did manage to glean that it was a Purcell concert, but you failed even to find out what was being played.
Which was probably a good thing. You have recently decided that you don’t go to enough classical concerts to waste one by repeating yourself too often and as it turned out you’d already seen this particular piece at at the Proms.
You took note of the start time. 6.30pm. This seemed a little early, but almost as if to prove your brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, you made nothing of this, not even when your more clued up companion pointed out that you weren’t going to be going home until gone ten. This did, however, seem to explain why, sold out though the performance was, your fellow promenaders were really rather thin on the ground.
Even the words ‘semi-staged’ didn’t clue you in. You had, by this point, worked out you were attending an opera, and so you just assumed you were getting some costumes and a bit of hand waving. Opera isn’t much more energetic plotwise than that anyway in your opinion.
It came as a bit of a shock, then, when, after an introductory parp from the orchestra, what the bunch of people standing behind them launched into was not anything to do with music but something which sounded suspiciously like A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
And finally you realised this was the full version of Purcell’s Fairy Queen. With the bastardised Shakespeare script, but minus the scenery and some of the bigger props.
The Fairy Queen is the best kind of opera. The singing bits are almost entirely overshadowed by the talking bits.
There was also a lot of dancing. Which was interesting. Obviously this production had decided to use up its equal opportunities budget all in one go and so had employed all the male dancers who are too short to get parts in a conventional company, but have the advantage of being easy to lift for the women who are too tall to get parts in a conventional company. Good though.
As for the play, having got most of the plot out of the way in the first half, the singing did rather take over in the second. It also rapidly lost any tenuous connection to the storyline. I mean the entire final act is supposed to be a Chinese extravaganza for no better reason, you assume, than it was even more exotic and had the potential to really send the staging budget through the roof, which you rather think was the sort of thing that constituted a good night out back in Purcell’s day. The costumes! The slitty eyes! The fantastical mechanical gadgets powering Phoebus’ chariot and the flying swans!
But it wasn’t a Chinese extravaganza in this modern production. That wouldn’t be very PC. Of course, you aren’t sure how receptive Purcell’s audience would have been to them relocating the whole scene to the garden of Eden and having innocent Eve turning into a gum chewing burbury wearing mobile phone toting Essex girl slut. But then the right thinking churchmen of the time would probably largely approve such an interpretation of the ur-woman figure.
If there were any right thinking churchmen left after the overthrow of the Puritans and the Restoration of Charles II.
Anyway, safe to say that in the cut price Proms version of the Glyndebourne production of The Fairy Queen they didn’t just play it for laughs, they milked it for vulgarity. Hopefully, Charles II would have approved of that, at least.
You don’t know whether it’s something about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or something about you that this meant the play part made a lot more sense than usual.
Certainly the rude mechanicals fitted in a lot better, although you did have another revelation about them. Shakespeare, you decided, had obviously spent a few too many rehearsals as the resident writer for the King’s Men being driven batshit by primadonnas trying to get all the best bits for themselves and insisting he add in nonsensical prologues.
Still, no matter how hard the actors, singers and dancers tried to shoehorn the maximum amount of knowingness into every given lyric, and believe me they tried hard, you just cannot imagine anyone ever thinking that a harpsichord could sound lewd.
But when ten giant pink bunnies bounded onto stage and proceeded to engage each other in energetic fucking motions in as many highly athletic positions as the music of the Haymakers’ Dance gave them time for you can’t say that you were actually displeased.
You really do get a bang for your buck at the Proms.
When you crawl through the door,
It is clear to Mummy,
You’re the one she adores,
The one she wants to see.
(Rock) Star, Mummy really loves you.
(Rock) Star, Papa loves you too.
We’re the ones who made you.
