Gridlock Holiday
... And the latent Summers' immersive musical ?
Dateline Hammersmith Bus Station yesterday afternoon. Randomly i recall the lovely woman who used to serve in the cafe there where i grabbed a snack yesterday. during lockdown, she stoically told me that she had been to 11 funerals for her bus driver customers who had been spat at (etc) by disaffected passengers. Well, we’re through that one for now…
The key seasonal factor in London’s heat wave ( as it was in Bromleys’ freezing rain but weeks ago) has been the sudden disappearance of public transport. At Trish’s gig on Friday-hugely worth it- numbers of us had to hoof at least a mile having waited some yonks. I am convinced that there is a secret manyana sign transmitted to drivers’ cabs that sends them off early. Bear in mind that driving these *** things all day in climes of increased tetchiness is no easy task. My old Nursing Buddy Debbie Cleaveley here uses transferrable skills in spades and is also a Train welfare guardian for the tired and emotional.
As a night-time broadcaster i am familiar with tired and emotional and the aggrieved or snarky at the tail end of their bibulosity. Also the convivial and conversational who intuit the special intimacy , the cordon sanitaire which is also - unrelatedly at my time of dotage largely- optimum conditions for an accretion of romance.
On the way back to Essex and within it things are a bit more upfront, which is fine when you’re sowing your juvenile wild oats - it builds resilience and resourcefulness whence the posse still stuck, but sardinely partying on East Croydon station on a chilly 7am as I was trying to head sonambulistically north of the river. Who knows where time goes? Certainly not Southern Railways.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon I had to get to Hammersmith on a budget , and avoiding the centre of town one fields the alternative 4 by 4 convention of the approach to Putney and Putney High Street. A couple of years ago the latter held the ghoulish record for air pollution in western europe, including central Rome and just ahead of Oxford Street. People flock to this still in their finery in the unique revelry that is the British Saturday afternoon. While in the week the jejeune may barge and snarl, at the weekend it is about the solemn or blithely trippy cortege to the overpriced parking lot. I would say that there are some great places to sup and dine there even if you get a bonne bouche of carbon monoxide on the way out.
So then to Hammersmith, which for my Richmond colleague and I brought to mind Michael winner’s assertion that London has typically about 33% under-capacity in its streetscape. It was so hot that Googlemaps bent around itself sending me on a bit of a wild goose chase( if only actual Geese were about). The appointed meeting was well organised and constructive, partly-staffed by an American crew who quickly noticed that the building had no air con and were looking forward to getting home on a plane that had. They looked after us well and deserved a cold beer. What struck me was the building, called The Ark. A clever and spacious bit of design with great views from the upper echelons , and a sense that you could almost lumpenly set sail in the thing like a gigantic Dutch Barge ( the ‘deck’ inlet is scrunched up to fit the shape of the site, so less like a liner., maybe a modernist twist the old tubs that used to ply between Birkenhead and Douglas IOM) .
Looking around W6 briefly for the first time in a while, you observe, as planners do, how people drop anchor and what space they utilise. How they behave when they do so. Up near Olympia. there was a bit of unidentified whooping and hollering , landing a bit shy of the Design Museum and Holland Park. A show without a venue. A bit of mobile phone waspishness outside a pub over the road. Guys with pushchairs on Dad duty prioritising their phones and tilling the Bodenesque cornering arcs like turning round an oil tanker while those of for whom it was a working day buck and weave. Almost like the seaside really.
Looking back at the streetscape in retreat , previously rattling through the new money district of Canary Wharf, the word in my head is Lego. The whole grid seems to be made from a Mussolini fortress version , brightly coloured, and it makes some young people sing and swoon. They can be urbane in a simplified domain, and their Dr. Pangloss/ Ronald McDonald view of human affairs as per their clamped phone invective is testament to this. We have been here before then , haven’t we- in that the musical Candide artfully skewed the disappearances of McCarthyism amid a manufactured climate of officially-licenced hubris. Hubris so glacial in its resolve that it stops the traffic and unfurls an IKEA bit of red carpet at the drop of a baseball cap.
Its the power ballad of heavy traffic and the badly-engineered screaming toddler soundtrack that makes me think of musical theatre on a bad day. Conversely, musical theatre on a very good day is in the back of my mind, what with Nishla Smith developing something with a Stephen Oliver award from Opera North ( there’s a study in the recovery from bureaucratic overload) . Secondly, my ex -partner Luda’s prize vocal pupil from Ukraine who was enthralled by the (waspish) optics and somewhat the score to The Devil Wears Prada. I think he’ll do a great job when he’s ready to make a move, though I think, speaking across the board, and as a straight guy at that, that the apparent mutant umbilical chord between ‘ show tunes’ and gay culture is getting a bit frayed and no guarantee per se of quality assurance. You have to look such optics behemothery squarely in the eye like the Lego soundscapes it seems in raw form to inhabit and have interest in the springing up thereof. These things go up as quickly as an actual German build from scratch, but sometimes spring leaks in Park Lane ( the musical Anna Neagle and Herbert Wilcox chose not to make) or fall emblematically cross the tracks in a state of inebriatin like the Tescos in Gerrards Crawse did a few years ago during the morning commute.
There is, you see, this budget-splurgely spate of making any damn thing into a musical . I wonder what type of money is going into Trainspotting, which is surely more of a contemporary Opera. ‘Compliance: The Musical’ might fly in the current irony by-pass twittering away .I have said my piece about Paddington cavorting around in this heat in his duffle coat to boy-bandery. Poor old bugger. Borderline animal cruelty , except that as pads and Harry showed before they were embrargoed , that particular bear traverses our human landscape and speaks truth to power with a Marmalade sanwich under his hat, as hereditary peers to the power of 92 will shortly no longer be able to do. Perhaps they will be turned into a musical. If you value your Sondheim, keep moving, there’s nothing to see here, art house shades on. It does seem, this endless *** campery ( or ‘campery with soda’ as Willie Rushton observed) to inform an arbitary ideolect divorced from grown-up exigency and fundamentally humourless by way of juggernaut. Notwithstanding the excellent crew at the Ark who can roll up their sleeves without the aid of a dresser or their Mum. Scroll forward a few years and hearken to the Steve Reich edition of The Wheels On The Bus in a 4 by 4 where you, the hapless honest practicioner, have been locked in the boot ,with the facility to latetally strap-hang, and will only be released if you can pen a soft rock number hymning your unique vantage point. Like I say, one finger, one thumb, keep moving and keep that beachfront cottage in view that you might have found before it turned to Lego.