Another concert this evening. I loaded the remaining sunflowers into Bergman and took them down to Brighton. Five minutes from Lou’s flat, January Thompson was doing a concert raising funds for endangered species and for International Animal Rescue.
I didn’t have to help dress the space this time, but I did a little bit anyway. I figured that the sunflowers would be attractive and topical, and I ended up backstage before it started, putting batteries into electric candles – more or less an exact mirror of what I was doing at the last minute at The Roundhouse. The amount of brand new electric candles I’ve handled in the last week make me look askance at the version of me that must have put a hundred of them into the electronics recycling bin at Park Royal dump about a month ago on the belief that keeping them would result in them sitting unused for a decade and leaking.
Then I spent much of the concert stalking around the edges trying to take good photographs with my sexy new phone camera. January is a complete musician – a singer songwriter, and surrounded by skillful artistic people who believe in her and want her supported. Her work is mystic and ethereal, but sewn through with a mercurial personality. She looks and sounds incredible. I haven’t seen her work until now. It’s often a sticky moment the first time you see another live artist work, when you know and like them socially. It can put you off people if the thing they do just doesn’t land at all with you. It’s happened to me before. The gig this evening landed with me very well. I was very happy to be helping document it. Photos might help with marketing and she really needs to be more widely known.
She was playing The Spire, which is a deconsecrated church in Brighton. It’s the sort of place we used to do Factory shows on on Sunday evenings. Freezing cold and old and strange and beautiful, seating about a hundred.
Last night at The Affordable Art Fair, I was being deliberately a little bit arch and I asked my nephew if there were any paintings of cats that I could look at. Tonight at The Spire, local Brighton stencil artist CassetteLord was selling a stencil of an endangered South East Asian Fishing Cat, sprayed onto a canvas background that reminded me somewhat of a Mao rally poster. I still miss Mao the cat, it was a picture of a cat and I had just asked for exactly that at the art fair, and it was affordable. It was up for silent auction. I put in £100, going up the animal rescue charity. Nobody bid more. Now I have a lovely bright picture of a cat. Nowhere to put it. But it’s mine and it’s signed and I like it. I’ve invested in art.
I’m back at Lou’s now. Bed approaches. A beautiful evening in a cold church in Brighton has not left me warm. I’m glad to have had such a good fix of live music lately, but seriously – it’s time for spring now. Too much cold despite heart warming music.
AlBarclay 