Monday 18 May 2009

The Great Escape

The Old Market Place in Hove is a fine old theatre with flushing toilets and clean dressing rooms that have TVs, which means we can watch the Eurovision Song Contest with assorted friends and partners while we psych ourselves up for the show.
The dismal British entry , penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, has lame aspirational lyrics that even R Kelly would gag on : “This is my time” over & over. Well, no, it’s not. This Euro trash contest demands alliteration & total absence of meaning, to deliver to a music hating EU demographic . “ La ,La, La” , the Spanish winner in 1968 created the unbreakable mould for this. Don’t mess with it. My favourite act, Ukraine , has a fit girl with not much on and some buff six-packed boys dressed as Spartan warriors; if, that is, Spartans wore only tiny loin cloths & shin guards with fluffy feathered helmets. Not sure if this is strictly historically accurate. Germany’s entry has fit Frauleins cavorting in micro lederhosen and Dita Von Teese in an improbable basque trying to make the hopeless singer look good. He doesn’t . But his silver trousers make a bold statement about Germany post reunification. We discuss getting strides like this too, for our show. My calves are too thick, I think.
Other than watching this nonsense, the evening’s a frustrating thrill . There’s a strict 11 pm curfew so we get 40 mins onstage, time to play only 8 tunes. It was wild, a great vibe with a fantastic & receptive young crowd, with 500 more outside trying to get in. A shame we had to get off. If we play Brighton again, we’ll play a long set.

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