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June 18, 2007
Bye, Darcey...
Looking out on the street one Saturday, I saw a group of shaved headed men in England kits carrying crates of beer in Morrison’s bags going into number twenty-three. I checked the TV guide. There was an international match on. Another Saturday, I saw a group of shaved headed men in lumberjack shirts and skinny jeans carrying bottles of wine in Berry Bros bags going into number twenty-seven. I checked the TV guide. Madame Butterfly was on.
I wonder if this second group got together to watch Darcey’s farewell from Covent Garden; and if they cried as much as she and I did at the Bambi’s Mother getting shot moment that was her curtain call.
Bless the BBC for providing us with comic relief by inviting Katherine Jenkins along.
True, she seemed a little off form, and clean forgot her comedy catchphrase:
“Thank everyone so much for buying my recordings and letting me live the dream - my Nana just died.”
She didn’t sing her comedy song, either. Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You, translated into Italian by somebody who needs to be told about rendering a line as, “You will always been in me.”
I can’t wait for the Viva La Diva tour to find out which divas inspired La Jenkins. From the look on Friday, I’d say take your pick of eighties porn actresses.
Debbie Does Dylais…
But what is this nonsense about her breaking down barriers and taking classical music to the masses? Which, where, what? There never were any barriers.
Take the two women whose busts used to flank the doors to the stalls at Covent Garden. At concerts Adelina Patti sang Mozart, Verdi and Wagner alongside Twas Within A Mile, Robin Adair and Home, Sweet Home. Melba recorded the Ave Maria from Otello on a 78 A side, and on the B side a song that sounds like a French take on Knees Up Mother Brown. The same goes for Rosa Ponselle: Norma’s Casta Diva with Carry Me Back To Old Virginny; Ernestine Schumann-Heink: the Brindisi from Lucrezia Borgia with Danny Boy; and so on and so on.
Patti, Melba et al were the A List Celebs of their day, and did take the masses into the marble halls where they sang. Which is just What Katy Doesn’t, as Covent Garden, La Scala, The Met and so on don’t book her. Llangollen does. But that doesn’t count. They’re all mad up there. They booked the most degenerate, filthy and licentious character comic as entertainment on family day at the International Eisteddfod.
And I got my revenge…
In my early twenties, I had a go at Eisteddfods, and made a real arser of it.
“For every class that you enter, you should include with your application a pound coin. Please send them individually, however.”
What, rather than welded together?
Oh, spirits d’escalier’s all very well now.
I stayed with my Uncle Vic in Cefn Fforest. Vic had a fabulous natural tenor, but pissed his talent away. He’s one of those people who don’t go far enough in a career to either succeed or fail and are ever able to say, “I could have…”
It’s never been said that I’ve always been in competition with him. But I have. And it’s been like competing with a lover’s dead ex.
The druids running the Eisteddfod say you don’t have to be a Welsh speaker, just a Welsh pronouncer and getter across of sense of poemer, which I was. You send them your choice of song, and they translate it and send it back. I Will Bring You Trinkets And Toys For Your Delight came back as Gwnaf I Ti Deganau Y Thlyssau Ar Fel Rhos, for example. On the side, I’d had special Welsh coaching from my Aunt Sophia.
So there I was, terrified, at the local junior school, for the first competition I had entered by sending in my non-welded pound coin.
I introduced myself in perfect idiomatic Welsh, “Iestyn Edwards”, tapping my chest, “baritone. Gwnaf I Ti…”
One of the judges stopped the conveyor belt of contestants introducing themselves and their song and off they went to speak to me in Welsh.
Oh, shit…
I tried again.
“Iestyn Edwards, Bariton, Gwnaf I Ti Deganau”, and signed for the pianist to start playing.
The judge spoke to me again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t actually speak Welsh.”
There was a You Made Me Miss silence. The inevitable bible-black-bun-headed, Zeppelin chested, Queen Anne chair-legged soprano, who once sang coughs and spits at Covent Garden and fronted schools music programmes singing I Love Little Fishy, He Swims In The River, He Swims All Day Long while make seal-like movements with her right hand to indicate rising and falling pitch remp’d the silence.
“You have a splendid voice, you have. But we couldn’t let you go up to the field for the next rounds of the contest if you wouldn’t understand what they were saying to you, now could we, no we couldn’t. Oh…”
I was out.
“All that time I spent being chased round catering tents”, said my aunt Sophia, “by those red-faced, string holding up their trousers, reeking of sheep-shit farmers wanting me to line my wellies up with theirs at some back door in the Brecon Beacons telling them “na na” as I ran, which I spent how long teaching you to say because if you pronounce it in the right way you sound legitimate Welsh and everything, and now look. You’re just like the rest of the bloody Silcoxs. None of them would be content with saying two little words – no, come again: just the one word said twice - when a whole bloody irrelevant spiel is there for the saying that’ll get you only something bad.”
Flash-forward fifteen years and I’m back at the Eisteddfod. This time being chauffeured to and fro from Bristol, where I was performing Ballet Star Galactica at the Tobacco Factory. All for my ten minute Scarf Pas De Deux skit. The fee was five months rent.
I was warming down from my set, when a steward ran up.
“Please, they say can you come back and go on again, the audience is leaving ever so sharpish, please.”
Holding my tutu against my belly, I trotted back across the grounds with him. The audience was nearly gone, scrambling up the side of the amphitheatre space like sheep away from one of Aunty Sophia’s farmers. I went into character and cajoled them into coming back for a second Scarf Pas De Deux skit.
“What on earth happened?” I asked the stage manager at fouettés end. She indicated a performer standing chatting to a St. John’s volunteer.
“They thought they’d booked a children’s entertainer, but he wasn’t.”
I could have told them that! I knew him from late night Cobden Club gigs. Which should say it all, but regarding the act in question, doesn’t.
“They booked him for the childrens’ space?”
“Yes.”
“Fantastic!”
“No, it’s really upset people. Look how pale everyone is.”
They were. Because the act they’d booked as a childrens’ entertainer actually plays a childrens’ entertainer. Who’s drunk, has a potty mouth, a fake penis hanging half out of his trousers, and a sign across his belly saying Free Sex Here For The Kiddies.
There would be a welcome kept for him in a very few hillsides.
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