Had a v. fun gig last night.
If you remember back as far as last year’s Edinburgh Festival, you may remember that on before me in the venue I was in was a fab theatre company called Subverse – a lovely collection of leftie eco-monkey anti-war political actors and playwrights doing a collection of short sketches that were alternately moving, hilarious and downright confusing.
Three of the pieces they performed – the three that most strongly resonated with me at the time – were three monologues in verse by a writer called Adrian Page, and it was these that I was called in to soundtrack last night.
The gig was at Theatre 503, at the Latchmere pub in Battersea, and our bit was the second half of the show. I missed the first half due to a lovely trip to eastborne for my nan’s 87th birthday party.
The three pieces each had a very distinct flavour – the first, ‘Peace Police’ we did as a beatnik/tom waits kind of vibe, with the genius that is Andy Williamson on sax, the second was ‘There Is No Left Left’ – dark despondent piece that I took in a twisted abstract direction, manipulating and processing Lara’s voice to further the sense of dislocation. And the last of the three, ‘the Clever People’, was a bubbling drum ‘n’ bass track, which the performer, Penny, hadn’t rehearsed but performed to a T – I started up building a basic track of percussive stuff, bassline and chords, then played over it and used the pause, restart, double speed/half speed and reverse functions to try and follow the contour of the text.
All in all a huge success – I interspersed the monologues with solo tunes, and finished up with a version of my Erich Roche-tribute tune, which I again got Andy Williamson to come and play on, which he did beautifully.
I’ll hopefully be back there before long, and will get the SubVersives along to do the three monologues at Recycle Collective soon as well…