Seldom seen kids - not for long

Bury. When you grow up and live in a town called Bury, it's likely your music is going to err on the melancholic. Elbow however, have managed to take melancholy and give it an almighty kick in the buttocks. They've armed it to the teeth with vast stabs of brass, soaring swathes of string and cataclysmic percussion. Guy Garvey leads this charge from the front. A mournful Northern grit is the bedrock of his voice, giving it endless light n' shade; sweeping the crowd up from rain filled graves to sunny skies in the space of a verse.

Garvey is also a highly under-rated wordsmith and an acute observer of the mundane and profane. He describes a Soho doorman as 'Mercifully free of the pressures of grace/St Peter in satin/He's like Buddha with mace/.' (Forget myself) It's this wry humour that permeates a lot of the songs, adding a welcome smile to what is essentially quite gloomy material. His affable banter between songs ensures you warm to both him and the band even more. He's constantly asking us if we're OK, then gently admonishes us when we don't ask him back. At one point he horribly fluffs an intro and calls on the entire audience to boo him. His look of horror and dramatically clutched heart instantly turns every voice in the house to wild cheering, in case he believed for a moment we actually meant it.

This was a great concert and possibly the last time we'll see this band, which has been steadfastly plying their trade for 18 years, play such intimate venues. Songs as big as these need stadiums to contain them. These kids should be seen everywhere.

B

Lost Highway - found at Young Vic

I suppose it must have seemed like a terribly daring idea at the time. Imagine if we took a dark, baffling, impenetrable movie, by the elder statesman of the dark/baffling/impenetrable oeuvre and made it into, *Gasp* an Opera! We'll get a DBI style composer and an even more DBI writer to knock up the libretto. We do some right moody visuals and presto, box office gold.

Sadly, what we actually got was a meandering, Philip Glass lite score, lack lustre visuals and some awkward melismatics from our cast of Actors(tm). The Mr.Eddy/Dick Durant character had the most fun with it, warbling and screeching like Tony Soprano on PCP. Our femme fatale also had a fine set of lungs on her, which she showed off with admirable regularity, both vocally and visually (God bless her). The Fred/Pete characters were deeply underwhelming however, and the rest of the hangers-on looked like the sort of saddo drama wannabes that hang outside the Old Vic stage door waiting for Spacey to sign their arses.

I think what irritated Skrzkrk and myself most was the unspoken assumption that the very act of making an opera out of Lost Highway was radical enough in itself to not warrant any further challenging of the material. No need to bother doing a score that actually disturbed and disquieted the audience in the way that Trent Reznor's original soundtrack for the film did. Lynch's films all have fantastic soundtracks and he's never afraid to mix genres and blend classical, jazz, electronica and heavy metal influences into one twisted soundscape. This show was seriously in need of some Burial or perhaps Sunn O))). The same goes for the lighting and general staging. Surely in a high tech space like the Young Vic's newly revamped auditorium, some of the film's intensely claustrophobic lighting could have not just been recreated but taken to new extremes. Let's pin Fred to the floor with a burning spot or crowd him into a pitch black strobed up corner. There was just too much conventional theatre business going on.

While we were perfectly well entertained I couldn't help thinking Mr.Lynch would have been bored stiff.

B

Green thumbs up

A lot can happen in a week. An election can be stolen on one side of the world, a garden landscaped on the other. Sunshine can turn to snow. Hey ho. Thanks to some hard working individuals, we've got our back garden all ready for Summer. Unfortunately, no one seems to have informed Mother Nature (TM) that Summer normally kicks in around the beginning of April rather than Winter. Ah well, at least it saves me having to water the turf. Perhaps next week, when it rains toads or blood, we'll have to think again.

Needless to say, stock up on boerie n' beers, the braai's at our house ekseee.

B