What's For Afters?

£25 well spent

What can you get in London for £25 these days? Lunch in a gastropub maybe - if you don't drink too much. A couple of nasty nylon sweaters in Primark. A taxi home from the west end.

Or the most fabulous night of music and entertainment from The Imagined Village. Billy Bragg, Eliza Carthy, Chris Wood, Sheila Chandra, Martin Carthy, Benjamin Zephaniah et al rework English folk for the 21st century.

This included the fusion of English musicians with a different ethnic heritage - predominantly south Asian - who drew from the other folk music they knew and merged it with the English folk they grew up with here. Could have been really really awful, but thanks to their talent and the sheer brilliance and hard work and effort that had gone into the whole thing it worked really really well. Hearing Scarborough Fair played on the sitar sent shivers down my spine.

[I was looking for a photo to put in here to show how gorgeous it was but the Festival Hall website is being as slow as a very very slow thing]

My favorite piece was one where Benjamin Zephaniah - projected on video screen - did a reworking of a very very old folk tale (girl goes to meadow, girl seduced by stranger (god?), girl has baby, girl goes back to meadow) and made it a story about asylum (what else would we expect from him?!) - the life of the stranger, the outcast. It was backed with a kind of reggae folk - great.

The tour has finished but if they do it again, go.

posted by Cal @ 10:57 AM