Long live Queen

Sorry about the crappy photo it was taken with my phone

Music has always coloured every era and every experience for me. From my earliest memories there is a soundtrack strumming in the background of everything I have seen, done, felt. Those who grow up with music can never be cured of the addiction. We need to be surrounded by sound in all that we do.

When I was a mini there was music everywhere - we listened to that radio on the way to school in the mornings, and alternated between Rod Stewart and Neil Diamond in the evenings, so that I travelled home with Maggie May and sweet Caroline. Weekend mornings the house was filled with Abba and The Beatles, Crowded House, The Rolling Stones and Led Zepplin. My dad told me tales of Elvis and Pavarotti, my auntie indocrintated me for hours with Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, and my cousin made a shrine for Guns and Roses. I chose Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan for myself in the early years, and later Alanis Morissette, The Cranberries and Nirvana.

But growing up the main source of music, and what it meant, was at parties. My mum had a riot of ridiculous and wonderful friends whose thirties were their glory days. On the weekends the gardens and bedrooms of suburban homes would be crawling with children hiding and seeking, chasing and catching, playing and squabbling, while downstairs the 'adults' cranked the tunes and let the good times roll.

Parties would start with Roxette, Bryan Adams, Bon Jovi, and then roll on to Dire Straits, were air guitar was obligatory. Fleetwood Mac and The Beach Boys would jostle for air time with Roy Orbison and Chuck Berry, and mixed CDs of greats would have you taken from Eric Clapton to Bob Marley in minutes.

And just when everyone should have been going to bed, the night would kick up a gear as a theatrical thrill poured out of the speakrs and made its way through the house - someone had found the Queen catalogue.

Freddie Mecury's voice has a hypnotic quality - all in its thrall are immediately turned into pouncing, posing, mincing, majestic rock stars. It's (a kinda) magic - there is no stopping it. Suddenly you are all platform heels and glitter, feather boas and operatic delivery, you are Brian May's 'fro and his electric guitar. Confidence flies through you harder than any line of cocaine and you are strutting and pouting through every song. This is the power of Queen.

They are part of a select group of bands whose songs I knew every word to before I could possibly be expected to understand what they were singing about. I heard them through walls when I was supposed to be sleeping, I crept down stairs to listen to them when parties had exploded. Watching the peculiar and fantastic dancing it inspired I longed to be part of the rock 'n roll tribe my parents and their friends had all been initiated into. There is no party Freddie can't fix, no mood he can't soften.

And so with this emotional attachment to Queen, this belief that they are mine, that they were a birth rite, I went to see Stormtroopers in Stilettos. The exhibition was set up in a warehouse just off Brick Lane and was an installation piece with a space dedicated to each of Queens first 4 albums.

It was wonderfully executed, a multi media indulgence in the extreme, with video, audio, photographs, letters, costumes, quotes from Queen members and other musicians. It was immersive - as though you had slipped back into their sequinned, irreverant, ridiculous world for a little while. In the beginning you read tales of Freddie just hanging around this fringes of the hipster/glam rock scene, watching Hendrix night after night all over London, sewing all his own costumes and singing at student parties. Imagining that life made me want to trade everything in for a flat in Shoreditch and a pocketful of rhinestones.

As you move through the space you are aware of their music developing, they draw more and more on the theatre that would become their trademark, experiment with every type of rock, and you listen as Freddie gains the confidence and depth in his voice that Rock hasn't seen since.
The exhibition it beautfully and lovingly put together, by people who obviously new and loved Queen and their music. There is so much to read, to watch to absorb I wish I had gone more than once and taken more time. Its a sensory treat for anyone, but for a real fan its a feast of information and a window into a band (and a time) gone. I left feeling full and overwhelmed by their magnitude, but also very sad that I could never see them in all their live glory. Long live Queen!

City Image of the Day - Layers

Spotted off Brick Lane

Okay at first glance it just looks like a pretty stern face, a large and quite talented rendering but so what... Well this has been made completely from peeling away layers of posters that were once on this wall to create a picture. I know?! The artist has added nothing, but purely by peeling away has managed to create this image... Awesome!

Girls Who Read

I am not very good at finishing things, so apologies that I have not yet completed my Asia postings...they are written by hand, they are waiting, but I just need to type them out. Sorry.

Coming back to London I launched into my new job. It's insanely busy, and most days I run around like a headless chicken, with no real life/work balance what so ever. So this is just a plagerised post from someone else, something sent to me by my sweet friend Riz, that was so brilliant I wanted to repost it. I will return soon, dear readers, with more posts from my own mind I promise, but until then, enjoy...

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl

"...because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgartory is better than a life in hell. Do it because a girl who reads can describe the amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled - a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accesible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows. and rightly demands, that they ebb comes along with the flow of dissapointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses - the hesitation of breath - endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a perios and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn't read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don't date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the cafe, you in the window of your room...The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colourful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed properly, of someone who is better than I am... You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take you Hemingway with you..."